Professor Hatpins had it all. A big comfy jumper. A bike that worked. Even his own apple press.
He also had a cottage with a real fire, a marriage to the lovely Heather of Bromwich, and an annual grant to finance his research. But then something happened which seemed to threaten all this unadulterated success.
Hatpins’ funding had been flowing in quietly but surely via the Department of Philanthropology at the University of Marlow for some years now, and it seemed that everyone in the department had long assumed that someone else was keeping an eye on the professor’s work. Then one day recently an academic journal had fallen open on the desk of Cardinal Forthright, head of department, revealing one of Hatpin’s recent articles: Dionysos and the Dinosaurs = ‘DNA Source’ I & II : Orphic Insights into the Seed from Sirius. In this piece Hatpins had related how the Orphic philosophers had believed that Dionysos flows in the human blood due to the fact that when Zeus blasted the Titans for making a meal of Dionysos, and then made the first humans from the ashes of this fire, the ashes of the dismembered Dionysos who had formed their meal were also present in the mixture. For Professor Hatpins, who had been working on such theories in isolation for some time, the Titans were the dinosaurs, who he now thought of as DNAsource One, while Dionysos, or DNAsource Two, was an infusion of a non-reptilian blueprint into the DNA matrix manifested from six-dimensional morphic fields sourced in the Sirius star system. So it was, according to Hatpins, that the human blood contained the blood of the gods, not just the draconic genes but also the stellar influence, the blood of Dionysos. Zeus blasting the Titans actually stood for an asteroid impact which brought about the demise of the Titans, the Dinosaurs, according to Hatpins, and he also suggested that perhaps bacteria had arrived upon this asteroid which had introduced a DNA set which somehow triggered the new genetic patterns.
Forthright’s brow furrowed in confusion as he read through the piece. DNA had not been discovered, let alone named, when the dinosaurs became known to science, still less when the Dionysos cult emerged, in fact the English language itself had not existed at that time. How then could the etymological connections Hatpins was suggesting be possible? Forthright searched through some other journals until he found another piece by Professor Hatpins in which it was stated as a fact that the Odyssey of Homer had been so named because it was an Ode-to-the-Sea, the old brine-encrusted sea poem of the Greeks.
Forthright sent a text message to Hatpins’ landline: “Hatpins, I need to see you now.”
When the voice generator on the landline had spoken these words down the phone Hatpins had not recognized the telephone number, but had formed the assumption that the message was one of erotic urgency and that it had come from his wife Heather of Bromwich. He had replied with a text to the same number: “Hatpins wants to see you too, delightful creature, for snuggles and cuddles and plenty more besides!”
Forthright could think of no appropriate response to this, but instead paid a visit to Hatpins directly at his cottage.
“Now look here Hatpins”, he said, with a note of gravity, after the professor had shown him to an armchair and given him a cup of tea. “All this about Homer naming things in English, and Orphic philosophers theorizing about dinosaurs and DNA…”
“Ah well now,” Hatpins interjected at this point, “I must say that I haven’t made any such claims. My reasoning is not so peculiar once you realize how information can travel on beams of higher-dimensional light back into the consciousnesses of the ancients, and that gifted intuitives such as bards, oracles and mystic philosophers are able to sense the information via their feelings. They referred to these beams of higher-dimensional light as the rays of Apollo, god of prophesy.”
“Maybe so, Hatpins, but where are your references?”
“I believed I referenced Barbara Ricicle.”
“Yes, but as far as I’m concerned such bold claims require strong proofs. Would you be able to provide a proof that such prophetic processes occur?”
“I am confident that I would be able to do so, yes.”
“Very well then, I shall give you two weeks. Should you find such a proof then I will willingly triple your pay and you may set up your own sub-department of Non-Linear Etymology. But should a proof be lacking then I will have no choice but to reduce your funding merely to an hourly rate for lecturing and tutoring on more conventional subjects.”
This, then, was the challenge that now faced Professor Hatpins: to prove that old stories may be pregnant with information sourced in times long after the stories were themselves conceived.
It would perhaps have been stylistically appropriate, from the point of view of the general shape of the tale here being reported, if Professor Hatpins had then gone into a decline, lapsing into alcoholism, alienating himself from his lovely wife and wasting his days in dingy bars before finally resolving to overcome the difficulties of his situation. It would indeed be rather handy for the story teller if such had been the pattern of events here, so he might force from his readership a welling up of artificial pity that would bind them to the protagonist, but alas, a sense of realism prevents me from inventing such a negative episode, for, much as we might like to wish otherwise, life just isn’t like that; it need not plumb the depths of despair that are encountered in fiction, but can be altogether a much cheerier affair. And, though it pains me to say so, I must admit that the plain fact is that Hatpins chose here to apply himself immediately and happily to the challenge that faced him without even so much as strong whiskey. I can only hope that you may find it in your generous hearts to feel a compassionate interest in the fellow despite his lack of pathetic behavior.
And so it was that, after contemplating the matter for some time, the amiable professor approached his dear friend Captain Cuppalot with an intriguing request.
“I am correct in supposing, am I not,” he asked, that you are aware of a past life as Daidalia, who sailed from Knossos with a contingent of Minoans to settle in Delphi, the greatest of the oracle centers of the Greek world?”
“You are indeed correct,” Cuppalot confirmed.
“And it is also true, is it not,” Hatpins continued, “that as Daidalia you went on to assume for some time the role of a prophetess at this oracle site.”
“That is correct, yes.”
“Excellent. My request then is a simple one. Might I ask you to invoke your connection to Daidalia while she is performing this role, and that you beam to her certain ideas which she may then be able to encode in some lasting form that we may be able to recover and decode and then cite as proof of this process, showing Cardinal Forthright that information can indeed code ancient stories from the present?”
“I should consider that a very worthwhile project,” said Cuppalot.
The next stage was to decide what ideas to beam back into the past. Hatpins explained that really it would have to be information that was available to us in our own time but which could not be available to Daidalia in any other form, and for this reason Hatpins thought it best if we chose some modern scientific theory which could not possibly have been arrived at through the science of Daidalia’s own society. After casting around for such a theory for a time, Hatpins hit upon a brilliantly elegant scheme: we would send to Daidalia the theoretical notion that if some form of light could escape from a black hole it could actually come out into the past, in other words an idea which was closely connected conceptually to the very process we were interested in proving! No-one of Daidalia’s time could have had the slightest inkling even of what a black hole is, let alone of the theory of relativity upon which the notion is based, so if this idea could be sufficiently well encoded in the ancient tale we would have our proof.
“Run it by me again,” said Captain Cuppalot, as the two sat, later that afternoon, fine-tuning the plan.
“Listen carefully. A black hole, such as is believed to be located at the centre of our spiraling galaxy, is somewhat like a prison from which even light, of the ordinary kind, cannot escape, so strong is the gravitational pull. According to the equations of relativity time slows down, relatively speaking, in an increased gravitational pull, and the gravity of a black hole is so strong that could light find a way to escape it could actually come out into the past. The black hole can also be thought of as being like a great hungry monster that engulfs everything it comes in contact with. For a long time it was assumed that nothing could possibly escape, but then it was stated that some forms of radiation were emitted, but it was not thought that they could contain any information about the inside of the black hole. But then, in the June of 2004, the month that saw Venus transit the Sun in the constellation of Taurus the Bull, scientists started saying that inside the black hole were things called Superstrings that were tangled but not destroyed, and that perhaps some of the emissions might contain some information about these Superstrings.”
“I don’t really get his business of the Superstrings,” said Cuppalot.
“That’s not a problem,” said Hatpins. “You don’t need to understand the concepts, you just need to transmit them to Daidalia, at the same time impulsing her to formulate the information in a way that may survive until our times. If she is a priestess of Delphi this shouldn’t be too difficult. Her words will be considered precious by all Greece.”
And so Cuppalot invoked Daidalia and beamed to her as best he could the strange ideas that Hatpins had described to him, something about an engulfing monster – did he say a bull? – in a spiraling prison from which it was for a long time said that no-one could escape, but how this could be achieved by some sort of amazing string, once it had been detangled and unraveled. Cuppalot also transmitted to Daidalia that it was important that the story be passed down without being changed until such time as science had developed its muscles, so to speak, sufficiently to be able to recognize the symbols of information, tokens of a future science. He transmitted to her the idea that if this information could be effectively recovered and decoded in this future age from which it had come, it would indeed be a most happy occasion!
Now it so happened that their friend Hawaki Leafstrain also had a past life connection that might prove useful, namely as a Celtic bard. So, to increase the chances of success, Hatpins carried out the same procedure with Hawaki.
Two weeks later Hatpins, Cuppalot and Leafstrain sat in audience of Cardinal Forthright in his office, relating to him their adventures. It was Cuppalot who was elected to tell the bulk of the story:-
“Well, once we had posted the core ideas into the past there seemed only one thing to do – to go on the quest to find the deposited tokens. It was decided that Hawaki would stay in Britain and search for the tokens within the Matter of Britain, while Hatpins and Heather together with I and my wife Myrtale, would make the journey to the mainland, the great Eurasian Continent. There was little doubt where would be the best place to start the search – an initial consultation with the priests and perhaps even the current prophetess of Delphi seemed most sensible, since this was where the seeds had been sewn.
And so we traveled to Gaul in our yacht, the HMHM Henry-Moorehen-Ry-Mooring, and upon landfall I was inspired to write a little verse:-
Here Am I on Continent
Awake with the Dream
Cuppalot incontinent
Gushing forth my stream.
In order to travel in style we decided to journey to Delphi via Apollo’s Wondrous Way, steering the Henry-Moorehen-Ry-Mooring overland on a constant bearing of 30 degrees south of East down along the rhumb line that runs from St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, past Mont Saint-Michelle off the north coast of Gaul, through the city of Bourges in the Gaul’s heart, along the Riviera of the east coast of Italy, through Corfu and straight to Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi. Apollo’s Way continues to Athens and then to the Kykladian island of Delos, birthplace of the god, but we stopped at Delphi to speak to its priests and priestesses, who sadly have for some centuries not enjoyed the same position at the forefront of the Greek world as once they did.
We spoke to a lady called Maria, explaining what it was that we were looking for. For a full three minutes she stared at us in open-mouthed wonder, while we smiled politely back at her wondering if she was still in possession of her senses. Then suddenly she yelled ‘Theseus!’ and leapt up like a lusty dolphin shooting out of the sea, and started dancing the Greek circle dance, calling us to join her, which we did as best we could while she laughed almost hysterically.
Then she lead us to the Thesea, the area of Delphi which has since ancient times been sacred to a legendary Athenian king who she said went by the name of Theseus. Here at last she began to explain her elation: she knew exactly the story we were looking for – it was a myth about this Athenian King, Theseus, and every one of the ideas Cuppalot had transmitted back to Daidalia had been received, recorded and successfully set down in permanent form. We asked her to relate to us the details, but she said that the discovery was so great that it deserved a suitably magnificent telling, and told us that we were to meet her in two days’ time in the Dolphin Temple in Athens.
And so we continued along Apollo’s Wondrous Way to violet-crowned Athens. While admiring the Parthenon Cuppalot experienced an epiphany of Athena as white marble shone like the Moon, revealing intimately the cherishing touch of centuries. Maria took us to the Temple of Athena the Craftswoman and Hephaestus the Craftsman, which had formerly been called the Theseum, sacred to Theseus, then it was time to go the Dolphin Temple.
Maria had really pulled out all the stops. The temple had been hung with fine drapes, and was lit by lamps burning olive oil, while pine-resin incense burned on the altar, wine was poured from large vessels in the antique style, and a harpist plucked gently while waiting to accompany Maria’s telling of the myth. The priestess herself looked positively regal when she entered the temple, wearing a blue velvet robe fastened with a beautiful gold broach in the shape of a sprig of olive bent round in a circle, and fine gold earrings in the shape of dolphins, with a laurel wreath upon her head. Her eyes glittered like those of a goddess as she began her tale.
She related in full the story of the Athenian hero who had entered the spiraling prison called the Labyrinth, the cyclopean-walled house of the flesh-eating bull-headed monster, the Minotaur. Prior to this it had been said that it was impossible to escape from this meandering prison, but Theseus was able to show that in fact it was possible, and the feat was achieved by use of a thread which he had been given a thread by a Minoan princess, which he unraveled as he went and then used to find his way back out of the dark stronghold. Maria also told how one of her Delphic predecessors, Plutarch, himself a high priest of Apollo at the oracle centre, had recorded a version of the tale of Theseus in which the young prince had escaped from Crete along with a daughter of King Minos called Aigle, which means ‘Light’. She told too how those seeing the approach of the returning ship back on mainland Greece saw a black sail, which they read as a signal that the escape had not been successful, when in fact it had. Further to this the beginning of her tale contained the fact that Theseus’ father Aigeus the king of Athens had, when wondering how he might have a child, visited the Delphic oracle and been given, by way of answer, a sewn up wine sack and told not to open it until he got back to Athens. After the birth of his child Aigeus had placed certain tokens under a rock – a sword and a pair of sandals, and had told the mother of his child, Aethra, not to tell his son who he was until he was strong enough to lift the rock and recover the tokens. Then he should be sent to meet Aigeus in Athens.
The child was named Theseus after these deposited tokens, and Plutarch’s version noted that the name could be read as a pun coming not only from the Greek for the placing of these tokens but also for the word for ‘acknowledge’, referring to the recognition of the hero by his father once he had arrived in Athens, for this was the happiest moment there had ever been in the city, according to the story. His father had not known who the young man was until he had drawn his sword to cut some meat, the sword that he had found under the rock. Aegius immediately recognized the token by the emblem carved onto it, and in this moment Theseus was recognized and acknowledged as the true heir to the throne of Athens.
And so we to had found the tokens that Daidalia had placed in the ancient story. Maria hardly needed to explain to us that the hungry flesh-eating monster was the black hole, how the thread by which the escape was achieved was the tangled superstring inside the black hole, how the black sail was the blackness of the black hole which sucks in light by the strength of its gravitational field but how Aigle, meaning light, with whom Theseus escaped is the higher-dimensional light that can and does escape this gravitational field, the reason that the black sail is not a true signal. It was also clear that the recovering of the tokens under the rock was an encoded symbol of the recovery of the information from the future, and that not opening the bag from the oracle until the right time symbolized Daidalia’s story being passed on unchanged until the time of decoding, and that Theseus developing his strength until he was strong enough to lift the rock and recover the tokens symbolized science developing to a stage of sophistication whereby this decoding became possible, in other words that the story could not possibly be decoded until science had developed this stage, which was why Hatpins had chosen these notions in the first place.
Now it was easy to understand why Maria had been so amazed when we had explained to her the details of our quest. Now it was we who felt that sense of amazement, with a thrill of wonder screaming through us more intensely than anything any of us had ever experienced before.
But I have skipped ahead and not really told you anything of the wonderful rendition of the story that was given by Maria. I have not mentioned for example her quotation of Bakchilides, adapted into English, which outlined the events surrounding Theseus’ arrival in Crete:-
The blue-prowed ship cut through the salty waves
Off the shores of great Minoan Crete
It carried Theseus, that brave hero
And fourteen young Ionian maids and youths.
It sped on winds sent by grey-eyed Athene
Filling its bright sails from the North
But when the arrows of desire struck Minos
Reaching out he touched one of the maids
Who screamed out in alarm for Theseus
Who seeing this with anger boldly spoke:
“O son of peerless Zeus the course you steer
Is carrying you towards a harmful deed
You may have been conceived by mighty Zeus
But I sprang forth from great Poseidon’s seed
Who lay with Aethra when the violet-wreathed
Nereads gave her a veil of gold.
Therefore, warlord of the Knossians
Cease from acts that would bring many tears
O I shall fight you, and the gods will judge.”
So he spoke, and sailors stood spellbound
To hear such bold defiance from this man
But Minos started raging deep inside
And forming in his mind a cunning plan.
“Father Zeus,” he cried, “Now hear my words
Listen to your son by Phoenix’ daughter
Send a peal of thunder as a sign
So all will know that I am of your line.”
Zeus answered his prayer and sent a flash
Of searing lightning down across the sky
And all aboard the ship were filled with awe
To see such confirmation of his birth.
Then “Theseus”, called Minos, “if you’re born
To Aethra as a son of he who stirs
The seas, leap now into those depths
Posiedon’s chambers lying far below
And bring back up this shining golden ring.”
Thus spoke the king and Theseus showed no fear
But from the solid wooden deck he sprang
Into the swirling forests of the sea.
The dolphins, those lithe roamers of the sea
Bore the hero swiftly through the fronds
To the palace of his horseman sire
And into the great regal hall of gods
There he gazed in wonder at those nymphs
Who, shining gold, performed a happy dance
And there he saw the ox-eyed goddess queen
Who was his father’s true majestic wife
She wrapped him in the finest purple robe
And placed a flowery wreath upon his head.
Then, unwet, he rose up from the sea
With gifts of gods bright-gleaming on his limbs
A miracle by which Minos was stunned
As the sweet-voiced nymphs began to sing
To celebrate the finding of the ring.
Though my crew and I had no need of an explanation, Maria described for the others present – who included members of the Athenian city council and the Greek ministry of culture – the symbolism of the tale, the way that it was encoded with information from the current time. As a result of this, following this evening, the stupefied ministers officially and publicly sanctioned and endorsed the Delphic oracle as of old, even themselves visiting Delphi for advice. This resulted in the oracle orchestrating the complete rebuilding of the sacred culture of Greece, albeit with a new emphasis. In times past the great myths had been valued for reasons many of which were particular to those times, and now here was a new reason to value them more than ever before, which revealed their numinous beauty again, for, according to the aesthetic philosopher Gerald of Hove, this is what true beauty is, an activated and resonant field of value, a healing balm for towns, cities and nations. Funnily enough even these governmental going-on have precedent in the old tale, for it was said that after he became king of Athens Theseus instituted many enlightened reforms.
We ourselves decided to spend a little more time in the Greek world, by way of a celebratory holiday, planning to continue south-east into the Aegean. But first we wanted to spend a some more time in Athens.
That evening the ladies, Heather and Myrtale, had found somewhere to discuss a novel their were planning to co-write and myself and Hatpins, that erudite son of Apollo, took a stroll around those ancient streets. Cosmopolitan hubub snaked through ancient Plaka, Bouzouki and the clink of dishes. We found a delightful little taverna and there enjoyed a traditional meal.
“Top up your retsina, professor?” I said.
“Most kind, Captain Cuppalot, thou far-galloping spawn of Bacchus.”
“So Hatpins, Greece...any thoughts?”
“Well, my dear Cuppalot, if I may take up a theme of non-linear etymology, I have learned that the Greek for 'oil' is a word which is pronounced 'larthi'. This is of course where we get the English word 'lather'. Now, what we call 'Greece' is not what the natives call their homeland. They call her Ellada, pronounced 'E-lather'. In other words the Greek for Greece is almost the Greek word for oil, which is effectively another word for 'grease'.”
“Most efharisto, kirie Hatpinos, but the next question surely is why? What could be the reason?”
“Well, where does the word 'oil' come from?”
“From the word 'olive'?”
“Kala! It is 'elias' in Greek. Olive oil has been produced in Greece since very ancient times. Huge and beautiful earthenware containers were built to store it. They ate it on food, they burnt it in torches, they rubbed it on their bodies for that 'Greek god' look, they put a layer on top of wine to prevent it oxidizing during storage, (in fact they still do that), it is also used to make soap, and so, for want of a less clichéd expression, the list goes on.
Since we are in Athena’s city, I might mention that Athena is the goddess of olive trees, and She is thoroughly Greek, hers is not one of the immigrant cults. One of Her epithets is Promachus, which means that She is a protectress. The Ancients believed that She helped to protect their land from invasion. And, interestingly, olive leaf extract is a very powerful microbe-remover, and so Athena's olive tree really does protect the body against invasion.”
“Good, and indeed truly most thankly prof Hatpins, for another most etymological interest. Most certainly so yes. Octopus?”
“Where?”
“Most silly kirie Hatpins! I was merely making a culinary suggestion!”
After embarking from Piraeus, the port of Athens, we headed out in the Aegean for some island-hopping, and here we lazed on various Kykladian islands and swam in their warm seas, sailing from one to t’other on the Henry-Moorehen-Ry-Mooring.
I was on a number of occasions inspired to poetry, and I shall include a couple of short examples here:-
Incontientiad
‘Here I am on balcony
Listening to birds,
Reading books on falconry
And playing games with words.
'Here I am on continent
Awake within my dream
Here I am incontinent,
Spilling forth my stream'
Here I am on campsite
Watching sprinkler squirts
Here I am in wardrobe, fest-
tooned with silken shirts
Yonder is the cuttlefish
Firing inky squirts
Here I am in jellyfish
Amid translucent skirts.
'My infant splendor’s mine
My heart's not broken
The beauty-seeing child within
Has now been woken
My infant splendor’s mine
I feel protected
The child inside Pandora's box
Is resurrected'
I stumble into orange groves and pilfer
for the express purpose of obtaining fluid
How much am I sweating?
One orange full? Two?
What?
I listen to the wind in the trees,
what is it saying? One? Two?
The song bird, what does he tell me? One orange? Two? Three even?
How much?
I hear the cicada,
Cicada, how much am I sweating? One? Two? More?
Mud frogs and Unglish mango out in the mad day fun
One mango? Two?
What?
Mud frogs and Unglish mango out in the mad day fun
It was while we were hopping around the Kyklades that my crew and I had various discussions about the Mayan calendar, initiated by Hatpins outlining a thesis he had been working on for some time. We first noted an elegance of idea in the way in which in Southern Greece Apollo’s Wondrous Way actually aligns upon Winter Solstice Sunrise, and the Sun at the winter solstices in our own period was aligned with the region of the Black Hole of Galactic Centre, how this would also be true at Winter Solstice of 2012, the date which is the end of the Long Count calendar of the Maya people of Central America, the beginning of a new age of the Sun. We talked too of how the Maya name periods of time after the last day of the period, as if the beginning of the period had been seeded from the end of the period, just as the Theseus information had come from our own time – the end of the Mayan Long Count – and gone back to the ancient days to form the core of the story.
And as we idled in the shade of the vines in the warm Aegean afternoons, serenaded by the hissing cacophony of the insects in the foliage, we talked too of how the Maya divide such periods of time into thirteens, and from here we began to talk of their other calendar, which does not finish in 2012 but continues its sacred cycles, namely the Mayan Calendar Round, as it is called. At the simplest level this calendar is made up of two interlocking wheels of 13 and 20 days, leading to a sacred year of 260 days, and between lunches of fresh-caught fish and love-making at siesta time with our respective spouses, the four of us wondered that this numerology of 13s and 20s was derived from a Central American rattlesnake, Crotallus Durissus Durissus, the 13 coming from the pattern of scales on its skin, and with two new fangs being grown every 20 days, thus accounting also for the twenty-day period.
Between snorkel dives and walks across hills fragrant with wild thyme, we noted the connection of this Calendar Round, and of thirteens, to Venus, and to sacred time that is seeded from the future. And while enjoying dark wine on the deck of our slowly lolling yacht, we let our minds play upon the fascinating patterns, for in more or less exactly the same time it takes the Earth to travel around the Sun eight times – eight solar years in other words – Venus orbits the Sun thirteen times.
The connection to future seeding comes from the geometry of circles, as we noted between yoga poses and cups of myrtle tea. A single circle is balanced around its own centre. Place another circle of the same radius upon the circumference of the first, and the centre of balance has shifted from the original centre of the first circle to the point midway between them. Add a third circle again of the same radius with its centre upon one of the two intersection points of the first two circles, and again the centre of balance will shift – the second movement. After seven circles have been drawn in this elementary way the centre has shifted six times, and now a hexagonal pattern has been created that is once again balanced around the original centre point of the first circle, since there are now six circles equally spaced around that first circle. As we enjoyed black oily olives and meditated upon ants walking in the sunbathed dust of ancient paths, or upon lizards scrambling over warm dry rocks, we recalled that this is why Chapter 24 of the I Ching says “All movement is accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return.” The first circle is created from the intersections of the circles which were themselves its creations, like a snake biting its tail, with the original seed having come from the future, as with the Theseus story. This too is the reason why certain creation myths, myths of Genesis, have seven days, the day of rest being equivalent to the return home to the original balance point. Myrtale massaged palm oil into my shoulders as I listened to Hatpins, cocktail glass in hand, explain how our own western week is based on this cycle of seven, but the week of the Maya people is of thirteen days because it is after drawing a further six circles between and outside these, in other words with their centers on the newly created intersection points, that a pattern is created that once again has its centre of balance at the original centre of the first circle. The same pattern can also be linked to the thirteen Venus years, each of these years equating to one of the circles. Through this geometry the 8 solar year period becomes sacred time, in the sense of the end being the beginning.
Relaxing indeed were the hours we spent drawing these patterns with pencil and compasses as the evaporating seawater of our last dip left its salt on our now tanned shoulders.
And it was with the aftertaste of barbequed kalimari still pleasing out palettes that we meditated too upon the way that the larger cycles of the Calendar Round and the pattern on the hide of the great rattle snake of the Maya link again to Venus. The solar year and the sacred year of 260 days come into phase once every 52 solar years, a sacred period for the Maya, and half of 104 solar years, the period of 13 Venus cycles each of 8 solar years and 13 Venus years. So from the elementary cycle of 13 days combined with the factor of 20 days, we move easily up to a period of 13 x 13 Venus years, while the pattern of scales on the skin of the rattlesnake is also a square of side 13. Of course the generation of this pattern from the twin wheels of 13 and 20 days is not absolutely accurate over long periods of time, and the only obvious times to recalibrate the calendar are the two Venus transits that occur with eight solar years between them then leave a gap of over a century before the next transit across the Sun. This makes the period between June 2004 and June 2012 the obvious time for recalibrating the Mayan Calendar Round.
It did not seem strange to us to be so involved with Mayan cycles while in the Greek setting, but we felt that perhaps there was some mystery in the fact that it didn’t seem strange, and sure enough we soon found our thoughts turning to connections between the Venus cycle and the Theseus story. According to the old story after escaping from the Labyrinth Theseus sailed with his crew to the island of Delos, and there they donated a statue of Aphrodite, that is to say Venus, to the temple complex, and danced a dance which was the first performance of the Labyrinth dance, a Greek circle dance no less. We thought of how the Greek circle dance, like the basic maypole dance, involves regular periodic retrograde steps as it goes round, just as Venus goes retrograde periodically, seeming to reverse her course in the sky, five times in every cycle of 8 solar years. We also recalled how Maria had related that in the Athenian version of the Theseus story it was Aphrodite, in other words the planet Venus, who guided Theseus through the Labyrinth. Really we could not deny the sense in which the Labyrinth Dance and the Venus Cycle are one and the same. After all it was Homer who wrote in his Odyssey that it was a dancing ground that Daidalus, elsewhere the designer of the Labyrinth, had built for Ariadne of the lovely locks.
While on Naxos I myself, Cuppalot, half in sleep under a colonnaded vine canopy in the warm afternoon, had a dream in which I was visited by a youthful god, Dionysos, stood sweetly recognizable amid the haze of my dream vision. He told me it was time for us to return home, and of the most elegant route that we might take. A course running parallel to Apollo’s Wondrous Way, the route by which we had come to Greece, but further north, running through the old site of the ancient city of Troy rather than through Athens, at that same constant bearing, namely in this direction 30 degrees north of west, would take us to the great city of Brighton-by-the-River, otherwise known as Llan Danu, often rendered as ‘London’. Yes, for when Geoffrey of Monmouth spoke of the tribe of the Trinovantes, saying their name derived from the fact that London was built as New Troy by the Trojan Brutus, he may not have been recording linear history, but rather bardic intuitions about the location of London upon the line of The Wondrous Way of Trojan Apollo. So it was that we steered our craft in the wake of Brutus’ ship up to the British capital.
During the journey we recalled how it was in June 2004, that month of a Venus transit, that scientists had started to speak of how superstrings inside the black hole might not be destroyed, the discoveries that made the encoding possible, noting the elegance of the fact that this too links to the cycles of Venus, since the sacred Venus cycle of 8 solar years is the period that would occur between that and the next Venus transit of the Sun, in June 2012. We recalled that 2004 had also been the summer in which the Olympics had returned to Greece, and that the Olympic period of four years also harmonized with the Venus cycle, being half the 8-year period. And in fact the Pythian Games were originally held every eight years in honour of Apollo at the site of Delphi. It also occurred to us that the Olympics of the summer of 2012 were to be held in New Troy, Llan Danu, London, upon the course of the Wondrous Way of Trojan Apollo. These facts cheered us to the possibility that leaving the idyllic Aegean did not have to be an exile from paradise, but rather that even London could be Arcadia, the Olympian precinct standing by the wide-flowing Thames as its original stands beside the Alpheus, the great river of Arcadia.”
These then were the words that Cuppalot, who had been elected to talk on Hatpins’ behalf, related to Cardinal Forthright, and as he reached the conclusion of his great monologue now it was the Cardinal’s turn to “do a Maria”, that is to say to stare in wide-mouthed amazement. So pleased was he with the story, and so complete was his acknowledgement of Hatpins’ original theory, that he not only raised the professors’ funding and gave him his own department of Non-Linear Etymology, but he also spoke with London’s Olympic committee so that they were made aware of the elegant connection of the games with the sacred cycles of Venus.
The crew had also by this time met up with Hawaki, who had in fact made discoveries of a similar nature regarding Celtic mythology. (SEE RHIANNON SONGS)