Mis-Guided Tours: Egypt,

Mythogeography & Death

On 15th July, after having photo taken with Simon for the Exeter’s
Choice exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Matthew
and me, and Simon for a little while, wandered about central
Exeter looking for Egypt. I had spent the morning in the Exeter and
Devon Institution on Cathedral Close researching written sources.

Notes: “modernist shapes on George St – like tombs or mausolea…

a necropolis at the heart of the city… (in pencil) Egyptian Quarter
= around Carfax, Milk Street is between Guinea Street & Fore St…
lots of feathers about… warehouses (remnants of… trade… see
down to Quay… with the Phoenicians… the Egyptians… see
Haldon Belvidere (any Egyptian connection?) …thru’ City Arcade
(or John St?) Sigils of the Craft…ghost of Cernunnos For Strength
and Empowerment… as if it has torn itself from the card…”

The Sphinx in the New

Buildings passageway looks as if she
has had botched plastic surgery. She
has swollen Leslie Ash collagen lips.
“Excuse me,” I’m stopped in the
street, “do you know Exeter?”

Notes: “heart shapes, Robert

Graves essay, path of Venus, Tarot, obelisk in jewelry shop,
crystals, pure geometry in nature, amber? cat… lotus (water lily)
roots in murky underworld ? clean flower out of murky depth…

1
mandala... pentagram/star of David (on Freemasons’ Hall in Gandy
Street)… DJ Osiris – on poster… mythos: how it is impossible
with modern technology to build the pyramids … chemicals…
there is something else… not just what you go back to… All Your
Base Belong To Us … Sapphire Security. Blue lily. Decorative
Dolmen – outside Jackson-Stopps & Staff (bishop’s statue) –
bishop’s staff (crook) …connection with Coptic Church of Egypt,
‘deal of the day: EGYPT from GATWICK 23rd July 1 week £264
B & B per person based on 2 sharing.’ Ka – the car.”

Twin lions are everywhere – in a leaden cistern on the Close, on

the ancient door to the Qua drangle on the Close, the ghosts of the
two lions that once adorned the Black Lions Inn at 78 South Street,
drawn in Mural Monuments by W.G.Croump (a handmade book,
its illustrations drawn and painted, the one copy in the Devon &
Exeter Institution – where only pencils and laptops are permissible,
ink not), and above Queen Street at the corner with Café Rouge.

At the White Hart:

Imagine you are travellers, visitors to

the city... tourists or businesspeople –
funeral directors or something like
that - at a conference – but when you
arrive, you find that your tour guide
is dead – where will you go? Where
will your guide take you then?

Egypt, perhaps.

Follow me.

2
 (Take a step out of the pub into
South Street.)

And here we are… we’ve already

arrived.

I’ve got a note to myself about maybe us starting the mis-guided

tours at the corner of Cathedral Close so we would clash and
confuse with the official Red Coat guides.

Here in South Street: a coin was found –

of “Constantine the Great: - on the
reverse a male figure standing,
apparently with a petasus – that’s a
winged hat – the mint mark is of
Alexandria, in Egypt. According to the
Sylva Antiqua Iscana, Numismatica,
Quintiam Furgina of eighteen thirty –
something by W. T. P. Shortt – on which I
rely far too heavily - - the figure is
probably that of “Thoth or Mercurius
Trismegistus (Hermes the thrice-
powerful), who lived…” according to
Shortt “in the time of Osirus, and taught
the Egyptians husbandry…”

I’d like to see an exact date for the “time

of Osirus”.

3
Coins are like electricity – they are a
currency – a means of transporting
meaning…

What was the meaning of the events in

Sun Street – just as the coin was being
dug from beneath South Street?

Sun Street was approximately here… and

it was in The Sun Inn, that Exeter
bricklayers… proletarian masons… tried
to form the first trade union branch in
Exeter… their meeting was broken up
and disrupted by the police… catching
the bricklayers dressed in animal skins
and in masks… initiating their
organisation before an image of death…
imitating freemasons, whose earliest
adherents at least believed they were
descendents of the masons of the
pyramids, the architect of Solomon’s
temple, and inheritors of the esoteric
tradition of Hermes Trimegistus…

But let me take you to a place once called

“Egypt”.

There are four basic things that help you

to achieve immortality – preservation of
the body on earth (mummification), the

4
 ka or lifeforce, the ba or personality, and
finally the name.

As we walk – either as yourself or in the

role of one of those funeral directors
combining work with pleasure – think
about how you walk - and how it might
compare to those souls travelling the
chambers of the afterlife.

----- Original Message -----

From: "mrwatkin"
To: "Phil Smith"
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 9:09 AM
Subject: RE: more Wings of God sightings

Ø >Watching the Antiques Roadshow or somesuch programme

(what a sad life I
> >live) I overheard a comment by one of the 'experts' about a
piece of
> >furniture's "pylon" shape and he then mentioned an
Egyptian derivation and
> >also a Pylon Temple. I've never heard of such a place or
thing, but if there
>
> Never heard of Pylon Temples! Where does the word
'pylon' come from anyway -
> must look it up...
>

5
> >is some connection then this may be a very ancient origin
for a
> >quintessentially modernist shape - perhaps there is a whole
web of lineages
> >of 'modern' signage? What price The Changes (the three
novels of which are
> >to be republished, starting in the autumn)?
>
> Do you mean the Peter Dickinson novel on which the TV
series was based?
> Odd, as I *just* got an email from a friend in Belgium - I'd
posted The
Ø > Changes video to a friend in Canterbury and asked him to
post it on to Belgium
> when he'd seen it...somehow thought it had got stuck
somewhere along the way,
> but apparently not. Inge in Belgium just started watched it
and apparently
> had an ultra-weird extended/intensive deja vu type
experience of feeling she'd
> seen it before somewhere (not impossible that it was
broadcast in Belgium in
> the early 80's but I somehow doubt it).
>
> Best,
> matthew
> --------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Matthew R. Watkins
School of Mathematical Sciences

6
There are three chambers down this way… (Fore
Street)

The former Franklin Temperance Family

Hotel and Picture Palace Cinema at no.
101 – advertising which Artful Thomas
had dressed as a chicken to lay golden
eggs. (In the foundations of the site of a
former Palace Cinema in Tamworth
mummies were buried by the traveller
William McGregor. The site is now a
MacDonalds restaurant – the company
refuses to allow an excavation.)

The second is behind the façade of number

144 – formerly known as The Egyptian
House – “contained within an Egyptian-
style taper framed architrave
incorporating the fascia, supported at its
centre by an elaborately diapered cast iron
column with an exotic capital three-
quarters of the way up, and a moulded
capital at the summit... an unusual
composition in the ‘Egyptian’ style of the
early 19th century…”

And third, the Catacombes – a private

enterprise Egyptian-style necropolis built
with pylon shaped columns – and almost
entirely unused, now corpse-less… waiting

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for our use. It is a stone mummy, the vessel
for the soul of a city. From the Catacombs
there is a wonderful view of the church of
St Michael and All Angels - a title which,
according to the Exeter University Press
publication ‘ The New Reading The
Landscape’ can sometimes indicate a
former site for the worship of Mercury or
Hermes.

“Only after
having traversed
each chamber
would the
guardian, or
initiate, have
been permitted
to come face to
face with the
bnnt-embryo, or cosmic egg, the original
Point of First Creation and benben-stone,
plausibly contained within its own
chamber…. The Underworld of the Soul
consists of a series of interconnecting
chambers linked to a long passageway
entered through some kind of
antechamber or underground hall.”

Can this layout be perceived in the actual

city of Exeter?

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(Throw the water into the middle of the
Carfax.)

This is the site of our ben ben stone – a site

first made not by building but by walking.

This is the site of the Carfax – the meeting

of the four ways – the Icknield Way from
East Anglia and then on over the Haldon
Hills in front of us – an ancient flint trade
path… the other ways – down to the quay
and beyond to the Mediterranean, to
Morocco, to the land of the Phoenicians,
and to Egypt, perhaps… (If that very old
Egyptian bracelet turned up by a farmer
at North Molton in 1889 got here directly.)

Francesco Careri, of the Stalker group of

urban walkers and explorers, argues that
the first architectures are not ones of
settling, but of walking. He rebukes “any
anti-architectural image of nomadism:
hunters of the Paleolithic period and
nomadic shepherds are the origin of the
menhir (standing stone), the first object of
the landscape from which architecture was
developed. The landscape seen as an
architecture of open space is an invention
of the civilization of wandering.”

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 Walking is not the enemy of architecture,
but its origin.

The structures (and their shadows and

memories) are not the enemy of the
wandering soul, but its conduits.

In a place like this we can let things flow

through us and develop the transparency,
the agitation, the fragmentation we need to
pass through.

And we will come back here – but first we

have to walk: to discover some more of the
twelve chambers we must pass through
and learn the spells to open up their
pylons…

(Walk to Broadgate.)

Note to myself: “What about the pillars in Phantasm? “We’re

discovering the hard truth of time travel… we can’t travel back...
time itself is winding down.” (screenplay of The Langoliers)
(Like the Egyptian “Devourers of Millions of Years”.)

“According to Puharich, at this point, a mechanical, robotic voice

could be heard in the apartment, which came either from Uri or
from directly above him… after which Puharich ended the session
and woke Uri. He told him about the strange voice… Puharich
played him the section of the tape leading up to the voice’s

10
intervention… (Uri) rushed out of the apartment… they found him,
as Puharich put it, ‘like a standing mummy’.”

(p.131 Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?, Jonathan Margolis,

London: Orion,1998)

“How curious it is that when Dr Vinod is the mouthpiece of the

superior beings, they speak in unaccented English, yet when they
speak through Uri Geller in the seventies, it is in the style of the
Daleks in Dr Who.”

(p.136, Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?)

I have to link Dean Koontz’s Phantoms with The Langoliers –

there are these moments of wonder in just-OK films, competent,
but nothing special and that’s why – the empty airport, the small
town deserted, these don’t need subjective-exceptions to set them
free and float. Pennywise: “It floats!” These are places – like the
asteroid-infected town from The Andromeda Strain – that are
already partly in orbit. In circulation. These are the dystopias
secretly desired. The giveaway is the way these ‘places’ keep
going without any people in them – like the ‘drift’ they are in
disruption, something hiccups the place and it starts ticking out of
time.

“The task of epic theatre… is not so much to develop actions as

to represent conditions…”

I saw this Kathakali performance once and although there was plot
the structural experience was, first, a brief elevation to a
heightened state and, then, a prolonged ecstasy.

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“…But ‘represent’ does not here signify ‘reproduce’… rather, the
first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just
as well say: to make them strange (verfremden).) This uncovering
(making strange, or alienating) of conditions is brought about by
processes being interrupted.”

(p.18 Understanding Brecht, Walter Benjamin, London: NLB,

1973.)

These movie-places have begun to conspire among themselves.

“film developed into the foremost medium of visual memory,

comprising the instrument by which its often corrosive traces
became engrained in urban space”

(p.8-9, projected cities: cinema and urban space, Stephen

Barber, London, Reaktion Books, 2002)

It’s the ideology that is performing, giving darshana - as people are

withdrawn (malls deserted, this is economic) the ideology needs to
‘feed’. It gets hungry, starts to show itself. Like characters without
actors to do whatever it is they do, churches without congregations
(is that why St Michael & All Angels, Mount Dinham is so
powerful as a building – because its congregation is so small and
the crosses have fallen from its stonework?), gods without
worshippers becoming ravenous. Taking away the people that
‘root’ the ideology (genii) to the place (loci) means the memes
float free and begin to interact with each other without the cloaking
default activities of zoon politikons. Then the dance of ideological
units is explicit. (Which is why, according to Franco Moretti,

12
Dracula and Frankenstein are never, except in comedy, in the same
cast.) The crocodile swallows the bear in Lake Placid. The
company guy (sublimated bureaucratic vampire) is eaten by the
aliens (sublimated monopoly capital) in Aliens. The zombies are
shot in the head by the vigilantes in The Night Of The Living
Dead. The aliens and the CIA (or are they supposed to be the
NSA) taking chunks out of each other in The Puppet Masters. In
all these ‘estranged place’ movies it is no coincidence that the state
(the violence on which our society is organised) eventually arrives,
always. Bureaucratic, forensic, armed and, in terms of the
narrative, hugely comforting; once the state has arrived there is no
longer any unpleasant tension or shock sequences, instead
everything is floated explicitly. Love and hate are overt – and the
state acts grand-parentally, orderly, protective, welfaric,
murderous, indulgent and hyper-disciplinary. And unless one can
embrace what fulfilment it grants to a need (a heart in a heartless
world) one will never have the stomach to consume and destroy
and simultaneously welcome and transcend it. Comforting –
because there is a plan!! In the final reel of “Phantoms” the
shadow of the state – ‘it’ – appears, in organic form, with many
long hairs and tentacles, a seething sociality. The Peter O’Toole
character calls it: “chaos in the flesh”. “It” is the hybrid, the
analogy, not politics but a self-organising biological economy, the
fundamental details of humanity, bent to serve and reproduce the
interests of the ruling minority.

Unused notes: “What if there were an art of memory in a city – an

accidental mental trick – the technique of impressing places on the
memory as a metaphorical index of knowledge… - a useful kind of
remembering that accidentally became part of a city… and all
those non-traditions, those invented traditions – all those frauds…

13
the pseudo-Egyptology of the freemasons … the autodidacts of the
18th century Institution …the theatre in Waterbeer Street (if only
we had a plan) … what if… nothing. They are films of
remembering, arts that have fallen, silted down onto the city…”

But what, Stephen Barber suggests, if it is the city itself that is

disappearing? Leaving the bathing of film, detached from the
equally disappearing movie houses. Multiperplexed, shop-
affronted, edgelanded out. Hungry motion pictures feeding along
the translucent inner urban surface. Unable to get a hold. Needing
the enactment of the shapes of the art
of urban memory to re-anchor them.

I draw the shape of the route and it is

the head of Anubis.

5/ ‘Egypt’

This is the place that was

once called “Egypt” – from
the mid 18th century to the mid 19th … all the
while Shortt was digging up the coins…Earlier
it had been called Strikinestreet (1265) or
Stykestreete (1458) … meaning, probably,
Bullocks Lane…. (The local historian Hazel
Harvey interrupted me at this point in the tour to
say she thought the names didn’t mean
“Bullocks”.) (note to myself: make the Bullman
of Greece/Osiris connection here?)

14
The lane “led to the city wall. In 1297, Edward I
…ordered the cathedral clergy to allow the use
of the lane and free access to the city wall for
those citizens responsible for its maintenance.”

Now it is closed by a security gate at the other

end… and policed by Sapphire Security Co. –
whose logo is a pyramid.

6/ High Street

26 High Street – where Andrew Brice arranged

to have his corpse displayed in the Masonic
Rooms for 6d a viewing.

Can I recommend The Stargate Conspiracy by

Lyn Picknett and Clive Prince … it’s a
wonderful melange of history, conspiracy theory
and high anxiety… (The manager of the High
Street branch of Waterstones had kindly arranged
to have this book ‘coincidentally’ displayed in the
window so that I could be ‘surprised’ to see it
there.) All about the sinister and influential
workings of a tiny channelling cult with its roots
in the work of Edgar Cayce – and the less than
salubrious channelings of George Williamson
and Alice Bailey – with their Blavatsky-like root
races and alien genetic interventions on racial
lines… a conspiracy to hijack the new age
agenda to sinister apocalyptic ends… with the
connivance of the US military and intelligence

15
forces… and the mastermind of this? The
Yugoslavian hypnotist, Andrej Puharich, a man
with connections to US government ‘mind
control’ experiments. His earliest channel? The
man who first channelled the commanders of
this movement – the very Nine themselves – the
Ennead or Nine Gods of Egypt… The same man
who now commands the chamber of St James…
East along the Icknield Way, who created a
windy and chaotic ritual there for the surgical
man-non-man and the magician of the
transparent chamber…. Uri Geller, of course,
contactee and non-executive director of Exeter
City Football Club ….who spoke in “a
mechanical robotic voice… like a standing
mummy.” “We – are – com – put – er – ised!”
The voice said: “Plans - for - war – have - been
- made - in - Egypt…. America - is - the -
problem.” His communications came from
entities introducing themselves as aliens from
the planet Hoova, specifically a computer called
Spectra in orbit about the earth that then
revealed itself to be the voice of the Nine – but
they might also have been agents of the planet J.
Edgar Hoover. “I’ve been meaning to ask you –
what do you think I saw in that garden when I
was four?”

And why Exeter? Where better to monitor the

end of the world than the new headquarters of
the Meteorological Office?

16
 On the other side of the Icknield way is the
Pyramids Swimming Baths with its murals of
Giza… I did come with my swimming costume
on - (unbutton trousers to show swimming
trunks) – if we’d had time we could swim in the
water imagining the island of creation held up
by the twin lions… … but there’s no time
tonight… so, instead… on your behalf… (pour
water - from the baths? - onto myself) (In the
event, showing my swimming trunks sufficed.)

Titi: I’ve read all your books…

Kevin: You said. Look… People know where I am. My daughter

knows exactly. If I don’t get back fairly soon they’re not going to
just ignore it…

Titi: Wow, where did all that anxiety come from? I only mentioned
your books. Nothing you do can ever change what I think about
them…

Kevin: Glad to hear you’re keeping such an open mind. Well

there’s not much point in us discussing Egypt then is there? So,
let’s see the mummy or … if it’s not available… after you, please?

(He gestures towards the exit from the baths.)

Titi: What if it turned out that these places are actually sacred
sites? Old shapes in the form of modern buildings…

17
Kevin: Then write your own book.

Titi: …like a swimming baths…

(Titi climbs out of the pool and takes a cutting from her shoulder
bag that she has placed on a poolside chair.)

Titi: This is the shape of the stars that they drew over London …

(Hands it to Kevin who gives it one glance and hands it straight

back.)

Kevin: Yes, it was in your Sphinx book…Waxworks, Woolies, and

a knocking shop…

Titi: It fits here too.

Kevin: What?

Titi: (Taking A – Z street map and shapes drawn on greaseproof

paper from her bag.) Look. This is the shape. If we lay it over the
city… where the temple of purification at Giza is…. That’s …
look… (Lifts up the greaseproof paper to show him on the map.)
… can you see where that is?

Kevin: Yes. It’s here. You know what they say: if you draw
enough lines…

Titi: But I didn’t draw these lines.

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Kevin: I’m sorry, but those shapes were drawn as part of some
inaccurate book to relieve gullible people of their 95 pences…

Titi: But what if accidentally… like the Victorians who designed

this place….

Kevin: I don’t really give a ... you know… I like you, Kelly, I like
your interest, but all of this stuff has been gone over a thousand
times before … old arguments… dialogues of the deaf…

Titi: That’s OK.

Kevin: I’m sorry if you didn’t like my books…. Miss Kelly… I

presume that’s your surname?

Titi: Presume away.

Kevin: I don’t have very

much time that isn’t work
or looking after my
daughter. Now, if you
can help me with my
work, then let’s do the
mummy. If not, if
you’ve something else
in mind, say now. I don’t
have much time for that
either…

Titi: Or for anyone other than yourself?

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Kevin: What do you care? I shouldn’t have come. Look, do you
have a mummy or can I go home?

Titi: The pool’s empty. I read all your books, Professor. They
didn’t add up to very much.

Kevin: Well, that’s the pity about empiricism, isn’t it? But when I
next need a reference for a research fellowship I shall come to you.
OK, goodnight.

(Walking to the exit.)

Titi: Have you ever wondered for one moment what it might mean
if you were wrong and Von Daniekin was right?

Kevin: (Stops. Laughs.) O. Wait a moment. Let me think. (Makes a

show of thinking.) No! No I never have! (Makes another show of
thinking.) Now I have. Goodnight.

Titi: Please…

Kevin: (Exiting towards swing doors to the entrance hall.) I don’t

need horizontally recruiting to the Secret Society of Pyramidiots,
Miss Kelly … or Kelly, or whatever your name is…

Titi: Why are you so scared?

10/ The Carfax

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And we return finally to the former site of the
Carfax – the Great Conduit … the ben ben stone
of medieval and early bourgeois Exeter – cities
built on trade and movement.

This is Francesco Careri again: “For the

Romans the menhirs (standing stones) were
simply simulacra of Mercury, or the natural
predecessors of the Hermae that guarded the
quadrivium, the crossroads symbolizing the four
directions of the world, where man encountered
different possibilities for the future, where
Oedipus ran up against his incestuous fate,
where it was best, therefore, to seek the
protection of a god. Hermes or Mercury, the
messenger of the gods, was the god of wayfarers
and of commerce (mercari = to trade), of thieves
and profit, and the protector of the roads and
intersections, in the dual sense of earthly roads
and those of the soul to the afterworld.”

This is where Artful Thomas danced as a

chicken – laying a golden egg.

The egg – imitated in the ben ben stone… the

first structure that life took… the first hill, the
primeval mound … in the midst of a sea of
water…. (Sometimes called the Island of
Trampling – is that what the Templars were really
up to?) The first structure and the first time…

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 space time as one… where the first nine gods,
the Ennead, made their entry into the world.

(Place a mound of earth in the centre and then

an egg (or stone to represent it) in the centre of
the mound)

If we look to the horizon: out on the edge of the

city the pylons are above the ground – great
structures… entering the ground in Marsh
Barton and dispersing through the city.

We move through the optic flowfield, the edges of the field are
pulled back and wrap around us. In the flowfield we see things in
abstraction, things that are not representative, but rather specified
as obstacle or landmark or navigation beacon. The diving gannet
uses a single optical parameter to time its wing positions for a
diving entry into water. “From an enormously detailed
microscopic description a single macroscopic variable emerges to
which the gannet is remarkably sensitive.” (p.190, Dynamic
Patterns: The Self-Organization Of Brain and Behaviour,
Kelso, J. A. S., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997)
Mythogeography is the attempt to identify and map these simple
variables in the social space of cities – the city as a thesaurus of
variables consciously or unconsciously encrusted, only readable
by walking.

We can also see the Haldon Belvidere, built by

Robert Palk for his friend Stringer Lawrence –

22
companions, like Thoth and Osiris, on an Indian
expedition.

Down
North
Street, The
Falcon Inn
once stood
at no. 7
Lower
North Street. Later a stone falcon sign marked
its absence. (Show drawing from Croump’s
Mural Monuments.) And finally when the stone
falcon was gone – real falcons appeared –
nesting on the spire of St Michael and All Angels
(the church of Mercury, Hermes or Thoth).

I found these (feathers) in the playground of St

David’s First School in the shadow of St Michael
and All Angels. Feathers from the pigeon prey
of the falcons… (This was a lie.) Take one and
weigh your hearts against it….

Thoth will write down the measurements.

Anubis will support us. A part lion/part
crocodile/part hippopotamus waits to tear us
apart – the destroyer of millions of years… like
the Langoliers in the Stephen King film… their
potential victims wait in a deserted world that
time has passed on from, in an echoless airport
lounge… watching electricity pylons crumple

23
one by one into the forest as flying teeth – part
crocodile, part hippo belly, part lion’s roar - eat
up the leftovers of time.

The heart is the centre of the intellect. But the

personality that survives is the “ba”. Everything
has a “ba” – including things like a feather,
including places like a city. These “bas” or
“bau” are represented as a human headed bird
– like Artful Thomas – dressed as a chicken,
laying a golden egg.

These are moments when the personality of a

person, a thing, a city can fly free of itself … and
begin to mix with other people, other things,
other places. In every other piece I have ever
done for Wrights & Sites autobiography has
played an important part. This time I’m not
sure whether to say: “ and it is again” or “I’ve
disappeared.”

“You come in, you go out…

You come to the earth in the tomb of the West.
To assume the form of phoenix, swallow,
Of falcon or heron, as you wish.

– the “spell for being transformed into a divine

falcon” is partly as follows:

“I rose up like a divine hawk, and Horus

endowed me with a Spirit-body with his soul…

24
 He shall say to the twin Lion-gods for me: get
thee back to the heights of heaven…. Thou shalt
have speech even to the uttermost limits.”

And so the personality of space flies to the

horizon, taking its place in the movements of the
stars.

Notes: The funeral procession = taking the deceased to the

horizon – where the sun sets and rises – regenerative… Carfax…
Carfax Abbey in Dracula? The world of the dead is always
changing shape… space in love with silence

Du

I can’t do the whole walk – it’s far too long and I’ve unwisely
worn shoes that don’t fit properly to go with my semi-costume –
(just before the first walk I became incapable of doing up my
necktie, something I’ve been able to do automatically for forty
years, I couldn’t recover any logical memory of exact movement,
so I had to wait till I could stop trying and then I was able to tie it
automatically again, in time for the second walk) – I do the walk
in short segments, returning to the pub in between. It is one of
several walks that Wrights & Sites stage that evening: Stephen
providing a sound walk on cd players, Cathy and Simon leading
parties like me.

We have visited the twelve chambers:

The Inland Revenue Office (sphinx under roof)

25
 144 Fore Street (formerly The Egyptian House)
Franklin’s Picture Palace
The Catacombs
The Devon and Exeter Institution
‘Egypt’ - lane
St James Park Football Stadium
The Freemasons’ Hall
St Michael & All Angels
The Falcon Inn
The Stack of the Central Library
The BT Regional Communications Centre

“In the Gnostic mysteries of Isis there are twelve

successive putting on and off of garments or
animal disguises…” (p. 166, The Gnostic
Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the
Beginning of Christianity, Hans Jonas, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1963) Here at The Sun Inn the
trade unionists were arrested throwing off their
animal skins and masks…

I haven’t got much time for the flesh-hating dualism of gnosticism,

but there is a place in the abstract structures of the universe where
Neo-Platonism takes on a kind of material kick.

“If I understand them rightly it is generally believed by

mathematicians that geometry is pre-existent in the human mind,
and that all we have to do is to look at nature and observe an
approximate resemblance to the properties of the ideal space. You
might assert the same pre-existence of dynamics, or chemistry. I

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think it is a complete reversal of the natural order of ideas. It seems
to me that geometry is only pre-existent in this limited sense: that
since we are the children of many fathers and mothers. All of
whom grew up and developed their minds (so far as they went) in
contact with nature, of which they were a part, so our brains have
grown to suit. So the child takes in the facts of space geometry
naturally and easily. The experience of past generations makes the
acquisition of present experience easier, and so it comes about that
we cannot help seeing it. But it is all experience, after all; although
learned philosophers, by long, long thinking over the theory of
groups and other abstruse high developments, may perhaps come
to what I think is a sort of self-deception, and think that their
geometry is pre-existent in themselves, while nature’s is only a bad
copy. Like the old Indian pundit, whose name was something like
Bhatravistra, who, after fifty years inward contemplation,
discovered God --- where – it would not be polite to mention.”
(p.385, Electromagnetic Theory, Oliver Heaviside, London: E. &
F.N. Spon, 1951, first published 1912)

Notes: What is Egypt in Exeter – it’s cold, lunar… it’s death… it’s
the end of theatre… no masks (deleted) arena… no union… ? not
the real Egypt in which the craftsmen… were highly prized… or
(or “on”) good (illegible) … like the guilds here… that became the
unions… the freemasons ? but this is the idea of Egypt… floated
free… our chance to walk in(illegible) (illegible) into bleakness …
so we don’t have to live there…

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