By: Desmond Swords

Desmond Swords — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:09:07 +0000

As it currently stands, the 8C BC oral poet Hesiod’s 1022 line creation myth poem – Theogony (trans. seed of the gods) is an 8C BC synthesis of local Greek myth on which the entire 500 yr old modern English poetic tradition is founded on and currently rests.
It was first written down when writing reappeared in 6C BC Greece after 300 years of the Greek Dark Ages (1100 – 800 BC) which began around the time the Iliad was set 500 years earlier at the end of the Mycenaean empire, which ran from 1600 – 1100BC, during the final phase of the Bronze Age in ancient Greece.
The nucleus of Mycenaean culture was the warrior caste, and it displaced the mercantile Minoan civilisation based on Crete, which was a sea faring trading empire based that ran from 2700 BC to 1500 BC, and whose demise wascoterminous with The Minoan eruption of the island of Thera (now Santorini) around 1500 BC.
Santorini, (Thera) is 70 miles north of Crete, and had a Minoan trading settlement at Akrotiri, and the eruption was one of the largest volcanic events in recorded history, which occurred in the mid second millennium BC and may have contributed to the collapse of the Minoan culture.
Minoan civilisation had no warrior class and traded with Greece (notably Mycenae), Anatolia, Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria and as far west as Spain. Religious frescoes and statuary depictions of Minoan goddesses and/or priestesses, far outnumber those of anything which could be remotley akin to a Minoan god, with the consensus being these represent at least several goddesses including a great fertiltiy Goddess, a Mistress of Animals, the protectress of cities, the household, the harvest, and the underworld, and more.
The frescoes also shopw men and women engaging in the same sports, the most prominent of which was the Minoan bull leaping ceremony, in which men and women leaped over a bull torso first. Due to this absence of a warrior caste, the femal religion and the physical and pictoral evedience, and from what is known of other cultures of that time, it is specualted that matrilinaeal succession was the norm, as opposed to what we have now, patrilineal succession.
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Anglo-German-Hibernian poet Robert Graves, who was one of the foremost creative minds of the 20C – won a scholarship to St John’s College Oxford where he studied classics and he fought in the Great War remembered in Britian last week. He was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts, author of historical novels such as I, Claudius, King Jesus, The Golden Fleece, and Count Belisarius and he wrote 140 books. His poetic theory is one which he attempted to piece together, by going as far back as Minoan civilisation, which ran from 2700 – 1500 BC.
Graves case is that the female chthonic deities represented in the statuary and frescoes of Minoan civilisation, are all aspects of a single Mother Goddess symbolised by the moon and that the Minoan’s, religious practices centered on the female aspect.
After the Thera eruption at the Mycenaean warrior culture displaced the 1200 year old Minoan civilisation which in the Graves model, is a peaceable female-faith based one, reliant on long distant trade with Egyptian and Levantean civilisations, and this version of the Greek Poetic, 1 -2000 years before Hesiod, is what Graves terms the *unimprovable original*. His theory is that:
*..the language of poetic myth….was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies, in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating back to the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the true language of poetry – *true* in the nostalgic sense of the unimporovable original, not a synthetic substitute.*
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One of Hesiod’s other (of three extant) works, Works and Days, an 800 verse poem, details five Ages of Man; which began with
1 – Golden Age during the rule of Cronus, youngest of the 12 Titans, son of Mother Earth Gia and parthenogenitically birthed Sky Father son-husband, Uranus. Mens spirit’s in this age, lived on as daemons who could help out the living.
Man and gods lived in peace and harmony and it was all smiles and happy, maybe like in Minoan times 1000 years before Hesiod?
2 – Silver Age – in the age of Zeus, who had overthrown Cronus who had overthrown his own father Uranus. Humans in this time lived a 100 years as children and a short span as adults who spent that time fighting with each other. Human spirits in this age, became blessed spirits of the underworld.
3 – Bronze Age. Men were hard and war their passion, everything forged in bronze, including houses, but undone by their violent ways, their spirits remained unamed, dwelling in a “dank house of Hades”.
4 – The Heroic Age – not corresponding to any metal. Noble heroes. and demi-gods who fought at Thebes and Troy and on death went to Elysium.
5 – Iron Age. Hesiods time, a rubbish life for humans, kids don’t respect their parents, no decency, immoralty patracide, brother killing brother and “there will be no help against evil.”
I dunno, but is Hesiod tellin porkies? if so, could Graves be right, that the Golden Age of Hesiod’s Works and Days is Minoan civilisation a 1000 years before — Hesiod not havin wiki, writing stopped when the bronze age collapsed into the iron age proliferation of new more kill-effective implements, coinciding with the swift destruction and demise of all Egyptian, Hittite and Mycenaean culture and civilisation, including Troy at the time of the Iliad?
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This is a theory which only now with the advent of IT, can we search the answers with a speed unthinkable prior to the rise of information technologies. To retrieve the relevent information would have taken ten life times, wheras now it is at our fingertips, a million libraries of Alexandria.
And so when Homer and Hesiod come along, their whole culture for the previous three hundred years, has been a post-apocolyptic Iron Age one, and for 500 years before that, the slow grind of continual regional wars, and before that, on Crete at least, 50/50 female Moon-goddess as Muse magical language unimprovable original Poetic.
Graves levelled the accusation of *intellectual homesexuality* against Socrates, who is the Holy ghost in the trinity of philosophers underpinning Western thought, and along with his pupil Plato, Father to the son Aristotle, these human beings, men, just like any man today, are somehow deemed infallable, but is the truth not they were trapped by their history of war-as-normal and the whole accusation of Graves, not entirely unjust.
The ancient Greek 6C BC Poetic, is the one on which Tudor courtiers founded modern English language poetry, 500 years ago and this tradition, is very short lived, when compared to the bardic tradition native on the British Isles, for 1200 years in print. The touchstone text of the whole bardic enterprise, was first translated in 1983, and is found in a 15C Harleian (Robert Harley, 1st earl of Oxford) manuscript 3.18, one of the Irish legal codices now at Trinity College, with the identification tag: MS 1337.
This text was only translated in 1983, and when i first clapped eyes on it three years ago, thought this cannot be, as – on the face of it – it explains what poetry is, where it comes from and how it humanly works; from the point of view of a 7C bard, who had (say) 1000 years of druids behind him or her, and 1000 years ahead of them, and it has no title, i am guessing, because it needed none as it was the first poem the grade one fochloc (sapling) was given at their first day in bard school. A/the touchstone text of the whole bardic enterprise, my instinct immediately thought and after 18 months sniffing round the hugely important poet-biggers in Dublin doing their very important biz of public reading at book launches et al, asking if they knew of it, expecting the higher ups to of course know it, it became clear this text is all but unknown and it was only when Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill agreed my hunch was correct after 18 months of asking, i stopped asking as that was proof enough for me.
At a stroke, this text does away with the What is Poetry? question, or rather it is a text that no TS Eliot, Pound, or any other figure in the history of English language poetry, is gonna persuade me they are speaking deeper than Amergin.
Because it was only translated into English in 1983, its significance has not yet been grasped and the older mob, won’t want to know as it makes their lifes work less important than they would like to have it, but Ireland and Scotalnd and the British Isles, were the last oputpost of this pure unimprovable original poetic, and had a literate tradition that ran from proto-Old Irish of ogham (2-4 C AD), Old Irish 5-9 C AD), Middle Irish (9-12 AD) and early Modern Irish (12-17C AD).
Twice as long as the current English poetic based on a dodgy all male myth in which erastes and eremenos, an old man has a young one say he’s submissive, in a warrior centric fight fight fight system of warring boring poets, and the Amergin text, is like finding a key to a locked door, behind which the answer lies and in front of which a load of poets from all the various camps and gangs, arguing on the question:
What is Poetry?
And this text comes along and says, well ..
Read it and unblock.
http://www.thunderpaw.com/neocelt/poesy.htm
love and peace
gra agus siochain

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By: Desmond Swords