Plans for lunar clock

A group of designers and engineers are proposing to build the world’s first tidal powered moon clock on the banks of the Thames as a waterside landmark and public sculpture.

The project, called Aluna, is a 40m wide, five storey high structure made up of three concentric translucent recycled glass rings. By looking at how each ring is illuminated, you can follow the moon’s movements, its phase and the ebb and flow of the tides. This animation of light will be powered using the tides via turbines, so will be environmentally friendly.

For witches, who follow the cycles of the moon in their spirituality and use it as a timing for rituals, this could be a useful as well as beautiful addition to London's landmarks.

The Aluna website says: "Aluna unites art, science and spirituality and is an ever-changing reminder of the natural cycles that have shaped our past and will determine our future."

To get the project off the ground, the Aluna team needs to raise £5m.

The designers have been working with the Deputy Mayor of London Nicky Gavron's Office to garner support and funding for the development of Aluna at a site on the River Thames in East London, but they also want people to sign a petition on their website to show support for the project.

Visit: http://www.alunatime.org/index.htm

Picture: copyright Aluna Limited, image by Mark Glean

Book clubs and soul mates

Yesterday, I joined the book exchange website www.readitswapit.co.uk/, hoping to swap some items that were cluttering up my shelves for books I could review on A Bad Witch's Blog.

The way the site works is that you list a load of books you want to get rid of, with the title, author and condition. You then make a wish list of books you would like. You can either search for books you want and contact people who are offering them, or wait for people to contact you.

Within a few hours of signing up, two people had contacted me saying they would like books on my list. I was very impressed with the ease of the service and the speed of response.

All I had to do then was browse the books they were offering to see if I fancied any and, if I did, reply saying which one I wanted in exchange. I was looking for books on folklore, spirituality, psychology, the unexplained or self-help - I was spoilt for choice.

One of the titles interested me purely because I disagreed with the subject matter intensely. It was a book on how to find your soul mate. The concept behind it appeared to be that everyone has one ideal partner somewhere in the world and that to find true happiness in love you need to find them.

What rubbish!

Now, I am a fan of love and romance. I believe it is possible to find a partner who ticks all the boxes and that love can last a lifetime if you are well suited enough.

But soul mates are simply the stuff of fiction, such as H Rider Haggard's wonderful novel She. Real life is different.

When you have just fallen in love, it is natural to feel as though it is the perfect match. You want nothing more than to spend all your time with your loved one, you can't imagine not seeing eye-to-eye about everything. They are days of wine and roses - or sex and toast. You imagine they will never end. But they do. You slowly learn each other's annoying little habits. You have your first row, then another. But it is natural. I doubt there is any couple in the world who have been together for a year or so and haven't had a row. The trick is to learn to resolve your differences and talk over problems.

Sometimes, that once-perfect relationship comes to an end. If you had convinced yourself your love was your soul mate, then you are left thinking anything else is second best. That is simply not true. It is quite possible to get over a broken heart and find love anew with a different partner. People do it all the time.

So, I am more inclined to believe in life on Mars than that we only have one chance of true love or that if we fail to find our single soul mate then we are doomed to unhappiness. I also think books that promote the concept of soul mates are misleading and potentially dangerous.

So, I didn't pick that book from the list offered me. Instead, I chose something about assertiveness, which is much more useful for handling the man in your life, in my opinion.

Links:
http://www.readitswapit.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_%28novel%29

Review: Surfers of the Zuvuya

On Sunday, I spent a lazy afternoon lying on the sofa reading Surfers of the Zuvuya: Tales of Interdimensional Travel by Jose A Arguelles.

I picked the book up in a charity shop a few weeks ago. Then, after watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last week, I found myself in the mood for another epic tale of South American weirdness and adventure.

Surfers of the Zuvuya fitted the bill perfectly. It even starts with a journey to a South American tomb:

"To get to the tomb of Pacal Votan [in Mexico] you first climb up to the temple on top of the pyramid. Then you go down narrow stairs. It is dank and dark. Finally you get to the tomb room. An ancient stone door has obviously been pulled open with great effort, like in the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'. An eerie feeling comes over you. Will the tomb ever be closed again? 'Ohmigod! you think. What does this mean?"

From there the adventure really kicks off, as the author, Jose A Arguelles, meets his dimensional double, who guides him in inter-dimensional travel using Zuvuya - the Mayan memory circuit.

The idea behind this is that the ancient Mayans were advanced beings - galactic engineers - who left behind clues so that we can follow them by astrally surfing the cosmic beams across the universe and through multi-dimensions. Also thrown into the book are Atlanteans, light beings, UFOs and a journey to the centre of the Earth to find giant healing crystals.

If that wasn't enough excitement, the book tells us that our current era of human civilization will end in 2012, with an elemental disaster of a catastrophic proportions. To survive, we are going to have to evolve some sort of higher state of consciousness and stop polluting the planet.

Of course, this book was written in the late 1980s, when this kind of New Age stuff was the rage and Millennium fever was beginning to get us all a bit edgy. Readers could at that time feel comforted with the thought of 25 years' grace in which to embark on their own cosmic journey and sort the planet out at the same time. Now, with just over three years to go until 2012 and the planet more polluted than ever, that seems a tall order.

But Surfers of the Zuvuya is not a depressing, doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world book. It is a fantastic journey through weird and wonderful places and beliefs, written with a massive sense of humour and lashings of poetic license. It is mythic rather than factual. The foreword says:

"Myths are not for believing or disbelieving. They are for using. If a myth or metaphor works in revamping our deepest values, it is truer than the evening news or the textbook fact."

Arguelles has come in for quite a bit of criticism with regards to the accuracy of his facts, but I would say that if a book provides an entertaining tale of adventure, then go along for the ride and enjoy it. Afterwords, decide for yourself if it has any deeper meaning.

Surfers of the Zuvuya costs £7.99 new or £3.10 secondhand through Amazon.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Arg%C3%BCelles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Votan
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2008/06/charity-shop-bargains.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367882/

Pagan Events

Now until 20 July; Solstice. Film installation with soundtrack marking the summer solstice by Neeta Madahar at PM Gallery and House, Walpole Park, Mattock Lane, London W5 5EQ. Tel: 020 8567 1227. www.ealing.gov.uk/services/leisure/museums_and_galleries/pm_gallery_and_house

Monday 30 June; The Woman Magus - A Woman's Adventures in the World of Modern Magick. Talk by Jaq Hawkins at Treadwells, 34 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7PB. 7.15pm for 7.30pm start. Tickets £5 in advance, booking essential. Tel: 020 7240 8906 or email: info@treadwells-london.com.

Wednesday 2 July; The Shaman, the Vision and the Brain. Repeat of sold-out lecture by Dr David Luke, of the University of Northampton, at Treadwells, 34 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7PB. 7.15pm for 7.30pm start. Tickets £5 in advance, booking essential. Tel: 020 7240 8906 or email: info@treadwells-london.com.

Wednesday 2 July; The Assassins and the End of Time. Talk by Boz Temple-Morris at The Moot With No Name, Devereux public house, 20 Devereux Court, off Essex Street, London WC2. Meet from 7.30pm, talk starts at 8.30pm. Admission £2.

If you know of any pagan events and want them listed on A Bad Witch's Blog, email me via my blog or leave a comment below.

In search of a sacred spring

Around the corner from where I work, in London EC2, is Holywell Lane. It is an ordinary city street, with office blocks and a few shops, but the name suggested a sacred well must have been there in the past, so I decided to ask some questions about it.

A woman I work with told me that in the Middle Ages, Holywell Lane, in Shoreditch, marked one edge of Holywell nunnery, which was founded by 1158. It covered eight acres and was the richest Augustinian nunnery in England.

However, this was slightly contradicted by something I found on a great website Sacred Sites, which said that Holy Well in EC2 is mentioned in John Noorthouck's History of London, published in 1773:

“In the parish are two prebends, and part of a third, belonging to St Paul’s cathedral, in the city of London: The first dominated by Eald-Street, or Old Street, received that appellation from the Saxons being part of the Roman military way: the second, which had been a separate village for many years, by the name of Hochestone, vulgarly Hoxton, likewise itself to be of a Saxon origin: the third called Haliwell, had its name from a vicinal fountain, which, for the salubrity of its water, had the epithet Holy conferred on it.

In King John’s Court, Holywell-lane, are to be found the ruins of the priory of St. John Baptist, of Benedictine nuns, founded by Robert the son of Gelranni, prependary of Haliwell, and confirmed by charter of Richard I in the year 1189. It was rebuilt in the reign of Henry VII by Sir Thomas Lovell, knight of the garter; who was there buried: and the following ditty was in consequence painted in most of the windows.

All the nuns of Holywell, Pray for the soul of Thomas Lovell.”

I couldn't find out for certain whether the nunnery was Augustinian or Benedictine, but both sources confirmed there had been a well in the area.

Many springs or wells were revered as sacred long before Christianity came to the British Isles and it is possible that the holy well in Shoreditch was one of these, as well as being respected for the "salubrity" of its water. I do not know if any archaeological finds have linked it to pre-Christian ritual practices.

There are more than 20 holy wells in and around the London area. Some still exist, although usually hidden beneath man-hole covers. The one in Holywell Lane has long been lost under roads and buildings.

I intend to spend more time visiting other sacred springs around London and will write about them on A Bad Witch's Blog.

If you have any more information about the history of Holywell Lane, or other sacred sites, email me or leave a comment on my blog.

Links:
http://www.google.co.uk/maps
http://www.hackney.gov.uk/ep-shoreditch-history.pdf
http://www.londononline.co.uk/streetorigins/H/
http://www.kch42.dial.pipex.com/holywellslond.htm

A Jack or Jill of All Trades

When I was a teenager, I went to a palmist who told me that I had a “mixed hand” – meaning that each of my fingers was a slightly different shape.

There are five different basic shapes: square meaning you have an orderly personality, spatulate meaning you are an active type of person, knotty meaning philosophic, conic meaning artistic and long, dainty hands that are supposed to indicate one is psychic.

The mixed hand, however, has bits of all of them. It shows, I was told, that I was destined to be a “Jack of all trades, but master of none”.

I was offended. For a start, I’m hardly a Jack. A Jill maybe, but the palmist must have been blind to get my gender wrong.

Then I read a bit more about palmistry. He was right in one thing. I do have a mixed hand – but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to flit from one thing to another without ever having any success.

On the contrary, I prefer to call myself multi-talented and good at multi-tasking. These are all great qualities for a witch who has to balance her work, caring for her family and learning skills that are useful for her craft.

And you don’t have to be a master of anything. Being adequate is good enough.

The photo is not a picture of my own hand. It is entitled Mixed Hand by Artisan Henna. Visit: http://www.artisanhenna.com/.

Links:
http://www.paralumun.com/palmistry.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiromancy

Crossroads of the elements

That rather dull looking scene of a suburban railway station near where I live is, in fact, a crossroads of the elements.

Water, in the form of a culverted stream, runs underneath the railway, the road and the rails represent earth, the bridge is air and fire powers the trains that run along it – well, electricity these days, but I do recall watching a few steam trains chuff their way through the station in my childhood.

Crossroads are enchanted places where different world’s might converge, as well as different roads. They are places where, in folklore, one might meet faery folk, vampires, wandering spirits or even the odd witch...

They are places where choices are made and the future is therefore not certain. They are a good place to do magic – although I realise you wouldn’t want to engage in some elaborate ritual on the bridge over the railway at rush hour.

And sometimes magic seems to break through even that dull little suburban crossway. The stream sometimes breaches the culvert and springs of water bubble up into the street. In spring, that hedge is always laden with blossom and it autumn it is rich with red berries. In both those seasons it is full of birds – nesting or feeding – and you can hear birdsong from right down the street. At times like those I can feel wild nature trying to break through, and the crossroads does seem magical.

Useful link: http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/crossroad.htm