I opened my blog this morning, to find that I had thousands of visitors yesterday and overnight. We can blame bots but the other explanation is that AI is crawling around looking at our blogs and learning how to write like a human I suppose. Fat chance Musk, humans think in different ways, that's what makes them human.
So I will confuse those little crawling bugs and talk of something they know little of, which is history, and boy they will have to swallow miles of books to even start on that subject.
You will note at the top a verse from a Thomas Traherne poem. Traherne was a 17th century poet a mystic and a poor, economically, vicar who wrote poems. It is the subject matter of the poem, the full poem is here by the way, of mirrored worlds or even parallel worlds that occupied the minds of past people and occupies my mind to. But it was reading Edmonds yesterday and I remembered something from Richard Bradley's book.
'Hels' shoes or feet. Scandinavian rock art. They are seen as either going up the slope or down. Bradley asks were they travelling to the underworld or overworld?
In the mythology of Northern Scandinavian, the dead occupy an underworld that is the mirror image of the world occupied by the living who walk upright.
In Norse mythology to go to death and the underworld one needs special hel shoes. Bradley discusses the way the carved feet in the rock goes up or down, or even disappear and becomes invisible. These hel shoes are found in a Bronze Age context, but the later polished mirrors of the Iron Age, must have been a great wonder to the people who saw into them and looked at their reflections.
Had they used the crystal clear waters of a river or spring to spruce themselves up in? The Iron Age men had very elaborate hair dos. See the first photo and the reflection of the trees. The mind tries to extrapolate the underworld where different things are happening. Tolkien tells of barrow-wights, that may lure into the old barrows to a sight of feasting and fun. But............ once caught, you cannot escape them and even if you do, time has passed in many, many years, the world has changed.
Understanding other worlds that are either symbolic or framed in a belief system is a fascinating study. Death is frightening so we construct a happier world full of food, sex and happiness as far as certain faiths dictate, whether young or old.
You have lost me in this. Perhaps my brain is not up to it. Sadly perhaps but in reality there is no underworld and no overworld either. Such notions were in the collective imaginations of our forebears - as a way of coping and making some sense of the senselessness.
ReplyDeleteYes Neil but we have always created them even in the Christian faith. I like Treharne's imagination, and perhaps deep down many people do wish for these things. And when you are interpreting archaeological monuments as Richard Bradley was when writing his books to look back at poets is not such a bad thing.
DeleteReflections in the water can be so lovely. I guess it depends on what they are reflecting. I like you pretty photo above.
ReplyDelete