Yuri Leitch's depiction of the third Key of Balance.
There's been a lot of talk in Glastonbury recently about the alleged terrestrial zodiac.Beyond its perimeter there is supposedly an effigy of a guardian dog. One aspect of its magical mysteries was dealt with in my last blog post. Here is another. This extract from my upcoming Avalonian Aeon features a previously unpublished episode in the psychic quest for the Seventh Sword partly dealt with in Andrew Collins book of the same name.It expands the existing magical mythology concerning the possibility of Mesopotamian travellers in Somerset and may be of interest to dragon enthusiasts.
A short version intro just isn't possible but this piece is sufficiently self-contained to be understandable despite some references to other material outside it.The fundamental point is that finding a magical sword that would complete a set also involved obtaining three mysterious artefacts known as Keys of Balance. Two are discussed in Andy's book. They were made of plaster glazed with a turqoise finish and measured but a few inches in length. The first was in the form of a caduceus, the second, a Celtic cross. The third manifested in the Glastonbury locale in the immediate run-up to the first Gulf War and proved to be a doorway not just to the eventual finding of the sword but to the emergence of the Nephilim material that would feature in Andy's masterpiece From the Ashes of Angels.
So here, featuring the spectacular psychic talents of Andy's partner of the time, Debbie Benstead (now Cartwright), here is an extract from the section entitled --
BABYLON RISING
In the lead up to Christmas, knowing that another Glastonbury New Year visit was looming, Debbie inevitably found herself looking back on the events of 1990, in particular the ongoing dragon theme that had led to the two Key of Balance eggs amongst much else. She became agitated with the feeling that the dragon was even more important than we had realised. There was something that we had so far not understood. She wondered what was coming next?
It had been perplexing that we had received two Keys on subsequent weekends and then had to wait so long for the third. There had been a number of occasions when things appeared to be set up for number three and then not quite happened. The actual form it would take seemed mutable. The destiny matrix kept reconfiguring. Debbie believed that a set of the artefacts had been constructed during the twentieth century by a man who was now dead. The one that would manifest as the third Key would determine massive future karma. The mechanism of all this was impossible to understand. How the set had been put into hyperspace as Terma type treasures could barely be speculated upon. It was clear that whatever the hell it was we were up to it was not separate from the bigger world drama. The Gulf crisis might well be a significant factor.
From December 23rd, Debbie began to repeatedly see an image of an arched stone bridge and an eastern, maybe Sumerian, looking priest leaning over it towards the river beneath in which lurked a huge, monstrous, open-mouthed dragon. The priest was tossing a red stone into its’ gaping jaws. It was an offering made in order to be able to cross over the bridge. The feeling was that this character had physically come to Glastonbury from Mesopotamia bringing dragon power of some kind with him. Every time the scene appeared it would conclude by turning into turquoise stone. This seemed to be a clear Key of Balance indicator. It was all connected with very powerful Glastonbury dragon energies.
In a dream she found herself present in the scene which she now knew was somewhere in the Glastonbury vicinity. The bridge had been located. She could hear chanting. The last words of the sequence were “Ehieh Metatron” and each time they repeated, a blinding flash of light was seen on the water. Debbie ran across the bridge saying urgently, “it’s there, we must get it.” She put her hand down into muddy water by the riverbank only to find her arm then being eaten by something beneath the surface. The excruciating pain caused her to leave her body and watch herself screaming. A procession of ten Sumerian-looking men appeared, crossing the bridge, repeating the chant for the third and final time. An unknown person, connected in some way with our group, threw something into the water. This sacrificial offering was sufficient for the beast to release Debbie. Some of the Sumerians helped pull her from the water. Her arm had mutated. There was a blue disc stuck to her stump on which was a picture of a dragon being fed the stone. The perplexing thought arose that just because we got it didn’t mean we’d succeeded, in fact we failed because they got across the bridge. The same dream repeated twice.
The chanting words heard were clearly Jewish Qabalistic and both associated with the sephiroth of Kether. Why would they be recited by alleged Sumerians? There were all kinds of nuances in the air. Abraham, the founder of Judaism, originated in the famous Sumerian city of Ur. The Jews took much from the Babylonians (heirs to Sumeria). Metatron, so the story goes, had once been a human being named Enoch who had attained unique archangelic status. A book concerning him was present in some versions of the Bible and he was of some significance in underground esoteric lore. As was so often the case with Debbie’s psychic material, there were seeds of future developments in what seemed to be peripheral details.
A further vision then followed on the 29th where Debbie was standing on a windswept hilltop. A strange young man named Eserkyll was with her. He had dark skin and hair and sported a bizarre inverted cone-shaped brown and gold hat. He also wore a thick necklace and a long white robe, enlivened by zigzag and square designs with a kind of squashed eye in the middle. He told her that an oath should to be taken on the hill on which they stood and then, from the starting point of a tree, the path of the beast needed to be walked to the crossway. “On oath the bridge is in sight.” There was talk of the River Pharet.
There was enough information for Andy to understand where we were being directed. Oath Hill is a well-known site in the region of the girt dog and also lies in an area that Somerset folklore says was once terrorised by a dragon that used to fly between Curry Rivel and Aller. It was slain by a man named Hext. In Loham Church, the spear allegedly used to kill it is displayed on the wall. Janet Roberts, wife of Tony, had looked closely at the landscape of the legend and believed it to hide a dragon effigy to add to the girt dog as a Zodiac guardian figure. There is an article by her discussing it in Glastonbury: Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem. About nine miles long, the serpentine creature has a head at each end, one of which was at the foot of Oath Hill. Churches in the general vicinity do seem to contain an abnormal amount of carvings of dragons and associated saints.
The area is full of evocative history and legend that strongly hints at ancient mysteries. It was in this area that Alfred the Great was based during the darkest days of the war between Wessex and the Vikings. After his victory, the mighty Dane Guthrum and his warriors were baptised at Aller, which is situated on the back of the girt doggie. As for offerings to the beast, it was also in the vicinity that the famous tale of the burnt cakes comes. Some have speculated that they were a ritual burnt offering put into the mouth of the Zodiac dog in a manner similar to Greek offerings to Cerberus the guardian hound of the underworld.
In a semi-dream state Debbie saw a place she named the Temple of the Blue Flame. It was in Mesopotamia and constructed around natural flame from the earth. The disc was seen tumbling through blue flame. Something untoward had occurred there. A presiding priestess had been murdered. Some group of travellers had carried the flame away. They had the Key.
As the Glastonbury visit got nearer, Debbie’s feelings on what was involved became more strongly focused. She believed that during the Christmas/New Year period a kind of astral video of an event that really happened replays. A Sumerian boat sailed up the River Parrett. It left the Key and loads more temporarily available there. The vessel sailed on to Glastonbury. It was red, white and green, colours associated with the travellers’ home city. They came at a time of unusual flooding that was primarily natural but also amplified in some occult manner by the powerful magical contingent. They stayed on board for a while before making landfall. Subsequent imagery such as the Ship of Solomon derives from these people. The great hero Gilgamesh was the son of one of them, who in turn was connected to the original form of Noah.
It was clear that a Sumero-Babylonian Key of Balance hung in the air. If we wanted it we had to bring the boat back to us. The third Key would take us to the root of our myths, in particular the dragon. The retrieval of the first Key had involved releasing a dragon. The second involved facing one. For the third, we needed to make an offering to it. They all represented very archaic magical acts.
On New Year’s Day the group diverged somewhat. Some had other business to attend to. I accompanied Andy and Debbie out towards Burrow Mump. An interesting dream of hers from the previous night was the first point of discussion. She was standing on Oath Hill in the company of a warrior king named Gwythyr who was directly descended from the wandering Mesopotamians. His name meant Head Dragon. He was also known as Uther and was the son of Hext who was also Hercules. He was the father of someone called either Amhearty or Amahita, which were versions of Arthur.
This was a bewildering blend worthy of Mary Caine. We were being invited to contemplate a series of potential associations. Gwythyr is primarily known for his role in the Mabinogion story of Culch and Olwen. He was betrothed to a beautiful maiden who is abducted by Gwyn ap Nudd. Arthur intervenes and rules that the two shall fight each other for her hand every Mayday until doomsday. The two protagonists appear to represent summer and winter. Their potential prize Creiddylyd, in some variants Cordelia, is the landscape goddess, sovereignty. Things start to get a bit complex when it is realised that she is daughter of Lludd who likewise features in a tale of Mayday conflict involving the two dragons that get buried at Dinas Emrys. Gwythyr was appearing for us in the middle of a two-headed dragon. If he was a Head Dragon, a pendragon, then it seems that he and Gwyn and their contention represent another pair of fighting dragons. There was a sense of thematic continuity in this from the first two Keys and all the way back to Cornwall. To suggest that these Celtic warrior types were descended from Sumero-Babylonian wanderers was a weird variant on the recurring eccentric British Israelite theme.
Marduk.
Debbie was only just getting warmed up for the day though. Having mentioned the previous night’s dream, she turned her attention to the present moment, picking up on the girt doggie. It’s not the guardian of the Zodiac, it’s the creator. This is where the mysterious boat travellers first let loose the power they had. It was in the form of the dragon because of “Mardek”. She began to use this alternative to the usual Marduk. Bel Mardek is god of light like the Celtic Lugh. More than that, he’s the oldest god of light, the first source of power for all sun kings and sun men, all god of light imagery. He was light, and a serpent, born of a fish. The ancient middle-eastern travellers believed life came from the sea. The old ones came and lived in the sea before any gods were formed in man’s mind. Baal, son of Dagon, came from the sea as knowledge and light. When priests acknowledged Bel the first knowledge began. Bel was the serpent of knowledge, symbolised by a flame above the head. He turned the wheel of man’s advancement. Something went wrong. They believed they’d got the wrong apple, temptation, and banished him, cutting off his arms and legs, making him into a serpent. Some priests stuck by him. They left in a boat and travelled to Britain, bringing Bel’s serpent power. At Burrow Mump they first let it loose. It’s not a dog, it’s a dragon. The dog is a later layer like Uffington’s horse over a dragon. The Gilgamesh legend reflects this. The Merdek name carried thru to the Druids as Myrrdin. The Merlin archetype is a wielder of dragon power. “Bel Merdek” was an initiatory title passed down that had mutated into Merlin. In Wales in April, at the foot of Dinas Emrys in the Grove of the Magicians, Myrrdin had spoken of the distinctive difference of the third Key. Our journey to the dog was becoming a journey to the origins of the source of the Matter of Britain and our work.
Dion Fortune as Sea Priestess by Chesca Potter. Brean Down in the background.
There were definite echoes of Dion Fortune in this material. The idea that Arthur , Merlin, and Morgan were titles passed down from an Atlantean lineage was one we had already made some kind of connection with in Cornwall. I noted that the location she used for her novel The Sea Priestess was at a powerful primal promontory called Brean Down by the Bristol Channel just before Weston super-Mare. It would have been a location that foreign seafarers in the Somerset vicinity would surely have been aware of. Debbie believed that the lineage connected by Dion Fortune to Atlantis was proper to Sumeria. It came to this country from the Middle East and not the mid-Atlantic. Its more ancient antecedents were not immediately relevant.
Burrow Mump
On a muddy, rainy, and windy New Year’s Day afternoon, we climbed to the top of Oath Hill and did our best to visualise the boat coming up river. Gwythawr appeared. He spoke of the two-headed dragon that flew between the nearby Crimson Hill and Red Hill. The nose of the Mump is the flame of fire from the dragon’s mouth. He asked, “do we come to strangle Cerberus or do we come to offer her?” We replied, “offer”. Having earlier been linked to Hercules, this was a clear link to his myth cycle. We were instructed to cross the bridge where the two rivers Tone and Parret meet, the area of the mouth of the dog or dragon. Gwythawr’s final advice was to, “always follow the path of the dragon for at the end of that path is the source of the power you’ve been given.”
On the bridge we offered up an artefact that had once been found in the usual bizarre circumstances by Bernard. It was a serpent bracelet with an orange stone set into it. We went to stand where the rivers meet. At first nothing seemed to be happening. Debbie then began to hear a tone coming from the ruined church atop Burrow Mump, which was clearly visible from where we were. It was the same sound that a Meonia sword made if struck. This was an obvious encouragement for Andy to use a sword he had with him for a similar purpose. To Debbie’s psychic hearing, the sounds met. Orange flames were seen ascending from the church tower and coming down to the water. Along each of the two rivers, a dark green shadow moved along, underneath the water. They converged at the meeting of the rivers, where the fire had touched the water. Debbie then started to hear the chanting from her dream of the procession.
We rushed back to the bridge, anticipating the appearance of the Sumerians. There was no sign of them. Debbie rapidly became confused and then upset. No instructions were forthcoming. We began to randomly search on the riverbank for the elusive Key but to no avail. Time passed. The mood was becoming increasingly despondent.
Suddenly, a typically strange Sumero-Babylonian type appeared on the opposite end of the bridge, identifying himself as Utnapishtim. The procession stood behind him but not very vividly. This was indeed an A List magical celebrity. He features in one of the most ancient extant myth sagas of the human race, the Epic of Gilgamesh, recorded on cuneiform tablets in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh but much older and found in varying forms across the Middle East. Gilgamesh is a proto-hero whose long journey in search of immortality finds later echoes in stories of the labours of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts and the Grail sagas. He may have originally been a real historical king who ruled from the city of Uruk around 2700 BC, an interesting date for Glastonbury Zodiac enthusiasts. Within the cycle is a flood tale that is clearly a major influence on the Bible story, including an Ark full of animals. Utnapishtim (known as Ziusudra in earlier Sumerian) is the main protagonist, a Babylonian Noah. He was once a king and seeds a new wave of the human race. Utnapishtim and his wife were made immortal after the flood. He was taken by the gods to live forever at "the mouth of the rivers." This makes him a kind of Ascended Master although I’m not aware of any New Agers channelling him. I felt it was interesting to put him alongside Melchizedek who had made his presence felt over the previous New Year.
This was an obvious further development of some of the fragments of material which had come out over the previous week where Gilgamesh and Noah had been mentioned along with a flood. The hero was indeed descended from Utnapishtim but wasn’t his son in the known versions. It suggested Ark connotations for the Sumerian boat.
Utnapishtim swept his arms through the riverbank rushes a few times. “Where did you find Moses?” he said. Aha! This set us off into frantic investigation amongst the rushes. It was Andy who found it. Debbie’s initial response was not jubilation but tears. She shook her head saying, “No, this isn’t supposed to be this way, this is wrong,” shuddering with an intimation of the path that had now been laid out ahead. There was no escaping Saddam’s rebuilding of Babylon and what was returning with it.
So what was this strange artefact? What did it depict? It was obviously part of the same batch as the first two Keys. The plaster and turquoise finish were identical. It was circular, about an inch and a half across. The design carved upon it was faded and difficult to discern at first but it was undoubtedly Debbie’s repeating vision. Despite her earlier successes with the first two Keys, she was profoundly shocked to see her imagery physically displayed in front of her, especially as on this occasion it was so distinctly unusual. There was a mountain in the background. A bridge stretched over an expanse of water. A robed figure standing on it, lent over the handrail to put a small spherical object into the gaping jaws of some dragon/crocodile type creature in the water. There was a tree by the right end of the bridge. What did it mean? They came down from the mountain and crossed the bridge over four rivers. The figure was feeding the dreamstone, the word the oracle speaks, back to the land, the dragon serpent, the beast, the father. Everything we do he will take from us. Our fruits will be offered to him. If we want to cross the bridge to where they’ve come from that’s the price we pay. Some kind of sacrifice might be involved. The hand that gives the offering could be torn off by the beast. It would be a long time before the immensity of what that really meant became clear. In the short term, Debbie was convinced that the final Key would act as a homing beacon for the seventh “black” sword. We wouldn’t have to go and dig it up somewhere. It would find us. All we had to do was ensure that certain things were set in motion and to keep calling to it.
Back in Essex, after yet another extraordinary New Years Day, Andy and Debbie retired for the night. The three Keys had been brought together for the first time in the bedroom by a mirror. Before long, a small very bright ball of powerful dark blue energy appeared out of the darkness, seeming to arise from the combined presence of the three artefacts. It was pulsating like a snakes tongue, sensing, waiting. Debbie realised that she was paralysed and could barely speak to alert Andy about what was occurring. It moved towards her. One side of her face became ice cold. She had trouble breathing. This was seriously scary. The small ball of light entered her head, slowly moving down through her body. She began to hear a deep, slow, voice that sounded as if it was echoing through immense caverns. It wasn’t speaking directly to her. She was overhearing something but could only hear some of the words. The energy finally left through her feet and she was released.
A feeling of powerful lingering presences in the flat remained for days. After a week, one night around 5 am, Debbie became aware of not being asleep anymore. It felt like the bed was floating but this was not unpleasant. A sudden sense of urgency made her feel it was important to sit up. She then realised that she was incapable of moving. Looking in the direction of the window, it seemed to disappear in glowing darkness. It was as if the night came through the window. It had a very long face with glowing eyes, long pale hands with long fingers that came ever nearer, making snaking movements across her body. The night then tapped it’s hands together, uttering a strange incantation that sounded like “ulab anhadre”. Debbie tried to force her face away feeling that if she looked for too long she would become the darkness.
Shemyaza crucified upside-down in the constellation of Orion by Debbie Cartwright.
Coming in 2010.
