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River of the Sun, chapter 17 – The Rule of Three
Lord Menascare, former mentor to the King-in-Rising, stood in the outer arc of the temple, close to Anzety, the high priest. He watched the care with which Neferaset approached and woke the young priest, Amkhren, whose body was lying, still deeply asleep, where he had left it. The four of them were the only occupants of the temple.
What must it be like, thought the Eye of the Cobra, to have your world destroyed, but still need to pick your way through the debris of what you held most sacred, to save another’s life? Damn you, Rameses – did nothing I taught you take root in the fertile soil of your pampered soul?
But I can do this! His anger became a fury, and the fury became a voice, projected so that the stone walls of the temple echoed in their jagged harmonics, causing every head but that of the kneeling Neferaset to look to the West. The power of Menascare’s voice was such that it reached those waiting in the passageway outside.
“Let all bear witness,”chanted Rameses’ wayward mage, “that in obedience to the King-in-Rising, Rameses, Chosen of Ra, the high priestess of this temple rightly demands our participation in the continuation of this sacred rite.”
Menascare glanced across at Obion, knowing the choice of words would be crucial. The Talatat leader tightened his fingers around the Khopesh sword he always carried. One slip of meaning and the elite commander would attack him. He knew that Obion had his orders, too – and there was no certainty that both would be the same…
“Let all know,” Menascare held up the royal scroll left by the ruler, conscious that the very edge of danger was being trod, “that by examination during the night, our mighty Regent has determined that the high priestess is fit to lead us in the further testing of the young priest-to-be, Amkhren.”
Sensing the powers that strove for mastery of her space, Neferaset seized her opportunity, “Amkhren, wake now!”
No-one of this young man’s calibre should be faced with waking in a temple whose dark wings will almost certainly toy with him until his death, mere hours from now, thought Menascare, shaking his head at Neferaset’s courage and…nobility.
The boy turned a sleepy head, then unfolded bent limbs and stretched in the unselfconscious way that young things do. He looked around the temple, startled that it was not all a dream, yet holding fast to the eyes of Neferaset whose power was focussed on him in this, his weakest moment.
The high priestess spoke softly, “You did well, Amkhren. You did what I commanded you to do. Now you must do more…so much more.”
Amkhren struggled to his feet and bowed, awkwardly, to Neferaset. “Yes, High Priestess,” he said, adding in a whisper. “Light of my existence…”
Menascare watched as Neferaset’s attention shifted – to the poles of power represented by the Talatat commander and himself. He studied her, admiring what he saw, as she unfolded her lithe body from the floor and, standing once again, gathered her resolve.
“Menascare, Obion!” Her voice was firm, “I have my orders from the King. Do you support me in what I must do?”
He could reply from the heart, “I can only speak for myself, High Priestess; I have my orders too – and they are to support you–but, also, to ensure that I lend to your rituals the same eye that the King-in-Rising, received at his tasks when the Regent was the age that your young apprentice priest is now.”
Obion spoke as one who tolerated being in the temple only because the King-in-Rising had demanded it.
“I have my orders, too, High Priestess, and in the Regent’s hand. Beyond those I cannot say, since neither the Eye of the Cobra nor I have seen him since last night,” he smiled slyly, “though you may have seen a lot of him..”
“I am sure the King’s eyes are everywhere, Obion,” said Neferaset, easily deflecting the soldier’s slight, “and that he sees through both you and me as he wishes. To return to my question: do you place your forces at my command so that I may carry out in this temple what the King has instructed me to do?”
That was a brave thing to say, thought Menascare. Everything now waited on the commander’s response.
“My orders are to guard, watch and wait,” said Obion, the deadly overtones obvious in his words.
“Very well,” said Neferaset. “This place, though damaged, is still a magical temple in the high tradition of ancient Kemet, our black land. The rites here were never designed for a circle of hardened soldiers. I will need to command their movements if not their words.” she looked from Menascare to Obion and back, testing them with her eyes. “Do I have your word on this?” She fixed her gaze on Obion, her evaluation of friend and foe finished, waiting for confirmation in their actions to follow…
Menascare interrupted, stealing the space within Obion’s slower response. “The Talatat are soldiers of the mind, above all else. Their obedience is absolute and they will do as Obion commands. What that is, I cannot say…”
Confident that she had at least secured a renewed beginning for her temple authority, she turned to talk to Amkrhen.
“Priest to be,” she said, softly. “You have one turning of the sand to wash and prepare yourself with fresh robes. Be swift in body but let your mind be swifter…”
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Index to previous chapters:
Chapter One – Gifts From the River
Chapter Two – An Agony of Sunset
Chapter Three – The Dark Waters
Chapter Four – Touching the Sky
Chapter Five – The Fire Within
Chapter Seven – The Crystal Air
Chapter Eight – The Unchosen Darkness
Chapter Nine – The Priestess Calls
Chapter Ten – Darkness at the Door
Chapter Twelve – Above and Below
Chapter Thirteen – The Binding Voices
Chapter Fifteen – The Intimacy of Enemies
Chapter Sixteen – Old Friends, New Dangers
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Introduction to River of the Sun
In April 2015 a group of people gathered in the Derbyshire hills to enact the Silent Eye’s annual Mystery Play, entitled, The River of the Sun. The five-act mystical drama formed the backbone of that Spring weekend, and told the fictional story of a clash of ego and divinity set in an Isis-worshipping temple located on an island in the Nile, during the the fascinating period of the 19th dynasty, the time of Rameses the Great.
The 18th and 19th dynasties were a period of deep upheaval for ancient Egypt. The reign of the ‘Heretic King’, Akhenaten saw Egypt’s religious structure torn apart, as the revolutionary Pharaoh became what Wallis Budge called the ‘world’s first monotheist’; re-fashioning the power of the many Gods with one supreme entity – the visible sun disc, the Aten, for which Akhenaten, alone, was the high priest. Many have pointed to the failure of the ‘herectic’ Pharaoh’s politics, but few have doubted the sincerity of his religious vision. He will, forever, remain an enigma.
Whatever the nobility of his goal, the actions he took were ruthless, and included the shutting down of the annual deity festivals which were the sole point of ritualistic contact between the ordinary people of Egypt and their locally-worshipped gods. In addition, Akhenaten paid little attention to the domestic and military affairs of Egypt, allowing the country’s enemies to encroach on its borders, greatly weakening Egypt’s power at that critical time for the region.
After Akhenaten’s brief reign, culminating in the Pharaoh’s mysterious death, shadowy military forces took control of Egypt, instigating the 19th dynasty in the persons of Rameses I and, soon thereafter, Seti I, whose throne name derives from the god Set – often considered the ‘evil one’ because of his slaying of his brother, Osiris.
Seti I is judged by modern historians as having been one of the greatest-ever pharaohs, yet his importance in the 19th dynasty was eclipsed by the actions of his second son, the brilliant Rameses II, whose long reign of over sixty years included much self-promotion and the alteration of Egypt’s recent history. Both Seti and Rameses II (Rameses the Great) were passionate about the evisceration of the last traces of Akhenaten’s ‘chaos’, as they saw it.
But, although, by the 19th dynasty, the the ‘Son of the Sun’ was long dead and the buildings of his embryonic and doomed city of Tel-al-Armana were reduced to rubble, something of that time remained in the Egyptian consciousness. A new kind of connection between Pharaoh and God had been established, one which elevated mankind, if only in the being of the Pharaoh, to be someone who ‘talked with God’. It was, at the very least, a bold experiment and, though the world would have to wait until the 19th century to re-discover the ‘erased’ pharaoh, the philosophical waves of that period rippled out and dramatically affected the way the incoming 19th dynasty had to repair the worship of the Gods, uniting the people of Egypt under a trinity of Amun-Ra, Khonsu and Mut.
Our fictional story is a tale of politics, friendships, mind and faith. It is set against an historically accurate background, and at a time when Rameses was due to take the throne from the dying Seti .
Returning to Thebes in his swift warship, crewed by his fearsome Talatat mind-warriors, Rameses decides to mount a surprise night-time raid on the island-based Isis temple which has prospered under the sponsoring reign of his father. Rameses suspects that the inner teachings conducted by the revered High Priestess and Priest conceal views that relate to the thoughts of the heretic Pharaoh, Akhenaten. He plans to insert himself and his warriors of the mind into the islands’s Spring rites as the high priest and priestess begin a cycle of initiation for a chosen apprentice priest who has proved himself worthy of special advancement.
The resulting clash draws everyone, including the young Pharaoh-in-Rising, into a spiralling situation where each is forced to confront their own fears as well as living out the roles which life has allocated them. River of the Sun is the story of a spiritual and political encounter from which none emerge unchanged, including the man who will shortly be Pharaoh, the mighty Rameses II, whose secret name for himself is ‘the unchosen’.
Through the eyes and minds of those surrounding the chosen priest and the ‘unchosen’ Pharaoh, the River of the Sun takes us on a tense and compelling journey to the heart of power and its eternal struggle with truth.
The chapters of the book will be serialised in this blog. The finished work is planned to be available in paperback and Kindle in the Spring of 2016.
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River of the Sun, serialised here, and its associated images, are the intellectual property of Stephen Tanham and is ©Copyright material.
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Ben’s Bit, part 13 – The White Hot Blade of Separation
by Steve Tanham
“And then there are the moments when the white hot blade of separation comes into your life, and everything changes. In the presence of such instantaneous power, you realise that the human view of transformation is impoverished by a lack of true experience at the edge, while your former life is separated from the now with a cut of such precision that it is as though the past was a dream… In such moments it is so very important to be fully conscious of what happens next; of what the universe fills that void with. If the deep and gentle breathing of true consciousness can overcome the panic and fear of sudden change, there are keys dropped into a life, then, that are of incalculable value…”
I wrote that, many years ago, lying on a floor, curled up on a Persian rug pulled by friction around my knees and thighs within the near foetal position I had taken in the middle of a moment of black and total grief. The old writing pad on which it was transcribed in tearful letters was, fortuitously, lying nearby, along with a pencil. For months it was pinned over my desk in the room that serves as my home office and place of writing. I looked at it so often it became burned into my memory. It has no claim to good writing – it is just what I found at the bottom of the old well that was me…
And now, reproduced in pencil on the pad given me by the departed Yellow Eyes, it stares me in the face each morning, as I make myself repeat it, like a mantra, while shaving over the old enamelled sink.
I cannot change my external circumstances–I am a prisoner, a fact brutally reinforced by the clinical and degrading encounter with the Governor in the shower block. I can only examine, as honestly as possible, how I am reacting to this fact.
I have a tendency to intellectualise things–we all have a makeup that is driven by such facets of our deeper selves. For some of us, it’s the emotions that power us, for others, the instinctive hungers are dominant. For me, it’s thinking; and that, while it has its upside, can be a dreadful curse when you’re locked in a gloomy remand cell for most of the day and night…
The only cure for the encroaching madness that the newly unveiled Governor and his well-qualified team would love me to embrace is to reject thinking, feeling and lusting; and harmonise a distillation of them all into something the ancients called Being…
Being is easy to say and rather more difficult for the personality to approach. Those who have touched it long for its return. Those whose understanding has matured are swallowed into its glory, swapping the realities of becoming for those of an ever changing face of an intelligent and loving eternity. I know the words…now would be great time to translate knowing into understanding… and beyond.
What stops us stepping naturally into Being is a dirty set of glasses…very powerful glasses, with lenses forged in the process of egoic learning that is our lives.
But Being is our home…and deep within us we feel that loss, bitterly, and search for the marks of others who understood that. The ancients who carved the now reinstated Saxon cross knew that…and, reading the landscape as carefully as they had carved the stone, they knew where the stone should stand in order to fulfil its purpose.
To see this world we need to take off those glasses of the personality – or, at least give them a substantial wash… This washing is not a trivial affair, but it is all that is required.
After that there is only seeing, for which we simply need our Selves.
Don and Wen: among the most significant names in my life… Two of my best friends, taken from me by an act of ‘armed vandalism’ on my part–if the words of Dr Grey in my latest interview, combined as a double blow after the Governor’s ‘visit’ – are to be taken seriously. The Governor carefully gave me the barest facts at my recent meeting with his committee. He’s an astute one. He knows his psychology – there’s nothing as acidic to the mind as part-knowing something.
But the good Doctor Grey has reassured me that I will be having a daily ‘interview’ to talk about my mental state. He thinks this may help my conditions here in Bakewell Gaol. It’s a clever use of language–he knows I will read it as ‘condition’ rather than ‘conditions’, and it will reassure me that, under the fist of the no-nonsense Governor, my interference with their own agenda will soon be at an end…
When your mind has eighteen hours a day to do nothing but think, it imagines… The blade of imagination has two edges… One of them is a very good friend to the human consciousness; the other…
Are my friends, Don and Wen locked up somewhere, too? Can the reach of the Knights of Severity be that strong? See, I’m imagining, again. The Governor didn’t say they’d been caught, not exactly. He took great delight in naming them and telling me that they were being pursued, and by two of his golfing buddy’s best police officers… And I know Don and Wen well; they’re not best equipped to escape the police for long… unless some unseen agency is flying low over their heads and leading their way through the dimensions of the possible. Equally, they might simply and sensibly be enjoying that trip to Scotland they were planning before the white hot blade struck me, again. The Governor and his police friends might simply have their first names and nothing more?
I reach for the pad, which has only a few pages left, and rip out one of the remaining, precious sheets.
I like triangles.
In our world – the world of physical consciousness, things happen in triangles. Old adages like ‘things come in threes’ have much wisdom behind them; but they’re partial. I know a deeper version, and its use begins with writing down what you know in a certain way.
I sit on my bed and think… this is good thinking – aimed at a specific problem whose elements are clearly identified. After several minutes, I close my eyes and imagine a clock face on which I project my triangle. Then, emptying my mind, I wait and breathe, shutting down the intellect as best I can.
It works. Five minutes later I’m standing at my sink with a new drawing pinned to the ancient cork-board that sits above the sink and mirror. To anyone else, the drawing would be a simple arrangement of names. To me, and to Don and Wen had they been here, the arrangement is of great significance in describing the driving forces of the now.
We are all of us arrows, and just at this moment, I wish I hadn’t been the arrow that Wen and Don fired… But the white hot blade of separation doesn’t have to be received passively. It can be wielded in defence, too… It can be used to carve the now…
<See index below for other parts of this story>
———————————————————–< to be continued-
Ben’s Bit is a continuing first-person narrative of the character created by Stuart France and Sue Vincent, which may bear some relation to the author of this story, Steve Tanham, their fellow director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness. In the latest of their books, Scions of Albion, Ben is arrested for his overly enthusiastic part in a mad escapade, and the other two are nowhere to be seen . . . For more, enjoy their Doomsday series of books, and the new series (Lands of Exile) beginning soon. Click here for details.
Index to Ben’s Bits:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve,
Sue Vincent describes her and Stuart’s perspective on Ben’s imprisonment: Part One, Part Two
The Doomsday Series of books and the new book, But n’ Ben by Stuart France and Sue Vincent
The Silent Eye School of Consciousness – a modern mystery school.
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A heart-warming account by Ali of a recent meeting with Stuart and Sue to discuss the Silent Eye’s April Workshop – Leaf and Flame. We have a small handful of places remaining… any takers?
Sue (Vincent) and I have always got on. We hit it off from Day One – meeting, as I recall, at Savio House for one of the SOL Gatherings (either GOL or RWP) four or five years ago.
Very quickly we discovered that we had much in common – not least, a love of writing and an earthy, nay coarse in my case, sense of humour. Many’s the rib-aching guffaw we have had since.
A while back, Sue suggested that we meet up to have a day out and to discuss the forthcoming Silent Eye weekend of Ritual Drama, entitled ‘Leaf and Flame:TheFoliate Man’ and based, by all that is wonderful, around the story told in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Had I been in a position to fund myself back in 1979, this Middle English poem was going to be the subject of my M.A…
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 51 – Butterfly Soup
by Steve Tanham
Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 51 – Butterfly Soup
.Alexandra.
I was ready when he arrived, fifteen minutes early to my twenty. My notebook was out on the small table, already open at the furiously scribbled summary. Two other objects were concealed beneath it. My carefully timed pair of coffees were just being delivered by Rose.
“Gotta hand it to the girl,” said Rose, tousling what is left of John’s hair as he bent to sit and could, therefore, do nothing about it. “Her timing’s getting a lot better…”
John grinned at the twin assault – one on his endangered vanity; the other directed at his habit of keeping me off-guard by being early to these meetings. But he said nothing.
I sipped my hot latté and did my snaky look at him. Still he said nothing.
“I have decided,” I began, brimming with plan. “That I need to recover some ground.” More coffee, then, “Having valiantly gained the initiative a few weeks ago, I have,” I pulled a face. “Lost the plot, somewhat…”
His smile broadened, but he remained steadfastly silent.
This was going well. “I had been considering things blow by blow, episode by episode,” I said. “whereas I should have been taking Heracles’ ‘year’ as a whole, single process – particularly the astrological significances.”
He finally spoke. “There’s only so much one can absorb on each visit. More is revealed each time… as it should be!”
He chuckled into his coffee, remembering how hot Rose made it and blowing it first, then sipping it gingerly. “And if you think Heracles is a challenge you should see the frown lines Noah’s Ark can induce!”
He sat back again, spreading his arms in a gesture of invitation.
We only had a forty-five minute window and I had a lot to say. I began, “The astrological progression is really a ‘container’ for the experiences of the aspirant. He or she begins, as does the astrological year, in March, in the sign of Aries.”
John was nodding, waiting.
“He bursts into his quest, ready to head-butt anything, full of the energy of new beginnings. Indomitable Soul that he is, he conquers the wild mares but then leaves his younger and less capable friend, Adberis, alone with the Mares and he is killed. In other words, it needed both Soul and Personality to tame the Wild Mares, and Heracles forgot that…”
I watched his lips break into an approving half smile, but he kept most of it suppressed.
Momentum. I was on a roll. A small sip of coffee and we were off onto the next bit. “In Taurus, he has to deal with the powerful lower nature of his physical self – with instincts, particularly sexual energy, delivering the bull to the care of a benign face of very focussed folk called Cyclopses…and points of single focus are very important as we’ll see when we get to Sagittarius, our latest foray…”
I was enjoying myself and had no intention of stopping. “He delves into that paradox of soul in body in Gemini, too, but becoming aware that his nature is twin, and that he has to accept that a new world is opening up.”
John was passive, smiling and sipping his drink. He made no attempt to speak, enjoying my charge.
“In Cancer,” I continued. “he has to come to terms with the fact that he is a member of a family, a tribe, a nation and that these arenas have other souls in them, too; but he doesn’t lose sight of his true quest, and achieves the capture of the elusive doe of intuition.”
“He keeps his eyes on the Sun.” suggested John, interrupting for the first time.
I thought about that and agreed. “Yes, despite the forces of the moon being in his way, he achieves his goal.”
More coffee, then, “In Leo, there’s a fight to the death with the Lion – but only so that something else can be born in the months that follow. In Virgo he makes a complete hash of the gift of new life offered by Hippolyte, the Queen of all the women, who, in a higher sense he should have united with rather than indulging his nasty habit of killing those he loved!”
Note to self, I thought. Stop obsessing about Heracles the butcher… “Comes with being a criminal lawyer,” I muttered into my coffee. John pretended not to notice. I continued, “So in Virgo he becomes conscious that the world of form – our physical world, is really nurturing something very special – something belonging to the Sun… or was that Son?” I let the words hang, proud that I had added them off-script, so to speak.
John had finished his coffee. I had barely started mine. He signalled Rose for two more. I smiled at his optimism and continued, “In Libra, he has to find the balance of power and the use of the mind to tame the respected but feared Boar and nearly stalls in his quest, stuck between the forces of the above and the below.” I paused. “And then we come to Scorpio – my rising sign…” I sighed.
“Scorpio?” John asked, studying me. “A problem?”
“Sex and death…”
“Beg pardon?”
“My best friend, who is a Scorpio, used to describe her life as a maze of ‘sex and death'”
“Nasty sting!” John pulled a face, obviously re-living a distant memory. I didn’t ask.
“Where Heracles has to go right down into the muck to pluck out and hold up the Hydra of illusion, thereby separating it from its swampy roots and killing it for good…”
“Phew…” said John, pretending to wipe his forehead. “Which brings us to Sagittarius, a noble sign if every there was one!”
“The archer on a white horse, or another Centaur, if you like, depending on whether you like your twin beings Divine and Human or Human and Animal.”
I could see that John wanted to add something important. I waved him on.
“”Now I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse‘ – Revelation,” said my uncle. “The King of Kings comes forward from heaven on a white horse…”
“To bring war and peace, as he does with the deadly Stymphalian birds.”
“And how does he defeat them?” Asked John.
“He used a set of cymbals, given to him by Athena, the Goddess of wisdom, to make a vibration–a pure noise so powerful that they were driven away for good.”
John leaned forward for his killer question, “So, if the wild mares were really untamed thoughts, what did these dangerous and noisy birds represent?”
I pulled the notebook to one side and looked at the old pocket watch I had left open on the table, sitting on the card. He had not noticed it.
I had timed it to perfection. I left what remained of my coffee and stood, bending to kiss the top of his surprised head in a mirror of our usual goodbye. But he wasn’t expecting the finger that sealed his questioning lips.
As I left the cafe, exactly twelve minutes early, I looked back, just once, through the cottage-style windows. He was looking at the watch, and the folded half of the butterfly card I had left beneath it.
As I turned to cross the road, I’m sure I saw a half-smile on his silent face.
(Image – composite by author)
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
©Copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2016.
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Have you ever walked along the water’s edge in wet sand, leaving behind a transient trail of footprints that will be washed away by the sea? The image is an evocative one, though a little trite perhaps. Many have seen it as an illustration of the fleeting and impermanent nature of our passage through the world.
Although there may be few things more wonderful than walking through warm shallows and laughing at the sun, that too brings an image of life to mind. The shallows are comfortable, they are safe and known, the point where land and water meet. We experience both without leaving our own natural element. We don’t even need to adjust much, simply take of the shoes and walk. At worst we risk stepping on a shard of shell. But we feel the caress of the waves on our skin and the shifting tides echoing in our…
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 50 – Snakes Down Below
by Steve Tanham
Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee, part 50 – Snakes Down Below
.Alexandra.
“Scary stuff!” said John, smiling at my carefully planned opening. I carried on using my twisting hand and wrist to greet him, as though both were parts of a snake.
“Okay…enough,” I said, feeling my wrist muscles start to ache, “And I know I’m eight of them short…”
“Need some hydration?” he asked, with a cheeky grin, passing me my latté.
I broke into a laugh at the play on words. “Funnier that it should have been,” I chuckled.
“So…” said John, wringing his hands in mock delight. “Tell me about the Hydra and what part it played in the spiritual education of Heracles.”
“Well, then…” I sipped my hot coffee, savouring Rose’s skills with the old Italian machine which chuntered in the corner near the entrance to the kitchen. “It’s quite a simple one: Heracles has to locate a nine-headed snake monster–the Hydra–and kill it… more killing…”
“Perhaps ‘slay’ might be better?”
“Slightly different meaning?” I queried. “More righteous, perhaps, less gratuitous?”
John nodded. “I think so. Less like cold-blooded or drunken murder?”
“Yes, that’s good…” I drank some more coffee and decided that ‘slaying’ felt better.
“And there are nine heads to the beast, so you’re on home ground?”
It was obvious what he meant–the Greeks’ choice of nine ‘heads’ mapped perfectly onto the enneagrams of personality. But the enneagram hadn’t been around back then, though a nine-sided figure called the enneagon was a known form.
“Is it that simple?” I asked.
“I think we are entitled to take that short cut.” he replied. “As serious students of the nine divisions of the human personality, we get a free ride on this one… Know any more Greek nines that might help us justify that stance?”
“Just the Nine Muses,” I said. “Inspiration for most of the creative activities, from poetry to song to dance to astronomy…”
“One for a different day, then,” John said, “But it all adds up to the fact that the Greek philosophers believed that there were nine facets, over many dimensions, to the human soul…” He drank some of his coffee, looking pensive. “So, where did he find the Hydra?”
“In a swamp,” I said; then realised my mistake as I noticed his smile. “In the lowest part of the psychic anatomy of himself…”
John inclined his head in agreement, “Much better,” he said, “and did he just stumble over the creature?”
I thought about that, seeing through the myth with the help of his prompting. “No, he had to send flaming arrows into the swamp to get the Hydra to reveal itself!” The imagery was suddenly startling, “So he had to shine light–consciousness down into the depths of his being…”
“Very good. And did the Hyrdra put up a fight?”
I thought about the image of Heracles wrestling a losing battle with the Hydra. “A hell of a fight… Every time Heracles cut off one of the heads, another two grew in its place.”
“Like attacking a weed that’s ready to drop its seeds!”
“Just like that,” I smiled. “And he only won the battle when he remembered some paradoxical advice that he should ‘kneel to grow’. “
“He knelt before the Hydra?” said John, looking horrified.
“Only so that he could pull the thing up by its roots, instead of attacking its weedy blossoms,” I said, flippantly.
“So he won by taking it from its source of energy?” asked John.
“Yes, by holding it up to the light – or fire in some versions – the heads died and the creature that was the Hydra perished; or rather; became a single immortal head that Heracles buried deep in the mud, in case he ever needed it…”
“And what would he use it for?” asked John, leaning forward.
“To use its vast energy in a ‘sober’ manner.” I said, replaying the dominant image from our last week’s conversation.
He smiled at me with warmth. “I’d say we could move on to slay something else now, wouldn’t you?”
(Image – composite by author. Underlying image of water snake from Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons licence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_snake#/media/File:Natrix_natrix_persa3.jpg)
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Nine Deadly Sins with Coffee is usually published on Thursdays.
©Copyright, The Silent Eye School of Consciousness, 2016.
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While I would much rather contemplate the swirling waters of a river and watch the birds take their morning bath, there is nothing much to do in an urban traffic jam except people-watch. The stream of humanity, though, offers its own gifts. From the children making their way to school, those who walk quietly and those up to obvious mischief, to the old man with the elderly collie, both hobbling arthritically in the chill morning air, or the young mother pushing the next generation in a hi-tech contraption that makes your car feel like a museum piece, there is always something to see and a train of thought to follow.
This morning, it was a young woman who caught my eye. She would, undoubtedly, have caught eyes other than my own. She was very conscious of that too… hair, make-up, dress…even the way she was walking, completely conscious of herself…
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An ancient landscape, shrouded in mystery… strewn with stones and the last of the summer heather…scattered with sites of ancient sanctity.
Stone circles… an enigmatic fortress rising from the bracken like a ship to carry mind and imagination back beyond the veiling mists.
Time becomes fluid, marked in shadows cast by standing stones. Stories carved in millstone grit by ancient hands come to life beneath the racing clouds… and all around is beauty.
Join us in September as the seasons turn once more to walk forgotten pathways across the moors to circles lost in the bracken. Learn of the dreams of a mysterious Seer, a lifetime echoed in stone and whispered through time as we explore the sacred landscape of Derbyshire. In the solitude of the moors, the voices of the past seem to reach through the land and touch your heart, finding there a continuous thread of light that…
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Still Vermin
—
I am just like you
But hungry
My stomach longs
For days of food
A taste that through
My numbing mind
I sometimes still remember
—
I am just like you
But dirty
My oily, spotted flesh
Smells rank and damp
From days afloat
With no warm breeze to sing to me
Just the icy spray from salted sea
—
I am just like you
But cold
My garments, insufficient
On the day I left, with hope,
Now cling like a thing
To which you would attach
The label of derision
—
I am just like you
But childless
From my frozen hands
The locks of young blonde hair
Were torn by those whose
Eyes could look no more
On frothing foam
—
I am just like you
But simpler
You do not know
What it is like
To live within a hungry hole
And shelter from the light
That gives the hunter sight
—
I am just like you
But weaponless
We fled from guns
From guns that in the mind
Protect and guard your kind
And bombs that split and thus divide
Their rending of the limbs by which we hide
—
And in the end
I am not enough like you.
And till my dirty words can touch your heart
As though my pain were yours
You can never be just like me
And, homeless, cold, and out there
I will forever be
Still vermin
——-
©Copyright Stephen Tanham 2016
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River of the Sun, chapter 16 – Old Friends, New Dangers
“Forgive me, high priest,” said Menascare. “Times have changed and we live in a dangerous age! Had Rameses – or anyone else here, known that we were friends of old, the situation could have moved beyond my control!”
Sitting on the curved chair in his chamber, Anzety massaged the back of his head. The blinding headache that Menascare’s carefully delivered blow had induced was still taking its toll.
“We were hardly friends, Menascare. You were my least favourite teacher in that far-away temple, I was terrified of you. We called you the ‘Eye of the Cobra’. Did you ever know that?”
“Yes,” said the elder man, smiling ruefully. “thank you for that. The name grew in the fertile soil of the royal palace and is used today when I am not listening–and increasingly, when I am… Nevertheless, you learned from my teaching, while others did not…”
Anzety shifted in his seat edgily, and not because of the pain in his head. “I have barely had time to think since the Royal assault on us! This situation is getting more complex every hour! Am I to take it that things are not well between you and the King-in-Rising?”
“I have been Rameses’ mentor for more years than I wish to remember… I thought I had passed to him some of the moderation of my years, but there is missing in him a foundation of kindness, a basic trust of the rest of his world. It is a trait that his father feared also. I worry for those in his way! His father was Seti: Man of Set – Beloved of Ptah! Imagine a life lived with the spirit of wildness dominating your soul, but shared with the God who gave the heart a tongue and a pen!”
Anzety stood and tried to stretch some of the tension from his frame. “But, my sister and I do not act against the King-in-Rising. We have merely adapted the old ways and merged them with a rebirth in the worship of the divine feminine. Our goal is to show that all such Goddesses are aspects of the One – aspects of the original Isis, mother of Horus, herself. We believe that the right new rituals will release great powers of healing into the Black Land.”
Menascare reached for his wine and drained the glass. He didn’t often resort to the grape, but this was no ordinary circumstance.
“And that is a noble goal, high priest. But Rameses fears the new. He loves it only when he is the source of it! Take care, for you are both in great danger. The Heretic King still casts a long shadow, and Rameses explodes with rage if anything brings that dark time to mind… His father may be fired from kinder clay, but his venom for the self styled ‘Son of the Sun’ is as acute as that of Rameses.”
Despite the fact that the temple was in the middle of a cycle of initiation, Anzety poured them both some more of the rich, red wine. Temple protocol had been cast aside, and not by them… “The Talatat scare me enough!” he said.
“The Talatat!” Mensacare spat the words. “Those bricks of harsh uniformity. But you heard Rameses’ words, no doubt?” Menascare looked up at the ceiling, cursing quietly.
“That you were their creator? I could not believe that. I assumed they were forged by Rameses himself?”
“No,” replied Menascare. “They were my creation. I engineered their minds to show how dangerously fanatical the pursuit of pure knowledge could be. I trained them in the inner ways of the mind so they could provide us with a living tableau of the outer parts of ourselves.”
The older man suddenly looked very sad. He hung his head and sighed, before continuing, “But Rameses became fascinated with their ‘purity of purpose’. Together with Obion, he warped them so that they emerged a fearful machine.” Menascare drank deeply from his glass. “Beware them, Anzety – they are not like others; the edges of their ruthlessness have never been found…”
The high priest registered the deep lines on the face of his former teacher and decided to move the subject on.
“What will the King do now?” he asked.
“I dread to think – but I had better go and find out – assuming he is not sharing his bedchamber with your sister!”
“I think she will have skilfully avoided that…but the price may be high. Anyway, shouldn’t you be guarding someone young with a sore neck?”
“It was time to show our King-in-Rising that there are limits to my obedience! Storming your temple was his idea and the bile still sits in my throat.” He coughed and shook his head. “In truth, your young priest lies on the temple floor getting the rest he needs. Besides, Rameses will not be checking him – he’s too busy with your sister!”
“But Obion might,” said Anzety. “From what I’ve seen, he is no friend of yours!”
“That is certainly true,” Menascare smiled. “But then, he only seeks friendship with the King – something he will never have! Besides,” he chuckled. “He sleeps the sleep of the drugged–he will need his rest, too!”
Anzety looked at the older man and wondered about the resourcefulness needed to last this long under the eyes of a tyrant like the young ruler…
Menascare looked up from studying his hands; still thinking deeply. “Your young priest-to-be is a brave soul, too. I expected him to weep under the royal pressure, but he remained calm and resolute. He will make a good priest…”
“We hope he will be more than that…” Anzety risked much in saying it, but felt the time was right. But the look the other returned him carried a warning.
“Then you walk a very dangerous path, Anzety – one I would be a fool to be party to!”
“We are not devious,” said the high priest, trying to recover lost ground.” “we simply want to protect the glory of Egypt’s soul at a time of strife.”
“Egypt thrives on strife! Did the Kingdoms not roll on through the Wheel of Neheh despite the many catastrophes in between?”
The Eye of the Cobra finished his wine and stood to go.
“Beware the price, Anzety, beware the price…”
With that, he left…
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Index to previous chapters:
Chapter One – Gifts From the River
Chapter Two – An Agony of Sunset
Chapter Three – The Dark Waters
Chapter Four – Touching the Sky
Chapter Five – The Fire Within
Chapter Seven – The Crystal Air
Chapter Eight – The Unchosen Darkness
Chapter Nine – The Priestess Calls
Chapter Ten – Darkness at the Door
Chapter Twelve – Above and Below
Chapter Thirteen – The Binding Voices
Chapter Fifteen – The Intimacy of Enemies
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Introduction to River of the Sun
In April 2015 a group of people gathered in the Derbyshire hills to enact the Silent Eye’s annual Mystery Play, entitled, The River of the Sun. The five-act mystical drama formed the backbone of that Spring weekend, and told the fictional story of a clash of ego and divinity set in an Isis-worshipping temple located on an island in the Nile, during the the fascinating period of the 19th dynasty, the time of Rameses the Great.
The 18th and 19th dynasties were a period of deep upheaval for ancient Egypt. The reign of the ‘Heretic King’, Akhenaten saw Egypt’s religious structure torn apart, as the revolutionary Pharaoh became what Wallis Budge called the ‘world’s first monotheist’; re-fashioning the power of the many Gods with one supreme entity – the visible sun disc, the Aten, for which Akhenaten, alone, was the high priest. Many have pointed to the failure of the ‘herectic’ Pharaoh’s politics, but few have doubted the sincerity of his religious vision. He will, forever, remain an enigma.
Whatever the nobility of his goal, the actions he took were ruthless, and included the shutting down of the annual deity festivals which were the sole point of ritualistic contact between the ordinary people of Egypt and their locally-worshipped gods. In addition, Akhenaten paid little attention to the domestic and military affairs of Egypt, allowing the country’s enemies to encroach on its borders, greatly weakening Egypt’s power at that critical time for the region.
After Akhenaten’s brief reign, culminating in the Pharaoh’s mysterious death, shadowy military forces took control of Egypt, instigating the 19th dynasty in the persons of Rameses I and, soon thereafter, Seti I, whose throne name derives from the god Set – often considered the ‘evil one’ because of his slaying of his brother, Osiris.
Seti I is judged by modern historians as having been one of the greatest-ever pharaohs, yet his importance in the 19th dynasty was eclipsed by the actions of his second son, the brilliant Rameses II, whose long reign of over sixty years included much self-promotion and the alteration of Egypt’s recent history. Both Seti and Rameses II (Rameses the Great) were passionate about the evisceration of the last traces of Akhenaten’s ‘chaos’, as they saw it.
But, although, by the 19th dynasty, the the ‘Son of the Sun’ was long dead and the buildings of his embryonic and doomed city of Tel-al-Armana were reduced to rubble, something of that time remained in the Egyptian consciousness. A new kind of connection between Pharaoh and God had been established, one which elevated mankind, if only in the being of the Pharaoh, to be someone who ‘talked with God’. It was, at the very least, a bold experiment and, though the world would have to wait until the 19th century to re-discover the ‘erased’ pharaoh, the philosophical waves of that period rippled out and dramatically affected the way the incoming 19th dynasty had to repair the worship of the Gods, uniting the people of Egypt under a trinity of Amun-Ra, Khonsu and Mut.
Our fictional story is a tale of politics, friendships, mind and faith. It is set against an historically accurate background, and at a time when Rameses was due to take the throne from the dying Seti .
Returning to Thebes in his swift warship, crewed by his fearsome Talatat mind-warriors, Rameses decides to mount a surprise night-time raid on the island-based Isis temple which has prospered under the sponsoring reign of his father. Rameses suspects that the inner teachings conducted by the revered High Priestess and Priest conceal views that relate to the thoughts of the heretic Pharaoh, Akhenaten. He plans to insert himself and his warriors of the mind into the islands’s Spring rites as the high priest and priestess begin a cycle of initiation for a chosen apprentice priest who has proved himself worthy of special advancement.
The resulting clash draws everyone, including the young Pharaoh-in-Rising, into a spiralling situation where each is forced to confront their own fears as well as living out the roles which life has allocated them. River of the Sun is the story of a spiritual and political encounter from which none emerge unchanged, including the man who will shortly be Pharaoh, the mighty Rameses II, whose secret name for himself is ‘the unchosen’.
Through the eyes and minds of those surrounding the chosen priest and the ‘unchosen’ Pharaoh, the River of the Sun takes us on a tense and compelling journey to the heart of power and its eternal struggle with truth.
The chapters of the book will be serialised in this blog. The finished work is planned to be available in paperback and Kindle in the Spring of 2016.
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River of the Sun, serialised here, and its associated images, are the intellectual property of Stephen Tanham and is ©Copyright material.
Sun in Gemini 
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