Fire Tornado 14 March 2014

 Is there something there? In the smoke? Can you see it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcUnE0tHcaI

Wormwood

It was in the first half of 2012 that I had been working an extremely early shift in a low paid job in Wormwood Street. The streets name had aroused my curiosity, being familiar as I was with the Book of Revelations, and this combined with the apocalyptic count down that seemed to be playing out on the calendar made the above find even more prophetic. A faded chalk spiral on the wall of 'All Hallows on the Wall'. This church was built on the old London Wall and had replaced a previous church that resided on the Roman city wall. It survived the apocalyptic fire of 1666 and was renown for it's many hermits.

Wormwood Street is called as such not after the biblical prophesy but after the Wormwood plant that used to grow on the London Wall. Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) is one of the ingredients that is used to make Absinth and contains thujone which is psychoactive and can cause convulsions and hallucinations (as well as kidney failure) if taken in large enough amounts.

Nicholas Culpeper (1616 –  1654), a kind of proto New Age anti-establishment astrologer/healer, insisted that Wormwood was the ingredient that was vital in understanding his work The English Physitian, a guide to herbs as medicine. His entry on this plant was described as reading like a stream of consciousness, suggesting that he had taken it when writing. Culpeper set up a phamacy in a halfway house (liminal?) in Spitalfields, just down the road from Wormwood Street and outside of the wall that marked the extent of the City of London's authority. He treated patient for free, gathering herbs from the nearby countryside.

Culpeper  appears as the major protagonist of 'Doctor of Medicine', one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling's 'Puck of Pook's Hill'. (Puck being the king of the faeries, as featured in Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_absinthium

Wormwood, αψίνθιον (apsinthion) or άψινθος (apsinthos) in Greek, is a star or angel.

"The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter." (Rev 8:10–11)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_%28Bible%29

Wormwood also links with the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 

The city name is the same as a local Ukrainian name for Artemisia vulgaris (mugwort or common wormwood), which is also чорнобиль "chornobyl"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_%28city%29#Name_origin

Wand, Wend, Wind

A 9000 year old 'magic wand' found in Tell Qarassa, Southern Syria (2007-2009). The site is from the Neolithic period and may have been some of the earliest farmers. Along with the 'wand', carved with human faces, were 30 headless skeletons.

"Earlier traditions of figurative art had avoided the detailed and naturalistic representation of the human face."

http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/1.580267


wand (n.) c.1200, from Old Norse vondr "rod, switch," (cf. Gothic wandus "rod," Middle Swedish vander), from Proto-Germanic *wend- "to turn," see wind (v.)). The notion is of a bending, flexible stick. Cf. cognate Old Norse veggr, Old English wag "wall," Old Saxon, Dutch wand, Old High German want, German Wand "wall," originally "wickerwork for making walls," or "wall made of wattle-work" (an insight into early Germanic domestic architecture). Magic wand is attested from c.1400 and shows the etymological sense of "suppleness" already had been lost.


http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=wand&searchmode=none



Wand - Wind (as in 'to wind a watch', a spinning motion) - Wind (as in a winding wind, a tornado?)



switch (n.) 
1590s, "slender riding whip," probably from a Flemish or Low German word akin to Middle Dutch swijch "bough, twig," or swutsche, variant of Low German zwukse "long thin stick, switch," from Germanic base *swih- (cf. Old High German zwec "wooden peg," German Zweck "aim, design," originally "peg as a target," Zwick "wooden peg"), perhaps connected with PIE root *swei- (2) "to swing, bend, to turn." 



http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=switch&allowed_in_frame=0

Wand - Switch (as in to switch 'on' or 'off'')


A stick that switches 'on' and 'off' the wind?


Gingerbread Cyclops

I saw these Gingerbread Cyclopean Women at the university library coffee shop, which doubles as my studio. They are both missing a left eye.

Stan Gooch describes the left/right characteristics as follows:

Left                                                        Right
Feminine                                               Masculine
Matriarchy                                            Patriarchy  
Goddess                                                God
Moon                                                     Sun
Night                                                     Day
Art                                                         Science
Magic                                                    Reason
Subconscious                                        Conscious
Cerebellum (Back Brain)                      Cerebrum (Front Brain)
Neanderthal                                          Cro-Magnon
Democrat (Left Wing)                           Republican (Right Wing)

 http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/5176/the_doubly_divided_self.html

Always The Artist

A Scene from the third series of Game of Thrones where a gruesome design of dismembered horses has been left  by the mysterious White Walkers. The 'galaxy' spiral design caught my attention and I wondered what was the intention of this dark art. Who was the sign intended to be viewed by? Was it religious in nature? Why do the White Walkers feel a need to produce this kind of art? 

And a question familiar to most art students...why this choice of materials?

Tracks left by Dust Devils on the surface of Mars

 http://www.outerspaceuniverse.org/dust-devils-planet-mars.html

A Dust Devil caught in action on Mars.

http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/marsasart/

Loren Coleman's deeply disturbing blog was the influence for me writing the one you are currently reading. I had noticed some of the events that Coleman had written about as they had come up in the news as well as others he had missed and I wanted to write of my own observations, from an especially personal perspective. His post on the Peter Pan suicides had caught my attention before (2010) and caught it again when he posted recently (Feb 2014).

A child found (2014) in an apparent suicide, surname Rider, in an area called Baton Rouge (red stick - a symbol to mark the boundaries of rival tribal areas).

(Rider- one who rides horses- this being the year of the horse)

Coleman links this, via what he refers to as the 'Name Game' a series of interlinking names and their meanings, to several 'suicides' from 1998-2010. There were two that happened on the same day in 2009, in both India and the US. Many were found hung from door hooks and Coleman suggests this may have a connection to Captain Hook, the villainous pirate in the Peter Pan stories.

It was the date that caught my attention.
20th Feb.
A date that had personal resonances with me.

I had noticed the name game myself many years before. Sometimes it is clear that names have been used to specifically hint at references as in the use of the date September the 11th (911 - in the American dating system) to indicate the 'emergency' of the American Emergency Services telephone number.  
But sometimes, names have been referenced in a way that could not have been caused by human agency and one can only speculate that a more supernatural design is at work. 

I hesitated to write about these connection because of the negative energy it implies. My superstitiousness is what attracts me to these details but it also warns me away.

http://copycateffect.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/new-hook.html

Horse-ripping, the mutilation of horses - suspected to be religious in nature, has been an ongoing phenomena I have taken note of. This is sometimes liked with mysterious horse-braiding, where braids are tied into the mane's or tail's of horses. 

(horses - symbolic of the Goddess Epona)  

(braiding, a form of weaving, is associated with daemonic activity)

'Pixies are drawn to horses, riding them for pleasure and making tangled ringlets in the manes of those horses they ride.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixie 

 

Venus of Willendorf c. 28,000 – 25,000 B.C.E. (with braided hair?)

 

Venus of Brassempouy 25,000 B.C.E. (with braided hair?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-ripping

http://www.academia.edu/3819433/The_urban_folklore_of_Otherworldly_horse_mane_braiding_and_the_
persistence_of_superstition_regarding_witch_knots_in_horses_manes_from_Shakespeare_to_Spiritual_Warfare

The White Horse at Uffington is suspected to be Celtic in origin and a reference to Goddess worship. It has been vandalized twice, both times with the addition of a rider. The symbolism here can be seen as a domination of the feminine Goddess element.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse

Gravesend

Sinkholes have been appearing in graves at Gravesend Cemetery, Kent (UK).

http://strangesounds.org/2014/02/zombie-sinkhole-apocalypse-coffin-shaped-depressions-swallow-graves-in-gravesend-cemetery.html


In 2013 a man sleeping in his bed was swallowed by a sinkhole taking the television set with him.

'Cables from a television led down into the hole, but the TV set, along with a dresser, was nowhere to be seen.'

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/01/17145165-massive-sinkhole-swallows-florida-man-and-its-still-growing?lite

Bob Dobbs' Five Bodies Model gives us an explanation for sinkholes (provided by Ion) which is that as people spend more and more time in their Microchip bodies, that is online in social media, the Chemical Body becomes neglected. The earth, as the 'mother' of all bodies, in that she provides all the chemicals that make up everyone's Chemical Body, becomes jealous of this neglect and starts to pull people down into the earth as a consequence.

http://informationfarm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/bob-neveritt-what-are-five-bodies.html