The following is partly a collection of etymologies based on the themes that suggest themselves in association to ritual identities.

These two names are the same, one being a reduction of the other. The name Morgan is said to mean ’sea bright’ in Welsh, but The Morrigan or Morgana is Irish Scots. Accepting this, the following origin for the names are offered.

1) Morrigan. Breaking down into three syllables Mor - Rig - An

a)   Mor. This word in Gaelic means - Mountain, Hill, Rath, Barrow, Creachaire, High.
b)   Rig. This only translates to Righ meaning Royal or King or Queen.
c)   An: As in Anu. However as Gan or gang; we have ’going’.

Consequently we have Morrigan as:

Mori a ’Fate’ or fairy and High Queen of Anu, or Queen of the High Way, as in Queen of Heaven or the Sky, or even, if a latinisation of Mor has appeared as Mori meaning death, Queen of Death’s way, meaning perhaps Queen of the Otherworid.

When reduced to Morgana we have Mor-Rig-Anu, High Queen of Anu. With both spellings, either way we have a High Queen of the Dragon. Whereas with the Welsh Morgan we might have Morgana as the Sea Dragoness.

Finally, though the construction would comprise of two linguistic roots, the Welsh and the Scotic, we could have the Welsh Mor as Bright or Shining or Sun, and Gan as Gang meaning To Go, Path, Way. This would give the epithet "The Shining Path", the road to Elphame, as in "Morgana is the path to Elphame" or as in "The Fairy Way, Route or Path".

In whatever sense, they all combine, because the Shining Path is the Sun-dappled bow wave of the Swan Barque, sailing across the Mere to Avalon at sunset, carrying Morgana the Dragon Queen of the Waters. Hence Morgana as Sea-Bright.

Concerning the Boggart
C. S. Lewis called dwarves ’The sons of Stone’ whilst in Scandinavia these were the Trolls. Boggart may have had two spellings. The first and perhaps the older of the two was Boggard or Bog Ard, meaning the High God, who was the Dagdha. As the god-king of the Danaan, the Dagdha would have been the royal arch-druid of the Tuadhe or nation. With regard to the other spelling, a reduction into two parts gives Bogg and Art.

The first means God and the second means Stone and hence Godstone or God’s Stone. In ’Phallic Worship’ by George Riley-Scott, one particular standing stone in Israel, said to he the God Stone and thought of as the habitation of the God was named Beth-El or the Bethel Stone, which is a Boggart. Alternatively the Boggart could mean God of the Stone, which easily renders itself as the God-King of the Lia Fail or the Cubic Stone, the Grail. Boggart as the God’s Stone would be the Lia Fail.

As the Stone that fell to Earth, the jewel in Lucifer’s Crown and so forth, the trail leads back to Robin Artisson. In which case, the anointed stone of the Beth-El and the Lia Fail, the cubic stone, would be female and not male. The female in question would be related to Astaroth, the forerunner of Sophia, wisdom or the holy spirit, to which the anointing oil of the Hebrews relates as the dew of the cup or rosicrucis. Astaroth is Ishtar, who was a draconian relation of Lilith the dragon queen, the ancestral grandmother of the Tuadha de Danaan.

A few Victorian amateur anthropologists, wishing to bring a breath of fresh air into the stufly drawing rooms of the middle classes, made much of the fertility rituals and beliefs of ancient and primitive peoples. Given the social climate of the time, this intention was thoroughly laudable but, in their haste to attribute Venal meanings to transcendent rituals and artifacts, they seem to have set in motion a movement devoted to missing the point.

One can imagine the relish with which some must have anticipated the opportunity afforded them. Here it seemed, was a license to shock without let or hindrance, presenting itself under the guise of valuable scientific research. This notwithstanding and despite the entertainment value, it must be said that any attempt to confront Victorian sensibilities proved in itself to have been rather pointless.

In many instances the work was either edited or suppressed by a society that was the most hypocritical and morally corrupt but nevertheless, behind closed doors, also the most lascivious and sexually inventive in western history.

The work of these pioneers was ground breaking and in particular we remember Sir Richard Burton with respect but even so, the foundations they laid, seem to have been built upon later by others whose only thrust appears to have been in proving that everything they discovered that might be labeled primitive, was in consequence automatically associated with fertility.

Such a mentality was both an insult to simpler or earlier cultures and a serious hindrance to their understanding, because it came to be thought that, if one early culture was based on fertility worship at a certain period in history, then it followed that all cultures of that time were based on fertility worship.

This approach didn’t take into consideration the differences in outlook or perception that existed between castes living side by side and nor did it appreciate that environment and resources change from region to region which, as such, has significant ramifications on the social and spiritual development of a people.

Basically the thinking was, in blunt terms, that an early or primitive society must inevitably be, in comparison to the christian, industrial culture of the historian, the missionary or the anthropologist; thick, brutish and uneducated. So it was thought that the primitive wouldn’t have understood the process of conception or birth and would therefore have worshipped it as a magical act at every given opportunity, basing their entire spiritual belief system on fertility alone.

That kind of attitude was patronizing, imperialist, arrogant and ignorant, born of the worst convictions of a society which itself had been and still is brutalized by its merchant classes and the greed of their ill-educated divines.

Anthropology in general, if one could call it that, arose as a discipline at a time when the christian west was conquering the rest of the known world. No widespread or intrinsic desire to understand the culture or history of other races existed at that time because the prime motive in any study was to prove white christian superiority, prior to or during invasion, colonization, conversion and exploitation. This meant that indigenous peoples were portrayed as ignorant, sex mad, cannibalistic savages, having ancestors who were also ignorant, sex mad, cannibalistic savages.

In the late twentieth century however, a swing towards a more liberal attitude has meant that societies are now being studied in greater depth and on their own terms. Nevertheless, to date, the hangover from our Victorian past means that some scholars still haven’t quite got the picture and, when confronted with an artifact or with evidence of ritual that appears to have a seemingly sexual context, they will often automatically label it accordingly and stick it in the pigeon hole marked "primitive fertility worship".

A case in point is the Beth-El stone which derives from a period in Hebraic antiquity when the Jews were polytheistic and worshipped the goddess. From a patriarchal christian viewpoint, one that had swallowed the later Jewish concept of the one male god, the Beth-El Stone was thought to be, as previously mentioned, a phallic emblem associated with an early manifestation of Jehovah as Behemoth.

One scholar relating the Beth-El to Jehovah, further associated the two with a scripture which said "His rocks shall crash together", which the academic said meant that God’s Behemothic testicles banged together during the penetration and withdrawal of the Beth-El phallus which accompanied God’s numerous sex acts.

As Jehovah, via Zeus, became the northern Thor, one must assume that thunder storms, euphemistically said to be the god banging away with his hammer, are in fact the result of his enthusiastic wedding tackle ricocheting against itself.

Whilst I am prepared to accept that this was a typical Jewish joke, and part of a colorful and imaginative folk culture of the time, I am hard pressed to accept it as part of the venal doctrine of a society, which manifested itself during a phase of fertility worship.

People haven’t changed a great deal in thousands of years and humorous euphemisms were as much a part of everyday life then as they are now. The biggest laugh of all is at our expense if we take these jokes seriously and are then prepared to waste years of our lives on our research, and whole rain forests of paper, in compiling so-called scholarly theses which soberly explain the finer points of a doctrine that probably started life as a humorous quip in a Jewish pub and was thought funny enough to put down on clay, stone or papyrus.

On its own the Beth-El, as an anointed stone, is reminiscent of all the black monoliths that appeared in mediaeval literature and art as stones that were, of themselves, anointed or sometimes baptized, including the 15th century picture "The heart’s search for Love".

There is no reason why any of them couldn’t be a Boga Art, the Goddess’ Stone and that their genital context thereto, like that of the Sheelagh Na Gig, has nothing to do with sexual reproduction per se. Indeed, being part of European Grail Lore which has part of its history emerged in the Hebrew culture, and further being associated with the Grail itself which is female and Tantric, the black stones probably have a component of their iconography which is, in itself a symbolic descendant of the Beth-El.

This would then mean that rightly it had absolutely nothing to do with willies or their progenitive functions, or indeed the reproductive functions of the female sex organs.

Both of these have been the subject of common knowledge amongst mankind for thousands of years, making it highly unlikely that every sexual symbol ever produced by so-called primitive or ignorant savages was solely manufactured for the fertility-cult market. With this and the foregoing in mind it is worth mentioning the ancient Hindu symbols of the Yoni or Vulva and the Lingam or Penis, as another example of simplistic over categorization.

Originally the Lingam was not the phallus. The word Lingam relates to Lingua or speech and hence the tongue and this means that the Tantric element of Hinduism and Buddhism relates primarily to the Beth-El and the Grail, and not to sex. When the Yoni was entered by the Lingam, this was an act of transcendence, not of copulation; and the union intended was with the gods who resided in, or who could be joined with by imbibing, the blood of the womb.

It is entirely possible that Beth-El was once Beth-Elohim, meaning House of the Gods, rather than just the House of God. The House of the Gods, the place one would find the Gods as a human being, and thus by implication attain transcendence, would be the womb. One would find the Gods by drinking from the Grail; the Womb.

"He who drinks in one draught will see God and the Magdalene".

The Gods abided in the blood of the Sacred Womb, which is what the Beth-El would signify, along with all the later cubic stones. With Beth Elohim we have Beth Lehem or Bethlehem, the Rath of the Womb of the Great Mother, which accords with Beth Seathan, a Rath or Tel which was a Repha’im temple of Nergal, the god of the Otherworld, built by the Scythians in Jordan.

The Otherworld is the House of the Gods and hence the Beth-El or Beth Lehem. If Jesus was born in a Beth Lehem, then he was born symbolically in the Otherworld and emerged from the womb of the Rath as a god-king.

The story of his being born in a stable which was a cave, has a great deal to do with this symbolism, as caves and Raths were places of the dead and, like the Sidhe Mounds of Eire, they were doorways to Elphame or the Other or Underworld and here we have a link with Epona, Rhiannon and Slepnir, and with Robin as an equine deity and thus a Priest King.

Being born in a Beth-El, Jesus - the Christsonday god of the witches - was Janus or Little John, the psychopomp, portal guardian and pontiff or bridge to the Otherworld. His priest kingship has much that is owed to this Scythian, Dragon symbolism. Here there is also a Mithraic link with the rite of the cave of the wolf (Jesus ben Panther, Son of the Eastern Werewolf) and a link with Apollo or the Sol Invicta.

Jesus would have been a son of the Beth-El, a Son of the Stone. According to Olga Friedenbourg the Russian writer, these links with the solar Mithras or Mazda, and hence Samael and the biblical Satan are confirmed in his choice of an Ass upon which to ride into Jerusalem. The Ass is the Egyptian Set who became Set-Typhon, or Sataniel-Lucifer the Enlightened and Enlightening One, identifying Jesus as the Buddha Siddharta of the Levant - A Boggart or Fairy.

Takla Makan
With regard to the Mummies of the Takla Makan, although the shamanka’s headdress was shown to be the conical hat of the witches, the headgear of the Tocharians in general was the conical hat with the rounded end which, when bent forward, becomes the Phrygian Cap.

This cap is also shown in relation to the Scythians, on a bas relief stone carving of them presenting gifts to the Persian emperor. The Tocharians have been in Takia Makan since 1200 BC and academics believe they came from the Steppes of Greater Scythia, forming part of an easterly and westerly migration of the Scythian Peoples.

This is the movement of the Danaan Nation at that period, part of which ended up in Ireland and eventually Scotland where they became the Picts. It is even more feasible to suggest therefore that Tocharian ’A’ script is closely related to Pictish and hence Fairy. It is now thought that the Scythians of Takla Makan came from Thrace. This would mean that they had much in common with the Scythian Fir Bolg.

It also means, if this is the case, that both languages are indeed Arshi Kantu, Arya-Sidhe Canto, or Aryan Sidhean Chant, and are the magical-religious singing languages both of the Buddhist priests and shamanic priestesses of the Tocharians, and of the Pictish and Irish Druids.

A cursory look at the written script reveals close similarities between written Tocharian and carved Pictish. It is now thought that the Tocharians were semi-nomadic, mounted bowmen who operated the same raid or trade policy as their pictish cousins in northern Europe.

Living on the edges of Takia Makan they occupied the mountains and the rich upland pastures to the north of the desert region. In this they are identical to the Scythian Bands so often confuse with the Celts in Britain and Eke. They are also probably the ancestral cousins of the tattooed Scythian Chieftain found buried in perma frost a few miles north in lower Siberia.

Additional Fairy Lore
Though a similar reference can be found in Yeat’s ’Celtic twilight’ I found this reference in an old Irish Fairytale called the ’Potato Supper’. "Some folk say that the Little People, the Fairies, were once angels that were cast out of Heaven for their sins". In the same work there is also a reference to the shining path to Elphame.

In a small children’s book by Robin May called ’Hallowe’en’ there are two references of particular interest. The first states that it was once believed that however unlucky the fairies could be in human affairs, it was even more disastrous if the land lost its fairies altogether.

I feel sure that this is a folk memory which harks back to the time when the fertility of the land relied upon the presence of the Fairy Queen or King, whose contact with the wisdom of the otherworld and its Sovereignty meant that her or his management of the land, and her or his guidance of the people in its proper husbanding, was essential for the survival of the nation, despite the occasional costs which, in any event, have been largely exaggerated and added to later stories of predation under adverse circumstances.

The Apple Trees of Avalon
The second reference reiterates previous notes, from another angle on the Apple symbolism. May states that Apples were once thought to be a link between men and the gods. What this obviously means is that they facilitated a link between the two, which means that the apples had some psychotropic effect, which naturally they don’t, if they’re ordinary apples.

In Cornwall Hallowe’en or Sanihain is called Allan Day and the apples involved in the holiday ritual there are called Allan Apples. To eat them brings good luck apparently, which is a watered down version of the idea that when one ate an Allan Apple, one would see the gods. Allan is an abbreviated form of Avallon and so the lucky apples, the ones that forge the ethereal link and facilitate transcendence, are the Apples of Avalon.

Avalon, the Isle of Apples is the Isle of the Swan Maidens, the priestesses who, like Lilith, are the Apple Trees themselves, whose endocrinal fruit brings wisdom and vision. The foregoing reinforces the assertion that druidism is Tantric as well as dualistic and that druids were men "Of the (Apple) Tree".

Zen and the Wild Hunt
Several games which are associated with both Hallowe’en and apples are particularly interesting. They have ancient roots in ceremonial druidic and witch pageants which had a teaching role to play within the Samhain festivals.

The first, Apple Ducking, where one attempts to catch apples, floating on water, with ones teeth, links two fairy symbols, the apple of Avalon and the Mere or lake in which the fairy isle is situated.

The apples bobbing in the water represent Avalon itself. To gain wisdom from the fruit of Avalon, one must first be immersed in the water and thereby enter Elphame, in order to win the coveted prize.

The second game involved eating an apple whilst balancing, legs astride, on a seesaw, in the middle of which, between ones legs, there was placed a lighted candle. The trick was to make both ends of the seesaw balance at the same height from the ground. The meaning of this is discovered firstly in the pentagram of the Goat of Mendes where the candle, stuck between its horns represents illumination from the womb of the goddess.

Secondly, this illuminating wisdom, facilitated by the reinforcing symbol of the participant eating the apple and thus obtaining the enlightening fluids of the womb, sustains balance within the individual, represented by the balance of the seesaw. In perfect balance, positive and negative forces cancel each other out and produce an equilibrium, which is both everything, and nothing, stillness, the Nix or Zero. The seesaw, like the Zero, is another principal symbol in Zen Buddhism. Enlightenment exists in balance and the candle at the pivotal point also suggests this teaching.

The third game involves taking an Allan Apple to bed on the night of Hallowe’en. One places it under one’s pillow in order to dream of an event or of some knowledge one wishes to be appraised of.

The apple is a symbol of the otherworld and the act of taking it to bed and placing it under the pillow is a substitute for the ancient practice of sleeping in the tomb chamber or later, of sleeping in a graveyard overnight, in order to obtain knowledge from the ancestors.

Mirrorworld
It is interesting to note the amount of lovers games are attached to Sainhain, a time when all hell was supposed to break loose. Previously I said that Odin was often called on out of context as a god of love. It appears that the Starfire hypothesis is correct because two Hallowe’en divinatory games in particular relate the symbols of transcendent wisdom to the cause of love.

In the first game, which is played at night by either sex, the performer eats an apple and brushes his or her hair whilst looking in a mirror. The image which, it is said, appears in the glass, is supposed to be that of one’s future lover or spouse.

Firstly the apple represents fairy wisdom obtained by eating the fruit of the glands. Secondly mirrors, like Meres or Lakes are doorways to Elphame, the land which is the reversed, mirror image of this world. Thirdly the comb or brush is a symbol of the mermaid and royalty.

The code translates as an invocation. By brushing the hair one mimics, and thereby invokes within ones self, the godform of the mermaid or merman, the fairy inhabitant of the mirror world of the sacred lake within which lies the Isle of Avalon, the otherworld.

This corrupted act identifies one with the Dragon Blood. The act of eating an apple shows the ritual intention, being that one desires to know, by looking into the otherworld behind the mirror, who it is who will either eats of one’s fruit, or give of their fruit in a Starfire ritual, not of mortal love, but of transcendent hierogamy.

The person one sees in the mirror is the person with whom one will be united in the Love that is Death Alternatively the ritual can serve as a spell to draw that person near, by sending a message through the mirror and through the subtle energy of the matrix underlying all form, which is Elphame. By invoking the person in the mirror, one implies that the person desired will not be human, that would be no good, but of Fairy or Dragon Blood themselves.

The act here, of staring into the mirror, is a method whereby the conscious mind can be persuaded to concentrate whilst the subconscious mind projects the image of the prospective alchemical lover into the glass.

As such it mixes sympathetic magic, which is basic Hermetics, with scrying. Pools of ink, Black Mirrors, the still surface of lakes or ponds have all been used for this type of scrying, which is in itself a form of hypnosis intended to bypass the conscious mind. This indicates that the doorway to the otherworld is in fact the subconscious mind itself, and plenty of archaic symbolism speaks to that effect, including the tenets of dualism on the personal or microcosmic level.

In previous notes I have covered the symbolism of the Hazel nut in some depth. In relation to Hallowe’en, a game exists wherein an individual, wishing to know whether they will unite with another successfully or not, throws two hazelnuts into the hearth. if they burn to ashes, the marriage or affair will be thought of as doomed to die. No esoteric overtones need apply here.

The symbol of the hazel nut comes from the tale of the ’Well of Nechtan’ and the salmon of knowledge and the symbol itself is corrupted. Perhaps some sympathetic magical component survives but it serves nothing to belabor the point.

It is interesting to note however that another fruit, associated with the rosicrucis and the act of Starfire has been linked to mortal love, further confirming that originally in the hierogamical act, there was parasexual physical contact an act ’of love’, as an intrinsic part of the alchemical process, of which this game is but a dim folk memory.

Although these games were once an intrinsic Part of Hallowe’en, especially in the last century, they started out as druidical and witchcraft practices. Consequently in their purer, older form, they are part of fairy tradition as magical rituals conducted by The fairies themselves long ago.

Traditionally, Hallowe’en is the time when, it is said, the gates of hell or the otherworld are thrown open and the fairies, witches and ghosts walk the earth creating mayhem. However, this tale arose because Hallowe’en was the beginning of the lean time of winter and to the Fairies, whose ancient Scythian ancestors were traditionally used to raiding, it was the time to stock up for the cold months ahead.

This is the basis for the identification of Samhain as Mischief Night, which has been carried forward to the present day by both the Guisers and the Trick or Treaters who, in their respective times have dressed up as demons, witches and sprites to knock on people’s doors and demand food or gifts.

The Fairy would have taken this night as one of the last shopping opportunities before the snows set in, and would have created havoc by raiding the surrounding countryside for food and goods.

This then was the time of the Wild Hunt for consumer durables and comestibles, as well as elf women, whose serum levels at that dark time of year, would have been naturally high.

It will be remembered that from The Dark Ages onwards, much of their lands had been cleared and therefore, they were a dwindling, persecuted and beleaguered people who were hard pushed to support themselves on less and less resources.

It is no wonder then that stories have come down to us today of the times when the very demons of hell would visit torment on a terrified mankind. It seems a just, inevitable and unavoidable retribution for man’s treachery and betrayal of an ancient, beautiful and mystical people without whom, man has lost his wisdom and his sense of balance, and has raped the Earth to his own doom.
 

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