As I sauntered out from the bathhouse of Albrecht the Bathman, I saw Aristocrates, whom I hailed elegantly, whereupon the conversation lead to a regaling by him of some matters that he assured me were of great import to humankind and Olympians alike.
“How do you fair?” Aristocrates asked me.
“I have just had the most fearfully ineffective massage in the Bathhouse,” I replied.
“Whyso?”
“The lady who gave the massage was a student of the school of Modern Massage. She used the session to bring me to a place of discontent from which I would be able to contemplate those problems of the world that she thought I ought to be contemplating.”
“Whereas you had gone there to relax and recuperate?” said Aristocrates.
“I had. I won’t be going there again. Anyway, my friend, what about you. How goes it?”
“I have just been visited by a spirit,” said Aristocrates. “It happened just after a thought came into my head that I might compose a work of nonsense.”
“You do seem to be surrounded by a divine glow. What was the message?” I asked.
“The message was ‘DO NOT COMPOSE A WORK OF NONSENSE.”’
“Just that?”
“The presence didn’t so much as actually say but left hanging in my mind the feeling that there are greater works to be achieved.”
“And then it departed?”
“Yes, but I felt an impulse to visit the Oracle of Chesham, where the sibyl was able to elaborate further.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She simply told me that I should consult a certain book at a certain page, wherein I found a certain web of ideas that have infused me with the godly radiance that you perceived when you saw me just now.”
I was most curious as to what these ideas were, and so pressed Aristocrates to share them with me.
“Certainly I would love to do so,” he replied, “but let us first go to some place where we may sit in comfort and be amongst nature.”
And so we found a placed hummocked by thick green mosses beside a trickling stream, overarched by boughs of luxurious ilex and bay. There we sat down and Aristocrates began to share with me his newfound wisdom.
“The text I read,” said Aristocrates, “told the story of a young man who was thinking of making the journey from his village to the Temple of Discordia, partly because he yearned simply to stretch limb over hill and down dale, and partly because some fellows of his age had spoken of it in terms that lead him to conclude that respect from said peers was to be found by his joining this cult.
Noting by my furrowed brow that I was somewhat confused by this, he then when on to say:-
“In case you are unfamiliar with the cult, I should point out that some years ago a religion known as Discordianism was founded by a certain Malaclypse the Younger, with the basics of it set down in a text called The Principia Discordia. It aligned itself with the ideologies of certain types of the art that has been called Modern for a number of generations now, hailing as its chief matron the goddess Eris, “strife”, whom the Romans had called Discordia. This was the Greek goddess responsible for presenting the golden apple which precipitated the Judgment of Paris and thus the Trojan War. Eris created discord in Heaven when she threw the Golden Apple into the wedding party of Peleus and Thetis. Of all the gods and goddesses only Eris had not been invited (who would want to invite “Strife” to a joyful feast?), and in retaliation Eris wrote “to the fairest” on an apple and then threw it in amongst the throng. This caused a dispute among the three goddesses Aphrodite, Athena and Hera, each of whom thought it was intended for themselves. This then lead to the gods deciding that a mortal would have to make the choice of who was to get the apple, and this job fell to Paris the Trojan, who eventually fell for the charms of Aphrodite, giving her the apple because of the promise she had made to him, that she would make the most beautiful woman in the world fall in love with him. This woman was considered to be Helen, a Greek who was already married, hence the Trojan War. In certain circles of modern art the aim is to emulate the apple incident by making art that, rather than being ordered and beautiful, disrupts and shocks, just as Eris found a way to create discord in the midst of the divine feast. A celebration of order, it was suggested, would create complacency; this order should give way to chaos and Eris was hailed by the Discordians as the goddess of this necessary chaos.
So, this young man got together enough food and drink for the journey to the Temple of Discordia, and then set off. Not far outside the village he caught up with another walker, who was a Priest of Hermes, and they entered into a conversation. When the priest heard about the lad’s intention, he began to point out some discrepancies in the Discordian principles. Firstly, he pointed out that it was quite incorrect to hail Eris as the goddess of Chaos, as the Discordians did. The Ancient Greek divinity of chaos was simply the god Khaos, the formless void out of which the Universe sprang and the parent of Night and Eros. Khaos did not desire to create human discord. Eris, in fact, was a totally different goddess, one who simply represented strife (the Greek meaning of eris); she was the goddess of quarrelling, who, in the Greek imagination, delighted in human suffering. So in the Trojan War she was pleased with the horrors of the battlefield.
“To create discord,” said the priest to the lad as they walked, “is simply to create for its own sake a state where people are in conflict with each other – a mean thing to do. And this is where there is a link to art that seeks to subvert the classical ideals. It can be shown that when people live in an environment that they find aesthetically pleasing, they are more at ease, more at peace, less violent, and more content. The ideal of beauty is good.”
The Hermetic priest continued by pointing out some more ways in which Discordianism was based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the Eris episode. This episode was of course the cause of the Trojan War, a saga that was universally felt in ancient times to have been a terrible and an unwanted thing. Even though the Greeks finally won back Helen, the glory of the victory was far out-shadowed by the horror of the long war that dragged out year after year, keeping husband stranded hundreds of miles away from wife and family and home. The Greeks themselves gave a considerable amount of thought to the question of what it was that had lead to the war, because the start of the war was seen as being like the opening of Pandora’s box, as if understanding what had gone wrong at that time would help them to solve the problems of life. Indeed, according to Hesiod (Theog. 225, &c.), Eris was the mother of a variety of allegorical beings, all of which were the causes or representatives of human misfortunes.
Hence, the solution to the question of what caused the Trojan War, a deep understanding of the incident of Eris throwing in the apple, would to Greek thinking itself be a kind of panacea to the problems of human existence. The idea that this event was to be emulated by our artists, as proposed by the Discordians, would have seemed preposterous.”
At this point I interrupted Aristocrates’ telling of the story of the lad on his way to the Temple of Discord, because I had a question.
“What do you think is the answer to this question? What was the real cause of the Trojan War and how does knowing this help us understand something about ourselves, our culture and our society? What would be a better aim for our artists?”
“Well, let us think a moment on this,” said my colleague. “The Trojan War was an episode of strife, so to say that it was caused by strife, represented by the goddess Eris, is somewhat circular. The Judgment of Paris was an event leading up to the start of the war, but it was the resulting affair of Paris with Helen that actually caused the Greeks to set off for Troy, because all the Greek kings had made an agreement that they would come to each other’s aid in this kind of situation. Helen was the wife of the Greek king Menelaus, so when Paris whisked her of to Troy, the Greek armies gathered and set off to bring her back.”
“So Paris should have chosen a different woman?”
“Exactly. His decision was based on the love of beauty, but it was not a wise decision, and it was one that disregarded the rules of marriage. And so in the realm of the poets there is the allegorical incident of his choosing Aphrodite, goddess of Beauty, but spurning Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Hera, goddess of marriage. Of course, he was not wrong to choose beauty itself – the mistake was to do so without wisdom and propriety.”
“So he should have chosen a beautiful woman who was available and with whom a marriage would engender good things, not strife?”
“Precisely. Eros unblinded.”
“But how does this relate to the aims of the artist?”
“Herein lies the genius of it, for the old tale was prophetic. We have this understanding that the artist, whether painter, architect, sculptor or whatever, can contribute to the reduction of human strife by creating works and spaces that people finding aesthetically pleasing. Now we can think of this in these same terms, with reference to the Three Goddesses. Let us consider for a moment that Paris, the city, has been a center of several post-Renaissance movements of art, movements away from and sometimes back towards classicism. Paris has indeed been in the position of choosing to which goddess to give its apples. Like Paris the Trojan, an artist may chose Beauty, but may do so in a way that is not wise, or which does not respect the Hera principle, which in this case is local, tradition, the vernacular. So for example, an artist in a Parisian artistic academy may have been encouraged to choose content from the old Greek myths for the subject of a painting in a way that may be compared directly to Paris the Trojan having the affair with Helen. The culture of the Ancient Greeks is, after all, known as Hellenism.”
“Good gracious,” I interjected. “So there it is: the affair of Paris with Helen.”
“Indeed, this is why I say that the old story was prophetic.”
“Right. So this then caused the Trojan War. But hang on, you yourself have often struck me as a bit of a Philhellene, as indeed am I. Are we then implicated in all this?”
“Not for a moment. You see, what happened in the Paris Academy was that painters were told what subject matter was suitable for their paintings. That meant that there were painters painting Hellenic themes but without necessarily valuing those themes themselves, and without passion, because they were just doing what they were told. If you genuinely love and are passionately interested in the Hellenic tradition, that is a very different matter. The point is that the passion of the artist is visible in the morphic fields of their works of art to those who are able to see with the eye of the mind, as everyone is to greater and lesser extents.”
“Aha! Now that is really making sense to me. So what they forgot was how to listen to their muse, yes? And this is why they were trumped by the Impressionists.”
“That’s it in a nutshell.”
“Ok. So let me think about this...are we saying that the Trojan War is a prophetic allegory for...for the French Revolution?”
“No, the French Revolution was a time of conflict, Eris, and was engineered by an replacement elite wanting to return to a purer classicism, but simultaneously it did play a part because the new zeitgeist that was stirred up lead to the people’s rejection of anything that smacked of the Old Regime; it played a role in the lead up to the artistic reaction against the academies, because those academies were seen as being part of that stuffy old aristocratic world.”
“Oh I see what you mean. Brilliant, so when the Impressionists put on their own exhibition in Paris in the 1880’s, in that daring two fingers to the “official” exhibition of the Parisian academy, that was the beginning the battle against the Trojans, like raging Achilles sallying forth from his ship in shining armour?”
“Indeed. That can be likened to the first battle of the war. When in the Post-Impressionist period Cezanne and Renoir finally wanted to bring back a sense of the classical and some influence from the Old Masters while retaining the new impressionist style, the new French vernacular, that can be likened to a temporary truce. Aphrodite and Hera reunited.”
Renoir's Bathers
“Then what happened?”
“The truce ended, and again Strife may have been the cause. After the First World War – more strife - people were disgusted by living in societies where wars could flare up upon the whims of kings and kaisers. Even more than after the French Revolution, it was felt that it was time to do away with old traditions since kingship itself was an old tradition. This was Modernism, and it was much more fundamentalist than Impressionism. The Impressionists had still loved Aphrodite - Beauty – but the “moderns” rejected even that. Newness, functionality and originality became the new gods. If the First World War had never happened, the culture of the 20th century would have been very different; it may have taken up the lead set by Renoir and Cezanne in a wholly different way, not with the starkly modern Cubism but with something infused with the resonance of tradition, as with the art of High Cultures of the past. Equally, the Art Nouveau style would have evolved not into Art Deco, but into something that retained the graceful naturalism that has been important in many artistic traditions back to Minoan Crete and beyond.”
“So the best thing for culture is to not have wars?”
“That seems to be the lesson, yes.”
“A bit obvious really, though, isn’t it?”
“True, but we are also dealing with the question what kind of remedial action could be taken, what sort of accelerated realignment could be achieved by understanding these matters better.”
“That must start with a justification of Beauty and of Tradition, don’t you think?”
“Quite, because these remain contentious issues. And this brings me back to our story of the young man and the priest walking along the road. As they walked, they were soon joined by a third, who was in fact a priest of Discordia. The young man noticed how the priest of Hermes was very polite and agreeable to this second priest, and this surprised him. The young man himself kept quiet amongst his elders for fear of showing ignorance, but he was confused as to why the priest of Hermes steered the conversation continually away from the subject of Discordianism, when, so the lad felt, he could have used the meeting as a chance to educate the other priest into the more sublime philosophy. The young man threw glances at the priest of Hermes to communicate his confusion, at which point the priest of Hermes bade them goodbye and diverted his journey down a side road.
Now the lad started to tell the second priest how he had originally intended to walk to the Temple of Discordia, but had now changed his mind because of what the first priest had explained to him. Thereupon the second priest began look most indignant, and started to argue in defence of his religion. He spoke of how the horrors of World War I had showed that Western Civilization was no less savage that primitive cultures, for which reason we would be more honest about our nature were we to embrace strongly influences from those artistic traditions rather than the veneer of civilization of the art of the Western Tradition, and he quoted the philosopher Adorno as saying that we can’t have beautiful art anymore after what happened in the Holocaust in World War II, as if it would be utterly false after that to claim that beauty is a part of human nature. He argued that with all the problems in the world art should forget about being beautiful and should instead be used as a platform to communicate important ideas. People should be shocked out of the complacency of their outworn old ideologies, argued the priest. Classical tradition? “Pah!” said the Discordian, claiming it had been no more than an expression of Roman imperial dominance.
The young lad was angered to find his newly adopted philosophy so quickly being attacked by the Discordian priest. He argued back, saying how art already has a role to play in making the world a better place, by reducing tendencies towards strife through the influence of beauty; to load visual art up with other duties better fulfilled in words than visual images, said the young man, was like crippling a donkey by giving it a load too heavy for it to carry, thus disabling it from doing the work that it could otherwise have done easily and effectively. He also argued that art could just as easily be used to communicate ideas by artists with dysfunctional ideologies as those with beneficial ones, so the shock tactics might all be in vain anyway. Regarding the Adorno concept, he argued that to cease to value beauty because of what happened in war was simply to let strife have the final victory that wins the war, crippling culture completely.
The priest argued back and voices were raised, brows furrowed, and they were even close to coming to blows. Then the young man decided he had had enough of this arguing, and so he turned and stormed back in the direction from which they had come, leaving the Discordian walking on alone.
Immediately the Young Man met again with the Priest of Hermes, who had in fact not taken a different road, but had been following at a safe distance. The lad told him of the argument and then the Priest of Hermes smiled and said: “If strife is ignored, so said the ancient Greeks, she stays small, but if engaged in argument she gets bigger. Not a good idea to quarrel with the goddess of quarrelling; in doing so you make an offering to her, for that his her food.”
The Hermetic priest then told him an old Greek story about Hercules. The hero had found his path blocked by an apple that had been placed there by Eris. Hercules struck the apple with his club, but it doubled in size. He struck it again even harder, but the same thing happened again. Only when it was ignored did the apple begin to shrink.
“That,” said the priest of Hermes, “is why I chose to hang back rather than speak my mind to the Discordian priest. Better to leave them alone; allow them their place at the Wedding Feast, but ignore them and spend the feast with more agreeable company.”
The young man answered: “But what do you think drives them to defend their creed?”
“I have a theory about that,” answered the older man. “I believe that what they really value is simply eccentricity. This can be a fine and charming thing. It is light, humorous, colourful and interesting. But eccentricity alone is not an armed camp; it does not of necessity burn its bridges. Its user can return to the former contingencies until the next moment when it seems fit and fun to be eccentric. In fact, now that you seem to have turned your steps from the Temple of Discordia, I might suggest instead that you explore the Precinct of the Eccentrics.”
“That sounds like a fine suggestion. There is something else I am curious about, however. Have we yet produced a justification for tradition? Beauty I think we are agreed has a beneficial effect on society, but what about tradition?”
To this the Priest of Hermes replied: “This is where we invoke Morphic Resonance, the presence of the past. By an actual process of resonance transpersonally across time, tradition connects us to the ancestors and the accumulated collective perception of the local landscape. This is what makes culture rich, and it gives as a sense of the realm that exists beyond linear time, and this is satisfying because it takes us out of the mundane view. This is called entering the Dreamtime. It gives simultaneously a sense of the transcendent and of being grounded in Earth culture. As Thrice-Greatest Hermes has said: Rise out of Time into Eternity, and See the Universal within the Particular. Cultures that lack this type of resonance have an emptiness which creates a hunger, a hunger that can be self-destructive, and that is the Wrath of Hera. It is true that some traditions have been used to support dysfunctional old ideologies which benefit only the elite maintaining power, but that is simply why it is important to be Awake Within the Dreamtime.”
“That must be a key point than,” said the young man. “You’re saying that in Paris at the time of the Revolution, or after World War I, it was not tradition itself that should have been rejected, but rather the blindness that comes from mindlessly falling under the spell of tradition without understanding how such spells are cast, in other words it is time to understand Morphic Resonance in dryer terms. So art did not in fact need to reject the sense of the timeless that comes from accessing the realm of myth, but rather to become more masterful and awake within that realm.”
“That was well put. And in addition it didn’t need to reject the harmonious order of classical forms, for Morphic Resonance is also one of the reasons why geometry forms so valuable a part of Classical technique. Resonance works by likeness of form, and this includes mental resonance. The forms of sacred geometry are absolutely definable, eternal and universal. This means that as mental forms, as ideas, they are highly resonant. You can accelerate the accumulation of resonant richness by the graceful use of sacred geometry in your works. In fact, Classicism should be redefined simply as exactly this: the use of Hermetic techniques by which to accelerate the accumulation of time-transcending and collective perceptual richness in works of art. This is a classicism which doesn’t need to involve the Affair with Helen. As a collection of techniques, it can be applied to local traditions just as much as to those of Graeco-Roman origin, and expressed through vernacular styles, for geometry is the same everywhere.”
“But Sir,” said the young man, “you yourself are a priest of Hermes, resident in the precincts of a Temple of Hermes in Oxford, here in this non-Greek land.”
“The full name is actually the Temple of Ogham-Hermes-Mercury-Thoth, but that is a bit of a mouthful. Ogham comes from the name of the Celtic name of the god of writing, just as Thoth was for the Egyptians, while Hermes is the Egyptian Thoth, and Mercury is the Roman Hermes. One day I may get a chance to explain to you a deep mystery concerning Bronze Age geodesy, sacred geometry, the planets, and the elegant appropriateness of the Graeco-Egyptian synergistic pantheon at certain sites in this land of Britain. But these are deep mysteries which I do not have time to explain right now.”
The young man was curious to know about this, but could see that it would be fruitless at this time to press the priest further on the matter. Putting this aside for the moment, another question came into his mind.
“I find it hard to picture an example of the classical approach being used to magnify the beauty of matter that is not Graeco-Roman. Are you aware of such an example, that will show that such a thing is possible, that the approach is not tied to that body of myth?”
The priest of Hermes thought for a moment, and then said: “That is one of the best questions about British art that has ever been asked. The question is such a good one, in fact, that I think we might even consider venturing along the old Ridgeway track to the site known as Silbury, near Avebury, to consult the great oracle of the Temple of Sulis-Apollo-Ra. This site of Silbury is part of the synergistic geodetic scheme I mentioned which I don’t at the moment have time to explain, but there will be plenty of time as we walk the old road to Silbury.”
And so a few days later they set off, and the young man got the chance he had hoped for to stretch limb over hill and down dale. When eventually they arrived, they underwent the preparations for entering the sanctuary of the oracle, the blessing with the water of the Swallow Head spring, the cleansing by fire, wind and Earth, and then they entered into the place where the oracle sat, and phrased their question. After a time the oracle from within her trance brought forth an utterance:
Like he who wandered through hollow lands and hilly lands,
You seek the Cygnet who is the Bypass of the War in Heaven.
The utterance seemed so short that they wondered if it could really be enough to lead them to what they were looking for, i.e. an example that would prove it was possible to apply in a fully effective way and non-jarring way the classical approach to local mythic matter. And while it was already a short utterance, even then part of it just seemed to reiterate the question, for they already knew they were seeking a bypass to the argument up in Olympus between the three goddesses. The thing about hollow lands and hilly lands didn’t seem all that informative. They asked the priest of Sulis-Apollo-Ra if he could help them to interpret the utterance, but the priest told them that he sensed in this case it was important that they did this themselves over time.
Some weeks later they both made major leaps forward. The priest of Hermes chanced upon someone who recognised that “hollow lands and hilly lands” was a quote from a Yeats poem, The Song of Wondering Aengus, while the young man chanced upon someone who had heard of a book called Signet of Atlantis : War in Heaven Bypass. He realized that this was surely what was referred to in the oracle’s utterance about “the Cygnet who is the Bypass of the War in Heaven”.
And in time, they were able to unravel the utterance and reveal the great treasure of its message, as follows.
They knew that a cygnet is a young swan, and they realised too that Helen was a swan maiden. She and Clytemnestra were born from one egg, and the twins Castor and Pollox from the other. The egg was itself a swan’s egg. It had been laid by her mother Leda. It was Zeus who had transformed himself into a swan and courted and coupled with Leda. This makes Helen the child of a swan father, born from a swan’s egg, so that she is herself, by extension, a Swan Maiden.
Cezanne's Leda
Next they turned their attention to that book that seemed to be referred to in the oracle’s utterance. In the late 1980’s the mystic writer, teacher and channel Barbara Hand-Clow was clearing out her garage when she had an extraordinary experience. A loud voice boomed in her head, and gave her the title of three books that she was to write during the next decade. These three books were her ‘Mind Chronicles’ trilogy, and when the titles came she had no idea what the books were to be about. Heart of the Christos, Eye of the Centaur, and Signet of Atlantis : War in Heaven Bypass were the three titles.
Even as she sat down to commence this book she didn’t know what this title referred to. She knew that a signet ring was one that was a sign of something, such as royalty. She did have help in the book from a channelled source, and it was this source that told her that the Signet of Atlantis referred to in the title was in fact the ‘Atlantean Temple Form’. Plato’s description of the citadel of Atlantis was of a long, deep, wide and straight canal connecting into an area where three large concentric circular canals surrounded a central island, with rings of land between each of the rings of water. So the signet was indeed a ring - the rings of water of this ‘Atlantean Temple Form’. This channelled source also went on to say that that circular henges of the British Neolithic landscapes were examples of this Signet of Atlantis, a temple form that evoked peace.
The young man and the priest did some investigating and found that there were two British sites in particular which seemed reminiscent of this “Atlantean Temple Form”, Thornborough in North Yorkshire and Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Here there are double-henges – two concentric circular ditches – on a large scale, and both these sites also had the long straight “cursus” ditch that equates with the straight canal in Plato’s description. Furthermore, both of these sites are on floodplains next to rivers, fitting with the idea that the ditches may have been flooded to form the straight and circular canals.
As the young man thought about this he realised that if the long, straight cursuses had been flooded, there would have been an inevitable result. Swans, long native to this land, would have used them as landing strips. Swans are the heaviest of flying birds. They are of a weight that means that they cannot slow down in flight, for this would result in them stalling in the air and dropping like stones. They therefore could not slow down enough to land on the ground, for their feet would not be able to match the speed of landing. Their solution is to land on water. What they need therefore is a long runway of water on which to do this. For this reason swans will generally fly along the course of or close to rivers upon which they can at any moment come in to land. In the sky the constellation of Cygnus, as well as looking like a swan in flight, also has the swan flying along the course of the Milky Way, the river of the sky. Actually, to speak more accurately, Cygnus actually flies along a long ‘lake’ - a section of the Milky Way that appears to be broken off from the main channel of the ‘river’. It would not be difficult to make an association between this and the flooded Cursus as a body of water close to a river.
The simple fact is that swans would, swans do use such stretches of water as landing strips. As a result of this they would also, where the cursuses connected to the concentric circular ditches of the henges, have found their way into those henges. In other words they would have swum, once landed, into the circular canals, sanctifying them with their beautiful presence.
Swans mate for life and spend a lot of their time as couples, and they look after their children for a long time, until they are fully-grown. They also have an intriguing mating ritual involving the undulation of their necks. These factors would make them a good choice for a shammanic swan marriage ceremony, and the flooded henges would make a good place for that marriage ceremony to take place. There is also a kind of logic that connects this with Leda.
According to Greek myth, the priestess Leto mated with Zeus in bird form and had egg-born twins as a result, Apollo and Artemis. The bird aspect, the egg, the mating with Zeus, the twin offspring, and the very similar name, the connections between Leda and Leto are too close to be coincidence, as was perhaps first pointed out to the general public by Robert Graves. The two are really the same bird goddess. Now Leto in Greek myth was a Hyperborean priestess who travelled from that place to the Greek island of Delos where she gave birth to her twin offspring. The Greek traveller Hecataeus who had visited Britain wrote that Hyperborea was the large fertile island off the coast of Gaul, in other words Britain. He recorded that Leto was a priestess from Britain. Hints of bird totemism in the Celtic stories of crane women and of Druids dressed in feathered costumes suggest that Hecataeus may have been thinking of such figures when he spoke thus of Leto. The coupling in bird form with Zeus may thus refer to the swan cult connected with the cursuses and henges. The swan coupling of Leda and the swan / Zeus and Leto may in fact have referred to such a swan marriage ceremony. And the priest and the young man found further evidence for the existence of such a ceremony in, of all places, the story of Aengus and Caer.
Aengus and Caer were both from the legendary and divine race of the Tuatha de Danaan. In Irish mythology these are the people of the Sidhe, the people who built the magical late Neolithic monuments and mounds, the people of places such as New Grange, and indeed Aengus the love god was particularly associated with that amazing site. According to Irish mythology these people did not disappear from Ireland, but retreated into these monuments, becoming the indwelling spirits of such places. So basically it is fair to say that the ancient Irish believed that the stories of the Tuatha de Danaan dated from the period of the building of these late Neolithic monuments.
The story of Aengus is both beautiful and happy. In a dream he saw his Dream Lover, and then he set out on a long quest to find her. Skipping ahead in the story, eventually he did find her, and she was a swan maiden called Caer. Caer said that she would marry him, but in order that they could do so he would have to come to a particular lake on a particular day of the year where she would be with her one hundred and fifty attendant nymphs, all of them transformed into swans. He too would have to consent to being transformed into a swan, and recognise her from amongst the others, and then they would be married. So it came to pass and they lived happily ever after, flying off to live in Newgrange.
This is ideal for classical treatment: the Boyne has its water nymph - Aengus’ mother Boann - a goddess of inspiration, and the spring of its source was an oracle of knowledge; Aengus is ‘the most charming of the creations of Celtic Mythology…an eternally youthful exponent of love and beauty…his kisses became birds which hovered over the young men and maidens of Erin, whispering thoughts of love into their ears.’ (The Mythology of the British Isles, Squire.) As well as espousing such ideals of beauty he was capable of shrewd wit, as in his winning of Newgrange from the Dagda. The transformation into a swan is also a metamorphosis typical of classical mythology. With hints of metamorphic shamanism, indwelling spirits, pantheism and polytheism and love triumphant, this is as suitable for classical expression as any Greek myth ever was.
The fact that this marriage occurs at a particular place on a particular day of the year suggests a sacred ceremony, and the transformation into swans accords with the swan-coupling marriages we have spoken of, of which the marriage of Leda/Leto with Zeus is a fairly clear example.
Cygnet of Atlantis
This great web of connections now focused to a point of epiphany. Helen was a swan maiden, as the Priest of Hermes had recognized, standing for the beauty of Greek culture. Paris, as they were aware, stands for non-Greek artists who seemed to lack a body of material upon which to base a classical renaissance, so they had an affair with Helen, i.e. Greek mythic matter, Hellenism. This material became dogmatically espoused in the academies, but this kind of rigidity lead to art without true passion, and then the reaction against the academies was the fall of Troy because it lead to a reaction against Classicism, which though essential and beautiful at the time as a triumph of passion over dogma, was ultimately damaging because in a purer form the classical ideal is extremely beneficial.
However, they suddenly realized, there does exist some beautiful mythology dating from early times and local to other places, such as the Celtic mythology of Ireland, and, to repeat the example, one of the most beautiful stories is that of Aengus and Caer. So if Paris the artist was to choose this and other such local matter, the War in Heaven need not happen. Now comes the truly multidimensional bit. Caer, like Helen, is also a swan maiden, and she is also, like Helen, divinely beautiful, the appropriate partner to Aengus the Love God.
The priest and the young man were in no doubt that here they had achieved their quest; they had located a local Helen, a Helen of the British Isles. Paris could make a wiser choice.
In the old story, the war happened because Paris had had the affair with the Greek woman, as if there was no maiden from Troy sufficiently beautiful. But what is a young swan? It is the ugly duckling. Greek matter seemed more beautiful precisely because it had been magnified by the classical approach. The classical approach is what turns the dowdy grey duckling in the dazzlingly white swan. Mythic matter itself is just a core of stories – their beauty is revealed in the way they are treated. Caer is as beautiful as Helen, once she has been given this treatment.
Stunningly, cosmically, nonlinearly, she is indeed, therefore, the Bypass of the War in Heaven, the resolution of the conflict in Olympus between the three goddesses, because Paris can make a choice that honours Beauty, Tradition and Wisdom. Caer is the swan maiden of the British Isles, the Cygnet of Atlantis. British artists can now utilize the classical wisdom and styles, and our poets can expand the tale invoking the Muses, and we can have dramas and operas and paintings and novels and poems and ballets and ballads and temples and fairs and all the other expressions of high art devoted to Aengus and Caer...for example.
And so it was that the priest and the lad realized that though Barbara Hand-Clow heard the title of her book in her mind’s ear, and took this to be the “Signet of Atlantis”, all the same since the words are homophones, it could just as easily have been “Cygnet of Atlantis” that she heard, for indeed we now see that this makes sense of the sub-title, for Caer, the Cygnet of Atlantis, is indeed the bypass of the Olympian quarrel, the war in heaven. Cygnet of Atlantis : War in Heaven Bypass.
Actually, if we take the time to look for them, there are various tales in Welsh, Scottish, Irish and more generally British mythology that can be dusted off and nurtured and grown into their fuller potential, their beauty magnified by the classical artistic tradition, with its use of sacred geometry and other tools of composition, execution and style, their devotion to accurate proportions of the human body, and their underlying sense of purity of form combined with a certain graceful naturalism, built on a subtle foundation of pantheism and polytheism, and the timelessness of the mythic realm. Exactly the same can no doubt be said of other traditions in other lands.
When traditional material is treated in the way that the Greeks and after them the Romans and then the Old Masters of the Renaissance treated the material of Greek myth, it is bound to shine with beauty. The skill of the Greek artisans combined the hermetic wisdom that had filtered into Pythagorean, Dionysiac and Platonic schools from Egypt, and this along with the sparkling beauty of the Greek marble showed Helen most definitely in a good light. The Celtic mythology, being further from the generative womb of Hermeticism that was Egypt had not at that time been elevated to the classical state, and so when Paris came to chose artistic subject matter, it seemed that the Greek Helen was more beautiful, but it was just that Caer had yet to mature into a full grown white swan.”
Aristocrates sat back and smiled, pleased with his monologue, then after some time felt compelled to add a little more:
“The prophesy of the Muses is therefore insisting that we now take the Renaissance off the back burner and use that classical technology to magnify the local myths and styles in whatever cultures we are resident. This, the gods seem to have decreed, is the journey that art must take in this coming Age of Light.”
I told Aristocrates that it seemed to me a great and very pertinent tale had been told here this day by his good self, and with that we got up from our place of discussion under the trees and wandered back into town.