Jan’s deep journey begins…
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Pat Ridell’s talk for the Jewel in the Claw weekend.
The Hieroglyphic Monad of John Dee
By The Patrician Lady
A talk given to The Silent Eye’s ‘Jewel in the Claw’ workshop on 21st April 2018
In my talk today I’m going to tell you a little about Dr. John Dee, one of the characters you have met in the drama, and something of his famous symbol the Hieroglyphic Monad or Monas Hieroglyphica. Most people, myself included, know or knew very little about this symbol so I decided to research it. As with all research I started by reading as much about it as I could find. This led me to articles and papers and it grew and grew and grew and I realised that this symbol incorporated the whole of creation and its processes; hence its name – the symbol of One-ness, Monas Hieroglyphica. Today I’m going to try and tell you something of what it means…
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As a child, I loved the old movies of the swashbuckling variety. Even then, I knew the stories were not real and the history likely to be wildly innaccurate. Romance and adventure did not wait behind every tree. Magic, though, had its own reality.
With a family who told me a closer-to-true version of the histories portrayed on the screen, I learned early the difference between fantasy, fact and fiction. What was produced for entertainment was never supposed to be a history lesson. I learned not to believe in what I saw… except for the duration of the film, when I could lose myself in make-believe.
The over-the-top acting, the swordplay and implausible heroics delighted me, and that has never really changed as I have grown older. A more mature eye sees the flaws with clarity, but I can still choose to ignore them and daydream about flashing steel, wild…
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+ #SE18Characters, #Silenti, esoteric psychology, Jewel in the Claw, Mystery Schools, Spirituality, The Jewel in the Claw
Jewels in the Claw (i)
by Steve Tanham
There is a moment when he stops, puts down his packing box, and looks at what remains of the Court Floor. It is the last vestige of a creative journey of twelve months, of twenty souls intent on giving their all to the rather unusual script, and of a Silent Eye spring weekend at the Nightingale Centre in the lovely Derbyshire hills…
Do things that have been created in the heart and mind cease to exist when they are played out in the time-honoured fashion of the mystical psycho-drama and pass from potential to actual to gone? There must be a difference between a thing – in this case a mystical play – created and performed to full effect, and a thing thought about in detail but not put into practice. The latter never makes it beyond the mind of the originator; the former becomes ‘actualised’ as a blueprint for the directed energies of a harmonic group of people, all of whom are aware that something deeper than an Elizabethan story is being told…
The man holding the box of monochrome, plastic squares thinks there is a difference… the life of the dramatic work has passed from potential to actual, and has, actually, not gone. Instead, its life has been transferred from single author to twenty others. Its story resonates differently in each of twenty acting perspectives, every one taking from its execution something unique to them and their lives; something that solidifies, then glows in the memory along with the unspoken words: “We did that. We came together and made that happen. We followed the path of the words in two-hundred pages of script and brought it to life.”
He hopes it will live for a while in their hearts, too. Long enough to ponder the many questions that the story prompts: What was most real, the dying figure of Shakespeare in 1616 or the drama created by the Tudor Queen of England when she brought an eclectic gathering of friends and enemies together at the Palace of Nonsuch in South London in April 1590 for a very unusual meeting of hearts and minds? Can we conceive of a reality that creates a plot, a story, as being different from the actual unfolding of that drama as twenty people bring it to life? Which is the most real? The passage of time is most certainly not the basis of the answer…
In his mind (the man with the packing box) the black and white squares re-assemble themselves into a very large chessboard known to the players as The Court Floor. It has four faces: East, West, North and South. Each face will later have a deeper name, but for now they are just the edges of a black and white, chequered surface.
In the shadows surrounding the chessboard and chairs:
“He is dying.”
“They say the spirit has come for him.”
Movement around the outside of the chairs – the Outer Court. The players realise they are being trained by doing.
“He is dying…”
Upstairs, in the chamber above the tavern, William Shakespeare lies dying on the chequered floor. At his head stands a candelabra with three lights lit. Behind this stands the surprisingly jovial figure of Death and Change: Count Mortido.
“Master Shakespeare, you have had an long and productive life, one which will be celebrated after you are gone. Are you content, now, to die?”
For the duration of two extinguished candles he nods and coughs his assent, but as the third is raised and the final chance of extended life is about to be removed, strong feminine hands grasp his ankles. Warm and sensual, they slide up the outside of his legs and an urging female voice fills the air as Countess Libido, sister-wife of the Count of Death hisses:
“Do not surrender this too soon! I will lend you my strength!”
She kisses Shakespeare on the lips, and the sexual/life charge rips through him. Filling his lungs with borrowed air and time.
“There was another story,” he says. “One that could not be told while she was alive.”
“The Queen?” asks Count Mortido.
The Bard nods.
The powerful female hands linger on his body, urging. “Tell it now…” chuckles the Count.
Elsewhen, the chequered floor, the arena and dancing-space of possibilities to come, flickers into life in 1590. Shakespeare’s form is no longer there…. but, of course, it is yet to happen.
A future-ghostly Shakespeare stands by the edge of an empty Court Floor, approached by a very real Christopher Marlowe, fellow Elizabethan playwright and friend.
“Play this with me, Master Marlowe. Be life to my ghost within this mind of life in death!”
The task between good friends is accepted. Marlowe turns to those in the outer shadows and summons them, one by one: the empty chair heading the South Face; the Dragon of the Seas, otherwise Sir Francis Drake; a spy who casts astrological charts for the powerful of Spain; the second richest woman in England…
The Southern seats are capped by the materialising presence of Count Mortido himself, come to check that the laws of causation are not being tampered with.
Marlowe moves across the empty East Face, which will soon be filled with the power of three. From the Northern edge of the Court Floor he summons others from the shadows: into the second seat walks an elegant Saracen lady, the wife of the Moroccan ambassador embarked on a trading exchange for English fancy goods… and possibly a little more; the second Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, comes forward to take the Champion’s seat in the middle of the row; this is followed by the wife of the Alchemist John Dee and Lady Blanche Parry, a woman who has cared for Queen Elizabeth since her birth in 1533.
The empty seat at the head of the row is taken by Countess Libido, who smiles at her brother-husband across the court. Neither of them can be seen by the others… well, not yet, at least.
The faces of the East and West are polarised in their emptiness. Eyes peer into the gloom, into what is left of the mysterious tavern, and other faces are found; looking down at small tables and drinking from tiny glasses.
Marlowe speaks, again, and the shadowy lady in the golden gown slowly raises her head. Marlowe trembles, slightly, then gathers his voice….
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence via home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.
©Stephen Tanham
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Lady in Red
by Steve Tanham
Ali gives her searing and soul-honest review of her character, Countess Libido, is last weekend’s Silent Eye workshop ‘The Jewel in the Claw’.
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As I schedule a post or two in advance to cover my absence for the Silent Eye’s workshop weekend, there are few things I can predict with any certainty. You never know what is going to happen or how things are going to work out. One thing I do know, though, is that barring unforeseeable disaster, I will get to spend some time with the friends and people I love. And we will talk… a lot… and when we start talking, we can cover a lot of ground, from the ridiculous to the sublime, the mundane to the mystical.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”
I often think of Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter” when these conversations get going. Though to be…
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By the time this goes out, another workshop will be over and our Companions will have dispersed for another year. Inevitably, every time we go back to Great Hucklow, we think of that very first workshop… and for me, that meant laughter…
“What have you done with my mother?”
The laughing sally greeted our arrival and my offer to climb into my son’s home through his bedroom window. It set the tone for the day… one mainly filled with laughter. It is often so.
Laughter, smiles, joy… they are as contagious as a yawn… or as any other emotion. They can also turn a moment of fading sadness to beauty. It is a well-known phenomenon that depression can affect those living with someone suffering from it, in almost the same way as the cold virus will spread through a household. The negative emotions set up a downward spiral as, for…
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Stuart’s opening comments on the ‘Jewel in the Claw’ weekend…
*
‘A change is as good as a rest’.
Proverbial wisdom or reckless folly?
For five years the Silent Eye Team has explored the spiritual legacy of the ages via a nine-fold map and our beloved Enneagram Mat…
This year, for our sixth Spring Gathering, things were going to be different.
Gone was the mat.
Our comfort and our staff.
In its place, in all its chequered glory lay a ‘Bloody Great Chess-board!’
Nightmare scenarios of a ‘McGoohan-ish’ nature crept from the shadows.
Mystery and menace appeared to lurk in unfathomably regular alternations of the black and the white.
Unfazed, the cast our production had called forth from across the globe set about the task of negotiationg both mystery and menace with their customary gusto and aplomb…
A robust Countess Libido saved our dying hero from his untimely end on the promise of a previously unwritten ‘masterpiece’ relating Queen Elizabth…
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The Ghost Ship
—-
They come from land and some by wave
To travel brave and not unnerved
Across a globe described by one
Who sees in numbers straight and curved
—-
That one, disgraced, must face a queen
Must eat her wrath and test its moment
And through eyes of tender wife
Must glimpse his soul and seek atonement
—-
Far more than anger rides the squares
Of chamber wrought to pry
To lift the skin of ancient wreck
And tear apart the sun and sky
—-
Four faces power has cast within
Four faces knit with passion
For rich and poor must play their parts
Beneath this cod and piece of fashion
—-
No blade dare chance the chequered chart
Lest bearer seeks parade
Of limbless foe ‘neath guardian’s blow
A groaning exhibition made
——
The mind and heart shall be the game
And high with low be paid
As rules reveal themselves in part
While each response is made
——
Within all this a Queen will sail
Upon a ship self-fashioned
Her quest: to tease the coming age
To birth with virgin’s passion
——
Dedicated to all those making, packing and preparing themselves for the Silent Eye’s 2018 workshop ‘Jewel in the Claw’, which begins tomorrow…
©Stephen Tanham
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“….so, this year it is Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Court, and next year we’ll be in Sumeria.” Running around getting things organised for the workshops always involves the attempted acquisition of some strange items. I frequently get asked what I’m hoping to use them for and that inevitably leads to questions about what we do, how and why.
“Sumeria?” The face was blank.
“An ancient civilisation, goes back five thousand years and more…” The face brightened with understanding.
“Oh.” There was a weird sort of relief too. “Cave men,” she said, thereby dismissing the great city of Uruk with two words.
“Not exactly…” But where do you start? The great walled city of Uruk, home to around eighty thousand people, was founded six thousand years ago, predating the rise of ancient Egyptian civilisation by a thousand years. The Sumerian culture had been growing for a long time before that too.
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