According to William Blake(1804), the Wheel of religion, and the Church, was the Dark Preacher of Death – ” of sin, of sorrow and punishment.”
Jesus died because he “strove against the current of this Wheel,” championing, instead to conquer by forgiveness, the true religion.
The Church was the terrible devouring sword that pretends to love but practices hate, pretends to forgiveness but practices envy, revenge and cruelty.
Albert Schweitzer (1906) also wrote about ‘the wheel’ …
There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him … the wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign.
Three ‘discoveries’ in 1980, 1981 and 1985, respectively, helped lay the foundation for the journey of a lifetime, as well as a script for an epic film.
The first occurred while tidying and cleaning-out ‘under the wooden stage’ in my Church Hall at Pennal, a small village in the foothills of the southern Snowdonia mountain range, in Wales. Yes. I was once a Country Parson! It was here that I discovered two 500 years old wooden St Hubert carvings, one depicting a stag and the other a hunting dog.
My introduction to the legend of St Hubert (Eustace) and the Pagan-Christian symbol of a Crucifix rooted between the antlers of a Stag, were very down to earth ones! (A string of ‘stag’ co-incidences were to follow over many years, but that story is for another time).
The second, was the discovery of old stag antlers, again while tidying and ‘cleaning out’, this time an old 1760’s bread oven in the garage of our Parsonage House.
Finally, it was on Samhain or All Hallowed Eve, in 1985 that I came across a second hand copy of Emma Jung’s ‘The Grail Legend’. This was my first encounter with the “cervus fugitivus” or the fugitive stag – an alchemical symbol – that continues to fascinate me to this
But the catalyst for what would become the epic story of ‘The Fugitive Stag’ was the theft of our much loved ‘stag carvings’ from my church in 1988. I was devastated. Wounded in a way that took me years to come to terms with.
The Spanish mystic St John of the Cross and his hymn to the ‘Wounded Stag’, with its theme of ‘intimacy and ‘loss’, best embodies the beginning of that quest:
Where did you hide yourself, Beloved, and leave me crying? Like a stag you fled Once having struck me; I ran after, calling but You were gone …
“Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
One evening I took Beauty in my arms – and I thought her bitter – and I insulted her.
I steeled myself against justice.
I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care!”
Rimbaud understood, at the start of his brief career, what others only understood at the end, if at all, that the sacred word no longer has validity. It carries ‘no weight’, as we say. He realized that the poison of culture (our so-called ‘civilized world’ and its values), had transformed beauty and truth into artifice and deception.
He takes Beauty on his knees and he finds her bitter. He abandons her. It was the only easy way that he could still honour her.
The ‘Fugitive Stag’ endeavours to honour Beauty in its own unique way.
You will find that now the more human organizations, spirits, which appeared to have most definitively formed nature to humanity, are now everywhere unhappier, precisely because they exist more rarely than in other times and places. The barbarians around us tear apart our best powers, before they can be cultivated and only the firm, deep insight into this fate can save us, and prevent us at least from perishing in an unworthy manner. We have to seek what is excellent, and hold to it as well as we can, to strengthen and heal ourselves in the feeling of it and thereby to gain the strength to recognize what is raw, skewed and misshapen not only in pain but as that which it is, in its character and specific lack. (Holderlin in a letter to his half-brother Karl Gok 4 June 1799.)
Hölderlin’s poems, however, display those little shards of light which remind us of who we are and what we might become.
More should listen to him in 2020.
Holderlin Tower in Tubingen – Ann ap lived for a couple of years a few houses down to the right out of picture (in an apartment)
The Magi were not kings but Zoroastrian priests-astrologers – from Persia or today’s Iran.
IRAN! How timely.
IN 1950 IRAN HAD A democratically elected government and Prime Minster. In late 1951, Iran’s Parliament in a near unanimous vote approved the oil nationalization agreement. But the USA and UK were not happy with the existence of a national Iranian Oil Company.
Our UK government did everything it could to make things difficult for the Iranians, even using the Royal Navy to blockade Iranian oil exports. The Iranian revenues were greater, because the profits went to Iran’s national treasury rather than to private, foreign oil companies. The UK went as far as banning British companies from exporting key products to Iran, including sugar and steel, as well as freezing Iran currency accounts in British banks.
The UK embargo had the effect of causing Iran to spiral into bankruptcy. Tens of thousands had lost their jobs.
By 1953, economic tensions caused by the British embargo and political turmoil began to take a major toll on PM Mosaddegh’s popularity and political power.
In 1953 a coup d’etat planned by the USA and UK overthrew the democratically elected PM Mohammad Mosaddegh, in favour of the monarchical rule of another Mohammad, who became the Shah of Iran.
It was the first covert action of the United States to overthrow a democratically elected foreign government during peacetime.
This act ensured Western control of Iran’s petroleum resources and prevented the Soviet Union from competing for Iranian oil. Some Iranian clerics even cooperated with western spy agencies – especially the CIA – because, dissatisfied with Mosaddegh’s secular government, they favoured a more religious form of government for the future!
The Shah of Iran ruled for 26 years as an absolute monarch, a Persian king, with the support of the USA and UK.
How many monarchs, absolute rulers, presidents and PM’s. today pay genuine homage to the teaching of the Palestinian Jew called Yehoshua or Jesus, the only ABSOLUTE PRINCE OF PEACE in history.
For what does it profit us if we gain the whole world, and lose our own soul? Or what shall we give in exchange for our soul? Matthew 16: 26
In my efforts to transform the story of the Fugitive Stag into a film, I can no more betray my soul (psyche) than I can betray or shortchange my Muse.Somewhere ‘out there’ there is a top director , producer or actor who shares my sentiments.
The Fugitive Stag 