Ichthys Cybernetics

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

2013-12-12T20:57:00.000+02:00

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

18 July 1918 – 5 December 2013

~ In Memoriam ~

...my father...reserved his own faith for the great spirit of the Xhosas, Qamata, the God of his fathers. My father was an unofficial priest.... He did not need to be ordained, for the traditional religion of the Xhosas is characterized by a cosmic wholeness, so that there is little distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the natural and the supernatural. ...my mother...became a Christian... I myself was baptized into the Methodist, or Wesleyan Church as it was then known...

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p.12

I was born in the Eastern Cape. It is a very beautiful part of our land. It is rich in vegetation and folklore. As a small child I stood on the outer edges of the evening camp-fire. I listened many times to the stories of the tribal leaders. There would be long silences in-between. They spoke of our ancestors. As I listened to them, images of colour were conjured up in my mind. As I looked up into the clear, crisp, night sky I saw millions of stars. I wondered how they shone?

-Nelson Mandela, On Colour, 2003 (Also see Twinkle Little Star)

Robben Island

"6th February 1998: We took the Makana ferry to that dismal island, Robben Island, where lepers and political prisoners were kept. It was a depressing pilgrimage into the dark shadow of our past. Featureless, desolate, drab, tragic. This was also the island where my tenth great grandmother, Eva Krotoa, was born and often banished." -CG Garvie, Journal, 6th February 1998

"Then came the wasted prison years. A great hood descended over my eyes. Grey became the primary and paramount colour. The paint on the interior walls and the gates and the side doors were grey. The outside walls have grey slate. The watchtowers were grey. Even the roads which were built with a mixture of lime and crushed seashells were grey in colour. White appeared as a relief. The prison clothing was a dull khaki. Even the prison guards wore khaki. Even Table Mountain, a symbol of freedom for us, was grey in the distance." -Nelson Mandela, On Colour, 2003

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
oOo

Inimba - Empathy and Connectedness

I never met Nelson Mandela though I was once in his presence. His life affected all of us. We are all different because of Madiba. My walk had very modest beginnings. Many have testified to a feeling of connectedness, a sense of loving rapport or resonance, with this man. I was also changed. Mandela was a catalyst. Can we explain this awe inspiring synergy?

A close friend, mentor, and colleague, the Rev. Vivian Harris, would often share a lovely Xhosa insight. It illustrates Madiba's Charisma and Compassion. It is the Xhosa idea of Inimba. Harris wrote about Inimba in the February 1994 edition of Living & Loving. It was shortly before the historic elections of that year. He wrote:

In our part of Africa we have a wide variety of people, languages, cultures and customs. It is easy for one group to feel that it can learn nothing from the others.

The truth is that we have heaps to learn from each other. Each culture is rich in traditions which could be of great blessing to others. Let me share with you something I learnt recently.

Any mother knows that when her infant cries the sound of that cry does something to her. She immediately responds - without having to think about it. Her response is not only an inner feeling of love and concern for her baby; she finds that her body also responds to the cry.

Without hesitation, and almost without being able to resist it, she responds to her child's need.

Now the truth I learnt is that the Xhosa people regard this response as a 'thing' that lives inside a mother. To them it is so real that they have given it a name. It is called Inimba.

Inimba is like an extra part of the body that lives in a mother, or it is a special spirit that works within a mother.

Pause awhile and think about this thing that is so strange to some of us, while it is so well-known to others.

Babies can be very wearying when they are ill. A stranger might become irritated by their constant crying. A stranger might reckon that a baby that keeps crying, when there is apparently nothing wrong, does not deserve to be loved or helped. But the mother loves her baby and goes to its rescue instinctively.

To Inimba there is no question about deserving; Inimba simply moves a mother to help. Inimba does not ask whether the baby needs to be helped. Inimba does not say, I have helped you enough times already today and now I will help you no more. Maybe I will help you again tomorrow.

Startling as this may seem, I believe, Madiba had this amazing attribute. I seldom hear Mandela being described as anything but as a man, a towering giant of a man, sometimes even an uncompromising, principled patriarch, a stern father figure. However, Madiba had Inimba. It comes to the fore especially in his love for the vulnerable and downtrodden, for little children and his passion for his country.

Madiba with the Children

(Photo: Source Unknown)

Harris continued:

This is a profound truth not only about a mother but also about our heavenly Father - God.

Possibly Inimba is one of the activities of God the Holy Spirit. I don't wish to be blasphemous so I must not make any detailed suggestions about God's nature. But this I do know: as a mother responds to the cry of her baby, so God responds to the need of His people.

One might go so far as to say that this response in love, care and rescue is part of the very make-up of God - part of His nature - so that it is not possible for Him to ignore our cry.
....
A baby's life depends on the Inimba in its mother. The life of this strife-torn part of the world depends on the Inimba in ordinary people like you and me.

This wonderful thought is developed further in Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's evocative article “Forgiveness and the Maternal Body, An African Ethics of Interconnectedness” and concludes that this awesome maternal instinct can be experienced and irresistibly expressed by men of compassion too.

Having “birthed” this infant democracy, the "New South Africa", Mandela responded to the needs of his people as a mother would reach out to her child. It was the most natural, spontaneous thing for him to do because he had Inimba.

oOo

My earliest recollection of Nelson Mandela was as a 16 year old boarding school boy in 1962. This was in connection with news of the Rivonia Trial. I was then only just beginning to become politically aware. Gandhi and Tolstoy were my teenage heroes. In my naivete I didn't much appreciate Mandela. He was portrayed as a villain and a rogue, a Communist and a remorseless terrorist. The African National Congress was demonized in our young minds. When Mandela reluctantly adopted the Umkhonto we Sizwe military option I thought this stance was not in harmony with the satyagraha or "passive resistance" of Gandhi and non-violence of Tolstoy. Gandhi and Tolstoy were more in accord with my own intuitive feelings of reverence for life, all life, loving your enemies, and turning the other cheek. Had I only but read Mandela's defence more carefully!

It was only once I had left school and moved to Johannesburg that I was exposed to the broader South African reality. The terror on our streets and the unrest in the townships had increased. It took me a long time to understand the work of the likes of Beyers Naudé, The Christian Institute, and the SACC.

The scales gradually fell from my eyes. I knew nothing of the South African Liberation Movements and very little of my own colonial mentality. The terror and fear evoked by the ANC and PAC bombings were in conflict with my understanding of justice. I was oblivious to my own innate unconscious fears and prejudices. My conscience could not justify limpet mines, bombings, and the awful, sometimes indiscriminate, casualties. It militated against my Christian and Gandhian values of reverence for all life that I had embraced as teenager. A thick veil had been drawn over my eyes. Indoctrination and propaganda had blinded us. Mandela was vilified. I never knew that I even shared a common faith with this remarkable man.

oOo

Liliesleaf

"20th April 2003, Easter Sunday: This year’s Easter was somewhat different. We fetched Mom Adam to visit Liliesleaf Farm. There, son-in-law, Steve, gave us a tour of the Liliesleaf Farm Hotel that he managed. Mavis Adam, though a year older, shared a birthday with Madiba. This was the place where several of the accused in the historic Rivonia Trial were arrested in the early 60s. The museum included historic photographic displays of the arrest and trial together with biographies written by the accused.... Steve presented me with a biography of Sisulu. Liliesleaf Farm was a fitting monument to Resurrection." -CG Garvie, Journal,20th April 2003

oOo

Gradually, very gradually there came a metamorphosis and change in my own political perceptions. This was largely due to three influences.

"Jack" Cook

Arthur John Thornhill Cook

(Photo: CG Garvie)

My minister, the Rev "Jack" Cook of the Clifton Methodist Church in Johannesburg regularly exposed us to Soweto and the dreadful circumstances of fellow Christians living there. Jack was a former Warden and Tutor at the historic Lovedale Theological College (Minutes of Conference 1981, p.12) where Govan Mbeki among others studied. Increasingly the grim oppression and monstrous evil of racial prejudice and "Apartheid" came to my attention. It was during this time as a Wesley Guild leader that I first came across and read some writings of Mandela which, at that time, had been banned and was even a criminal offence to possess. Jack's influence was enormous extending even to an appreciation of African music once taking us to meet Hugh Tracey, an authority in African music, music that Madiba so loved. It was only then that I really began to think about the Christian values of justice, freedom, liberation, and redemption. Jack Cook struck a new chord for me.

Senator Charles Diggs

Charles Coles Diggs, Jr.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Senator Charles Diggs was a vocal American Baptist Senator who visited South Africa and more especially the iconic NASA Deep Space Tracking Facility at Hartebeesthoek in August 1971 where I was employed. "He was a committed publicist for the liberation cause in South Africa. His 'Action Manifesto' (1972) displayed his support for the armed struggle against Apartheid and criticised the United States government for decrying the use of such violence when it failed to condemn measures used by the South African government to subjugate the majority of its own people" (Wikipedia). Diggs was cause for further consideration and reflection. Though unpopular he got me to thinking. I could no longer ignore the township and prison tears.

Recently, American Vice-President Joe Biden, remembered, "When I tried to enter Soweto township with Congressmen Andrew Young of Atlanta and Charles Diggs of Detroit, I remember their tears of anger and sadness." Charles Diggs' visit contributed eventually to my decision to enter the Methodist Ministry at the end of 1971. NASA withdrew shortly thereafter and the Tracking Station was closed for "diplomatic reasons" (DJ Mudgway, Uplink-Downlink, p.77).

Douglas Thompson

Douglas Chadwick Thompson

The Rev. Douglas Thompson was a Methodist Minister who had been detained and was served banning orders in the 1960s. I first met Douglas when I was appointed to the Springs-Nigel Circuit of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa in 1978. Anthony Egan records in his, "Detention without trial: the experience of the Reverend Douglas Thompson in the South African state of emergency", how Joe Slovo urged Douglas to serve as their chaplain and to conduct an Easter Sunday Service for them on the 17th April 1960.

Joe Slovo had put him up to it. Noting that other prisoners at the Fort had access to Sunday services, Slovo and the others decided that this was unfair and needed rectifying. Since the prison authorities would not provide them with chaplains, the detainees should − and could − produce a chaplain from within their own ranks.
...
For his text that Easter Sunday, Thompson chose 1 Corinthians 13, the famous Pauline discourse on love. Aware that most of his “flock” were agnostics, he produced a powerful sermon on three Greek New Testament notions of love − the love of God, the love of another person, and the love of community, with its emphasis on sharing. His homiletic intention was clear: the detainees should stick together, support each other in their time of crisis. Though the source of this exhortation to solidarity lay squarely in the Gospel tradition, its content dovetailed neatly with Liberal values of generosity of spirit and Marxist notions of solidarity. Years later, former detainees would remind him of that sermon and in an interview in 1982 Thompson recalled it with delight.

Egan notes, "This would seem to echo the thinking of a famous Lutheran theologian, Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: a study of the Christian idea of love." I rather think Douglas took his Easter Sermon from another source.

Douglas gave me his copy of Alfred Ernest Garvie's The Christian Doctrine of the Godhead. Garvie's (no direct relation) chapter on "The Christian Life" speaks of "The Energy of Love" (p.417):

i.Love to God as Motive and Pattern;

ii.Love to Man as Forgiveness and Sacrifice;

iii.Love as the Moral Principle; and,

iv.Love as the Social Bond.

Garvie concludes, "The Christian truth that in one body the members suffer or rejoice together is affecting political theory, if it has not yet adequately influenced political practice. Even in citizenship love needs to be exercised."

Learning to appreciate Madiba was no easy walk for me. I was slowly and painfully being conscientised, step by step along the way, by a Providence that I will ever be grateful for. I was beginning to realise that Wesleyan "Perfect Love" could not be divorced from "Social Holiness". It was evident that Madiba exemplified this love of which Alfred Ernest Garvie wrote.

Whether Madiba was steeped in the writings of John Wesley I do not but few have come this close to Wesley's portrait of a Christian...

He is full of love to his neighbour, of universal love, not confined to one sect or party, not restrained to those who agree with him in opinions or in outward modes of worship, or to those who are allied to him by blood or recommended by nearness of place. Neither does he love those only that love him or that are endeared to him by intimacy or acquaintance. But his love resembles that of Him whose mercy is over all His works. It soars above all these scanty bounds, embracing neighbours and strangers, friends and enemies - yea, not only the good and gentle, but also the froward, the evil, and unthankful... This is the plain, naked portraiture of a Christian. (John Wesley, Letters, II, 376-802)

oOo

During the 1980s South Africa was plunged into a dark night of boycotts, anger, chaos, and confusion. It was when Dan Heymann composed the South African hit, "Weeping", questioning the injustices of the ruling order...

It doesn’t matter now

It’s over anyhow

He tells the world that it’s sleeping

But as the night came round

I heard its lonely sound

It wasn’t roaring, it was weeping

Original video of "Weeping" by Bright Blue

(Directed by Nic Hofmeyr. Dan Heymann on keyboards)

Then came the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 at a time of escalating civil unrest. The rest is history.

oOo

Methodist Conference, Umtata, 18th September 1994
In the picture: Revs, Vivian Seethal, Viv Harris (Secretary of Conference), Colin Garvie, and Presiding Bishop Stan Mogoba (former Robben Island prisoner), Inset: Madiba. Photos: Dimension

"My joy at being in this conference is multiplied many-fold by the fact that this is for me also a personal home-coming, both in the physical and spiritual sense. The environs of Umtata are not only my humble origins. It is here that my spiritual association with this great Church started. And I cannot over-emphasise the role that the Methodist Church has played in my own life." -Nelson Mandela, Address to Conference

"18th September 1994: When Dr Mandela arrived, which he described as a "spiritual homecoming", the people exploded in a crescendo of Methodist song. Here was the prisoner who had become a prince, come home. When the choir rendered the anthem, the President spontaneously stood up and started dancing. This was the dancing President. Tears flowed from my eyes. There I was, the weeping Preacher! It was a moving and deeply touching moment." -CG Garvie, Journal

oOo

The "Mandela" Particle

Qamata, omnipresent and obscure, the supreme God of Madiba's father, was the most prominent deity in Xhosa religion and folklore. Qamata was the child of the sun god, Thixo, and the earth goddess, Jobela. Madiba has given us a glimpse of Qamata.

Madiba also defies definition. During the Apartheid years he acquired the nickname, "the Black Pimpernel" from "the novel by Baroness Emma Orczy set during the Reign of Terror" about a "hero with a secret identity", The Scarlet Pimpernel. Many places, institutions, plants, and discoveries have been named after Nelson Mandela but the most elusive was a theoretical nuclear particle, called the "Mandela Particle" which like the hero of the story has refused to be pinned down....

What was it: The 'Mandela' particle was (at that time) a new sub-nuclear particle from cosmic ray interactions in experiments. The scientists observed a bump in the 'hadron energy spectrum in cosmic rays' which was detected by an 'innovative hadron calorimeter'. This could have been due to a new particle, which the researchers dubbed the Mandela. Sadly, the bump was eventually found to be due to a burned-out connection in the detector's custom-built computer. (CERN Courier 2006)

Why it was named 'Mandela': Dr John Baruch says in a Bradford University staff profile that he was interested in politics at the time and suggested that the particle be named after Nelson and Winnie Mandela. Nelson Mandela was in jail at the time but says Baruch 'I thought their time would come and so would this new nuclear particle. As with many things scientific, the data improved the particle went away, but not before we had hit the world headlines and had two TV programmes made. Mandela did rather better and Apartheid was pushed into the dustbin of History.'

http://www.sabc.co.za/mandela/featuredetails/193c8b80473c71b292069f04758a6c68/group4
(See also: "Search for a Particle with a Long Interaction Length")

There is a parable in there for us. Madiba - now you see him, now you don't - constantly deflected attention away from himself.

Asimbonanga (we have not seen him)

Asimbonang' umandela thina (we have not seen mandela)

Laph'ekhon (in the place where he is)

Laph'ehleli khona in the place where he is kept)

- Johnny Clegg & Savuka

Madiba had Inimba! He epitomised what we call agape-love, a love that asks for no reward. As a shepherd boy Madiba learned to tend his father's flock and to look to the stars. As President of the "Rainbow Nation" Madiba taught and showed us to forgive, to love, to hope, and to live with integrity reaching beyond our own limited selves and "look to the stars"! The walk must continue!

oOo

“I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended” ~ Nelson Mandela from Long Walk to Freedom, 1994

Mooi loop, Madiba!

oOo

Methodist References:
Methodists Mourn Tata Madiba, MCSA
Remembering Madiba, Rev. Dr. Stanley Mogoba
Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, Methodist influences, My Methodist History
Statement on the death of Nelson Mandela, The Methodist Church in Britain
Hymn: This day we have witnessed (At the death of Nelson Mandela), Andrew Pratt

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

As Destinies Entwine....Is there More waiting in the Wings?

2013-12-03T09:05:00.000+02:00

Life is filled with secrets. You can't learn them all at once.
-Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

Coincidence was a concept he did not entirely trust. As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.

-Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

Our word 'clue' is derived from the Anglo-Saxon clew, meaning a 'ball of thread'. The most famous ball of thread in Western culture belonged to Ariadne, the beautiful daughter King Minos of Crete, who fell in love with Theseus...sent to the great Labyrinth of Knossos to be sacrificed to the Minotaur.

-Anthony Stevens, Ariadne's Clue, p.3

This reflection arises really from the previous, "As Destinies Entwine....A Love Story". The story is ongoing. The Garvie-Adam connection may yet have a sequel one day. There may be more to this thread that has yet to disclose itself to us.

When we first visited Scotland in 2004 we homed in on Aberdalgie about three miles south-west of Perth. Several generations of my Garvie ancestors lived there. My great grand father Laurance Garvie was born at West Lodge, Dupplin Castle, Aberdalgie in 1845. His father, John Garvie, was a forester on the Dupplin Estates. John Garvie's parents, James Garvie and Janet Hutton were also from Aberdalgie. Though I know of no know connection, the Rev William Garvie was the local minister at the time.

Cousins Ken and Colin Garvie

Descendants of John and Janet Garvie

Aberdalgie

The primary object of our visit to the Aberdalgie Church was to see the Garvie graves in the church graveyard. The one grave of immediate interest to me was the grave of Janet Luke, John Garvie's wife and several of their children. It was this grave that pointed us to the Cemetery in Balgay. The monument read...

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

JOHN GARVIE

DIED 21ST AUGUST 1898 AGED 79

INTERRED AT BALGAY CEMETERY, DUNDEE

AND JANET LUKE HIS WIFE

WHO DIED 15TH MAY, 1884 AGED 66

ALSO THEIR CHILDREN

MARGARET WHO DIED 16TH JULY

1875 AGED 21

ELIZABETH WHO DIED 26TH APRIL

1881 AGED 33

AND

CHARLES, JESSIE & MARY ANN

WHO DIED IN INFANCY

JANE GARVIE DIED 29TH JULY

1928 AGED 83 YEARS

---

ERECTED BY HER DAUGHTER JANE

PEACE PERFECT PEACE

-=O=-

John Garvie's father was James Garvie who we believe was a son of James Garvie and Janet Glass. (It might be that the two James' are the same person and Janet Hutton was a second marriage. Janet Glass had died early in 1812. In September 1812 James Garvie married Janet Hutton. Unfortunately the records are incomplete.) Whatever, the James Garvie of Janet Glass was born 15 Oct 1753 in Scone.

The Garvies of Scotland proliferate around the legendary Scone near Perth in Perthshire. According to a letter from J C Garvie Macleod to the editor of the Oban Times, Spenthorn, West Park, Leeds (date unknown) it is said that the Garvies of Perthshire "are descended from John Garbh, seventh Maclean of Coll, through one of his sons, probably John of Totaronald." According to him, John Garbh was wounded at the Battle of Inverkeithing, Fifeshire (1651) and did not return to Coll. His three sons (or grandsons) rented Upper Balgarvie, Lower Balgarvie and the Mill of Balgarvie in the Perthshire, Parish of Scone from the Earl of Mansfield. Their descendants were tenants of Muirton, Haggis Hall and other farms near Perth.

In Scots the prefix "bal" means "place or town of" so "Balgarvie" means "Garvie's Place". "Balgay" means "Place of Breezes".

Walking around the small Aberdalgie cemetery we came across two mysterious Adam family memorial stones side by side....

Sylvia Adam between the two Adam Memorials

Aberdalgie, Perthshire

The memorial stone of the first read in part...

IN MEMORY OF

JAMES ADAM

WHO DIED AT BALGARVIE, SCONE

5TH FEBY 1934 AGED 44 YEARS

BELOVED HUSBAND OF

ANNIE ANDERSON

WHO DIED

2ND FEBY 1972 AGED 80 YEARS

.....

The second stone read in part...

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

JAMES ADAM

BELOVED HUSBAND OF

JANET NIVEN

WHO DIED 3RD JUNE 1925

AGED 63 YEARS

.....

Other than the reference to Balgarvie, Scone there is no other indication that there is any link between the Garvies and Adams of Aberdalgie except that from other records, James Garvie and Janet Niven came from Lundie is a small hamlet 10 miles northwest of Dundee. They had Dundee connections too, Dundee where John Garvie and Elizabeth Fawns are buried (see previous blog).

The coincidence of "Balgarvie" may simply serve as a symbolon, a pointer. Anthony Stevens explains this beautifully in his Ariadne's Clue (p.12):

The Greek noun symbolon referred to a token or tally which could be used as a verification of identity. An object, such as a bone, would be broken into two halves and each given separately to two people...who could then identify each other by producing both halves and checking that they fitted together. Each tally-holder knew his own half to be genuine. If perfect fit occurred between the two halves of the symbolon, a Gestalt was suddenly created out of the familiar (known) and the strange (unknown) parts and the bona fides of each individual was established as sharing the same allegiance.

Synchronicities work in such a way too. It is the "Adam Affect", the “Wow Moment”, when Adam first met Eve he exclaimed, "This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!" (Gen 2.23). Diese endlich! The word Gestalt or “wholeness” is a good one in this context.

Stevens continues...

The conjunction of sym (together) with ballein (to throw) emphasizes the idea that the strange must be 'thrown together' with the familiar to construct a bridge of meaning between the known and unknown. In psychological terms, something unconscious is connected with consciousness, resulting in the experience of new meaning.

As the one monument stone pointed me to Balgay so the other was directing me to Balgarvie. Together they were the symbolon building a bridge from the known to the unknown.I am inclined to the "doctrine of the more"!

Further Reading:

Henry Z Jones Jr, Psychic Roots, Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy, Genealogical Publishing Co. In. Baltimore
Henry Z Jones Jr, More Psychic Roots, Further Adventures in Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy, Genealogical Publishing Co. In. Baltimore
Anthony Stevens, Ariadne's Clue, Princeton University Press, Princeton

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

As Destinies Entwine....A Love Story

2013-11-30T04:25:00.001+02:00

Laban ran out to the man at the spring..... "Arriving today at the spring....." [Abraham's servant] said, "Yahweh, God of my master Abraham, please grant a successful outcome to the course I propose to take. While I stand by the spring, if a girl comes out to draw water ... let her be the girl whom Yahweh has decreed for my master's son." I was still saying this in my mind when Rebekah came out, her pitcher on her shoulder. She came down to the spring and drew water..... I bowed down and worshipped Yahweh, and I blessed Yahweh, God of my master Abraham, who had led me by a direct path to choose the daughter of my master's brother for his son.

~Gen 24:29-48 NJB

The First Insight Theory: Mysterious coincidences cause the reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet.

~James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

Why hast thou cast our lot
In the same age and place?
And why together brought
To see each other's face?
To join with softest sympathy,
And mix our friendly souls in thee?

~Charles Wesley, Engagement Hymn, MHB 716

In previous blogs I reflected on the "geographies" of our cradles and graves, of "hatches" and "dispatches". In the collective psyche of humanity birth places and death beds have been tinged with the mystical. These are sacred places, sometimes called "thin places" or even "stargates".We need only think of Bethlehem and Golgotha.The tagline to the "Stargate Universe" television series is "Where will Destiny take you?"

However, what about "matches"? Marriage is a portal and like birth and death is associated with "passage rites". An important feature of such significant moments and places is the idea of "synchronicity". A synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence.

Carl Jung wrote in Synchronicity, An Acausal Principle: "By far the greatest number of spontaneous synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and analyze can easily be shown to have a direct connection with an archetype." Marriage is one such archetype and possibly the most synchronistic of all. It is the "the girl at the spring" moment. What Brigid of the Wells is to the Celts so is Rebecca and Rachel to the Hebrews.

"According to psychologist Carl Jung, marriage is one of the great event archetypes, along with death, birth, initiation and a few others. Jungian psychologists believe that these archetypes exist in a collective unconscious mind that binds together all living beings, organizing the experiences of each species–all the experiences, back to the very beginning–to create an ever-increasing pool of knowledge, belief and expectation that each individual shares, and to which each contributes their own experiences." ~ http://blog.californiapsychics.com/blog/2010/08/the-archetype-of-marriage.html

"The wedding and specifically the bride just might be one of the grandest of all archetypal images. .... [Jung] said that archetypes function like river beds." ~Dr Jeff Howlin

Chance? Fate? Karma? Kismet? Murphy's Law? Synchronicity? Providence? Quantum Entanglement? So many words to describe the "chemistries" or "connections" we experience! Deepak Chopra coined the word "SynchroDestiny".

Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805) said, "There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny." Indeed!

I had the great privilege to prepare many couples for marriage. With each couple I would ask two questions and make a statement of fact:

"When and where were you born?" - This was a legal requirement but it was a loaded question about beginnings.
"Your earthly relationship will come to an end. Hopefully not because of divorce but then certainly because of death." - A statement of fact but opened us to a consideration of endings.
Then what I considered the most fascinating: "How did you meet? What brought you together?" - This enabled us to explore synergies and synchronicities.

So how did Sylvia and I meet? What strange providence had "cast our lot in the same age and place" that together we might be one? On the surface of things it was rather obvious that we would have met in the way we did. Sylvia was, after all, "the girl next door". There was nothing unusual about that. Or was it?

YMCA-YWCA

As chance would have it, we lived across the road from each other in Rissik Street, Johannesburg. She was in the YWCA and I was in the YMCA. One doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to realise that inevitably there would be at least some magnetic flux between the two hostels. It was simply a matter of biological attraction, of boy meets girl, was it not? Some might say pheromones were the cause, that love was in the air. Proximity had brought us together. Others again would contend that surely there must have been something more “metaphysical” than just "pollen spores". Facilitating all this, of course, was that many residents of both the YWCA and YMCA congregated at the nearby Clifton Methodist Church. A large number of matches happened and were sealed there. In this way like met like.

YMCA Bedroom View across to the YWCA

To my electronics biased mind, the love acted much like a "band pass filter" naturally bringing suitable partners together because they radiated similar "vibes" while filtering others out. For technicians romance becomes a case of resonating circuits, automatic frequency or phase-locked loop control systems. It was harmonics and Fourier Analysis!

A L-C Resonating Circuit (Graphic: Wikimedia Commons)

On the surface then, that was how we met. It was a simple matter of the confluence of two rippling streams and a common geography. Circumstance. However, from this point on, the connections become a little more mysterious. After all, how does one rationally explain the coincidence of a quest, a prayer, a well, and a pretty girl? Similarly, in my case, there were antecedents too...

NITR-SAIMR

Sylvia moved into the YWCA because she was working at the nearby SA Institute for Medical Research (SAIMR) studying to become a medical technician and I had moved to the YMCA working at the Tracking Station of the National Institute of Telecommunications Research (NITR) and studying to be an electronics technician. While I attended day classes at the Witwatersrand Technical College she attended night classes there. So there was much in common.

What interested me however were the other more extraordinary events that had conspired long before we had even met, that brought us together. It was only very much later in our marriage that this even dawned on us. What “star-crossed” circumstances had led me ending up in Johannesburg to be on the same "street where she lived"? I wasn't a Johannesburg boy. This thought was all the more strange considering that while we were both born in Africa, to South African parents, we had in fact been born some 4833 km apart as the stork flies. I was born in Ladysmith, South Africa whereas Sylvia was born in Vom, Nigeria, both in the late 1940s. We met some twenty years later. Here to mention but three of the strange concurrences that led to our lives being so entwined. They set the scene and was...

The Proscenium...
"the part of a theatre stage between the curtain and the orchestra (i.e., in front of the curtain)

In ancient Rome, the stage area in front of the scaenae frons was known as the "proscenium", meaning "in front of the scenery". As a metaphor, the proscenium is a "window" to the stage of life. Three instances come to mind...

First: Balgay Cemetery, Dundee

Our paternal ancestral lines takes us both back to Scotland, to Dundee in fact and in Dundee to the Balgay Cemetery. This is where we pick up the thread, “Ariadne's Clue” as it were, to the labyrinth of our lives.

In 2004 with the help of cousins Ken and Eleanor Garvie, we had found the grave of my great great grandfather, John Garvie, in the Balgay Cemetery in Dundee, Scotland. To our astonishment, shortly after our return home to South Africa, we discovered that Sylvia's great great grandmother was also buried in the Balgay Cemetery! Had we only known before! Gratefully, Ken and Eleanor, afforded us a second opportunity to visit Balgay and the two graves in 2008. Whether John Garvie (c1820-1898) and Elizabeth Fawns (1821-1903) ever knew each other we might never know. This much we do know...they were contemporaries and both were from blacksmith families living in Dundee. Remarkably, Dundee descendants of John Garvie and Elizabeth Fawns were to end up in South Africa and there to marry. Both families arrived in South Africa within a year or two of each other in the early 1880s.

Grave of John Garvie, Balgay, Dundee Grave of Elizabeth Fawns, Balgay, Dundee

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or

like trees in the forest, which co-mingle

their roots in the darkness underground.

- William James

Second: Ladysmith

We next pick up the thread in Ladysmith, South Africa. I wrote in my previous blog....

Yet another remarkable anecdote. Living in Ladysmith at the time of my birth was Emily Adam (Alder). Emily passed away a year after my birth on the 16th July 1947. I was to marry Emily's great-granddaughter, Sylvia, 25 years later. Sylvia's great-grandfather was the local blacksmith and though he died in 1939 it is likely the two families knew each other..... It is a small, small world.

Emily Adam was the wife of James Adam the son of the same Elizabeth Fawns of Dundee, Scotland! He died shortly before my birth.

Our "paths", though we never met till much later, next cross at...

Third: The Komati

Komati River, Moedig Farm

Not long after my birth in Ladysmith we moved. I grew up on a farm almost 400 kms away, Gemakstroom (Leasure Stream) located just below Skurweberg (Rough Mountain) near present day Machadodorp. The Komati River flowed through the farm. Many years later I discovered that Sylvia, who had been born thousands of miles away in Nigeria, would come to South Africa and spend her childhood holidays on a family farm at "Moedig" (Courage). Moedig was also on the Komati, just a few miles upstream from Gemakstroom! We never realised it! So close yet so far. Destiny was then already conspiring to bring us together! We were both Kids of the Komati! Talk about prevenient grace!

In hindsight...

"Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal, or a window opening on something more than itself." ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On 30 June 1921, Alfred Watkins had been driving along a road near a village in Herefordshire. While gazing at the scene around him, in the words of his son, "like a chain of fairy lights" a series of straight alignments of various ancient features, such as standing stones, wayside crosses, causeways, hill forts, and ancient churches on mounds, caught his attention. He called these "ley lines".

Geographical synchronicities are like love leys linking lovers together. One can plot them on a map, joining the dots, Dundee-Ladysmith-Komati-Johannesburg, and perhaps one day, we might even extrapolate them to the stars. They are "entanglements" in the fabric of our Universe.

It is one thing to ask, "How did you first meet?" It is another to enquire, "Why did you meet?" Possibly, synchronicities act as pointers. Synchronicities point us to Metaphysics and the Numinous. Speaking of the numinous, Wikipedia puts it succinctly: "The numinous experience has in addition to the tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling, a quality of fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly other." Is that not why? We meet in order that we might encounter the Wholly Other.

American novelist, poet, philosopher, Wendell Berry in Given, once said, "There are no sacred and un-sacred places. There are only sacred and desecrated places." I like to think of Balgay-Ladysmith-Komati as a "chain of fairy lights" that lends enchantment to the "sacred places" of our lives, lives that in every moment is intensely mysterious, amazing, and sacred. If only, like Abraham's servant, we could but connect the dots, join the “fairy lights” of love, the matrix of marriage would take on a far greater significance and meaning. As our Jewish friends remind us, marriages are truly made in heaven!

Further Reading:

Deepak Chopra, SynchroDestiny http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synchrodestiny-Harnessing-Infinite-Coincidence-Miracles/dp/1844132196

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

More Psychogeography - Our Birth Place

2013-11-17T02:55:00.000+02:00

...some people believe that we choose not only our parents but also our place of birth.

This is simply another way of emphasizing the importance of nature, for geography and nature are not really dissimilar. Being born into this world in a particular place is like having the signature of that place stamped upon you. The essence of your place of birth cloaks and protects your walk through this life, and whatever you do becomes registered in the ledger of that geography.... Your footprints still lead back to the place where you began. Any time there is a thought or memory of the origin, or an illusion to the origin, or more specifically a prayer that addresses your roots and the nature of your origin, then vast forces in the universe are unleashed.

- Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p.40

Ladysmith - the centre of the world’s attention, the scene of famous deeds, the cause of mighty efforts...

~ Winston Churchill, The Boer War, p.209

Ladysmith 28° 33′ 35″S, 29° 46′ 50″E
Home Farm 28° 34' 60S, 29° 36' 0E

In my last blog I introduced the thought of Psychotherapy. "Psychogeography". Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." While expressly intended for avant garde urban environments we can apply the concept to rural geographies too. Places have vibes!

Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson wrote, "The place where we grew up or currently reside is more than physical space. It defines who we are, how we think about ourselves and others, and the way we live." What about the place where one is born?

Malidoma Patrice Somé boldly asserts an African belief: "We choose not only our parents but also our place of birth."

I was born in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (28°33′35″S 29°46′50″E) in the midst of the great battlefields of KwaZulu-Natal. My parents were living with my grandparents on Home Farm (28° 34' 60S, 29° 36' 0E) about 15 kilometres to the west of the historic town.

Home Farm, District of Ladysmith with

Dewdrop Stream meandering through (Photo: Google Earth)

Founding History

The traditional Zulu name for Ladysmith is eMnambithi - King Shaka gave this name to the Klip River after tasting the sweet water ‘mnambitheka’ - meaning ‘tasty’.

King Shaka (1785 -1828) regularly visited various chiefs and indunas from various clans in his kingdom. It was during one of these visits that he visited the area of eMnambithi. When a new area was visited, the custom at the time was to give a name to the place. In the case of this area, King Shaka drank water from the Klip river and found it to be sweet compared to the coastal water. He pointed out that the water is tasty. In isiZulu anything that is tasty is called "nambitheka". The river was then name "uMnambithi" because of its tasty water.

- http://salanguages.com/munnames.htm

In 1847 after buying land from the Zulu king Mpande, a number of Boers settled in the area and called it the Republic of Klip River with Andries Spies as their commandant. The republic was annexed by the British in the same year and on 20 June 1850 was proclaimed a township called Windsor. On 11 October 1850 the name was changed to Ladysmith after Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon Smith also known as "Lady Smith", the Spanish wife of Sir Harry Smith, the Governor of the Cape Colony. Sir Harry Smith was the British general governor of Cape Colony and high commissioner in South Africa from 1847 to 1852.

- Wikipedia, Ladysmith

The story of Harry Smith and Juanita, a young Spanish teenage girl is one of the great love stories of South Africa. So strong was their devotion to each other that she silently endured the discomforts and danger of life on the battlefield, often having to flee for her own life.

In 1812, at the age of fourteen, she found herself orphaned and only with a sister, when her home town Badajoz was besieged for the fourth time during the Peninsular War. After the siege ended in a successful but very bloody storming by the British and Portuguese forces, the sisters sought protection from the plundering and pillaging soldiers by some British officers they found camping outside the city walls. One of them was Brigade-Major Harry Smith, of the elite 95th Rifles scout regiment, whom she married a few days later.
....
Juanita Smith and her husband are the central characters in the historic novel The Spanish Bride by Georgette Heyer, which spans the period from just before their meeting after the battle of Badajoz through the aftermath of the battle of Waterloo in the latter part of the Napoleonic Wars.

- Wikipedia, Juana María de los Dolores de León Smith

Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon Smith

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The Boer War

Following the Battle of Ladysmith (1899), with the British forces...regrouping in the town, the Boer forces decided to surrounded the town. The siege lasted 118 days, from 2 November 1899 to 28 February 1900, during the most crucial stage of the war. A total of around 3,000 British soldiers died during the siege.

- Wikipedia, Ladysmith

Home Farm was the scene of of vicious battles

between the British and Boers including

Spionkop and Vaal Krantz

1900 Map

Home Farm was located just north of Dewdrop

west of Ladysmith in the foothills of the Drakensberg

Winston Churchill wrote: "I climbed up to see it for myself. Only eight miles away stood the poor little persecuted town, with whose fate there is wrapt up the honour of the Empire, and for whose sake so many hundred good soldiers have given life or limb--a twenty-acre patch of tin houses and blue gum trees, but famous to the uttermost ends of the earth" (London to Ladysmith Via Pretoria, p.221).

Two icons of my life date back to this time. Two RML 6.3 inch Howitzers used by the British during the Siege stand in front of the Town Hall aptly named, Castor and Pollux. I am a Gemini. The other is Mohandas Gandhi who was a stretcher bearer in Ladysmith influenced my spiritual and political thinking as a teenage. I grew up with an intense aversion for war. Early in my teen years I felt drawn to the non-violence stance of Tolstoy and the satyagraha. A statue of Mohandas Gandhi can be seen at the Lord Vishnu Temple.

Statue of Gandhi, Ladysmith

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

It was this "poor little persecuted town", if I am to take Malidoma Patrice Somé literally, that I chose to be born on the 15th June 1946. To all intents and purposes it is a little surprising to find my father and mother in Ladysmith. They had met in Vryheid, Natal and married in Ermelo, Transvaal. Then World War II separated them for nearly five years. My father was a POW in Germany. I was born nine months after his return home. During that time, Mother had moved several times living with her parents in Ermelo and the in-laws at Home Farm in the Ladysmith District. My father was only decommissioned from his unit, the Umvoti Mounted Rifles, on the 5th May 1946, a month before my birth. Two years later we had moved to a farm in the Eastern Transvaal

"Book of First Entry", Register of Midwifery, Ladysmith Library showing birth of Colin G Garvie

While we frequently visited Ladysmith for holidays even on one visit meeting Sister Sandalls, the midwife who had delivered me, Ladysmith was never much more than my port of entry into this world. William Dixon wrote, "Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of every thing" (The Human Situation, 1937). Nevertheless I could never think of Ladysmith or drive through the town on my frequent trips between Johannesburg and Durban without there being a great surge of emotion and affection.

Gate to Home Farm, Ladysmith. (Photo: Google Street View)

There was an auspicious total lunar eclipse at 9pm SAT the evening before I was born.

Star Map of the 14th June 1946 Lunar Eclipse at 21h00 SAT

(Stellarium)

Yet another remarkable anecdote. Living in Ladysmith at the time of my birth was Emily Adam (Alder). Emily passed away a year after my birth on the 16th July 1947. I was to marry Emily's great-granddaughter, Sylvia, 25 years later. Sylvia's great-grandfather was the local blacksmith and though he died in 1939 it is likely the two families knew each other. Even stranger, Sylvia's great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Adam (Fawns), and my great-great-grandfather, John Garvie, are buried in the same cemetery in Dundee, Scotland. Sylvia was born in Nigeria. It is a small, small world.

The Grave of James and Emily Adam, Ladysmith Cemetery

Somé is right when he says...

Being born into this world in a particular place is like having the signature of that place stamped upon you. The essence of your place of birth cloaks and protects your walk through this life, and whatever you do becomes registered in the ledger of that geography.... Your footprints still lead back to the place where you began. Any time there is a thought or memory of the origin, or an illusion to the origin, or more specifically a prayer that addresses your roots and the nature of your origin, then vast forces in the universe are unleashed.

That is psychogeography!

Alas during that ugly colonial war

You were besieged with fightings all around

The Brit and Boer their cannons smoked

Yours the portal through which I came

Ladysmith.

[Note: Driving along the N3 between Durban and Johannesburg, Home Farm is the farm on the South-West quadrant of the N3-R616 junction near Ladysmith, https://maps.google.co.za/maps?q=google+maps+28%C2%B0+34'+60S,+29%C2%B0+36'E]

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Geography as Destiny and the Vredefort Dome

2013-11-14T18:08:00.002+02:00

All the Earth is sacred – it's just that some places seem alive, and it is easier to be aware of that spiritual connection.

- http://www.geomancy.org/index.php/sacred-space

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

- Abraham Verghese

The place where we grew up or currently reside is more than physical space. It defines who we are, how we think about ourselves and others, and the way we live.

- Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson, quoted
http://wisecounsel.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/geographical-psyche-does-your-location-shape-you/

Artist depiction of an Asteroid Impact

In my previous blog,"Connecting the (wrong) Dots", I related how three geographical locations, baKoni-Boskop-Kromdraai, may have subliminally informed the course of my life.

These are places akin to what the Scots and Irish call "thin places" or what Eric Weiner calls "the Geography of Bliss". (For a thoughtful reflection on "thin places" see click here.)

Another place, and the most primal of all, is the Vredefort Dome in South Africa not far from where I lived as a teenager. The Vredefort Crater is the largest known impact crater on Earth. When I was 11, my father had been transferred from the gold mines of Pilgrims Rest to the fabulously rich gold reefs of Blyvooruitzicht, "Happy Prospect". This was a move, literally from the Blyde River Canyon to what was during the 1960s, one of the richest gold mines on the planet, Blyvooruitzicht.

During those teen years we would often drive down across the northern crater rim of the "Vredefort Crater" to Parys for Sunday picnics along the Vaal River. The Vredefort Dome is now a World Heritage Site. The geological significance of those Sunday picnics only dawned on me much later in my life.

Vaal River near Parys, South Africa

The Vredefort Crater

The asteroid that hit Vredefort is estimated to have been one of the largest ever to strike Earth (at least since the Hadean eon some four billion years ago), thought to have been approximately 5-10 km (3.1-6.2 mi) in diameter...

The original crater was estimated to have a diameter of roughly 300 km (190 mi), although this has been eroded away... The remaining structure, the "Vredefort Dome", consists of a partial ring of hills 70 km in diameter, and are the remains of a dome created by the rebound of rock below the impact site after the collision.

The crater's age is estimated to be 2.023 billion years (± 4 million years), which places it in the Paleoproterozoic era. It is the second-oldest known crater on Earth, a little less than 300 million years younger than the Suavjärvi Crater in Russia...

The dome in the center of the crater was originally thought to have been formed by a volcanic explosion, but in the mid-1990s, evidence revealed it was the site of a huge bolide impact, as telltale shatter cones were discovered in the bed of the nearby Vaal River.

The crater site is one of the few multiple-ringed impact craters on Earth, although they are more common elsewhere in the Solar System.

The nearby Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC) and Witwatersrand Basin were created during this same period, leading to speculation that the Vredefort bolide's mass and kinetics were of sufficient magnitude to induce regional volcanism. The BIC is the location of most of the world's known reserves of platinum group metals, while the Witwatersrand basin holds most of the known reserves of gold.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_crater

Vredefort Crater (Photo: NASA)

[For more about the Vredefort Dome and some dramatic photos see the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Obsevatory Web Site at http://www.hartrao.ac.za/other/vredefort/vredefort.html.]

Incredibly, because of an asteroid impact two-billion years ago, my father ended up working at the Blyvooruitzicht Gold Mining Company Limited! Indirectly, my life's course, to my great astonishment and amusement, had ancient Paleoproterozoic antecedents! Suddenly Paul's assurance to the Ephesians took on a new meaning for me, “He chose us in Christ before the world was made to be holy and faultless before him in love, marking us out for himself beforehand, to be adopted sons, through Jesus Christ. Such was his purpose and good pleasure” (Eph 1:4-5 NJB).

Here was the genesis of my interest in cosmology, catastrophes, and apocalyptic cataclysms! Curiously, the move from Pilgrims Rest to Blyvooruitzicht also marked a switch in theological perspectives. We moved from the Dutch Reformed Church to the Methodist Church. This shift was to have a huge impact and consequence on my life's trajectory too.

Cybernetics of Landscapes and Geography

This brings me to a long held conviction, the conviction that we are assigned our time and place in the Universe by God. Geography somehow imprints itself on our psyches and instinctual behaviours. An instinct is defined as an "inborn pattern of behaviour in response to specific external stimuli" in this case, a geophysical location. It is also described as "an intuitive judgement or feeling about the best way to act, not based on rational conscious thought" (WordWeb). That is, geography modulates our instincts, effects and affects our destiny. Landscapes impinges on our lives! Vredefort did!

This field of study and research is sometimes called "Human Geography", "Cognitive Geography", or "Psychogeography". Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

Christian environmentalist, Steve Lummer, writing about "Geography Affects Destiny" explains...

Author of Wild Goose Chase, Pastor and Adventurer Mark Batterson reminds us of this very thing when he points us to Genesis 15 where we see an amazing illustration of God's desire to get us "out there".

God took Abraham outdoors to look up into the nighttime sky. He told him that his offspring would outnumber the stars in the sky. What God did may be just as significant as what He said. He led Abraham outside for an object lesson that he would never forget. He would never see the stars in the sky the same way again. Every time he looked into the nighttime sky, he "remembered the promises of God."

Why did God take him outside? Because held up inside the tent, Abraham's vision of God and God's amazing future for him was limited. He could not see the potential of God's promises. God wanted him to get a glimpse of just how big a God He was. Taking him outside was God's way of telling Abraham not to put limits and ceilings on what He wanted to do through him and for him.

The same point could be made when God relocates Abram from Ur to settle in Canaan. Steve Lummer continues, describing his own boyhood experience. It echoes my own...

What a great place to grow up as a child. Little did I realize at the time, but that place of adventure and exploring was a set up by God.

I found an amazing passage this morning out of Acts 17:26-27 that explains why we live where we do and why we live when we do.

According to Acts 17, God places us in certain geographical locations at certain times in history for a real specific reason. "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him."

Time and time again, a Voice calls me from my "tents", my comfort zones and says, "look up into the nighttime sky" and see the bigger picture. Thirty years before its discovery in the 1990s, an asteroid from long, long ago had cast its spell and was to reverberate through my life and choice of interests and careers.

Impact craters indeed make ideal sand pits and ponds for Sunday afternoon family picnics for boys in which to play and cosmic nurseries for new life to spawn!

For further reading:

D. R. Montello, Cognitive Geography, University of California – Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~montello/pubs/CogGeog.pdf
Harm de Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape
Vredefort, Miscellanuous Books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Vredefort
Abiogenesis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life
What is Astrobiology, http://astrobiology.com/1998/04/what-is-astrobiology.html
Celestial Impact Events, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Connecting the (wrong) Dots?

2013-11-12T16:19:00.000+02:00

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." - Frederick Buechner

When I was a child I loved my colouring in and connecting the dots books...especially the latter. Much to the consternation of my teachers I seemed to have had more fun colouring outside the lines and connecting the wrong dots! Seeing pictures in inkblots and tea leaves were just as intriguing. Later in life came Fuzzy Logic and Quantum Entanglement! It's what Einstein called "spukhafte Fernwirkung – spooky action at a distance"!

Connecting the "Dots"

Synchronicity

For many years I have been conscious of synchronicities in my life. They have become a fascination. Some have been quite dramatic. Many can testify to their own experiences. Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, who coined the term, wrote....

Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers. ~ C. G. Jung, I Ching or The Book of Changes (Richard Wilhelm, translator)

In a way, the "Ichthys Cybernetics" logo above embodies something of this enchantment. The fish emblem derives from Garvie heraldry whereas the scallop shell from Methodism. They come together in my logo. I see it as the conjunction or coincidence of two beautiful marine symbols full of historical meaning, spiritual import, and personal significance. See my blog "Of Sprats and Scallops".

Asynchronicity

The fish-scallop logo is not a synchronicity in the strict sense which implies a meaningful coincidence of something in time. Instead, here is something that occurs across time. Perhaps we can call them "asynchronicities", that is, "meaningful connections not occurring or existing at the same moment".

In cybernetics or information processing, engineers also speak of synchronous and asynchronous modes of transmission of information. This could well apply to biological and psychological systems such as in cognitive processes. Asynchronicities are "happenstances" sprawled across space and time such as when say, something written years ago, suddenly "jumps out at one" now. Sometimes it is called the "see (or catch) you later effect". "Instant Messaging" might not always be instant!

The phases of the Moon illustrates what we mean by synchronicity and asynchronicity. New Moon and Full Moon are synchronous moments when Sun, Moon, and Earth align or coincide. These are numinous moments of considerable awe. Sometimes, however, the coincidence is such that we have something very special occurring, a portend, which we then experience as either a lunar or solar eclipse.

Asynchronicity, on the other hand, are all those phases in between the News and the Fulls, including First and Last Quarters...the "boredom and pain" times of Buechner. While eclipse moments are striking and momentous they are no more meaningful than every other stage of the Moon in its endless rounds around the Earth. Each moment evokes its own emotion and vibes. Like the Seasons of the Sun, Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter we have here one of the most ancient of cosmic quarternities:

First Quarter

New Moon + Full Moon

Last Quarter

Here is another personal example of what I've called an asynchronicity...dots along the road of my life. It has been a source of much wonder and pleasure for me...

baKoni Ruins

baKoni Ruins (Photo: Google Earth)

As a child I grew up in an mysterious region near Machadorp called the baKoni Ruins. The hills around the area are terraced with thousands of ancient stone walls which form part of a vast complex of settlements, fields and roads. Traditional archaeologists and historians believe the ruins were settlements of the baKoni people going back to at least the early 18th century. Recently, others such as Michael Tellinger, have suggested that these ruins are far more ancient than supposed.

Boskop Man

Boskop Man compared to a Modern Human Skull

Later as a teenager I found myself at school in Potchefstroom where, at nearby Boskop, fossils of the so-called "Boskop Man" were discovered in 1913. The fossils have long mystified anthropologists and palaeontologists. The unusually large endocranial volume of 1800 ml led to considerable speculation round who this mysterious big-brain Boskop Man was?

Kromdraai

Kromdraai (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On leaving school I worked at the Hartebeesthoek Tracking Station in an area that is today called the "Cradle of Humankind" near the famous fossil hominid sites at Kromdraai and the Sterkfontein Caves. It is a region that has caught the imagination of the human family.

Just three of some of the asynchronous serial events in my early life, baKoni-Boskop-Kromdraai, that profoundly affected me. It engendered an interest in astrobiology and the origin of humans. I often wondered why this repetition of subliminal circumstance in my life? Was it providential? Chance? Kismet? Prejudice might have unconsciously made me connect dots in my life's journey that really had no common, causal relationship at all. While it might have no significance for others, for me it was a clarion call no less compelling than the repeated call on the life of the boy Samuel at Shiloh...

One night, around the age of 13, Samuel heard a voice calling his name. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Samuel was about 12 years old. He initially assumed it was coming from Eli and went to Eli to ask what he wished to say. Eli, however, sent Samuel back to sleep. After this happened three times Eli realized that the voice was God's, and instructed Samuel on how to respond.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel

Confirmation Bias

Critics correctly speak of "selection bias", "sample bias", "confirmation bias", and many other "cognitive bias" fallacies. The discerning mind must certainly bear these in mind when determining the truth of any hypothesis.

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

While my early fortuitous exposure to at least three fascinating pre-history locations is a good example of "confirmation bias" it cannot be argued that for me personally they had a formative significance and had deeply affected me. It had the effect of opening me up to a sense and awareness of wonder, destiny, providence, and vocation.

I would therefore agree with Dimension1111.com that...

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs. Many critics believe that any evidence for synchronicity is due to confirmation bias, and nothing else.

Wolfgang Pauli, a scientist who in his professional life was severely critical of confirmation bias, lent his scientific credibility to support the theory, coauthoring a paper with Jung on the subject. Some of the evidence that Pauli cited was that ideas which occurred in his dreams would have synchronous analogs in later correspondence with distant collaborators.

Meaning

Sometimes, the dots we connect or the way we string words together, no matter how surprising or disconnected, may open doors or take us down roads less travelled, roads that we may never have explored or even considered before. Asynchronicities become a means of meaning and sometimes a means of grace as we press or project patterns and order upon the chaos and confusion that seeks to engulf us.

I am reminded of William Cowper's beautiful hymn...

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea

And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never failing skill

He treasures up His bright designs

And works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy and shall break

In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;

The bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err

And scan His work in vain;

God is His own interpreter,

And He will make it plain.

oOo

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

The Coming Solar Storm

2013-08-17T07:38:00.000+02:00

As humans we depend on the light of the Sun. The astrological Sun feeds our vitality and quality of being, and when there is a solar storm or a coronal mass ejection we are affected here on earth. Cosmic rays disrupt the electrical systems on earth, and as humans we are surrounded by an elecromagnetic grid that can be affected by solar changes.

- http://astrodynamics.net/astrologicalmusings/2013/08/06/the-suns-magnetic-field-is-about-to-flip/

"Every particle of rock or water or air has God by its side leading it the way it should go; The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness; In God's wildness is the hope of the world."

-John Muir, Travels in Alaska

"I am an attendant of the sovereign Sun... A vehement love for the splendors of this god took possession of me from my youth; in consequence of which, while I was a boy, my rational part was ravished with astonishment as often as I surveyed his etherial light; nor was I alone desirous of stedfastly beholding his diurnal splendors, but likewise at night, when the heavens were clear and serene, I was accustomed to walk abroad, and, neglecting every other concern, to gaze on the beauty of the celestial regions with rapturous delight: indeed I was so lost in attentive vision...."

-Julian the Apostate, Oration to the Sovereign Sun

“...he would be able to look at the Sun and contemplate its nature, not as it appears when reflected in water or any alien medium, but as it is in itself in its own domain....And now he would begin to draw the conclusion that it is the Sun that produces the seasons and the course of the year and controls everything in the visible world, and moreover is in a way the cause of all that he and his companions used to see.”

-Plato, Allegory of the Cave, Republic, 516ff)

"Our motion is regulated by some measure of the amount by which it has not yet been accomplished."

-NorbertWiener, Cybernetics, p.116

Sunrise in Sunningdale (Photo CG Garvie)

Some Sundays, despite my love for worship, I would rather want to walk the beach or simply listen to the scheduled "Radio Amateur News Bulletin" than suffer spartan benches and discordant music!

I am a licensed Radio Amateur (ZR5ADZ). Not an active one but a philosophical one, one that constantly monitors the 2 metre bands networking with an invisible band of channellers. I even have an Android application (Echolink) to communicate worldwide (or should I say, after Bucky Fuller, "world-around"?) using my smartphone! Some regard "hams" as a somewhat esoteric breed of enthusiasts.

Last Sunday I did in fact tune in to the South African Radio League News broadcast and one item caught my attention. I was riveted. We are currently in the midst of a solar cycle peak. Solar Cycles and sunspots are a peculiar, ubiquitous interest of hams. Extreme arcane ghost-like concepts from electron holes to sunspots and even black holes interest us, indeed anything that has to do with propagation, transmission, or connectivity. Back to that news item....

SUN MAGNETIC POLES READY TO REVERSE

SARL NEWS SUNDAY 11 AUGUST 2013

According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to turn over. The Sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as our home star's inner magnetic field generator reorganizes itself signalling the mid-point of a Solar Cycle.

Todd Hoeksema is the Director of Stanford's Wilcox Solar Observatory which is one of the few that monitor the sun's polar magnetic fields. He says that we are no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal and that this change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system. This is because of the Sun's magnetic influence, also known as the Heliosphere, which extends billions of kilometres beyond the minor planet Pluto and almost to interstellar space.

When solar physicists talk about solar field reversals they are also referring to something known as the Sun's Current Sheet. This is a sprawling surface jutting outward from its equator where it's slowly rotating magnetic field induces an electrical current. During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy. As Earth orbits the sun, it dips in and out of the current sheet. Transitions from one side to another can stir up stormy space weather around our planet which in turn can affect radio propagation to some degree.

As the field reversal approaches, data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory shows that the sun's two hemispheres are out of synch. According to Solar Physicist Phil Scherrer the Sun's North Pole has already changed sign, while the South Pole is racing to catch up. Soon both poles will be reversed, and the second or downhill half of Solar Max will be underway. For amateur radio it likely means that good DX openings especially on the higher bands could be fewer and far in-between.

What caught my attention was the remark, "..... this change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system." Disturbing, apocalyptic language, as this may sound, there is nothing to be alarmed about really. I myself have lived through six such flips already and have happily survived....May 1947, March 1958, November 1968, December 1979, July 1989, March 2000, and now August 2013! Of interest to radio amateurs, of course, is the effect of solar activity on propagation, communications, and electronic equipment. Cosmologists, Astronomers, Astronauts, Electrical Engineers, Neurologists, Psychologists even Astrologers and Homing Pigeons are interested in these solar rhythms too. Perhaps Cybernauts and Theologians should be too. Every Sunday evening I religiously tune in to "Sterre en Planete" ("Stars and Planets) on RadioRSG to get the week's update on what is up with the Sun. Julian the Apostate would be impressed by my devotion!

Magnificent CME_Eruption (Wikimedia Commons)

Little ripples can have humongous consequences but we are not expecting Earth to be toasted to a crisp this time round. These ripples are relatively subtle. Your GPS might be out of kilter for a bit so watch where you are going. The Internet might go down here and there much to the annoyance cyber junkies. There could be a power outage like the New York blackout of 1977. ATMs might be uncooperative. But the Solar Flip does not have to be a conflagration. It could be a joyful, expansive jubilation moment, a time of illumination. Clement of Alexandria said: “The healthful Word or Reason (the Logos), who is the Sun of the soul...has risen within the depths of the mind, the soul's eye is illuminated” (Exhortation to the Greeks 6). In the Hermetic Corpus we find: “But when the Sun did rise for me, and with all-seeing eyes I gazed upon the hidden [mysteries] of that New Dawn...” (Virgin of the World, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, III,60). Let us see where the ripples takes us.

We touched on this in my previous blog about "Trim Tab"Fuller.

We talk about feedback loops, chain reactions, the butterfly effect, cybernetics, governors , or servo control systems. Positive feedback leads to a self-amplifying chain of events while negative feedback have a dampening effect. Jesus may also have alluded to small effects with massive outcomes when he spoke of the mustard seed and the leaven in the lump.

For instance, in Stellar Physics the theory is that a remarkable magnetic braking system controls, governs, or regulates stellar effects such as the angular momentum of a star including our Sun. Mysterious mechanisms shields us from harmful bombardments. All parts of a complex but delicately balanced control system.

Coronal Mass Ejection (Wikimedia Commons)

We know that solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), if directed earthwards can knock out entire power grids. Could they not also impact on our behaviour? Do we flare up in sympathy with solar activity? There is considerable evidence that we do! These are called "circadian rhythms". Inasmuch as some might be moonstruck we can also be solstruck. One might even speculate whether there are magnetic braking systems governing our own physical and psychological well being at molecular DNA levels ensuring balance and equilibrium in harmonious resonance with the Sun and/or even the Galaxy as Plato deduced: “the Sun … controls everything in the visible world.”

Dr Robert Becker said back in 1963: Subtle changes in the intensity of the geomagnetic field can affect the nervous system by altering the living body's own electromagnetic field." (Newsweek, 13 May 1963). Changes elsewhere in distant galaxy pulsates through us affecting and effecting us in subliminal ways modulating waves as they pass through us. We are an intrinsic element in a vast cosmic self-adapting ocean.

MichelGauquelin of the Psychophysiological Laboratory at Strasbourg University in 1966 wrote:

....the sun is responsible for a mass of strange effects which seem to influence all of life on this sphere through the weather, the atmosphere, and magnetic disturbances.

However, perhaps not all cosmic effects on earth come from the sun and the moon. There remains in the universe a huge field of influences which have yet to be explored: the influence of galactic forces, the disturbing influence of planets in the solar field, cosmic rays coming from distant space, and no doubt many other things which we know nothing about at the moment. When we do know more, we will understand better what goes on between the sky and ourselves.

(Astrology and Science, p.199)

More recent studies have refined these assumptions.

Jo A Joselyn in a paper, "The impact of solar flares and magnetic storms on humans" says:

Solar flares may disrupt radio communications in the HF and VLF ranges. Energetic particles pose a special hazard at low-earth orbit and above, where they can penetrate barriers such as spacesuits and aluminum and destroy cells and solid state electronics. Energetic solar particles also influence terrestrial radio waves propagating through polar regions. Magnetic storms may disturb the operation of navigation instruments, power lines and pipelines, and satellites; they give rise to ionospheric storms which affect radio communication at all latitudes. There is also a growing body of evidence that changes in the geomagnetic field affect biological systems.

Sometimes our chronobiological clocks might miss a beat or two in sympathy with the Sun.

Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell "became profoundly aware that each and every atom in the Universe was connected in some way, and on seeing Earth from space he had an understanding that all the humans, animals and systems were a part of the same thing, a synergistic whole. It was an interconnected euphoria," says Ian O'Neill in an article "The Human Brainin Space: Euphoria and the 'Overview Effect' Experienced byAstronauts".

One need not be a Moon Astronaut to experience this "interconnected euphoria". It can be enjoyed equally in the woods and desert places of our own planet. Naturalist, John Muir wrote: "When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." Visiting Yosemite he wrote, "We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us."

In short...the solar cycle has a direct effect on humans. There could be solar butterflies affecting emotional tornadoes in our minds and behaviour on our streets, in our universities, temples, mosques, synagogues and churches. Possibly the Arab Spring has its wells on far distant planets or deep within the magnetic poles of the Sun.

So hang on to your hats and sunblocks, take off your shirt and feel the Sun...you never know precisely when the Sun will flip your mind!

Sunset in Sunningdale (Photo: CG Garvie)

Further Reading:

"Trim Tab" Buckminster Fuller

2013-08-09T19:00:00.001+02:00

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trim Tab.

-Designer and Inventor Buckminster Fuller, Playboy, February 1972

The Grave of Buckminster Fuller (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Genealogy, and by extension biography, has always fascinated me and in many respects changed me, opening up surprising new worlds and insights for me. Reflecting back I notice I tend to be attracted for some unknown reason to more unusual, extraordinary, off-beat personalities. One of these is American creative thinker, inventor and designer, Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983). So I felt a little “trim tab tribute” to "Bucky" Fuller should feature sometime as I muse here about small feedback influences with huge effects in my "cybernetic" (from the Greek, kubernesis, meaning "a rudder") blogs.* Trim tabs work much like the butterfly effect in Chaos Theory and Automatic Frequency Control in radios except that they are more controlled than random butterflies.

Out of the box thinker, Buckminster Fuller, is probably best remembered for popularising the notion of "Spaceship Earth". In 1968 he published his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in which he laments the exploitation of Earth's resources...

...we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions.

Fifty years later and our “bank account” is in overdraft and we are morally and spiritually bankrupt.

1927 (he was 32) was a crucial, crossroads, year in Fuller's life. He had hit rock bottom and was deeply depressed. He felt responsible for the death of his little daughter some ten years previous. He had lost his job and was financially ruined. He was at the end of his tether. He contemplated taking his life so that his family could benefit from a life insurance policy. He found himself a disappointed, broken man on the shores of Lake Michigan when out of the blue he had an extraordinary life changing experience.

LloydSteven Sieden relates this amazing story in his, Buckminster Fuller's Universe: His Life and Work:

After several hours of internal debate over the question "Buckminster Fuller - life or death," Bucky was suddenly seized by an experience which would transform his life and his overall perception forever. As he would later recall, he experienced what he thought was the most significant of many seemingly mystical events which occurred throughout his life. During almost all of the lectures which followed that experience, he would recount that he had unexpectedly found himself suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a "sparkling white sphere of light." During the incident, time appeared to stop while he listened to a voice speaking directly to him. Although the experience was difficult for the pragmatic Fuller to accept as reality, he remembered not resisting and allow himself to savor it fully. Because of that, he was able to remember the exact words he heard. The voice declared, "From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth." It continued, "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others." Although we will never know if that "voice" was simply Fuller's inner thoughts or some higher guidance, it did result in a vastly transformed individual.

It was an epiphany that changed the course of his life. Henceforth he sought to live such that others would benefit.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow called such moments of unexpected grace, "peak experiences”. Rationally inexplicable, we suspend judgement and marvel contemplating such life transfiguring, "Damascus Road" experiences with a sense of overwhelming awe and wonder.

I have advocated journaling as a spiritual discipline but Fuller deliberately took the practice to extremes. He wrote what he called his "Dymaxion Chronofile" in which he sought to record every fifteen minutes of his life from 1920 to 1983! It is the ultimate personal scrapbook! He said, "I decided to make myself a good case history of such a human being and it meant that I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record" (Oregon Lecture #9, p.324, 12 July 1962). His diary rivals everything envisaged by Pepys and John Wesley!

Spaceship Earth at Epcot, Walt Disney World, a Fuller Geodesic Sphere.

(Wikimedia Commons)

An idiosyncrasy was the manner in which Fuller wrote and spoke sometimes "levitating" us out of our own traditional comfort zones. He invented words and used neologisms with dramatic koan like effect. “Dymaxion” was a word that came to be associated with Fuller and his designs. He readily adopted it as a personal trademark. It was a portmanteau of "dynamic maximum tension" and was so descriptive of his life and work. Wikipedia explains his mind-shifting language further...

Buckminster Fuller spoke and wrote in a unique style and said it was important to describe the world as accurately as possible....

Fuller used the word Universe without the definite or indefinite articles (the or a) and always capitalized the word. Fuller wrote that "by Universe I mean: the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) Experiences."

The words "down" and "up", according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words "in" and "out" should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object's relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. "I suggest to audiences that they say, 'I'm going "outstairs" and "instairs."' At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real 'reality.'"

"World-around" is a term coined by Fuller to replace "worldwide". The general belief in a flat Earth died out in Classical antiquity, so using "wide" is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth —a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. Other neologisms collectively invented by the Fuller family, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder, are the terms "sunsight" and "sunclipse", replacing "sunrise" and "sunset" to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics.

Fuller was not simply a stickler for precision. He was wanting us to rise above old, dated, confining paradigms and be caught up in life transforming orbs of light ourselves. Such are the minds, thoughts, and experiences of others that have not only amused me in the course of my own life but also inspired me to realise that there is much more to being human than simply a constricted Space-Time-Energy-Mass (STEM) Box prisoner of circumstance and misfortune. Huge is the impact of a singular life upon another that in time reverberates down the generations with awesome tidal consequences and outcomes.

A Geodesic Sphere (Wikimedia Commons)

oOo

* Along these lines I commend the South African based novel of BryceCourtenay, The Power of One...another story I resonate with.

Acknowledgement:

Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Immensity!

2013-08-07T17:48:00.000+02:00

However one might imagine the cosmic immensity, God is present at every discrete point, from the smallest speck, the tiniest sparrow, every niche of time and space, to the uttermost parts of the seas and heavens, and unknown galaxies.

-Thomas C Oden, John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity, p.34

Viewed from the being of God as holy love, omnipresence means nothing less than the ability of divine love to maintain itself everywhere unhindered by limitations of space.

-Albert Truesdale, A Contemporary Wesleyan Theology, Vol.1, p.126

The Andromeda Galaxy (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In my previous blog, "Awesome!", I reflected on the immensity of space and by implication, of time. I wondered, where does God fit in this picture? Can we even apply "where questions" to God? Can we even ask a question such as, "Where is the Universe?" Dr Albert Truesdale reminds us that, "God's omnipresence has nothing to do with how a physical entity can nevertheless be unbounded by spatial restrictions. God is Spirit..." (ibid.) Whatever, instead of negating our understanding of God, our new cosmologies and biologies have served to enhance and enrich theology tremendously. I agree with Kit Pedler...

I began to study the works of people with legendary names: Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger and Dirac. I found that here were not clinical and detached men, but people and religious ones who imagined such unfamiliar immensities as to make what I have referred to as the 'paranormal' almost pedestrian by comparison. (Kit Pedler, Mind Over Matter, p.11)

In relation to the universe three attributes of God comes to mind: Infinity, Eternity, and Immensity. Much of my own theological understanding of God has its roots in Wesleyan theology. I agree with John Wesley where he says in his sermon, "The Imperfection of Human Knowledge"...

...our desire of knowledge has no bounds, yet our knowledge itself has. It is, indeed, confined within very narrow bounds; abundantly narrower than common people imagine, or men of learning are willing to acknowledge: A strong intimation, (since the Creator doeth nothing in vain,) that there will be some future state of being, wherein that now insatiable desire will be satisfied, and there will be no longer so immense a distance between the appetite and the object of it.

...

Who is able to comprehend how God is in this and every place how he fills the immensity of space? If philosophers, by denying the existence of a vacuum, only meant that there is no place empty of God, that every point of infinite space is full of God, certainly no man could call it in question. But still, the fact being admitted what is omnipresence or ubiquity Man is no more able to comprehend this, than to grasp the universe. The omnipresence or immensity of God, Sir Isaac Newton endeavours to illustrate by a strong expression, by terming infinite space, "the Sensorium of the Deity."

We occupy a minuscule sliver of time (three score years and ten of 14-billion) and a mere wedge of space (a speck in the vastness of an immeasurable universe), aware of only a very tiny slice of the full electro-magnetic spectrum of light. We are severely confined creatures!

Another of John Wesley's sermons is his homily "On the Omnipresence of God", or what he terms the "ubiquity of God." In the homily Wesley addresses deistic tendencies, the idea that the Creator is remote or absent from creation. Wesley argues that however immense the universe might be, that God is all pervasive, immanent in time and space. Contemporary theologians sometimes describes this as “panentheism”. Wikipedia defines panentheism as “a belief system which posits that the divine interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it.” Church of the Nazarene/Methodist theologian Thomas Jay Oord advocates panentheism, but he prefers the word "theocosmocentrism".

Dated 1788, I still find Wesley's sermon, despite the limited scientific knowledge of the time, refreshingly contemporary:

The Macrocosm

God is in this, and every place. The Psalmist, you may remember, speaks strongly and beautifully upon it in the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm; observing in the most exact order, First, "God is in this place;" and Then, "God is in every place." He observes, First, "Thou art about my bed, and about my path, and spiest out all my ways." (Ps. 139:3.) "Thou hast fashioned me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me." (Ps. 139:5) Although the manner thereof he could not explain; how it was he could not tell. "Such knowledge," says he, "is too wonderful for me: I cannot attain unto it." (Ps. 139:6) He next observes, in the most lively and affecting manner, that God is in every place. "Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit, or whither shall I go from thy presence If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; if I go down to hell, thou art there also.'(Ps. 139:7, 8.) If I could ascend, speaking after the manner of men, to the highest part of the universe, or could I descend to the lowest point, thou art alike present both in one and the other. "If I should take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there thy hand would lead me," -- thy power and thy presence would be before me, -- "and thy right hand would hold me,' seeing thou art equally in the length and breadth, and in the height and depth of the universe.

In a word, there is no point of space, whether within or without the bounds of creation, where God is not. ...The universal God dwelleth in universal space.

The Microcosm

If we may dare attempt the illustrating this a little farther, what is the space occupied by a grain of sand, compared to that space which is occupied by the starry heavens? It is as a cipher; it is nothing; it vanishes away in the comparison. What is it, then, to the whole expanse of space, to which the whole creation is infinitely less than a grain of sand? And yet this space, to which the whole creation bears no proportion at all, is infinitely less in comparison of the great God than a grain of sand, yea, a millionth part of it, bears to that whole space.

God acts in heaven, in earth, and under the earth, throughout the whole compass of his creation; by sustaining all things, without which everything would in an instant sink into its primitive nothing; by governing all..... having a regard to the least things as well as the greatest; of his presiding over all that he has made, and governing atoms as well as worlds. This we could not have known unless it had pleased God to reveal it unto us himself. Had he not himself told us so, we should not have dared to think that "not a sparrow falleth to the ground, without the will of our Father which is in heaven;" and much less affirm, that "even the very hairs of our head are all numbered!"

....

Omnipresent

If I remove to any distance whatever....to any conceivable or inconceivable distance; above, beneath, or on any side;, it makes no difference; thou art still equally there: In thee I still "live, and move, and have my being."

Empty Space

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud

Wikimedia Commons

And where no creature is, still God is there. The presence or absence of any or all creatures makes no difference with regard to him. He is equally in all, or without all. Many have been the disputes among philosophers whether there be any such thing as empty space in the universe; and it is now generally supposed that all space is full. Perhaps it cannot be proved that all space is filled with matter. But the Heathen himself will bear us witness, Jovis omnia plena: "All things are full of God." Yea, and space exists beyond the bounds of creation (for creation must have bounds, seeing nothing is boundless, nothing can be, but the great Creator), even that space cannot exclude Him who fills the heaven and the earth....for it is well known, the Hebrew phrase "heaven and earth," includes the whole universe; the whole extent of space, created or uncreated, and all that is therein...

In extra-mundane space, (so to speak,) where we suppose God not to be present, we must, of course, suppose him to have no duration; but as it is supposed to be beyond the bounds of the creation, so it is beyond the bounds of the Creator's power. Such is the blasphemous absurdity which is implied in this supposition.

Of course this is a sermon and not a scientific treatise. Elsewhere Wesley reflects on the mysterious immensity of creation:

Wesley on the "Goldilocks Zone":

The Copernican System

That [God] who dispenses existence at his will, should multiply, extend, enlarge, and add a kind of immensity to his works, is not properly what surprises me; at least my amazement is chiefly founded on my own extreme littleness. But what astonishes me most, is to see, that notwithstanding this my extreme littleness, he has vouchsafed to regulate his immense works, by the advantages I was to receive from them! Thus he has placed the sun just at such a distance from the earth on which I was lodged, that it might be near enough to warm me, yet not so near as to set it on fire.

-John Wesley, A Compendium of Natural Philosophy, VOL. III.p.253

Wesley on the "immensity of the great chain of beings":

Great Chain of Being. Retorica Christiana, written by Didacus Valdes in 1579

Between the lowest and highest degree of corporeal and spiritual perfection, there is an almost infinite number of intermediate degrees. The result of these degrees composes the universal chain. This unites all beings, connects all worlds, comprehends all the spheres. One SOLE BEING is out of this chain, and that is HE that made it.

A thick cloud conceals from our sight the noblest parts of this immense chain, and admits us only to a slight view of some ill-connected links, which are broken,and greatly differing from the natural order.

We behold its winding course on the surface of our globe, see it pierce into its entrails, penetrate into the abyss of the sea, dart itself into the atmosphere, sink far into the celestial spaces, where we are only able to descry it by the flashes of fire it emits hither and thither.

But notwithstanding our knowledge of the chain of beings is so very imperfect, it is sufficient at least to inspire us with the most exalted ideas of that amazing and noble progression and variety which reign in the universe.

-John Wesley, A Compendium of Natural Philosophy, Vol IV, p.60

Since Wesley there has been an eruption of knowledge. Our knowledge is still severely imperfect.

Wesley concluded his sermon of 1788 with this mindful application which is as applicable today as it was in the 18th Century:

If you believe that God is about your bed, and about your path, and spieth out all your ways, then take care not to do the least thing, not to speak the least word, not to indulge the least thought, which you have reason to think would offend him. Suppose that a messenger of God, an angel, be now standing at your right hand, and fixing his eyes upon you, would you not take care to abstain from every word or action that you knew would offend him Yea, suppose one of your mortal fellow-servants, suppose only a holy man stood by you, would not you be extremely cautious how you conducted yourself, both in word and action How much more cautious ought you to be when you know that not a holy man, not an angel of God, but God himself, the Holy One "that inhabiteth eternity," is inspecting your heart, your tongue, your hand, every moment; and that he himself will surely bring you into judgement for all you think, and speak, and act under the sun!

Acknowledgements:

Charles Carter Ed., A Contemporary Wesleyan Theology
Thomas C Oden, John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity

H Orton Wiley and Paul T Culbertson, Introduction to Christian Theology.

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Awesome!

2013-08-05T20:08:00.000+02:00

Here, in the dark immensity of the of the heavens, we shall meet with glories beyond description and witness scenes of inexpressible splendor. In the great black gulfs of space and in the realm of the innumerable stars, we shall find mysteries and wonders undreamed of.

-Astronomer Robert Burnham, Celestial Handbook, Vol.1, p.13.

What are the odds that we are alone in the universe?

I was but a toddler growing up on a farm called "Gemakstroom" (Afr. Comfortstream) in the foothills of "Skurweberg" (Afr. Rough Mountain) when one dark starry night my father took me up in his arms and we went outside to show me what I think was supposed to be a lunar eclipse. I had no idea what he was on about. How could I? I was hardly three! To say it was incomprehensible is putting it mildly.

Now that I am almost 70 it is no less incomprehensible. Louie Giglio rightly says it is "indescribable"! Then he is only scratching the surface of what our limited intellectual capacity can grasp. We hardly apprehend even the minutest sliver of the undefinable reality in which we “live and move and have our being”.

View Louie Giglio's "Indescribable"

I am presently engaged in a course in "Mathematical Philosophy" grappling with the notion of infinity. Needless to say I cannot even begin to wrap my mind round what the lecturer is trying to explain despite his assurance that high school math will suffice! I cannot even begin to comprehend the magnitude and magnificence of the universe. It defies our best descriptions and formulations.

The Psalmist exclaims...

The heavens declare the glory of God, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork, day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge. No utterance at all, no speech, not a sound to be heard, but from the entire earth the design stands out, this message reaches the whole world. High above, he pitched a tent for the sun, who comes forth from his pavilion like a bridegroom, delights like a champion in the course to be run. (Psa 19:1-5 NJB)

As we know, our sun is but a star, one of many billions of stars. I once sat on Battery Beach in Durban with my teeny-bopper grandson, Dane. Taking a handful of beach sand in my hand with grains streaming through my fingers I asked, "Dane, how many grains of sand?" "Billions!" he replied. "And how many grains of sand on Battery Beach and all the beaches in our world?" I pressed. I knew he intended to become a marine biologist one day. "Uncountable!" he told me somewhat pleased with himself. I then said something stupid like, "Dane, do you know that there are more stars out there than all the grains of sand on the beaches of planet earth?" I didn't think I was exaggerating. Even John Wesley anticipated this great vastness when he wrote, "This assemblage of vast bodies is divided into different systems, the number of which perhaps exceeds the grains of sand which the sea casts on its shores" (John Wesley, Compendium of Natural Philosophy, Vol.IV, p.51). Totally befuddled and bewildered, all Dane could say was, "Bull!" That was pretty smart, I thought, an exclamation of sheer brilliance!

Dane was right. Later that night I pointed out to him the fascinating constellation of Taurus the Bull, rich in legend, myth, and religious tradition and significance which in ancient times marked the beginning of the course that our sun ran like a groom across the skies replete with "uncountable" stars. I pointed out the beautiful Pleiades in Taurus to which Dane's ancient Khoikhoi ancestors presented every new born Khoi baby. (See More Khoi Starlore...and Theology: The Pleiades.)

Age of Taurus the Bull

Equinox 4000BC (Stellarium)

The Sumerian high god Enki was referred to as "The Bull". The supreme deity of the Canaanites, El, was represented wearing a crown adorned with the horns of a bull. In the oldest of the Egyptian inscriptions, the Pyramid Texts, the king is addressed...

Behold, thou art the Enduring Bull of the wild bulls of the gods who are on earth...of the gods who are in the sky... Endure, O Enduring Bull, that you may be infinite in strength as the ruler of all, at the head of the spirits forever... (Quoted Robert Burnham, Burnham's Celestial Handbook, An Observer's Guid to the Universe Beyond the Solar System, Vol.3, p.1814)

In our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, there are estimated to be more than 100 billion stars! Many billion of these are "sun-like stars"

Carl Sagan also said, "Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours. In every one of them, there's a succession of incidence, events, occurrences which influence its future; countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time." (Cosmos, Episode 8, “Journeys in Space and Time” )

The Milky Way

Michael Moyer in Scientific American wrote:

Look up on a starry night. Almost every one of those tiny pricks of light is home to an unseen world. Our Milky Way galaxy is full of planets-100 billion or more-and many of those planets are Earth-like rocks (although our solar system still appears to be an oddball).

An estimated 17 billion. "Almost all sun-like stars have a planetary system," said Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Fressin's research indicates that about one in six stars is home to a rocky, Earth-like planet.

We are just talking about our galaxy explains Michael Moyer....

John Johnson of the California Institute of Technology says that Red Dwarfs make up 70 percent of all stars in the galaxy, and these are absolutely full of planets. We can estimate that the Milky Way is home to at least 100 billion planets. "Our solar system is rare among the galaxy's population of planetary systems," says Johnson, "because our star is not a red dwarf." But with 100 billion possibilities to choose from, who would bet that there's one not like us peering back through that darkness?

It boggles the imagination. We can not even begin to appreciate the number of possible earth-like planets swirling around out there. However, there is more! There are universes, how shall we say? Universes within universes ad infinitum!

According to an article in National Geographic entire universes exist tucked away within so-called "black holes"! Our universe may be in such a hidden tuck of another. At our own galactic centre is a black hole too that could well be a portal to another universe!

Our Galactic Centre (Photo: NASA JPL)

A supermassive black hole resides in the bright white area, right of the center.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Center_of_the_Milky_Way_Galaxy_IV_%E2%80%93_Composite.jpg

Ker Than writing for National Geographic News says, "Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe. In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe-from the microscopic to the supermassive-may be doorways into alternate realities.

This is a remarkable theory which, though Dane is now 21, I still hesitate even to mention to him!

The psalmist harps...

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. (Psa 8:3-5 KJV)

...and I begin to wonder and ask myself, "Who then are the angels, the "elohim," of whom the psalmist sings?" Clearly in his mind we are not alone in the universe, we cannot be the only form of intelligent life in a universe so indescribably and infinitely vast. If there be such diversity of “wonders undreamed of” out there, how much more then, the diversities of all the hosts of heaven and the imponderable “glories beyond description”!

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

"Very deep is the well of the past" -Thomas Mann

2013-08-03T12:05:00.000+02:00

“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp, amounts to indescribable awe sometimes. Everything seems to be full of God's reflex, if we could but see it. Oh, how I, have prayed to have the mystery unfolded, at least hereafter! To see, if but for a moment, the whole harmony of the great system! To hear once the music which the whole universe makes as it performs His bidding.
-Charles Kingsley, His Life and Letters, I, 55

As a boy we lived within a stone's throw of the legendary Bourke's Luck Potholes at the Blyde River Canyon in South Africa. It was one of my favourite childhood haunts. The awesome potholes were named after a persistent prospector and gold digger named Tom Bourke who in the 1880s discovered signs of alluvial gold in the canyon in the late 1880s. He quickly staked a claim and began to pan for gold. Sadly, his claim did not yield a single ounce of gold, while other prospectors in the area struck it rich. However, the legend lived on.

Bourke's Luck Potholes (Wikimedia Commons)

The Elusive Nature of History

History is thought by some to be a factual account or chronicle of past events, of both fortune and misfortune. However this is not so, history is but an interpretation (or misrepresentation) of something which in itself is mysterious, elusive, and undefinable like a morning mist that has transpired. It is a narrative or report of events through the lens of a mind not my own, an author, an interpreter, an editor, or an observer. It is impossible to represents events as they had actually occurred or were. At best history is a means of gazing out across the vast vistas of time through the eyes of another. We can never get a grip on reality as it is, without interfering with it. On the micro level this is known as (or confused with) Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. In Physics it is called the Observer Effect. Entropy sets in with time the moment conscious experience slips further and deeper into an abyss of unconscious oblivion.

Quantum Physics contorts our linear concept of future, present, and past even more to a point where we may literally not know whether we are coming or going we get so “entangled”. Stephen Hawking suggests we could conceivably warp time-space sufficiently to arrive back to somewhere before we started and even modify histories in ways never dreamed of before. (See A Brief History of Time.) Now that could be a lot of fun with a new class of holographic and cybernetic therapists and shamans, avatars, emerging doing fixit or hatchet jobs on our behalf! Historian Michael Parenti unravels the record of the past in his History as Mystery exposing the ideological agendas that invariably underlie our history books and scriptures that then seek to inform or reconstruct our futures.

Historia, by Nikolaos Gysis (1892)

Folk-Lore, Legend, Mythology

Is 9/11 history, folk-lore, legend, or mythology? There are already elements of all four wrapped in that awful but recent tragedy. The historicity of events such as the Lunar Landings and the Holocaust are now being questioned by a new generation that never experienced or can even imagine the likes of it ever happening despite the evidence of Martian Rovers and Modern Day Genocides. Historic events take on mythological dimensions with time. This applies especially to the more distant, so-called "pre-history" accounts recorded, say, in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Alphabets dwindle into hieroglyphs, pictograms and eventually neolithic doodlings left to scholars and specialists to decipher and interpret for us. It is all very hidden and occult.

Equally so the epics recorded in the ancient Sanskrit and Mayan texts. Such myths are stories generally not believed to be true, or at least not literally so, involving impossible adventures or supernatural, fabulous mythological creatures. Much of it is couched in poetry and romantic metaphors that isn't always literally true but instead, as it should be, poetic. Are the stories about Aladdin and his mysterious lamp and magic carpets, for instance, fact? Fantasy, perhaps? Or fiction? Yet, if it can be imagined could it not also be true? After all, it is a construct of a rational mind, is it not? Legends, on the other hand, are stories peoples tell about themselves, often with improbable, exaggerated elements. Folk-lore are usually oral traditions, kind of trans-generational gossip, handed down from one generation to another giving cohesion to a community or people.

Anthropologist and mythologist, James Frazer exposes his own prejudices (and mine) when he writes of the Old Testament:

The annals of savagery and superstition unhappily compose a large part of human literature; but in what other volume shall we find, side by side with that melancholy record, psalmists who poured forth their sweet and solemn strains of meditative piety in the solitude of the hills or in green pastures and beside still waters; prophets who lit up their beatific vision of a blissful future with the glow of an impassioned imagination; historians who bequeathed to distant ages the scenes of a remote past embalmed for ever in the amber of a pellucid style? These are the true glories of the Old Testament and of Israel; these, we trust and believe, will live to delight and inspire mankind, when the crudities recorded alike in sacred and profane literature shall have been purged away in a nobler humanity of the future. (James George Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, Studies in Comparative Religion Legend and Law, Abridged Edition, Preface.)

There is something enduring, “historic” if you like, in the ephemeral, truths that "delight and inspire".

It is likely that legends and mythologies do contain elements of historical fact. For instance, Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid. For many years scholars doubted that the Trojan Wars ever took place. Since the Heinrich Schliemann and Carl Blegen excavations, the existence of the ancient city of Troy proved that historical truth lay behind the legends and myths of these ancient places and poets. The Mycenaeans, the Hittites, Agamemnon, and Nestor are indeed historical realities from our mythological past. The same could be true of the mythologies of the ancient Sumerians and Hebrews. Similarly the Incas and Mayans and the fabulous stories of Credo Mutwa.

Even fiction can and does incorporate historical fact. It can be argued that even if Christ-Myth theories were valid and, heaven forbid, the Bible pure fiction, that there still remains an underlying and abiding authenticity in the Gospel stories of the New Testament that is far more true than conspiracy or a spurious eruption of the Collective Unconscious. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ-myth and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus.) Of course, to get to the core of the truth running through such stories takes a lot of digging, dredging, and reduction of the ore to extract the gold. (See "Reductionism".) By the same token we cannot simply take our daily newspaper or school history text books at face value. They carry a hidden agenda.

Euhemerus

The idea that mythologies might be based on actuality is called "euhemerism", so named after the ancient Greek mythographer Euhemerus. I first met Euhemerus through the writings of the Early Church historian, Eusebius. "The term euhemerism is derived from his name, and is the philosophy attributed to Euhemerus which holds that many mythological tales can be attributed to historical persons and events, the accounts of which have become altered and exaggerated over time" (Wikipedia). Euhemerus considered mythology to be "history in disguise." It is like when astute whistleblowers disguise fact in fiction. An extension of this can be found in prophetic writings such as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged where future fact is disguised as fiction. Similarly Star Trek, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, and John of the Apocalypse.

Eusebius cites Euhemerus...

With regard then to gods the men of old have handed down to their posterity two sets of notions. For some, say they, are eternal and imperishable, as the Sun and Moon and the other heavenly bodies, and besides these the winds, and the rest who partake of the like nature with them; for each of these has an eternal origin and eternal continuance. Other deities they say were of the earth; but, because of the benefits which they conferred on mankind, they have received immortal honour and glory, as Heracles, Dionysus, Aristaeus, and the others like them. (Eusebius, Praep. evan. ii.2.59B-61A)

"It is not at all correct to elevate any human being to the position of a god." ~ Nelson Mandela at home, Soweto, South Africa, February 1990

Mandela Window,Regina Mundi Church, Soweto

We have an innate tendency to deify and to mythologise. We transfigure our heroes. We are witnessing the deification of Nelson Mandela right now in the South African psyche contrary to Madiba's own aspirations. Googling "deification of Mandela" renders numerous instances of this peculiar phenomenon. (Eg. http://www.politicalworld.org/showthread.php?14420-Why-do-humans-deify-people.) There could yet come a time when we will even wonder whether Madiba ever existed in the sense that Prof. Gary Gutting recently asked "Did Zeus Exist?" We worship our rugby heroes such as Bryan Habana and idolize our celebrity stars like Charlize Theron projecting qualities of a Hercules to the one and the attributes of a Venus to the other. Then comes the day when Atlas shrugs and no longer wishes to carry the burden of the world systems on his shoulders.

Another somewhat extreme example of euhemerism is Sitchinism and the divinisation of the Sumerian sky-heros, the Sumerian trinity, Anu, Enlil, and Enki. In Zechariah Sitchin's view the Sumerian gods were historical personages, extra-terrestrials in fact, who visited Earth, created humans and returned to their home, Nibiru, from whence they will come again. Drawing largely on Sumerian mythology and Genesis 6 a New Age theology has evolved which, with apology to Ireneaus and others, could be summarised: "The sons of heaven became sons of earth in order that the children of earth might become children of heaven. Extraterrestrials became terrestrials so that terrestrials might become extraterrestrials." Here is a mythic elaboration of the Christian and ancient Greek doctrine of apotheosis, "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods" (Thomas Aquinas, Opusc. 57, 1-4 cf. 'If the Word has been made man, it is so that men may be made gods' (Ireneaus, Adv. Haer V, Pref.)

Enki (Wikimedia Commons)

The Enduring Essence of Mythology

Joseph Campbell, American mythologist, quotes Thomas Mann, "Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it bottomless? The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable" (Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p 5 from Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers).

Hans Schindler Bellamy wrote, "We must rather go to the mythologist, the quiet collector of 'cosmic fiction', who has not been taken seriously up till now, for the true meaning of the reports that have been handed down to us for time immemorial."
(Hans Schindler Bellamy, Moons, Myths and Man)

There is gold hidden in these ancient traditions, wells, and potholes. Tom Bourke for all his misfortune is remembered for his persistence. Legend has it that Tom struck it lucky when he found nuggets of alluvial gold in the potholes that now bear his name. The other gold diggers are largely forgotten and unknown. The young boy of Bourke's Luck would sit many hours and look out in sheer bliss across the deep gorge and geological sandglass of the Blyde River Canyon and ponder things as they were. "Very deep is the well of the past!" Such is the stuff our stories are made of. We must relentlessly pan the streams lest it slips through our fingers forever!

Blyde River Canyon. Photo CG Garvie

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Where do you come from?

2013-07-22T15:38:00.000+02:00

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the Universe 'peoples.' Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of Nature, a unique action of the total Universe.

-Alan Watts

Inside all of us lies a hidden history, the story of an immense journey told by our DNA. Deoxyribonucleic Acid is the biochemical molecule at the heart of the reproduction of all life, plants as well as animals. And since the discovery of its structure in 1953, scientists have pieced together the epic narrative of how human beings populated our planet.

-http://www.scotlandsdna.com/

Where do you come from?

"Cuimhnichibh air na daoine bho'n d'thainig sibh." ("Remember the people whom you come from." -Old Gaelic Proverb)

Some years ago I was persuaded to do a yDNA test for genealogical reasons. The primary object was to validate a Garvie family tradition that the Garvies of Perthshire were indeed descendants of John Garbh Maclean of Coll. I was curious. What did my yDNA tell me about my own "long journey"?

Like countless generations before me, I have been consumed by the questions, "Where have I come from? Why am I here? Why now?" I have approached these questions in previous blogs but I felt it was time to tackle the topic again.

When I first read the introduction to Bill Bryson's, A Short History of Nearly Everything, I was transfixed reading the paragraph where he says...

"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of you forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly - in you."

I don't think anybody has said it better than that! Hence my interest in my ancestry and genealogy.

Close Genealogy
This much I knew of my paternal line with a certain degree of confidence: I was born in Ladysmith, Natal South Africa. My father was born in Johannesburg. His father, my grandfather, in Knysna. His father, my great grandfather, came from Aberdalgie in Perthshire, Scotland. His ancestors in turn, I learnt, came from Perth, Kinnoull, and Scone. The further back I went in time the more did my ancestral history merge into tradition and legend and increasingly, the mists of myth.

Perthshire tradition had it that the Garvies were descended from John Garbh, seventh MacLean of Coll, through one of his sons, probably John of Totronald. This son was wounded at the Battle of Inverkeithing in 1651, and did not return to Coll. His three sons (or grandsons) rented Upper Balgarvie, Lower Balgarvie, and Mill of Balgarvie in the parish of Scone, Perthshire from the Earl of Mansfield. Their descendants were tenants of Muirtown, Haggis Hall and several other farms near Perth.
(According to a letter from J C Garvie Macleod to the editor of the Oban Times, Spenthorn, West Park, Leeds. Date unknown. Also see A E Garvie, Memories and Meanings of My Life, 15.)

In Agents of Change, Scots in Poland 1800-1918 by Mona Kedslie McLeod (Tuckwell Press ISN#1 86232 081 0 ) page 116 we find...

"The Garvie brothers were descended from the Macleans of Coll. Backing the wrong side in the first Jacobite Rising of 1689, they forfeited their lands, adopted their nickname 'garbh', the Gaelic for rough or strong, and moved to Perthshire in search of a living. By the end of the eighteenth century Perth had become one of the centres of the developing linen industry and was enjoying a building boom..."

To date I had not found historical genealogical records to confirm this. I still wanted to know where I came from! So I resorted to DNA analysis. My yDNA Haplogroup turned out to be: R-M207 Subgroup: R1b1b2-M269

Y-chromosome DNA (yDNA) is a type of DNA that is only carried by men and is inherited directly from their fathers. Men who share a common paternal ancestor will have virtually the same yDNA, even if that male ancestor lived many generations ago. Theoretically then, sooner or later, as more data becomes available and more matches come to light I should be able to deduce whether there are Garvie links to the Hebrides and specifically to the Isle of Coll or not. Was it just accident that in a way I had come geographically full cycle and now stay where the last of the lairds of Coll died?...

Coll was home to a branch of the Clan Maclean for 500 years, not all of which were peaceful. In 1590 the Macleans of Duart invaded their cousins on Coll with the intention of taking the island for themselves. A battle was fought at Breachacha Castle where the Coll clan overwhelmed the Duarts, chopped off their heads and threw them in the stream, which is still known as "the stream of the heads". The Macleans of Coll retained their baronial fief and Castle of Breachacha until 1848 when Alexander Maclean of Coll emigrated to Natal, South Africa where he died unmarried.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coll

This more distant biological journey in time is as interesting and fascinating as that of my immediate documented ancestry. We carry within us the genetic material and possibly coded memories that go back to creation itself!

Deep Genealogy
When the last Ice Age began to abate ~13,000 years ago and living conditions slowly improved across Europe, localized populations migrated from west Asia R1b1b2-M269 moved primarily throughout western Europe, creating opposite geographic distributions which are still evident today. R1b1b2-M269 is found at very high frequencies (50-80%) throughout western Europe particularly the Celtic populations in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, especially the Hebrides. Geneticists are pretty sure about the broad details of this remarkable migration of Celts. It is reasonably well documented for instance in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA)#R1b1a2_.28R-M269.29

Even Deeper Genealogy
Haplogroup R is defined by a DNA marker known as M207. Everyone who carries this marker today descends from a common paternal ancestor who lived about 30,000 years ago in west Asia. To date, over thirty subclades of haplogroup R have been identified, of which, R1a1-M17 and R1b1b2-M269 (historically called R1b3) are the most well described. Both of these subgroups are indicators of European ancestry with haplogroup R1a1-M17 most representative of Eastern Europeans and R1b1b2-M269 most characteristic of Western Europeans. Originating in the regions of modern day Turkey I saw correlations with the Keltoi and the diaspora of nations alluded to in Genesis and Josephus.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Further back, as members of the human family, all people living today can trace their earliest paternal ancestors to populations that lived approximately 100,000 years ago in eastern Africa and possibly southern Africa described as the "Cradle of Humankind" where as providence had destined I would spend a number of years of my life working probing the night skies tracking spacecraft. These early humans became spread throughout the African continent, and beginning ~50,000 years ago, a series of complex migrations moved them out of Africa into regions of Asia and beyond to eventually populate every major area of the world.

Very Deep Genealogy
Some have suggested there might have been, startling as it may sound, an inter-galactic intervention at some time in the distant past or, possibly occurring all the time! Molecular biologists have been perplexed by segments of DNA that appear to be older than the Earth itself suggesting an origin beyond our Solar System.

Dr. Francis Crick, Nobel Prize Winner and one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule suggests in his book, Life Itself: Its Origins and Nature (1981), that primordial life was shipped to Earth in "spaceships" of some kind. Crick makes this startling proposition: "Life did not evolve first on Earth; a highly advanced civilization became threatened so they devised a way to pass on their existence. They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria or meteorites with the hope that it would collide with another planet. It did, and that's why we're here."

Terming his model "Directed Panspermia", Crick suggested that a "spaceship" carrying "large samples of... microorganisms" was sent to the Earth billions of years ago by an extraterrestrial civilisation - either as an experiment, preparation for colonisation or a genetic Noah’s Ark of some sort. (Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E. "Directed Panspermia", Icarus, 19, 341 (1973), quoted in David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight)

Zecharia Sitchin, at the other extreme, suggests a much later Mesopotamian intervention based on his reading of Sumerian texts and the first eleven chapters of Genesis, speculating in his Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries and elsewhere, that humans were biologically engineered about 6000 years ago. Sitchin's views, though no less extreme than Crick's, are generally disregarded by the scientific community but have become popular among the general public as evidenced by the unusual demand for his numerous writings.

Sumerian Version: Ningishzidda, Enki and Ninmah create Adamu

It is speculated by both rational scientists and mavericks that our DNA could be encoded with messages from these other civilizations. Ancestral memories par excellence, beyond our wildest dreams, could be encoded in our very DNA. Unknown cosmic entities may have programmed our genetic make-up so that when we reached a certain level of intelligence, we would be able to access this information, and they could therefore "teach" us about ourselves, and how to progress. (For more about so-called "Junk DNA" see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA. On "DNA Activation" see http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf.) Human DNA appears to be a lot more pliable (eg. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21091066) and mysterious (eg. the DNA Phantom Effect http://www.thescienceforum.com/biology/1144-dna-phantom-effect.html) than previously thought.

Photo: NASA

Though cautious in their conjectures and conclusions, exobiologists are now more and more convinced that not only could microorganisms proliferate throughout creation but that it is equally possible that actual alien life forms might have traveled from other worlds to Earth! The Universe could be teeming with life. Celestial life! Retired Senator John Glenn and former Astronaut once cryptically remarked...

Back in those glory days.... Some people asked....were you alone out there? We never gave the real answer, and yet we see things out there, strange things, but we know what we saw out there. And we couldn't really say anything. The bosses were really afraid of this, they were afraid of the War of the Worlds type stuff, and about panic in the streets. So we had to keep quiet. And now we only see these things in our nightmares or maybe in the movies, and some of them are pretty close to being the truth" (NBC TV 6th March 2001).

Potent words! Tongue in cheek? A Freudian slip? An intentional admission? (See http://www.enterprisemission.com/glenn.htm) Or are we standing on the very Threshold of an exciting new era, the Kingdom of Heaven itself? I would not be surprised! In fact, we always have!

At times I had to tread

Where not a star was found

To lead or light me, overhead;

Nor footprint on the ground.

I toiled among the sands

And stumbled with my feet;

Or crawled and climbed with knees and hands,

Some future path to beat.

-Gerald Massey, The Natural Genesis.

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

The Lost Documents of Coll

2013-07-18T12:45:00.000+02:00

The Lost Documents of Coll

[Hint: Increase Page View pressing Ctrl+ or Ctrl- to reduce it]

One hundred and fifty years after disappearing, rare and valuable documents of a Hebridean clan have been brought back to Scotland. When the island of Coll was sold in 1856, the Macleans, the lairds of Coll, were scattered across the globe. Recently, a large group of their family papers turned up in South Africa, and were acquired by Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, who lives in Breacachadh Castle on Coll in the Inner Hebrides.

-National Archives of Scotland, 5th June 2007

Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.

-Carl Jung

Macleans of Coll Crest Badge

Alexander Maclean passed away in 1875. Juliet Maclean Windham left Natal in 1884 and died in 1909. That did not mean that their connections with South Africa suddenly came to an end. Some of the children remained or returned to South Africa. If anything the mystery of the Coll family deepened and became even more intriguing. Shortly before I embarked in all seriousness in my search for the grave of Alexander Maclean, news broke that Clan Maclean of Coll documents that had strangely disappeared, had miraculously come to light in Port Elizabeth, South Africa! How these documents came to be in Port Elizabeth of all places is a story that is yet to be told by the custodians of these incredibly interesting papers.

The astonishing story of the "Long-lost clan papers brought back to Scotland after 150 years" can be read on the website of the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) at http://www.nas.gov.uk/about/070605.asp. The disappearance and recovery of the rare Coll papers is a story so amazing that I can hardly not draw attention to it. It too is replete with personal serendipities and synchronicities such as we observed in the accounts of Alexander Maclean and Juliet Maclean.

Genealogists Colin and Eleanor Garvie at the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh

I first became aware of the lost clan documents in the course of a discussion on the Maclean Forum in early August 2007. John Mclean emailed and assisted me considerably with information that I did not have....

Hello Colin

I read your letter with interest as I too am descended from the Coll family, though way back. Whilst not having any specific information on Alexander, I am inclined to believe that he may have emigrated to South Africa purely for financial reasons. The family were in a dire financial situation when he emigrated in 1849. The family mansion and estate "Druimfin House" on Mull was sold in 1846. The rest of the Estate was liquidated in 1855. The Laird Hugh moved to London and lived with his daughter Margaret until his death in 1861. Perhaps moving to South Africa with some assets prevented creditors from making a claim on it. Of course there must have been family or friends already there to make it attractive to him.

Another fascinating thing is the recent recovery of the Coll family papers which turned up in a house clearance sale in Port Elizabeth, Natal (sic). How did they get there and whose possession were they in? Nicholas Maclean-Bristol who bought them and took them back to Coll, claims his great-uncle saw them in 1897, so they presumably arrived in South Africa after that. The papers date from 1528-1927, so who added the later documents?

There is some interesting reading in the Celtic monthly newspapers of the early 1900s where there is some dispute regarding who is the proper representative of the Coll family. The Macleans of Crossapol seem to believe their claim is correct, as do the Macleans of Gallanach. Interestingly one of the writers states that some people have an interest in Coll not being represented at all. There appears to be some truth in this, as 100 years on, it still has not happened. The link to the index for these papers is http://www.electricscotland.com/history/celtic/index.htm ....

John

-John McClean, Email Re: MacLeans:His: Alexander MACLEAN, 16th MacLean of Coll, Natal. 5 Aug 2007

That was some six weeks before I acquired Juliet Maclean's Natal Diaries and located Alexander Maclean's grave in the West Street Cemetery in Durban.

Believing the reader will want to read the full story here I simply want to reflect on some of the fascinating coincidences.

The lost Clan papers are returned to Scotland, as was my acquistion of Juliet's "Natal Diaries"...after 150 years. "One hundred and fifty years after disappearing, rare and valuable documents of a Hebridean clan have been brought back to Scotland." I am left asking whether this was pure chance that these documents came to light at precisely the time the grave of Alexander Maclean was also located again and that exactly 150 years after Juliet's emigration to the Colony of Natal? Here was a synchronicity of profound import to me.

"By chance a British dealer spotted the lost papers in a house clearance sale in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. It turned out that some Macleans had emigrated to Natal after the estate was sold." As a genealogist I shudder to imagine had those "lost papers", including a royal charter of 1528, not been spotted by a "British dealer"! The words "by chance" is enough to send shivers of anxiety and dread down my spine had these priceless documents been dumped or had disappear as so often happens in clearance sales! What if had the dealer not chanced on the find?

Equally mysterious was the initial disappearance of these documents. "Fifty years ago, then a young officer in the King's Own Scottish Borderers stationed in Glasgow, [Coll historian, Nicholas Maclean-Bristol] asked the Scottish Record Office (as the National Archives of Scotland used to be known) to help him find the Maclean of Coll estate papers. They discovered a box in an Edinburgh solicitor’s office inscribed 'Maclean of Coll'. There was nothing in it. The papers had gone as salvage in the Second World War." An empty box! That raises so many questions. What had become of these papers? Who had taken them? When? And why? Salvaged?

One cannot overlook the timely presence and passion of Coll historian, Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, taking the initiative to research and restore Maclean history, revitalising an island community. The outcome has not only been the preservation of these vital historic documents but has also played an important role in the social quickening of young people's lives through his "Project Trust" that "has helped make the island one of the most dynamic communities in the Hebrides. The history of the Hebrides has... helped inspire a new generation in the United Kingdom to serve overseas and helped revive an island." In no small measure Nicholas Maclean-Bristol is fulfilling the collective dream and destiny of the Island of Coll. That too is synchronicity.

The National Archives of Scotland article both asks the question and hints at an answer: "What is the point of studying history?" Or genealogy, one may add. "Some people say that it is irrelevant to the 21st century. The tangible link between clan history and the modern life of an island provides one answer." The point of a synchronicity lies in that "tangible link" inherent in meaningful coincidental events!

References:
Synchronicity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
Alexander Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/in-search-of-forgotten-grave-alexander.html
Juliet Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/juliet-alexa-maclean-1826-1909-personal.html
Lost Clan Documents: http://www.nas.gov.uk/about/070605.asp
McLeans of Coll Home Page: http://www.mcleanofcoll.com
Project Trust: http://www.projecttrust.org.uk/Us.php?p=5

Bookplate of Alexander McLean of Coll

(See http://www.mcleanofcoll.com/)

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Juliet Alexa Maclean 1826 - 1909 - A Personal Serendipity

2013-07-17T12:27:00.000+02:00

"A Delightful Escape"

Juliet Alexa Maclean 1826 - 1909

A Personal Serendipity

A Forest Scene near Umhlali

Alexander Maclean came to Natal on the Lalla Rookh, accompanied by his brother William. Their sister Juliet Alexa came to Natal on the Waldensian in Jan. 1858. She married Ashe Smyth Windham.
-Natal Historian, Shelagh Spencer

For years, genealogists have been pursuing elusive ancestors...perhaps, at least in some cases, those ancestors have actually been chasing us!
-Jane Fletcher Fiske, FASG, Foreword to Henry Z Jones Jr, More Psychic Roots, Further Adventures in Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy.

Why do some of us genealogists have....seemingly nonrational experiences? ....such topics as synchronicity (events that happen simultaneously with no apparent causal connection but with deep significance for those who experience them); numeracy (the mathematical probability of having a connection with any person you may happen to meet); intuition (a seeming sixth sense that a record will appear where it may or may not belong); genetic memory (the possibility that we inherit from our forebears some of the facts about our heritage)... You may not find a satisfying answer at the end of every explanatory avenue, but the very least you owe yourself, to your ancestors, and to your descendants is to investigate each one.
-Helen Hinchcliff, Foreword to Henry Z Jones Jr, Psychic Roots, Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy.

oOo

Sometimes there crosses one's path in life a friend, a celebrity, a crisis, a book, even an obscure person from the past that is momentous, transforming, and life changing. It is almost as if such "happenstances" are destined and meant to be. There is no rational explanation for them. Or as Dante once explained...

And passing through a street, she turned her eyes thither where I stood sorely abashed; and by her unspeakable courtesy...she saluted me with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then and there to behold the very limits of blessedness... I parted thence as one intoxicated. (Quoted by John Sanford, The Invisible Partners, p.21)

That was how the chance encounter with Juliet Alexa Maclean seemed to me. It was as if it were a glimpse of Beatrice. Perhaps it was simply the schoolboy associations of her name that conjured up forgotten memories of "star cross'd lovers". It was after all Shakespeare's Juliet who asked, “What is in a name?”

A Zulu village near Umhlali, Natal

In my previous blog, mention was made of Chief Alexander's sister, Juliet Maclean. The story of how I came to learn about Juliet was in itself, for me personally, an intriguing one, coinciding with a crisis of faith that I was about to go through but unaware of its imminent significance. In no small measure she was pivotal, as if in my engagement with her story, she was meant to accompany me through my own impending Night Storm Voyage. It came about quite fortuitously and unexpectedly in the course of my search for Alexander's grave.

I record something of how it all unfolded in my Journal...

August 8, 2007 - Wednesday:

After attempting several obsolete addresses [enquiring after Alexander Maclean] I finally received an email from the University of KZN, Pietermaritzburg…

Dear Rev Garvie Your query on the Maclean clan refers. We do have the book "The Natal diaries of Mrs. Juliet Windham (nee Maclean), 1857-59, 1860-61 and 1866". You can borrow this book via interlibrary loans. Simply go to your local library and request it from us. As far as I am aware it is not available online. Doing a quick search online I have not found anything on Alexander Maclean - it would need a good thorough search to find material. Charles Rawden Maclean, 1815-1880 is quite well covered in our library - I am not sure of his relationship with the Macleans you are researching - if at all. You are very welcome to visit and make use of our Library. Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban is another good place to look: http://campbell.ukzn.ac.za/?q=node/42 Sorry that I have not been of more help Margaret BassSubject LibrarianUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal (Pmb)

I was more than delighted. I had originally assumed from the entry in the Dictionary of South African Biography that these were possibly diaries of the son of Ashe Windham. Instead they turn out to be the diaries of Juliet MacLean, the sister of Alexander MacLean. I immediately went down to the Musgrave Library just a block away from work and was a little disappointed that I would need to go into the City Library to arrange the interlibrary loan. The Killie Campbell Library might be easier so I emailed the librarian there only to be given an old email address again. I tried another which seemed to have gone through. They might even have a copy of the diaries. I am hoping too that in their collection of newspapers they might have an obituary for Alexander MacLean. Also today after being referred to them I managed to find and order…
Warriors and Priests: History of the Clan Maclean, 1300-1570 by Nicholas Maclean-Bristol
Clan to Regiment: 600 Years in the Hebrides 1400-2000 by Nicholas Maclean-Bristol
So many little surprises seem to be coming together in this search for the MacLeans!

These "little surprises" were to turn into a startling, breath-taking life-change event!

The next reference to Juliet occurs a few days later...

August 12, 2007 - Sunday:

....Ken and Eleanor G had yesterday gone to the Archives Depot in Pietermaritzburg and they kindly copied for me the estate papers for Ashe and Juliet Windham (nee MacLean) including a photo of Ashe Windham for which I was very grateful.

Early Will of Juliet Windham

Then...

September 19, 2007 - Wednesday:

I heard from the City Library that Juliet Windham’s Natal Diaries had arrived. Not a large book I started photocopying it for my own MacLean archives.

The "book" was a copy of the original typed manuscript. I started reading it a few days later. On September 29, 2007 - Saturday, I emailed Coll historian, Nicholas MacLean-Bristol, in which I explained something of my excitement in acquiring the Natal Diaries...

Sir

I presume my earlier email has been forwarded on to you but just wanted to let you know that I did eventually receive a typed copy of Juliet Wndham, nee MacLean's Natal Diaries through Interlibrary Loan from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg and reading it with great interest and delight.

What was exciting was that by sheer coincidence I received the Diaries on the 150th anniversary of Juliet leaving home and sailing on the 24th September 1857 to visit her brother "Alister" in Natal! That is the date of her first entry in this diary. What a remarkable synchronicity!

I still haven't located Alexander MacLean's grave here in Durban but I will keep looking.

Slainte!

Colin G Garvie

September 24, 2007:

I had not mentioned that the 24th was also the birthday of my wife, Sylvia Adam, who was of Clan Gordon descent. Furthermore, the coincidence of an anniversary and a birthday forged a link between the two. The following day I sent an email off to the cousin who had copied the Windham papers for me…

Hi Eleanor

Did I tell you that I made a curious discovery? The diary of Juliet MacLean the sister of Sandy MacLean of Coll that I got arrived a few days before the 24th September, Sylvia's birthday. So what? you say. Well, she starts her diary sailing from England for Natal on the 24th September! Isn't that remarkable? No? Yes! 1857!!!! I get her diary on the 150th anniversary of her diary! Wow!

She starts....

It has long been a wish of mine dating from the days of childhood and the reading of Robinson Crusoe to know what it would be like to live far away from civilization, and later on I have longed to live where there should be neither calling nor returning of calls, neither church nor clergymen. To live quite too far from thy church, as I would say....

I think I like this girl! A dram to the Maids of Coll!

Colin

Juliet described it as "a delightful escape".The more I read the more fond I grew of Juliet. The intention was, of course, to glean information about her brother, Alexander "Alick" Maclean but the further I read, the more I admired this determined, independent Hebridean woman, "Jupiter's Child!"

Crashing Waves...No one Spoke a Word

Little did I then know that within days I too would be "leaving" the church disenchanted and disappointed in and by the ecclesiastical order, sailing, like Juliet, into what seemed were very stormy turbulent waters, "...waves seemed really 'mountains high.' I could not have believed it unless I had seen them, they kept coming up against us like great black walls, and it seemed as if each wave must come down right on top of us, and crash the masts, but instead of this on getting pretty near they always seemed to go under the ship... The noise of the wind was great and it was pretty dark, the waves seemed to get even larger. The sensation I experienced was that it was very frightful but that I was not frightened, as the sailors did not seem to be. No one spoke a word" (October 4th, 1857).

Therein was a parable for me. In a way, leaving the church, was for me "a delightful escape" too but which was like "great black walls" crashing down on me at times.

Night Skies...Dark Black Places

Once the skies cleared Juliet remarked on the night sky that were to become her canopy for the next, almost three decades ... "We are now halfway between South America and South Africa. I am disappointed in the 'Southern Cross.' It is not like one, more like a little kite, string and all. Megallan's clouds and Cape clouds are very pretty, made of stars but appearing to be a pair of small misty soft white clouds quite near each other. Also there is a queerlooking black place in the sky, and far from them, called by the sailors 'the entrance to Hell.'" (October 22nd, 1857)

A Church Gone Dumb

Juliet was an avid reader. One of the books she took with her and read while at sea was Thomas Carlyle's satire, Sartor Resartus. One place Carlyle writes...

...every conceivable Society, past and present, may well be figured as properly and wholly a Church, in one or other of these three predicaments: an audibly preaching and prophesying Church, which is the best; second, a Church that struggles to preach and prophesy, but cannot as yet, till its Pentecost come; and" third and worst, a Church gone dumb with old age, or which only mumbles delirium prior to dissolution.

-Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, "Church-Clothes"

Interrupted Solitude

For Juliet, life and church had become a "delirium". I also thought my church had “gone dumb with old age.” No one spoke a word. My church had lost its prophetic voice...gone dumb. Juliet sought new adventures, the need to assert herself and forge a new identity far away from her impoverished past. But escape the church, she could not. She had hardly gone ashore at Port Natal when there was the inevitable visit from the Colonial Chaplain, the Rev. Lloyd. Juliet travelled north and joined her brother at Umhlali hoping there to find the solitude she was seeking but...

...the Bishop had thought fit to get up church services and to send a clergyman to this place which is a great “sell” for me, as I had hoped to realise my old idea of happiness to live “far away beyond the reach of any church!” … The clergyman it seems is Archdeacon of Maritburg [Charles F Mackenzie later Bishop of central Africa], and only on the coast for a time. He lives on the Umhlali... Alick says he is sure I shall find them all worth knowing (15th January 1558 at Umhlali)... Alick tells me the Archdeacon and his sisters are all good and agreeable and well worth knowing people. They are coming to see us. I am glad that they are good and do good, and that they are High Church. But alas for my anticipation for real solitude. What! Visitors after all and a church! (24th January 1858) ...The Archdeacon called....I thought to myself. “Now let us have it out. I shall say exactly what I think. I choose to be my real self and show that I believe that I have a right to my convictions as well as any Church Christian to his.” So we both spoke quite openly. I liked him, and find him, for a clergyman, rather reasonable. And I once even made him laugh... (1/2nd March 1858)

Nicholas MacLean-Bristol devotes a chapter and more to this remarkable Maclean woman, Juliet Alexa Maclean, in his monumental, From Clan to Regiment, which I heartily recommend. It should be on the shelves of every Highlander of Scottish descent!

Umgeni River on the way from Durban to Umhlali

On arriving in Durban, Juliet had made her acquaintance with St Paul's and the Rev. Lloyd. Juliet was far from escaping the church. Her brother Alexander encouraged her and nurtured those vital connections they had as youngsters on Coll. She eventually enjoyed a long standing friendship with Bishop John Colenso of Natal and shared his liberal views. Her diaries describes life in the Colony with her husband and children. Her affection and longing for her brother, Alick, continued till his early death at the age of 47.

She found love in Natal and married Ashe Windham, the Magistrate of Greytown. Natal Historian, Shelagh Spencer, wrote: "Windham, who was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, came to Natal with Bp Colenso, his former tutor. According to the Natal Witness of 26 Aug. 1859, Windham married Ms Maclean at his residence Bishopstowe on 19 Aug. 1859. They were married by Bp Colenso."

In 1861 Juliet and Alexander's father died. They visited home in 1862 but returned to Natal again. In 1867 her brothers Hugh and Willy died. In 1875 Alexander died of dysentery with Juliet nursing him. Juliet eventually returned to England with her husband in 1884 and died in 1909 three months after Ashe at the age of 84 in Norbury, Surrey. The Windhams left three children: Ashe, William, John, and Katherine Jane who was named after Ashe and Juliet's mothers.

Death Notice: Juliet Alexa Windham

Juliet's death was announced in "South Africa Magazine: Domestic Announcements, December 11, 1909"...

WINDHAM - At Norbury, Surrey, in her 84th year, Juliet Alexa WINDHAM, widow of the late Ashe WINDHAM, of Wawne, Yorkshire, and daughter of the late Colonel Hugh MACLEAN, Scots Guards, of Coll, Argyleshire. Cremation at Woking today (Saturday). Funeral train leaves private station, Necropolis Company, 121, Westminster Bridge Road, at 11:50 a.m.

oOo

Serendipity

Helen Hinchcliff speaks of synchronicity, numeracy, intuition, and genetic memory. As I reflect on my encounter with Juliet Alexa Maclean I feel deeply affected by that experience...

"synchronicity (events that happen simultaneously with no apparent causal connection but with deep significance for those who experience them)": As described in my previous blog, "Search for a Forgotten Grave", the quest was accompanied by a number of serendipities and synchronicities. Receiving Juliet's Natal Diaries "out of the blue" at the time of the 150th Anniversary of the Diary was significant. That it also coincided with the September Equinox (Mabon 21-24 September) would have meaning to one of Celtic mind. Also being the birthday of Sylvia, my wife, the Juliet-Sylvia connection was serendipitous.
"numeracy (the mathematical probability of having a connection with any person you may happen to meet)": The odds that one should be presented with historic source material within days of its 150th Anniversary struck me as unusual and significant. The statistical probability might not be of much consequence to others in general but to me it had huge import.
"intuition (a seeming sixth sense that a record will appear where it may or may not belong)": That I had communicated at "just the right time" with a particular institution hoping to find further relevant information was both an obvious as well as unconscious act. I was seeking information relating to Alexander Maclean and to my surprise my attention was directed increasingly to Juliet Maclean.
"genetic memory (the possibility that we inherit from our forebears some of the facts about our heritage): Some call it "ancestral memory". I rather prefer describing it as "genetic resonance". I only had unsubstantiated family traditions to go on that there was a Garvie-Garbh-Maclean connection. Neither source documentation nor yDNA matching has to date yielded any confirmation that there is any substance to what might only be legend. It is more a "feeling" or an "affection", whether ancestral or simply association, that somehow there exists a common connection between the two familiy branches. Nevertheles, the Garvies are a recognised Sept of Clan Maclean.

The question, "Why do some of us genealogists have....seemingly nonrational experiences?" remains. Safe to say that whoever Juliet and Alexander Maclean may be to me historically or Beatrice to Dante, they continue to chase us down the years with mystery and mystique surprising us with joy and happiness along the way!

oOo

Links:
Alexander Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/in-search-of-forgotten-grave-alexander.html
Juliet Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/juliet-alexa-maclean-1826-1909-personal.html
Lost Clan Documents: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-lost-documents-of-coll.html

Sources:
Many assisted me in this search and I want to acknowledge especially Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, Shelagh Spencer who was most helpful, Ken and Eleanor Garvie, the Staff of local Parishes and Libraries. Their generous help was much appreciated. Photos are from J Forsyth Ingram's, Colony of Natal, An Official Illustrated Handbook, 1895.

Journal of James Robertson, Sherriff Substitute at Tobermory 1844, Introduction to the Journal of James Robertson 1799-1876
Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, From Clan to Regiment.
Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol.V, Smith-Windham, Ashe

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

In Search of a Forgotten Grave - Alexander Maclean of Coll

2013-07-11T17:12:00.003+02:00

In Search of a Forgotten Grave

Alexander Maclean of Coll 1827-1875

A Personal Quest

Alexander, eldest son of Hugh of Coll, succeeded his father as representative of the descendants of John Garbh. He was tall and athletic, modest, and full of kindness. He emigrated to South Africa in 1849. He died at Umgeni, near Durban, on Sunday afternoon, July 11th, 1875. He was in the forty-seventh year of his age. He was succeeded in the chieftanship of the Macleans of Coll by his brother, John -Hector-Norman.

-Rev A. Maclean Sinclair, The Clan Gillean, 1899, p.383.

View from Coll

Family oral tradition had it that we, the Garvies, were descendants of the Macleans of Scotland. Scottish theologian, Alfred Ernest Garvie, in his auto-biography, Memories and Meanings of My Life, wrote...

After the defeat at Killiecrankie, the [Maclean] clansmen were scattered. Some of the Macleans settled in Perthshire, and assumed the name Garvie, which is found in a parish register in 1690; and is said to be derived from a Gaelic word garbh, meaning strong or rough. The Garvies in Perthshire claimed descent from Lachlan Maclean of Coll, and the Garvies in Ross-shire had a McLeod for ancestor. Three Garvies (John, James, and Patrick) settled at Balgarvie, which had already long borne that name.... (p.15).

In a letter from J C Garvie Macleod to the editor of the Oban Times, (date unknown) it is said that the Garvies of Perthshire "are descended from John Garbh, seventh Maclean of Coll, through one of his sons, probably John of Totaronald." According to him, John Garbh was wounded at the Battle of Inverkeithing, Fifeshire (1651) and did not return to Coll. His three sons (or grandsons) rented Upper Balgarvie, Lower Balgarvie and the Mill of Balgarvie in the Perthshire, Parish of Scone from the Earl of Mansfield. Their descendants were tenants of Muirton, Haggis Hall and other farms near Perth.

My genealogical interest goes back to the early 1960s when, as a schoolboy, I first read about Alfred Ernest Garvie. Increasingly I became aware of my Scottish roots. In the course of time it also came to my attention that a Maclean chief lay buried in Africa somewhere. Highland families were in dire financial straits during the 1800s because of famine and so-called "clearances" and had left the Hebrides and Highlands in large numbers to settle in the Colonies.

My quest began in real earnest when in 2004 cousins, Ken and Eleanor Garvie, afforded us an unforgettable trip to Mull and Iona, the Maclean Islands. I was not even aware of Coll which was to become the focus of my research. As I stood on the battlements of Duart Castle looking across the sea I pondered the pluck and plight of the Macleans. They were fighters to the end and stood true in battle and circumstance. I returned home even more enthused. There were family roots to be researched and there was a grave to be found.

The Search Begins

Intrigued, I felt the need to acquaint myself with the histories of the Macleans of Scotland. I was fortunate to obtain copies of JP Maclean's A History of the Clan MacLean and Rev. A Maclean Sinclair's The Clan Gillean. It was from John Patterson Maclean's history that I was first to learn about Chief Alexander Maclean (1849-1875)...

Alexander, sixteenth and last of Coll - Sliochd Iain Ghairbh - inherited in a remarkable degree the characteristics of his family, great benignity and kindliness of disposition, which made his forefathers among the most popular landlords of their day. In 1849, he emigrated to Natal, Africa, where he died, July 11, 1875, aged forty-seven. He was never married. In him the family of Coll, in the direct line, became extinct.

There was my first clue. I now had a name, a place, and a date. Alexander Maclean died in Natal, South Africa in 1875. By this time, in 1991, I had myself been transferred to Durban in KwaZulu-Natal.

Maclean Sinclair was more specific as to where...

Alexander, eldest son of Hugh of Coll, succeeded his father as representative of the descendants of John Garbh. He was tall and athletic, modest, and full of kindness. He emigrated to South Africa in 1849. He died at Umgeni, near Durban, on Sunday afternoon, July 11th, 1875.

I was astonished. We lived just above the Umgeni Estuary in Durban! The question now arose, where was Chief Alexander Maclean laid to rest? His grave could not be in the nearby Stamford Hill Cemetery which was post-1875. Queries addressed to the Local History History Museum and the Killie Campbell Library proved fruitless. I eventually, after considerable correspondence with historians, archivists, and churches, both local and abroad, found Alexander Maclean's Estate Papers in 2007. The search was only beginning!

The Estate Papers of Alexander Maclean

I was naturally curious and anxious to locate Alexander's grave. It was suggested that I should direct my queries to the Anglican Church since, being a British Colony, the spiritual care of British settlers were overseen by the Church of England. He could be buried in the St Paul's Church burial ground, some suggested. I visited St Pauls hoping to find, if not a grave, then surely, a memorial of sorts. There was none. The original St Pauls had been destroyed by a fire.

The Bishop's Office in Pietermaritzburg yielded very little information. I then discovered that the Church of England burial ground had in fact been incorporated into the West Street Cemetery but was actually some distance from St Pauls itself. Initially I did not know this. I visited the West Street Cemetery several times. Unfortunately no record of such a grave could be found in the West Street Registers. This was deeply disappointing. Records had previously been destroyed in a fire, I was told. Many hours scouting round the cemetery yielded no evidence of the Laird's final resting place. Some said part of the cemetery had made way for a freeway and possibly the grave did not exist anymore.

Fortunately, just as I was beginning to despair, I then located the Estate Papers for Alexander Maclean. These were lodged in the National Archives Depot in Pietermaritzburg! Not in Durban as I had expected. The Executor of his estate was none other than his brother-in-law, Ashe Windham of Greytown near Pietermaritzburg. Alexander's sister, Juliet, had also settled and married in Natal. I had not known that. Much to my delight, among the papers was a receipt for a grave plot that was eventually to lead me to that of Chief Alexander.

Durban Sept 30th 1875

Received if A S Windham Esq "Exor to the late Alexander McLean Esq" (by payment for Mr Thos. Drew Undertaker) the sum of Six Pounds six shillings for the purchase of a plot of ground in the St Pauls Church Cemetery - measuring 12 feet frontage in a straight line and next to Mrs Benningfields at the south end by eight feet wide - to be held in perpetuity for internments - subject to the Subs (?) and Regulations made from time to time - for the management of the said Cemetery.

As Witness my hand this day and year above written.

For the Minister & Churchwarden
of St Pauls Cemetery
G W Saker
Actin Sexton

There it was, St Pauls Cemetery! If I could locate the Benningfield plot it would then be relatively easy to find Alexander's grave.

Also among the Estate Papers was an invoice dated the 28th September 1875 from the Undertaker suggesting that the deceased had temporarily been interred in the vault of a Mr Lloyd.

To Cost of Ground 12ft x 8 £6 6 0
" Buidling Brick Vault 8ft x4
" Opening & Closing Mr Lloyds Vault
" Removing body of the late Mr McLean to new Vault & etc £25 - -

West Street Cemetery, Durban

With this information I returned to the West Street Cemetery Offices and with their kind assistance I soon located both the Benningfield and Lloyd plots. Much to my relief, these were recorded in their registers.

The Benningfield Family Plot

The Lloyd Family Plot

To the south of the Benningfield family plot was a lone, neglected grave with neither headstone nor inscription. It lay between the Benningfield and Lloyd graves. Could this be the grave? It was in a state of bad repair. Had it been vandalized or just severely weathered over the years? I was hoping to find something more becoming of a Scottish Chief. My heart sank. Whose grave was this? Could the Cemetery Superintendent identify this grave? So many questions welled up within me. Had we found the missing grave?

The Unmarked Grave of Alexander Maclean
The Iron Railing of the Benningfield Plot casting its shadow
to the "south end" across the modest Celtic Grave

I hastened back to the Superintendent and enquired who was buried in Section 8, plot 24? Quickly the Superintendent found old scrappy maps for the Church of England Section, Block 8 of the West Street Cemetery and there it was, no.24, "Alex Macbean"!

For me, finding and then confirming the grave, was one of those rare "Eureka!" moments in my life.

From the Estate Records, I also knew that a monument was ordered for the tomb. Ashe Windham states...

...I have with the consent of the heirs of the said Alexander Maclean entered into a Contract with [...] Smith of Pietermaritzburg for the preparing and erecting a tomb stone to be placed over the grave of the said Alexander Maclean at a cost of Twenty eight pounds Sterling ...

The tombstone no longer exists. No picture of it has come to light. One can now only but imagine the design and inscription of the monument. Would it have really been ornate as I might have envisaged? Or did it simply record his name, his birth and death, and perhaps The Maclean crest and the words, “Sliochd Iain Ghairbh”?

I returned to the grave and stood there a long while, deeply affected, reflecting on the arduous discovery of this humble grave and the valiant and mysterious man who had been laid there to rest. As a minister I had many times recited the words, "from dust to dust". Never did those words seem more poignant than that day.

James Robertson (1799-1876) Sheriff Substitute, a Coll family friend was early impressed by the young Alexander Maclean who he fondly called "Alick". When he first met him he recorded in his Journal...

Saw young Coll for the first time and his brother John. The former is a handsome well grown youth of 16 or 17, near 6 feet high, quiet and modest. He is dark, round faced and black eyed.

That was the beginning of an abiding friendship that was cut short when the family left Coll in the mid-1840s, impoverished and destitute. The grim story is dramatically documented by Coll historian, Nicholas Maclean Bristol, in his monumental work, From Clan to Regiment. Alexander had emigrated and found himself north of Durban where he bartered beads for ngunis with the Zulu tribes. His father had always intended him to become a merchant but the older Coll would never have envisaged it in the Kingdom of the Zulus.

On his death, an anonymous correspondent wrote...

A paragraph in the Natal Colonist gives intelligence of the death of Alex. Maclean, Esq, of Coll, on 11th July [1875],at the early age of 47.... the subject of this short memoir emigrated to Port Natal in 1849. On two or three occasions he revisited England, and thirteen months ago spent a short time in his native district of the Highlands. Though so long absent and so young when he left, he yet retained the most lively recollections of his old acquaintances and associates, who can never forget the pleasure it seemed to afford him to meet them again, nor the eager grasp of his hand and the sparkle of his eye, lighted up by sincere affection, when they chanced to meet. To those who knew Mr Maclean from boyhood as some of us did, when the slim gentle youth headed our many deer-hunting parties on his father's estates, accompanied by his younger brother — now also no more — and our boating expeditions in quest of wild fowl, &c — to such, certainly, his outward appearance was much changed - a tropical climate had ripened that youth into manhood of the most prepossessing appearance. That splendid figure, manly form, straight as a pine, a man among a thousand struck us with admiration, and still more so when we found the same gentle, mild, unassuming, affectionate disposition that distinguished his youth.

The obituary in the Natal Colonist read...

The deceased gentleman was one of our oldest colonists, and the predecessor of Mr T Reynolds in the proprietorship of Oaklands, Umhlali. He was the eldest member of a very old Highland family, a considerable traveller, having visited South America and British Columbia. He was also one of the earliest visitors to the Diamond Fields, but he invariably returned to Natal after these more or less protracted absences. One of the gentlest yet bravest of men, Mr Maclean was thoroughly esteemed by all who knew him. He was not only a considerable traveller, but was an enthusiastic hunter and sportsman, and his commanding and powerful frame gave no token of so early an end. He was not married, and his only near relative in Natal is Mrs AF Windham, who was near him when he died; The funeral took place on Monday morning in the burial ground of the Church of England, and was attended by many of the friends of the deceased, whose loss will be most sincerely deplored by them. Archdeacon Lloyd read the offices of the church.

-Nicholas Maclean Bristol, From Clan to Regiment, p. 565

Parish Registers, 1850-2004 South Africa, Natal, Durban,
St Paul Burials 1849-1925 Image 87 of 333 No.870

https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1951-23609-32620-66?cc=1468076&wc=M93C-3M3:n331387211

A deep satisfaction came over me. Whether Alexander Maclean was a distant cousin - Sliochd Iain Ghairbh - mattered little to me in that moment. I simply felt an indescribable affinity and connection to this remarkable, enigmatic man. We had a common connection with the land of our forbears. My own broken life was represented now by this lonely, weathered grave. A wave of awe came over me. I left the cemetery both curious and perplexed, wondering, questioning why Providence should have led me to this unpretentious, unmarked grave, mysteriously drawn to it by an inexplicable compulsion?

Scotland our Mither --- this from your sons abroad,
Leavin' tracks on virgin veld that never kent a road,
Trekkin' on wi' weary feet, an' faces turned fae hame,
But lovin' aye the auld wife across the seas the same.
...
Scotland our Mither --- since first we left your side,
From Quilimane to Cape Town we've wandered far an' wide;
Yet aye from mining camp an ' town, from koppie an' karoo,
Your sons sicht kindly, auld wife, send hame their love to you.

-Charles Murray

oOo

Links:
Alexander Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/in-search-of-forgotten-grave-alexander.html
Juliet Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/juliet-alexa-maclean-1826-1909-personal.html
Lost Clan Documents: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-lost-documents-of-coll.html

Sources:
Many contributors assisted me in this search and acknowledge especially Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, John McLean, Ken and Eleanor Garvie, the Staff of local Museums, Archive Depots, Libraries, and Cemeteries. Their generous help was much appreciated.
Journal of James Robertson, Sherriff Substitute at Tobermory 1844
James Irvine Robertson, Introduction to the Journal of James Robertson 1799-1876
JP Maclean, A History of the Clan MacLean.
Rev. A Maclean Sinclair, The Clan Gillean. http://archive.org/details/clangilleanwithp00sinc
Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, From Clan to Regiment.
Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, Warriors and Priests, The History of the Clan Maclean 1300-1570.
McLeans of Coll Home Page, http://www.mcleanofcoll.com
Celtic Magazine http://www.electricscotland.com/history/celtic/index.htm

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Krotoa: Daughter of the Cape

2013-06-26T08:49:00.000+02:00

Robben Island, Birthplace of Krotoa
Photograph by Roger de la Harpe, Getty Images

It is not right for us today to write off our past generations and pretend that history began when we were born.

-Es'kia Mphahlele, 1986

As a person who is from the line of Krotoa, who shares that ancestral line, it is important for me to know who my ancestors are and to celebrate those ancestors.

As South Africans, Krotoa represents a cement. If we liken ourselves to different bricks in our diversity, she is the cement that binds these bricks into the wall we want to call a nation.

Krotoa has white descendants. Krotoa has black descendants. Krotoa has descendants who are labelled "coloured". We have something here in common to explore, to celebrate, to build upon.

If we use this cement as a nation we can be a strong wall. If we remain just bricks piled on top of each other this nation is going to fall apart.

You judge for yourself whether this was a vixen and a whore and a drunkard as some historians say. This woman was much, much more.

-Tariq Mellet, Hidden Histories, Krotoa Daughter of the Cape, SABC TV2, 9/6/2013

RE-MEMBERING KROTOA & AUTSHUMATO

by Deela Khan

http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/re-membering-krotoa-amp-autshumato

Divested of names and birthright

Autshumato and Krotoa were ferried

oor die see, oor die see, in die eiland stemertjie

every time they incurred the wrath of their insatiable masters.

As island-prison you were too small to hold Autshumato

(considered to be the devil himself & called Harry die Strandloper)

whose nostrils retained the odour of the wild.

The irresistible allure of the ancestral spirit-land compelled him

to snatch a boat, brave the froth and blinding spray

of vessel-snapping swells and with fellow Khoi-comrade row into

Blaauwbergstrand, unspotted, dazed, but in one piece!

Swift as an air-slicing pestle, he was not re-captured

but his land had already slipped into Dutch hands.

Robbed of her Khoikhoi identity at eight

Krotoa, pygmalioned into a Dutch girl,

was baptised and re-named Eva.

Subtly programmed to manipulate and betray

her people and to serve the Dutch East India Company

Krotoa became the most spirited traitor-diplomat of her time.

But when the Dutch had eventually grabbed all

her political use-value declined.

A sudden turn of the wheel of fortune made her service

at the Castle obsolete, put her master-mistress foster-parents

Jan & Maria Van Riebeeck on a ship to Holland and lured

her husband, the respected Posthouder1, into a premature death.

Thus shaken awake she found no hooks to hold her

at the castle, but to what alternative place was she to trek

lugging her bewildered self and her young?

Estranged from Autshumato and her fast-disappearing

people, there remained no Khoikhoi kingdom

she could return to. Caught as she was between

two cultures, tottering on the rim of the Dutch world,

the Khoikhoi world, the Khoi-Dutch world,

she threw herself into a cask & hit the bottle hard

as she struggled to drown the niggling imagoes

of her Khoi-princess past.

Khoi princess Krotoa, wrapt in the glory

of her favourite skins, chattering away in musical clicks,

limbs oiled, vital and glowing, would only be seen as a smelly

inboorling, a Hotnot meid wholly and innately dangerous?

Never could she dream of reclaiming

her birthright, she had irretrievably

lost her natural identity?

The Company buried baptised Krotoa

away from her kindred spirit-soil. Thus

"earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

in sure and certain hope of the resurrection

to eternal life..." Eva, propped into a Dutch

coffin, was planted in a remote corner of the

Castle-fortress where she had served,

had loved & married, was widowed,

lost her children, lost her people,

her head, heart & carved-up soul?

-Extract from: Engaging the Shades of Robben Island, (Realities, 2002. pp.22-23)

See:
http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/docs/16.2/17%20Narismulu%20F.PDF
http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2012/11/krotoa-our-mythic-go-between.html

Sources:
Hidden Histories, Krotoa Daughter of the Cape, SABC TV2
Deela Khan, 2002. Engaging the Shades of Robben Island. Realities.
Karel Schoeman, 2009. Seven Khoi Lives. Cape Biographies of the Seventeenth Century. Pretoria: Protea.
Dan Sleigh, 1938, Eilande, recently translated from Afrikaans by Andre Brink (in Dutch: 'Stemmen uit zee'/in English: 'Islands').

Internet Resources:
http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/krotoa.htm
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/69.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotoa
http://ancestry24.com/eva-krotoa-van-die-kaap/
http://www.geni.com/people/Krotoa-Eva-van-die-Kaap/
http://www.southafrica.to/history/history.html

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Mathematicians and Dreams

2013-01-20T06:05:00.000+02:00

Some time ago I wrote about "Cybernetics and Dreams" and how the cipher to John Wesley's coded journal was revealed to Nehemiah Curnock in a dream.

One of the most extraordinary stories about mathematical revelations through dreams was celebrated recently at the 125th anniversary of the birth of the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan, a mathematical genius and prodigy.

Photo: Wikipedia

Wikipedia says...

Srinivasa Ramanujan FRS (22 December 1887 - 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. ...
Born at Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu) in a poor Hindu Brahmin family, Ramanujan's introduction to formal mathematics began at age 10. He demonstrated a natural ability, and was given books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney that he mastered by the age of 12; he even discovered theorems of his own, and re-discovered Euler's identity independently. He demonstrated unusual mathematical skills at school, winning accolades and awards. By 17, Ramanujan had conducted his own mathematical research on Bernoulli numbers and the Euler-Mascheroni constant.

This remarkable man died at the age of 32. A Daily Mail article, reported...

While on his death-bed in 1920, Ramanujan wrote a letter to his mentor, English mathematician G. H. Hardy, outlining several new mathematical functions never before heard of, along with a hunch about how they worked.

Decades later, researchers say they've proved he was right - and that the formula could explain the behaviour of black holes.
....
Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri.

The Durban Sunday Tribune elaborated, crediting the Daily Mail report...

Genius saw formulas in dreams

Researchers have finally solved the cryptic deathbed puzzle renowned Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan claimed came to him in dreams...outlining several new mathematical functions never before heard of... Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri.
...
Emory University mathematician said..... "No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them,"
...
The findings were presented... at the Ramanajun 125 conference at the University of Florida, ahead of the 125th anniversary of the mathematician's birth on December 22.

- Tribune Herald, 6 January 2013

Hinduism Today featured an article posted by Dr Jai Maharaj in which he wrote:

.... Ramanujan possessed supernatural intelligence, a well of genius that leaves even brilliant men dumb-founded. Ramanujan was a meteor in the mathematics world of the World War I era. Quiet, with dharmic sensibilities, yet his mind blazed with such intuitive improvisation that British colleagues at Cambridge -- the best math brains in England -- could not even guess where his ideas originated. It irked them a bit that Ramanujan told friends the Hindu Goddess Namagiri whispered equations into his ear. Today's mathematicians -- armed with supercomputers -- are still star-struck, and unable to solve many theorems the young man from India proved quickly by pencil and paper.

Ramanujan spawned a zoo of mathematical creatures that delight, confound and humble his peers. They call them "beautiful," "humble," "transcendent," and marvel how he reduced very complex terrain to simple shapes.

In his day these equations were mainly pure mathematics, abstract computations that math sages often feel describe God's precise design for the cosmos. While much of Ramanujan's work remains abstract, many of his theorems are now the mathematical power behind several 1990's disciplines in astrophysics, artificial intelligence and gas physics.

Who is Namagiri?

In Hindu mythology Namagiri is the consort of Narasimha, the lionman avatar of Vishnu. Narasimha symbolises the omnipresence of God. Like the Sphynx of Giza, he is the everpresent guardian, an Aslan figure.

Srinivasa Ramanujan attributed his mathematical findings to the goddess Namagiri. According to Ramanujan, she appeared in his dreams, proposing mathematical formulae, which Ramanujan would then have to verify. One such event was described by him as follows:

"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."

Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote:

"Debate still lingers as to the origins of Ramanujan's edifice of unique ideas. Mathematicians eagerly acknowledge surprise states of intuition as the real breakthroughs, not logical deduction. There is reticence to accept mystical overtones, though.... many can appreciate intuition “in the guise” of a Goddess. But we have Ramanujan's own testimony of feminine whisperings from a Devi and there is the sheer power of his achievements. Hindus cognize this reality."

Namagiri, the goddess of creativity, is akin to the Greek Muse, Urania, the muse of astronomy, science, and mathematics. As such she is an Anima figure inspiring, revealing, and unveling the mysteries of nature. Namagiri would be the feminine, guiding aspect, who can be thought of as a counterpart of the Jewish Hokmah or the Christian Sophia.

The genius of dreams....let us pay attention to our dreams!

Also see: http://www.legacyoframanujan.com/index.html and http://www.hinduwisdom.info/quotes321_340.htm

Picture Credits: Wikipedia and Gustave Moreau, Hésiode_et_la_Muse

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Musings of a Cybernaut: Metaphysical Reflections on Death and Dying, Stanford and Steve Jobs

2013-01-10T07:57:00.000+02:00

In 1970 I was privileged to visit what must surely be the Mecca of Silicon Valley - Stanford University. It is a pilgrimage, a haj, that every questing scientist, engineer, and technician however modest dreams to make at least once in a life time. The university motto reads, "Die Luft der Freiheit weht - The wind of freedom blows", a motto with an intriguing origin and history. Of special interest to me was not so much the renowned Stanford Linear Accelerator which was of course fascinating, but instead a church, the "crown jewel" of the famous university - the Stanford University's Memorial Church.

Stanford Memorial Church Facade, CG Garvie, 1970

Though some may deny it, even geeks and cynbernauts (a computer user who explores cyberspace and cybernetics) are mystics at heart and contemplate the mysteries and meaning of life, death and dying. Quarky? Not at all! It is a cybernetic endeavour of every thinking person. As programmers we are constantly considering elegant ways of closing down the programs we write or the systems we design. Elegance is no less true of "life systems" as it is for IT systems. There comes a time when we too will "shut down" or cease to operate. Every student should know that! So a Temenos at the hub of scientific learning and endeavour is not all that surprising.

Recently I was considering once again - for some strange reason I kept returning to it - Mona Simpson's beautiful eulogy to her brother, Apple Founder, Steve Jobs. She was at his bedside, the brother she so loved, when he passed away. Having read Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living, Holy Dying" and even "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" I wondered, how does a Cybernaut die? Do the "winds of freedom" blow even in death?

In her stirring tribute delivered at her brother's memorial, held at the iconic Stanford University's Memorial Church on October 16, 2011, Mona revealed the last words Steve uttered mere hours before he died. Mona said Steve had been looking at the members of his family, gathered around his bed, when suddenly he gazed past them and exclaimed," OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."

Steve's final words, "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow," might have been an experience of Nirvana "more powerful than orgasm," according to Columbia University’s Robert Thurman, who is chairman of Buddhist studies and also translator of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead'. The repetition of words "sounds like a beautiful moment, when he is indeed moving toward the light," said Thurman, who as a Buddhist scholar, knew Steve. He said the computer entrepreneur was deeply influenced by Buddhism. For me, Steve's death spoke powerfully of Stanford's "winds of freedom".

As I reflected, two verses came to mind, one Buddhist and the other Christian.

Edwin Arnold concludes his epic poem about Prince Siddhartha, "The Light of Asia", with the words...

I take my refuge in thy order! OM!
The dew is on the lotus! Rise great sun!
And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave;
OM MANI PADME HUM, the Sunrise comes!
The dewdrop slips into the shining Sea.

The Methodist hymn writer, Charles Wesley, uses the same metaphor to describe the ineffable journey for which Steve Jobs had only one word, "Wow!"...

Eager for Thee I ask and pant;
So strong, the principle divine
Carries me out, with sweet constraint,
Till all my hallowed soul is Thine;
Plunged in the Godhead's deepest sea,
And lost in Thine immensity.

Whether Cybernauts experience what psychic investigator Robert Crookall once described as "the supreme adventure" or Robert Thurman as "a beautiful moment," when our "life support systems" shut down, might be a matter of conjecture. However, when a technocrat such as Steve Jobs points to an "Aha!" moment one is naturally inclined to sit up, take note, and ponder. This much we know for sure, when for a moment we do pause as Steve did and glimpse past our immediate temporal concerns such as the familiar faces that press down on one, there often breaks through into our awareness an indescribable wow, a beatific moment of joyful, celestial bliss Software or media developers might call this an "Easter Egg" of sorts, an unexpected oceanic surprise, a transcendental exclamation, deliberately hidden and secreted somewhere deep within our make-up, call it what you will, our DNA Code, the Akashic Record, or even the Lamb's Book of Life, by a gracious, compassionate Divine Cybernaut, the Lord of Cybernetic Surprises.

Among other remarkable discoveries the Stanford Linear Accelarator facility was used to reveal hidden text in the incredible Archimedes Palimpsest recovering erased works of the Greek mathematician and thinker. When Steve's sister Mona, disclosed her brother's last word. she may have given us an incomparable glimpse into something of the mysterious text hidden deep within in the fabric of her brother's life and our life!

OM!

oOo

Read Mona Simpson's eulogy at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

More Khoi Starlore...and Theology: The Pleiades

2012-11-27T05:50:00.000+02:00

One of the most beautiful Spring star clusters rising in the east at Advent time are the Pleiades. The Pleiades captured human imagination from the earliest times. They are plaited and weaved with myth and belief. Some extraterrestrial researchers refer to Nordic type celestial beings as Pleiadeans.

"The eyes of the ancient Khoikhoi," says Khoi scholar, Theophilus Hahn, "were early directed towards the sky." The Pleiades held a particular fascination for them heralding the coming rains. The Pleiades were the daughters of the Supreme God, Tsui-||goa. The Greeks, strangely, called them the "Seven Sisters", the daughters of Atlas. Alcyone is the most beautiful one and the brightest. The other sisters are Celeno, Maja, Merope, Taygete, Asterope and Electra.

The 18th Century Moravian missionary at Genadendal, George Schmidt, related:

"At the return of the Pleiades these natives celebrate an anniversary ; as soon as these stars appear above the eastern horizon mothers will lift their little ones on their arms, and running up to elevated spots, will show to them those friendly stars, and teach them to stretch their little hands towards them. The people of a kraal will assemble to dance and to sing according to the old custom of their ancestors." (Quoted by Hahn, p.43)

They then dance and sing and pray to their Heavenly Father, Tsui-||goa, "Wounded Knee":

Thou, oh Tsui-||goa!
Thou Father of the Fathers! All Father!
Thou our Father!
Let stream, let rain, the thunder cloud!
Let please live our flocks!
Let us also live please!
I am so very weak indeed!
From thirst!
From hunger!
That I may eat field fruits!
Art thou then not our Father!
The father of the fathers!
Thou Tsui-||goa!
That we may praise thee!
That we may give thee in return and bless thee.
Thou father of the fathers!
Thou our Lord!
Thou, oh, Tsui-||goa!
(Hahn, p.58)

Appreciating these traditions of my early early African forebears, I cannot agree more with Theophilus Hahn when he concludes:

I hope that these pages may be an impulse to missionaries to look deeper into the eyes of a Hottentot. Perhaps they may discover some more sparks of the primæval revelation. Missionaries, I regret to say, are so apt to treat the heathen gods as demons or evil spirits. It is also very wrong to teach the heathen so eagerly, as is done by certain missionaries, our dogmas, and to tell them of the differences of Calvinism and Lutheranism. There is something like fanaticism in this -- a zealotism which can never bear fruit. To them, also, the poet gives the warning :

Grau, Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und ewig grün des Lebens goldener Baum.

(Grey, friend, is all theory,
And green the golden tree of life.)

The abode of true religion -- I mean of the true yearning and craving after the infinite -- is our heart, which becomes deaf and dumb as soon as it is surrounded by the mist and clouds of dogmatism. The key-note of true religion is love -- a key-note which is never touched in the fanatical controversies of our modern dogmatists.

-Hahn, p.150

Sources and Credits:
Theophilus Hahn, Tsuni-||Goam, The Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi, 1881, Trubner, London.
African Starlore, http://sirius-c.ncat.edu/EthiopianEnochSociety/Africa-Star/index.html
South African Star Myths, Royal Museums Greenwich
http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/astronomy-and-time/astronomy-facts/stars/south-african-star-myths/*/viewPage/1

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Adam Clarke: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Methodist Maverick? An Appreciation.

2012-11-25T08:34:00.000+02:00

"... my Text commends GOD's Works, not only for being great, but also approves of those curious and ingenious Enquirers, that seek them out, or pry into them.. And the more we pry into, and discover of them, the greater and more glorious we find them to be, the more worthy of, and the more expressly to proclaim their great Creator.

-Derham, Physico-Theology, 1786, p.427

Being a Methodist and a lover of antiquities, I am very much attracted to the writings of the early Methodists....the Wesleys, Whitfield, Fletcher, and others. Not that the 18th and 19th centuries are antiquated in any way but it is that these remarkable individuals channel for us something that goes far back to the dawn of civilisation that is quaint in a way. In technical terms I think of them as "Crossover Individuals". They "bridge" the past, present, and future for us. I was drawn especially to the renowned Methodist Bible commentator and scholar, Adam Clarke (c1762–1832). Though as a boy he was slow in learning he quickly asserted himself as one of the foremost scholars of the 19th century. His Commentary is still widely appreciated and consulted today.

I had long been inquisitive concerning some entries in Clarke's Commentary. He has numerous references to ancient Rabbinic and Arabic writings that fascinated me. It appealed to my sense for what was ancient, esoteric and, sometimes, beyond ordinary modern understanding and consciousness. Equally interesting is his inclusion of The Gitagovinda, a beautiful Hindu "mystical poem" in his commentary of the Song of Songs but that is a subject for another time.

A while ago I came across a paper by Ron Heisler titled "John Dee and the Secret Societies" that linked John Dee with Adam Clarke. John Dee was a noted mathematician, librarian, occultist, and alchemist of the 16th Century. Heisler made the surprising statement...

Dr Adam Clarke, Hebraist, alchemist, astrologer and kabbalist, was arguably the leading Methodist intellectual of the early 19th century. Tragically, his manuscript "Mysterium Liber" seems to have utterly vanished from the face of the earth. But at least we have Clarke's note describing this fascinating effort: "N.B. As it is assembd that the six books of Mysteries transcribed from the papers of Dr. John Dee by Elias Ashmole, Esq., preserved in the Sloan Library,.... are a collection of papers relating to State Transactions between Elizabeth, her Ministers and different Foreign Powers, in which Dr. Dee was employed sometimes as an official agent openly, and at other times as a spy, I purpose to make an extract from the whole work, and endeavour, if possible, to get a key to open the Mysteries. A.C." (List of MS formerly in possession of the late Dr. Adam Clarke. Baynes & Son Sale Catalogue (1837), copy in British Library.)
(Ron Heisler - John Dee and the Secret Societies, article originally published in The Hermetic Journal, 1992.)

Clarke also alludes to these references in his comment on 1 Cor 13.1 speaking of "the tongues of angels" where he writes...

...the apostle refers to a notion that was common among the Jews, that there was a language by which angels might be invoked, adjured, collected, and dispersed; and by the means of which many secrets might be found out, and curious arts and sciences known.

There is much of this kind to be found in their cabalistical books, and in the books of many called Christians. Cornelius Agrippa’s occult philosophy abounds in this; and it was the main object of Dr. Dee’s actions with spirits to get a complete vocabulary of this language. See what has been published of his work by Dr. Casaubon; and the remaining manuscript parts in the Sloane library, in the British museum.

Hebraist, alchemist, astrologer and kabbalist? Really? Certainly a Hebraist but I had never heard Clarke being described as an occultist before. It was not the portrait of the Methodist I had read about at university and seminary. What became of Adam Clarke's Mysterium Liber, if it ever existed? And did he ever succeed in finding the key to unlock the "six books of Mysteries"? One is naturally curious but I rather think of Clarke as a man of science.

As theologian he was not without controversy. He was a President of the Methodist Conference. What fascinated Adam Clarke so, even as a young boy? Did he encrypt some of his own esoteric interests into his commentary? A sort of "Da Clarke Code"? Perhaps we will never know unless the Mysterium Liber comes to light one day. But we do know that his interest in arcane and esoteric subjects developed from a very early age.

Adam Clarke was very much a child of his time and conditioned, as John Wesley was, by the prevailing world views of the time. It was the dawn of the "Scientific Age". Philosophers and Theologians were still profoundly influenced by Hermetic ideas. Isaac Newton had pursued an interest in alchemy and astrology despite being one of the greatest mathematicians ever. The Occult Sciences enjoyed a status no longer popular today. Another commentator makes the point, "Just as chemistry sprung from alchemy, and even war gave rise to the Law of Nations, so ancient pagan astrology was the parent of our modern science of astronomy. But the tendency of all true science is to point the way to faith. A perception of the harmonious order of the firmament, and especially a knowledge of astronomy, would direct devout minds to Him who is the Centre of the spiritual solar system, to the creative Word, the Source of all order." (Lange, Matthew 2.1-12) Clarke says much the same where he comments on Exodus 28.3...

Who taught Newton to ascertain the laws by which God governs the universe, through which discovery a new source of profit and pleasure has been opened to mankind through every part of the civilized world? No reading, no study, no example, formed his genius. God, who made him, gave him that compass and bent of mind by which he made those discoveries, and for which his name is celebrated in the earth. When I see Napier inventing the logarithms; Copernicus, Des Cartes, and Kepler contributing to pull down the false systems of the universe, and Newton demonstrating the true one; and when I see the long list of Patentees of useful inventions, by whose industry and skill long and tedious processes in the necessary arts of life have been shortened, labor greatly lessened, and much time and expense saved; I then see, with Moses, men who are wise-hearted, whom God has filled with the spirit of wisdom for these very purposes; that he might help man by man, and that, as time rolls on, he might give to his intelligent creatures such proofs of his Being, infinitely varied wisdom, and gracious providence, as should cause them to depend on him, and give him that glory which is due to his name.

From a very young age, says Clarke's biographer, JW Etheridge, the young Adam had an unquenchable curiosity, "with a mind characteristically eager in investigation, he was not content to read such books as expounded the outward phenomena of nature, but longed to penetrate, also, the arcana of the spiritual world."

He was hardly fifteen when, says Etheridge, "He had heard that among the gypsies many vestiges of this precious lore were handed down from father to son; and, learning that a wandering party of that singular people had pitched their little camp at a distance of some miles, he sallied forth in quest of them. After some ingratiating talk, he told them what he had come for. The conversation which followed was highly satisfactory; for he found, to his great joy, that they had at least a great part of a book for a sight of which he had been devoured by desire, — the Occult Philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa. The gypsies were not disposed to part with these precious sibylline leaves, but gave him full permission to read them on the spot, and make whatever extracts he pleased."

Even as a boy he had some misgivings and questioned the expediency of these occult pursuits. "A paper he read in an odd volume of the Athenian Oracle, which he met with about that time," says Etheridge, "made a wholesome impression on his mind, and contributed to set it in a more profitable direction." He tempered his youthful curiosity with a maturing sense of reason and discernment He lived at a time of transition. It was the Age of Reason.

In the course of his life, Clarke not only met with alchemists but experimented to understand better the nature of matter. He studied "Basil Valentine, George Ripley, Philalethes, Nicholas Flammel, Artephius, Geber, Paracelsus, the Hermetical Triumph, all the writers in Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, &c.; not with the hope of finding the philosopher’s stone," say his biographer, "but rerum cognoscere causas, to see nature in her own laboratory." Etheridge gives an intriguing account of meetings between the Methodist scholar and a keen but mysterious alchemist from Dublin. It is a rare glimpse into the mind of the alchemist, of the arcane and magical arts and the perceptive reasoning of a very acute investigator and researcher. Etheridge's conclusion is instructive:

Mr. Clarke, in his correspondence with this honest enthusiast, did not forget to urge upon him the necessity of obtaining the true riches, “than gold and pearls more precious far,” and of seeking that wondrous transmutation of mind and heart which no power can effect but the grace of the Eternal Spirit. He warned him against the inordinate desire of wealth; and exhorted him, in a diligent attendance on the house of God, the reading of His word, and the communion of His people in class-meeting, to work out his salvation. Mr. Hand died in peace, somewhat suddenly. There was good reason to believe that his acquaintance with Mr. Clarke had led him to that “secret of the Lord,” that “knowledge of the Holy,” which is the true elixir of immortal life, the key to treasures incorruptible. These aerial excursions into the cloud-land of alchemy only gave Mr. Clarke a greater value for a standing on the solid ground of true science. (p.258ff)

Derham's Astro-Theology and Physico-Theology had a more positive impact on Clarke's mind than the many occult philosophies he studied. Even as a boy, Etheridge observes, "... the things that are seen became to him a heart-stirring momento of the everpresent Deity. The heavens at night spoke, and told him how great is God; the spheres sang; the deep down on the shore, as he stood on the rocks, was heard lifting up a voice in the great chorus. “His praise the winds, that from four quarters blew, breathed soft or loud;” and the pine-woods waved their tops, with every plant, in sign of worship. Already the future commentator was musing on that text, “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.” (p.30ff)

Adam Clarke explains himself in his autobiography:

He read some treatises on different parts of Chemistry, and having borrowed the use of a friend’s laboratory, he went through the process of refining silver, that he might be the better able to comprehend the meaning of those texts of scripture where this operation is referred to. He read also several Alchemistic authors, the perusal of which was recommended to him by a friend who was much devoted to such studies; and he also went through several of the initiatory operations recommended by professed adepts in that science. This study was the means of greatly enlarging his views in the operations of nature, as he saw many wonders performed by chemical agency..... This study served to divert his mind from that intensity of thought on other matters, which before was preying upon itself. (p.199)

He applies this knowledge in his Commentary for example at 1 Peter 1.25 he writes: "As the apostle, on 1Peter 1:7, mentions gold, and gold chemically examined and tried; and as this figure frequently occurs in the sacred writings; I think it necessary to say something here of the nature and properties of that metal," whereupon he proceeds with a lengthy discussion on the properties of gold.

Was Adam Clarke an "alchemist, astrologer and kabbalist"? He certainly was well versed in these matters and admitted to even going "through several of the initiatory operations" associated with such. Whether being well read in Kabbalism makes one a kabbalist is open to debate. For instance, that he was an astrologer is extremely doubtful. He expresses his view on astrology in his commentary on 1 Samuel 6.21:

After all, I need not say that the system of judicial astrology is vain, unfounded, absurd, and wicked. It in effect presumes to take the government of the world out of the hand of an all-wise God, and to abandon it to the most fortuitous and unconnected occurrences of life; for the stars have their influences according to this pretended science, conformably to the occurrences here below: e.g., if a child be born but one hour sooner or later than a particular configuration of the heavens, his destiny will be widely different from what it otherwise would have been; and as an almost infinite number of casualties may accelerate or retard a birth, consequently the whole destiny of man is influenced and ruled by these casualties: to say nothing of the absurdity, that those omnipotent stars ever can affect the infant while invested with a thin covering of flesh in the womb of its parent. But the whole science is a tissue of absurdities.

Clarke's references to the kabbalists and kabbalism are generally negative and sometimes disparaging. On 1 Corinthians 2:13 he writes...

We dare no more use the language of the Jews and the Gentiles in speaking of those glorious things, than we can indulge their spirit. The Greek orators affected a high and florid language, full of tropes and figures, which dazzled more than it enlightened. The rabbins affected obscurity, and were studious to find out cabalistical meanings, which had no tendency to make the people wise unto salvation. The apostles could not follow any of these; they spoke the things of God in the words of God; every thing was plain and intelligible; every word well placed, clear, and nervous. He who has a spiritual mind will easily comprehend an apostle’s preaching.

This much we can say with certainty: Clarke was first and foremost a Christian and a rational, thinking, enquiring one at that. He was a Christian Alchemist convinced that tarnished souls can change unto glory. As a Methodist he was persuaded that dross can be transmuted into gold. For him Christ was the Philospher's Stone, the Elixir of Life, that they who drink of this water will never thirst again.

We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. (1Co 2:7-10)

His alchemy was that of spiritual metamorphosis,of sanctification, perfect love, and Christian perfection: "Call it by what name we please, it must imply the pardon of all transgression, and the removal of the whole body of sin and death; for this must take place before we can be like him, and see him as he is, in the effulgence of his own glory. This fitness, then, to appear before God, and thorough preparation for eternal glory, is what I plead for, pray for, and heartily recommend to all true believers..." (Adam Clarke, Christian Theology, 12.Entire Sanctification)

I am left wondering....what did become of the Mysterium Liber? One is drawn to a good mystery and this is a great one. Where there are "gypsies" of this kind, there we will find the secret stuff of magical lore. Are we not all wanderers at heart, enquirers after the meaning and purpose of life exploring the hidden secrets of the Universe? If we find the arcane and the apocryphal so fascinating such as the books of Dan Brown would attest, then why should we not also pry more deeply into that "crowning blessedness" that Adam Clarke commends above all else, even above the veiled teachings of the Hebrew Rabbis and the Egyptian Gnostics?

For further reading:
J.W Etheridge, The Life of the Rev. Adam Clarke, LL.D., 1858
Adam Clarke edited by Joseph Butterworth Bulmer Clarke, An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life of Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S., etc.
Wikipedia, Christian Perfection, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Perfection

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

John Wesley and "Unexplained Flying Observations"

2012-11-19T09:33:00.000+02:00

Elijah's Chariots of Fire, Byzantine Museum, Athens, Greece

John Wesley was insatiably curious about natural and supernatural phenomena. He published an expansive work titled "A Compendium of Natural Philosophy". His "Journals" are a tremendous collection of psychic and spiritual reports. He speculated about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Recently, I came across this tantalising reference:

Aliens have been sighted all throughout history by millions of people. Most people think that only crazy people have said they have saw "aliens" or "UFO's," but that is not true. Christopher Columbus, who discovered America recorded that he saw a UFO that looked like fireballs going across the sky. John Wesley, the Christian theologian said that he saw a UFO come out of a lake. Three Presidents of the United States, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter and Dwight Eisenhower, also have said that they saw UFOs. Not to mention over 14,000 American Servicemen in the Air Force and Navy, along with thirteen astronauts have spotted UFOs.

-Cody Waters, Friday, June 1, 2012, Aliens & UFOs

I was familiar with most of these documented reports but the sighting attributed to John Wesley was new to me. Attempts to locate the source reference has failed. I wondered if anyone else had heard of this? I had not. I would be most appreciative if a Wesleyan researcher could point me to the likely incident referred to here. If Wesley actually saw "a UFO [or something like that] come out of a lake" I would be very interested to know. It certainly begs further investigation.

However, John Wesley does relate another, most extraordinary incident he had come across and, as he often would, sought to investigate it for himself...

Last year, a strange letter, written at Penzance, was inserted in the public papers. Today I spoke to the two persons who occasioned that letter. They are of St. Just parish, sensible men, and no Methodists. The name of one is James Tregear; of the other, Thomas Sackerly. I received the account from James, two or three hours before Thomas came: But there was no material difference. In July was twelvemonth, they both said, as they were walking from St. Just church town toward Sancreet, Thomas, happening to look up, cried out, "James, look, look! What is that in the sky?" The first appearance, as James expressed it, was, three large columns of horsemen, swiftly pressing on, as in a fight from southwest to northeast; a broad streak of sky being between each column. Sometimes they seemed to run thick together; then to thin their ranks. Afterward they saw a large fleet of three mast ships, in full sail toward the Lizard Point. This continued above a quarter of an hour: Then, all disappearing, they went on their way. The meaning of this, if it was real, (which I do not affirm,) time only can show. (Journal, 7th September 1755.)

Wesley is not sure about the objective reality of the reported event. He typically, "thinks and lets think" on such matters. For him such occurrences evokes a sense of awe and wonder. Unfortunately he doesn't comment further. Nehemiah Curnock, the editor of Wesley's Journals, refers to the Gentleman's Magazine 1754, p. 482 which is even more curious despite its brevity:

"About three weeks since, two persons of St Juste, six miles westward of Penzance in Cornwall, about 10 at night, saw in the sky, a large fleet of ships, and soon after a cloud came before it, and the scene was changed to an army, or armies, seeming to be smartly engaged in battle. It lasted fifteen minutes, and divers other persons saw this phaenomenon." (Gentleman's Magazine, Octboer 1745, p.482)

What are we to make of this? It was witnessed by "divers other persons". How many? A night-time observation....could it have been fireballs? northern lights? group hallucination? unidentified flying objects? psychological projection? star wars? condensation trails? a fiction? Definitely not Japanese lanterns! "Definitely not a hostile takeover!" The story is most peculiar. reminiscent of numerous, similar experiences reported throughout history since Elijah's chariots of fire and before.

Paul Lambourne Higgins in his, John Wesley Spiritual Witness, says, "At every point Wesley was a careful observer of unusual events and a thorough-going and highly intelligent investigator of psychic and supernatural phenomena." He also observes that the "active power of Providence for Wesley shaped the very forces of nature" which might explain how Wesley might have understood the experience of the two "sensible men" from Penzance. "Those experiences which strangely eluded man's understanding and quite defied the explanation of natural science were to Wesley clear evidence of the Providence of God." We probably need to view this incident in a similar light...an awesome manifestation of God's foresightful protective assurance and care for his creatures.

Whatever startled Tregear and Sackerly and others that July night in 1754, it remains a mystery to us, an "unexplained flying observation". Wesley leaves us to ponder "the meaning of this", to quietly contemplate the strange and mysterious permeation of worlds unseen and dimensions unknown to us. But time will tell!

Further Reading:
Graham Hancock, Supernatural, 2005, Arrow Books, London.
Paul Lambourne Higgins, John Wesley Spiritual Witness, 1960, Dennison & Co, Minneapolis.
Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, 2002, Routledge, London and New York.
Jacque Vallee, Passport to Magnolia: On UFOs, Folklore and Parallel Worlds, 1993 Contemporary Books, Chicago.
WY Evan-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, 2004, New Page Books, Franklin lakes, NJ.
Walter Scott, Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Krotoa - Our Mythic Go-Between

2012-11-15T12:31:00.001+02:00

There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call the terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come.

Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, p.86-87

Recently, the South African Post Office, issued a postage stamp portraying a young Khoikhoi woman named Krotoa, also known as Eva to the Dutch. Krotoa became an important figure in South African history. The recognition of Krotoa on one of our postage stamps was of considerable import to me personally as it must have been for many others.

Krotoa was a 9th great grandmother of mine and as such I have a special affinity with her. Indeed she is "mother" of countless South Africans of many races. Through her we are all connected. She embodies and reflects in many ways the "shattered mythic" essence of the South African psyche. Her story is our story.

The stamp, "designed by Lien Botha, features a drawing from the Western Cape Archives portraying Krotoa and a VOC (the Dutch East India Company) ship from a painting by Aernhout Smit (1683). These images are superimposed onto a contemporary photograph taken at Milnerton beach with Table Mountain in the background. The Commemorative folder cover also features the face of Krotoa, this time encircled by a wreath of tulips which alludes to the Company's Garden" (1,2)

Krotoa is probably the most written about woman in South African history. The Post Office Souvenir Folder (3) gives us a tantalising glimpse into the life of this remarkable but enigmatic young woman...

Krotoa was born in about 1642 on Robben Island, a decade before the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. She was the first Khoikhoi woman to appear in the European records of the early settlement at the Cape as an individual personality who interacted socially and culturally with the Dutch settlers.

Krotoa's brother-in-law is said to have been Oudasoa, a chief of the Cochoquas. When she was young, she worked in the household of Jan van Riebeeck, the first governor of the Cape Colony.

As a teenager, Krotoa learned Dutch and Portuguese and like her uncle, Autshumao (known as Harry or Herrie by the Dutch) - a Coringhaicona Khoikhoi leader and trader, she worked as an interpreter for the Dutch who wanted to trade goods for cattle. Krotoa's role as interpreter extended beyond trading, as she was also instrumental in negotiating with the 'Peninsulars', whose foreman was Doman, regarding conflicts around land that erupted into formal war in 1659.

Since Krotoa travelled frequently between the Dutch colony and the Cochoquas, she came to embody the notion of an in-between figure, but found little happiness in either community. On 3 May 1662, she was baptised into the Christian religion by a visiting parson, Petrus Sibelius, in the church inside the Fort de Goede Hoop.

On 26 April 1664, she married Pieter van Meerhoff, a Danish surgeon. She was the first Khoikhoi to marry according to Christian customs, and this marriage is the first between a European and a Khoi at the Cape. In May 1665, the couple left the Cape for Robben Island where Van Meerhoff became superintendent. He died on 27 February 1668 on an expedition to Madagascar.

On 30 September 1668 she returned to the mainland with her children. According to VOC reports, she was suffering from alcoholism and left the Castle in the settlement to be with her family. In February 1669, she was imprisoned at the Castle and then banished to Robben Island for disorderly conduct. She returned to the mainland on many occasions just to find herself once more banished to Robben Island. Three of her children survived infancy. She died on 29 July 1674 at the Cape and was buried on 30 September 1674 in the church at the Fort.
Krotoa's eldest daughter, Pieternella, married Daniel Zaaijman, a friend of Van Riebeeck's.

They lived in Madagascar for a while, but returned to the Cape upon the departure of the VOC from the island. Because of Pieternella's documented descendants, Krotoa is regarded a significant ancestor for many South Africans across various races.

Krotoa is described as an "in-between figure" reminding me of Brighid of the Celts (4).

Like Brighid, Krotoa is the 'Lady of the Shores'. She greets the European settlers as they come ashore. The shore is one of those magical in-between places that so fascinated the Celts and certainly the Strandlopers of the Cape. These in-between places, sometimes called "thin places", such as shorelines, fountains, wells, mountain passes, doorways and so on, are go-betweens, corridors. The shore is neither dry land, nor is it the ocean, yet it is the meeting place of both. In Krotoa, Africa and Europe meets. If we consider that the land represents our solid, material world, while the sea represents the Great Cosmic womb of all life, the intuitive side of our nature, we can see that the shore is a meeting place between one world and another and a young Khoikoi girl the bridge between Black and White South Africans.

oOo

Relationship Chart

Krotoa (Eva vd Kaap) - Colin Garvie

Acknowledgements:
1. Botha's interpretation of Krotoa was derived from; Sketches representing the Native Tribes, Animals and Scenery of Southern Africa, from drawings made by the late Mr Samuel Daniell, engraved by William Daniell, London, 1820, Courtesy of Western Cape Archives and Records Service - M1052 (photograph) and J 741 DAN (publication).
2. William Fehr Collection, Iziko Museums, Cape Town - ship from Aernout Smit painting of Cape Town, 1683. Carine Zaayman, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
3. Setempe, South African Stamp News, Vol.17, No.3, September - December 2012.
4. Wendy M. Reynolds, The Goddess Brighid, http://www.millersv.edu/~english/homepage/duncan/medfem/bride.html

Sources:
Karel Schoeman, 2009. Seven Khoi Lives. Cape Biographies of the Seventeenth Century. Pretoria: Protea.
Dan Sleigh, 1938, Eilande, recently translated from Afrikaans by Andre Brink (in Dutch: 'Stemmen uit zee'/in English: 'Islands').
SA Philatelic Services, Customer Services: http://www.postoffice.co.za, http://www.virtualpostoffice.co.za

Internet Resources:
http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/krotoa.htm
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/69.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotoa
http://ancestry24.com/eva-krotoa-van-die-kaap/
http://www.geni.com/people/Krotoa-Eva-van-die-Kaap/
http://www.southafrica.to/history/history.html

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

A Tribute to Binary Notation - And the Old Shall Become New

2012-10-26T07:28:00.004+02:00

...there are many algorithms which might be used for combining contingencies, the simplest of these is known as the algebra of logic par excellence, or the Boolean algebra. This algorithm, like the binary arithmetic, is based on the dichotomy, the choice between yes and no, the choice between being in a class and outside it. The reason for its superiority to other systems are of the same nature as the reasons for the superiority of the binary arithmetic over other arithmetics.

-Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, p.140

I was first introduced to the aesthetic beauty of binary numbering systems in a course in Digital Techniques at Technical College in the mid-1960s. I had not heard of binary arithmetic at school. Most school children today are taught the now familiar base two numbering system that uses only two symbols, 0 and 1, and carry a galaxy of pulsating flip-flops in their Blackberries and iPads around with them in their satchels.

As someone has observed, "For many years, mathematicians saw base two as a primitive system and overlooked the potential of the binary system as a tool for developing computer science and many electrical devices." http://www.bookrags.com/research/binary-number-system-wom/

And yet it has a fascinating history. Many ancient civilisations used a form of binary system but credit must surely go to the Chinese for their sophisticated use of binary notation as illustrated, for instance, in the trigrams of the I Ching, which interestingly might also describe the Genetic Code of Life if not also the Essence of Creation itself.

The West was a relatively late starter but took binary notation to new heights. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) invented his "bilateral code" but used the symbols "A" and "B" to represent the letters of the alphabet much as dots and dashes are used in Morse Code or the 0's and 1's in the ASCII Code today.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), mathematician, philosopher, theologian, learned of the binary system from Jesuit missionaries who had lived in China. He wrote, "Two Letters on the Binary Number System and Chinese Philosophy" (Norbert Wiener). He also attempted to apply binary thinking to theology. He speculated that the creation of the universe may have been based on a binary system, where "God, represented by the number 1, created the Universe out of nothing, represented by 0."

"The rest is history," as they say. Most electronic devices now are digital and we appreciate the purity, beauty, authenticity, and convenience, from digital music to digital cameras, digital television and even awesome digitized images from Mars and beyond to the very fringes of time.

What was once dismissed as crude and primitive has become the corner stone, the musical yin-yang of our technological age. Therein lies a parable. Today, few would dispute the elegance inherent in binary systems from ancient Chinese bi-cosmologists to yellow polka dot bikinis! Symmetry weaves her thread mysteriously into the fabric of the universe. Unless we appreciate that historically, mathematical systems such as the binary system were regarded as reflections, symbols, and algorithms of spiritual truth, much of the significance and alchemy of number systems will remain incomprehensible and obscure to us. (Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, p.96f) Binary notation and Boolean Algebra is indeed "the algebra of logic par excellence", the Alpha and Omega of the manifest World!

Photo Credit: NASA Hubble Galaxy Pair

Scorn Not His Simplicity...

2012-09-26T08:18:00.000+02:00

Scorn not his simplicity
But rather try to love him all the more
Scorn not his simplicity
-Phil Coulter

Arthur

1957-2012

"With God, life and strength within me, how can I be weak?"

-Selvarajan Yesudian

Recently, my younger, Down's Syndrome brother, Arthur, passed away leaving me to reflect on the huge impact that his life had on mine.

Of all the experiences and crises that transformed and influenced the course of my life none came near to the profound challenges that Arthur brought to bear on my own life and mind. Arthur affected my life not so much by what he was capable of doing or saying, though often surprising and dramatic as those epiphanies were, but simply by who he was as a lovable human being without rancour or guile.

I saw more looking intently into the eyes of Arthur than I ever discovered standing with astonished amazement beneath NASA's 210-foot Goldstone Dish Antenna in California gazing into the mysterious immensity of Space.

His life had greater impact on me than that once in a lifetime moment in my life when I was ordained into the Christian ministry by the laying on of hands.

All the academic learning of Technical Colleges and Universities, neither Diplomas in Space Communications nor Degrees in Theologies, can ever compare with what Arthur taught me.

Great thinkers moulded my grasp of who I was in the indescribable vastness of the Universe, Plato, Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Wesley, Kierkegaard, Einstein, Jung, Gandhi, Smuts to mention but a few, but outshining all of these was the simple life of a little brother who loved Jesus - ARTHUR! Scorn not his simplicity! Namaste!

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Cybernetics and Dreams

2012-08-28T14:34:00.000+02:00

...build belief in yourself and as you do this, you reactivate the success mechanism -- the servo-mechanism -- within you. This implies that your eyes are open to opportunities that arise because you want to see them and reach them -- without stepping on other people's toes, but also without tripping over your own toes.

-Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics and Self-Fulfillment, p.8

The term cybernetics stems from the Greek κυβερνήτης (kybernētēs, steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder — the same root as government). In 1 Corinthians 12:28 (cf Prov 1.5; 11.14 Septuagint) κυβέρνησις is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Today the word is generally used in the context of Information Systems.

The significance of cybernetics to anthropology, sociology, physiology, and psychology was appreciated by the father of modern cybernetics, Norbert Wiener and others. He wrote, "Drs McCulloch and Fremont-Smith have rightly seen the psychological and sociological implications of the subject.... The need of including psychologists had indeed been obvious from the beginning. He who studies the nervous system cannot forget the mind, and he who studies the mind cannot forget the nervous system. (Wiener, Cybernetics, p.26). Thus the relevance of cybernetics to dreaming and dreams.

Over the years I have come to experience and think of dreams as an inner guidance system, a rudder or steering mechanism to help one navigate through life's difficulties. Dreams can be a useful problem-solving resource.

A little while ago I had been reading John Kehoe (Quantum Warrior, p.120f) explaining how one can consciously dream solutions to problems through a process he calls "dream incubation". Top of my mind at the time was an awful conflict situation I had had at work. It was an accounting environment and the problem was one of financial accountability. I was a programmer and a technician but not an accountant so felt inadequate to deal with it. The problem was a complex legal-forensic one and a very serious one at that. It affected me deeply. Kehoe led me to think differently about the problem by reactivating the "servo-system" within myself.

So, on going to bed I kept repeating the question that was running through my mind, "What must I do about this situation at work? Do I continue working at it or do I just resign from it, throw in the towel, and not get involved?" With this concern on my heart I went to sleep.

I woke early the next morning dreaming that I was at a radio observatory of sorts like the one at Hartebeesthoek where I had previously worked. In a mysterious way my dream had latched on to a context I could easily relate to as a technician and programmer. In the dream we weren't getting a clear "picture" of a critical deep space object that we were looking at. I suggested the noise level was anomalously high, distorting the picture, and that we should check the signal to noise ratio (SNR is a standard measurement in radio telecommunication). We needed to take corrective action in order to see the big picture by reducing internally generated dissonance . (See Gestalt and Cybernetics.) And so it happened.

Mariner 6 photo enhancement.

First panel is the original picture. The top-right panel

is the system noise pattern which when digitally

applied to the original clarifies it as in the lower pictures.

Photo Credit: NASA

It was quite some dream! As a direct response to my question, the the dream seemed to be advising me that the problem should not simply be ignored but that it had to be addressed. It also indicated the kind of contribution I could make.

Remarkable as my dream was, dreams of this nature are not unusual. Indeed, one of the most significant instances comes from my own Methodist tradition. John Wesley wrote parts of his Journal in code, intentionally guarding its contents deliberately hiding it by means of a cipher. Sometimes there is good reason for encoding transmissions. In this case, it was not noise that hid the true content but encoding.

John Wesley had left behind a Journal much of it written in an indecipherable code. In 1909, the Rev. Nehemiah Curnock was poking around through a secondhand bookstore when he came across a treasure - John Wesley's personal Bible, with marginal handwritten notes in the same mysterious code. Curnock bought the Bible, studied it, and then forgot about it. One night, shortly thereafter, while deep in sleep, Reverend Curnock had a dream - he saw Wesley's Journal, and on one page the code was deciphered. Waking, he had the key. Remembering his dream, he examined Wesley's code in the Bible, and unlocked the mystery. Curnock alludes to the dream in his introduction to his edition of the Journal of John Wesley. His dream was cybernetic, it had guided and directed him to the key that would help unlock the mysterious cipher John Wesley had used.

Dreams do that for us! They open us to new possibilities helping us to see the underlying issues and get the "bigger picture".

oOo

Further Reading:
Two interesting articles by George Butler:
"Minister's Remarkable Dream", http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=19761010&id=-6QfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OtYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1360,1216912
"Dreams often provide key to many of world's mysteries", http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=19750816&id=wKcfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=VtYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=811,2666820

Recent Wesleyan research has built on the earlier work of Nehemiah Curnock. Richard Heitzenrater has devoted much of his time decoding the diaries of John Wesley http://divinity.duke.edu/publications/2008.10/features/code/index.htm. Charles Wesley also coded large sections of his Journal which has been cracked by Professor Kenneth Newport http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1049285/Coded-diary-reveals-secret-sex-scandal-haunted-Methodist-founder-Charles-Wesley.html

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za