By Simon Crook
And if you flung her headdress on her from under her highlows you’d wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexengown
– James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
‘an orangefiery shipload from the planet Alpha’
On 10 December 2023, 32 days into navigating a family bereavement, I learnt of a recently discovered Roman shrine complex in Hampshire (Smalley 2019), situated on the River Meon and crossed by the A32, a road I knew well as a passenger on once regular family trips to London. One journey home, c.1978–9, involved the perception of being ‘monitored’ for 70-odd miles by an orange-yellow aerial lightform, first ‘picked up’ on the A3 near Raynes Park. Intermittently, other lights appeared to calve off from it, as from a ‘mother ship’. As we rounded the bend in Warnford, entering the Meon valley, with mounting apprehension we noticed the amber lightform ‘pause’ above Beacon Hill, looming to our right. My younger sisters cried out as it made a beeline for us, passing directly overhead as a formation of lights, resembling the pattern of two geomantic figures, Caput or Cauda Draconis, the Head or Tail of the Dragon, moving ‘head’ first. This climactic development coincided with our imminent approach to the yet-to-be-discovered temple complex.
Arguably, all this was merely a convergence of misidentified phenomena: airline traffic, a bright planet appearing to move as we moved, a light aircraft. Nevertheless, whatever it was left an impression. Aware of Aimé Michel’s theory of orthoteny – the tendency of UFO sightings on the same day to form straight lines – on an OS map I aligned the Devil’s Jumps round barrows by the A32 near West Tisted and the trig point on Beacon Hill, thinking I’d plotted the object’s course. Now, 45 years on, the discovery of a shrine – ‘in a roadside pasture’ – constructed directly above an earlier burial of a mare and foal has rekindled memories of that experience, forming a constellation into which other elements are drawn. A hidden reciprocity between these dispersed particulars generates the unique temporal signatures of coincidence, spurring configurations of thinking mediated here by recourse to James Joyce’s novel, Finnegans Wake, in which ‘The horseshow magnete draws his field and don’t the fillyings fly?’ (FW 246.23–4).
Melusinian ripples
Clues of something unusual at the north-west limit of Meonstoke parish, near Beacon Hill, emerged when a stretch of the A32, Warnford Road, was widened in the 1930s, and Roman foundations were discovered in a ditch. Excavations in 1989–91 revealed part of an aisled building, extending each side of the road. In 2016–18 a hexagonal temple and bath-house around a courtyard was uncovered. A silver minim of Epaticcus found here, from just before the Roman conquest, suggested ‘an Iron Age phase to the site’s sequence’ (King 2017: 6). In 2018 the burial of a young mare and new-born foal was found in a late-Iron Age enclosure ditch pre-dating the Roman construction, raising associations with the goddess Epona (Smalley 2019: 27). They had been placed in the part of the ditch lying directly beneath the future shrine, ‘almost’ at its centre. In 2019 part of a second-century CE Dea Nutrix (nursing goddess) figurine was found in the hexagon’s central area in levels pre-dating the stone structure. Evidence of feasting included structured deposits of broken pottery, animal bones and oyster shells (ibid.). Two natural flint spheres – fossil sponges – deposited inside the hexagon were obviously considered worthy of votive offering (King 2017: 6). Painted wall plaster in the bath-house includes at least one naked female figure, probably representing a nymph or water deity (ibid.: 7–8). Additionally, next to an old river channel lay a possible mausoleum (Smalley 2019: 27).
The site’s likely dedication to a river deity, her name reconstructed as Meonna or Meanna (King 2017: 8), reflects a literary personification of the river in Finnegans Wake’s Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP). As ‘spawife to laird of Manna’ (FW 242.25–6), ‘Fennyana’ (FW 55.5), ‘this snaky woman’ (FW 20.33) bears water goddess characteristics. Her ‘race’ being ‘both the competition of speed and the swift current of the stream’ (Rabaté 1991: 204), the Curragh racetrack on the banks of the Liffey tells ‘how the whole blazy raze accurraghed… from spark to phoenish’ (FW 322.19–20). In a text in which coincidences ‘exfoliate outward, beyond the book… to the whole universe’ (Wilson 1983: 10), recurrent association of rivers and racetracks ripples ever outwards. A public house called the White Mare, near Thirsk, North Yorkshire has for its sign a white mare depicted leaping with its rider off a cliff into Gormire Lake (Monson-Fitzjohn 1994: 152). It alludes to a race between the Abbot of Rievaulx, a Cistercian abbey by the River Rie, and a knight, Sir Henry de Scriven. Sir Henry, riding the abbot’s white mare, disappeared over the cliff, while the triumphant abbot, on the knight’s black horse, turned into the Devil (ibid.: 152–3). Similarly, we may perceive Tom Pearce’s grey mare in ‘Widecombe Fair’, performing a role as psychopomp, conveyor of souls to the otherworld, implicated in the name of the Grey Mare and her Colts, a Neolithic chambered tomb near Abbotsbury, Dorset. The Grey Mare’s Tail, a waterfall in the Moffat Hills, Dumfries and Galloway, also comes to mind.
There seem to be confluences between the Meonstoke mare and foal and the goddess Macha, legendary founder of Emain Macha, capital of Ulster. It marked the spot where Macha died giving birth to twins, after being forced to run a race against the king’s horses. Some see her downfall ‘as akin to “crushing the serpent”, the overthrowing by men of female domination’ (Green 1995: 77). The passage ‘Fenny poor hex she must have charred’ (FW 208.31) implicates this process/event, condensing the persecution of witches (hexen), Dorset’s River Char and menial domestic service. Mythic violence punctuates the patriarchal order of ‘a kingbilly whitehorsed in a Finglas mill’ (FW 75.15–6), subverted in Finnegans Wake.
Accumulator tips
Contested equestrian social geographies in Finnegans Wake’s archaeology inscribe historical change as the path of the individual life passing away ‘after life’s upsomdowns’ (FW 49.23–4) and the collective ‘steeplechange back once from their ophis workship’ (FW 289.7), from primeval snake worship to the office workshop of capitalism. Shot through with explosive contradictions of race, class and sex, ‘their ancient flash and crash habits of old Pales time’ (FW289.8–9) accumulate in the ‘orangeflavoured mudmound’ (FW 111.34) microcosm of Joyce’s novel. Here, sexual activity and the violent male domination of women takes the form of ‘frenzied horserace images’ (Rabaté 1991: 204). The dance that Shaun seems to be engaged in, cup of champagne in hand, waltzing his bride, ‘his daintree diva’ (FW 492.9), across the room conjures up a scene, with the sequence of ‘stirrup’, ‘bridle’ and ‘cup’, of racing: ‘To stir up love’s young fizz I tilt with this bridle’s cup champagne’ (FW 462.8–9). ALP/Issy is described as a filly ‘so and so hands high, such and such paddock weight’ (FW 396.8), while Jaun threatens to whip Issy like a horse. In a re-run of FW character HCE’s voyeuristic conduct in Phoenix Park as a horse race, he is ‘Emancipator, the Creman hunter’ (FW 342.19–20), losing to two fillies, who show him their rears: ‘two early spring dabbles, are showing a clean pairofhids to Immensipater’ (FW 342.25–6). The ‘spring doubles’ are the Lincolnshire Handicap and the Grand National.
Finnegans Wake’s consistent association between racetracks and rivers correlates archaeologically with Catterick racecourse, N. Yorks.: ‘And rivers burst out like weeming racesround joydrinks for the fewnrally’ (FW 277.3–5). As Roman Cataractorum it was named after the rapids of the River Swale (Cameron 1961: 35). Abutting ‘the sacrosanct line of the racetrack itself’ is a probable Neolithic henge, detectable as a parchmark crossing the racetrack (Moloney 1996: 128–9). Like most henges it is close to a river, its bank made up of river cobbles, sharing this quality with Mayburgh henge: ‘stud stoned before a racecourseful, two belles that make the same appeal’ (FW 194.26–7). Curiously, the Roman road Dere Street aligns on the Catterick ‘henge’ from the south, slighting its bank. The road’s course north of the henge cannot be traced because it runs along the racecourse (Moloney 1996: 129). The henge banks became the obvious place to construct hurdles for the horses to jump over (ibid.). Adjacent to its bank was an Anglian burial ground (ibid.: 131).
The final straight of Goodwood racecourse (W. Sussex) aligns on the southern bank of The Trundle, an Iron Age hillfort. First formalised in 1801 when the Duke of Richmond gave part of his estate to construct a track (Hadfield 1970: 186), an old map shows a row of round barrows alongside the straight, called The Harrows, presumably since levelled, their alignment with The Trundle absorbed into the track. In the 2000s, a large bronze sculpture of a horse’s head, called Artemis, by Nic Fiddian-Green, stood on The Trundle, recalling the cult of Demeter Erinys as a mare-headed goddess. Goodwood’s name is derived from Gōdgifu’s Wood (Glover 1975: 63), Gōdgifu being ‘a common female name in the late Old English period, better known in its Latinised form, Godiva’ (ibid.). A pool in this area is ‘recorded in 1209 as Godiuemere’ (ibid). Was Gōdgifu/Godiva a title for the kind of mythical ‘spousefounderess’ (FW244.18–9) who, like ‘gamy queen Tailte’ (FW 83.23), instigated a ‘tailturn horseshow’ (FW 386.27)?
‘warmed off the ricecourse of marrimoney’
A corpus of stories associated with Welsh lakes concerns a fairy woman who emerges from the lake and takes a human husband, departing after he commits an infraction against her. The return of the fay to Llyn Cwellyn, near Caernarfon, is connected with attempts to place a bridle on a spirited steed. She and her husband ‘went out together to catch a horse in the field… Unfortunately, when the man threw the bridle at the horse, it struck his wife and she disappeared’ (Loomis 1956: 122). The withdrawal of the bride to the lake is a social performance emerging from women’s position of ambiguity, manifested in a wide array of ethnographic material relating to the anthropologically defined practice of exogamy, the ‘marrying in’ of women to a patrilocal group, in which the woman may have remained an outsider to some extent.
Psychogeographical correlates of such ‘outsiderhood’ are found in the worship of a female spirit by contemporary Selenga Buryats in Russia. Envisaged as wearing dark-blue clothing, mounted on a black stallion, she is said to be the spirit of a woman who stopped at Bayan-Tugud hill where she tied her horse to a tree before she died of disease. Local people buried the woman there, untied her horse and let it wander. The horse was caught by people of another clan, who killed it. They began to die of a terrible disease. Only after sacrifices were made to the spirit (woman and horse) did the disease disappear (Humphrey 1995: 150). The spirit is considered to be the ezen (‘land master’) of a lateral section of land extending between Bayan-Tugud hill and another called Olzeitei-Ondor, an area known as güideltei gazar, translating as ‘running-track land’, a güidel being a track or a run of a spirit or animal (Abayeva 1992: 78, cited in Humphrey 1995: 78). The idea of the ‘track’ is homologous with ‘the movement of women between male social groups, a movement which often fails in one way or another (through ill-treatment, divorce, and flight of the wife with nowhere to go)’, creating ‘a hiatus of abandonment, from which asocial place the female spirit wreaks her revenge’ (Humphrey 1995: 151). Regarding the theme of the ‘Fate-Road’ in southern Siberia, the semantic base of the Turkic Jol – the road, path, row, line – brings together such dissimilar things as navel string, hair/plait, beam, bridle/thread/cord, girdle, snake, breath(soul)/song/narrative, road, river (Hoppe 1993: 69). Metaphors of the connection of the human world with the world of spirits, ‘connection’ also assumes a meaning of ‘dependence’ within social relationships, focused on the subordinate position of women, related to the semantics of bridle, girdle and lash (ibid.). In Yakut wedding rituals, the establishment of subordination is expressed in the positions of the leading and the led: the bridegroom, ‘entering the bride’s home, offers to her a belt, bridle or lash; she takes the loose end in her left hand, rises to her feet and bids farewell to her parents, then crossing the yourta’s threshold she is to begin to weep’ (Novik 1984: 189, cited in Hoppe 1993: 69): ‘And lest there be no misconception, Miss Forstowelsy, over who to fasten the plightforlifer on (three hundred and thirty three to one on Rue the Day!)’ (FW 444.10–13).
‘Psing a psalm of psexpeans’
The hexagonal shape of both the Meonstoke shrine and the honeycomb cell of a bee evokes a cryptic Latin ‘incantation’ in a footnote of Finnegans Wake. In three hexasyllabic sentences, written by ALP’s daughter, Issy, each initial letter spells, in triplicate, ALP’s initials: Apis amat aram. Luna legit librum. Pulla petit pascua (FW 262 F4). Translated, it reads: ‘The bee loves the altar. The moon reads a book. The foal seeks the pasture’. Indeed, in Joyce’s Ulysses, Milly Bloom and her mother, Molly – anticipating the relationship of ALP and Issy – are visualised in Leopold Bloom’s epiphanic reverie: ‘She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they… They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone’ (U 14.1083). In the construction of the hexagon given in Euclid’s Elements, each point of the hexagon marks the tip of each leaf/petal/wing of a hexafoil, a geometric device formed from six vesica piscis lenses arranged radially around a central point (see NE 175 and 176). In a medieval kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Mafteah, the Sabbath Queen dwells at an inner point of this intersection of six radii (Lachter 2014: 125), just as a mare and foal – reconfigured now as Binah, the Supernal Mother, and her daughter, the Shekhinah – indwell an inner point of the Meonstoke hexagon.
I visited the site of the shrine for the first time on 13 December 2023, partly as a place to reflect after the funeral that afternoon. Memories of trips up and down the A32 partook in the parallelogram of forces manifested in these moments, especially that one seemingly tracked by mysterious lights. That today was St Lucia’s Day, festival of lights in Sweden and Norway, was another of the day’s coincidences, evoking Lucia, Joyce’s daughter, inspiration for the character, Issy. She had died, strangely enough, 41 years and a day before, on 12 December 1982. The excavations, still exposed on Google Earth images examined the night before, were now covered over. Yet it was enough to stand in that muddy field, being in the precincts of something that as a 16-year-old, fascinated with Celtic mythology, I would have been thrilled beyond measure to have been aware of. Then we visited the trig point on Beacon Hill as the sun was setting. On our return home, I found a white feather at the doorstep.
References
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- Kilpatrick, Kelly. A. 2014. Saxons in the Meon Valley: A Place-Name Survey. https://www.academia.edu/11177759/Saxons_in_the_Meon_Valley_a_Place_Name_Survey Accessed 22/12/2023
- King, Anthony C. 2017. Excavations at Meonstoke Roman Site 2016 and 2017 interim report. https://www.academia.edu/35213645/Meonstoke_Roman_Site_2016_and_2017_interim_report Accessed 17/12/2023
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- Wilson, R. A. 1983. ‘Synchronicity and Linguistics in Finnegans Wake’. Fortean Times, 39: 4–10.