Article - Laura Knight-Jadczyk
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Article - Laura Knight-Jadczyk
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Chapter 26 The Maruts were the companions of Indra, his helpers in the fight against his adversaries, the evil gods who afflict mankind. But more than this, these dancers, (Dan-cers) were bringers of all necessities to the people in some magical, mysterious, and astonishing way:
And dancing makes us think of mazes. Hundreds of mazes and labyrinths are found scattered across Europe, parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas. They are composed of turf, hedges, stone, brick, or tilework on floors. There are paintings and carvings of mazes on rocks that are incredibly ancient. One of the oldest representations that I have found is a twenty thousand year old bracelet carved from a single piece of mammoth ivory, found at Mezin, Ukraine. This piece has a magnificent "Greek Meander" or "maze" design which predates any other maze design known, as far as I have been able to discover. This locates the knowledge of the function of the maze in that area of the world long before it was evident anywhere else. This date actually puts the maze design at around the same time of the creating of the elegant, stylistically superior art works of the French and Spanish caves. The majority of experts who write about the labyrinth, tell us that the plan and meaning of the maze clearly originated in Egypt, where it ws the scene of the religious dramas involved in killing the god-king in the form of a bull. They further tell us that the sacrifice was only token, and that a divine bull was substituted for the king in the culmination of several days of ritual dance, drama and combat performed in a labyrinth. A similar cult is said to be at the root of the Cretan labyrinth myth. The "bull of Minos" would be the representative of the kingship and power of Minos; and Theseus, by killing the bull and taking the king's daughter, was claiming the throne symbolically. Indeed, such a solution would explain why bull, king and labyrinth occur together in both Crete and Egypt, but what it does not explain is the labyrinth itself and why the same design is found all over the world. Most scholars of ancient history and archaeology, are powerfully influenced by the theories of Egyptology which posits that all civilizations diffused from ancient Egypt, or from Mesopotamia, at least. However, the sheer volume of physical evidence suggests that this is not the case. The Egyptian labyrinths were always composed of straight lines, and the abstract mazes on seals were usually made up of square fret patterns. These are the patterns that later came to be "game boards." Cretan coins from classical times often show labyrinths, some of which are of the Egyptian fretwork kind, but most of them show a maze of a very different construction - the square or rounded spiral design - the Greek meander - of European tradtion, which is never found in Egypt. The spiraling maze consists of a series of interlocking concentric bands, usually seven in number, with a straight line of exit running from the center to the base. This is the form of nearly all the ancient mazes of Europe including those known to have been focal points of nature religions and folk activity such as festivals, dancing, dramas and games. These designs are known as Troytowns. Spiral mazes with names that are obviously derived from the word "Troy" are found in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, England, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Russia. In short, there is absolutely nothing Egyptian about the Troy mazes, and there is every reason to believe that they are indigenous to the megalithic cultures which were independent developments from the civilizations of the Near East. But in the stories of the Hyperborean girls, the myths of Theseus, as well as several other myths, we find two independent aspects of the maze puzzle meeting and interacting, and what they have in common is, in our opinion, ancient technology - a device that may have been at the center of the dance of the god at Stonehenge, utilized to manipulate gravity, space and time, which was stolen by force at the time recorded in the myth of the dance of Apollo at Stonehenge - the same time that is proposed for the "unification of Egypt" under Narmer/Menes. That similar powers were available to the Egyptians seems to be evident, but it is also clear that their perception of the world, their reaction to it, and their utilization of this technology was quite different. Their view of society was Synarchic, not a Partnership. And the spiral dance of the God at Stonehenge became the moves on a game board: the Secret Games of the Gods. In the stories of the Egyptian labyrinth, the object at the center was a terrible, devouring power. In the story of the Hyperboreans, the dance of the god was a celebration of life, of bounty, of victory over the serpent. The "spear-armed Maruts" danced and brought forth baskets of bountiful blessings, materialized from the waves of the great Star Goddess, the Enthroned Queen. Something happened. Something terrible, and whether or not we discover that any sort of "object" was at the center of the labyrinth, we believe that our investigations will lead us to the knowledge of the Ark. When we consider our dancing Maruts, going from the early Aryan forms to the classical Greek, we come across the Kouretes whose function so closely parallels that of the Maruts that we cannot doubt the identity of origin. The Kouretes were a band of armed youths of semi-divine origin whose home was in Crete where they were associated with the worship of the goddess Rhea. Their dance was supposed to have been taught to them by Athene, and a text discovered among the ruins of a temple in Crete, The Hymn of the Kouretes, demonstrates that the dance was designed to bring increase in the reproductive energies of Nature. What is more interesting is that the God is not being worshipped in a subservient way, but is being invited to join in the dance as the act that will produce the results! Thus we find that there is evidence that the classic Greeks carried a tradition from their Aryan forefathers that a group of special people, of semi-mythical origin, represented as armed youths, who were notable dancers, were closely associated with the abundance of Nature in a very specific relationship. As we track such things, again and again we see that such matters always have two faces. The dance of the Phrygian Korybantes is a case in point. This dance was distinguished from that of the Kouretes by its orgiastic character. It was wild and whirling, similar to that of the modern dervishes, and was often accompanied by self-mutilation, wild cries, and unrhythmic clashing of weapons. Some think that this latter characteristic was included to drown out the cries of the victims. In short, the dance of the Korybantes was sacrificial in nature; that of the Kouretes interactive with the cosmos for purposes of praise and abundance. We now begin to see the wild orgies of the New Year festivals, the Dionysian frenzies, the Nature cults with parades of ecstatic men and women bordering on being in a state of madness, as corruptions of what was obviously an original, formalized series of dance type activities. In the Roman Salii, we find a connection between the modern Morris and Mummers dances and an archaic ceremony utilizing certain elements of the Grail Legends that have since be separated to a great extent. The Salii was a college of twelve priests dedicated to Mars in his primitive growth and vegetation aspect. Long before he was the god of war, Mars was the Spring deity whose name is memorialized in the month March. It was only in later times that he became associated with warlike elements - only after the incursions from the South. The first of March was the traditional birthday of Mars and during the whole month, the Salii offered sacrifices and performed dances in his honor. They wore pointed caps or helmets, swords at their sides, and carried on their left arms a shield that was purported to be modeled on a fabled "shield" that fell from heaven. In this, we see an early reference to the grail as platter. In their right hand the Salii carried an object that has been described a short lance, but it seems that certain bas reliefs have shown that these objects actually resemble the Wands of the Tarot deck. It is suggested that they were drumsticks used to beat on the shields which may have been made of skin stretched on a frame. In this case, the shield as a representation of the feminine being rhthymically struck by the wands as phallic symbols would have been utilized as a sound accompaniment to the dance. The suggestion by many is that this is a Tantric reference, but we think that many of the "sexual" implications do not refer to sex at all, but rather to a far more fundamental thing about procreation: DNA. And, like everything else, it has been corrupted. At the conclusion of their songs the Salii invoked Mamurius Veturius, the fabled smith who was supposed to have made the copies of the original shield that fell from heaven. On the 14th of March, a man dressed in skins, representing the smith, was led through the streets, beaten by the Salii with rods, and thrust out of the city. The following day, the 15th, the Salii celebrated the feast of Anna Perenna. The most famous form of the Sword Dance that survives today is that of Papa Stour, on one of the Shetland Islands. The dance is performed at Christmas by seven dancers who represent the "seven champions of Christendom." Their leader, playing the part of St. George, gives a speech, after which he dances solo, followed by a presentation of each of his companions who each give a performance, followed by an elaborate dance in unison. In both the Sword Dance and the Mumming Play, the chief character is St. George, the dragon slayer. This connects us back to Indra and the Maruts, Perseus and St. Romain. The English Morris dance has lost the dramatic elements, but has retained other elements, including the skin draped clown, that the Sword Dance and the Mumming Play no longer have. At the end of some of the Sword Dances, the dancers form a pentagon and cry "A Nut! A Nut!" Jessie Weston notes that this is similar to the game of "Nuts," or breast-knots, which are nosegay's affixed to the chest at Mayday celebrations. This naturally reminds us of the head of Medusa with it's knotted serpent hair that was affixed to the breastplate of Athene, and its relation to the Head of Bran that was both oracular as well as the source of endless bounty. The reader might also want to note the story of the head of John the Baptist on the platter is juxtaposed against the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the head of Bran was known to specialize in loaves and fishes! In Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero's badge is the Pentacle, explained there as the "Endless Knot." In some Tarot decks, the pentacles replace the dish, so we find another connection. In one form of the Morris dance, the lead dancer actually carries a chalice at the same time he carries a sword and a bull's head on the end of a long pole! [Weston, op. cit.] These ancient cults, that we suspect to be representations of an archaic technology consistently refer to the same symbols, or objects of cultic value. These mysterious objects form the central theme of the action of the story of the quest, and it seems that a true understanding of these objects is as essential to the hero himself as it is to the modern day "seeker of mysteries." The objects, the cup or dish, the lance or sword, and the stone, when reassembled, bring us to some idea of the rites of the Temple of Apollo where the god "danced all night" until the heliacal rising of the Pleiades. We see that the symbols of the ancient technology are often separated from each other - some in a rather haphazard way. They no longer form a complete ensemble, and even the dates of the performance of the action have shifted. But careful research shows that they were all originally part of a whole, and at some point whatever they represent was all utilized in a single process. In the legends of the Grail, we discover by careful reading that there is a specific task that the hero must accomplish that is, somehow, not of a nature that would accrue benefits to himself, but rather that it was a battle against evil forces to free a ruler and his land from disastrous consequences. The close relationship between the illness of the king and the condition of the wasteland is not a literary invention of the Middle Ages. It is, in fact, a deeply rooted element from immemorial antiquity. As we have seen, connected to the legends of the grail are a complex of "ceremonial practices" which hold to a certain form no matter what variation of the story one encounters. But we also see that something happened to bring to an end the dances of Apollo and the lifestyle of the megalith people. Tied in to all of this is the ancient alchemical lore about the "philosopher's stone," the Holy Grail, the head of Bran the Blessed, the head called “Baphomet” of the disappearing Templars, and Noah’s Ark. All are all connected to the idea of certain powers that have to do with the stopping or manipulating of time, a source of endless abundance (multiplying loaves and fishes), passage to a new life with a load of animals, eternal life or the "elixir of life," and so forth. And, most importantly, we perceive the idea of "cycles" and astronomical placements being necessary to the "work."
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