Westeros v Middle Earth v The Five Kingdoms

The best fantasy worlds need to feel real while still providing readers with their fill of the fantastical. They need to be unique and not at all derivative. And they need to be fully fleshed out so it feels like the characters are moving between real world locations across open areas which seem vast and give a good sense of distance while cities should feel cramped and populated and not at all like their country-set counterparts.

The amount of detail given about a world is also important. It should feel incredibly real, even when we are reading about dragons and shadow assassins. Characters in Westeros in The Game of Thrones talk about where they need to go or who controls what lands so naturally and vividly it’s as if they are talking about real places. A Song of Ice and Fire is a perfect example of how a writer can create a fantasy world without it being cliche or derivative.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, however, is the fantasy world by which all other fantasy worlds are judged. Almost everything Tolkien ever wrote took place, in one way or another, in Middle-earth. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series give a good idea of just how detailed a fantasy world can be. Everyone has a family tree in Middle-earth and every place has a detailed history.

The Five Kingdoms, the other dimension to where the time travelers are taken in The Reluctant Time Travelers Guide to Other Worlds and Other Dimensions, has a similar detailed history as one of the characters in the story explains to another character.

Best described, as an alternative Wales, the first character says, with the borderlands around it being like the Welsh Marches. Very like twenty- first century earth, in some ways, and yet very unlike them in others, because in The Five Kingdoms elves and sprites and fairies still live alongside mortals, like they used to on earth in days gone by. And there are Sorcerers too!

One area of The Five Kingdoms in particular, a land of extremes where the burning desert of Myrrhia meets the icy wastes of Cyonil and the overwhelming heat of day is matched only by the icy cold of the nights, is ruled by a queen called Setura, who appeared there suddenly, and without warning, in the dim and distant past, and just took it away from the people who had been living there before she came. No one really knew where she had come from, or even when it was she first began to gather her army about her, because once she was there, no one dared venture into that land again. And those who had been there when she first came were never free enough afterwards to leave and tell the rest of the world about it.

This was the forbidding land into which Aurora Bradley had blundered because she refused to believe it could exist, and from where she spent the rest of the story trying to escape.

The Reluctant Time Travellers Guide To Other Worlds And Other Dimensions, a new e-book by Brian W Taylor, the first part of a trilogy, will be free on Amazon Kindle on 28th and 29th October. Don't miss your chance to own a copy.

                                                               

Pond Plants You'd Rather Not Have

A damp and dark day in Shropshire and though the threatened worst excesses of the unfortunately named, ‘Storm Brian’, have yet to strike us, it’s still raining heavily enough to prevent me working outside.

I had been working in my pond, pulling out the Australian Swamp Stonecrop ( Crassula helmsii) which came from who knows where to set up home with us a couple of years ago, and liked the situation so much it now needs two sessions a year of me pulling it out to keep it under control.

The only weed the pond is supposed to be home to is Curly Waterweed (Lagarosiphon major), which we put in as an oxygenator when we first made the pond twenty or so years ago and which, being less thuggish by nature than its neighbour, continues to float about on the surface of the water in clumps about the same size as those we introduced.

Australian Swamp Stonecrop was introduced to Britain from Tasmania in 1911, was first sold as an oxygenating plant in 1927, by Perry’s Hardy Plant Farm in Enfield, and was first recorded as growing in the wild in a pond at Greenstead Farm in Essex in 1956.

The plant first appeared in our pond as a small light green tussock which had attached itself to the surface of a pot with a plant in it growing just above the waterline and then grew out rapidly to form a dense mass of vegetation. Bits of that vegetation then broke away from the parent plant when I tried to remove it and rooted into other plants in the pond. That is how it has continued to spread around the pond.

Australian Swamp Stonecrop eliminates native flora by out-competing with it. It is shade tolerant, frost tolerant, desiccation tolerant and has no dormant season. The only ways of controlling it at all seem to be to cover small patches of it with black plastic or carpet, or spraying it with formulations of Glyphosate specific to aquatic environments.

In the garden, on a bank above the pond, perhaps, look out for the deep rose pink flowers, spreading habit and vigorous growth of Erica carnea  ‘December Red’, the Winter Heath, adding brightness to our lives in the depths of winter

The Cult of Mithras

Sometime over four thousand years ago there emerged from the depths of southern Russia a wild and war-like race of horsemen whose influence on the subsequent history of mankind was to be out of all proportion to the exiguity of their numbers.

What it was which sparked off the migration from their homeland or, even where the exact location of that home­land was, no one has ever been able to say with any degree of certainty. Only the places where they eventually settled are beyond dispute. They read like a roll of honour of some of the greatest civilisa­tions ever seen as radiating south, west, north and southeast like the spokes of a wheel. The descendants of these Aryan invaders founded the Greek and Roman empires, the Celtic and Teuton tribal systems of northern Europe, the Hindu culture of India and the earliest orga­nised settlement of Iran in the days before the prophet Zoroaster.

They were days about which very little is known, for if records were kept they have since been destroyed and even the birth place of the prophet himself can be gauged no closer than a rather vague location somewhere in east-central Iran, around 660BC — thirty years before he received the series of miraculous visions which were to set him off on the quest for true knowledge. A knowledge which for him was to find fulfilment in the establish­ment of a new order. A dualist religion with Ahura Mazda as supreme god. A religion which held that the powers of good and evil were in perpetual conflict, with man an onlooker, free to support either side as his heart dictated.

Not that the heart of every man dictated that he supported either side. Despite the threats and cajolery of the established church many preferred to stick with the tried and tested nature deities of their Aryan forebears. The result was much as it was a millennium later when the Christian Church gave up trying to eradicate the related Celtic religion, in favour of absorbing it instead. The one difference was that what the Christians called saints the Zoroastrians looked on as yazatas. One of their number was Mithra, a god widely revered amongst Aryan peoples everywhere.

He had first been mentioned in a Hittite document of 1400-1300BC under the name of Miidra, the supreme god of the Mitanni, who were an Aryan tribal group controll­ing mountain areas fringing the north of the Mesopotamian plain. Later he became more widely accepted as the giver of cattle and sons, god of light, divine inspiration of loyalty and faith-keeping. One 'to whom princes pray when they go into battle' according to the Khordah Avesta.

And not only princes. It had been the perseverence of the ordinary people in continuing to worship Mithra in the face of official persecution which had resulted in his newly gained importance to the state religion. For so long, much as the Druids under Roman rule, Mithraic priests had conducted their secret cere­monies in the open, beside natural altars of wood or stone with the aid of fire-worship and a visionary draught prepared from the sacred haoma plant. Now they felt secure enough to emerge once more from the shadows and accept the official recognition of their spirituality which had for so long been denied.

With its star in the ascendant the stage was set for an expansion of Mithraic understanding. Carried by Iranian con­scripts to the forces of the Imperial Empire, knowledge of Mithra reached Rome during the first century BC.

It was more of a secret society than a religion by then and one from which women were excluded. Adherents had no exclusive allegiance demanded of them and were permitted to take part in any other religion they chose. Nevertheless, they were bound by strict vows to reveal nothing of the nature of the mysteries and sacred symbolism with which the cult of Mithras, as he was now known, was surrounded. The precepts, rituals of food and drink, and physical and psychological ordeals which were encountered throughout the various grades of initia­tion were guarded with holy dread.

They made less secret of their belief in the nature of a god they declared to be the creator and orderer of the Universe and the Divine Word incarnate, who had been born into their world to save them from Ahriman, the power of darkness.

In a creed which owed, or lent, much to Christianity 25 December was taken as the day when Mithras was born in a cave and visited by shepherds who had left their flocks to seek him. There followed a life filled with teaching and the perform­ance of miracles before he held a last supper with his disciples and ascended to heaven. He will come again though at the time of reckoning to judge the guilty and lead the chosen through a river of fire to blessed immortality. Those seeking to prepare for this should live a life of devotion and communion with their god through the sacramental means of initia­tion.

Whether or not this latter really included the need for the initiate to stand beneath a grating through which the blood of a freshly slain bull poured down on him is open to question. The depiction of the god killing the cosmic bull is commonly encountered, but this may have been purely for its symbolism rather than its actuality. The sun's gift of fertility to all lifeforms, the transfer of vitality to earth and womb and the transmutation of matter into energy between opposing poles may be what we are expected to see.

Other depictions show Mithras spring­ing fully armed from the broken halves of the cosmic egg as the creative action of the spirit of life, or emerging from the centre of solid rock as the life force seeking to free itself from the shackles which the limitations of existence impose on it.

To the soldiers who made up the bulk of the congregations who prayed to him, Mithras was never so metaphysical, however. In natural or artificial caves known as Mithraeums they worshipped him as an unconquerable warrior riding across the heavens in a chariot drawn by four swift horses. Though the heyday of the cult was undoubtedly during the third and early fourth centuries AD in Britain, at least, the appeal of Mithras seems to have been strictly limited. The size of such places of worship as have been discovered by archaeologists suggest that a dozen worshippers may have been the most ever to gather together at one time. Three temples along Hadrians Wall emphasized the point as well as revealing the infinite variety of the symbols associated with the god. At Housesteads for instance, Mithras was given the title Saecularis and portrayed as Lord of Ages with a design making clever use of rear illumination and the signs of the zodiac. At Rudches­ter the accent was on the sun god who was either companion and advisor to Mithras or his own alter ego depending on the belief of the individual.

At Carrawburgh initiation by ordeal was stressed by the provision of a cist for temporary entombment. This had been superceded by the importance of revela­tion at a later period of use though, for a remarkable altar had been constructed to depict the god as he is described in an Egyptian liturgy at the moment of his manifestation in glory, his sun-ray crown being pierced for illumination from behind.

Later still the Carrawburgh site seems to have been deliberately desecrated and thrown down to be used as a dumping place for refuse and animal manure. This would have undoubtedly been on the instructions of a Christian commandment as the ritual and dogma of Mithraism would have seemed a diabolical mockery of the sacraments of Christian belief.

They were certainly similar enough for suspicions of that nature to flourish and it was a similarity which was to bring about the termination of the cult. For as soon as the Christian Church felt itself strong enough to misuse the power granted it in 313AD by the Edict of Milan, it struck without mercy. The sun god was exting­uished by the Son of God, and the light of the sacred fires of Mithras was seen no more.



To find out more why not read Gardens of the Gods by Brian Taylor, recently given a five star rating by a satisfied reader, and available as a hard back book from Amazon, or its e-book version, Sacred Plants of the World From Neolithic Times Until the Present Day. Available from Amazon Kindle.

The Cult of Dionysus

There can be few people who have not heard of the Eleusinian festivals of Ancient Greece which assured that the burgeoning of spring would follow on as a matter of course, from the barren land­scapes of winter. The rituals surrounding the goddess Demeter, and her hapless daughter Persephone, have been the subject of countless books and articles over the years. Less well explored, however, are the observances associated with a deity whose own part in the festivals has been misted by the centur­ies in between. God of Spring, life-force of vegetation and reproductive animals. The Neoplatonists of a later era christ­ened him 'The Mind of the World'. Non­believers who were living at the height of his worship looked less kindly on a dogma which had its beginning in the seduction of Peresphone by her father, the supreme god Zeus.

The child of that union. Dionysus, should have gone on to inherit all of his father's power and glory. Instead he was taken prisoner by the Titans who turned him into a sacred meal —a not unusual fate for anyone captured by their enemies in those uncertain times.

Only the heart of the young god survived. This his half-sister Athena rescued and from it whilst Zeus was revenging himself on the Titans by reducing them to the ashes from which he drew the life force which was to become the human race, she fashioned a philtre to administer to Semele, a princess of Thebes.

The victim drunk deeply of the draught and almost immediately was filled with such an overwhelming passion for Zeus that mere carnal knowledge of him was not enough. She desired to see the god in all his glory and to this end she tricked him, only to be consumed by flames from which her unborn baby was shielded by a thick shoot of ivy, which was to become the sacred symbol of his cult. The reborn Dionysus, child of god and mortal as one who came later was also to be, was brought up by nymphs, muses, satyrs and maenads.

He passed his formative years on Mt Nysa in Thrace, an area which forms part of modern day Bulgaria. Later he travelled to Libya. Arabia and India, bringing with him wherever he went an advanced knowledge of agriculture, arts, crafts and winemaking, as well as the influence of the orgiastic mystery cults into which Cybele had initiated him. His eventual ascent into Heaven with his bride, Ariadne, was a promise to every believer that their faith would earn them a similar reward.

And if that seemed ever to be an eternity in its achievement there was no need for any loss of heart. Compensa­tions aplenty abounded to help while away existence on the mortal plane. Opium, ivy. toadstools, mystic rituals, wine, a state of divine possession which the uninitiated took to be a state of intoxication. It was said by his followers that anyone refusing to believe in Dionysus would be stricken by madness. It was claimed by critics of the cult that the opposite was far more likely to be the case.

Even sacramental communion with the god was a wild and excessive affair. The maenads of mythology were female elementals given to dancing wildly to the clashing of cymbals, wearing snakes in their hair, and performing acts of frenzied barbarism such as tearing the poet and musician Orpheus to pieces for his rejection of their role in the religion he had helped to form.

The latter day maenads of Dionysaism danced themselves into a state of hysterical ecstasy before taking part in Omophagia— a sacred rite in which a bull, or young kid, identified with Dionysus was torn apart, its blood drunk and almost all of its flesh devoured. All, that was, except for the phallus of the sacrificial victim.

Dionysus was god of the cycles of the earth and in a two year cycle of his own, his death and rebirth were celebrated at alternating festivals. The phallus, repre­senting the life principle, was needed to be born again the following year in the young Dionysus, the 'light from the east'.

Little else is known for certain about the rites of the cult. As a generalisation it can be assumed that the path to true knowledge would be via priest or hierophant. in a fashion common to all mystery religions. Preparatory purifica­tion, possibly taking the form of a procession to, and ritual washing in. the sea. Instruction in mystic disciplines. Study of certain sacred artefacts. The enactment of a divine story. The crowning and wreathing of the successful initiate. It is to the paintings and reliefs of the period that we must look if more specific information is required.

From these it would appear that the female role in Dionysaism was unex­-

pectedly important, considering the general status of women in the ancient world. In nearly every depiction they appear as priestesses, leaders and initiators, whilst male initiates and priests alike are shambling figures, veiled and blinded. Upright phallii in baskets of fruit symbolise the inexhaustible forces of life and fertility. A phallus on the head of an initiate makes of him a living symbol of the male principle. Meanwhile the female initiate unites with a priest in proxy of sacred intercourse with the god and sets off on a wild dance of exultation as she is accepted into the sorority of maenads.

And yet it should not be assumed that such rites were merely the excuse for licentiousness and debauchery, which their critics made them out to be. Raised to a higher plane of awareness by the intoxication of their beliefs, initiate and established believer alike were able to attain an intensity of worship transcen­ding by far anything of which non-initiates were capable.

Nor did the followers of Dionysus find their god only in this way. The mainstream of the cult might remain incorrigible in the established beliefs and practices but there were milder offshoots which found the excesses of their fellows as abhor­rent, as did the ordinary citizenry.

The Orphics, as they were known after their inspiration Orpheus, believed that the divine element in an initiate could be strengthened in a number of ways. By observing set rules of purity and absti­nence. By wearing only white clothes. By eating only that meat which represented the raw flesh of the suffering and dying god. By avoiding sexual over indulgence and pollution. By living in such a fashion that any evil would be expunged from the soul and the punishment of rebirth after death transmuted instead to a voyage to the Isles of the Blest.

It was a popular concept during the early part of the millennium and yet for all that there seemed to be any number of adherents ever ready to spread theirs was not a religion destined to stand the test of time.

If you want to know more why not read Gardens of the Gods, by Brian Taylor, available as a hardback book from Amazon, or its e-book version,  Sacred Plants of the World from Neolithic Times Until the Present Day, available from Amazon Kindle.

Bee friendly blooms

  A  sunny day in Shropshire and I’ve just been watching bees working some of the flowers in my garden and hoping at least some of the insects working so industriously were mine. There are so many hives in the vicinity that I know of, I couldn’t be sure.

A few weeks ago it was the red flowers of the Japanese Quince, Chaenomeles speciosa ‘Falconnet Charlet’, they were enjoying. This time it was the yellow blossoms of Caltha palustris, the Marsh Marigold, or Kingcup, which flourishes in the centre of my pond as well as the marshy edges of it, and is spreading with an abandon I might regret in time.

In a few weeks’ time it will the multitude of blue flowers covering the Californian Lilac, Ceanothus thrysiflorus, a shrub which prefers warmer conditions really, but clings to life in my garden despite a climate which doesn’t really suit it much of the time, which will seem to be humming themselves with so many bees visiting them for their pollen. Proof that, in my garden at least, despite what some experts say, the bees have no preference where colour is concerned.

In the garden, keeping up the bee friendly flowers theme, any time between May and September, look out for the slightly cupped, sweetly scented, white and yellow carpet of flowers which, Limnanthes douglasii, the Poached Egg plant, an annual, will produce.

Sometimes called the “Bee Flower”, because honey bees are said to be so attracted to it for both its nectar and pollen, when I grew it in my own garden a year or two ago, it was notable for its complete lack of attendant bees of any sort. Nor has it grown again as a result of self-seeding, as it’s supposed to do. Perhaps because it didn’t attract enough insects to pollinate its flowers. Though that could be a virtue rather than fault. It depends on your point of view.

The picture below is of one of my bees proving the Poached Egg plants popularity by being on two of its flowers at the same time.

                                                                 

Haunted Hearts, a supernatural love story.

I had no idea where Haunted Hearts would take me when I started writing it, what the man in Elizabethan clothes, who appeared out of the mist behind Peter on his first morning at work was doing there, or where meeting him would take Peter. Nor did I know at first that there was going to be a murder in my story, or who the murderer was going to be. Once there had been a murder though, it seemed to me that there was only one person who could have done it.

I set my story in a garden open to the public, on the hills above Church Stretton, because that is an area I know well. The house and gardens in which the action takes place, and the staff working there, were suggested by my experiences at Chiswick House Grounds, where I worked for a lot of years, and which did have a number of ghosts, including a Grey Lady, who raced through the grounds from time to time, screaming for her husband to pardon her and save her from the executioner's axe. It didn't have a farm though, so I borrowed the idea of a farm open to the public from Acton Scott, which is quite near Church Stretton, and which I have visited on a number of occasions, but never worked at..

                                                                     

The Disenchanted Garden - a new book by Brian W Taylor

    

An eighteenth century landscape garden, with lake, woodlands, statuary and buildings designed by Humphry Repton, Middleton Hall, as envisaged by its owners, and set out by its designer, was meant to be an enchanted garden in every sense of the word, but even before it was swallowed up by urban sprawl during the twentieth century, something had gone seriously wrong with that ideal.

The Disenchanted Garden. The lives and loves of people in a suburban park during the summer of 1983 and their involvement in events surrounding a tree planting ceremony to commemorate a sharp tongued local councillor's twenty-five years of service.

The e-book and paperback versions of this poignant tragicomedy about a group of painfully mismatched workmates are available from Amazon Kindle. Don't miss your chance to read one or other of them.

 During the 1960s 70s and 80s I worked for several different local authorities in London, and in a lot of different parks as apprentice, gardener, and then supervisor. Not all of my fellow workers had set out to follow a career in horticulture, some were failed actors, some were painters working in the parks during the summer months to earn enough money to spend the winter months painting, some were rehabilitating criminals who had served their time, some were just doing the job until something better came along - except that sometimes it never did. Some were just there to take advantage of the security of a job for life on the council, which was one of the perks in those days.
Job security, indeed the job itself, disappeared during the years when Mrs Thatcher ran the country, and you won't find parks or their staff like those depicted in my book anymore. Some might say that's as good thing, but I think it's a pity that that way of life has gone.
The people and events depicted in the book, those which really happened, are taken from several of the parks in which I worked and added to those which are purely fiction to make a story, the ones which are pure fiction are simply that. I hope they all gel together to make a story people will enjoy. It always makes me nostalgic for those times when I read the story again, and I do from time to time, because I enjoy it.