The magic of the Sovereignty of the Land has long been hidden from us by many means, screens and schemes, and one way of preventing us from dis-covering it has been to change the meaning of words. For instance, let us consider the word ‘history’. ‘History’ actually comes from the 12th century Norman ‘histoire’, which in that language meant ‘story’. Thus, when discussing ancient ‘histoires’ we are dealing with a story that may or may not be true.
However, it doesn’t matter for our magical purposes because, as I always say, the only difference between mythology and history is that myths are true, by which I mean that “history” is usually written by the victors who are bound to put a spin on their recorded events, but “mythology” contains deep and eternal truths that always remain true.
And so by engaging with what we believe to be history is, in effect, entering cognitively into the fabric that made up the consensual reality of our ancestors, and no matter how much the transcribers and translaters have, over time, taken that fabric, and cut and tailored it into different suits, jackets and dresses, the mythological truth still remains evident, in the weave, to those who have the eyes to see it.
One of these cognitive items of clothing has been woven from stories about St Cuthbert, a holy man who was well-revered in the north-east of the country from the 7th century onwards.
St Cuthbert appears to be much more of a reclusive mystic than the sort of saint or church father that Christianity usually promotes. He had such a gift for healing that people would flock to him from far afield and he became known as the Wonder Worker of Britain.
At one time, St Cuthbert was persuaded to be bishop of Lindisfarne, the island terminus of ley lines or dragon lines, (Saxon ‘dragon’ = ‘lint’) that were followed by the ‘farines’ (pilgrims). But after just two years there, Cuthbert decided that the worldly life was not for him, and he retired to return to his cave – presumably in order to better explore the silent joys and mysteries of the inner worlds.
Anyway, looking at his official story – the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto – through the lens of a modern-day shaman/alchemist, Cuthbert seems to be pivotal in stories – popular for long after his death – that were about claiming or reclaiming the Sovereignty of the Land through multi-dimensional and holographic activity.
I perceive this underlying theme in the accounts of those Druidic scribes whose role it was to record stories about the kingship of Britain, particularly concerning the relationship between St Cuthbert, the Viking king Guthrum and King Alfred the Great. Earlier on, they had been responsible for the beautifully illustrated Lindisfarne gospels.
By weaving the Bible stories through with the golden threads of allegorical codes, it seems that these scribes of old understood the vital role of the Spirit of the Land in bedding or rooting down the Sovereignty. They appear to have realised that it was connected, mathematically, alchemically and astrologically, to vast cosmological processes that were marked and honoured in ceremonies that were always held at the right Place and Time, and that went back in the ancestral lore for thousands of years.
The numbers found in these cosmic ‘histoires’ have also been discovered in the measurements of Megalithic stone circles, such as Stonehenge, if you know how to read them. Some archaeologists have called Stonehenge an “eclipse predictor” and can produce the mathematics to prove it. It is certainly true to my understanding that eclipses, to our early ancestors, represented the Marriage of the Sun and the Moon, the alchemical process that creates life through a communication between all Three Worlds (the Underworld, the Middle World and the Upper World).
So fast forward to the 9th century CE, and I believe that the Viking King Guthrum would have known these Three Worlds as, respectively: Hel, Midgard and Asgard and, to my way of thinking, these three realms would have been invoked at his coronation of the Danish peoples, which took place in the presence of St Cuthbert’s dead body that had been brought expressly for that purpose to Oswigesdune in Northumbria.
This is the same King Guthrum that King Alfred defeated at the decisive battle at Edington in May 878 CE after receiving a vision of St Cuthbert.
In Chapter 19: The Geomancy of King Alfred the Great of my best-selling book The Sacred Sex Rites of Ishtar , I go into great detail about the magical geomantic practices that were performed in the 9th century by King Alfred and his Druidic retainers under the cross of the four Royal Stars which, like Excalibur, protect the Sovereignty of the Land called Avalon, in Somerset.
And so here is something further to all that and I hope it will help us to understand more about St Cuthbert’s relationship to Sovereignty.
The number of the eclipse
Eclipses were considered to be so important by our ancestors because they understood the magical implications of performing ceremonial work at the time that the Sun and the Moon were “making love”, and the coding of the symbol for such cosmological events is the 265:153
One hundred and fifty-three is the number of what is known as the Lunation Triangle, a measurement found in the circles of Stonehenge by archaeologist Robin Heath. The square root of √ 153 is 12.369, which is the number of full moons in one year.
If 153 is the number of the Moon, then 265 must be the number of the Sun. This is shown above in the mathematical symbol for the alchemical Great Work of the Marriage of the Sun and the Moon as the Vesica Piscis:
Now you will have almost certainly heard of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes because he was the one that ran naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!” – after he discovered that the volume of the liquid displaced by a body equals the volume of that body – merely by sprawling out akimbo in his bathtub. I mean, it seems obvious to us now – we are careful not overfill our bathtubs because we know that once we get into it, the waters could overflow the rim. The Greeks probably knew it then too; I can’t imagine that they didn’t. But it was Archimedes who discovered the mathematical formula for that process and, later on, he also found that the mandorla – the centre part of the Vesica Piscis – is represented by the number 265:153, which equals 1.732 aka the square root of 3.
So what has this got to do with St Cuthbert, King Alfred the Great and Sovereignty? Please do bear with me, because we’re nearly there.
The word Vesica Piscis was Latin for “the bladder of the fish”, and it is now that things are going to get decidedly fishy!
The last chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament contains a story about Jesus’s disciples, the fishers of men.
It was after the crucifixion and they had sailed out on to the Lake of Galilee to fish. But despite fishing for most of the day, their nets remained empty. Suddenly, Jesus appeared in a vision and he told them to throw their nets to the right side of their boat. Eureka! Their nets are suddenly heavy with the catch and not only that but it produced a haul of exactly 153 fish.
A little further on, the writer John makes the point of telling us that this is the third time that the disciples had received a vision of Jesus since his death. Could he have been signalling that we should pay attention to the numbers in this story. If so, we have the numbers 3 and 153 in a story about fish. This can only mean that the story itself is part of an allegory for the Vesica Piscis, the mathematical symbol for the alchemical Marriage of the Sun and the Moon, 265:153, the key formula for the Spirit of Sovereignty.
When St. Cuthbert’s coffin was re-opened a few centuries after his death, one of the reported artifacts found in there was his copy of St. John’s Gospel.
A similar story is found in Chapter 15 of the Historia about Alfred. It is told that before going into the final and decisive battle against Guthrum and the Vikings, he had retreated to the Somerset marshes. In fact, he had retired to Athelney Abbey, near Burrow Mump, and it was there that one day, a stranger came to him who was poor and hungry. Alfred gave him food to eat, and the next day, Alfred was rewarded with three boatloads of fishes. The following night, he had a vision of St Cuthbert who revealed to Alfred that it was he who had been the hungry stranger, and that he will now be the defender of Alfred and his sons who are the chosen kings of Britain.
Thus Guthrum, who had been crowned king of the Vikings over the dead body of St Cuthbert, was defeated by Alfred who was now protected by the saint, and so the Historia tells us, Alfred had Guthrum baptised into the Christian faith in a village called Oath on the Somerset marshes.
Andrew Benjamin Donaldson (1840–1919)
And so in this blog article, I have set out to show why, from the point of view of the shaman-alchemist, it doesn’t matter whether our history books contain records of events that actually took place and that can be verified as such, or whether the backstory of Britain just based on myths, because there’s only one kind of truth that really matters when it comes to Sovereignty.
Shaman of Avalon 