God of the Witches

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alias te poenitebit).
The body, according to the ecclesiastical account, was found by a charcoal
burner. It was placed on a rough cart, covered with a poor ragged cloak and
conveyed for burial to Winchester. William of Malmesbury makes a great point
.
of the blood dripping to the earth during the whole journey; though this is
an actual impossibility the record is consistent with the belief that the
blood of the Divine Victim must fall on the ground to fertilise it.
Malmesbury notes that Rufus was mourned by few of the nobles and
ecclesiastics who attended his funeral, but Ordericus records that the poor,
the widows, the mendicants, went out to meet the funeral procession and
followed the dead king to his grave. This fact alone shows that to the
common people he had been a just ruler and that they knew they had lost a
friend, it also suggests that the peasantry were still Pagan and mourned
their dead god.
The Norman accounts of the finding and burial of the body were written by
poets, not priests. The lamentations of the nobles, who wept and tore their
hair, are first described; then follows the making of the bier, which was
strewn with flowers and slung between two richly harnessed palfreys. A
baron's mantle was spread on the bier, and on this the king's body was laid,
and another rich mantle was laid over him. With mourning and grief the
procession went to Winchester, where they were received by nobles, clergy,
bishops and abbots. The next day was the burial, when for him monk and clerk
and abbot "bien ont lu et bien chant�". Never had such a funeral been seen,
never had so many masses been sung for any king as for him.
The death of Rufus was expected before it happened, and was known within a
few hours in Italy and in more than one place in England. In Belgium Hugh,
Abbot of Clugny, was warned the previous night that the king's life was at
an end. On the day of the death Peter de Melvis in Devonshire met a rough
common man bearing a bloody dart, who said to him, "With this dart your king
was killed to-day". The same day the Earl of Cornwall, while walking in the
woods, met a large black hairy goat carrying the figure of the king. On
being questioned the goat replied that he was the Devil taking the king to
judgment. Anselm received the news in Italy through a young and splendid
man, who told the clerk on guard at Anselm's door that all dissension
between the king and the archbishop was now at an end. A monk, of the Order
to which Ordericus Vitalis belonged, had a vision very early in the morning
after the death of Rufus; he was chanting in the church when he beheld
through his closed eyes a person holding out a paper on which was written,
"King William is dead"; when he opened his eyes the person had vanished.
Though the stories are slightly childish they all suggest that the death was
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GOTW
expected, and the news was probably signalled from one place to another. The
most suggestive of the stories is that of the black goat, when it is
remembered that this was the form in which the ancient god (in Christian
parlance, the Devil) was wont to appear in France.
In the entire history of Rufus, more particularly in the stories of his
death, it is clear that the whole truth is not given; something is kept
back. If, however, Rufus was in the eyes of his subjects the God Incarnate,
Man Divine, who died for his people, the Christian chroniclers would
naturally not record a fact which to them would savour of blasphemy, and the
Pagans, being illiterate, made no records.
The date of Rufus's death, August 2nd, seems significant; it is always
emphatically called "the morrow of Lammas". Lammas, the 1st of August, was
one of the four great Festivals of the Old Religion and there is evidence to
show that it was on the great Sabbaths only that the human sacrifice was
offered. If then my theory is correct Rufus died as the Divine Victim in the
seven-year cycle.
Thomas � Becket[2]
The death of Thomas � Becket presents many features which are explicable
only by the theory that he also was the substitute for a Divine King. The
relative position of King and Archbishop from Saxon times onward was so
peculiar that it suggests a closer connection between the two offices than
appears at first sight. The most remarkable instances are Edwy and Dunstan,
William the Conqueror and Lanfranc, Rufus and Anselm, Henry II and Becket.
The quarrels between king and archbishop were not always politico
-religious, there was often a strong personal element; such bitter quarrels
never occurred with the Archbishop of York, whose importance in the North
was as great as that of Canterbury in the South. In the dissensions between
Rufus and Anselm as well as in the disputes between Henry and Becket most of
the bishops sided with the king. It is possible that, as wherever there had
been a flamen of the Pagan religion a bishopric had been founded and an
archbishop had replaced an arch-flamen, the duties of the arch-flamen of
Canterbury descended to his Christian successor. If this were so, was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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