Tuesday 13 June 2017

Lady Godiva

Lady Godiva statue by John Thomas
John Thomas (1813–1862) was a British sculptor and architect, who worked on Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster.Thomas's work 'Charity' was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Godiva, Countess of Mercia (died 1067), in Old English Godgifu, was an English noblewoman who, according to a legend dating at least to the 13th century, rode naked – covered only in her long hair – through the streets of Coventry to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation that her husband imposed on his tenants. The name "Peeping Tom" for a voyeur originates from later versions of this legend in which a man named Thomas watched her ride and was struck blind or dead.
Godiva was the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia. They had one known son, Aelfgar. The modern era Kingsbury family have claimed descent from Lady Godiva.
Godiva's name occurs in charters and the Domesday survey, though the spelling varies. The Old English name Godgifu or Godgyfu meant "gift of God"; Godiva was the Latinised form. Since the name was a popular one, there are contemporaries of the same name.

If she is the same Godiva who appears in the history of Ely Abbey, the Liber Eliensis, written at the end of the 12th century, then she was a widow when Leofric married her. Both Leofric and Godiva were generous benefactors to religious houses. In 1043 Leofric founded and endowed a Benedictine monastery at Coventry on the site of a nunnery destroyed by the Danes in 1016. 

Her signature, Ego Godiva Comitissa diu istud desideravi [I, The Countess Godiva, have desired this for a long time], appears on a charter purportedly given by Thorold of Bucknall to the Benedictine monastery of Spalding. However, this charter is considered spurious by many historians. Even so, it is possible that Thorold, who appears in the Domesday Book as sheriff of Lincolnshire, was her brother.
According to the typical version of the story, Lady Godiva took pity on the people of Coventry, who were suffering grievously under her husband's oppressive taxation. Lady Godiva appealed again and again to her husband, who obstinately refused to remit the tolls. At last, weary of her entreaties, he said he would grant her request if she would strip naked and ride on a horse through the streets of the town. Lady Godiva took him at his word, and after issuing a proclamation that all persons should stay indoors and shut their windows, she rode through the town, clothed only in her long hair. Just one person in the town, a tailor, thereafter known as Peeping Tom, disobeyed her proclamation in one of the most famous instances of voyeurism.
Lady Godiva by John Collier, c. 1897
Some historians have discerned elements of pagan fertility rituals in the Godiva story, whereby a young "May Queen" was led to the sacred Cofa's tree, perhaps to celebrate the renewal of spring. The oldest form of the legend has Godiva passing through Coventry market from one end to the other while the people were assembled, attended only by two knights. This version is given in Flores Historiarum by Roger of Wendover (died 1236), a somewhat gullible collector of anecdotes, who quoted from unnamed earlier writers.

Other attempts to find a more plausible rationale for the legend include one based on the custom at the time for penitents to make a public procession in their shift, a sleeveless white garment similar to a slip today and one which was certainly considered "underwear". Thus Godiva might have actually travelled through town as a penitent, in her shift. Godiva's story could have passed into folk history to be recorded in a romanticised version. Another theory has it that Lady Godiva's "nakedness" might refer to her riding through the streets stripped of her jewellery, the trademark of her upper-class rank. However, these attempts to reconcile known facts with legend are both weak; in the era of the earliest accounts, the word "naked" is only known to mean "without any clothing whatsoever".

Love and light,
Trace
xoxo

Book of Kolbrin ~ Truth or Fiction?

Source ~ HERE
If you’ve even heard of the Kolbrin, you’re in a minority. It has been languishing quietly in print for just a couple of decades. The Kolbrin is a collection of eleven books, six Egyptian and five Celtic, first published in New Zealand in 1994 by the Hope Trust (now dissolved) and the Culdian Trust, a metaphysical organisation based loosely on the original ‘Culdees’ or Celtic followers of Christianity brought to south-west Britain by Joseph of Arimathea in the 1st century AD.
Source ~ HERE
No-one knows what the word ‘Kolbrin’ means. It’s probably a garbled version of the Welsh word Coelbren, meaning either the name of a village south-west of the Brecon Beacons National Park, or Coelbren y Beirdd, a supposed ‘druidic’ alphabet allegedly invented by the writer Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) whose validity has been questioned by scholars. Some have suggested that Iolo Morganwg himself forged the Kolbrin.
People also say the Kolbrin and its accompanying book the Kailedy (an ancient British term meaning ‘wise strangers’) are channelled. Not so, says the Culdian Trust. The Trust publishes a number of channelled texts, but insists that both the Kolbrin and the Kailedy come from another source altogether: they were brought over to New Zealand from the UK as typescripts and set out with an introductory history by an elderly merchant seaman who attended gorsedds (councils of Welsh or other Celtic bards and Druids), belonged to a hermetic organisation, and died in the 1990s.
The Nine Unknown Men ~ a secret society founded by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka around 270 BC to preserve and develop knowledge that would be dangerous to humanity if it fell into the wrong hands. The nine unknown men were entrusted with guarding nine books of secret knowledge.
Lake Como, Italy
A hardback cloth version of the Kolbrin is available online direct from Goodeys Bookshop in Auckland and via a web link on the Culdian Trust’s website. The advantage of this New Zealand version is that it carries the all-important Dedication, Foreword, Introduction, Salutation and end-matter (which can also be read on the website).
In 2005 the Kolbrin was pirated and published in paperback as a ‘bible’ by Your Own World Books in Nevada, USA. Yowbooks’ versions are available online in laminated hardback and paperback and include:

  • The Kolbrin Bible: 21st Century Master Edition (complete edition)
  • Egyptian Texts of the Bronzebook: the first six books
  • Celtic Texts of the Coelbook: the last five books
  • Kindle edition.

These paperbacks have numbered paragraphs for easy reference, but do not include the all-important preliminary and end material. Instead, the US publishers have tried to reconstruct the history of the Kolbrin text. They think it might have been written in Egyptian hieratic script after the Exodus of the Jews, then translated into Phoenician script and taken to Britain (among other ports of call) on trading ships; from there it would have been rendered into Old Celtic/Brythonic, then Old English, then Biblical English and on into modern English. They reckon that the Celtic books were written between 20 and 500 AD. The historical accuracy of their introduction has been questioned.
If you were to sit down and read the Kolbrin from start to finish, chances are you’d be utterly baffled, because what now exists is only a patchwork remnant of the original.

How did so much of the text get lost? Well, according to the Introduction, the Kolbrin manuscripts were salvaged from Glastonbury Abbey at the time of the great 1184 fire which destroyed virtually all the buildings and many of its treasures. We are told that the fire was arson intended to destroy the heretical manuscripts in the library, but the Kolbrin manuscripts – which have been considered heretical on many levels – were secretly housed elsewhere at the time and preserved.
Note: King Arthur's Tomb ~ READ HERE

Jumping forward several hundred years, we know that the manuscripts were looked after by a group called the Culdians who were descended from a 14th-century Scottish community led by a man called John Culdy. These later Culdians were travelling smiths and craftsmen, sometimes known as ‘Koferils’, who followed the beliefs of those Celtic Culdees I mentioned earlier, (from the Gaelic Culdich/Domesday Book quidam advanae Culdich or ‘certain strangers’). At an unknown date some of the manuscripts were transcribed on to metal plates and became known as The Bronzebook of Britain; under this title they were written down in book form in the 17th century. The text was modernised in the late 19th/early 20th century, incorporating some salvaged Celtic manuscripts which had not been transcribed on to metal plates, known as the Coelbook. We also know that for a period of time the Kolbrin was buried under a stone cairn in the mountains of Wales.
Asthma History: 2000 B.C.: Chaldeans introduce physicians to Babylon
During the 1920s and 1930s these books were kept by a little-known religious group. During World War II the books were thrown out as worthless junk, then salvaged.

Originally, the Introduction tells us, there were five great book-boxes containing 132 scrolls and five ring-bound volumes which comprised The Great Book of the Egyptians. But over the centuries many of the books have been lost or destroyed – the Lesser Book of the Egyptians, the Book of the Trial of the Great God, the Sacred Register, the Book of Establishment, the Book of Magical Concoctions, the Book of Songs, the Book of Creation and Destruction, and the Book of Tribulation have all gone.
The introduction to the Kolbrin states, ‘it has not been easy to reconstitute them [the remaining books], even with the assistance of a more knowledgeable co-worker who filled in the few gaps with compatible references to modern works’. The Introduction goes on to say, ‘every possible fragment has been retained; some of the proper names are spelt wrong and some of the original correct ones replaced by others; no claim is made regarding historical accuracy, and the biblical form of English has been modernised by one who has no scholarly pretensions whatsoever.’

The underlying story

Beneath its overriding metaphysical texts, The Kolbrin carries an underlying story – and it’s a fascinating one, with its themes of genetics, global catastrophes and the search for immortality.

The story in the Egyptian Books

At the very beginning of human life, different species of men exist in the world. The Book of Origins states that there were two species:
– ‘The Children of God’. They ‘struggled harder, were more disciplined, because their forefathers had crossed the great dark void’ from ‘another unearthly place far distant’ [outer space?], and they do not ‘inherit death’.
Wodewose ~ TheTaymouth Hours
– A primitive indigenous species called ‘the Children of Earth’, known as ‘Yoslings’, ‘half-folk’, ‘not true men’, ‘Sons of Bothas’, and ‘kinsfolk to the beasts of the forest’. They are also called ‘Men of Zumat’, meaning ‘they who inherit death’ [descended from a highly developed ape?].


(The Book of Gleanings, set later in time, lists even more species:

– ‘The Grand Company’, who subsequently withdraw in disgust at the behaviour of mankind.

– ‘The Children of God’, led by a wise father, who ‘knew Truth and lived in the midst of peace and plenty’.

– ‘The Children of Men’, a primitive indigenous species who were wild and savage, clothed in the skins of beasts.

– ‘The Men of Zumat (Yoslings) who were even wilder.)

According to the Kolbrin, the different species should always have stayed separate. But when, eventually, matings start to occur, this is described as the first ‘defilement’. The Children of God are then banished from the gardenland and it becomes a desert.The first Yosling man to mate with a woman of the Children of God dies of his illness, but his lover gives birth to a daughter. This hybrid offspring is described as ‘a cuckoo-child’. She is an unusual female with long red hair – never seen before – and she lives by herself in the forest as a sorceress, preferring the company of Yoslings. Eventually she marries a great hero of the Children of God in the land of Krowkasis (the Caucasus). Versions of her story appear in both the Egyptian and the Celtic books.
The second defilement happens later when woman is tempted by ‘the strength and wildness of the beast, which dwelt in the forest’. We are told that ‘because of the wickedness that was done, there are among men those who are the Children of the Beast, and they are a different people.’
The Kolbrin makes clear that it is woman, and woman alone, who is responsible for the two genetic defilements of the race of the Children of God, for it is she who weakens and mates, first, with a Yosling, then with the beasts of the forest. By defiling her race, she does herself a great disfavour, for the Children of God regard woman as the equal of man – whereas the Children of Men use her as a sex-slave and a chattel, which over time becomes the norm throughout the human race.
Over thousands of generations and endless intermingling, distinctions between the species gradually disappear and the resulting mixture becomes the shorter-lived, disease-prone human beings we are now. The Earth is destroyed by fire. Man survives, but he is not the same. The sun is not as it was before, and a moon disappears. A subsequent destruction splits apart the eastern and western mountains so that they stand up in the sea, and tilts the northern land mass over on its side. The lands of the Little People, the Giants, the Neckless Ones, and the land of Marshes and Mists are all destroyed.

In the intensely cold age that follows, human beings survive by hiding in caves. They are terrorised by giant beasts until, following ‘heavenly rebellion and turmoil’, a cataclysm hardens the face of the Earth and turns the beasts to stone. Subsequently, the Earth is destroyed by the Flood of Atuma, then by the Deluge.
The Deluge story is followed by a lengthy version of the Gilgamesh story with a hero called Hurmanetar.

When Osireh/Yosira the Great One comes from the West with the People of Light seeking refuge in Egypt after the destruction of his own land, Ramakui of the seven cities, Land of Copper, he finds a population living in holes in the ground; following the cataclysm, a plague has wiped out all the adult population and with it all knowledge of basic living skills. The remaining population includes ‘men who were blood kindred with the beasts of the forest or with fowl or with serpent’, who ‘dwelt together according to their kinship, and were divided thereby’.
Dagda on the Gundestrup Cauldron.
Osireh teaches the lost generation how to grow corn, to spin and to carve stone, as well as writing and numbers. But when he tries to teach the people about God, they do not understand him, so he invents signs and simple tales (the first-ever myths) to help them understand. He tells them that when he dies, the sun will become their adoptive parent in his place. He is much beloved by the common people. Osireh has brought with him from Ramakui amazing technology: the Sacred Eye and the Firestone ‘which gathers the light of the sun’– forms of knowledge lost to us now, just as we have lost ‘the rituals of sea shells’ and ‘the song of the stars’; above all, he brings with him, out of his people’s transparent temples, ‘the light that shines when darkness falls without being lit’.
Osharian Celtic Druids.
Osireh is not like other men. Wearing robes of black linen and a red headdress, he has ‘the likeness of a god’ and his bones are ‘not as those of others’. When eventually he dies ‘in the manner of men’, he leaves behind him a flourishing civilisation.

Later, wise men come to Egypt from Zaidor , another land recently destroyed. They are great astronomers, they reject the idea of the sun as a god, and they have a unique mummification practice of covering the bodies of their dead with potter’s clay and leaving it to harden.
Over subsequent centuries, Egyptian scribes wonder where their Motherland could have been. They consider all the geographical options where strange races live, and speculate whether the Motherland might have been Ramakui, Zaidor or some earlier civilisation. The Book of Origins states unequivocably that their cradleland was Krowkasis [the Caucasus. Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia derives the name ‘Caucasus’ from the Scythian kroy-khasis – “ice-shining, white with snow”. In August 2011, scientists at the Zurich DNA genealogy centre iGENEA reconstructed the DNA profile of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Results showed that he belonged to a genetic profile group known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which 70% of British, 70% of Spanish and 60% of French men also belong. Roman Scholz, director of the iGENEA Centre, said, “We think the common ancestor lived in the Caucasus about 9,500 years ago.”]
Lost Fortresses of Sahara Revealed by Satellites.
The Libyan Desert.
Source: More HERE

The narrative continues. It has now become the story of the Sons of Fire, whose quest is to guard the Great Book of Egypt and find a safe home for themselves. The Sons of Fire are said to be highly skilled metalworkers of Tyre, people of the ‘twin cities’ [Tyre and Sidon?]. Knowing they must go north, the Sons of Fire make their scrolls and metal-plate texts watertight, load their provisions and set sail. But the place where they try to settle first and build a city is full of wild men; it is on the edge of the known world and the now-destroyed Land of Mists and Kingdom of the Trees, where the dampness causes sickness and many of them die.

After some years, knowing they will all die if they stay there any longer, the Sons of Fire set sail again northwards. They come across a group of Greek refugees from Troy and travel together. Eventually, they arrive on the south coast of Britain. At this time, post-Ice Age Britain is still an empty land inhabited by Painted Men (small, tattooed Picts) and a few 6-cubit/9-foot giants – survivors of the cataclysm that destroyed most of the race of giants.
Brutus of Troy, the Brutus Stone in Totnes
The Trojans sail on to Dadana [later called Dodonesse in Holinshed’s Chronicle, now known as Totnes.] with their leader Corineus and, after slaying the few remaining giants still living in Belharia [St Michael’s Bay?] −‘The same giants are builders of great temples and they are six cubits tall’ − the migrants settle in what is now Cornwall. Several different languages are known to have been spoken in Britain at this time.
The legendary Corineus and Gogmagog the giant

The story in the Celtic Books ~ HERE

Love and light,
Trace
xoxo