In the Last Hour of 2012

Unidentified Grocer's shop, Darnell, Sheffield, South Yorkshire

 

 

 

The Lord of Thunder went out one day

To ride on his favourite filly

I’m Thor he cried

And the horse replied,

“You’ve forgotten your thaddle, thilly.”

 

 





The Butcher's Bill

Unidentified blacksmith's shop, Sheffield

In the Great War, my paternal grampus Bill served in the Royal Garrison Artillery. Bill was injured after being kicked by a horse. After the Armistice, the brigade was kept in France and informed they were now going to be sent to Russia to fight on the side of the White Russians against the Red Bolsheviks (a futile cause as we now know).


After being told of this new posting, most of the brigade, including Bill (and his brothers), deserted and made their way back to England; knowing well that if they were caught, they would be shot. The authorities later caught up with some of the deserters and although they were not court-martialled, because public opinion was against British involvement in the Russian War, they were denied the right to return to their pre-war employment and they never received their war medals.


It is thought that Bill was a mere Porter with the Grand Central Railway before the war, becoming a Guard after completing his war service. Perhaps Bill joined under the GCR "colours" although I would think this detail of  branded a deserter may mean that his name is expunged from any GCR records.

Seems unfair that he was denied his medal in recognition of the service he did perform, but such is the bloody-mindedness of the English authorities and unwillingness to admit the cause was futile.

Several young lads from Sheffield were executed for "desertion".

The Execution of Sheffield Soldiers in the First World War.

C. Thompson, Butcher, most probably Colin Thompson of Totley Rise & Dore, Sheffield

 

Honey, have you seen where I left my anvil?

Vulcan - Sheffield Town Hall, Yorkshire

Shamanic Process is an integral, relational and inclusive way of living, and by that definition, of, by and with the spirits and not 'religious' or spiritual',but merely Spiritist. We live in a holographic universe in which we are connected and interconnected at pan-dimensional levels, the Shamanic life is one by which we appreciate, relate and journey at those levels.


At times our incarnate selves 'loses the plot' and becomes distracted or lost and our spiritual connection gets 'interference' or becomes 'disconnected'. This 'disconnection' can be a result of physical, emotional, mental or spiritual trauma. Our soul being fractures and those fractured parts or essences, disaffiliate, becoming lost or exiled from us.


At this point our lives can become seemingly pointless or without direction and we wander from physical experience to physical experience searching for connection and meaning. And all the while our spirit, our soul is calling and searching for us, yearning for return.

 

Sheffield Snow: a Frosty Pact

Clumber Park - Sheffield, South Yorkshire

 

 

The Undutiful Daughter  recounted the tale of how the daughter of a wealthy London gentleman was tempated by the Devil to poison her parents. She was spoilt and capricious and after one display of disobedience her father decided to punish her by confining her to her room. As she sat sulking one night:

 

The Devil to her appear did straight,

In human shape and manner like a man;

And then he seem’d to take her by the hand.

He said, fair creature, why do you lament?

What is it fills your heart with discontent?

She said my parents cruel are to me,

And keep me here to starve in misery.

He said then if you will be rul’d by me,

Revenged of them thou shall quickly be …

 

 

The Devil’s pact may have been portrayed primarily as a physical contract, a deliberate appeal to the Devil, but religious teaching implied that the committing of sin was in essence a tacit pact as well - a concept that was well embedded in eighteenth-century religious education, as evident in Anglican catechisms and the responses of child witnesses at the Old Bailey. Unlike the confessions of accused witches who said they were beaten by, married to, or slept with the Devil, people, primarily men, actually attempted to make written pacts with Satan in the tradition of Faust.

(Excerpt from Talk of the Devil: Crime and Satanic Inspiration in 18th Century England
by Owen Davies, Cunningfolk)

Image by Carlie167, stolen from Sheffield History Photo Gallery, Winter
.

The last Time I saw Sheffield

Sheffield General Cemetery

 

......for the Peak District and you know what I mean when I say that because everyone
in Sheffield does

for when your dad drove us home for Christmas from the house filled with damp
and it was snowing like a bastard and you were changing the radio
every thirty seconds because you wanted music not chat


for telling me I was stronger than I thought when I couldn’t feel my way away from
my own mind


for the fight between dragging paralysis and explosive creativity and all things it
makes us do


for the tide that might just might slowly turn


for the future we might just might just might deserve


~ Edd Mustill

Deep in the Heart of the Wimmera

 

 

O, come, o, come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

 

O, come, our Wisdom from on high,
Who ordered all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

 

O, come, o, come, our Lord of might,
Who to your tribes on Sinai's height
In ancient times gave holy law,
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

 

 

 

Boldog Asszony

Once in royal David's city
stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby
in a manger for his bed;
Mary, loving mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little child. 

 He came down to earth from heaven
who is God and Lord of all,
and his shelter was a stable,
and his cradle was a stall.
With the poor, the scorned, the lowly
lived on earth our Savior holy. 

Jesus is our childhood's pattern;
day by day, like us he grew;
he was little, weak, and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew;
and he feeleth for our sadness,
and he shareth in our gladness.

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that child so dear and gentle
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

 

Exiled Christmases: Coal to Newcastle

Thomas Nast's most famous drawing,

 "Merry Old Santa Claus," from Harper's Weekly,

 January 1, 1881.

 

 

It started, our lifetime of lonely exiled Christmases, with a fight. But it didn't really start then. It started in pre-history, or pre-my-history, in ancient bitternesses, deaths and sins unforgiven from before I was even born.

 

 

By the time the fight happened, my mother and grandmother were the sole survivors of a small, intense and insular family, and I was almost grown up. A father and husband had died, a brother and uncle had died, a powerful grandfather had died, a two-year-old son had died, making my mother an only child. Things were said, their partial estrangement began, and increased, and our many years of bad Christmases began.

 

 

At first it was got through pleasantly enough on the surface, but at great emotional cost to my mother. Then it became an annual awkwardness, the problem of somehow dealing with Christmas in a way that kept my mother and grandmother apart — or at least, bubble-wrapped, like two delicate presents sent together through the mail. [read more]

 

 

 

Image Sourced from

Bill Casselman's article on Thomas Nast: The Man Who Designed Santa Claus

Eminently Useless Information

For the last 18 months or so I have been frequenting a popular astrology forum and paying attention to the topics that come up time and time again for discussion and the extraordinary things people think astrology is capable of achieving.  In some ways, it is like having a window into the workings of a special purpose psychotic delusion and I wonder if because so many people do believe in, and practice astrology, if the 'safety in numbers' deal renders the delusion ~ within normal range?

Whatever that means.

Hot mundane topics for discussion by the amateur wannabe professional astrologers, purveyors of all things cosmic and wise, is the death of Jacintha Saldanha in the wake of the prank played by two royal arseholes in Australia and the latest mass shooting in Newton, Conneticut by yet another troubled single white male loner.

With three more sleeps until the End of the Something on 21 December, I am happy to report that yesterday I received a most pleasant and welcome surprise: an unexpected Christmas hamper from the St Vincent de Paul Society chock-full of my favourite goodies.  Like the hamper gods had read my mind!

It is within these small little ordinary events that I am reminded of the existence of the sacred in every molecule of our lives.  Of  worlds within worlds whirling and turning, all ticking along quite nicely without our help and certainly not in need of our interference.

I know there are intelligent people who are skilled in the use of the tool that is astrology. What worries me is that they are in the minority and are too busy to hang out in these astrology forums to see the ways in which their hard-won and long developed theories are being distorted by the unintelligentsia.

The amateurs are analysing 'natal' charts using false information in lieu of the correct date and place of birth details, so strong is the obsession to know, to force an answer or, in most cases, to make themselves a part of the tragedies: to ride on top of the ambulances and hearses.

Ghouls. 

Internet forums are riddled with them.  People with 1001 ways to fix the world and more opinions than there are arseholes in Calcutta. Yet where the hammer meets the anvil, these are disempowered people searching for transits causing events and imprisoning themselves with Acquired Astrology Disorder ~ sunsagmoonlibra or plutotrinemars. 

A special language for people who need to feel special. 

After three years of intense self-directed study of astrology, I have experienced the positives of astrology as a tool for deep personal growth and understanding; as well as having skated close to losing my ability to converse with others in non-astrological terms. With a Saturn conjunct transit brushing the cobwebs off natal Neptune for only the second time, I am mindful of what I know of Saturn's archetype.

I am mindful of the fact that I met the Saturn archetype a decade before I became curious enough to take a serious look at astrology.  What I have gained from my journey through astrology is the reassurance that I had already lived 49 years of my life without any knowledge whatsoever of whether Mercury was retrograde or that my Venus is in detriment.

Millions of people are living now with no knowledge whatsover of their natal chart and some may say that is what is awry with this world.  As for me, I think the world knows what it is doing and astrology might be the magnet on the cosmic fridge holding down the to-do list.

As for this astrology forum?  The latest offering on the tragedy of Newtown is that in the Human Design System, the troubled young man was a splenic (spontaneous) Projector on the Right Angle Cross of the Unexpected.

I am sure the parents of the slain children, the extended families of the slaughtered, and the world community will find that information eminently useful.