Dear Don,
Good trip, wasn’t it? Once again time seems to have been obliging and stretched itself to fit with our meanderings. We are going to need to go south again though, with all I am reading about Marden Henge lately. Do you recall me mentioning it some time ago? The site on the line between Avebury and Stonehenge? The excavations are revealing another huge complex.
While I was reading up on it a bit, I came across this pic of a brooch found close by… What would you say at first glance? Early Christian?
Apparently not. It’s a Bronze Age sun disc, dating back around 2,400 years before the Christian era, found in a burial mound none too far from Stonehenge. It just goes to show what we have been saying for a while… the symbols that speak directly to the inner being don’t belong to any period or system.
Both sun and cross are associated with wheat, aren’t they? I was thinking about that as I was going through But ‘n’ Ben. ‘The Field of Sheaves’… I knew I’d come across that mental image before. Genesis for a start 37:7, Joseph’s prophetic dreams… “For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf.”
That wasn’t, though, what I was thinking of, although it is pretty much the same era. It was the field of sheaves in the Egyptian afterlife… the Fields of Peace. You know the bit in the Papyrus of Ani where Ani himself is cutting sheaves of wheat having made it past the weighing of the heart and been found worthy? There are a number of such scenes in the tomb paintings and stelae, and Osiris, the Green God, is associated with the growth of wheat.
Wheat being a golden symbol of resurrection, it is not at all surprising it became a Christian symbol too, is it? Mind… it is curious that Jesus should have been born in Bethlehem… ‘the house of bread’. Didn’t they eat bread baked in the shape of Osiris at the festival of his resurrection? The bread of life…
Plus ça change…
Some things don’t change, though. The beast seems more interested in crumpets than bread at present… it’s the butter, you know…
Love,
Wen and Anu x
