Chapter 37 The Manor
The bells of the nearby church chimed for eight o’clock at the exact moment Lewis rang the bell on the large wooden door of the Manor.
‘Impeccable timing, gentlemen’ Lewis beamed. There was a noise in the hallway the door was opened by a tall, thin man in a dark suit.
They were beckoned into the hall, but as the night had a slight chill they kept their jackets on and were lead into the library on the side of the house overlooking the gardens. The library was spacious, and new – dating from the start of the century, unlike the rest of the house which was Tudor.
Keiller had only been in the house just over a year but already the place was stacked with his belongings. The library was full to overflowing with leather-bound volumes, and here and there small pieces of interest lay on cupboards and tables: small Egyptian artefacts, flints, a prehistoric bronze axe.
Keiller had been sitting in a leather wing backed chair beside the fireplace, looking out over the garden where the moon was grazing the top of the fir-tree hedge. As his guests entered he turned and rose with a genuine smile, putting down the tumbler of whiskey he was holding and approaching each man with a hand-shake.
‘So good of you to come; one tire’s a little of the same company – archaeologists are a rather single minded lot and the conversation over dinner can be a little… predictable.’ He smoothed back his short grey-flecked hair and asked if the friends would like a sherry, or something stronger?
The butler returned with three glasses of whiskey.
‘Thank you Frazer’ he said. Frazer nodded and left.
‘While we’re waiting for our other guests I’ll show you the house,’ Keiller said. He gestured for them to precede him into a room leading off the library: a room stocked with utilitarian cabinets looking almost medical in their spartan nature; angled wooden worktops were laid over some, and a large table at the centre also in the same dark wood.
‘The map room’ Keiller declared, walking over to a half-finished map on the drawing board closest to the window. He beckoned the men over.
‘Here you can see the north-west sector; here’s the trees we have cleared so far… and if you look here’ he lifted the map to expose another beneath full of other markings, ‘you’ll see what a job we’ve had to clear the site of trees. We started in early March so you see what you’ve been seeing is very much the tail end of the clean-up process.
‘This stone here is the one we’re raising at the moment – it was only buried under a couple of feet of soil; but you can see from the space here that we’ve not even begun to survey the rest of this sector yet. The lifting of this stone was very much a showpiece for both press and our eminent guest Sir Flinders Petrie.’
Keiller scowled momentarily and was about to go on but Lewis interrupted him.
‘How long is it going to take you to finish the circle?’ he asked.
‘Twelve years we think – that’s what we have budgeted for anyway. This season we’ll be dealing just with this sector – but there is so much more to do, and I don’t just mean digging and reconstruction; there’s cataloguing and publishing the finds; we have, of course, to find a permanent location for the museum...’
Just then the doorbell rang.
‘Ah, good… more guests – shall we?’ Keiller said, gesturing out of the map room.
They soon found themselves once more in the library; Tom and Violet Penry-Evans stood sipping their sherry looking over Keiller’s vast collection of books. Tolkien was looking with curiosity at a reconstructed clay vessel with a narrow waist and a wide mouth, like a small vase, but incised with regular bars of pattern.
‘Ah. Yes, this was found beside one of the stones in the avenue. It’s what we call a beaker, probably dates to 2000 BC. The beaker culture were the people who brought in metalwork from the continent: bronze wielding invaders with long skulls, riding horses, we think.’
Tolkien held the cup carefully. Had one of his horse lords from under the round mounds by the sanctuary once drunk from such a cup?
‘Before this,’ Keiller was saying ‘we find this type of pottery on site – grimston-lyles we call it, heavier, cruder perhaps, but with lozenge and spiral patterns – most entrancing…’ but was interrupted as the doorbell rang again. Frazer left his standing position at the side of the door and disappeared out of sight.
‘Who else is invited, I wonder?’ Barfield whispered to Tolkien. It was with a mixture of pleasant surprise and worry that the new guests were seen to enter.
First came the young archaeologist Piggott, smiling widely. Behind him, first revealed by a gruff voice in the hallway, was Petrie and with him the woman who had been at his side earlier that day at the stones.
‘Full house! Splendid!’ laughed Keiller. ‘Dinner will begin at half past eight.’ Tolkien glanced at his pocket watch: quarter past.
Until dinner was called Keiller worked the room, spending the majority of the time showing his Egyptian antiques to Petrie and his companion, who had been introduced as Margaret Murray.
‘My word,’ Lewis had said to Tolkien. ‘That’s THE Margaret Murray; an Egyptologist of some repute, recently retired, I believe from the University of London – but she wrote a book on witchcraft which I read and must say found rather hard to swallow.’
Tolkien glanced over at her; she had a long, kind face, her heavy eyelids and downward sloping eyebrows made her look sympathetic. She certainly seemed to be having a positive effect on the usually dour Petrie, who was laughing, his beard wagging.
Lewis chuckled, turning conspiratorially towards his two fellows.
‘This is marvellous; we have a pan-worshipping host, a guest who writes about witches and another who is an occultist who believes she once escaped from Atlantis. I foresee stormy waters ahead before the soup course is finished.’
***
Lewis was wrong; the cream of mushroom soup had been ladled from the terrine, eaten and the plates removed without so much a fractious word being spoken by any of the guests. But that was about to change.
The three friends had grown used to fine dining at Oxford, though Barfield found it more nostalgic, enjoying it far less often than he had; only Tom and Violet Penry-Evans seemed awkward. They had been placed beside each other facing the window of the large Georgian-style dining room, opposite Petrie, Miss Murray and Barfield; Tolkien sat beside Violet, opposite Barfield, while at the ends of the table sat Lewis, between Tolkien and Barfield, and Keiller and Piggot, rather tightly packed between Tom Penry-Evans and Flinders Petrie.
Frazer stood near the door, beside a polished wooden cabinet bearing a selection of bottles, walking to the table to refill the guests’ wineglasses when necessary.
They had talked so far about the excavation and of the state of British prehistory in general. Tolkien had eaten in silence, red faced when Petrie had begun again to mention the superiority of certain races of men, and the paucity of North-west European civilization compared with, say, Egypt. He had tried to steer the conversation away from such subjects and towards myth, wishing to question the assembled experts on certain aspects of creation myths.
‘It’s the symbolism of twins which fascinates me,’ Tolkien said, ‘in relation to creation legends. You mentioned the sky goddess Nut or Hathor yesterday, Sir, and I seem to recall from my reading that this goddess is a twin?’
‘Indeed, she is the sister of the earth-god Geb, who is serpent-headed, and depicted as falling from her embrace; he becomes the earth and she the sky.’
‘This particular Creation myth,’ Murray added; ‘the Heliopolitan myth, has a number of brother/sister pairings; each generation arises from the former, like a flower opening, having first risen from Atum.’
‘It’s just I was thinking of the symbolism of the creation in other Near Eastern myths, such as the separation of Apsu and Tiamat by the sun-god Marduk – the imagery seems linked.’ Tolkien explained.
Petrie leaned forward, slowly nodding – ‘A staple image from the ancient world, and no stranger to our own modern ears: “And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” Genesis 1:7.’
Lewis eyed Tolkien, wondering what exactly lay behind his questions, but Tolkien gave nothing away.
‘Does one find many such correspondences between Biblical and Egyptian myth?’ Tolkien asked; ‘…such as the Flood?’.
Petrie considered while sipping his wine.
‘The Nile flood, of course, dominates Egyptian tradition, but that is strictly seasonal. As for a sea-flood, the only reference I am aware of, and one cannot escape the possibility of higher, Classical influence, is the building texts at Edfu… These texts purport to tell the story of the Primeval Ones who predated the Egyptians, who inhabited an Island of the Gods, but which was tragically engulfed by the sea forcing the Primeval Ones to come to Egypt bringing their knowledge with them and establishing the original temple, long destroyed and rebuilt, at Edfu.’
‘And Classical influence is likely, because…?’
‘Because of the date of the temple – it is Ptolemaic – Hellenistic – in date, increasing the possibility of influence from, say, Plato’s Timaeus. Had the myth been found elsewhere in Egypt, at an earlier site, we might give more credence to it as an Egyptian myth...’
Tolkien merely nodded, reasoning, silently, that Petrie would never easily have credited such a myth to an aboriginal civilization… of course he’d rather see it as an import from a ‘higher’ cultures…yet his answer had fuelled Tolkien’s thinking – here, too, a flood – but is it history or myth?
Presuming, rightly, given Tolkien’s questions, that the assembled guests would be interested in their work, Petrie and Murray continued to speak at length of the many excavations they had headed in Egypt, such as the labyrinth at Nekada that the Romans had reduced to dust.
‘Such sites get little recognition amongst the public, I am afraid, who are more interested in that second-rate tomb of Tutankhamun and ridiculous ideas of the mummy’s curse than in real archaeology.’
‘So, what do you think of the curse?’ asked Violet.
‘It is pure bunkum. I am surprised you had to ask. You think I’m the sort to give credence to such beliefs?’ he said.
‘Not at all;’ she replied, with a slight smile. ‘But the ancient Egyptians certainly believed in magic.’
‘Many ancient civilizations laboured under the delusion of superstition; it does not mean that we should.’
‘So, you admit your highly advanced Egyptians were superstitious? Does that not make them un-civilized, and if not, how do you tally their belief in magic with their supposedly high level of culture?’ It was clear to all assembled that Mrs Penry-Evans was baiting this bear of a man.
Petrie grimaced. ‘There belief in magic is, one must admit, a hangover from a more primitive time, but that does not negate the splendour and complexity of their art or architecture, for instance.’
‘Well, let us not immediately dismiss their beliefs.’ Violet said. ‘We cannot say for sure whether some human faculties, such as psychic abilities, may have atrophied over time, so their disappearance could be due to other factors than having ‘outgrown’ them in the sense of, say, outgrowing childish behaviour. You merely dismiss them as uncivilized because our modern western civilization, in its narrow-minded hubris, assumes it to be so simply because we no longer possess them; I believe the phrase is ‘sour grapes’. Perhaps an Egyptian curse might be effective today – even more so when acting upon us moderns who lack the appropriate knowledge of psychic self-defence.’
‘Psychic self-defence? My word. What absolute poppycock!’ He glared at Keiller, as if holding him solely responsible for his guests’ ridiculous questions.
Tolkien looked across at Barfield who was clearing his throat; he had the advantage of being on the same side of the table as Petrie and so was able to address his point to Violet Penry-Evans.
‘You have a very good point there Mrs Penry-Evans,’ he began. ‘We have a very narrow view of what our ancestors may or may not have experienced. We read The Iliad and interpret the appearances of the gods as poetic metaphors, or we read of the sightings of fauns or elves and take them as whimsy – but the sources from which we take these instances do not suggest anything but they are reporting actual experiences. Perhaps man’s consciousness was different, closer to that of the animals, perhaps in a semi-mystical state, more open to spiritual realities; a state we might well describe today as magical?’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Tom Penry-Evans in his sing song accent. ‘Exactly right, my man. When my Celtic ancestors talked of the fairy-folk they weren’t some Victorian winged fancy but beings of great power, and sometimes great size; the tales talk of interactions between them and mankind; are we right to dismiss this as fiction just because the majority of us are no longer as able to experience such events?’
Petrie was shaking his head. ‘Of course we are right to dismiss them! Where is the evidence, the one shred of evidence that man once truly knew or experienced magic as a reality? Huh?’ he looked around the table and was just about to grunt as if to say ‘exactly’ when a voice challenged him.
‘Language.’
‘Eh, what was that?’ Petrie asked, cupping his hand to his ear.
‘Language’ Tolkien repeated.
‘Pray, go on…’ Petrie said, smugly.
‘The study of language,’ Tolkien stuttered, aware of all eyes on him, ‘reveals that from the earliest times it dealt not in abstractions but in such a way as to suggest the world it described was thought of as somehow more poetic and mystical than we now credit. It reveals our ancestors conceived of a world where everything was connected – magically connected, but that in time we have become severed from that older state of awareness and find ourselves alone in the world, cut off from nature.’
‘Give me an example. And for god’s sake speak more clearly’
It was Barfield who answered. ‘If I may, Tollers? The Latin word Pneuma: it means both spirit and breath and wind; one can posit a time when the speaker of that word did not have to identify which particular meaning he was referring to, as they were all one and the same; in other words, his world was connected, mystical – the very breath in his body was the spirit that animated him; the wind was the breath of God. Or the word Cereal which contains the name Ceres, harking back to a time when the wheat itself was seen as the body of a god, orient and immortal’ he winked at Tolkien.
Petrie was shaking his head again. ‘Language proves nothing; just because old words had several meanings does not prove magic ever existed – or that man ever perceived the universe as different as we see it today.’
‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken. It does exactly that. How we perceive the world is directly based on our language,’ Barfield continued.
‘There is a world of difference between, say, ‘a tree’ and ‘a dryad’: one seems to be a label, dismissive, the other gives soul to the object, and who is to say that is wrong? Just the use of that word adds an extra dimension, and who are we to say it is not a true perception? Its reductionist to say we give it a soul by using such words – surely, we take away its soul when we fail to use the word.
‘And as our language today is fragmented, so is our view of the world. This is why we need to use metaphor to express spiritual or mystical concepts – we’re having to use it to reconstruct what was once inherent in the first words uttered by mankind, but which are now corrupt, fallen. The Egyptian mind with its hieroglyphic writing suggests a very different mind-set and worldview than ours – not just an interpretation of the world, mind you, but an experience of it! Coleridge talks of imagination as the basis of perception; for it is imagination – the image-creating faculty – that defines what we see. The Ancient Egyptians literally saw a different world from you or I. Theirs was a world of dryads, not trees, where the growing corn was Osiris and the flooding of the Nile a divine, rather than a physical, event.’
Petrie had suffered this paean to words as nobly as such a man could; hands folded in front of him, waiting patiently for a chance to brush aside the folly being spoken.
‘My dear sir, you are, I recall from our introductions, a solicitor, no? And we two…’ he gestured towards himself and Margaret Murray, ‘are amongst the most eminent Egyptologists in the world today. I rather think we may know a little more about the Egyptians than you.’ The edge of his mouth curved up in a crisp expression of superiority.
Lewis put down his wine glass.
‘My dear sir, these two…’ he said, gesturing to Tolkien and Barfield ‘are two of the most eminent linguists in the world today. I rather think they know a little bit more about language than you.’
Keiller let out a peal of laughter of the same volume and glee as the one he had let out the day before when the fragment of wood had crowned Piggott, and clapped his hands.
‘Bravo!’ he said. ‘Bravo! Touché, my good man!’ evidently he was beginning to become drunk, and less worried about appeasing the Olympian Petrie.
Tolkien was amused to see the austere butler Frazer also betray a smile, though he was quick to turn to the dresser and begin polishing the silverware in an attempt at distraction.
At that moment the door opened, and two maids entered bearing large serving plates of vegetables and slices of meat.
‘From our own garden.’ Keiller remarked; so this was George’s handiwork, Tolkien thought, helping himself to a modest portion of vegetables.
With usual British politeness the meat was served, and more wine poured. Piggott, drinking water, remarked on the quality of the food, and all agreed with polite noises of approval.
Pleasantries were exchanged between the guests during this lull in combat; but before the main course was ended Violet had turned to Keiller with a smile and asked him about his interest in witchcraft.
‘Ah, how observant of you! Yes, I do have a keen interest as you picked up from my library; I am lucky enough to have in my possession a great number of the best books on the subject – some dating back to as early as 1452; I have, however, of late had to curtail my researches given my absorption in prehistoric archaeology!’
‘I would be most interested in having a better look later, if that wouldn’t be a problem.’ She said.
‘By all means, by all means! And your own interest?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with a napkin
She looked about her. ‘I am very interested in the occult – and in the practice of...magic.’ she looked at Petrie when she said the latter, relishing the word.
‘Splendid!; laughed Keiller, red-faced from the whiskey and wine, and looking directly at Mrs Murray.
Mrs Murray regarded him with a look that betrayed neither contempt or acceptance; she just looked at him then shifted her gaze to Violet Penry-Evans and then back to Keiller. Her drooping eyes sparkled as she spoke.
‘Of course the study of witchcraft does lead on to the study of ancient religions and therefore ancient sites, by consequence, Mr Keiller. The subjects are linked.’ She said.
Keiller shrugged. ‘I suppose that depends whether one believes witchcraft to be a derivative of such ancient cults.’ He said matter of factly.
‘Which I do, as you know.’ Mrs Murray said. He bowed his head in affirmation.
‘I regret to say,’ Keiller said ‘that I have not had the time to study your latest volume with as much rigour as I had hoped.’
‘So you have written on witchcraft?’ Tom Penry-Evans asked.
‘I have.’ She replied. ‘And as Mr Keiller rightly says my theory is that withcraft was part of a pagan fertility cult that persisted into Christian times.’
‘Under the eye of the Church?’ Lewis, from the end of the table opposite Keiller, asked. ‘I find that hard to believe.’ His own glass had been emptied and filled nearly as much as Keiller’s, and the high colour in his cheeks was no longer due to fever.
‘Oh yes; under the eye, and even with the blessing of, the church in some cases.’ She said.
Lewis pulled a face. ‘Pagan elements, yes, I can believe that – look at all the green man images you find in medieval stonemasonry; but a still-practising pagan cult I’m afraid is very unlikely. What would you say, Mrs Penry-Evans?’
Violet thought for a while before answering. ‘I see no reason, like yourself, why elements may have survived; in the case of witchcraft we are looking not at survivals of pagan religion per se but of age old magical practises, some of which might have been passed down for generations without them being thought of as necessarily pagan.’
‘Like the Acerbot…’ Tolkien suggested; ‘it means ‘acre-remedy’, it’s a late Anglo-Saxon charm that calls for a number of prayers and Christian symbols, but the whole process is magical and pagan to the core, a fact that was probably lost on those who enacted it, who would probably have been horrified to think they were taking part in some pagan rite.’ He suddenly chuckled to himself remembering Owen’s description of the quartz stones, the cloch geala, that Mrs Mac Govan-Crow had boiled in the water she had given to Jack to soothe his throat.
‘Are you a pagan, Mrs Penry-Evans?’ Lewis asked.
‘I consider myself a believer in Christ but do not deny the older gods their due.’
Tolkien glanced up at Barfield and raised his brows. Quite how does one balance such beliefs, he wondered to himself. To believe in Christ is, surely, to deny the older gods. Still, I cannot deny the attraction these older gods might have, though by that I mean an aesthetic attraction, a literary one…
He may have been preparing to speak but Mrs Murray had started to address Mrs Penry-Evans.
‘I think it is a mistake to look at witchcraft as a magical tradition; it was religious, through and through – a religion based on the worship of a nature god, like Pan, one whose details can be gleaned by a careful reading of witchcraft trials; again and again we see the coven of 13, the leader of which is no spirit or god but a flesh and blood man – the leader of the coven, whose horns and cloven feet are but ritual costumes of a pagan priest.’
‘A god like Pan?’ Lewis asked.
‘Yes; although to the Celts he was Cernunnos, whom we see depicted on the famous Gundestrup cauldron with the antlers of a deer, stood beside a wolf and a deer, and serpents in his hands.’
‘The master of animals…’ Lewis said.
‘Myrddin Wyllt’ Mrs Penry-Evans agreed, her eyes flicking to the side to meet Tolkien’s.
‘A careful reading indeed, Ms Murray.’ Keiller said. ‘But erroneous. I point you, with all due modesty, to my publication of 1922: ‘The Personnel of Aberdeenshire Witchcraft Covens in the Years 1596-7…’
Lewis, Barfield and Tolkien exchanged surprised glances – Keiller was a dark horse; the man, as George had rightly said, was clearly a scholar.
‘…in which I cover the same sources as your book ‘The Witch cult in Western Europe’ but reach, shall we say, different conclusions; the majority of women accused of witchcraft during that period were solitary individuals – the number 13 is hardly present; and what’s more their accounts of visitations by supernatural beings cannot just be explained away by costumed priests. These are either the visions of madness, that is delusions of a sick mind, or hallucinations, or else fictions foisted upon these poor women, or forced out of them by torture at the hands of their accusers.’
Keiller’s usual boyish animation had become a steely and controlled delivery of opinion.
‘I just do not find a shred of evidence that such a demonic being was worshipped by these poor witches; these people lived in real fear of Hell – to them such worship would be anathema; we can’t make the mistake of foisting our modern concepts of such acts on the past; oh I’ve been known to wind ivy round my head and pour wine at the foot of the statue of Pan in the garden here – but it’s all play; For myself, in this age of reason the god Pan, I would say, represents something natural and capricious in our character – and can be seen as an embodiment of Nature, as something to celebrate not repress; I risk nothing by doing it, as I have little in the way of Faith; but these people would have believed that by so acting they were risking their eternal souls.’
‘Perhaps these are all the old Gods were and are, Mr Keiller.’ Mrs Penry-Evans said; ‘something close to nature within our own souls that we can allow to open up to and celebrate – a celebration of our unity with the living world. But even so, these images are living realities; Pan is very real; be careful lest you wake something you cannot then control.’
Keiller laughed. ‘I appreciate your warning; drunken play is all it is, I have no more sinister intentions. At heart I’m a traditionalist and besides, as I grow older, I find my youthful follies less and less attractive. It is hard when one has enough money to not worry about a single thing; I see myself as saved by archaeology – I have a passion now that I can share, and the money to guarantee beautiful places like Avebury are not lost to future generations. I feel worthy, now, not some rich playboy with no aims or goals.’
Mrs Murray had kept quiet during this exchange, though she had glowered for a while at Keiller’s dismissal of her ideas; he was an amateur, a rich kid with too much time on his hands; if he had studied the subject as she had, spent his life in academia, he might be less reactionary and better able to judge the value of her work. She was not about to lose her temper with a jumped-up son of a marmalade-maker. Places such as Avebury had once thronged with people proclaiming the life and sacrificial death of the divine king; and if she was right, such a ritual had continued to be enacted throughout so-called Christian history under the very nose of organised religion. Madwomen having visions – how did that explain the similarities between the accounts of witches from all over Europe? This had to be a cult that had continued in secret; it couldn’t just be coincidence; what other option was there? Not Mrs Penry-Evans’ theory, that was certain; to argue that that the many similarities in the Witch trials occurred because they were drawing on the same magical realities, the same invisible gods and spirits - Heaven’s above! To even begin to entertain such a thought would be to undo the progress of hundreds of years of critical thinking!
Two events in quick succession brought the meal to a premature close. Petrie had remained relatively silent and glowering after Keiller’s outburst of laughter; but now his plate was cleared he turned to his host and announced he had an early train to catch back to London the next day and called on Frazer to fetch his overcoat. Mrs Murray, evidently, was also about to leave, as she called out after Frazer with the same request. The guests around the table stood to say their goodbyes to the departing pair; but before she left Mrs Murray turned to Mrs Penry-Evans and said that given the latter’s interest in witchcraft she could do no better than to write to her secretary and have copies of her two books on the subject sent to her, gratis.
Mrs Penry-Evans smiled warmly, aware the gesture was meant as much for Keiller’s ears as her own, and was an attempt to help guide these poor misguided individuals back into the truth as she saw it.
‘Thank you, I certainly shall. And by way of thanks I shall send you in return two of my books.’
‘I didn’t realise you were a writer’ Mrs Murray said, surprised.
‘I go under the pen name Dion Fortune; I will send a copy of my novel, The Goat-foot God and a non-fiction work on the Mystical Qabalah.’ She beamed.
Keiller snorted at the look on Mrs Murray’s face as she responded with a polite thank you, her eyes wide in what he took to be some kind of horror.
Barfield’s eyes were no less wide.
‘Deo non Fortuna!’ he said, laughing. ‘Of course!’
‘I shall see you to the door.’ Keiller shouted after the two departing guests.
‘We shall see ourselves out!’ came the gruff reply.
Keiller looked back towards the remaining guests, twisting on the spot as if trying to decide whether out of politeness he should ignore Petrie’s remark and show them out anyway; but evidently something inside him realised the pointlessness of buttering up the old man any further and he stood where he was and laughed heartily.
‘Well I think that went swimmingly, wouldn’t you agree?!’ he said.
And at that very moment Piggott who had been sipping water rather too frequently slid to the floor in a dead faint.
‘Frazer!’ Keiller called out. ‘Smelling salts! Man down!’
‘Is he okay?’ Mrs Penry-Evans asked, walking to where Barfield and Lewis now crouched propping up the prone waxy figure.
‘I’m okay,’ Piggott mumbled; ‘Would someone mind awfully helping me back to the Red Lion? It’s devilishly hot in here.’
The bells of the nearby church chimed for eight o’clock at the exact moment Lewis rang the bell on the large wooden door of the Manor.
‘Impeccable timing, gentlemen’ Lewis beamed. There was a noise in the hallway the door was opened by a tall, thin man in a dark suit.
They were beckoned into the hall, but as the night had a slight chill they kept their jackets on and were lead into the library on the side of the house overlooking the gardens. The library was spacious, and new – dating from the start of the century, unlike the rest of the house which was Tudor.
Keiller had only been in the house just over a year but already the place was stacked with his belongings. The library was full to overflowing with leather-bound volumes, and here and there small pieces of interest lay on cupboards and tables: small Egyptian artefacts, flints, a prehistoric bronze axe.
Keiller had been sitting in a leather wing backed chair beside the fireplace, looking out over the garden where the moon was grazing the top of the fir-tree hedge. As his guests entered he turned and rose with a genuine smile, putting down the tumbler of whiskey he was holding and approaching each man with a hand-shake.
‘So good of you to come; one tire’s a little of the same company – archaeologists are a rather single minded lot and the conversation over dinner can be a little… predictable.’ He smoothed back his short grey-flecked hair and asked if the friends would like a sherry, or something stronger?
The butler returned with three glasses of whiskey.
‘Thank you Frazer’ he said. Frazer nodded and left.
‘While we’re waiting for our other guests I’ll show you the house,’ Keiller said. He gestured for them to precede him into a room leading off the library: a room stocked with utilitarian cabinets looking almost medical in their spartan nature; angled wooden worktops were laid over some, and a large table at the centre also in the same dark wood.
‘The map room’ Keiller declared, walking over to a half-finished map on the drawing board closest to the window. He beckoned the men over.
‘Here you can see the north-west sector; here’s the trees we have cleared so far… and if you look here’ he lifted the map to expose another beneath full of other markings, ‘you’ll see what a job we’ve had to clear the site of trees. We started in early March so you see what you’ve been seeing is very much the tail end of the clean-up process.
‘This stone here is the one we’re raising at the moment – it was only buried under a couple of feet of soil; but you can see from the space here that we’ve not even begun to survey the rest of this sector yet. The lifting of this stone was very much a showpiece for both press and our eminent guest Sir Flinders Petrie.’
Keiller scowled momentarily and was about to go on but Lewis interrupted him.
‘How long is it going to take you to finish the circle?’ he asked.
‘Twelve years we think – that’s what we have budgeted for anyway. This season we’ll be dealing just with this sector – but there is so much more to do, and I don’t just mean digging and reconstruction; there’s cataloguing and publishing the finds; we have, of course, to find a permanent location for the museum...’
Just then the doorbell rang.
‘Ah, good… more guests – shall we?’ Keiller said, gesturing out of the map room.
They soon found themselves once more in the library; Tom and Violet Penry-Evans stood sipping their sherry looking over Keiller’s vast collection of books. Tolkien was looking with curiosity at a reconstructed clay vessel with a narrow waist and a wide mouth, like a small vase, but incised with regular bars of pattern.
‘Ah. Yes, this was found beside one of the stones in the avenue. It’s what we call a beaker, probably dates to 2000 BC. The beaker culture were the people who brought in metalwork from the continent: bronze wielding invaders with long skulls, riding horses, we think.’
Tolkien held the cup carefully. Had one of his horse lords from under the round mounds by the sanctuary once drunk from such a cup?
‘Before this,’ Keiller was saying ‘we find this type of pottery on site – grimston-lyles we call it, heavier, cruder perhaps, but with lozenge and spiral patterns – most entrancing…’ but was interrupted as the doorbell rang again. Frazer left his standing position at the side of the door and disappeared out of sight.
‘Who else is invited, I wonder?’ Barfield whispered to Tolkien. It was with a mixture of pleasant surprise and worry that the new guests were seen to enter.
First came the young archaeologist Piggott, smiling widely. Behind him, first revealed by a gruff voice in the hallway, was Petrie and with him the woman who had been at his side earlier that day at the stones.
‘Full house! Splendid!’ laughed Keiller. ‘Dinner will begin at half past eight.’ Tolkien glanced at his pocket watch: quarter past.
Until dinner was called Keiller worked the room, spending the majority of the time showing his Egyptian antiques to Petrie and his companion, who had been introduced as Margaret Murray.
‘My word,’ Lewis had said to Tolkien. ‘That’s THE Margaret Murray; an Egyptologist of some repute, recently retired, I believe from the University of London – but she wrote a book on witchcraft which I read and must say found rather hard to swallow.’
Tolkien glanced over at her; she had a long, kind face, her heavy eyelids and downward sloping eyebrows made her look sympathetic. She certainly seemed to be having a positive effect on the usually dour Petrie, who was laughing, his beard wagging.
Lewis chuckled, turning conspiratorially towards his two fellows.
‘This is marvellous; we have a pan-worshipping host, a guest who writes about witches and another who is an occultist who believes she once escaped from Atlantis. I foresee stormy waters ahead before the soup course is finished.’
***
Lewis was wrong; the cream of mushroom soup had been ladled from the terrine, eaten and the plates removed without so much a fractious word being spoken by any of the guests. But that was about to change.
The three friends had grown used to fine dining at Oxford, though Barfield found it more nostalgic, enjoying it far less often than he had; only Tom and Violet Penry-Evans seemed awkward. They had been placed beside each other facing the window of the large Georgian-style dining room, opposite Petrie, Miss Murray and Barfield; Tolkien sat beside Violet, opposite Barfield, while at the ends of the table sat Lewis, between Tolkien and Barfield, and Keiller and Piggot, rather tightly packed between Tom Penry-Evans and Flinders Petrie.
Frazer stood near the door, beside a polished wooden cabinet bearing a selection of bottles, walking to the table to refill the guests’ wineglasses when necessary.
They had talked so far about the excavation and of the state of British prehistory in general. Tolkien had eaten in silence, red faced when Petrie had begun again to mention the superiority of certain races of men, and the paucity of North-west European civilization compared with, say, Egypt. He had tried to steer the conversation away from such subjects and towards myth, wishing to question the assembled experts on certain aspects of creation myths.
‘It’s the symbolism of twins which fascinates me,’ Tolkien said, ‘in relation to creation legends. You mentioned the sky goddess Nut or Hathor yesterday, Sir, and I seem to recall from my reading that this goddess is a twin?’
‘Indeed, she is the sister of the earth-god Geb, who is serpent-headed, and depicted as falling from her embrace; he becomes the earth and she the sky.’
‘This particular Creation myth,’ Murray added; ‘the Heliopolitan myth, has a number of brother/sister pairings; each generation arises from the former, like a flower opening, having first risen from Atum.’
‘It’s just I was thinking of the symbolism of the creation in other Near Eastern myths, such as the separation of Apsu and Tiamat by the sun-god Marduk – the imagery seems linked.’ Tolkien explained.
Petrie leaned forward, slowly nodding – ‘A staple image from the ancient world, and no stranger to our own modern ears: “And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” Genesis 1:7.’
Lewis eyed Tolkien, wondering what exactly lay behind his questions, but Tolkien gave nothing away.
‘Does one find many such correspondences between Biblical and Egyptian myth?’ Tolkien asked; ‘…such as the Flood?’.
Petrie considered while sipping his wine.
‘The Nile flood, of course, dominates Egyptian tradition, but that is strictly seasonal. As for a sea-flood, the only reference I am aware of, and one cannot escape the possibility of higher, Classical influence, is the building texts at Edfu… These texts purport to tell the story of the Primeval Ones who predated the Egyptians, who inhabited an Island of the Gods, but which was tragically engulfed by the sea forcing the Primeval Ones to come to Egypt bringing their knowledge with them and establishing the original temple, long destroyed and rebuilt, at Edfu.’
‘And Classical influence is likely, because…?’
‘Because of the date of the temple – it is Ptolemaic – Hellenistic – in date, increasing the possibility of influence from, say, Plato’s Timaeus. Had the myth been found elsewhere in Egypt, at an earlier site, we might give more credence to it as an Egyptian myth...’
Tolkien merely nodded, reasoning, silently, that Petrie would never easily have credited such a myth to an aboriginal civilization… of course he’d rather see it as an import from a ‘higher’ cultures…yet his answer had fuelled Tolkien’s thinking – here, too, a flood – but is it history or myth?
Presuming, rightly, given Tolkien’s questions, that the assembled guests would be interested in their work, Petrie and Murray continued to speak at length of the many excavations they had headed in Egypt, such as the labyrinth at Nekada that the Romans had reduced to dust.
‘Such sites get little recognition amongst the public, I am afraid, who are more interested in that second-rate tomb of Tutankhamun and ridiculous ideas of the mummy’s curse than in real archaeology.’
‘So, what do you think of the curse?’ asked Violet.
‘It is pure bunkum. I am surprised you had to ask. You think I’m the sort to give credence to such beliefs?’ he said.
‘Not at all;’ she replied, with a slight smile. ‘But the ancient Egyptians certainly believed in magic.’
‘Many ancient civilizations laboured under the delusion of superstition; it does not mean that we should.’
‘So, you admit your highly advanced Egyptians were superstitious? Does that not make them un-civilized, and if not, how do you tally their belief in magic with their supposedly high level of culture?’ It was clear to all assembled that Mrs Penry-Evans was baiting this bear of a man.
Petrie grimaced. ‘There belief in magic is, one must admit, a hangover from a more primitive time, but that does not negate the splendour and complexity of their art or architecture, for instance.’
‘Well, let us not immediately dismiss their beliefs.’ Violet said. ‘We cannot say for sure whether some human faculties, such as psychic abilities, may have atrophied over time, so their disappearance could be due to other factors than having ‘outgrown’ them in the sense of, say, outgrowing childish behaviour. You merely dismiss them as uncivilized because our modern western civilization, in its narrow-minded hubris, assumes it to be so simply because we no longer possess them; I believe the phrase is ‘sour grapes’. Perhaps an Egyptian curse might be effective today – even more so when acting upon us moderns who lack the appropriate knowledge of psychic self-defence.’
‘Psychic self-defence? My word. What absolute poppycock!’ He glared at Keiller, as if holding him solely responsible for his guests’ ridiculous questions.
Tolkien looked across at Barfield who was clearing his throat; he had the advantage of being on the same side of the table as Petrie and so was able to address his point to Violet Penry-Evans.
‘You have a very good point there Mrs Penry-Evans,’ he began. ‘We have a very narrow view of what our ancestors may or may not have experienced. We read The Iliad and interpret the appearances of the gods as poetic metaphors, or we read of the sightings of fauns or elves and take them as whimsy – but the sources from which we take these instances do not suggest anything but they are reporting actual experiences. Perhaps man’s consciousness was different, closer to that of the animals, perhaps in a semi-mystical state, more open to spiritual realities; a state we might well describe today as magical?’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Tom Penry-Evans in his sing song accent. ‘Exactly right, my man. When my Celtic ancestors talked of the fairy-folk they weren’t some Victorian winged fancy but beings of great power, and sometimes great size; the tales talk of interactions between them and mankind; are we right to dismiss this as fiction just because the majority of us are no longer as able to experience such events?’
Petrie was shaking his head. ‘Of course we are right to dismiss them! Where is the evidence, the one shred of evidence that man once truly knew or experienced magic as a reality? Huh?’ he looked around the table and was just about to grunt as if to say ‘exactly’ when a voice challenged him.
‘Language.’
‘Eh, what was that?’ Petrie asked, cupping his hand to his ear.
‘Language’ Tolkien repeated.
‘Pray, go on…’ Petrie said, smugly.
‘The study of language,’ Tolkien stuttered, aware of all eyes on him, ‘reveals that from the earliest times it dealt not in abstractions but in such a way as to suggest the world it described was thought of as somehow more poetic and mystical than we now credit. It reveals our ancestors conceived of a world where everything was connected – magically connected, but that in time we have become severed from that older state of awareness and find ourselves alone in the world, cut off from nature.’
‘Give me an example. And for god’s sake speak more clearly’
It was Barfield who answered. ‘If I may, Tollers? The Latin word Pneuma: it means both spirit and breath and wind; one can posit a time when the speaker of that word did not have to identify which particular meaning he was referring to, as they were all one and the same; in other words, his world was connected, mystical – the very breath in his body was the spirit that animated him; the wind was the breath of God. Or the word Cereal which contains the name Ceres, harking back to a time when the wheat itself was seen as the body of a god, orient and immortal’ he winked at Tolkien.
Petrie was shaking his head again. ‘Language proves nothing; just because old words had several meanings does not prove magic ever existed – or that man ever perceived the universe as different as we see it today.’
‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken. It does exactly that. How we perceive the world is directly based on our language,’ Barfield continued.
‘There is a world of difference between, say, ‘a tree’ and ‘a dryad’: one seems to be a label, dismissive, the other gives soul to the object, and who is to say that is wrong? Just the use of that word adds an extra dimension, and who are we to say it is not a true perception? Its reductionist to say we give it a soul by using such words – surely, we take away its soul when we fail to use the word.
‘And as our language today is fragmented, so is our view of the world. This is why we need to use metaphor to express spiritual or mystical concepts – we’re having to use it to reconstruct what was once inherent in the first words uttered by mankind, but which are now corrupt, fallen. The Egyptian mind with its hieroglyphic writing suggests a very different mind-set and worldview than ours – not just an interpretation of the world, mind you, but an experience of it! Coleridge talks of imagination as the basis of perception; for it is imagination – the image-creating faculty – that defines what we see. The Ancient Egyptians literally saw a different world from you or I. Theirs was a world of dryads, not trees, where the growing corn was Osiris and the flooding of the Nile a divine, rather than a physical, event.’
Petrie had suffered this paean to words as nobly as such a man could; hands folded in front of him, waiting patiently for a chance to brush aside the folly being spoken.
‘My dear sir, you are, I recall from our introductions, a solicitor, no? And we two…’ he gestured towards himself and Margaret Murray, ‘are amongst the most eminent Egyptologists in the world today. I rather think we may know a little more about the Egyptians than you.’ The edge of his mouth curved up in a crisp expression of superiority.
Lewis put down his wine glass.
‘My dear sir, these two…’ he said, gesturing to Tolkien and Barfield ‘are two of the most eminent linguists in the world today. I rather think they know a little bit more about language than you.’
Keiller let out a peal of laughter of the same volume and glee as the one he had let out the day before when the fragment of wood had crowned Piggott, and clapped his hands.
‘Bravo!’ he said. ‘Bravo! Touché, my good man!’ evidently he was beginning to become drunk, and less worried about appeasing the Olympian Petrie.
Tolkien was amused to see the austere butler Frazer also betray a smile, though he was quick to turn to the dresser and begin polishing the silverware in an attempt at distraction.
At that moment the door opened, and two maids entered bearing large serving plates of vegetables and slices of meat.
‘From our own garden.’ Keiller remarked; so this was George’s handiwork, Tolkien thought, helping himself to a modest portion of vegetables.
With usual British politeness the meat was served, and more wine poured. Piggott, drinking water, remarked on the quality of the food, and all agreed with polite noises of approval.
Pleasantries were exchanged between the guests during this lull in combat; but before the main course was ended Violet had turned to Keiller with a smile and asked him about his interest in witchcraft.
‘Ah, how observant of you! Yes, I do have a keen interest as you picked up from my library; I am lucky enough to have in my possession a great number of the best books on the subject – some dating back to as early as 1452; I have, however, of late had to curtail my researches given my absorption in prehistoric archaeology!’
‘I would be most interested in having a better look later, if that wouldn’t be a problem.’ She said.
‘By all means, by all means! And your own interest?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with a napkin
She looked about her. ‘I am very interested in the occult – and in the practice of...magic.’ she looked at Petrie when she said the latter, relishing the word.
‘Splendid!; laughed Keiller, red-faced from the whiskey and wine, and looking directly at Mrs Murray.
Mrs Murray regarded him with a look that betrayed neither contempt or acceptance; she just looked at him then shifted her gaze to Violet Penry-Evans and then back to Keiller. Her drooping eyes sparkled as she spoke.
‘Of course the study of witchcraft does lead on to the study of ancient religions and therefore ancient sites, by consequence, Mr Keiller. The subjects are linked.’ She said.
Keiller shrugged. ‘I suppose that depends whether one believes witchcraft to be a derivative of such ancient cults.’ He said matter of factly.
‘Which I do, as you know.’ Mrs Murray said. He bowed his head in affirmation.
‘I regret to say,’ Keiller said ‘that I have not had the time to study your latest volume with as much rigour as I had hoped.’
‘So you have written on witchcraft?’ Tom Penry-Evans asked.
‘I have.’ She replied. ‘And as Mr Keiller rightly says my theory is that withcraft was part of a pagan fertility cult that persisted into Christian times.’
‘Under the eye of the Church?’ Lewis, from the end of the table opposite Keiller, asked. ‘I find that hard to believe.’ His own glass had been emptied and filled nearly as much as Keiller’s, and the high colour in his cheeks was no longer due to fever.
‘Oh yes; under the eye, and even with the blessing of, the church in some cases.’ She said.
Lewis pulled a face. ‘Pagan elements, yes, I can believe that – look at all the green man images you find in medieval stonemasonry; but a still-practising pagan cult I’m afraid is very unlikely. What would you say, Mrs Penry-Evans?’
Violet thought for a while before answering. ‘I see no reason, like yourself, why elements may have survived; in the case of witchcraft we are looking not at survivals of pagan religion per se but of age old magical practises, some of which might have been passed down for generations without them being thought of as necessarily pagan.’
‘Like the Acerbot…’ Tolkien suggested; ‘it means ‘acre-remedy’, it’s a late Anglo-Saxon charm that calls for a number of prayers and Christian symbols, but the whole process is magical and pagan to the core, a fact that was probably lost on those who enacted it, who would probably have been horrified to think they were taking part in some pagan rite.’ He suddenly chuckled to himself remembering Owen’s description of the quartz stones, the cloch geala, that Mrs Mac Govan-Crow had boiled in the water she had given to Jack to soothe his throat.
‘Are you a pagan, Mrs Penry-Evans?’ Lewis asked.
‘I consider myself a believer in Christ but do not deny the older gods their due.’
Tolkien glanced up at Barfield and raised his brows. Quite how does one balance such beliefs, he wondered to himself. To believe in Christ is, surely, to deny the older gods. Still, I cannot deny the attraction these older gods might have, though by that I mean an aesthetic attraction, a literary one…
He may have been preparing to speak but Mrs Murray had started to address Mrs Penry-Evans.
‘I think it is a mistake to look at witchcraft as a magical tradition; it was religious, through and through – a religion based on the worship of a nature god, like Pan, one whose details can be gleaned by a careful reading of witchcraft trials; again and again we see the coven of 13, the leader of which is no spirit or god but a flesh and blood man – the leader of the coven, whose horns and cloven feet are but ritual costumes of a pagan priest.’
‘A god like Pan?’ Lewis asked.
‘Yes; although to the Celts he was Cernunnos, whom we see depicted on the famous Gundestrup cauldron with the antlers of a deer, stood beside a wolf and a deer, and serpents in his hands.’
‘The master of animals…’ Lewis said.
‘Myrddin Wyllt’ Mrs Penry-Evans agreed, her eyes flicking to the side to meet Tolkien’s.
‘A careful reading indeed, Ms Murray.’ Keiller said. ‘But erroneous. I point you, with all due modesty, to my publication of 1922: ‘The Personnel of Aberdeenshire Witchcraft Covens in the Years 1596-7…’
Lewis, Barfield and Tolkien exchanged surprised glances – Keiller was a dark horse; the man, as George had rightly said, was clearly a scholar.
‘…in which I cover the same sources as your book ‘The Witch cult in Western Europe’ but reach, shall we say, different conclusions; the majority of women accused of witchcraft during that period were solitary individuals – the number 13 is hardly present; and what’s more their accounts of visitations by supernatural beings cannot just be explained away by costumed priests. These are either the visions of madness, that is delusions of a sick mind, or hallucinations, or else fictions foisted upon these poor women, or forced out of them by torture at the hands of their accusers.’
Keiller’s usual boyish animation had become a steely and controlled delivery of opinion.
‘I just do not find a shred of evidence that such a demonic being was worshipped by these poor witches; these people lived in real fear of Hell – to them such worship would be anathema; we can’t make the mistake of foisting our modern concepts of such acts on the past; oh I’ve been known to wind ivy round my head and pour wine at the foot of the statue of Pan in the garden here – but it’s all play; For myself, in this age of reason the god Pan, I would say, represents something natural and capricious in our character – and can be seen as an embodiment of Nature, as something to celebrate not repress; I risk nothing by doing it, as I have little in the way of Faith; but these people would have believed that by so acting they were risking their eternal souls.’
‘Perhaps these are all the old Gods were and are, Mr Keiller.’ Mrs Penry-Evans said; ‘something close to nature within our own souls that we can allow to open up to and celebrate – a celebration of our unity with the living world. But even so, these images are living realities; Pan is very real; be careful lest you wake something you cannot then control.’
Keiller laughed. ‘I appreciate your warning; drunken play is all it is, I have no more sinister intentions. At heart I’m a traditionalist and besides, as I grow older, I find my youthful follies less and less attractive. It is hard when one has enough money to not worry about a single thing; I see myself as saved by archaeology – I have a passion now that I can share, and the money to guarantee beautiful places like Avebury are not lost to future generations. I feel worthy, now, not some rich playboy with no aims or goals.’
Mrs Murray had kept quiet during this exchange, though she had glowered for a while at Keiller’s dismissal of her ideas; he was an amateur, a rich kid with too much time on his hands; if he had studied the subject as she had, spent his life in academia, he might be less reactionary and better able to judge the value of her work. She was not about to lose her temper with a jumped-up son of a marmalade-maker. Places such as Avebury had once thronged with people proclaiming the life and sacrificial death of the divine king; and if she was right, such a ritual had continued to be enacted throughout so-called Christian history under the very nose of organised religion. Madwomen having visions – how did that explain the similarities between the accounts of witches from all over Europe? This had to be a cult that had continued in secret; it couldn’t just be coincidence; what other option was there? Not Mrs Penry-Evans’ theory, that was certain; to argue that that the many similarities in the Witch trials occurred because they were drawing on the same magical realities, the same invisible gods and spirits - Heaven’s above! To even begin to entertain such a thought would be to undo the progress of hundreds of years of critical thinking!
Two events in quick succession brought the meal to a premature close. Petrie had remained relatively silent and glowering after Keiller’s outburst of laughter; but now his plate was cleared he turned to his host and announced he had an early train to catch back to London the next day and called on Frazer to fetch his overcoat. Mrs Murray, evidently, was also about to leave, as she called out after Frazer with the same request. The guests around the table stood to say their goodbyes to the departing pair; but before she left Mrs Murray turned to Mrs Penry-Evans and said that given the latter’s interest in witchcraft she could do no better than to write to her secretary and have copies of her two books on the subject sent to her, gratis.
Mrs Penry-Evans smiled warmly, aware the gesture was meant as much for Keiller’s ears as her own, and was an attempt to help guide these poor misguided individuals back into the truth as she saw it.
‘Thank you, I certainly shall. And by way of thanks I shall send you in return two of my books.’
‘I didn’t realise you were a writer’ Mrs Murray said, surprised.
‘I go under the pen name Dion Fortune; I will send a copy of my novel, The Goat-foot God and a non-fiction work on the Mystical Qabalah.’ She beamed.
Keiller snorted at the look on Mrs Murray’s face as she responded with a polite thank you, her eyes wide in what he took to be some kind of horror.
Barfield’s eyes were no less wide.
‘Deo non Fortuna!’ he said, laughing. ‘Of course!’
‘I shall see you to the door.’ Keiller shouted after the two departing guests.
‘We shall see ourselves out!’ came the gruff reply.
Keiller looked back towards the remaining guests, twisting on the spot as if trying to decide whether out of politeness he should ignore Petrie’s remark and show them out anyway; but evidently something inside him realised the pointlessness of buttering up the old man any further and he stood where he was and laughed heartily.
‘Well I think that went swimmingly, wouldn’t you agree?!’ he said.
And at that very moment Piggott who had been sipping water rather too frequently slid to the floor in a dead faint.
‘Frazer!’ Keiller called out. ‘Smelling salts! Man down!’
‘Is he okay?’ Mrs Penry-Evans asked, walking to where Barfield and Lewis now crouched propping up the prone waxy figure.
‘I’m okay,’ Piggott mumbled; ‘Would someone mind awfully helping me back to the Red Lion? It’s devilishly hot in here.’