A Saintly Soul Abducted

Day 4 of the 5-part series A Sainlty Soul Abducted by K.G. Watson

McNeil bit his tongue.  He knew how dangerous it was to speak in anger.  He ground his teeth and waved Liam on.  Better to get this over.  There was not much left in the pile of paper beside his chair.

Liam, too, had to draw a deep breath to regain some composure.  “These are a list of sources that refer to events surrounding St. Patrick on a very broad timescale.  Patrick was born and died in about 400 CE.  Drogheda was 3500 BCE.  Brian Boru was about 1000CE.”  He touched each collection as it stuck out from the pile.  I want to use the Book of Kells as another exhibit in my case.  As you know, this book was a copy of the four Gospels and is dated from about 800 CE.”

McNeil was well acquainted with this source.  He’d visited it where it was on display at Trinity College in Dublin.  Sure enough, Liam started with the missing pages and the cover that someone had torn off for the jewels it used to contain that embellished it.

I want to use this to show that there was likely an ‘underground’ within the Church at the time – a fifth column whose presence went back to at least St. Patrick.  Patrick was ordained, as we both know, but his voiceprint supporting a liberation point of view lived on after he died, and I suggest the evidence is here.”  He tapped the top of a collection of photocopies of the elaborately illustrated pages.

“Though the pictures were painted in extraordinary detail with some figures smaller than a millimetre, nobody has spent much time asking how that could be.  Ground glass lenses were an invention to come – almost 800 years later.  Yet here is evidence that that could be easily explained if the artist was looking through a glass as the details were built up.   I cite your own work on the 100+ calves that gave up their hide for the vellum.  I answer the source you question about the blue pigment.  It was Lapis Lazuli, and at the time, the only source on earth was modern-day Afghanistan.  How did the crystals make their way across half the world to Ireland?

Well, they did.  There’s the proof.  And since they did, it is no stretch to imagine that a hand lens, sufficient to the task, was also collected on the way.  So when someone had enough sins, and the wealth to buy forgiveness from them appeared, the exotic materials and technology were at hand for a highly skilled illuminator to go to work.  The managers focussed all their attention on the words that were repeated or missed.  When lenses next crossed the theological table, Galileo had made one and put it into a telescope that showed the moon was cratered, not perfect, as the Church claimed that God had made it.  God doesn’t make battered work.   It was the lens’s fault.  It was the demonic eye.  Looking through it distorted God’s beauty.

Nobody knew, or had forgotten that the Book of Kells might have used another demonic eye in its creation.  The book’s purpose was to be a worthy addition to the world of writing.  But I can find no protest that the original Celtic symbols that portrayed a circular theological view entirely at odds with the linear view of the church at that time were on page after page.  Here, in the most historic book of their time, was the plain evidence of the parallel acceptability of the circle of life surrounding the words that said life was just a line – birth, death, heaven.  And the Christian managers never noticed, or if they did, were prepared to explain it as pretty decoration.  They chose not to see the encouragement for Ireland to rise again, and again and never give up.    

A Saintly Soul Abducted

Day 3 of 5 of the short story A Saintly Soul Abducted by K.G. Watson

McNeil slouched back in what amounted to blasphemy from his student and was about to interrupt, but Liam knew enough not to let him.  If he let the Prof get started, he’d spout propaganda that had the weight of time and lineage he revered.  Liam plunged on.

“Millennia before there was a Christian church in Ireland, there was an oral tradition, as there was in most of the world. Writing arrived like a scourge.  It was the tool of the weak-memoried or anti-social.  But writing was mystical in allowing communication between people who never met and across time that exceeded lifetimes.  Could there be a better device made for support of a religious practice that claimed communion with the miraculous?”

“The trump card was that it eliminated the fallibility of human recall – sometimes.  Here was certainty on the written page.  Except for those who felt obliged to add words of interpretation.  “This is what the author really meant,” claimed those trying to elevate themselves above the original.  So in Patrick and the snakes, the interpreters claimed the use of the word for ‘serpents’ was a metaphorical one.  

“We know there were no snakes.  We think he was referring to pagans in their midst,” and they chuckle their way down an explanation that ignores the source and intent of the original oral presentation.

“To illustrate the point about oral tradition conveying accurate information over millennia, you can’t beat the burial mound at Newgrange in Drogheda County.  Details of astronomical observation were collected over eons by those living there before the pyramids were built.  It was passed by word of mouth generation after generation until enough had been gathered and saved without writing, and the tomb could be built about 3200 BCE.  We’re talking about a memory exercise that exceeds the time the Christian Church has existed!”  A thick sheaf of photocopies joined the others on the table.

McNeil had never felt so assaulted!  The very foundation of modern progress rested on the infallibility of the written word.  His pupil had just pointed out that libraries of the world had not been around as long as they had been.  He exploded out of his chair.  “You cannot test words not written.  What you would do by raising gossip to the level of careful thought is turn the wisdom of the ages, written in books, into a debate.”  The older man was livid.

“Is it a debate about what was really, or what people wanted it to be?”

“It’s not as easy as that,” shot back the equally red-faced student as his supervisor sat.  “Our protestant friends not long ago had a program of trying to decide from the Biblical records what Jesus said.  By applying a term called ‘voice printing’ along with other criteria, they feel they have extracted the words for the man at the well from those that copiers or editors added over time.  At least it gave another view of this person they worship … without the window dressing.”

 

 

A Saintly Soul Abducted

Day 2 of a 5-day short story series by K.G. Watson

“My second collection of evidence supporting the claim that Patrick’s reputation was abducted is this,” Liam said as he laid it out.   “Gene expression can be affected by social situations.  The field is evolving, but there is enough evidence to support that the Irish have been trying to break free of oppression since the get-go.  I use Brian Boru to illustrate even though he is from about 1002 CE – 600 years after Patrick. But he makes my point.  Irish had been struggling long before then, and I think that fighting for national identity was alive and well when Patrick was walking the hills.”

McNeil looked askance at the packet that Liam had picked off the floor.  “The topic is called ‘Epigenetics.  It was not known until about 50 years ago, but it gains credibility with yet more evidence every day.  I offer these results from Holland.” Thud!

“By using these data in my thesis, I am bringing the field out of the realm of legend and opening new avenues for future research.  You told me that should be a goal of my research.”

McNeil nodded agreement but hated the fact that he could no longer keep up with his pupil if he opened that door.

“You’ll get a lot of pushback going that route, young man.”

“Well, I thought this was supposed to be a research project,” Liam stressed the adjective. “If established authority is only going to accept its own evidence, does it not stop being what it was required to be?”

“I’m simply saying,” McNeil blustered.  “Go on.”

“Well, new research will come up again, but more obliquely.  Let me come back to it later.”

Liam paused to get his thoughts back on track.  “In every Irish case I’ve read, the hero is one who supports independence of thought.  Patrick stands out for the souls he has rescued by bringing them to the Christian God rather than his bringing disparate tribes together.  Oddly, those first references are from ecclesiastical sources who would benefit from having such a hero on their side.   Here’s a person of such stature that he is a national hero.  On the one hand, he is claimed to be almost messianic in his godliness; on the other, he is revered for standing against forces of oppression that the first side definitely was.  The defeat of pagan religion was the objective of the early Christian Church in Ireland.  To do that, they chose to defeat their adversary by making him seem to become one of them.   He drove the poisonous snakes from Ireland, say those looking to credit him with a miracle.  We know from centuries of scientific study there never were any there.  Those who sought to control Ireland had pasted a veneer of stories over him as they turned him into a hero of the oppressors.”

And they wrap up their arguments by referring to written records, often from centuries later, as proof of how virtuous Patrick was.  Those writers and readers had forgotten the source of the Irish national wisdom.  Willfully blind, they gazed past evidence which we can now see and which reveals their abduction.

Spotlight on K.G. Watson

Today’s blog post features author, K.G. Watson. Ken is the author of a large number of books in our collection, and there’s no sign of him slowing down! He writes everything from historical fiction (Duty’s Son, Duty’s Daughter, Duty’s Dad) to non-fiction (Acts of Remembrance, a first-hand account of WW2 through the lived experience of a young girl in Holland during the war) and has written books that centre around real-life challenges such as ageing, homelessness, and the endurance of the human spirit (To Give and Receive with Grace, Life Supports, Stitch in Time etc.) You can find all of his titles on Amazon! Not only is Ken a published author many times over, he’s also an accomplished Opera Chorus singer, blacksmith, and genealogist. Ken has even narrated his own book, Duty’s Son, which will be available on Audible Audiobooks through Amazon soon! Check out his info below:

From One Christmas to the Next

December 8, 2020- K.G. Watson has written another wonderful book! Today, we’ll give you a sneak peek into his brand-new novel titled From One Christmas to the Next available on Amazon here: From One Christmas to the Next: Watson, K.G., Goubar, Alex: 9781989506264: Books – Amazon.ca Or available for pre-order on our site here: From One Christmas to the Next – Pandamonium Publishing House
This novel is book 1 of 2 in a sequel! Here’s an excerpt from his book:

He hadn’t counted on going in. He’d just been too darned lonely house-sitting the place while its owner studied overseas.  He really resented the inane or gratuitously violent TV offerings.  So, after his TV dinner, he’d just gone out, walking, till he got tired enough to sleep – just like every other night for the past six months. But who counted? He had seen the bustle from a block away.  Cars had been trying to get into the plugged parking lot.  Lines of bundled-up families chatted excitedly and called to each other as they converged.  Bright light bathed the spire and filled the windows.  He found himself trapped between clumps of people ahead and behind and fenced in by the solid row of parked cars to his left.  The human tide simply herded him off the sidewalk with them and up the broader approach to the double doors.  Rather than step out of the line into the knee-deep snowbanks, he decided he’d just go with the flow.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know the drill.  It was Christmas Eve.  How many similar services had he conducted through his lifetime?  It’s just he couldn’t do it anymore.  And he had nobody to not do it with either since Margaret had died back in the Spring.

The memory brought the image the Remembrance Cards the Funeral Home had produced.  She had always demanded she be referred to as ‘Margaret’ never ‘Maggie’.  A moment when he had called her that as he sang an old song about being young had set off an unexpected explosion. “I was named Margaret and that is the name on my Birth Certificate, and my Driver’s License and my bloody Passport,” she had shouted.  “Get used to it!”  She’d never sworn before or after. “OK,” he said to himself halfway up the walk. “What else is there to do tonight, anyway?” Most of the group ahead turned towards a side entrance – probably the Christian Education Wing or something similar – big gym, meeting rooms, kitchen, likely the church office.  They left a pair of animated adults right in front of him.  One pulled open the main door to let his partner enter and the two couples behind him all but pushed him inside.  

He took two more steps forward and the group closed ranks behind him – a solid wall of backs in wool worsted. He reflexively pulled off his toque as he stepped through the inner vestibule doors into the sanctuary.  Belatedly, he noticed he had passed the cloakrooms to the right and left just behind him.  He had opened his coat.  He’d be OK.  At that moment he just wanted to get out of the road of the people now fanned out behind him.  Three large steps got him into a pew with an aisle seat.  A mother tugged a child closer to her, leaving the seat open.  When she gave his tousled hair, last cut six months ago, and his three-day stubble a second look, she moved the child to her other side giving as much space as possible between them and the vagrant she obviously thought he was.