AMYDON-EXETER CENTRE 113 COMMUNICATION - CONSULTANCY - PERSONAL GROWTH - WISDOM TRADITION
"Exaudi nos, Domine, sancte Pater, omnipotens æterne Deus, et mittere digneris sanctos Angelos tuos de cœlis, qui custodiant, foveant, protegant, visitent et defendant omnes habitantes in hoc habitaculo…"*
"Graciously hear us, Lord, holy Father, almighty eternal G-d, and deign to send your holy Angels from heaven, to guard, cherish, protect, visit and defend all residents in this tiny dwelling-place…"* * i.e., the manifest cosmos.
According to Dennis Wheatley (The Devil and all his works, Book Club Associates, 1977, pp.232-3): "In Savoy in 1477 a witch named Antoine Rose was brought to trial. She had told a neighbour that she badly needed money, so the friend took her to a sabbath where she was persuaded to do homage to the Devil… They knew him by the name of Robinet. This is one of the many instances in which witches stated that the Devil was spoken of by them as Robin, or some form of that name. Dame Alice Kyteler called him Robin Artisan, the Somerset witches called the chief of their coven Robin; and Puck, a deity of the Little People, was also know as Robin Goodfellow. Professor Murray remarks on the connection between the latter and Robin Hood, and points out that the legends regarding Robin Hood associate him with many places far removed from Sherwood Forest - for instance, Scotland."
The Story of the Fight to Save The Tomb of Robin Hood (ISBN 0 9540164 0 8)
WWW.ROBINHOODYORKSHIRE.CO.UK BARBARA GREEN BGreen@Juliet33.freeserve.co.uk 
Deep in the heart of an ancient woodland in West Yorkshire, hidden beneath a formidable barrier of fierce thorns and dense undergrowth there lies a ruined shrine. Close by lies, some say, Robin Hood, England's outlaw hero, bloodily slain by the Prioress of Kirklees Nunnery six hundred years ago and cast into an unhallowed grave; others say he met his end in the top of a tower which suggests a link with flying saucers or dragons in the sky. Today, Robin lies forgotten and unmourned in his lonely sepulchre, if such it be, for few people, if any, now know the whereabouts of his actual grave on Earth or elsewhere. However, his more recent substitute memorial at Kirklees is already ancient, too, and many a Robin Hood legend has now become inextricably linked with what survives of Kirklees Priory. For the past twenty years the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society has fought to allow access and restoration to the site, so that people throughout the world who love these legends, may pay their final respects to their hero. Often the Society's efforts have met with some very strange results...
Hardprint illustrated copies of this work, including maps, pictures and other documentation, and undoubtedly likely to appeal to anyone interested in Robin Hood or the paranormal, may be purchased from:
Palmyra Press, 23 Victoria Avenue, BRIGHOUSE, West Yorkshire HD6 1QT
Also available and by the same author: Marian's Christmas Rose (1986), Prince of Robbers (1988), The Outlaw Robin Hood - His Yorkshire Legend (1991), Spirit of the Greenwood (2001). All these titles can, for so long as they are available, also be obtained directly from Nurse Barbara Green by writing to:
P.O. Box 10, Brighouse, West Yorkshire HD6 1ZD
"The father of Saxo's Amlethus was Horvandillus, written also Orendel, Erentel, Earendel, Oervandill, Aurvandil, whom the appendix to the Heldenbuch pronounces the first of all heroes that were ever born. The few data known about him are summarised by Jacob Grimm:
He suffers shipwreck on a voyage, takes shelter with a master fisherman Eisen, earns the seamless coat of his master, and afterwards wins frau Breide, the fairest of women: king Eigel of Trier was his father's name… The Edda has another myth… Groa is busy conning her magic spell, when Thorr, to requite her for the approaching cure, imparts the welcome news, that in coming from Jötunheim in the North he has carried her husband the bold Örvandill in a basket on his back, and he is sure to be home soon; he adds by way of token, that as Örvandil's toe had stuck out of the basket and got frozen, he broke it off and flung it at the sky, and made a star of it, which is called Örvandils-tâ.Power… compares the hero to Orion:
…Some lines of Cynewulf's Christ dedicate to the hero the following words:He was a huntsman, big enough and brave enough to cope with giants. He was the friend of Thor, the husband of Groa, the father of Swipdag, the enemy of the giant Coller and the monster Sela. The story of his birth, and of his being blinded, are lost apparently in the Teutonic stories, unless we may suppose that the bleeding of Robin Hood till he could not see, by the traitorous prioress, is the last remains of the story of the great archer's death. Dr. Rydberg regards him and his kinsfolk as doublets of those three men of feats, Egil the archer, Weyland the smith, and Finn the harper, and these again doublets of the three primeval artists, the sons of Iwaldi, whose story is told in the prose Edda.
| Hail, Earendel, brightest of angels thou,
sent unto men upon this middle-earth! Thou art the true refulgence of the sun, radiant above the stars, and from thyself illuminest for ever all the tides of time |
The experts disagree whether Earendel, here, points to Christ, or to Mary, and whether or not Venus as morning star is meant, an identification which offers itself, since ancient glosses render Earendel with 'Jubar'." (Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill - An Essay investigating the origins of human knowledge and its transmission through myth, Jaffrey: David R. Godine, 1977, pp.354-5.)
Tread lightly o'er the earth - and speak no word
GEORGE SEARLE PHILLIPS 1848 |
The poet commands our at least momentary silence by subtly inviting us to consider which of two objects he has mentioned is the better qualified as "swift flying" - Robin's "unerring arrow" traversing its ritually defined ærial distance of exactly one measured mile, or the cruelly slaughtered deer so eager to embrace death that the grass is "bloody" even before it falls.
Sicut Cervus - As the hart…
In what has been called "the very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written", Roberto Calasso's Ka (translated from the Italian by Tim Parks: Vintage Books, 1999, pp. 52-7), we read -
"Bespattered with the blood and seed of the Father, no sooner was she separated from him than Usas fled South… The eyes of the gods were fixed on the Archer and the dying Father, who were about to speak to each other. At this point Usas was no longer the Dawn… She was just an antelope running off into the woods, waiting for the hunter who would shoot her down. The antelope was the first being to be wounded, when Rudra's arrow buried itself in Prajapati's groin. So it was also the first being to be hunted and sacrificed…At a certain point in their history, men, having long thought of themselves as antelopes, began to kill antelopes, to hunt them. The antelope was the first being in whose regard they felt guilty: killing the antelope, they were killing themselves, as once they had been… Unless the skin of a black antelope was laid out on the ground, there could be no sacrifice. The sacrifice rested on that skin, on the side of the fur: the black hairs were the Vedic meters. And those undergoing initiation, the diksitas, would gird their loins with a black antelope skin, as if at every moment to recall, indeed to absorb through their pores, something of the substance of that being whose wanderings and flight marked out the borders of the territory where sacrifice took place - civilization - beyond which lay an unknown land, merely wild, that hemmed it in on every side.
One day Usas became the Buddha. The powers of the world - the desire and the wound - come to a stop there where all that is left of the antelope is a hoofprint. The Buddha remembered as much when he came to Sarnath, drawn by an episode from one of his earlier lives. The king of Varanasi hunted a great many antelopes in his park. Many died in ditches where the vultures and jackals devoured them. The king of the stags made a pact with the king of Varanasi. Every day he would hand over one antelope, who would be chosen by drawing lots. One day the lot fell on a pregnant antelope. No one was willing to take her place. Then the Bodhisattva, who was an antelope, offered to take her place and went to show himself to the cooks. The knife fell from the cook's hand. On seeing what had happened, the king of Varanasi granted all the antelopes their freedom…
If the Buddha is he who leads toward awakening, his Vedic precursor was the young woman who comes forward, 'like a girl without a brother who walks towards the men,' visible from afar: Usas, sovereign of awakening. Before it became a noun, bodhi, the 'awakening' which was Buddha's revelation - and which the fainthearted translate as 'illumination' - was actually an imperative - 'Awaken!' - issued from the lips of Usas. But there was a duplicity about Usas that enchanted men and distressed them… 'Awakening' can be said in two ways, which alternate constantly in the hymns addressed to her: bodhayanti, jarayanti. But a second meaning lurks in jarayanti: 'making one grow old.' With awakening, with that which brings things into existence, comes time, which makes them disappear… 'The mortals who saw the first Dawn shine forth have departed. Now she lets us gaze upon her. And behold the approach of those who shall see her in times to come.'…
There are only so many gestures one can make, but meanings are innumerable. So the same stories are repeated, with variations, so that each time we may discover, in one slow rotation, a new Earth and a new Sky of meanings. And it was precisely there, in the Sky, that that rotation was first observed. There was a time when Orion had risen in the dawning of the Spring Equinox, beginning of every beginning, first moment of time… But the seers saw how through the centuries Orion was slowly moving - and how Aldebaran was approaching the place where it had been. They recognized the precession of the equinoxes long before Hipparchus gave it its name and consigned it to science. And they found all the actors in the drama up there. They saw the precession of crimes in the Sky. In the beginning the guilt lay with Prajapati, who was Orion, whom they called the Antelope, Mrga. In the end, as the equinoctial point shifted, it was in the hunter himself, the Archer, Rudra, who was Sirius. But now the arrow was loosed not by a god, in perfect wakefulness, but by a man, Pandu, a hunter king who mistakenly, carelessly, shot two antelopes, one a brahman, the other his spouse, as they coupled…
Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, between these enchanting names lies the Place of theHunter. A bloody, feverish sstory has embedded itself in the Sky. It reminds us that it will go on happening forever. But at its edges we find these names, which dissolve in the mind and dissolve the mind. They are the fragrance of sound. If every words conceals the killer of the thing, still without redress since time immemorial, these names emanate a substance that is soft and bright, a substance we would seek in vain among the things that are…"
In Robin Hood's Yorkshire legend his burial place is reputed to be at Kirklees Priory, four miles north-east of Huddersfield. "When he was dying, Robin took refuge here and shot two arrows from the window of his cell. One fell into the river Calder, the other into the priory and marked the place of his grave."
Fran & Geoff Doel add that "the supposed grave slab which lies about seven hundred yards from the nunnery gate, was said to have been damaged at the time of the building of the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway. The gravestone was first recorded in 1584 and a drawing of it made in 1665 including a partial inscription 'Here lie robard Hude, William Goldsburgh, Thomas…' " (Robin Hood - Outlaw or Greenwood Myth, Tempus, 2000, p.102.)
"Today", writes the local historian and author, Nurse Barbara Green, "few people know of the existence of Robin Hood's grave in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, or its precise whereabouts on the Kirklees Estate in the heart of the Pennine Hills. For the past seventeen years the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society has fought to allow access to and restoration of this ancient site, so that people throughout the world who love the legend, may pay their final respects to this legendary hero."
"Situated and bounded by Bradford to the east, the moors of Brontëland to the north and Lancashire to the west", Barbara Green explains, "Calderdale's southern boundary is formed by the M62, linking the international airports of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester. Yet, despite its reputation as part of the industrial north, Calderdale itself is very largely rural, with vast tracts of moorland and upland pasture, intersected by the River Calder and its tributaries flowing through steep-sided woodland valleys.
In the past, this combination helped to create the conditions for the growth of the historic textile industry, which has, in recent years, been replaced by tourism as the borough's main source of income. The council have, in fact, capitalised on many local attractions, such as the Piece Hall at Hardcastle Craggs at Hebdon Bridge and local links with the Brontë sisters, who visited the area frequently from nearby Haworth. The Calderdale Way has been developed along with the Pennine Way which crossed through Calderdale, while the restoration of the Rochdale Canal and other waterways has made boating a popular way of visiting the beautiful countryside."
Prince Charles has already visited Brighouse. "Why then", Barbara asks, "is Calderdale so reluctant to make the most of what could be its biggest and most famous tourist attraction?"
"I the undersigned JOHN RUSSELL POPE of 71 The Ridge Dollis Valley Way Mays Lane Barnet Hertfordshire British Citizen DO HEREBY ABSOLUTELY RENOUNCE AND ABANDON the use of my former surname of POPE and in lieu thereof do assume as from the date hereof the surname of POPE-DE-LOCKSLEY
AND in pursuance of such a change of surname as aforesaid
I HEREBY DECLARE that I shall at all times hereafter in all records deeds and instruments in writing and in all actions and proceedings and in all dealings and transactions and upon all occasions whatsoever use and sign the said name of POPE-DE-LOCKSLEY as my surname in lieu of the said surname of POPE so renounced as aforesaid
AND I HEREBY AUTHORISE AND REQUEST all persons to designate and address me by such assumed surname of POPE-DE-LOCKSLEY only
IN WITNESS whereof I have hereunder signed my forenames of JOHN RUSSELL and my assumed surname of POPE-DE-LOCKSLEY and my relinquished surname of POPE and have set my seal this 22 day of November One thousand nine hundred and eighty four
SIGNED SEALED AND DELIVERED by the above named JOHN RUSSELL POPE-DE-LOCKSLEY in the presence of:- 
formerly known as JOHN RUSSELL POPE
According to Nurse Barbara Green's fellow campaigner and friend of many years standing, Doctor John Russell Pope de Locksley (Email: bindinglea@onetel.net), himself apparently a direct descendant of Robin Hood, this hero's grave is not at Kirklees, but somewhere in Hartshead, underneath the M62. Interesting, too, in the light of Roberto Calasso's account, Doctor Rydberg's remarks and Giorgio de Santillana's & Hertha von Dechend's above quoted discussion, is Pope-de-Locksley's continuing insistence (as in his Letter to Doctor Hamer of 3 January 2004) both that Robin Hood had a special tree - and that this tree, sacred to Maid Marian, somehow identifies the latter as Our Divine Mother the Virgin Mary, Our Lady Diana, the Moon Goddess, both White and Black, also known as Neith - and, of course, known also by several other names, such as: Usas, Astarte, Queen of Heaven, Wilbet (for Germanic Saxons one of the three Sisters of Fate), each of which has its own validity. Cfr. Jeffrey Hopkins, The Tantric Distinction - An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1984).
Entirely serious? Laughter is the best medicine! "G-d is number, measure and weight." (St Bernard of Clairveaux)
Egoïsm, glamour and publicity-seeking differ vastly from Self-Knowlege. Vigilance and discernment are most important. Many share John's conviction that no contradiction exists between authentic Christianity and genuine Paganism. Wicca's historical and traditional antecedents include the courageous example of St. Joan of Arc's life and politically contrived, brave and for ever glorious death.
- Shalom & Welcome! Contents currently under review -
Copyright © The Neith Network Library 2006
Webmaster: H.B. ExtraReverendDoctorColinJames Hamer, The Rainbow Programme
Creativity House, 9 Oxford Street, St. Thomas, EXETER, Devon EX2 9AG, U.K.
Updated 12:24 27/11//2006
