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Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November (British History)
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Oakey Dokey



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I wrote a huge long post on James, Frederick, Ferdinand, Hermetic thought, Paganistic Hermetic renaissance thinking and the birth of proper science in Britain and Britain becoming a world power, subsequently only to have it disappear -- ahhhh bollox.

Anyway one point worth mentioning, James's mother's (Mary Queen of Scots) mother was of the French family Guise. I can't be arsed reposting the details now but that family and the whole Thirty Years War (really a crusade) have loads of political twists and turns involving the Guise family.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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The letter to Lord Monteagle goes like this:

"My lord out of the love i beare to some of youere frends i have a caer of youer preseruacion therfor i would advyse yowe as yowe tender youer lyf to devys some excuse to shift of youer attendance at this parleament for god and man hath concurred to punishe the wickednes of this tyme...


Meaning both the Protestants and Catholics are in the wrong?

...and think not slightlye of this advertisement but retyre youre self into youre contri wheare yowe may expect the event in safti for thowghe theare be no appearance of anni stir...


Calculated coldly then, not a wave of passion that everyone on edge already.

...yet i saye they shall receyve a terrible blowe this parleament and yet they shall not seie who hurts them


It will not be a self-evidently Catholic plot?

this cowncel is not to be contemned because it may do yowe good and can do yowe no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as yowe have burnt the letter...


Possession of the letter is incriminating, then. How underground were Catholics at this time?

...and i hope god will give yowe the grace to mak good use of it to whose holy proteccion i comend yowe.


Sure, this might be an all-Catholic letter, but it seems to be consistent with a Wiccan plot, too.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Now we need only link Lord Monteagle with Wicca.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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The letter has been attributed to Francis Tresham, one of the conspirators, who was Monteagle's brother-in-law, so he'd be understandably concerned for his safety but why would it be anonymous and if they were bros-in-law surely Tresham could have found a safer means of communication. Opinion seems to be divided about the letter's authenticity.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Guy Fawkes is one of [York's best-known historical characters, famous for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. He was born in Stonegate, York on 13 April 1570 and baptised at St Michael-le-Belfry on 16 April 1570, where his baptismal register still exists. Guy's father died in 1578 and his mother remarried a Catholic in 1587, Dionysius Bainbridge, who connected with the Pulleyn and the Percy family.


I never knew Dionysius was an English christian name but it sure as hell is a "Gnostic" one.

Fawkes attended St Peter's School in York in 1578, where he received Roman Catholic influences, along with other boys. St Peter's previous headmaster, John Fletcher, had been imprisoned for 20 years as a Catholic recusant. Guy's headmaster, John Pulleyn, outwardly conforming, seems to have influenced the boys greatly in two ways - drama and Catholicism.


So, his school headmaster, who was also the headmaster for some of the other plotters, was a close associate of his stepfather, "Dionysius". Dunno about you, but I am slightly surprised to find a "recusant Catholic" being kept in prison for twenty years. It's an expensive business, prison....

Eventually there were thirteen plotters, three of whom - Guy Fawkes and the brothers John and Christopher Wright - were schoolfellows at St Peter's School in York.


Remind you of anything?
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Two families mentioned by Ishmael are specially redolent -- the Pulleyns and the Percys. The Pulleyns are (I believe) the Boleyns who in the person of Ann Boleyn can be said to have triggered the English Reformation. And of course Queen Lizzie herself was a Boleyn. (In all this I am beginning to get the gleanings that actual religious labels are less important than people trying to get their hands on the levers of power to shake the Establishment into paths they might not otherwise go.) The Percys (see your Shakespeare) are prime movers and shakers in all northern revolts. And talking of Shakespeare I think it is significant that we appear to have far more historical detail about Guy Fawkes than we do about W Shakespeare -- is this to be taken as evidence that "legends" (ie false documentation seeded into the record to establish bogus identities) are about?
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Hatty
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We might not be going far enough back. On a rock known as Darius' tablet in Behistun, dated 519 BC, which gives an account of the important events of Darius The Great's life and times, one of which was his victory over a rival claimant to the Persian throne, a 'false king' called Smerdis, an imposter in fact (his real name was Gaumata):

This inscription provides a date for every major effort of Darius in his ascension to the throne with a specific date on Achaemenian calendar. This luni-solar calendar is also known as old Persian calendar. In Darius' words "After that I sought help of Ahuramazda; Ahuramazda bore me aid; of the month Bagayadi 10 days were past, then I with a few men slew that Gaumata the Magian, and those who were his foremost followers" The date of his triumph over Gaumata is mentioned -- the month of Bagayadi 10 days were past.

Bagayadi overlaps with the month of Mehr in the Persian calendar, starting 23rd September; the ancient Persian calendar consisted of twelve months, 365 days, so each month was 30 days apart from the eighth month which had five extra days added in the Achaemenid period to the month of Varkanza (the month of the 'wolf-man' or werewolf), October-November, which caused great confusion. A month after 23rd September would give the 25th October, ten days after that is 5th November, which may or may not be one of those "coincidences".

Mithrakana "Mehregan" coincides with the month of Bagayadi
It is believed that Mithrakana festival was an ancient festival even for the Achaemenian kings. On the day of this great festival Darius identifies and destroys Gaumata, "the false Smerdis" and saves the Persian Empire. Mithra, a pre-Zoroastrian guardian angel, later taken as a Zoroastrian Yazata (Persian: Mehr Izad). Ancient Indo-Europeans believed Mithra to be the protector of covenants and green fields, as she was the destroyer of drought and famine. To them Mithra was symbolized by the first rays of sun at dawn.

Mithrakana festival was celebrated by Achaemenian kings as followers of prophet Zoroaster. Even an unproven theory exists that Achaemenian new year was celebrated on Mithrakana. Later Sassanian kings followed the same tradition with celebrating Mehregan -- on the month of Mehr and Mehr day.

To this day the Great harvest festival known as "Mehregan, Mithrakana, or 10 days past Bagayadi" survives and is well celebrated by Persian all over the world.
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Mick Harper
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Hatty's identification is potentially important. It's well known that the Persian kings always tried to link their own activities (which were depressingly down-to-earth) with the activities of their gods as here, Darius (himself an illegitimate pretender to the throne and a regicide) is clearly making his relationship to Gaumata the equivalent of Ahura Mazda's to Ahriman (roughly the Devil). Since Zoroastrianism is a "fire religion" then it follows that 5th November might be Bonfire Night. And it's good to see the Magi back in the story.

But the link with us is that Zoroastrianism seems to be linked fairly directly with Pauline vs Gnosticism! The way it happened is thus
    1. Just before Chistianity took over the Roman Empire Mithraism, which seems to be an updated version of Zoroastrianism, was the main contender with Christianity for becoming the state religion (it was particularly popular in the Roman army)
    2. When Christianity triumphed, the Mithrans went the usual route and became a dispersed intellectual minority
    3. When Christianity was clearly not going to go away, the Mithrans then went the usual route and became (outwardly) a variant of Christianity -- that's the Gnostics
    4. Anywhere that the Empire/State Church lost its temporal power to assert monopoly, the Gnostics went the usual route, ie going overground and starting to organise the general populace (the Bogomils, the Cathars etc)
    5. But otherwise they just hung around constantly presenting themselves as "reformers of the Church" eg Pelagianism, Lollardry in Britain.
Of course this is not strictly 'conspiracy' history. A great deal of it is straightforward sociology but nonetheless there is always a substrate of people who (roughly) know what they are doing.

PS The Christians, as is the usual route, incorporated bits of Mithraism into their religion (just as the Paulines incorporated just enough Gnosticism) to make sure that everybody except the diehards could be part of the new Broad Church.
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Hatty
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Still no nearer finding a correlation with 5th November, the festival of Mehr is celebrated on or around 2nd October, ten days after 23rd September, the autumn equinox - in line with harvest festivals generally.

The word bonfire has nothing to do with French bon but comes from banefire, meaning a fire for burning bones, rather more macabre than burning garden rubbish. So bonfires seem to have been associated with altogether more dramatic events than the burning of effigies.

(When I looked at "bonfire" on OED the definition cited 1st May and 5th November as "two major festivals", no mention of 'pagan' though.)

O.E. bana "slayer, murderer," from P.Gmc. *banon, cognate with *banja- "wound" (cf. O.Fris. bona "murderer," O.H.G. bana "murder," Goth. banja "stroke, wound"), from PIE base *bhen- "to strike, wound" (cf. Avestan banta "ill").

Avestan, the language in which the sacred texts of the Zoroastrian Avesta were written, was a language only used by priests and ceased to be a spoken language c. 400 BC (like Hebrew and Latin so I've been reliably informed). The sacred word was passed down the generations through oral tradition, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, and evolved from late Pahlavi (Middle Persian) which itself was derived from Aramaic. It seems that Aramaic was the "lingua franca" of the Middle East so would have been spoken by Romans occupying Palestine presumably as a means of communicating with the natives.
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Mick Harper
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The OED, in its ineffable way, has revealed two things. Firstly a link between 1st May and 5th November. The First of May is specially important because it has no known equinoctial purpose (solstice, quarter-day etc) but is simply (but unchangingly and unavoidably) the day the dawn sun shines up the Dragon Line of southern England. If it can be linked with 5th November in a slightly less perfunctory way than in the OED, then we're halfway home.
And secondly, this (I thought) fascinating detail about bone-fires. Dan will know more but has this not got something to do with potash or some such chemical in the alum story?

I am puzzled about what you say about Aramaic though. I had always been taught (so that's pretty unreliable then) that Aramaic was a Semitic language whereas Persian is a firmly Indo-European one (Iran = Aryan). But unlike most linguists' posturings about dead languages this should be pretty easy to check because Aramaic is still spoken by a tiny minority today. (I think Ishmael has something on them.) I find it most unlikely that Romans would be so politically correct as to learn Aramaic to converse with the natives, though "Romans" were often Greek-speakers in the Eastern half of the Empire. Anybody the Romans would have had dealings with in Palestine would presumably have Greek. Though of course this might not have applied to the rank-and-file soldiery who, I understand, were fervent Mithrans.

But actually I am rather glad that the status of Aramaic has been called into question because according to the precepts of THOBR the whole local population ought to be speaking a variant of demotic Arabic. Jesus as an A-rab...now that would put a cat among the fundamentalist pigeons.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Mick Harper wrote:
The OED, in its ineffable way, has revealed...a link between 1st May and 5th November.

Excuse me. I must have missed this point. How does the OED link May First and November Fifth?
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Mick Harper
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I was quoting Hatty's statement

When I looked at "bonfire" on OED the definition cited 1st May and 5th November as "two major festivals", no mention of 'pagan' though.

It is not so important whether OED actually believes there is a link. Remember, Applied Epistemology piggy-backs on academia even when (especially when) academia doesn't quite know what it is doing. Now a good many professional man-hours has gone into the Official Explanation of what 'a bonfire' is. Personally, I'd define it as something you light in your back garden to get rid of smallscale waste. That meaning is extended to include the more major outbreak of al fresco fire-raising that we call Bonfire Night. End of story. But the OED, apparently quite gratuitously, has included the detail about the 1st of May. But I've never heard of a Mayday Bonfire. To me, it's all dancing round maypoles and interfering with maidens in hedgerows. (The latter not in my lifetime, or at least not in the hedgeless wasteland that is South London. )

But, critically, the OED has. In other words, in the OED's capacious maw there is a tradition of Mayday Bonfires...and we can take that as fact. So there's a link with the only other day that is specially commemorated with a bonfire.Unless the OED lists a whole stream of Bonfire Days. Does it, Hatty?
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Brian Ambrose



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There's an (alleged) Biblical link between Halloween/Samhain etc. and Noah's Flood -- apparently it's a memorial for all that were killed.

Gen 7:11:
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month--on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

The Jewish second month (I think) is Chislev, the middle of which corresponds with the end of October/beginning of November (Chislev seems to start around the middle of October).
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the Cathedral door on Halloween. October 31st.

It also occurred to me this morning that Halloween -- being "All Hallows Eve" is the day before "All Saints Day." It seems that the day once called "All Hallows Day" was transformed to "All Saints Day." When did this happen? And why wasn't the name of All Hallows Eve changed to All Saints Eve? One day is changed and the other left alone.

The other interesting thing is that November 1st is the day of All Hallows. That's only 4 days separation from November 5th, where Halloween is five. What is the history of All Hallows?

And this word, Hallows....looks like Gallows.
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Oakey Dokey



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Gallows/Hallows

I have previously suggested that "Celtic" sacrifice was a rare execution for crimes. And this is where the Gall in Gallows comes from - a gall, if you remember, was the thing made by wasps in oak trees and, so we speculated, was used by the Druids for medicinal purposes. Thus hanging from an oak tree.

The reason being that, unlike our current judicial system (reform and punish), the ancients thought that life was an illusion therefore to die was to speed up another chance at unlocking mysteries. To suffer death as a 'punishment' therefore had to serve two functions. Firstly it had to stop a perpetrator repeating a crime. Secondly it had to give the perpetrator's soul/life force a sufficient chance to succeed. The best way to do this was through the sacred door to the 'other realm' - the Oak. Hence hanging from oaks - Gallows. Which is another way of killing on 'Hallowed' ground. They were not just executing, they were sending the soul on the next part of its journey. We would consider this reincarnation, they would say another go on the merry-go-round.

All Hallows Eve is where the membrane between us and the underworld (the state of being non-living) is thinnist. It's our closest link to the dead but a celebration of those lost to us (because basically we love and can't forget in a human condition type of way). No bloody wonder it's so important. IT'S THE HOLIDAY - I mean can you honestly see anything more important to a society based on the next world?
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