Black Steel Chain

I’ve used a chain wallet since 1993 and had various chains from a chrome-plated dog-lead type chain to a black anodised aluminium chain but they’ve all had their limitations – too bright and flashy or too weak and prone to snapping and there seems to be little point in keeping your valuables chained to your arse if the chain snaps at the first tug. Earlier this year I started to browse the web in search of a nice strong chain. I wanted something that was strong yet decorative, well crafted and specific to my needs but not so expensive that I’d need to pawn a kidney. I also wanted it to come from the UK – I’m not a flag-waving British-Is-Best type but I’ve been stung by customs several times in the last 12 months and I’m getting sick of paying their fees. My search lead me to Pictish Badger Design – purveyors of high class chain mail artefacts and jewellery. I opted for a Byzantine weave chain in black steel. I discussed my requirements with Craig, the artisan behind Pictish Badger Design, and a few weeks later my chain was delivered. None more metal. None more black. www.pictishbadgerdesign.co.uk

The New Inquisition: Defenders Of The Faith

God Save Russia!

With Belief in God, Freedom or Death!

Sodom will not stand!

We will not allow the corruption of our land

Let our distinguished academics see how Orthodox people treat their pseudo-theories

A new history has begun and the events in this history will occur under new laws of world conflict. In the beginning this war will not be nuclear, it will be conducted in the form of conflicts of low intensity and it will not only be a war of armed forces but also an information war.

We have declared a new holy inquisition that will fight all villains who oppose Christ, the sacred symbols and the Orthodox Church

I first came upon The Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers, sometimes translated from the Russian as The Union of Orthodox Flag Bearers or the more poetic Union of Orthodox Gonfalon Bearers when browsing a website of Russian photo-journalism. The site contained several images of the Union holding a demonstration against a concert given by Madonna in Moscow in 2007 and one could not fail to be struck by the dramatic, almost sinister appearance of this sect as they speared a large poster of the “American Satanist and Kabbalist” with a wooden stake. Dressed in black paramilitary fatigues, sporting thick beards and bedecked in the regalia of the Russian Orthodox Church, Tsarist military decorations and the occaisional deaths-head the Union possess a strong visual aesthetic that instantly captured my attention. I began to research the movement and found that information, at least information in English, was scarce but very interesting.

The Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers was co-founded in 1993 by Leonid Simonovich-Nikshich, who I have seen described in one place on the web as a pretender to the Serbian Crown – although how much credence can be given both to that statement and Simonovich’s claim is another matter. The Union is a radical organisation that seems to be comprised mostly of layeity although it would appear to enjoy at least tacit support amongst the more militant elements of the Orthodox clergy and follows the precedent of the Black Hundreds in calling for a return to the Old Russia of Tsar and God. For Simonovich and the members of his Union we are living in the Last Days and politics is an irrelevance as we await the final battle and the raptures of apocalypse. America in particular is castigated as a secular Satan whose crime in bombing the Serbs is not her interference in the affairs of another state but her decision to take up arms against an Orthodox country. Simonovich has resurrected a more important fundamental – the Patristic declaration that a synagogue is a refuge of demons and also seeks to resurrect the medieval myth of Jewish ritual murder as evidence of the Jewish threat, publicly calling for the canonisation of Andriushy Iushchinsky, whom Jews were accused of murdering in 1911, and declaring that the murder of Tsar Paul I bore the hallmarks of a ‘Masonic’ ritual killing. Further threats to the integrity of Russian Orthodoxy are offered by Roman Catholics, NATO and the West in general. As well as getting hot and bothered about Madonna’s gig The Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers has been active in violently opposing Gay Rights marches in Moscow, in which veteran British busy-body Peter Tatchell was soundly twatted, protesting about the publication of Harry Potter books in Russia, ritually impaling a toy monkey as a public denouncement of Darwinian evolution and joining forces with other groups on the far right of Russian parapolitics to protest about the radio station Echo Of Moscow, which it accused of broadcasting anti-Russian propaganda. So what? I’m unlikely to be visiting Russia any time soon and and shouldn’t we simply treat these people with as much contempt as our own homegrown religious cranks and crackpots? Well – yes and no. It’s certainly true that militant and confrontational as they may be The Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers is a small group on the outer fringe of the fringe of Russian politics and maybe we can all get behind somebody who wants to impale Madonna but is the enemy of your enemy really your friend? In this case I would say not. They probably don’t like Venom either.

The New Inquisition: Deaths Heads & Blonds

Endvra Videos

I never visit YouTube unless it’s to watch old Cadbury Flake or Limara adverts but somebody has made me aware of a couple of Endvra videos that have been posted. The first uses the track A Golden Heresy from Black Eden as a soundtrack for some Lovecraftian / Cthulhu imagery http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AwyjJXei6w

and the second juxtaposes Black Eidolon from the debut Dreams Of Dark Waters with some interesting footage of natural phenomena. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1xtb6biKO4&feature=related It’s not exactly the thing I had in mind when I nicked the title from Clark Ashton Smith in 1994 but it adds a certain something to a song I can’t even remember recording. It is obvious that we had never heard of Dead Can Dance either….

Gear-Wheels for the Engines of Heaven

It is possible to consider ones self an educated and informed person, to be familiar with the great schools of thought and movements of history and to one day stand in front of an object that is so beautiful and so unknown that it is the cause of a quantum-shift in ones understanding. One wet Saturday afternoon several weeks ago I visited Durham University Museum of Oriental Art with my daughters. As they dressed up in the silk robes and peered at the Egyptian mummies I browsed the Chinese gallery. In one cabinet was a disc cut from pale watery green jade. It measured approximately 7 inches across and had a small round hole in the middle. The edge of the disc was notched with four perfectly symmetrical raised fins making the object look like a translucent circular saw-blade. The disc was one of the most beautiful pieces of art I have ever seen. I found the harmony of color, material and form breathtaking but I had no idea what it was, who made it or for what purpose. The label in the cabinet simply read: Jade Bi, Northern China Approximately 3000 BC. Like a thunderbolt I realised I knew nothing about China. I had a passing familiarity with the modern Chinese state, I knew a modest amount about the Terracotta Army and had possibly read something somewhere about the Warring States period but the little information I had was piece-meal, disconnected and scant. I knew nothing about the Neolithic cultures of China, nothing about the material artefacts recovered from these cultures and I had never heard of a Bi (pronounced as the English letter “B”). I did not know that circular stone discs, often cut from jade, have been found across modern China and that the Er Ya, the earliest dictionary-style Chinese reference book, gave different names to such objects according to the width of the ring but that modern archaeologists tend to refer to all of them as Bi discs. I did not know that the earliest Bi were cut without the assistance of metal tools using cutting “wires” made from animal sinew covered with sharp sand and powered by water wheels. I had no idea of the variety of Bi – notched, bulged, flanged, toothed or plain. I knew nothing of the range of stones they were made from, of the differences in size and use of collars around the central hole. I did not know that later Bi were decorated with geometric and linear patterns and to my mind are thus less beautiful that the austere, unadorned Bi of the Neolithic. But most importantly – I did not know why such magnificent, ethereal objects were made. I cannot think of anything comparable from the European Neolithic. There are certainly objects of grace and beauty – delicately knapped leaf-shaped blades or polished stone axe-heads from Great Langdale but these objects have obvious practical origins, even the thinnest ceremonial axe-head is still recognisably an axe-head whereas the Bi is an object of infinitely more craft and design that has been abstracted to the point that its function is lost to us, its secrets hidden inside its form. I read that Chinese tradition associated Bi with an encompassing circular heaven that revolved on an axis, that the Bi was juxtaposed with the Cong, a tiered cylindrical column with a squared profile that represented the earth. Zhou Rites, a book that records the sacrificial activities of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, states, "Jade is used to make six ritual objects (bi, cong, gui, zhang, huang, and hu) to be offered to Heaven, Earth, and the four directions. The blue Bi is for Heaven, and yellow cong is for Earth." The circular Bi conforms to the concept of the universe: Heaven was round, Earth square. The few descriptions I was able to find speak of Bi being handled by shamans as possessors and transmitters of sacred knowledge and being interred with the dead, often placed on the stomach or chest of the body. I found an account of the central hole being used by people to call through when they wished to speak to heaven but how much of this is recent folklore and how much reflects the intended function of Bi I do not know. Bi were high status ritual objects manufactured to exacting standards and produced in large quantities, the presence of which is evidence of an ordered society able to support a stratum of skilled artisans producing luxury objects for a ruling elite but it is still not clear exactly how the Bi functioned as a symbol of heaven? It is easy for the lazy to throw around broad, meaningless concepts such as “fertility rite” or “cosmological significance” but they bring us no closer to understanding the true purpose or function of the Bi for the people who made them. The Bi of Neolithic China are analogous to the megalithic monuments of Atlantic Europe – enigmatic and anonymous pieces of paleo-engineering that by their antiquity are open to endless interpretation and analysis. Were Bi used to open a way, to act as symbols for something that had no shape and was ineffable beyond human understanding, to divide and measure the immeasurable?

Depe Croix Dale I

There are some places so special, so alive that one hesitates to write of them lest it erode their sanctity. There are trees so ancient that they stood before Christ came to these islands. The massive first forests that once covered the land are now slivers of green winding along narrow valley bottoms. They have been grubbed up, tore down and tarmaced over for super-markets, industrial estates and horrible, soul destroying houses but echoes of the past still remain. Not wild but not yet managed, fallen into blissful neglect and allowed to return to self seed and a kind of genteel wilderness in which fallen trees rot slowly back to earth and windfalls form ad-hoc dams over slow lazy streams.

These places are few and far between and when you find one you know it by the rise in the hairs on the back of your neck and the still hush that falls as you enter. They are not new, bright woodlands. They are not easily accessed by the fly-tipper or the casual arsonist. They are hidden away in secret pockets, in folds of the lands protected by stone and water. They can be glimpsed from the windows of speeding trains and entered quietly through fields and forgotten paths but these hemmed-in strips of woodland are time-machines that can call the willing back to the land as it was, doors into Elphame that still open for those who knock though the way is hard and shrinking every day.

The woodland that wraps around Croxdale Beck has this character. A long, thin green snake of mixed broadleaf and conifer that winds along the valley, bordered on all side by farm land and with the busy East Coast mainline running through it for a short distance. In it’s upper stretches, where the beck runs swiftly over small rocky pavements and undercuts banks held in place by networks of ash and sycamore roots the woodland is open and light, a delicate scent of wild garlic just beginning to perfume the valley in the warmth of a sunny day in late March. The paths are broad and clear although seemingly seldom tread, there are no ruts made by mountain bikes, no wayside deposits left by carefree dog-walkers and very little litter, except for the ubiquitous pieces of plastic caught in the waterside branches to show the high water mark of the last flood.

This is an empty and forgotten woodland, a long way from the nearest settlement and on the way to nowhere in particular there is no reason for people to visit, unless they want to walk quietly along its neglected paths and peer into the depths of the pools. Somewhere ahead of me a pheasant is noisily alarming. I look down the trail but cannot see the bird, from the quality of the sound it appears to be too far ahead to have been disturbed by my presence. As I entered the wood further back another pheasant had silently sloped away into the undergrowth with that exaggerated chicken-run gait these birds adopt when they want to make themselves scarce so I know pheasants. Whatever is alarming this bird it seems to be further into the wood. I carry on down the trail, stopping to watch wrens flitting around an old stone wall and to look for the chub and dace that were restocked into the beck a few years ago.

Suddenly to my right, on the other side of the beck three Roe make a break from their cover and run back upstream, crashing through the undergrowth and making small goat-like caprioles over fallen trees. It happens so fast that I barely have time to lift the camera and snap off a picture, hoping for the best as their white rumps disappear into the woods. By now it’s obvious that the path I’m following was once a canalised channel, its high walls overgrown with ash saplings and its stone lined bottom a grassy green lane. As the canal-path continues down through the wood the stonework becomes larger and more impressive showing sluice gates and the remains of a long forgotten mill overgrown by trees and brambles. There is rock everywhere, warm orange sandstone poking through the thin sandy soil. The valley is deepening, the rocky outcrops are becoming higher and more impressive and the beck begins to loop in larger and deeper coils about the flanks of the hill, cutting down to reveal cliffs hung with moss and saplings, the stream rippling and rolling over small waterfalls and rapids.

Depe Croix Dale II

It is here that the character of the wood changes, as subtly yet distinctly as if one had crossed a street. The open sunny rides of ash and sycamore are replaced by a dark brooding wood of ancient oaks, beech and yew and guarding the entrance to this older, deeper valley is an ancient yew tree of such massive proportions it is all one can do to stop from falling to ones knees in front of it. The tree grows out of a steep hillside above the beck, serpentine roots slither out from a thick and gnarled trunk. Slow growing and seemingly immortal this guardian-yew is one of many very old yews growing in the valley bottom of the middle section of the beck, a clue written in elder-ciphers of stone, wood and water revealing the secrets of the Place to those with the Key. The sides of the valley rise and the rocky outcrops become cliffs, cut steeply through the exposed sandstone by the action of the beck over thousands of years. Here the light is dim and diffuse, even at mid-day the bottom of the dale is gloomy and overcast. A forgotten world in which massive trees reach up to the sky above and deep drifts of rich brown beech and oak leaves crunch and crisp below, no matter how quietly one tries to walk through them. Now you are in the Depe Croix Dale of the old balladeer, a haunted valley shunned by good Christian folk because of its reputation as the abode of beasts and devils.

He feared noy ye loute with hys staffe Nor yet for ye Knyghte in hys mayle He cared no more for ye Monk with hys boke Than ye fyendis in depe Croix Dale

Then out spoke Hodge, yt wyghte soe bolde Yt onse on Ferie hye And he hathe sworne by Seynt Cuthberte bys rode Yt this horride brawne shall dye

Here the landscape and folklore combine to form the geomythology of today. The deep, cliff-guarded secret dale is a last pocket of the primal wildwood that blanketed the middle Wear-valley until the middle ages. This lost forest, of which this is a last remaining pocket, was the home of the Brawn of Brancepeth, the monstrous wild boar that was slain by Roger de Feyre “sometime about 1200”, on the hill where Ferryhill now stands and from whom the village takes its name. Roger, or Hodge, is believed to be buried at St John’s Church, Kirk Merrington, which stands on a hill dominating the valley, its 72-foot high tower a landmark for miles around. Ferryhill and Kirk Merrington control the road-ways both north-south and east-west. There are clear sightlines south to the Tees estuary and the North Yorkshire Moors beyond and northwards beyond Durham to the Tyne. These hills were important places of transition and crossing, important enough for ancient churches to be sited on still more ancient hill-tops. Fitting places for the deeds of heroes. Fitting places to cast out devils from deep dark valleys by the erection of crosses and to proclaim the ascendancy of the new god by killing the totems of the old gods.