Mis-Guided Egypt: Mythogeography & Death

8/14/2019 Mis-Guided Egypt: Mythogeography & Death

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Mis-Guided Tours: Egypt,

Mythogeography & Death

On 15th July, after having photo taken with Simon for the Exeters

Choice exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Matthew

and me, and Simon for a little while, wandered about central

Exeter looking for Egypt. I had spent the morning in the Exeter and

Devon Institution on Cathedral Close researching written sources.

Notes: modernist shapes on George St like tombs or mausoleaa necropolis at the heart of the city (in pencil) Egyptian Quarter

= around Carfax, Milk Street is between Guinea Street & Fore St

lots of feathers about warehouses (remnants of trade see

down to Quay with the Phoenicians the Egyptians see

Haldon Belvidere (any Egyptian connection?) thru City Arcade

(or John St?) Sigils of the Craftghost of Cernunnos For Strength

and Empowerment as if it has torn itself from the card

The Sphinx in the New

Buildings passageway looks as if she

has had botched plastic surgery. She

has swollen Leslie Ash collagen lips.

Excuse me, Im stopped in the

street, do you know Exeter?

Notes: heart shapes, Robert

Graves essay, path of Venus, Tarot, obelisk in jewelry shop,

crystals, pure geometry in nature, amber? cat lotus (water lily)

roots in murky underworld ? clean flower out of murky depth


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mandala... pentagram/star of David (on Freemasons Hall in Gandy

Street) DJ Osiris on poster mythos: how it is impossible

with modern technology to build the pyramids chemicals

there is something else not just what you go back to All YourBase Belong To Us Sapphire Security. Blue lily. Decorative

Dolmen outside Jackson-Stopps & Staff (bishops statue)

bishops staff (crook) connection with Coptic Church of Egypt,

deal of the day: EGYPT from GATWICK 23rd July 1 week 264

B & B per person based on 2 sharing. Ka the car.

Twin lions are everywhere in a leaden cistern on the Close, on

the ancient door to the Qua drangle on the Close, the ghosts of thetwo lions that once adorned the Black Lions Inn at 78 South Street,

drawn in Mural Monuments by W.G.Croump (a handmade book,

its illustrations drawn and painted, the one copy in the Devon &

Exeter Institution where only pencils and laptops are permissible,

ink not), and above Queen Street at the corner with Caf Rouge.

At the White Hart:

Imagine you are travellers, visitors to

the city... tourists or businesspeople

funeral directors or something like

that - at a conference but when you

arrive, you find that your tour guide

is dead where will you go? Where

will your guide take you then?

Egypt, perhaps.

Follow me.


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(Take a step out of the pub into

South Street.)

And here we are weve already

arrived.

Ive got a note to myself about maybe us starting the mis-guided

tours at the corner of Cathedral Close so we would clash and

confuse with the official Red Coat guides.

Here in South Street: a coin was found of Constantine the Great: - on the

reverse a male figure standing,

apparently with a petasus thats a

winged hat the mint mark is of

Alexandria, in Egypt. According to the

Sylva Antiqua Iscana, Numismatica,

Quintiam Furgina of eighteen thirty something by W. T. P. Shortt on which I

rely far too heavily - - the figure is

probably that of Thoth or Mercurius

Trismegistus (Hermes the thrice-

powerful), who lived according to

Shortt in the time of Osirus, and taught

the Egyptians husbandry

Id like to see an exact date for the time

of Osirus.


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Coins are like electricity they are a

currency a means of transporting

meaning

What was the meaning of the events in

Sun Street just as the coin was being

dug from beneath South Street?

Sun Street was approximately here and

it was in The Sun Inn, that Exeter

bricklayers proletarian masons tried

to form the first trade union branch inExeter their meeting was broken up

and disrupted by the police catching

the bricklayers dressed in animal skins

and in masks initiating their

organisation before an image of death

imitating freemasons, whose earliest

adherents at least believed they weredescendents of the masons of the

pyramids, the architect of Solomons

temple, and inheritors of the esoteric

tradition of Hermes Trimegistus

But let me take you to a place once called

Egypt.

There are four basic things that help you

to achieve immortality preservation of

the body on earth (mummification), the


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ka or lifeforce, the ba or personality, and

finally the name.

As we walk either as yourself or in therole of one of those funeral directors

combining work with pleasure think

about how you walk - and how it might

compare to those souls travelling the

chambers of the afterlife.

----- Original Message -----

From: "mrwatkin"

To: "Phil Smith"

Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 9:09 AM

Subject: RE: more Wings of God sightings

>Watching the Antiques Roadshow or somesuch programme(what a sad life I

> >live) I overheard a comment by one of the 'experts' about a

piece of

> >furniture's "pylon" shape and he then mentioned an

Egyptian derivation and

> >also a Pylon Temple. I've never heard of such a place or

thing, but if there

>

> Never heard of Pylon Temples! Where does the word

'pylon' come from anyway -

> must look it up...

>


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> >is some connection then this may be a very ancient origin

for a

> >quintessentially modernist shape - perhaps there is a whole

web of lineages> >of 'modern' signage? What price The Changes (the three

novels of which are

> >to be republished, starting in the autumn)?

>

> Do you mean the Peter Dickinson novel on which the TV

series was based?

> Odd, as I *just* got an email from a friend in Belgium - I'd

posted The> Changes video to a friend in Canterbury and asked him topost it on to Belgium

> when he'd seen it...somehow thought it had got stuck

somewhere along the way,

> but apparently not. Inge in Belgium just started watched it

and apparently

> had an ultra-weird extended/intensive deja vu typeexperience of feeling she'd

> seen it before somewhere (not impossible that it was

broadcast in Belgium in

> the early 80's but I somehow doubt it).

>

> Best,

> matthew

> --------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Matthew R. Watkins

School of Mathematical Sciences


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There are three chambers down this way (Fore

Street)

The former Franklin Temperance Family

Hotel and Picture Palace Cinema at no.

101 advertising which Artful Thomas

had dressed as a chicken to lay golden

eggs. (In the foundations of the site of a

former Palace Cinema in Tamworth

mummies were buried by the traveller

William McGregor. The site is now aMacDonalds restaurant the company

refuses to allow an excavation.)

The second is behind the faade of number

144 formerly known as The Egyptian

House contained within an Egyptian-

style taper framed architraveincorporating the fascia, supported at its

centre by an elaborately diapered cast iron

column with an exotic capital three-

quarters of the way up, and a moulded

capital at the summit... an unusual

composition in the Egyptian style of the

early 19th century

And third, the Catacombes a private

enterprise Egyptian-style necropolis built

with pylon shaped columns and almost

entirely unused, now corpse-less waiting


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for ouruse. It is a stone mummy, the vessel

for the soul of a city. From the Catacombs

there is a wonderful view of the church of

St Michael and All Angels - a title which,according to the Exeter University Press

publication The New Reading The

Landscape can sometimes indicate a

former site for the worship of Mercury or

Hermes.

Only after

having traversedeach chamber

would the

guardian, or

initiate, have

been permitted

to come face to

face with thebnnt-embryo, or cosmic egg, the original

Point of First Creation and benben-stone,

plausibly contained within its own

chamber. The Underworld of the Soul

consists of a series of interconnecting

chambers linked to a long passageway

entered through some kind of

antechamber or underground hall.

Can this layout be perceived in the actual

city of Exeter?


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(Throw the water into the middle of the

Carfax.)

This is the site of our ben ben stone a sitefirst made not by building but by walking.

This is the site of the Carfax the meeting

of the four ways the Icknield Way from

East Anglia and then on over the Haldon

Hills in front of us an ancient flint trade

path the other ways down to the quay

and beyond to the Mediterranean, toMorocco, to the land of the Phoenicians,

and to Egypt, perhaps (If that very old

Egyptian bracelet turned up by a farmer

at North Molton in 1889 got here directly.)

Francesco Careri, of the Stalker group of

urban walkers and explorers, argues thatthe first architectures are not ones of

settling, but of walking. He rebukes any

anti-architectural image of nomadism:

hunters of the Paleolithic period and

nomadic shepherds are the origin of the

menhir (standing stone), the first object of

the landscape from which architecture was

developed. The landscape seen as an

architecture of open space is an invention

of the civilization of wandering.


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Walking is not the enemy of architecture,

but its origin.

The structures (and their shadows andmemories) are not the enemy of the

wandering soul, but its conduits.

In a place like this we can let things flow

through us and develop the transparency,

the agitation, the fragmentation we need to

pass through.

And we will come back here but first we

have to walk: to discover some more of the

twelve chambers we must pass through

and learn the spells to open up their

pylons

(Walk to Broadgate.)

Note to myself: What about the pillars in Phantasm? Were

discovering the hard truth of time travel we cant travel back...

time itself is winding down. (screenplay ofThe Langoliers)

(Like the Egyptian Devourers of Millions of Years.)

According to Puharich, at this point, a mechanical, robotic voice

could be heard in the apartment, which came either from Uri or

from directly above him after which Puharich ended the session

and woke Uri. He told him about the strange voice Puharich

played him the section of the tape leading up to the voices


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intervention (Uri) rushed out of the apartment they found him,

as Puharich put it, like a standing mummy.

(p.131 Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?,Jonathan Margolis,London: Orion,1998)

How curious it is that when Dr Vinod is the mouthpiece of the

superior beings, they speak in unaccented English, yet when they

speak through Uri Geller in the seventies, it is in the style of the

Daleks inDr Who.

(p.136, Uri Geller:Magician or Mystic?)

I have to link Dean Koontzs Phantoms with The Langoliers

there are these moments of wonder in just-OK films, competent,

but nothing special and thats why the empty airport, the small

town deserted, these dont need subjective-exceptions to set them

free and float. Pennywise: It floats! These are places like the

asteroid-infected town from The Andromeda Strain that arealready partly in orbit. In circulation. These are the dystopias

secretly desired. The giveaway is the way these places keep

goingwithout any people in them like the drift they are in

disruption, something hiccups the place and it starts ticking out of

time.

The task of epic theatre is not so much to develop actions asto represent conditions

I saw this Kathakali performance once and although there was plot

the structural experience was, first, a brief elevation to a

heightened state and, then, a prolonged ecstasy.


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But represent does not here signify reproduce rather, the

first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just

as well say: to make them strange (verfremden).) This uncovering(making strange, or alienating) of conditions is brought about byprocesses being interrupted.

(p.18 Understanding Brecht, Walter Benjamin, London: NLB,

1973.)

These movie-places have begun to conspire among themselves.

film developed into the foremost medium of visual memory,

comprising the instrument by which its often corrosive traces

became engrained in urban space

(p.8-9, projected cities: cinema and urban space, Stephen

Barber, London, Reaktion Books, 2002)

Its the ideology that is performing, giving darshana - as people are

withdrawn (malls deserted, this is economic) the ideology needs to

feed. It gets hungry, starts to show itself. Like characters without

actors to do whatever it is they do, churches without congregations

(is that why St Michael & All Angels, Mount Dinham is so

powerful as a building because its congregation is so small and

the crosses have fallen from its stonework?), gods without

worshippers becoming ravenous. Taking away the people that

root the ideology (genii) to the place (loci) means the memes

float free and begin to interact with each other without the cloaking

default activities ofzoon politikons. Then the dance of ideological

units is explicit. (Which is why, according to Franco Moretti,


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Dracula and Frankenstein are never, except in comedy, in the same

cast.) The crocodile swallows the bear in Lake Placid. The

company guy (sublimated bureaucratic vampire) is eaten by the

aliens (sublimated monopoly capital) in Aliens. The zombies areshot in the head by the vigilantes in The Night Of The Living

Dead.The aliens and the CIA (or are they supposed to be the

NSA) taking chunks out of each other in The Puppet Masters. In

all these estranged place movies it is no coincidence that the state

(the violence on which our society is organised) eventually arrives,

always. Bureaucratic, forensic, armed and, in terms of the

narrative, hugely comforting; once the state has arrived there is no

longer any unpleasant tension or shock sequences, insteadeverything is floated explicitly. Love and hate are overt and the

state acts grand-parentally, orderly, protective, welfaric,

murderous, indulgent and hyper-disciplinary. And unless one can

embrace what fulfilment it grants to a need (a heart in a heartless

world) one will never have the stomach to consume and destroy

and simultaneously welcome and transcend it. Comforting

because there is a plan!! In the final reel of Phantoms theshadow of the state it appears, in organic form, with many

long hairs and tentacles, a seething sociality. The Peter OToole

character calls it: chaos in the flesh. It is the hybrid, the

analogy, not politics but a self-organising biological economy, the

fundamental details of humanity, bent to serve and reproduce the

interests of the ruling minority.

Unused notes: What if there were an art of memory in a city an

accidental mental trick the technique of impressing places on the

memory as a metaphorical index of knowledge - a useful kind of

remembering that accidentally became part of a city and all

those non-traditions, those invented traditions all those frauds


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the pseudo-Egyptology of the freemasons the autodidacts of the

18th century Institution the theatre in Waterbeer Street (if only

we had a plan) what if nothing. They are films of

remembering, arts that have fallen, silted down onto the city

But what, Stephen Barber suggests, if it is the city itself that is

disappearing? Leaving the bathing of film, detached from the

equally disappearing movie houses. Multiperplexed, shop-

affronted, edgelanded out. Hungry motion pictures feeding along

the translucent inner urban surface. Unable to get a hold. Needing

the enactment of the shapes of the art

of urban memory to re-anchor them.

I draw the shape of the route and it is

the head of Anubis.

5/ Egypt

This is the place that wasonce called Egypt from

the mid 18th century to the mid 19th all the

while Shortt was digging up the coinsEarlier

it had been called Strikinestreet (1265) or

Stykestreete (1458) meaning, probably,Bullocks Lane. (The local historian Hazel

Harvey interrupted me at this point in the tour to

say she thought the names didnt mean

Bullocks.) (note to myself: make the Bullman

of Greece/Osiris connection here?)


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The lane led to the city wall. In 1297, Edward I

ordered the cathedral clergy to allow the use

of the lane and free access to the city wall for

those citizens responsible for its maintenance.

Now it is closed by a security gate at the other

end and policed by Sapphire Security Co.

whose logo is a pyramid.

6/ High Street

26 High Street where Andrew Brice arrangedto have his corpse displayed in the Masonic

Rooms for 6d a viewing.

Can I recommend The Stargate Conspiracy by

Lyn Picknett and Clive Prince its a

wonderful melange of history, conspiracy theory

and high anxiety (The manager of the HighStreet branch of Waterstones had kindly arranged

to have this book coincidentally displayed in the

window so that I could be surprised to see it

there.) All about the sinister and influential

workings of a tiny channelling cult with its roots

in the work of Edgar Cayce and the less than

salubrious channelings of George Williamson

and Alice Bailey with their Blavatsky-like root

races and alien genetic interventions on racial

lines a conspiracy to hijack the new age

agenda to sinister apocalyptic ends with the

connivance of the US military and intelligence


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forces and the mastermind of this? The

Yugoslavian hypnotist, Andrej Puharich, a man

with connections to US government mind

control experiments. His earliest channel? Theman who first channelled the commanders of

this movement the very Nine themselves the

Ennead or Nine Gods of Egypt The same man

who now commands the chamber of St James

East along the Icknield Way, who created a

windy and chaotic ritual there for the surgical

man-non-man and the magician of the

transparent chamber. Uri Geller, of course,contactee and non-executive director of Exeter

City Football Club .who spoke in a

mechanical robotic voice like a standing

mummy. We are com put er ised!

The voice said: Plans - for - war have - been

- made - in - Egypt. America - is - the -

problem. His communications came fromentities introducing themselves as aliens from

the planet Hoova, specifically a computer called

Spectra in orbit about the earth that then

revealed itself to be the voice of the Nine but

they might also have been agents of the planet J.

Edgar Hoover. Ive been meaning to ask you

what do you think I saw in that garden when I

was four?

And why Exeter? Where better to monitor the

end of the world than the new headquarters of

the Meteorological Office?


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On the other side of the Icknield way is the

Pyramids Swimming Baths with its murals of

Giza I did come with my swimming costumeon - (unbutton trousers to show swimming

trunks) if wed had time we could swim in the

water imagining the island of creation held up

by the twin lions but theres no time

tonight so, instead on your behalf (pourwater - from the baths? - onto myself) (In the

event, showing my swimming trunks sufficed.)

Titi: Ive read all your books

Kevin: You said. Look People know where I am. My daughter

knows exactly. If I dont get back fairly soon theyre not going to

just ignore it

Titi: Wow, where did all that anxiety come from? I only mentioned

your books. Nothing you do can ever change what I think about

them

Kevin: Glad to hear youre keeping such an open mind. Well

theres not much point in us discussing Egypt then is there? So,

lets see the mummy or if its not available after you, please?

(He gestures towards the exit from the baths.)

Titi: What if it turned out that these places are actually sacred

sites? Old shapes in the form of modern buildings


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Kevin: Then write your own book.

Titi: like a swimming baths

(Titi climbs out of the pool and takes a cutting from her shoulder

bag that she has placed on a poolside chair.)

Titi: This is the shape of the stars that they drew over London

(Hands it to Kevin who gives it one glance and hands it straight

back.)

Kevin: Yes, it was in your Sphinx bookWaxworks, Woolies, and

a knocking shop

Titi: It fits here too.

Kevin: What?

Titi: (Taking A Z street map and shapes drawn on greaseproof

paper from her bag.) Look. This is the shape. If we lay it over the

city where the temple of purification at Giza is. Thats

look (Lifts up the greaseproof paper to show him on the map.)

can you see where that is?

Kevin: Yes. Its here. You know what they say: if you draw

enough lines

Titi: But I didnt draw these lines.


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Kevin: Im sorry, but those shapes were drawn as part of some

inaccurate book to relieve gullible people of their 95 pences

Titi: But what if accidentally like the Victorians who designedthis place.

Kevin: I dont really give a ... you know I like you, Kelly, I like

your interest, but all of this stuff has been gone over a thousand

times before old arguments dialogues of the deaf

Titi: Thats OK.

Kevin: Im sorry if you didnt like my books. Miss Kelly I

presume thats your surname?

Titi: Presume away.

Kevin: I dont have very

much time that isnt work or looking after my

daughter. Now, if you

can help me with my

work, then lets do the

mummy. If not, if

youve something else

in mind, say now. I dont

have much time for that

either

Titi: Or for anyone other than yourself?


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Kevin: What do you care? I shouldnt have come. Look, do you

have a mummy or can I go home?

Titi: The pools empty. I read all your books, Professor. Theydidnt add up to very much.

Kevin: Well, thats the pity about empiricism, isnt it? But when I

next need a reference for a research fellowship I shall come to you.

OK, goodnight.

(Walking to the exit.)

Titi: Have you ever wondered for one moment what it might mean

if you were wrong and Von Daniekin was right?

Kevin: (Stops. Laughs.) O. Wait a moment. Let me think. (Makes a

show of thinking.) No! No I never have! (Makes another show of

thinking.) Now I have. Goodnight.

Titi: Please

Kevin: (Exiting towards swing doors to the entrance hall.) I dont

need horizontally recruiting to the Secret Society of Pyramidiots,

Miss Kelly or Kelly, or whatever your name is

Titi: Why are you so scared?

10/ The Carfax


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And we return finally to the former site of the

Carfax the Great Conduit the ben ben stone

of medieval and early bourgeois Exeter cities

built on trade and movement.

This is Francesco Careri again: For the

Romans the menhirs (standing stones) were

simply simulacra of Mercury, or the natural

predecessors of the Hermae that guarded the

quadrivium, the crossroads symbolizing the four

directions of the world, where man encountered

different possibilities for the future, whereOedipus ran up against his incestuous fate,

where it was best, therefore, to seek the

protection of a god. Hermes or Mercury, the

messenger of the gods, was the god of wayfarers

and of commerce (mercari = to trade), of thieves

and profit, and the protector of the roads and

intersections, in the dual sense of earthly roadsand those of the soul to the afterworld.

This is where Artful Thomas danced as a

chicken laying a golden egg.

The egg imitated in the ben ben stone the

first structure that life took the first hill, the

primeval mound in the midst of a sea ofwater. (Sometimes called the Island of

Trampling is that what the Templars were really

up to?) The first structure and the first time


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space time as one where the first nine gods,

the Ennead, made their entry into the world.

(Place a mound of earth in the centre and thenan egg (or stone to represent it) in the centre of

the mound)

If we look to the horizon: out on the edge of the

city the pylons are above the ground great

structures entering the ground in Marsh

Barton and dispersing through the city.

We move through the optic flowfield, the edges of the field are

pulled back and wrap around us. In the flowfield we see things in

abstraction, things that are not representative, but rather specified

as obstacle or landmark or navigation beacon. The diving gannet

uses a single optical parameter to time its wing positions for a

diving entry into water. From an enormously detailed

microscopic description a single macroscopic variable emerges towhich the gannet is remarkably sensitive. (p.190, Dynamic

Patterns: The Self-Organization Of Brain and Behaviour,Kelso, J. A. S., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997)

Mythogeography is the attempt to identify and map these simple

variables in the social space of cities the city as a thesaurus of

variables consciously or unconsciously encrusted, only readable

by walking.

We can also see the Haldon Belvidere, built by

Robert Palk for his friend Stringer Lawrence


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companions, like Thoth and Osiris, on an Indian

expedition.

DownNorth

Street, The

Falcon Inn

once stood

at no. 7

Lower

North Street. Later a stone falcon sign marked

its absence. (Show drawing from CroumpsMural Monuments.) And finally when the stone

falcon was gone real falcons appeared

nesting on the spire of St Michael and All Angels

(the church of Mercury, Hermes or Thoth).

I found these (feathers) in the playground of St

Davids First School in the shadow of St Michaeland All Angels. Feathers from the pigeon preyof the falcons (This was a lie.) Take one and

weigh your hearts against it.

Thoth will write down the measurements.

Anubis will support us. A part lion/part

crocodile/part hippopotamus waits to tear us

apart the destroyer of millions of years like

the Langoliers in the Stephen King film their

potential victims wait in a deserted world that

time has passed on from, in an echoless airport

lounge watching electricity pylons crumple


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one by one into the forest as flying teeth part

crocodile, part hippo belly, part lions roar - eat

up the leftovers of time.

The heart is the centre of the intellect. But the

personality that survives is the ba. Everything

has a ba including things like a feather,

including places like a city. These bas or

bau are represented as a human headed bird

like Artful Thomas dressed as a chicken,

laying a golden egg.

These are moments when the personality of a

person, a thing, a city can fly free of itself and

begin to mix with other people, other things,

other places. In every other piece I have ever

done for Wrights & Sites autobiography has

played an important part. This time Im not

sure whether to say: and it is again or Ivedisappeared.

You come in, you go out

You come to the earth in the tomb of the West.

To assume the form of phoenix, swallow,

Of falcon or heron, as you wish.

the spell for being transformed into a divine

falcon is partly as follows:

I rose up like a divine hawk, and Horus

endowed me with a Spirit-body with his soul


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He shall say to the twin Lion-gods for me: get

thee back to the heights of heaven. Thou shalt

have speech even to the uttermost limits.

And so the personality of space flies to the

horizon, taking its place in the movements of thestars.

Notes: The funeral procession = taking the deceased to the

horizon where the sun sets and rises regenerative Carfax

Carfax Abbey in Dracula? The world of the dead is alwayschanging shape space in love with silence

Du

I cant do the whole walk its far too long and Ive unwisely

worn shoes that dont fit properly to go with my semi-costume

(just before the first walk I became incapable of doing up mynecktie, something Ive been able to do automatically for forty

years, I couldnt recover any logical memory of exact movement,

so I had to wait till I could stop trying and then I was able to tie it

automatically again, in time for the second walk) I do the walk

in short segments, returning to the pub in between. It is one of

several walks that Wrights & Sites stage that evening: Stephen

providing a sound walk on cd players, Cathy and Simon leading

parties like me.

We have visited the twelve chambers:

The Inland Revenue Office (sphinx under roof)


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144 Fore Street (formerly The Egyptian House)

Franklins Picture Palace

The Catacombs

The Devon and Exeter InstitutionEgypt - lane

St James Park Football Stadium

The Freemasons Hall

St Michael & All Angels

The Falcon Inn

The Stack of the Central Library

The BT Regional Communications Centre

In the Gnostic mysteries of Isis there are twelve

successive putting on and off of garments oranimal disguises (p. 166, The Gnostic

Religion: The Message of the Alien God and theBeginning of Christianity, Hans Jonas, Boston:

Beacon Press, 1963) Here at The Sun Inn the

trade unionists were arrested throwing off theiranimal skins and masks

I havent got much time for the flesh-hating dualism of gnosticism,

but there is a place in the abstract structures of the universe where

Neo-Platonism takes on a kind of material kick.

If I understand them rightly it is generally believed by

mathematicians that geometry is pre-existent in the human mind,

and that all we have to do is to look at nature and observe an

approximate resemblance to the properties of the ideal space. You

might assert the same pre-existence of dynamics, or chemistry. I


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think it is a complete reversal of the natural order of ideas. It seems

to me that geometry is only pre-existent in this limited sense: that

since we are the children of many fathers and mothers. All of

whom grew up and developed their minds (so far as they went) incontact with nature, of which they were a part, so our brains have

grown to suit. So the child takes in the facts of space geometry

naturally and easily. The experience of past generations makes the

acquisition of present experience easier, and so it comes about that

we cannot help seeing it. But it is all experience, after all; although

learned philosophers, by long, long thinking over the theory of

groups and other abstruse high developments, may perhaps come

to what I think is a sort of self-deception, and think that theirgeometry is pre-existent in themselves, while natures is only a bad

copy. Like the old Indian pundit, whose name was something like

Bhatravistra, who, after fifty years inward contemplation,

discovered God --- where it would not be polite to mention.

(p.385, Electromagnetic Theory, Oliver Heaviside, London: E. &

F.N. Spon, 1951, first published 1912)

Notes: What is Egypt in Exeter its cold, lunar its death its

the end of theatre no masks (deleted) arena no union ? not

the real Egypt in which the craftsmen were highly prized or

(or on) good (illegible) like the guilds here that became the

unions the freemasons ? but this is the idea of Egypt floated

free our chance to walk in(illegible) (illegible) into bleakness

so we dont have to live there

Documents

Mis-Guided Egypt: Mythogeography & Death