All at sea

If you're fond of sand dunes and salty air,
quaint little villages here and there.

From wikipedia, Hogmanay:

The roots of Hogmanay perhaps reach back to the celebration of the winter solstice among the Norse, as well as incorporating customs from the Gaelic New Year's celebration of Samhain. In Europe, winter solstice evolved into the ancient celebration of Saturnalia, a great Roman winter festival, where people celebrated completely free of restraint and inhibition. The Vikings celebrated Yule, which later contributed to the Twelve Days of Christmas, or the "Daft Days" as they were sometimes called in Scotland. The winter festival went underground with the Protestant Reformation and ensuing years, but re-emerged near the end of the 17th century.

As we moved into 2009, the Scottish year of Homecoming, massive crowds paid to ritually gather round Edinburgh Castle, the Royal Mile and Walter Scott's Monument to see in the bells and watch (depending on how much one paid) headlining act Groove Armada and others perform in Princes Street Gardens, once the Nor Loch.

Yet earlier, in the morning of Hogmanay, a gruesome discovery fit for any Ian Rankin novel was made within the city, a mummified head wrapped in a plastic bag.

From the BBC:

A human head found in a bag in Edinburgh is that of an adult who may have died between five and 10 years ago, according to police. The remains, which appeared to be mummified, were discovered by a woman walking along a footpath at Hawthornvale, Leith, at about 1030 GMT.

More precisely, Hawthornvale is part of Newhaven, once a small fishing village, itself now part of the metropolis that is Edinburgh, the Athens of the North; whilst the name Hawthornvale means, literally, the valley of the hawthorns. The footpath, itself an old disused railway line.

From Newhaven Village website:

Newhaven, nestling between the ports of Leith and Granton, is one of Edinburgh's coastal villages. It was absorbed into Edinburgh in 1920 as part of a 33 square mile expansion.

Newhaven was a microcosm of the ‘Disruption’ in the Church of Scotland of 1843 in which 450 ministers seceded to form a new denomination (the Free Church of Scotland) over issues of State control and patronage to which they objected.

James Shelby Downard:

Because Masonry is obsessed with earth-as-gameboard (tessellation) and the ancillary alignments necessary to facilitate the "game," it is inordinately concerned with railroads

The hawthorn, a tree surrounded by ancient mythology and legends, certainly significant to our ancestors, as we glean from various sources, including:

From In Worship of Trees:

The Hawthorn tree (Crataegus oxyacantha) is one of the sacred trees of Wicca and Witchcraft.

In Irish folklore the Hawthorn is sometimes referred to as the fairy bush, due to the belief that fairy spirits inhabit the tree as guardians

An early Christian legend about the Hawthorn begins with the death of Christ and the myths surrounding the Holy Grail. Christ’s uncle was Joseph of Arimathea, who according to the Gospels of the New Testament was a rich Jew and a member of the Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish court in Jerusalem. According to old Cornish legends he was also a tin merchant who traded with miners on the west coast of Britain. On one of his trading journeys he brought along his nephew, the boy Jesus and together they made a pilgrimage to the Holy Isle of Avalon.

As the legend has it, during the crucifixion Joseph collected some of the blood of Jesus in a goblet (one used during the Last Supper and known as the Holy Grail), and hid it in a tomb. Years later Joseph returned to Avalon bringing the Holy Grail with him. When he moored his boat on Wearyall Hill and stepped ashore, he planted his staff in the ground where it took root and blossomed into a Hawthorn tree, known today as the Glastonbury Thorn. This was taken as a sign that Christianity would flourish in England and so Joseph built the first Christian church in Britain at Glastonbury. Somewhere nearby he also hid the Holy Grail, which has never been found since.

and here:

Christianization did not deter British fondness for hawthorn magic. The Burning Bush seen by Moses was said to have been a hawthorn. The crown of thorns on the head of Jesus was a hawthorn wreath, a myth that lent itself to hawthorn's oldest divine associations with Death & equally with Life.



Of course, decapitated heads and Holy Grails also feature prominently, and perhaps contradictorily given the above, in the legends of the freemasonic secret society founding Knights Templars, some saying they themselves carried the grail for safekeeping, along with the decapitated head of John the Baptist.

We move back to Edinburgh author Ian Rankin, his 13th book "Resurrection men", a name applied to those who engage in the practice of body-snatching.


And close with freemason Burns:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne ?

cheers

please see, for further information:

Gods of Eden - Knights' New Dawn

The Untold Tale of the Templar Shining Ones

& my own posts, on freemason Ian Rankin - Traversing the rats-gate with Archibald Pelago.

On the Templars - I saw three ships a sailing.