Jesus Christ, Stonehenge Star?

Last time we reviewed Easter 09's tie-in crop of book and film-TV releases and related press announcements. As we were fully occupied last post with 'cannibal' druids, new Templar secrets to do with the Shroud, and so on, I said I'd devote a separate follow-up over Easter weekend to the most promising-looking of the new books. This was The Missing Years Of Jesus by Dennis Price, for which I put in a pre-publication order so I could review it at Easter. It's been getting positive early reviews - perhaps from those encountering the subject matter for the first time.
For this is the first modern full-length book study of this subject, the old West Country folktale known as the Holy Legend, famously referenced by Blake's poem Prelude To Milton, which became the lyric for England's so-called alternate anthem, "Jerusalem" that we've discussed before (see various earlier blog items, passim). The last study (perhaps the only other modern one), out last spring from Clairview Books, Glyn S Lewis's Did Jesus Come To Britain? : An Investigation Into The Traditions That Christ Visited Cornwall And Somerset, was only 78 pp, focussing on local folklore from those two counties. Despite its broader title, this new 252pp hardback also focuses on England's Holy Legend.
The legend takes the traditional form of snippets of local folklore across the West Country that Jesus himself was brought to England as a boy by his uncle Joseph of Arimatheia on one of his (alleged) trips to acquire Cornish tin. These folklore snippets were collected in several early 20th-C. books by Church of England clerics. In 1989, a 21-page essay by AW Smith in the Journal Of The Folklore Society surveyed the various collected folk sayings, songs etc, arguing none of these were provably pre-1804, i.e. before Blake's famous allusion to it. This the big problem with the legend's cred, the difficulty in finding pre-Blakean references. The Journal's conclusion was the legend was just propaganda from the early-20th-C British-Israelite movement (though typically no evidence was offered to support this convenient it-was-all-just-special-interest-propaganda argument).
But here, the author dismisses [p139] Blake's famous allusion to it as negative evidence calculated to make people disbelieve the idea Jesus came here, so Blake's involvement gets short shrift. And even though he's trying to locate JC in England, he explores only a few items from this local folklore roundup. This is counterproductive as the Folklore Journal volume is not well-known, and has a lot more to it in the way of topical references which could lead to firmer evidence (I have the 21-page original). At the very least, a lot of snippets of folklore can create the idea that where there's smoke, there must've been fire, if you see what I mean. It's certainly a tried and tested approach in the speculative book genre.
He does mention the so-called tunic crosses found around the West Country which show Jesus as a boy, but doesn't pursue the matter as to dating or any associated folklore. Price's real interest is in Stonehenge and nearby monuments like Silbury, in whose archaeology he's been involved for several decades. Thus the main rival theory that JC went east during his missing years to India etc., he dismisses in a few words as merely the result of someone claiming psychic powers c1900. As we saw last time, there's a whole lot more to the “Eastern school” than that, with a trail of scholarly books following up on several old manuscripts, going back centuries. Rather than try to amass a weight of counter-evidence for the West Country thesis, he soon shifts to writing about his own favourite site, Stonehenge, which has no associated legends.

This is where the book begins to undermine its own thesis, for in doing so he slights evidence associated with the many rival local legends, which exist from the New Forest right around the whole southwest coast. Priddy in Somerset, which he visited, is the only other site to get a favourable mention. Even Glastonbury doesn't get much prominence, though the Holy Legend is so associated with it it's often referred to as the Glastonbury Legend. But he says he has ignored all the legends about Joseph of Arimatheia returning to Glastonbury post-Crucifixion as irrelevant.

Nothing is known about Stonehenge in the 1st C. AD . The association of Druids with the site has long been ridiculed by archaeo-historians as it's thought to have been in ruins for over a thousand years by that point. But the book keeps trying to tie the legend in with it, as his own personal-interest area, where he worked on various archaeological digs over a period of years. He was the person who flagged up the idea that the 'city' and nearby sacred 'precinct' in a famous early description of the Hyperboreans (Far-Northerners) could well be Stonehenge and Vespasian's Camp hillfort outside Amesbury (see my earlier post on "The Lost City Of Apollo"). But he doesn't pursue this angle here, though it would help his argument as it implies such sites were not abandoned but still in use in the late Iron Age. Instead we get: Did Jesus visit Stonehenge, perhaps to exorcise a "resident demon"? (He argues Stonehenge was a labyrinth like the Cretan one with the Minotaur at its centre.) And did deeply religious archaeologists guess this connection, and interfere with the site and conceal evidence because they were unnerved and thought the place evil? (We also get local ghost stories.)
Because of this Stonehenge-centred approach, the author can't come up with any real evidence, so the book turns into one of those overly-speculative and under-evidenced books you get in this subject area, where the thread of some sensational argument is built around the phrases "might have", "could have," "no reason why not" and so on. Here the thesis is that Jesus didn't just visit as a boy, but lived here for his whole 'missing years' period, ages 12 to 30. This would imply there should be more evidence than previously published. Originally, I thought as Jesus is not named as such in any known British sources (or we'd have heard about it), we'll get the he-was-living-under-another-name approach that we get with sought-after but still-elusive figures like Arthur. (In fact the other rival recent book mentioned last time, Ralph Ellis's King Jesus, argues Jesus was exiled here and became the original inspiration for Arthur.)
We do get the proposal that JC may be commemorated as the Celtic deity Esus, portrayed as a wood-cutter, as Christ was a carpenter. Esus or AEsus is not British however, being known from inscriptions from Gaul and NW Africa, a pagan 'woodsman' deity thought to be centuries older than JC. He also argues this was also the 'Esiu' whose name is inscribed on British Iron Age coins depicting a horse, together with a reminder that Christ rode a sort of horse (an ass). In fact, British coins from the 1st C. BC often depict stylised horses (thought by some to be the Celtic horse goddess Epona); and there are various others of uncertain antiquity depicted on chalk hillsides. (The root AEs- can also be related back etymologically to a pair of Indo-European horse-brother deities, and is also the likely I-E root of ass, i.e. donkey.) We get the translation of the “Phoenician” Bal-deity Beelzebub as “Lord Of High Places” (it's usually given as lord of flying things, i.e. carrion flies), with the suggestion this inspired Blake to write of “England's mountains green” when England doesn't have any real mountains.
No ancient codex manuscripts are cited in support. (The citations in the Folklore Journal article are of course to undateable oral traditions.) Nor is there is any correlative attempt to claim Jesus's teachings paralleled those of Druidism (as those proposing the “Eastern Thesis” have done with Buddhist influence), only vague insinuations that JC could easily been interested in meeting Druids, and vice versa. Little is known of Druidic belief, as it was maintained through oral tradition rather than holy books, but there is a school of thought the author is evidently unaware of, that there was a continuity between the Roman-persecuted Druids and the first generation British Church.
Reconciling pagan and Christian traditions has a broad appeal these days, and some early reviewers are clearly excited about the idea that you-know-who-was-here. It adds buzz to the mystique of a whole New Age Christianity-rediscovered subculture which dates back to the early 70s era of the influential filmed musical Jesus Christ, Superstar. But this 'Jesus Christ, Stonehenge star' approach will only convince the more critical that the entire legend has no basis beyond wishful thinking.
I had higher hopes of this work, partly as the author runs an iconoclastic blog about Wessex archaeo-history, called Eternal Idol, one of whose posts gave the book its punning subtitle The Greatest Story Never Told. However if there is indeed a factual background story, it remains untold. The book is so padded out it reads like a companion to one of those cable-channel historical documentaries where speculative claims keep getting repeated and questions raised which are never answered.
I think (having scripted a few documentaries myself) if one were making such a TV documentary to which this appears to be an advance companion, exploring other avenues into the legend would be far more productive. As I've made clear in earlier posts, I feel there's an underlying story there worth pursuing even if the legend can't be taken literally, at face value. Various ancient codex accounts support Britain's long-standing claim it had a Christian church before Rome, i.e. at Glastonbury, which is of general interest in itself. As is the way the so-called Holy Legend persisted over the centuries underground, through allusions in texts like Blake's "Jerusalem" - what we would call nowadays a literary "code." Perhaps it would help if we gave it a name .... The 'Jerusalem' Code?

When Music Won The Cause

As I write this Easter weekend, the radio and TV schedules are naturally dominated by Christian-themed programming: hymns, psalms and related concert music, church services, film and TV 'Passion Plays,’ documentaries about redating the Shroud, and so on. Music has always been an international language, and this time I thought we’d look at a different type of manuscript, the kind with musical notation on it. Scholars would deny any of this music is Celtic in origin. I’d argue they’re missing the larger picture, that some of the inspiration goes back to the original Celtic Church Of Britain, which the Church Of England supplanted.
For a long time, England was famous for having no concert-music tradition or English equivalent of Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, et al. “A capella” (literally, “chapel style”) or unaccompanied choral music seems to have been favoured, so even compositions for organ were not developed. This is often attributed to Puritanical influence (there were those who felt church organ etc music was “for Methodists”). The alternative view is that it was another instance of of the Church taking over entrenched pagan or Celtic-Church locations, a policy dictated by St Augustine c600 AD. Just as the Church re-branded, as Christian, seasonal rites like Easter (=1st Sunday after 1st full moon after spring equinox), they may also have taken over earlier choral traditions. For example, the May Day practice still maintained in certain towns of greeting the sunrise with a chorus seems eerily ancient - no more Christian than the Maypole, more likely a relic of the Celtic first week of May festival of Beltane or “Beautiful Flame.” (The most famous May-Morning chorus is in Oxford, atop Magdalen College Tower - downloadable large-scale Wiki image here]; you can also see it in the film of CS Lewis’s memoir, Shadowlands.)

I covered the first breakaway from this stranglehold in an earlier post, England's Little Green Book, on the centenary of the CoE’s 20th-C. replacement hymn-book The English Hymnal, which had hymns set to music mainly by its editor, Ralph Vaughan Williams.
This year is the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death in 1958, and there have been complaints that Britain’s greatest composer since Purcell was not being properly celebrated (no portrait on stamp or bank-note etc), though he was famed for the “Englishness” of his music, and it still tops Classic-FM polls. Over the last holiday break, I did see ‘the first ever full-length film biography of the great man’, a New Year’s Day 3-hour tribute. Isolde Films’ O Thou Transcendent: The Life Of Ralph Vaughan Williams [now on DVD] looked at his influence on others, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to modern pop groups Fairport Convention and the Pet Shop Boys.
It told how RVW came into his own when he turned for inspiration to tradition folk-song melodies (such as Greensleeves). He collected notes on these in his famously crabbed handwriting (which has since plagued biographers). He also collected and adapted traditional verse and song, which was disappearing due to the growth of commercially printed sheet music. He set some verses to music, his first and most lucrative sheet music being his song from ‘Linden Lea,’ from the pastoral verse which Thomas Hardy’s mentor William Barnes had documented. Later he would work these traditional motifs into his pastoral symphonies, film scores and other works.
For fifty years, RVW, his sister, and his wife and lifelong collaborator Ursula also organised the still-ongoing springtime festival of song for local choirs held at Leith Hill in Surrey. Founded in 1905 when RVW lived nearby, the annual Leith Hill Musical Festival echoes the ancient Celtic or pre-Celtic massive choirs mentioned in the earliest accounts of Britain as being based in Wales (where choral traditions survived the English Reformation) and in England at Amesbury (near Stonehenge) and sometimes at Glastonbury. Leith Hill, the highest point in SE England, is somewhat reminiscent of Glastonbury, with a hill offering far-ranging views and topped by an unusual tower. (The eccentric 18th-C. owner had had himself buried under it, upside-down to face Judgement Day all the better.) The LHMF is reminiscent of a Welsh, Cornish, or Breton bardic Gorsedd recital competition-cum-festival [pictured], in this case with choral works rather than spoken-word ones, involving hundreds of singers.

The LHMF at one point had the banner title ‘Music Won The Cause', a slogan reminiscent of how the popular inspirational song ‘Jerusalem’ had come into being. This was on the heels of the 'Fight for Right' campaign pioneered by the soldier turned mystic Col. Sir Francis Younghusband in WWI. Along with other writers, he promoted this as a good cause - a moral war, a 'Fight For Right'. (The title is actually that of a William Morris poem.) One of these other writers, Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, convinced composer Sir Hubert Parry (who had tutored RVW) to set to music a short poem by William Blake.
Blake’s works had been kept out of the English Hymnal on the basis he was thoroughly unorthodox, despite RVW’s interest in his work. RVW would later write a pastoral ‘masque’ ballet based on Blake’s The Book Of Job. But Blake’s now-familiar short ‘prelude’ poem had suitably timely call-to-arms imperative refrains (“Bring me my Chariot of Fire!”). And “Jerusalem" evaded Church control when it was adopted by the Women’s Institutes and the Women’s Suffragette Movement. (It would also become a rallying point over the fact women continued to be excluded from Church ordination.) It soon became known by its current epithet of England’s alternate national anthem.
However despite its apparent tone of muscular Victorian Christianity, the poem seems more a call for England to become its own New Jerusalem, in the light of the apocryphal ‘holy legend” Blake had obviously heard of. This was that Jesus had visited England as a youth, leading to some of his disciples emigrating here and building the first above-ground church in Christendom, at Glastonbury. This was the foundation of the Celtic Church of Britain, just before the Roman Conquest. Younghusband had become interested in Tibetan mysticism after his 1904 military Mission to Lhasa, and wanted "Jerusalem" to be not just for Christians but a multi-cultural anthem. But Parry refused to allow the Fight For Right movement to use "Jerusalem" for such purposes – the start of the debate over its politicised use. (This debate continues to this day among the present political parties, from Conservatives to Labour to the British National Party, each of whom claim the hymn speaks of their own aims.)
Parry died at war's end, and in 1922, Sir Edward Elgar, who had specialised in large-scale choral performances pre-war, elaborated the orchestration into its present form. Elgar himself was unhappy about the glib, unrelenting celebration of his “Pomp ‘n Circumstance” marches, especially his 'Land of Hope and Glory' being turned into a patriotic singalong. He felt this jingoistic focus overshadowed his more complex works like the Enigma Variations - which comes with a code no-one yet has broken. (It is contained both in the musical notation and a supporting document called the Dorabella Cipher.)
Another such endeavour was the tune we now know as the Rugby World Cup theme "The World In Union". This was based on the poem ‘Urbs Dei’ [City Of God], by diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, who as Ambassador to the US wanted to encourage America to enter the war. But it was not set to music till 1921, when RVW’s friend Gustav Holst used a theme from his wartime suite The Planets to turn the poem into the hymn “ I Vow To Thee, My Country,” which became a staple of Armistice ceremonies and later a school song, from where it became a favourite of Princess Diana and another Church - Charlotte.
The Church Of England seemingly continues to regard ’Jerusalem’ and the legend which inspired it as misguided, irreligious, perhaps even heretical, and it is often banned in local church services, including weddings and funerals.

Blake At 250 – The Unsolved Mystery

This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake, and there are various ‘Blake At 250’ academic conferences, commemorative walks, and so on. It remains to be seen whether there will be any explanation of the greatest mystery of his career: what was the inspiration for his poem beginning, “And did these feet in ancient time /Walk upon England’s mountains green….?” This allusion to what is known as England’s ‘Holy Legend’ – that Christ visited England – has never been adequately explained. Where did he get this from? He doesn’t seem to be making it up, simply alluding in passing to an event he has evidently heard about, and asking if it could really be true. How much he expected readers or listeners to grasp of the allusion is impossible to answer. Blake’s work is famously esoteric (I recall some four decades ago carrying around a paperback of his poetry for months, hoping to make sense of it by dint of perseverance.) It’s been said before that millions sing these words as part of England’s ‘alternative national anthem’ Jerusalem without even understanding the allusion to the Holy Legend. But where does this incredible legend actually come from?
Some years ago I came across a 1989 article by A.W. Smith in the Folklore Society Journal which tried to trace the legend back to its source, and couldn’t. There were plenty of local ‘holy visit’ legends around the southwest coast, maintained by Cornish tin miners, but none could be dated back very far. The writer concluded it was all an invention … of the British Israelite Movement. Certainly a proponent of this theory, that the British were descended from a lost tribe of Israelites, was a vicar of Glastonbury who wrote a book on the Holy Legend. But this was in the 20th century.The British Israelite Movement is thought to date back to around Blake’s time, or even to the 17C Puritans, but did the Puritans really just invent it?
There are some aspects of the mediaeval Glastonbury Abbey legends of the founding of Christianity in Britain which suggest it goes right back to the Dark Ages. Representatives of the mediaeval British Church sought precedence over that of Rome (which sounds dangerous) on the grounds their church was established by Christ’s disciples, in the last years of the reign of Tiberius – which would put it within five years of the Crucifixion. The reliable mediaeval historian William Of Malmesbury, though he could not get any details, refers to the discovery of "documents of no small credit, which have been discovered in certain places to the following effect: ‘No other hands than those of the disciples of Christ created the church of Glastonbury.’ "The idea Christ’s disciples came to England (presumably fleeing the Romans, who had not invaded Britain) of course does not mean Jesus did too. The tin-miner’s version of the legend have Jesus visiting with his ‘uncle’, Joseph of Aramatheia, who became a major figure in the Arthurian Romances as keeper of the Grail. The rationale is that Joseph knew Britain from his trips as a tin merchant, and on one of his trips he had brought his nephew, the boy Jesus, but there seems no way of ever documenting this. The Bible says nothing about Jesus ‘s life between ages 12 and 30. The Vulgate Bible gives Joseph as nobilis decurio and a decurion was a term often used for an official in charge of mines. (Cornish tin-miners folklore had a saying and song that "Joseph Was A Tin-Man and the miners loved him well.")
There have been claims Blake was a kind of honorary Druid who was indoctrinated into an esoteric, i.e. secret oral tradition. But this is not only unprovable, the poem ‘outs’ the supposed secret in a way that implies others would grasp the allusion. The legend is so radical it may be there is reluctance to tackle it. But it would be something if for Blake’s 250th someone could produce, if not new evidence, at least a coherent explanation.