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+ esoteric psychology, Jewel in the Claw, Mystery Schools, Silent Eye School, Silent Eye Workshops, Spirituality, Understanding Fear
The Adventurer’s Hidden Magic
by Steve Tanham
“Strike man, strike!”
Those were the last words of Sir Walter Raleigh, spoken to an executioner who was taking his time, at the end of one of the most colourful lives of the whole Elizabethan era. The attitude–not of defiance, but of expediency–typified this adventurer’s life.
Raleigh had charmed Elizabeth I, but failed to do so with her successor, James I of England, who inherited the throne on the death of the childless ‘Virgin Queen’ in 1603. Despite the religious horrors of her early years, Elizabeth was pragmatic about religion, and actively sought to calm the religious stresses that the ‘bloody reign’ of her half-sister, Queen Mary I, had unleashed.
Raleigh was born into a strongly Protestant and well-connected family in Devon. Their lives had been blighted by religious persecution, and the aspiring Raleigh fitted Elizabeth’s cause well. As a young soldier of seventeen, he began a three year period of fighting for the Hugenots in France, an apprenticeship that was to fashion his outer persona as a handsome, gallant and efficient soldier.
An early academic start at Oxford University was cut short, and he never finished his degree. Instead, he later studied at the Inns of Court in London, though, at the end of his life, he denied he had ever studied law. He had become an accomplished soldier, and rose to fame as part of Elizabeth’s force in Ireland, which was tasked with putting down the frequent rebellions, which were stirred from afar. The Pope had sanctioned a series of incursions into southern Ireland, with the intention of supporting its Catholic traditions, and creating insurrection against England.
Raleigh served as a junior officer in the infamous Siege of Smerwick on the tip of the Dingle peninsula. Hundreds of Spanish and Italian soldiers had been landed there by boat and had prepared a hasty fortification using the ruins of a stone-age settlement. The English forces were soon on the scene. Messengers, sent earlier by the English, had been massacred and hung up, as trophies. Lord Grey, Elizabeth’s Deputy of Ireland, surrounded the invaders and began the Siege of Smerwick, which led to the brutal massacre of the six hundred invaders.
It is likely that, while serving under Lord Grey, Raleigh met Edmund Spenser–soon to be one of the most famous of the Elizabethan poets. Spenser was serving as military secretary to Lord Grey. His most famous poem, The Faerie Queen, was later presented at Court to Elizabeth, to whom it was dedicated. Raleigh, by then elevated in rank and rich in confiscated Irish estates given to him by the Queen, is likely to have been one of the sponsors of this introduction, since the two were neighbours in Munster.
Raleigh was a dazzling courtier, and renowned for his sparkling wit and quick-mindedness. Elizabeth was twenty-four years his senior, and, though no-one’s fool, she enjoyed his attentions and his intelligence. Once within the royal arc, Raleigh rose rapidly in her favour, and was knighted in 1585 at the age of thirty-one.
In 1591, in what the Queen was to see as an act of betrayal, Raleigh secretly married one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Throckmorton. She was pregnant with their child at the time, though the child died of plague in 1592. Bess returned to her duties with the Queen, who soon discovered what had happened. In her fury, the Queen had both Raleigh and Bess imprisoned in the Tower of London.
But Elizabeth needed his expeditionary expertise and released him to oversee an attack on the Spanish coast. The fleet was recalled at the last minute, but Raleigh had already captured a rich merchant ship, the Madre de Deus, sailing off the Azores. On his return, Elizabeth sent him back to the tower to remind him of her authority over his life. She released him shortly afterwards and allowed him to become a member of Parliament, where he soon established a reputation as an eloquent speaker on religious and naval matters. Bess had also been forgiven and resumed her duties at the Queen’s side.
For the rest of their lives, Raleigh and his wife remained devoted to each other. They had two more sons.
Elizabeth died in 1603. Raleigh did not get on with the more cautious James I, who was fervent and dogmatic in his religious beliefs and suspicious that the Queen’s former favourite was one of a new breed of ‘free-thinkers’; more allied to the world of knowledge than of God. Elizabeth had been keen to stay abreast of the emerging fields of what we would now call natural sciences, particularly where she could see advantage for her England. But James was more superstitious and frightened of anything that bordered on what he saw as magic, having been persecuted, he believed, by witches in Scotland.
Raleigh, along with Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was a founder of a mysterious organisation known as The School of the Night… Under James, this was asking for trouble.
How does all this relate to our mystical workshop in April 2018?
In our story, when the company arrives at NonSuch palace, they are shown into a newly-prepared room, one in which a deadly search for the truths of the age will be played out on many levels: intellectual, emotional, religious and magical. Outside of the Queen’s own mind, no-one else in the room is aware of what is to follow.
What confronts the participants in the centre of the space is a huge game board consisting of black and white squares…
Each side of the board has its own symbolism and its own champion. In our five-act magical drama, Raleigh is selected by the Queen to be one of her Champions. To do this, he must represent the house of Adventure, a role to which he agrees he is suited. But only the Queen and one of her advisors knows the full pattern of the relationships which will unfold as each character shows their strengths… and their vulnerabilites.
At the start of the game, the Queen asks them all to help her answer a single question, revealed only when she begins speaking. The purpose of the Questioning at NonSuch, as these few days will come to be called, is to provide the answer, no matter how demanding the process…
We can speculate on his history but nothing reveals the soul of a person like their own writings. Raleigh’s life had many facets, including being a father, soldier, statesman, spy. philosopher and poet. The severity of his early life gave him little time for the fanciful. He loved poetry from an early age and was considered one of the finest poets of the day.
By way of an example, Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, was ten years younger than Raleigh. Raleigh considered Marlowe’s famous poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ to be hopelessly romantic and ungrounded. Below is a comparison of Raleigh’s notorious response to the original – The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.
There is much to learn about the man from the subtleties in the verses, matched, here, to the original.
The Silent Eye’s spring workshop 2018 is: “The Jewel in the Claw’. The jewel is the emerging spirit of tolerance that Elizabeth, the self-styled virgin-queen, engendered; the claw is the nature of the forces of ignorance that still plague us in the twenty-first century every bit as much as they did in 1588, the year that the mighty Spanish Armada was defeated by a combination of English naval courage and our equally fabled weather; and Elizabeth I finally achieved a degree of security.
The Silent Eye has produced dramatic mystical workshops since its inception in 2013, but this is a break from tradition, and will stick closely to the formula of an actual Elizabethan production, letting the acts of the play tell the deeper story. There is no formal audience, of course. We, the players, play to each other, and in doing so invoke the desired depth of psychological and spiritual interaction.
If you’ve never been to such an event before, don’t be over-faced by this heady agenda. There are always new people joining us, and we take great care to ensure they are comfortable. We do not expect our ‘actors’ to learn their lines! We all read from scripts – as though doing a final rehearsal, but the atmosphere is truly electric and you will find yourself working to bring your character to the greatest life you can give them! You will also find they stay with you for years afterwards…
Above all else it is always fun; and every year, come the Sunday farewell lunch, those attending do not want to go home and end that living link with a body of experience and aspiration that they have helped create…
We can honestly say that the workshops become a living thing, formed and sustained in the minds and hearts of those attending. Come and join our ‘merry band’ and you’ll want to come back.
Places are still available for ‘The Jewel in the Claw’. 20-22 April, 2018. The average price is approximately £250, fully inclusive of all meals and accommodation. You will struggle to find a better value weekend, anywhere.
The weekend workshop will be held at the lovely Nightingale Centre, Great Hucklow, near Buxton, in the heart of the Derbyshire Dales at a wonderful time of year – the spring.
You can download the pricing and booking form here:
Image: Composite of original artwork by the author plus a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh courtesy of Wikipedia, CC by 3.0, Public Domain.
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 low-cost supervised correspondence courses.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©️Stephen Tanham.
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When Winter’s call
Strips bare the wood
When Summer’s kiss
Is but a brood
Upon your heart
I will intrude
My lady solitude
~~~
When silent spell
Slows heartbeat’s time
And reaches deep
To chill the wine
Upon your lips
I will intrude
My lady solitude
~~~
To wait the green
And keening ride
That signals Spring
Begins its tide
Emergent green
We will extrude
From deep within your solitude
~~~
©Stephen Tanham
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Thilo Frank’s Mirrored Room. Image google search, source unknown… appropriately
My son has an infinity mirror in his bedroom which startled the electrician who installed it. He thought it was ‘just’ an illuminated mirror and nearly fell through the imaginary black hole it creates when he switched it on to test it. Tiny LED lights are mirrored back into ‘space’. I take great delight in showing it to people… it always elicits the same surprise and delight, from child to adult, and it reminds me every time I see it of moment from my own childhood.
Standing between the two mirrors in the rather swish cloakroom of the store, I saw my reflection stretching, apparently, to infinity. I was fascinated by the fact that I could see myself from both the front and from the back… a view we seldom see. Not only myself, but others in the cloakroom and…
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Continued from Part Two
So, this one day, considered in all its facets, resolves itself into a journey, a destination and an arrival – an arrival at a meeting with a French relative we have never met, and whose unlikely presence, here in the north-west corner of Wales, completes a cycle of mystery and loss lasting ninety-three years…
As we journey along the spine of Anglesey, to meet her by the Red Tower in the university town of Bangor, Juliette is waiting, over a coffee, in a place where she will be able to see us walking up the main street.
The car journey, fortified by all the strange connections, becomes an arrow; an arrow that completes…
The island of Middle Mouse seen from the cliffs above St Patrick’s church
On the road across the island, we talk of the wonderful good luck of finding the local guide cum historian in the church of St Patrick at Llanbadrig Head; of his smile when he had told us that, usually, he attends on only two afternoons a week, but this morning, he felt he should be there… Wonderful story teller that he is, he had walked us to the cliff edge to see the island of Middle Mouse, to point at the dark rock and bring to life St Patrick’s escape from the storm that wrecked his ship. He had told us of the deadly cliffs, below, and that we were standing right over the cave that gave sanctuary to the swimmer on the dawn as Patrick escaped from his isolated rock and made the relative safety of the shore, with its protective cave with the freshwater spring.
And then how he had taken us back into the church, the remarkable church rebuilt by Lord Stanley, the man who had fallen in love with an Islamic lady and been so ‘opened’ to the love in his soul that he had converted to Islam and devoted his time to ‘good works’, including the reconstruction of the remarkable St Patrick’s Church.
On hearing that, a shiver ran up my spine. What, I had asked myself, as our guided tour unfolded, did any of the history of St Patrick’s Church have to do with the fact that, on this day, we were due to close the gap between two parts of a family lost to each other for nearly a hundred years? Suddenly, in the guise of Lord Stanley – Adbul Rahman as he became, in his new spiritual tradition, there was a symbol of a man who loved a woman so deeply that he gave up his ‘home’ – physical or spiritual, for her.
Stephen, my great-uncle and Adrienne, his wife
My grandmother’s eldest brother, Stephen, had done that, too. He came through the war unscathed, and, while still in France, married Adrienne, the woman he loved. Then he brought her back to England and the northern working-class town of Bolton, where their first child, Madeleine, was born. We do not know what happened after that; only that the three of them returned to France within two years. Stephen, later known in the family as ‘The Englishman’, went to work in the family’s bakery business and, subsequently, ran a successful Tabac near Calais.
Elizabeth, my paternal grandmother, never saw him, again… Was there bad feeling, that the Bolton family had lost their eldest son to a French girl? Maria, Stephen’s mother, was said to be a strong personality, even refusing to have her photograph taken because it might ‘steal her soul’. Perhaps she and Adrienne, Stephen’s new wife, fought. More likely is that her lack of spoken English may have created great hardship and homesickness for her – especially with a young child. My aunt Mary, Stephen’s niece and still alive in her nineties, remembers Adrienne ‘being very quiet; she just sat there and said nothing…’
Adrienne in the family Tabac and coffee shop
Whatever the reason, on returning to Calais, the family links seem to have fallen away… and were lost, eventually, to the knowledge of their English cousins and their children. They stayed that way for nearly a hundred years.
As a teenager, I remember my grandmother telling me the story of her eldest brother, and crying at the sadness of never having seen him again after his return to France. Other than the ancestral records and the fact that I, too, am called Stephen, I have little presence in her, or great uncle’s Stephen’s story… but the memory of her tears is very real and painful, and gives me a point of historical reality that suddenly becomes very raw, like a wound that needs healing.
Perhaps this is why we are here… on this day; to make good that gap in love. And, as Stuart would say, names are important; and mine is Stephen.
Stephen and Adrienne’s four children. The boy is Etienne – French for Stephen
In the car, we review what we know: Stephen and Adrienne had four children. Etienne (Stephen in French) was their third, and is still alive, though in his nineties. His wife is Mado (Madeleine) who began her earnest search for their long-lost English family over a decade ago. It was Mado’s message that Bernie, my wife, found on the Ancestry website while she was conducting a parallel search.
One of their children is Christophe, who is a Green politician in Calais. His daughter is Juliette, the Erasmus Language Scholar, studying at Bangor University, who waits for us in Bangor, near the red tower.
We arrive with five minutes to spare. We walk from the car park in near silence. The events of the morning have been overwhelming on so many levels. I feel as though a great weight rests on our shoulders as we complete the physical act of climbing the hill to the Red Tower. I speak a little French, though it is rusty. Perhaps I need not worry; she is a languages scholar, after all…
Juliette has finished her coffee. She sits on a bench by the Red Tower, rising to her feet and smiling, as we approach…
‘We found him, Grandma, and this woman is his great-granddaughter…’
Epilogue
I could have written: ‘we discovered that a long-lost branch of the family was alive and well in France. A younger member of that family is studying in Bangor, Wales. We happened to be on a short break, nearby, that weekend, so we arranged to meet up with her.’
But where would the fun have been in that? Moreover, where would the truth have been in that?
Any spiritual path, including that of the Silent Eye, requires that we examine the whole of our life, in detail, as it happens. We observe and let unfold; we do not judge – we simply let happen so that it may reveal its real nature.
This has been the story of that day’s unfolding. Everything in the three parts of this story is the truth, told as it happened.
Juliette and her grandmother, Mado – the originator of the French side of the search
Other parts of this series of posts
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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 low-cost, supervised correspondence courses. His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©️Stephen Tanham
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Our last visit of a weekend that seemed to have flown by all too quickly was to a little church on the edge of Aberdeen. The sun finally decided to show its face… though it still managed to rain anyway, but at least we had blue skies through the roofless ruins of St Fergus’ Church.
Originally built around eight hundred years ago, the old parish church of Dyce sits high above a bend in the river Don. It was a place of Christian worship long before the present church was built…and possibly already a sacred or significant site in the pre-Christian era. Little now remains of the church apart from its shell, with the curious doorway to the east, where the altar would normally be situated.
Fergus the Pict was an Irish bishop, responsible for bringing Christianity to many in this area of Scotland. He may be the same Fergus…
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It is, still, all of it, only one day…
Though now the winds that buffeted the bed-and-breakfast farmhouse have abated. I look at my watch. We have two hours to go before we need to leave to drive across Anglesey to meet a young woman named Juliette, who holds the key to this entire story. She will be waiting, at noon, by the red tower in the centre of Bangor – the nearest town on the other side of the beautiful but deadly Menai Straits.
We have time, we decide. Time to visit the isolated and mysterious St Patrick’s Church on the rugged cliffs to the east of Cemaes Bay. Prior to this trip, we hadn’t heard of it. Now, after hearing local accounts of its history, we can’t wait to visit…
After a couple of false starts, we correctly interpret the hand-drawn map, donated at breakfast, and make our way from the main Holyhead road along the mile of narrow and twisting country lane to find the archway to the church ahead of us.
Not far away, but long ago, he is standing a little way ahead; looking down at the crashing waves and bringing his gaze from the dark rock of Middle Mouse island towards the cliffs beneath his feet.
It is 1864 and he has used his wealth to fund the restoration of the little church behind him.
He gazes down at the waves… How long had Bishop Patrick clung to the inhospitable granite of the tiny island of Middle Mouse, as the wreckage of his ship washed past him? Did he wait till first light, before tying what was left of his heavy and saturated woollen robe across his back and entering the sea, again, to swim the half kilometer to the cave he could now see; a cave that would offer a fresh-water spring and let him tend his wounds, a cave that would become his home until the miracle of his survival became known to the local people, who would build him a church on the headland – the first Christian church in these parts.
Badrig – St Patrick
Adbul Rahman looks down one last time at the savagery of the waves breaking below. He shakes his head at what early religious pioneers of all faiths had to go through. His own sacrifice is small by comparison; and carried out under the cloak of wealth. But, in his own way, he has sought out worthy causes, to show that his heart is still within Britain, though his faith has changed. Now a devout muslim, and the first such in the British House of Lords, Adbul Rahman, formerly Henry Edward John Stanley, Third Baron of Alderley, has just overseen the full restoration of St Patrick’s first church in Wales.
The feeling is a good one. He, Adbul Rahman, has made a contribution to the sincere worship of God, paying respect, as is the custom in his new faith of Islam, to those of other faiths. The completion of the church at Llanbadrig has been timely; his sister has just given birth. The infant’s name is Bertrand Russell. It sounds like a good name -a portent, perhaps of the child’s future…
Entering the tiny church, he is greeted by the ancient cross, the one bearing the two-overlapped fishes – said to be the original Christian cross design. Beneath the cross is a crude carving, chiseled, with patience and dedication, on the ancient granite pillar whose origin or possible previous use is unknown. It is a palm tree. No one knows what it means, or why it is juxtaposed with the crossed fishes…
On the far eastern wall, behind the simple, but beautiful altar, the wall tiles are of an Islamic pattern, though fired in England. It has been his one overt imposition on the design of the restored site, though several more are hidden – for those who have knowledge of eastern symbolism – in the design of the church.
It is 1919. Stephen Duffy fingers the document in his pocket for the umpteenth time, realising that his constant fretting with it is wearing the paper away. He pulls his fingers from his jacket’s inside pocket, glancing, nervously across at his youngest sister, Elizabeth, who knows him so well that she has spotted his fretful behaviour. From the look in her eyes, she senses that something dreadful is going to happen, despite the smiles of her beloved brother and his new French wife.
Stephen Duffy and his French wife, Adrienne
A soldier in the Royal Engineers, he has come through the first World War unharmed – a miracle in itself. But his wife, Adrienne, cannot settle in the working class darkness of post-war Bolton, and needs to return to her home town of Calais, where her relatives have created a new job in the family’s bakery business. Stephen is a baker by trade and will be very welcome in the family’s boulangerie, The couple’s newborn first child, Madeleine is assured of a warm, family welcome. Three more children will follow, including Etienne, Juliette’s grandfather. Etienne is French for Stephen.
Stephen Duffy, of Bolton, Lancashire, and his wife Adrienne are leaving for France. The document in the breast pocket is the ticket for the ferry. Elizabeth Duffy, my paternal grandmother, looks at him across the table where Sunday lunch has been, and senses, correctly, that despite his surviving the horrors of the war, she will never see her elder brother, again.
Juliette Duffy is twenty years old. She is combing her hair and looking at her reflection in the small room’s mirror. She knows she looks like her devoted grandmother Mado. Mado – the preferred short-form from her given name of Madelaine – has been a detailed researcher of the family tree – particularly the lost English connection, for decades. Juliette knows that there is a mystery back there, back then, as to why the two families lost contact… but fate has cast her, an Erasmus Scholar of languages, studying at Bangor University, in an unlikely role.
Seven years ago, Mado placed a request on the Ancestry website asking for help from anyone who could help reunite the two sides of the family by giving details of its lost English connection. Two weeks ago, that notice was finally seen by a woman in England who knew of the Duffys; indeed had married the grandson of one…
Juliette puts on her coat and leaves the student block. She will be early. She will have a coffee and think what she might say to these two middle-aged relatives on behalf of her grandmother, who is frantic with anticipation across the channel in Calais…
(Continued in Part Three)
Other parts in this series:
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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 low-cost, supervised correspondence courses. His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©️Stephen Tanham
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Over the past few days we have shared stories and pictures of the places we visited during the Solstice of the Moon weekend in Scotland. What is impossible to share on these pages is the sense of warmth, the laughter and the camaraderie that attends these weekends. Those who come along are not all members of the Silent Eye… in fact, the majority are not. It is not a requirement. They come for the sake of friendship, companionship and a shared curiosity about the mysteries of this land and the even deeper mysteries our human lives.
Three times a year we gather for informal workshops in the landscape, exploring historic sites and the spiritual history of those who built them. Sometimes… as with Portmeirion… we take a more modern landscape and seek a symbolic landscape, finding ways to apply what we learn to or own daily lives. Spirituality is not…
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Quite apart from…
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being excessively beautiful…
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Loch Ness turned…
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out to be…
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A veritable watering hole for monsters!
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It looked, for a while, as if we might escape being rained on at our second site of the morning, but no… that would have been too much to ask The ritual cleansing would continue. We were heading for another recumbent circle, with a few unusual features… Loanhead of Daviot.
The car park was full so I parked the car at a little distance and we walked back, arriving to find the group listening to a ghost story about the lady seen in the woods through which we would walk to the circle. The trees could not have been there when the circle was constructed, or they would have blocked the view of the moon and made the recumbent redundant, but they do provide a beautiful approach and backdrop to the stones. The green lawn opens out beyond the shadows of the trees on a spectacular site.
There are two…
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