Chapter 24: Old Man
Conall Astor was walking bare footed along the sun-baked dirt path that lead from the car park to the west of the village southwards to Silbury hill and on to the rise on which West Kennet longbarrow crouched.
The path was well trodden and wide, and he watched carefully to avoid stepping on the trails of ants that crossed it at various points; but he was also, after Shen’s story of the adder, on the lookout for snakes. The path followed the curve of the river, bordered by reeds and willows, under which Con sheltered every few minutes when the burning sun got too much.
Just north of Silbury Hill a small bridge traversed the stream and Conall took this, and followed the path as it curved about the hill until he reached the small car-park beside the Bath road that served the viewing platform for the hill. Here, just a few hundred yards across the road, lay the newly made crop circle; Conall debated for a few moments whether to look more closely at it but decided not to, already fearing he may have missed his appointment with Wolf.
From here he walked up the brow of the hill where the road rose beside it, and crossed it, taking the path towards the Swallowhead spring.
He sat for a moment on the sarsen stones that forded the spring to cool his dusty hot feet in the cold water. Further towards the source of the spring a family was sitting having a picnic, and he said hello as he passed, taking the path that cut diagonally across from West Kennet – the very path he had seen the large dog or cat taking that morning. He stopped and looked across the valley towards Waden hill at the spot where he had been sitting when he had seen the creature. It looked so far away. The hard-baked earth was free of any tracks that might have helped him discern if this creature had been flesh and blood rather than some spirit conjured from this sacred earth. He shivered, suddenly eyeing the trees down the slope to his left, wondering if some cool, dismissive canine eye was watching him. Then, like a punch in the gut he remembered what Tolkien in his letter had written – river of the bright dog…He stepped up his pace and headed for the barrow.
Having reached the summit of the hill, the breathless Con sat astride the back of this immense ancient tomb for a moment, lying flat on the grass and looking skywards to where the skylarks dipped and hovered; one of his arms cushioned his head like a pillow, while the other lay across his heaving chest, in his hand the owl’s feather which he had just removed from his hat-band. It was here that Shen had given him this gift all those many months ago.
Just twenty-four hours earlier he had strode back from the pub, adamant that his lightened mood had had nothing to do with the reappearance of this girl in his life; but now, letting the feather tickle the side of his face he saw that this had been a laughably naïve conclusion; clearly she hadn’t changed, and when he had left her a year ago he knew he was falling heavily for her. He had changed, though; and that wasn’t her fault – it was a fault of timing and circumstance.
He sat up and put the feather from him; but then turned and picked it up again, holding it to his chest, suddenly feeling as if he might cry out, remembering her beside him on the barrow, her warm, sonorous voice telling him he could kiss her if he wanted… and now she was with another, and it was all too late; and even if she were free, how could he ever allow himself to be happy with her after what had happened, knowing it was because of her he had stayed here, a few hundred miles too distant to do what Hayden had for Shen – too far to save that precious life.
He turned his head and looked towards the massive entrance stones of the barrow, following the line of sight to the Sanctuary on the brow of the hill where he had been this time yesterday; the crop circle in the field between the two points was harder to see from this lower angle, just elipses of shadow in the corn. I can’t believe these are done with a rope and a plank of wood; he thought, the artists needed computer-precision to get such results; night-vision goggles, laptops, GPS devices - no doubt all were needed.
He thought of the group in the pub the night before: Croppies, Wolf had called them; it seemed hard to equate those boozed-up techno-hippies with this kind of art. But maybe that was the point; they relished their anonymity. It seemed strange, though – most young men would want to boast about what they had done; he thought about what he’d read concerning the Ancient Greek mysteries of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, how the life-changing ‘secret’ revealed to the thousands of celebrants over the many centuries it had been celebrated had never been revealed – never – no single participant willing to spill the beans, not for fame nor fortune. Perhaps croppies were made of the same stuff – bearers of an awe-induced silence because of the nature of their work… mouthpieces for Gaia. No, he smiled. Mouthpieces for Demeter, the barley-goddess, known to the Romans as Ceres, goddess of the crops, from whom the word cereal was derived. And cerveza, he thought, once again wishing he’d not drunk as much over lunch. Perhaps, he continued musing, the croppies rejected the fame of modern artists because they rejected the ego, the ‘I’ that separated them from nature – the crop circles’ designs seemed to speak in the language of mathematics, in Pythagorean numbers, of cosmic harmony – they were a symbolic of song of the summer earth, an echo of Eden, calling us back… that’s if they were man-made, and not some strange of exudation of mathematics into nature, or the work of elves or aliens…
‘I saw a fairy once’… Melissa’s sing-song voice.
He smiled at the memory. Of course, she would have...
Just then he felt a strange hollow quiver rising from the mound – then another; the distant beat of a drum – Wolf’s drum, he reasoned, and so he stood and walked to the stones that flanked the entrance of the tomb.
The portal stones that fronted the entrance were huge, and Con entered the tomb by walking behind the largest of them, whereon he was presented with a dark chamber leading straight into the mound. This inner chamber was made of other great sarsen stones, and here, on each side of the passageway, stood smaller chambers, two each side and one at the end, the latter illuminated by a modern glass roof-light – five separate chambers in which the bones of the dead had once been placed – and it was in the chamber to the immediate right of the passage that Wolf Jones sat on a deerskin hide, eyes closed, drumming.
From the opposite chamber, to the left of the passage, came a voice. It was Ananda Coombe from the Red Lion; she smiled in greeting. Con went and sat beside her, exchanging pleasantries in a hushed tone as Wolf continued to drum, with short, deep guttural sounds coming now and again from his throat – and the odd snatch of words:
Hen wyr y gwlad! Dewch!
The earth beneath Con’s hands was cold and dusty, with a coolness that made it feel damp; it was tight in the chamber, and he pressed his back against the stone that formed its back to give Ananda some space; her light hair was tied back in a ponytail and above her round glasses, between her brows, was the faded remnants of three white horizontal lines with a red dot at their centre; a slight hint of sandalwood masked some of the damp staleness exuded by the stones.
Presently the drumming stopped, and Con found himself fixed by cool predator eyes that suddenly creased with mischief.
‘Welcome to my humble abode’ Wolf grinned, waving a hand. ‘You’ve met the lovely Sat Chit Ananada…’
‘She’s served me a fair few pints since I’ve been here.’ Con blushed.
‘Indeed – she’s the amṛta-bearing Mohini… initiatrix into the wisdom of the East…’ he smiled.
Ananda raised her eyes to the sky, despairing. ‘He’s so full of shit, ignore him.’ she said to Con, with a wink.
‘It’s good you’re here, Con. I’m drumming to Old Man.’
Con must have looked blank as Wolf continued, with hardly a pause.
‘This chamber – this is where the bones of the old man were found – the man whose bones are being relocated to the museum tomorrow. They should be
here.’
Wolf explained how the bones had been removed some forty years ago, after Stuart Piggott had excavated the longbarrow in the 60’s, had found the previously unknown side chambers hidden within the drystone walls between the facing stones and the previously excavated back chamber.
‘They’d been filled with stone – literally packed solid with material,’ Wolf explained, ‘so it was just assumed there was nothing there – just wall.
‘It’s usually assumed that newcomers that did this – they wanted this place shut. It had been here for for a thousand years – the bones of the dead were housed here and then removed for ceremonies in the circle or up on Windmill Hill - but the Bronze Age newcomers sealed it up and put those massive sarsen stones out the front, blocking the tomb, ending the communication between the living and the dead.’
‘Like locking the doors of a church?’ Con mused.
‘Or to stop things getting out – the ancestral spirits of the people they had overrun. You don’t want mardy ancestors on your hands, mate…For generations their nameless bones were put here – until the last burial. You see Old Man was buried whole – I think he was the last of his tribe – the last shaman of the stone-wielding people. He was killed and placed here and then the tomb was filled.’
He stopped and rolled himself a cigarette.
‘Killed?’.
‘It’s one theory; the newcomers didn’t arrive peacefully – Old Man was killed before he was put here – an arrowhead was found buried in his neck bones – he’d been shot in the throat. And in the chamber over there, three females – a maiden, a mother and a crone; priestesses of the old religion, perhaps; no arrowheads there – I think they were probably drowned or strangled.’
Con blanched at the word drowned…
Ananda shifted and picked up a handful of dust.
‘Of course, as Wolf knows, I don’t wholly agree…’ she said. ‘I think we could look further than just the defeat of an old shaman by incoming metalworkers. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of interpreting a mythical, ritual occurrence as history...’
Wolf slapped his own wrist in mock admonishment; ‘Ananda has a habit of trying to fit our prehistory into a Hindu framework,’ Wolf explained ‘Don’t you my dear?!’
Ananda shrugged. ‘I started off as a Hindu but then discovered druidism… and I’ve been trying to unite the two ever since. The Celtic and Hindu world were parts, albeit separated geographically, of the same cultural complex, the Indo-European language group… and I see no reason why both didn’t spring from a single root culture, a Neolithic predecessor - so why not use Eastern parallels to illuminate western? I run a class at the Hindu temple in Swindon on the subject…’
‘Tell him about the posset of milk.’ Wolf prompted.
‘Another time… I doubt he’s interested…’ she said, eyeing Con for signs of boredom.
‘No, please…’ Con prompted.
‘Have you heard the folk tradition that Silbury was raised in the time it took a posset of milk to boil?’
Con nodded. ‘I read it somewhere, yep.’
‘There’s a Hindu rite known as the pravargya rite, celebrated at dawn in which an earthenware pot filled with milk is heated over a fire, when then boils over it is supposed, through a kind of sympathetic magic, to bring about the dawn and sunrise. The milk, you see, is associated with the cow or cows of dawn in Hinduism, or a beautiful goddess named Uṣas; and the rite causes the cow or Uṣas to be released from her place of hiding or imprisonment under the horizon, or in the celestial river Rasā …the boiling milk pushes off the lid of the pot, which is supposed to echo Indra destroying the monster Vṛtra ‘the coverer’, who has previously stolen the dawn.’
‘We tried it this spring equinox. Fookin’ disaster’ Wolf cut in, ‘sat atop Silbury in the dark and rain; I’m crouched down trying to keep the wind from blowing out the fire, and when it did light the milk took about half hour to boil and then boiled over and put out the fire.’
‘Maybe next year’ Con said; Wolf and Ananda looked at each other briefly, something passing between them that Con missed.
‘So you think the Silbury folktale is a memory of a rite observed here that was similar to the Hindu one?’ he asked.
Ananda nodded.
‘A midwinter or spring rite, designed to release the sun imprisoned over winter.’ She said.
‘Like the Japanese Amaterasu myth?’ Con said.
Ananda lifted a brow in surprise, ‘indeed…’
‘Christ, here we go… thought this might happen… ‘, Wolf laughed… ‘welcome to University Challenge…and on our left we have Professor Astor, and on our right Guru Ananda Coombe’
Con laughed. ‘I researched a ton of midwinter solar myths when I was doing the PhD – trying to find a rite that might fit Stonehenge… the Amaterasu myth has the sun-goddess hiding in a cave and tricked out by a dancing goddess who exposes herself, making the other gods laugh – so Amaterasu peeks out to see what they’re laughing at and thereby the sun is released. That myth, as I recall, was probably derived from a Hindu original taken to Japan along with Buddhism.’ Ananda was nodding, so he continued; ‘But it misses the cave as serpent symbolism that you find in the Hindu and Indo-European myths… the cows stolen by the serpent which are then rescued by the hero – be that Indra or whoever, the forerunner of the whole dragon-slaying mythos.’
Ananda was still nodding. ‘Where did you find this one, Wolf? Someone who knows his eastern myth!’ she laughed.
‘The serpent, Vrtra – the concealer, the coverer…’ she continued, ‘he represents the static condition that prevents new growth - be that night, or winter… anything that conceals or dims the sun, fertility, or anything creative. He’s not evil, per se, he represents inertia…holding up the circle of creation.’ Ananda remarked, her voice echoing within the chamber… just like a stone cave, Con thought.
‘And he’s beheaded, as I recall, to release what he has captured?’ Con asked.
‘Beheaded, dismembered… or his throat simply cut, as often he has swallowed the sun, or cows, or Uṣas, or soma…the magical drink…and the wounding releases a stream of magic words that can grant immortality.’
‘And the man buried here…how does he fit into this?’
‘I think might have been enacting a similar kind of rite – the release of soma, or the sun, from the throat – so not necessarily the victim of racial or cultural attack…’ she said pointedly, looking at Wolf, who grinned in return.
‘So, he was the serpent Vritra, and this is his cave?’ Con asked, peering about him.
Ananda paused; ‘It’s not that simple…’ she began; ‘as I said, the serpent represents stasis, inertia; a state that needs to be ended, usually through violence; he's the dragon who hoards gold or virgins but has no use for either… hence the need of a hero to come and rescue what is imprisoned…’
Con thought of the letter of Tolkien’s he’d read earlier after leaving Shen’s:
‘What struck me was the font – and the cup in the hands of the headless figure; the cup I had Bilbo steal from Smaug; I, of course, got it from Beowulf… but it’s a common motif – the stealing of the vessel of immortality, the Holy Grail… the mead of knowledge…from the dragon…
‘– but it is a version of a much bigger theme,’ Ananda continued; ‘namely, the cosmogony, the creation. Now, there’s plenty of Celtic legends that have a hero or a saint being decapitated, and springs or wells appearing where the head falls – like St Winifred - in these cases the beheaded figures aren’t evil, as theirs is usually a willing sacrifice.’
Con was thinking deeply, drinking in what Ananda was saying; twisting it around in his mind in an attempt to understand why this man had been slain over five millennia earlier.
‘You think he was killed in a re-enactment of a creation myth?’
‘In some Hindu myths the universe comes about through the dismemberment of the primal man, Purusa; the force of creation is latent within him and he needs to be broken apart for it to be released; it’s the same image as the release of the sun from the serpent, only he’s not hoarding it negatively; he’s akin to the vegetation god who must be dismembered and planted so that he can be reborn.
Con thought of John Barleycorn, the sacrificed man, giving his lifeblood for the good of the people…snippets of the song he had heard at the pub with Shen the day before flashed through his mind:
They took a plough and plough'd him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.
They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell'd him full sore;
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn'd him o'er and o'er.
And they hae taen his very heart's blood,
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
‘Basically…’ Ananda explained, ‘the cosmos is seen as stemming from an anthropomorphic being, be it the Purusa, the Cosmic man, of the Rigveda – or the Iranian Gayōmart, he holds the potential creation within him, locked away, so he is dismembered…and from him the world is formed.’
‘Like the giant Ymir in Norse mythology,’ Wolf chipped in, ‘who becomes the world –
From Ymir's flesh the earth was formed,
and from his bones the hills,
the heaven from the skull of that ice-cold giant,
and from his blood the sea…’
‘Yes, it’s the same image,’ Ananda agreed, ‘he literally becomes the earth, the sky – he is creation itself, formed through a world-creating sacrifice. Like the corn he is buried and new life sprouts from him. It’s an image that probably stems from planting myths, I would think…death precedes life.’ she mused.
Con creased his brow in confusion.
‘And this man buried here…’
‘…died in a re-enactment of that first creation;’ she re-iterated, ‘he’s what they call a foundation sacrifice; he’s the original first man, the primal ancestor – the sacrificed god – and his wound in the throat, opening him up at the neck, releasing the forces of creation....’
‘And why him? Why was he special?’
She answered:
‘He was already marked as special; he was lame, disabled by spina bifida, and he had a supernumerary toe… yet he’d lived until old age; he couldn’t hunt, or farm, certainly couldn’t fight. So, others in the community would have had to look after him; I think maybe he was a priest or shaman, as you suggested Wolf, he certainly had gifts that meant he was cared for, not left to die. Nature had already marked him out as different. That’s why I don’t think he was killed in a war between tribes. I don’t think he would have been fighting, for a start. It’s clearly a different death – a sacrifice, and when you look at all these old myths of throats being cut or beheading to release the powers of fertility, or the waters of rebirth, or the milk or mead of immortality… I think that explains the neck wound.’
‘His burial here creates the land, forms it; makes it fertile;’ Wolf said; ‘so you can see why I don’t want him stuck in a museum, divorced from the land he gave his life for.’
The chamber became suddenly cool and Con gazed about him at the drystone walls; the low ceiling formed from an immense capstone – feeling, for the first time, claustrophobic. Here, where he sat, the corpses of the dead had once been piled; reeking, flyblown, or perhaps browned sinewy limbs, desiccated from exposure elsewhere; and here, not in fiction or legend, but in truth, a poor man, lame and riddled with pain all his life, always an outsider, perhaps considered an oddity, a freak, perhaps feared, had been finally laid to rest, his throat gashed open by the killing arrow that had sailed so swiftly as to embed itself in his spine; he imagined the spill of crimson over the white curls of his chest, and the silent last gasps of his blood-flecked lips. For the first time he felt no sense of connection with those buried here – they had always been like himself, just older, in different clothes, like a costume drama… but now they seemed wholly alien; inhabiting world too far away to bridge, both temporally and culturally – like the ash-covered Saddhus he’d seen pictures of on the banks of the Ganges, with matted dreadlocks, sitting amongst the dead…
‘He’s the first man, the great ancestor;’ Wolf said, ‘the Old One; Eldest; stag and blackbird’s brother. His body is the land; the land is his body. And we are formed from him, too, in turn – from the flow of his magical words… released by the arrow-wound.’
In the beginning, thought Con, was the Word…
Silence followed as each thought over what had been spoken of, the ancient sacrifice that had been enacted on this very spot; the pent-up forces of creation released by such a violent act, making him, Old Man, holy, a martyr, even…
The silence was ended by a soft, rhythmic pulse as Wolf began to drum again…
Con closed his eyes and lay back against the cool sarsen stone that formed the back of the chamber; part of him excited, part of him hoping no visitors would walk in and see him like this.
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Wolf Jones began to sing in a deep voice:
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through blood and bone
And pelt and claw
Come and follow me
down to the ancient tree
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through ice and fire
And Thunders roar
Sons leave your childhood lands
Take your ash spears in your hands
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through red cap, white spot
Vision’s Door
Wolf-skin warrior
Stag and blackbird’s brother
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through voices of those
Who have gone before
Spirits of the land
Dance with the warrior-band
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Darkness; for a long time; Con shifted to get more comfortable… but the drumming had begun to lull him, and spaces began to lengthen between his thoughts…
Had he slept? Time seemed to have passed, but he remained still, the drum reverberating around the chamber, almost sickening in its intensity, causing a palpitation deep within his chest.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum
Seconds? Ages? past.
He opened his eyes, or at least his inner eyes, and saw willow trees arched above him, but billowing and morphing strangely, and he suddenly realised he was watching them through water…it’s only my imagination, he thought…
Beside the stream, above him, seen through the ripples, a wolf was pacing back and forth, with Wolf Jones’ eyes…
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Con was himself crouched beside the stream; looking down at his reflection – at a face red with blood or some kind of paint, and over his own eyes the amber eyes of the wolf, whose skin he wore over his shoulders, and whose boneless front limbs were tied in front of his breastbone. His hair long and curled hung from his brow and touched the water… and those eyes, predator’s eyes… his own… and something behind the eyes began to speak – a voice, again his own, but also Wolf’s; and there was Wolf Jones sat opposite against a great fir-tree, the skull and antlers of a stag on the trunk above his head…
‘If you do not make something of your life, little wolf…’
Then a long pause.
‘…I will take it from you…’
And then, he seemed to see, from afar, crouched in a dark cave formed from grey sarsen stones, set on the rise above the stream, a crooked man, grey bearded, and bent to one side; eyes glinting from a small fire over which sat a clay vessel, its contents frothing and boiling; and from his throat a golden light pouring down, like sunlight…on his brow antlers, no, the curled horns of a ram, no – just matted hair…
…From the beginning, Old Man is singing…
And he was grinning, strong white teeth under the matted hair, under antlers; face painted with red-earth, two meanders, serpents or rivers, down each cheek from temple to jaw; darkening as the stone above him seemed to lower, to crush down on him – yet still he smiled; under stone; under hill…
And the feeling of guilt welling up, repressed, of joy repressed threatening to burst… yet imprisoned within him; static, dead with inertia… and then a whistle and twang and the feeling of the flint blade of the arrow piercing his throat and lodging in his vertebrae, and the light bursting out of his wound, jolting him awake, his heart hammering, as fast as the drum…
Dub-dub-dub-dub dub dub dub
The tempo of the drum had changed and somewhere miles distant, a voice from some other time, Wolf Jones’s voice, was telling him to come back, to return.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
How long had they sat like this? His body was stiff as if he’d slept for a long time… minutes? Hours? Wolf’s voice came again, closer this time, telling him to slowly stretch and to open his eyes when ready and to sit up slowly…
Con felt an odd sense of elation; and the need to tell Wolf what he had seen, but Wolf held up his hand.
‘What you saw is between you and Spirit’ he said. ‘Remember what you saw. It came to you from the ancestors, from Old Man who is within each of us – and behind him the animal powers all the way back to the first fish in the first oceans…’
Con sat in silence. Of course, it’s all imagination, he thought to himself; yet the stark warning remained in his mind; if you don’t make something of your life, I will take it from you; and the sense of discomfort in his throat, sharp, deep, yet offering the painful promise of release of feelings long imprisoned...
Conall Astor was walking bare footed along the sun-baked dirt path that lead from the car park to the west of the village southwards to Silbury hill and on to the rise on which West Kennet longbarrow crouched.
The path was well trodden and wide, and he watched carefully to avoid stepping on the trails of ants that crossed it at various points; but he was also, after Shen’s story of the adder, on the lookout for snakes. The path followed the curve of the river, bordered by reeds and willows, under which Con sheltered every few minutes when the burning sun got too much.
Just north of Silbury Hill a small bridge traversed the stream and Conall took this, and followed the path as it curved about the hill until he reached the small car-park beside the Bath road that served the viewing platform for the hill. Here, just a few hundred yards across the road, lay the newly made crop circle; Conall debated for a few moments whether to look more closely at it but decided not to, already fearing he may have missed his appointment with Wolf.
From here he walked up the brow of the hill where the road rose beside it, and crossed it, taking the path towards the Swallowhead spring.
He sat for a moment on the sarsen stones that forded the spring to cool his dusty hot feet in the cold water. Further towards the source of the spring a family was sitting having a picnic, and he said hello as he passed, taking the path that cut diagonally across from West Kennet – the very path he had seen the large dog or cat taking that morning. He stopped and looked across the valley towards Waden hill at the spot where he had been sitting when he had seen the creature. It looked so far away. The hard-baked earth was free of any tracks that might have helped him discern if this creature had been flesh and blood rather than some spirit conjured from this sacred earth. He shivered, suddenly eyeing the trees down the slope to his left, wondering if some cool, dismissive canine eye was watching him. Then, like a punch in the gut he remembered what Tolkien in his letter had written – river of the bright dog…He stepped up his pace and headed for the barrow.
Having reached the summit of the hill, the breathless Con sat astride the back of this immense ancient tomb for a moment, lying flat on the grass and looking skywards to where the skylarks dipped and hovered; one of his arms cushioned his head like a pillow, while the other lay across his heaving chest, in his hand the owl’s feather which he had just removed from his hat-band. It was here that Shen had given him this gift all those many months ago.
Just twenty-four hours earlier he had strode back from the pub, adamant that his lightened mood had had nothing to do with the reappearance of this girl in his life; but now, letting the feather tickle the side of his face he saw that this had been a laughably naïve conclusion; clearly she hadn’t changed, and when he had left her a year ago he knew he was falling heavily for her. He had changed, though; and that wasn’t her fault – it was a fault of timing and circumstance.
He sat up and put the feather from him; but then turned and picked it up again, holding it to his chest, suddenly feeling as if he might cry out, remembering her beside him on the barrow, her warm, sonorous voice telling him he could kiss her if he wanted… and now she was with another, and it was all too late; and even if she were free, how could he ever allow himself to be happy with her after what had happened, knowing it was because of her he had stayed here, a few hundred miles too distant to do what Hayden had for Shen – too far to save that precious life.
He turned his head and looked towards the massive entrance stones of the barrow, following the line of sight to the Sanctuary on the brow of the hill where he had been this time yesterday; the crop circle in the field between the two points was harder to see from this lower angle, just elipses of shadow in the corn. I can’t believe these are done with a rope and a plank of wood; he thought, the artists needed computer-precision to get such results; night-vision goggles, laptops, GPS devices - no doubt all were needed.
He thought of the group in the pub the night before: Croppies, Wolf had called them; it seemed hard to equate those boozed-up techno-hippies with this kind of art. But maybe that was the point; they relished their anonymity. It seemed strange, though – most young men would want to boast about what they had done; he thought about what he’d read concerning the Ancient Greek mysteries of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, how the life-changing ‘secret’ revealed to the thousands of celebrants over the many centuries it had been celebrated had never been revealed – never – no single participant willing to spill the beans, not for fame nor fortune. Perhaps croppies were made of the same stuff – bearers of an awe-induced silence because of the nature of their work… mouthpieces for Gaia. No, he smiled. Mouthpieces for Demeter, the barley-goddess, known to the Romans as Ceres, goddess of the crops, from whom the word cereal was derived. And cerveza, he thought, once again wishing he’d not drunk as much over lunch. Perhaps, he continued musing, the croppies rejected the fame of modern artists because they rejected the ego, the ‘I’ that separated them from nature – the crop circles’ designs seemed to speak in the language of mathematics, in Pythagorean numbers, of cosmic harmony – they were a symbolic of song of the summer earth, an echo of Eden, calling us back… that’s if they were man-made, and not some strange of exudation of mathematics into nature, or the work of elves or aliens…
‘I saw a fairy once’… Melissa’s sing-song voice.
He smiled at the memory. Of course, she would have...
Just then he felt a strange hollow quiver rising from the mound – then another; the distant beat of a drum – Wolf’s drum, he reasoned, and so he stood and walked to the stones that flanked the entrance of the tomb.
The portal stones that fronted the entrance were huge, and Con entered the tomb by walking behind the largest of them, whereon he was presented with a dark chamber leading straight into the mound. This inner chamber was made of other great sarsen stones, and here, on each side of the passageway, stood smaller chambers, two each side and one at the end, the latter illuminated by a modern glass roof-light – five separate chambers in which the bones of the dead had once been placed – and it was in the chamber to the immediate right of the passage that Wolf Jones sat on a deerskin hide, eyes closed, drumming.
From the opposite chamber, to the left of the passage, came a voice. It was Ananda Coombe from the Red Lion; she smiled in greeting. Con went and sat beside her, exchanging pleasantries in a hushed tone as Wolf continued to drum, with short, deep guttural sounds coming now and again from his throat – and the odd snatch of words:
Hen wyr y gwlad! Dewch!
The earth beneath Con’s hands was cold and dusty, with a coolness that made it feel damp; it was tight in the chamber, and he pressed his back against the stone that formed its back to give Ananda some space; her light hair was tied back in a ponytail and above her round glasses, between her brows, was the faded remnants of three white horizontal lines with a red dot at their centre; a slight hint of sandalwood masked some of the damp staleness exuded by the stones.
Presently the drumming stopped, and Con found himself fixed by cool predator eyes that suddenly creased with mischief.
‘Welcome to my humble abode’ Wolf grinned, waving a hand. ‘You’ve met the lovely Sat Chit Ananada…’
‘She’s served me a fair few pints since I’ve been here.’ Con blushed.
‘Indeed – she’s the amṛta-bearing Mohini… initiatrix into the wisdom of the East…’ he smiled.
Ananda raised her eyes to the sky, despairing. ‘He’s so full of shit, ignore him.’ she said to Con, with a wink.
‘It’s good you’re here, Con. I’m drumming to Old Man.’
Con must have looked blank as Wolf continued, with hardly a pause.
‘This chamber – this is where the bones of the old man were found – the man whose bones are being relocated to the museum tomorrow. They should be
here.’
Wolf explained how the bones had been removed some forty years ago, after Stuart Piggott had excavated the longbarrow in the 60’s, had found the previously unknown side chambers hidden within the drystone walls between the facing stones and the previously excavated back chamber.
‘They’d been filled with stone – literally packed solid with material,’ Wolf explained, ‘so it was just assumed there was nothing there – just wall.
‘It’s usually assumed that newcomers that did this – they wanted this place shut. It had been here for for a thousand years – the bones of the dead were housed here and then removed for ceremonies in the circle or up on Windmill Hill - but the Bronze Age newcomers sealed it up and put those massive sarsen stones out the front, blocking the tomb, ending the communication between the living and the dead.’
‘Like locking the doors of a church?’ Con mused.
‘Or to stop things getting out – the ancestral spirits of the people they had overrun. You don’t want mardy ancestors on your hands, mate…For generations their nameless bones were put here – until the last burial. You see Old Man was buried whole – I think he was the last of his tribe – the last shaman of the stone-wielding people. He was killed and placed here and then the tomb was filled.’
He stopped and rolled himself a cigarette.
‘Killed?’.
‘It’s one theory; the newcomers didn’t arrive peacefully – Old Man was killed before he was put here – an arrowhead was found buried in his neck bones – he’d been shot in the throat. And in the chamber over there, three females – a maiden, a mother and a crone; priestesses of the old religion, perhaps; no arrowheads there – I think they were probably drowned or strangled.’
Con blanched at the word drowned…
Ananda shifted and picked up a handful of dust.
‘Of course, as Wolf knows, I don’t wholly agree…’ she said. ‘I think we could look further than just the defeat of an old shaman by incoming metalworkers. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of interpreting a mythical, ritual occurrence as history...’
Wolf slapped his own wrist in mock admonishment; ‘Ananda has a habit of trying to fit our prehistory into a Hindu framework,’ Wolf explained ‘Don’t you my dear?!’
Ananda shrugged. ‘I started off as a Hindu but then discovered druidism… and I’ve been trying to unite the two ever since. The Celtic and Hindu world were parts, albeit separated geographically, of the same cultural complex, the Indo-European language group… and I see no reason why both didn’t spring from a single root culture, a Neolithic predecessor - so why not use Eastern parallels to illuminate western? I run a class at the Hindu temple in Swindon on the subject…’
‘Tell him about the posset of milk.’ Wolf prompted.
‘Another time… I doubt he’s interested…’ she said, eyeing Con for signs of boredom.
‘No, please…’ Con prompted.
‘Have you heard the folk tradition that Silbury was raised in the time it took a posset of milk to boil?’
Con nodded. ‘I read it somewhere, yep.’
‘There’s a Hindu rite known as the pravargya rite, celebrated at dawn in which an earthenware pot filled with milk is heated over a fire, when then boils over it is supposed, through a kind of sympathetic magic, to bring about the dawn and sunrise. The milk, you see, is associated with the cow or cows of dawn in Hinduism, or a beautiful goddess named Uṣas; and the rite causes the cow or Uṣas to be released from her place of hiding or imprisonment under the horizon, or in the celestial river Rasā …the boiling milk pushes off the lid of the pot, which is supposed to echo Indra destroying the monster Vṛtra ‘the coverer’, who has previously stolen the dawn.’
‘We tried it this spring equinox. Fookin’ disaster’ Wolf cut in, ‘sat atop Silbury in the dark and rain; I’m crouched down trying to keep the wind from blowing out the fire, and when it did light the milk took about half hour to boil and then boiled over and put out the fire.’
‘Maybe next year’ Con said; Wolf and Ananda looked at each other briefly, something passing between them that Con missed.
‘So you think the Silbury folktale is a memory of a rite observed here that was similar to the Hindu one?’ he asked.
Ananda nodded.
‘A midwinter or spring rite, designed to release the sun imprisoned over winter.’ She said.
‘Like the Japanese Amaterasu myth?’ Con said.
Ananda lifted a brow in surprise, ‘indeed…’
‘Christ, here we go… thought this might happen… ‘, Wolf laughed… ‘welcome to University Challenge…and on our left we have Professor Astor, and on our right Guru Ananda Coombe’
Con laughed. ‘I researched a ton of midwinter solar myths when I was doing the PhD – trying to find a rite that might fit Stonehenge… the Amaterasu myth has the sun-goddess hiding in a cave and tricked out by a dancing goddess who exposes herself, making the other gods laugh – so Amaterasu peeks out to see what they’re laughing at and thereby the sun is released. That myth, as I recall, was probably derived from a Hindu original taken to Japan along with Buddhism.’ Ananda was nodding, so he continued; ‘But it misses the cave as serpent symbolism that you find in the Hindu and Indo-European myths… the cows stolen by the serpent which are then rescued by the hero – be that Indra or whoever, the forerunner of the whole dragon-slaying mythos.’
Ananda was still nodding. ‘Where did you find this one, Wolf? Someone who knows his eastern myth!’ she laughed.
‘The serpent, Vrtra – the concealer, the coverer…’ she continued, ‘he represents the static condition that prevents new growth - be that night, or winter… anything that conceals or dims the sun, fertility, or anything creative. He’s not evil, per se, he represents inertia…holding up the circle of creation.’ Ananda remarked, her voice echoing within the chamber… just like a stone cave, Con thought.
‘And he’s beheaded, as I recall, to release what he has captured?’ Con asked.
‘Beheaded, dismembered… or his throat simply cut, as often he has swallowed the sun, or cows, or Uṣas, or soma…the magical drink…and the wounding releases a stream of magic words that can grant immortality.’
‘And the man buried here…how does he fit into this?’
‘I think might have been enacting a similar kind of rite – the release of soma, or the sun, from the throat – so not necessarily the victim of racial or cultural attack…’ she said pointedly, looking at Wolf, who grinned in return.
‘So, he was the serpent Vritra, and this is his cave?’ Con asked, peering about him.
Ananda paused; ‘It’s not that simple…’ she began; ‘as I said, the serpent represents stasis, inertia; a state that needs to be ended, usually through violence; he's the dragon who hoards gold or virgins but has no use for either… hence the need of a hero to come and rescue what is imprisoned…’
Con thought of the letter of Tolkien’s he’d read earlier after leaving Shen’s:
‘What struck me was the font – and the cup in the hands of the headless figure; the cup I had Bilbo steal from Smaug; I, of course, got it from Beowulf… but it’s a common motif – the stealing of the vessel of immortality, the Holy Grail… the mead of knowledge…from the dragon…
‘– but it is a version of a much bigger theme,’ Ananda continued; ‘namely, the cosmogony, the creation. Now, there’s plenty of Celtic legends that have a hero or a saint being decapitated, and springs or wells appearing where the head falls – like St Winifred - in these cases the beheaded figures aren’t evil, as theirs is usually a willing sacrifice.’
Con was thinking deeply, drinking in what Ananda was saying; twisting it around in his mind in an attempt to understand why this man had been slain over five millennia earlier.
‘You think he was killed in a re-enactment of a creation myth?’
‘In some Hindu myths the universe comes about through the dismemberment of the primal man, Purusa; the force of creation is latent within him and he needs to be broken apart for it to be released; it’s the same image as the release of the sun from the serpent, only he’s not hoarding it negatively; he’s akin to the vegetation god who must be dismembered and planted so that he can be reborn.
Con thought of John Barleycorn, the sacrificed man, giving his lifeblood for the good of the people…snippets of the song he had heard at the pub with Shen the day before flashed through his mind:
They took a plough and plough'd him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.
They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell'd him full sore;
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn'd him o'er and o'er.
And they hae taen his very heart's blood,
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
‘Basically…’ Ananda explained, ‘the cosmos is seen as stemming from an anthropomorphic being, be it the Purusa, the Cosmic man, of the Rigveda – or the Iranian Gayōmart, he holds the potential creation within him, locked away, so he is dismembered…and from him the world is formed.’
‘Like the giant Ymir in Norse mythology,’ Wolf chipped in, ‘who becomes the world –
From Ymir's flesh the earth was formed,
and from his bones the hills,
the heaven from the skull of that ice-cold giant,
and from his blood the sea…’
‘Yes, it’s the same image,’ Ananda agreed, ‘he literally becomes the earth, the sky – he is creation itself, formed through a world-creating sacrifice. Like the corn he is buried and new life sprouts from him. It’s an image that probably stems from planting myths, I would think…death precedes life.’ she mused.
Con creased his brow in confusion.
‘And this man buried here…’
‘…died in a re-enactment of that first creation;’ she re-iterated, ‘he’s what they call a foundation sacrifice; he’s the original first man, the primal ancestor – the sacrificed god – and his wound in the throat, opening him up at the neck, releasing the forces of creation....’
‘And why him? Why was he special?’
She answered:
‘He was already marked as special; he was lame, disabled by spina bifida, and he had a supernumerary toe… yet he’d lived until old age; he couldn’t hunt, or farm, certainly couldn’t fight. So, others in the community would have had to look after him; I think maybe he was a priest or shaman, as you suggested Wolf, he certainly had gifts that meant he was cared for, not left to die. Nature had already marked him out as different. That’s why I don’t think he was killed in a war between tribes. I don’t think he would have been fighting, for a start. It’s clearly a different death – a sacrifice, and when you look at all these old myths of throats being cut or beheading to release the powers of fertility, or the waters of rebirth, or the milk or mead of immortality… I think that explains the neck wound.’
‘His burial here creates the land, forms it; makes it fertile;’ Wolf said; ‘so you can see why I don’t want him stuck in a museum, divorced from the land he gave his life for.’
The chamber became suddenly cool and Con gazed about him at the drystone walls; the low ceiling formed from an immense capstone – feeling, for the first time, claustrophobic. Here, where he sat, the corpses of the dead had once been piled; reeking, flyblown, or perhaps browned sinewy limbs, desiccated from exposure elsewhere; and here, not in fiction or legend, but in truth, a poor man, lame and riddled with pain all his life, always an outsider, perhaps considered an oddity, a freak, perhaps feared, had been finally laid to rest, his throat gashed open by the killing arrow that had sailed so swiftly as to embed itself in his spine; he imagined the spill of crimson over the white curls of his chest, and the silent last gasps of his blood-flecked lips. For the first time he felt no sense of connection with those buried here – they had always been like himself, just older, in different clothes, like a costume drama… but now they seemed wholly alien; inhabiting world too far away to bridge, both temporally and culturally – like the ash-covered Saddhus he’d seen pictures of on the banks of the Ganges, with matted dreadlocks, sitting amongst the dead…
‘He’s the first man, the great ancestor;’ Wolf said, ‘the Old One; Eldest; stag and blackbird’s brother. His body is the land; the land is his body. And we are formed from him, too, in turn – from the flow of his magical words… released by the arrow-wound.’
In the beginning, thought Con, was the Word…
Silence followed as each thought over what had been spoken of, the ancient sacrifice that had been enacted on this very spot; the pent-up forces of creation released by such a violent act, making him, Old Man, holy, a martyr, even…
The silence was ended by a soft, rhythmic pulse as Wolf began to drum again…
Con closed his eyes and lay back against the cool sarsen stone that formed the back of the chamber; part of him excited, part of him hoping no visitors would walk in and see him like this.
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Wolf Jones began to sing in a deep voice:
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through blood and bone
And pelt and claw
Come and follow me
down to the ancient tree
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through ice and fire
And Thunders roar
Sons leave your childhood lands
Take your ash spears in your hands
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through red cap, white spot
Vision’s Door
Wolf-skin warrior
Stag and blackbird’s brother
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through voices of those
Who have gone before
Spirits of the land
Dance with the warrior-band
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Darkness; for a long time; Con shifted to get more comfortable… but the drumming had begun to lull him, and spaces began to lengthen between his thoughts…
Had he slept? Time seemed to have passed, but he remained still, the drum reverberating around the chamber, almost sickening in its intensity, causing a palpitation deep within his chest.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum
Seconds? Ages? past.
He opened his eyes, or at least his inner eyes, and saw willow trees arched above him, but billowing and morphing strangely, and he suddenly realised he was watching them through water…it’s only my imagination, he thought…
Beside the stream, above him, seen through the ripples, a wolf was pacing back and forth, with Wolf Jones’ eyes…
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Con was himself crouched beside the stream; looking down at his reflection – at a face red with blood or some kind of paint, and over his own eyes the amber eyes of the wolf, whose skin he wore over his shoulders, and whose boneless front limbs were tied in front of his breastbone. His hair long and curled hung from his brow and touched the water… and those eyes, predator’s eyes… his own… and something behind the eyes began to speak – a voice, again his own, but also Wolf’s; and there was Wolf Jones sat opposite against a great fir-tree, the skull and antlers of a stag on the trunk above his head…
‘If you do not make something of your life, little wolf…’
Then a long pause.
‘…I will take it from you…’
And then, he seemed to see, from afar, crouched in a dark cave formed from grey sarsen stones, set on the rise above the stream, a crooked man, grey bearded, and bent to one side; eyes glinting from a small fire over which sat a clay vessel, its contents frothing and boiling; and from his throat a golden light pouring down, like sunlight…on his brow antlers, no, the curled horns of a ram, no – just matted hair…
…From the beginning, Old Man is singing…
And he was grinning, strong white teeth under the matted hair, under antlers; face painted with red-earth, two meanders, serpents or rivers, down each cheek from temple to jaw; darkening as the stone above him seemed to lower, to crush down on him – yet still he smiled; under stone; under hill…
And the feeling of guilt welling up, repressed, of joy repressed threatening to burst… yet imprisoned within him; static, dead with inertia… and then a whistle and twang and the feeling of the flint blade of the arrow piercing his throat and lodging in his vertebrae, and the light bursting out of his wound, jolting him awake, his heart hammering, as fast as the drum…
Dub-dub-dub-dub dub dub dub
The tempo of the drum had changed and somewhere miles distant, a voice from some other time, Wolf Jones’s voice, was telling him to come back, to return.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
How long had they sat like this? His body was stiff as if he’d slept for a long time… minutes? Hours? Wolf’s voice came again, closer this time, telling him to slowly stretch and to open his eyes when ready and to sit up slowly…
Con felt an odd sense of elation; and the need to tell Wolf what he had seen, but Wolf held up his hand.
‘What you saw is between you and Spirit’ he said. ‘Remember what you saw. It came to you from the ancestors, from Old Man who is within each of us – and behind him the animal powers all the way back to the first fish in the first oceans…’
Con sat in silence. Of course, it’s all imagination, he thought to himself; yet the stark warning remained in his mind; if you don’t make something of your life, I will take it from you; and the sense of discomfort in his throat, sharp, deep, yet offering the painful promise of release of feelings long imprisoned...