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+ esoteric psychology, Jewel in the Claw, Mystery Schools, Silent Eye School, Silent Eye Workshops, Spirituality, Understanding Fear
The Mind of the Virgin Queen
by Steve Tanham
Is it possible to go back in time and see into the minds of monarchs who played a key role in a country’s development? Given it is so long ago, how difficult would it be to do this for the Elizabethan age?
This is our task for the Silent Eye’s spring workshop 2018: “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 did 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.
That security had been a long time coming: twenty-nine years, to be exact, the length of time between her coronation, in 1559, and the sanctuary created by the failure of the Spanish fleet.
Philip II of Spain, the ‘prudent king’, never recovered, politically or financially, and despite the continued plunder of South American gold, Spain’s dominance in Europe went into decline. It took with it the hopes of Pope Pius V that England could be brought back into the Catholic faith with force.
His was the decision to excommunicate Elizabeth using his papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, in 1570 – accompanied by the formation of the Holy League, an alliance of Catholic states whose demise the failed Armada triggered.
Elizabeth’s life was truly lived on the edge, but fate conspired to protect her, in the form of a number of true and loyal advisers, whose council she knew could be depended on. Our play therefore includes such figures as John Dee: her personal astrologer and a man who would shape the mathematical future of navigation, enabling the emerging English navy to safely navigate the known world. But Dr Dee was also an alchemist with deeper secrets, which left him vulnerable to sinister interpretation… and potential exploitation, as a close confidant of the Queen.
William Cecil, first Baron of Burghley, was at her side for most of her reign, and she depended on his wise council, about which he wrote in his diaries, “Often, I best serve my Queen when I do nothing, rather than hasten to act…”
The years would teach her how complex it is to rule, and how few – even among supposedly close friends – can be trusted, fully. The era of the play includes the explorers Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, both men embodying the expansive spirit of the age, which would see the mastery of the seas and an empire that spanned the world.
Always close at hand was her childhood sweetheart and alleged lover, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose wife was found dead at the foot of their stairs during his and Elizabeth’s period of greatest personal intimacy. How lonely and vulnerable must the Queen have felt at that moment?
She was a resourceful woman of surprises, as evidenced by the hosting of a month-long visit by the Moroccan ambassador, Al-Anouri. Their joint and secret agenda was to build a mighty alliance between England and the much more powerful Islamic world. Then, as now, the world beyond Europe was hungry for our expertise in the making of weapons…
And then there was the formation of the original secret service, within which Dr Dee ironically held the code name 007, the original ‘James Bond’, though he cut an unlikely figure as a spy. Created by William Cecil, the secret service was taken over by Sir Francis Walsingham, whose methods were ruthless, but whose effectiveness was unquestionable – protecting the Queen from the Catholic plot to replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots, as one example. At the time of the play’s setting, Walsingham is dying; but his equally capable daughter Frances Walsingham, the ex-wife of the Queen’s Champion, Sir Philip Sidney, takes his place.
Throughout this, Elizabeth crafted a potent role for herself: that of Lover of the English people; a people who had openly cheered her through the streets of London at her coronation, despite the fact that she was a virtual unknown. They had become weary of her half-sister, Mary’s policy of persecution and wanted an age of peace in which ‘blood did not run through the streets of the capital’.
Our final ingredient is the emergence of what later became known as the ‘age of science’. Here, Sir Francis Bacon is cast as a figure able to bestride the emerging knowledge and balance it with the intimate and (to today’s eyes), mystical cosmology that had dominated the west’s world view for fourteen hundred years.
Elizabeth’s triumph in 1588 did not remove the threat of plots against her. But it did mean they had to be much more subtle. The nature of such intrigue forms the core of the workshop and is played out as a tapestry of events taking place over a weekend in which the Queen has invited her closest friends and courtiers to her favourite Palace of Nonsuch. Our intrigues will touch the human soul in ways that will be remembered, always, as the soul of the age is laid bare…
And what of the influential women in Elizabethan society? It was a very patriarchal age, and women were expected to better themselves, if at all, through marriage. They were forbidden formal education, though the most well-born or wealthy could be tutored. One of the best examples of a determined Elizabethan women is Bess of Hardwicke, who married four times – each time to a richer husband. She rose to become the second most wealthy and powerful woman in England, second only to the Queen. There are many more examples, and some of them will feature as either independent characters or equal partners to important male figures in the workshop.
Our workshop is written as a Shakespearean play, but set in plain English; indeed the Bard, himself, is one of the characters, rising from his chair in the last moments before death to share with the kindly spirit of the abyss the essence of his great unwritten work, wherein he undertakes to reconcile the deeper nature of playing, itself, with the best actress of the age – the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor.
The Silent Eye is a modern mystery school, and our real-life mysteries go far deeper than politics or murder…
How can we bring together this mixture of politics, science, magic and human nature into a story of five acts? We’ll have to ask the Bard…
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 put 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 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 portrait of Elizabeth I, circa 1590, Wikipedia, 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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This is my entry for week 35 of Sacha Black’s
And this week the theme is ‘Pyramid’. Sacha is the founder of the Blogger’s Bash and is a bit under the weather at the moment. Please send her your kindest thoughts; she’s a great character and a wonderful organiser…
Pyramid Text
Magnox, PI, had seen the deadly red lettering before. He wondered how he could wake, in Jorgi’s bar, face down in his battered Burberry mac, and make insightful observations. The broad in the picture was dead, but the neat square indentations in her neckline told him everything: the Pyramid Killer was back…
Story 52 words. Suitably black, Sacha? Best wishes.
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Georgette Heyer is probably best known for her Regency romances and her knack of capturing an era and bringing it to light-hearted life. She also wrote detective novels and the two works for which I admire her the most… An Infamous Army, which is an account of the Battle of Waterloo and The Spanish Bride, about the Peninsula campaign of the Napoleonic wars. In both cases, the author builds her story around the lives of individuals, making the trials of the campaign personal and engaging the reader’s emotions.
In The Spanish Bride, Heyer tells the romantic and true story of Juana María de los Dolores de León, a child just out of the convent who was brought to the battlefield and consigned to the care of the British troops by her sister when their home was sacked after the fourth siege of Badajos. Fourteen year-old Juana was married a…
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Summer’s Last Kiss
When ocean’s shine turns mirror bright
And deeper love seems written there
When crested waves hiss rest awhile
And be with us in formless dream
Then know that summer’s parting kiss
Casts lingering promise bold and bare
➰
To cling is but a dreamer’s sigh
As worlds rotate and tides return
Her russet hand will still caress
Though leaves are falling, thick and slick
Her naked skin still shines within
The wood-flame’s crackling burn
➰
The smoke mosaics to fall of snow
When deepest dark encloses
Reducing days from distant blaze
Which culls as much as harvests
Now tightly held in midnight’s cold
Endurance starkly, sweetly urges
➰
Till one damp morn when green is borne
Upon a tide of coming bliss
She’ll call the rising of the sap
And deep you’ll breathe the urgent need
To be with her above the sky
Entwined in endless summer’s kiss
➰
©Stephen Tanham
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This series of posts are based on the outline of an exploration session presented at The Silent Eye (a modern mystery school) “The Feathered Seer” weekend in 2017. Whilst I have attempted to retain some of the flavour of the actual talk, the interactive elements of the exploration are absent, and since most of it was done “on the hoof” it is not really a true reflection of the session. Many of the sections are expanded considerably from that presented on the day…
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“Boy Mood 2” (found at eskipaper.com)
Not sure what I was thinking, really. It’s a massive topic, and whilst I did mention this during a previous exploration session, in 2016 on Spirit Animals, I somehow found myself agreeing to attempt the subject the following year.
April 2017 came far too quickly, and finding myself, the night before the session, scratching…
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“Sure, ’tis a terrible thing to choose one or t’other.”
The Aurally Man
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“Alchemy as process has a number of stages.”
“And nobody seems able to agree on how many!”
“This might not though be a disagreement of number but of measure.”
“An hour possesses sixty minutes and three-thousand-six-hundred seconds, after all.”
“If we make our focus three, we get…”
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“A point worth considering: all the triangles are of equal size.”
“Individually this seems obvious but, perhaps, not quite so, relatively.”
“A shortcoming alluded to in the phrase, ‘vagaries of the human eye’.”
“Which is another point worth considering.”
“The human eye follows lines like a moth to flame.”
“This is one of the reasons why the ‘Blessed Head of Joshua’ is eyeless.”
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(Above – a commercial example of the use of the IOM’s symbol – author’s photo)
We have just returned from a long weekend on the Isle of Man. It is one of our favourite destinations, although it shares much of the wet climate of north Lancashire and neighbouring Cumbria, being seventy miles from the connecting port of Heysham.
The ferry journey takes four hours and can be a delight or a horror, depending on the winds… You can fly, but where’s the fun in that, these days? An hour sitting in the wind on the deck of a ship, gazing out to sea, can be a wonderful meditation. Can’t think of anything that compares on a plane…
(Isle of Man national flag: origin Wikipedia, Creative Commons licence)
I have often looked at the Manx national flag – the three legged figure above – and wondered at its origins. Flags, like sung anthems, say a lot about what we might call the ‘national psyches’ of their countries, particularly at the time that identity was forming,
Take a moment to look at the symbol, above. Try not to analyse it; simply let it affect you as it will…
My own initial reactions were: its a fascinating design, suggesting independence, with an almost ‘engineering’ feel to it; it’s not something I’d want on my wall as it’s a ‘hard’ image; the ‘threeness’ of it really stands out and hits you… there are many more, and it is useful to let the imaginative side of the mind just play like this.
The three legged symbol of Mann (as the Manx people traditionally write it) is undoubtedly inspired by the Celtic . There are many examples, which have a common form of a ‘leg’ in the shape of a spiral or knot – one of the favourite forms of the Celts.
A Celtic triskelion
Threeness is a very old concept, and fundamental to the world’s philosophical systems, as well as being an icon of stability. The equilateral triangle is often used to denote threeness, which can be point up or down. When it’s up, it usually indicates the ‘coming into being’ of a single point of power or will which seeks the diversification of manifestation to make the ‘garden below – creation’ a rich one. The one gives rise to the two, which are polar aspects of the one, though very different, and therefore inseparable. The Great Pyramid of Gizeh is an example of a three-dimensional triangle with a very special set of properties. As Pythagoras would have attested, all triangles are very potent forms.
Within the triangle, ‘polarity’ becomes the cornerstone of creation; and the different natures and relationships set up between the parts of ‘that which was and always will be One‘ weave the world or sub-world we see and in which we have our daily being – below’. A better way of thinking of all this is inner and outer; where the inner is the most powerful and causative, but less detailed; and the outer is the result–in all its multiplicity.
Above and below signify authority being above, whereas a more modern mystical view sees both as essential to the creative plan. What changes, with evolution, in all this, is the coming into existence of the act of Seeing from within…
The great mystical secret behind this statement is at the heart of what the Mystery Schools, such as our own Silent Eye, teach.
When we amend things in the outer, we are dealing with traditional cause and effect. To amend things on the inner is the basis of so-called esoteric magic.
Because the one that becomes two introduces differentiation, intelligent diversity has been created, and the creation can move on. All this is set within a circle – a traditionally solar symbol whose centre of activity is the centre of that circle. We can see that the three-legged Isle of Man symbol is based on a circle at whose centre is the intersection of the three centre lines of the figure’s legs. This is usually missed, but is a key aspect of the design.
So the One wills the continuation of the creation and the two that was one is therefore three, becoming four as the stability of this process is established and the Work proceeds in its unfolding.
But the symbol of Mann, above, is subtly different from the traditional Celtic treskilion. The traditional spiral of the triskelion is here replaced by actual legs; showing that this refers not to some ‘cosmic’ force, but to Mankind.
The triangle is there – look at where the tips of the feet are pointing and you’ll see it. This time, unlike the triskelion, the triangle is point-downwards, though the whole design is slightly offset from the vertical. The first image – the commercial logo that I’ve used as a simpler example, uses a different offset, which may be a legal requirement from the Manx government.
One reason for the offset may be that the design clearly implies movement. Something is ‘whirling’ – but running under is own ‘steam’. A perfectly vertical triangle would be a symbol of perfection, but the world isn’t perfect, it is ‘coming into being’ constantly, ‘unfolding’ is the world we use in the Silent Eye School.
The symbol therefore incorporates the idea of the process of evolution, driven by the creative forces embedded in the three-legged world, whose human image indicates that there is a ‘man/woman’ doing this! Not just any man/woman, but the generic human, of which we are all an instantiation – a living soul made from a spiritual and organic blueprint. In doing this we fulfil what Sue referred to in an earlier post concerning the text of Genesis.
In terms of elements, the three-legs of Mann are similar to a design I have found in a few old churches in Britain. Here, the illustrator has extracted the essential features to show the essential threeness plus the emphasis that the individual three are not the same:
There is only so much you can show in simple symbol!
Armed with the above knowledge, we can take things deeper and draw two triangles over the core Legs of Mann image like this. I’ve rotated the original to align the circular core to the vertical.
The hexagram has attracted lots of media attention over the years, being associated – like the pentagram – with sensationalised ‘magic’ over the years, but here we can see that the triangles can also be interpreted as an intertwined downwards and an upwards progression. Creation is said to proceed downwards and evolution upwards; but this representation allows us to interpret involution and evolution as driven from the point in the centre, which happens, also, to correspond with the genitals, something that has close alignment with Hebrew Kabbalistic thought. Time does not allow further discussion of this point, but it is significant…
Only one other country has a similar national symbol: Sicily. The three-legged flag is shown below:
Image Wiki, public domain.
Here, the central figured is a Gorgon – the snake headed creature from Greek mythology, who had the power to turn ‘men’ into stone… but that’s for another day!
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 supervised correspondence courses.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
Images: Taken by the author and copyright unless otherwise stated.
©️Stephen Tanham
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Our genial host, Mark, described it as ‘a stroll with TT’.
I was somewhat dubious at this proposal, since the Isle of Man (IOM) is famous for an invasion of super-powerful racing motorbikes during the famous TT road races in June; and the thought of somehow ‘strolling’ with several hundred motorcycles whizzing past at anything up to two-hundred miles per hour was a little unsettling, so soon after breakfast…
The traditional races are held in early June, which had come and gone, but the TT season lingers in the shape of the Classic TT. This hosts older and classic bikes, and is a gentler affair. Nonetheless, the steel and fibreglass monsters still race around the thirty-eight mile circuit at astonishing speeds.
He had, though, conceived a more subtle plan…
Like me, Mark loves the idea of a full or half day out in which the return journey is via a different route or mechanism than the outbound leg. In this case the enabling technology was going to be the electric railway that connects the Isle of Man’s capital, Douglas, with town of Ramsey – the second-most populous place on the island, and the area on the edge of which Deborah and Mark live.
Our good ladies had been dropped off in Ramsey to do some present shopping, and the plan was to meet up for a pub lunch at one of the traditional hostelries on the quayside – at the end of our walk. The Victorian electric railway would provide the transport home – Mark and Deborah live a short distance from one of the small stations.
Our walk was to take us over the last section of a ridge of hills that run from Laxey- the site of the famous industrial ‘wheel’ – to Ramsey in the north. The ridge includes the North Barrule (561metres) and Snaefell peaks, the latter being the island’s highest point, at 620 metres.
Tess, our collie, was with us, and we set off, following the line of the railway until we could cross the main road and begin the steeper climb up to the Ballure reservoir, at the base of the North Barrule peak.
The first part of the steeper climb was a ‘bit of a grunter’ as Mark says, until we emerged onto the plateau, half way up, that holds the Ballure reservoir and nature reserve.
From here, the paths diverge; the most direct, for our purposes, following the sodden incline of a shallow stream, which saw us emerge, several hundred metres later, onto the mountain section of the TT course!
When we booked the trip we had no idea that we would be sharing both boat and island with hundreds of my leather-clad, two-wheeled brethren – I am a biker, though of a much more gentle persuasion that those who want to do the ‘double-ton’ – as 200 mph is named, here.
There are constant reminders of the fragility of life on that edge… Helicopter-based paramedics are on hand for the most serious injuries, but each year at the full TT, several people are killed.
The bikers we met on the outbound ferry crossing were friendly and pleasant. Now, a few days later, we were encountering them at a slightly faster rate, as bike after bike howled past us on a road that had no pedestrian pavements and few pedestrians…
During the actual races, stepping onto the course would be illegal and deadly; but, during the practice week, the official high-speed laps are during the evening, when the roads are closed and revert to one-way flow (clockwise). This doesn’t stop many of those here for subsequent competition from opening their throttles wide on the mountain sections during the daytime, as we found…
My host watched, concerned, as a cluster of shining and snarling monsters flew past us, and Tess, securely on her lead, clung, bemused, to my right leg. Eager to minimise the dog’s exposure, we spotted a long gap and darted across to the safety of the ‘tower footpath’ – the way to our final destination before our descent into the gentle streets of Ramsey.
The tower is known as The Albert Tower, in commemoration of the only visit by Victoria’s husband, who arrived in the royal yacht on the 20th September 1847. The prince was rowed ashore at Ballure and he then walked up the hill and into the glen. From there he spent some time studying the view from the top of the hill. The hill was renamed in his honour. In 1848, a year later, the foundations of a commemorative tower were laid. It is made of granite and is forty-five feet high. It is considered a royal monument to both Ramsey’s subsequent development and the Island ongoing success.
Ironically, The Albert Tower is also known for another feature. From below, and almost any angle, it appears to be a round tower, not a square one… which did prompt much Roald Dhal-based humour on our part, based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the scene about ‘Square towers that look round’.
Our climb was complete. All that remained was to descend through the wide paths of the forest below us.
At the end of the descent, the outskirts of Ramsey enveloped us, with one final reminer – at one of the most dangerous ‘Z’ bends, of the extreme nature of all aspects of TT riding.
Soon, we passed the terminus for the electric railway – also an ever-present gift from the Victorian era (est. 1893). It was our good fortune that a train from Douglas, the island’s capital, was just arriving. We were able to watch as the train’s two carriages were split, allowing the powered car to have its overhead armature moved across its length – permitting reverse travel without being turned around. In the second stage, the other carriage was allowed to roll down the terminus slope, coming to a final halt in its correct position for the return journey to Douglas. Simple, space-saving and resilient – as its longevity has proved.
Our route to the quayside took us through Ramsey’s main streets.
And finally along the quay…
Our destination lay ahead – the Trafalgar, where we would, an hour later, meet up with Bernie and Deborah. It had been a wonderful walk – and a vivid reminder of the dual nature of the wonderfully vivid and world-famous TT.
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.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
Images: taken by the author and copyright.
©️Stephen Tanham
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