HOW I ONCE LASTED CLOSE TO AN HOUR FLY PITCHING IN LONDON’S EXCLUSIVE PORTOBELLO ROAD STREET MARKET

IN PREPARATION…. SUGILITE :  THE HIDDEN FORTRESS

For now another tasty little morsel about the perils of fly pitching…                 

I want you to think of ten things that are absolutely impossible to achieve and can never happen in a thousand years. Try hard!

Okay, I’ll give you some ideas that look good on the surface.

1). A woman becoming Pope! Forget it. It’s already been done, aka Pope Joan.

2). Everyone being able to go to the Moon! Richard Branson will sort it out soon if you can pay.

3). Alex Salmond becoming President of the Republic of Scotland. Impossible? Are you kidding? He’s already being measured up for the stamps.

4). America going socialist. With the political crazies they’ve got over there it looks quite impossible until you recall that what used to be Communist China has now gone capitalist with Russia not far behind.  

5). Men having babies! Bad as it sounds they’re already talking about it in America. Scientifically it’s not impossible.

6). A Jew becoming British Prime Minister. Improbable as it seems, because no Jew in his right mind would want to i.e. too much trouble it’s already been done. Disraeli though got himself baptised first!

7) Most of the surface of Planet Earth being covered by water. It’s come close to happening before and given projected sea level rises in the next two hundred years the fact of it happening again is by no means impossible.

8) England winning the World Cup in the next thousand years. Not unless Harry Redknapp takes over the management and there’s no hope of that!

9) Nick Clegg becoming Prime Minister! Only if most people go mental but that’s what the Lib-Dems are counting on so there’s always a chance!

10) Me, you or anyone else fly-pitching in or anywhere near London’s Portobello Road Street Market and lasting an hour before being arrested or thrown off.

Okay, that’s it! The absolutely impossible thing that I’m looking for and the subject of this post.

What I’m saying is this. That any of the above are more possible, more likely to happen, than me you or anyone else selling goods on the fly in the above named street market and lasting more than an hour. If you don’t believe me why don’t you try it? Either the police will get you, or the street trading inspectors, or any of the official traders with permits, or their friends, or their dogs. I should know. I once did!

Portobello Road Market is situated in west London close to Ladbroke Grove tube station. The top end begins near the Harrow Road and runs south till it finally ends under the West Way Arterial. It’s the crème de la crème and utter dogs bollocks of street markets anywhere, not only in London and the whole Western World but anywhere on the entire fucking planet to say nothing of the known universe. It’s a place that’s so far up its own arse that it’s never likely to reappear, not even if England win the World Cup and that’s saying something!

It’s full of totally precious antique dealers, bric-a-brac and collectable shops run by Kensington Georges and Jonnies, stalls selling swag jewellery, costume clothing and hats purveyed by countless old lesbos or gone to seed Jessica’s. It’s a place where the deeply exclusive meets fruit and veg jack the lads. Where young and old queens put on an endless variety of ta’s and pardons for American tourists so that any visitor from Mars would instantly think that butter wouldn’t melt up arses in this neck of the woods.

There are many interesting things for sale if you’re lucky to be there at the right time and you’ve got plenty of money because the fine pieces of jewellery, furniture or artefacts can cost you an arm and a leg. Portobello Road isn’t for the poor, the working class or students. It’s where middle and upper middle class dealers strut their stuff. They may be full of swank but they’re knowledgeable with it. Just what you’d expect of middle class trade. Pretentious to the gills and all very darling! It’s a great place for finding and seeing beautiful things but all the action’s around just a few streets. It’s nothing compared to the Rastro in Madrid though it’s certainly as famous.

It’s impossible for anyone without a permit to trade in the Portobello Road street market and just as impossible to obtain one. It’s not just that the number of official pitch sites and spaces are limited. Nor is it the fact that the waiting list to get on is so long that a hundred generations have to go by after someone dies - they actually never retire – before you can get their place and even then you need to be a blood relative and have all the necessary certificates to prove it before you can take their place, and even then it’s not enough! They might take DNA samples and you’ve got to match. If you don’t, tough!

If you’re not a blood relative, just a top end Royal, an ‘A’ list celebrity or a star in the Premier League, do you think for one moment that gets you in? Well forget it! You can be an oil sheikh trillionaire, a Russian oligarch or computer chip king… any one of these and you’ve put a million quid up front to get a place the answer’s still no. It’s not about money or power or class, pedigree or breeding. Nothing like that. It’s about tradition. You can be a humble fruit and veg trader, a jack the lad from Essex and know with cast iron certainty that when you die it won’t be Elton John, Willy Wales or Roman Abramovich who’ll be stalling out on your pitch on a cold and frosty but your eldest boy Billy from Bow.

For any outsider, no matter who he may be, trading legally on or anywhere near Portobello Road market is impossible. It can only be done illegally as a fly pitcher. You’ve got to be mad to even think about trying it let alone actually doing it! I mean go there with a paste table, black cloth and holdalls full of your gear and have the sheer bloody nerve to set up… You know the impossibility of the whole thing and all the dangers involved, particularly the hostility of all the legitimate traders who’ll grass you up the minute they see you or give you the verbals and worse. I know what it feels like, the fear that something bad can happen at any time, yet I still went and did it.

There I was. Everything inside my head telling me NO… I’d never get away with such damnable cheek but I still had to try. Maybe it was to see how long I would last or how much I would take but most of all it was because I’d know in my head that I’d actually done it. Like some crazy death defying stunt. In a way maybe that’s the real truth of it all. That I wanted to conquer my fear.

I’d already visited the Portobello Road area and had a look round. Sussed out in my mind what was what.  The stallholders were a bunch a bullshitting tarts. I really didn’t like them at all so why not put a little mud in their eye? Louise was absolutely against it so when she drove me there on a Saturday I knew she was full of anxiety. That said there I was, on the pavement slap bang in the middle of the Golborne Road junction with Portobello, holding my table and bags full of stock.

Late Saturday morning and the main drag already jammed packed with punters. Stalls to the left of me, stalls to the right of me, stalls just about everywhere but nothing bang on the corner! Lucky boy! Bags down, table opened in seconds and covered with my cloth then out with my gear. Right at the front animals on marble, immediately behind, baskets of crystals and semi-precious tumble-stones then pendants on silver chains. Further back, ‘Tiny’ size gem-trees with leaves of amethyst, rose quartz, crystal, tiger eye and green quartz polished chips. Finally right at the back a few superb willows. Everything set up quickly in a neat compact display that sparkled brightly in the sun. Soon people were wandering across from the route up the drag to have a look and the stall was surrounded.

“Never seen you ere before mate,” was a regular comment to which I invariable replied with a smile, “doing a spot of fly-pitching before the policeman comes! Everything cheap, made of precious stones. Straight off the back of a lorry!” Then with a serious face, “my wife and I make it ourselves. Nothing’s expensive.”

Some animals went in the first few minutes then four pairs of earrings. Two-fifty a pair was a pretty good price. People were looking hard at the small gem-trees wondering whether they’d break or the leaves come off so I picked up a couple of araldite specials I’d purposefully put out and squashed them flat, throwing one onto the pavement. In seconds I made them all good again. Soon there were questions. Did I have this stone or that for someone’s birthday? In the next ten minutes I sold 8 Tinies at six quid apiece along with a few crystal pendants, keeping a smile on my face with my eyes on the lookout just about everywhere. No sign of trouble so far. As for the Trading Inspectors I didn’t know who they could be. Same type of blokes as at Camden Lock or Leather Lane, clipboards and pencils in hand. So far no sign and miracle of miracles, no nosey regulars either.

Half an hour and first contact! A couple of antique dealers, you can tell them a mile off with their polo neck sweaters and gabardine jackets, had a suss over the stall then a quiet word in my ear. “Wouldn’t let the inspector catch you doing that here.” I caught the smell of whisky mixed in with cologne then felt an eye up my arse.

“Such a nice boy isn’t he? Be a shame to see him in trouble.”

I thought fuck the pair of you but thanked them both for their concern! Expressed a real gratitude! They had nothing to gain by my being there but nothing to lose either. It didn’t matter. Fly boys were the lowest of the low where the regulars were concerned. Scum out of the vilest housing estates. That was their judgement. To me these oh so respectable people were snakes! Even so it amused me to counter their posh upper class accents with an oh-so-superior accent of my own. What could they have thought? Probably that I was taking the piss until I told them that I was part of a group of students down from Oxford trying to raise money for the rowing club charity. That shut them up!

Forty-five minutes! No trouble so far and sales still rolling in. I couldn’t believe it! People were actually buying. As quite a few of them said, they’d never seen anything like it. There were also plenty of tourists. People being drawn over by the crowd round the table. I was talking incessantly now. Our stuff was made of real semi-precious stones… The price of the jewellery was good… And feeling on a high I came out with it all. Yeah, our prices were great but I was trading illegally so I didn’t know how long I would last…

Till the policeman comes was a favourite expression of fly pitchers! I didn’t make any effort to hide anything. I was quite open. And while I was talking and selling I felt no resentment from anyone. Putting myself out in a good natured way got a good natured response. They liked my stuff and my honesty with it. If I was fast it was because fly boys had to be fast.

In the time I’d been there I must have done well over a hundred I thought to myself. Another few hours and I’d make a sweet little killing. Then it happened. Someone bought a crystal willow for his wife and a few minutes later I bagged up an amethyst. The thousands of people walking through had never seen my gear before. It was novelty. The sky was the limit and I was on a definite roll. Another three Tinies and I’d taken two hundred or more in under an hour. I was buzzing. My eyeballs were floating… all that money in fifty-five minutes. Suddenly out of the blue I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned with happy expression all over my face there was mister policeman behind me, and he wasn’t smiling!

At the front of the table a sharp rat-faced woman with another sallow-faced boy in blue were giving me the gorbals. “Illegal trading. A criminal offence,” was all that she said. The crowd drew back except for a determined old gent. “I’ll have that one,” he said firmly, pointing a rose quartz willow.

“He’s not allowed to sell anything,” the rat face came in, pointing to her street trading badge.

“I’ll give him the money,” the old man protested. “It’s private, just me and him.”

“The police won’t allow him to take any money,” she said in a threatening manner. “If I were you, sir, I’d be on your way. You don’t want to be committing a crime.”

The crowd around me evaporated in seconds. I was now on my own with two Boys Own coppers and Kensington’s street trading bitch! I’d lasted just short of an hour. Illegal street trading! Would I be arrested? Would they confiscate my stock? Make me hand over my takings? Call for a van and take me down to the nick? Anything was possible. I’d broken the law. The police could do anything and these were kids, only interested in piling up their street cred with sarge. I recorded the whole thing in my Diary Entry made the following day.

“Fly pitched in the Portobello Rd. Good for the hour it lasted, but was then apprehended by street inspectors who’d called the police. A very nasty hour followed. The police behaviour was bad and bordering on intimidation. I may well be summoned for illegal street trading. Bad experience.”

The woman trading inspector was an absolute bitch. There were actually two of them but the man with her stayed silent throughout. I could certainly expect a summons for what I’d been doing. The two young John Q’s then got to work. Name, address, the whole works. Yeah a summons was more than likely.

I got it long and hard in the neck but I wasn’t arrested or charged. Neither did I lose my stock or my takings. Truth is, I could so easily have been in a cell. It was all simple enough. They just wanted to scare me out of my wits and threaten me with a summons to keep it that way. Make it all very clear… If he ever came back he was dead!  

They watched me pack everything away and fold up the table. I never recorded how I left but it could only have been in a taxi. I felt no shame at being so publically kicked out. It was all part of the risk I took doing it. I’d got off lightly and it was quite an achievement to have lasted as long as I did. It’s an interesting market all right and could even be better if the creepy crawlies who work it weren’t so pretentious or precious, bringing it down to the level of an upmarket shit-hole where reputation is everything.

As for me I’ve got the t-shirt. Been there, seen it and done it. How many other boys on the fly can say they had the nerve?

And one more thing I’d like to add. Another impossibility challenge! Can you think of any other political party in the UK at the present time that’s even more despicable than the Liberal Democrats?  

Okay, I’ll give you some clues. Firstly think of one that used to stand for equality, fairness and justice, and once had ethical values that were clean and good. Now think of this party which, when in Government, adopted a policy of so called light touch regulation over the banks (the phrase actually means no controls whatsoever) allowing them to bankrupt the British economy… Now think of this same party supporting the view that the vast majority of British people should have to pay for their political crime which has caused half a million people to become unemployed.

Okay, second clue. Can you remember which recent Government had a policy of no control whatsoever over the activities of the energy supply companies on which British people depend to keep warm in the winter and cook their food, so these companies could raise their prices whenever they fancied and make outrageous profits on the health and welfare of the general public. Now think about who these disgusting politicians could be.

Finally, think of the elected representatives of the political party that once had decent ethical values making fraudulent claims for expenses while its leadership did its level best to turn Britain into a police state?

That’s the challenge. Think of a political party on the British landscape that’s even more disgusting than the Liberal Democrats. I’ll give you two seconds!

SUGILITE, HEIRONYMUS BOSCH AND THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

Heironymus Bosch, for the uninitiated, was most definitely not a British rock star of the 1970s who had a goatee beard, wore two large gold earrings, looked a bit like Bob Marley and called everyone dude. The name was a pseudonym for a man born around 1450 at Hertogenbosch, a small Flemish town near Antwerp, who went by the even better name of Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aiken. However it was the pseudonym with which he signed his enigmatic paintings. Yes, you know who I’m talking about now. Most of them are so jam packed with what to our modern eyes is psychotic religious imagery that half an hour looking at any of them makes you think that either someone’s put something in your drink or the guy himself was on LSD.

There’s no two ways about it. It’s either you or him! It’s up to you. You make the decision! What is true is that the man was a great artist whose work leaves us with a permanent psychological riddle of interpretation. Why the endlessly grim symbolism of hell and all the medieval religious nastiness that happened to you if you put a foot wrong or the cloying pullulating expressions of virtue and all the good things that came with righteousness? Why the intense dichotomy. The bad wasn’t just bad, it was meant to terrify, while the good offered you the prospect of God, Christ and the angels, to say nothing of the virgins. And all the way through there are some of the most fantastic images that any human being has ever created. Things so far flung in imagination that it’s genuinely impossible to get your head round them all. Stuff that’s not just plain weird but strongly borders on the alien.

All his paintings are riveting but The Garden of Earthly Delights is seriously mind boggling. It comes in three parts, a triptych, which I’ve looked at over and over for hours, taking it in bit by bit and trying to make sense of it then studying it as a whole thing. It’s so packed with imagery that you need a powerful degree of self-control not to get carried away by it all. You are bombarded by countless peculiar presentations, one after the other, that you have absolutely no reference to in ordinary life or even your wildest imagination. All the way through you’re in an endless state of wonder and at the end you can only ask, where on earth did he get it all from? And there’s the clue really, because what you’ve been looking at is really like nothing on earth.

Once you’ve got that far and you are just coming out of being mind-boggled you still come back to the question… Where did he get it all from? For one thing there’s no contemporaneous imagery of the kind he presents for him to work from. Sure, his ethos is stuffed with all the delights and horrors of medieval Catholicism. Heaven, hell and damnation… virtue and its rewards… the whole uncompromising spectrum of the good, the bad and the ugly, only there was nothing artistically graphic around at the time for his imagination to feed off. Therefore we’re still left with the question. What fired it up? What made him create such an uncompromisingly hypnotic panoply of the grotesque? Sure, there’s room enough for artistic interpretation galore but what there isn’t any room for is doubt. He makes sure you know what’s good and what’s bad and you definitely know what side he comes down on.

So what drove him to do it? Work so intensely packing a painting like The Garden of Earthly Delights with so much spiritual imagery? The more you look at it the more you realise that the focus and concentration needed to do such a thing must have been immense, almost bordering on the superhuman. And that’s saying nothing about having the phenomenal technical ability to put it all into place and say what you want in a piece of perfectionism bordering on the psychotic. If the Garden of Earthly Delights says anything about Heironymus Bosch it’s that he’s a man on a mission.

There’s been much speculation that Bosch, though part of a religious order known as The Brotherhood, dabbled in some of the various ‘cures’ that doctors of the time prescribed. One being a kind of ‘witches ointment’ that induced powerful hallucinations similar to the imagery expressed in his paintings It’s possible that a bit of sniffing fired up the religiosity already there in his mind. We well know today that a fair bit of modern popular culture was inspired, let us say, by an involvement with certain prohibited substances, so five and a half centuries back, Bosch could have got into the habit. However substance abuse on its own wouldn’t explain the effortlessly broad spectrum of spiritual energy found in his work, especially The Garden of Earthly Delights. Not even if he was permanently high as a kite. No, there’s got to be something more here.       

With recent scientific advances in the chemistry of spectral analysis and a better understanding of the spiritual dynamics of crystal healing, it is now possible to comprehend the complex relationship between Sugilite, Heironymus Bosch and the Flemish Master’s greatest painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, both on a factual basis of science and on a level that is essentially spiritual. Both, crucially, are integral to the process and cannot be separated.

Because of an ongoing interest in dating his work in recent years, those engaged in preservation have increasingly called upon the expertise of science to explore certain aspects of its material structure, digging under the surface imagery as it were to show what it is actually made of. The chemistry of the paint, as is well known, has a direct bearing on its colour so it was really no surprise that spectral analysis revealed sodium for reds and flesh tints, one of the main compositional colors of the central panel, along with potassium, lithium, iron and manganese for the darker hues of that on its right. Despite pigment fading of  five hundred years it all seemed to fit into place and nothing more was made of it. A scientific approach to cleaning and preservation with an eye to the chemistry of the paint could proceed.

It was now that fate lent a hand. One of the team engaged in the process, like so many others engaged in art preservation, had a multi-disciplinary training in the sciences and purely by chance one of his subjects of choice was mineralogy. With his eye running down the chemistry of its pigmentation he was sharply drawn by its overall mineral composition. For confirmation of what at first seemed supposition he consulted a text book in the field and was immediately rewarded. The chemical structure completely conformed with the alumino-silicate mineral Sugilite and its content of potassium, iron, sodium, manganese and lithium!

Now this was a real surprise. Sugilite was a rare mineral, usually massive in form though sometimes containing even rarer tiny prismatic crystals. The question of how it became part of the paint Bosch had used for his masterpiece was interesting but not especially significant. It simply may have come from or been part of other sources supplied to the artist. Our preservation expert, however, was entirely unaware of the spiritual, healing character of the mineral. Why should he be? This kind of thing wasn’t part of his background and anyway only came later.

That, precisely, is where one part of the story ends and another more fascinating revelation begins, namely the spiritual relationship between Sugilite and the extraordinarily spiritual fifteenth century Flemish artist Heironymus Bosch. For those associated with crystal healing Sugilite is special, particularly in matters of spiritual protection, dreams and purification where it becomes an illuminating beacon of light. In this respect it will certainly be interesting to consider these functions alongside what has already been said about the artist.

First and with any such connection in mind, it will be useful to consider some of the mineral’s beneficial properties from the standpoint of healing. As is well known, its protective quality for those who possess it from negative aspects in their environment are exceptional. It is deemed to create a shield of light, maybe even a force field around a person making them immune to the disharmony of others. Its protective quality may indeed have guarded Bosch from the spiritual turbulence around him at the time, especially as, by 1500 he was facing a world of religious reformation.

Then again, Sugilite helps advance our ability to ground spiritual energy. In other words assists us in giving it the focus we need to take us where we want to go. This may have been particularly important for someone like Bosch, determined absolutely to promote his very own thoroughly distinctive religious message in his art.

Other functions though create an even more profound connection. Sugilite plays a key role in meditation and dreams, greatly increasing the depth of inner experience. This is especially important because the images experienced are more than usually packed with symbols and symbolic meaning. Meditation and dreaming with the artist maybe on some kind of high that I alluded to earlier, all of this, with the spiritual energy of Sugilite driving it on, would buzz up the densely packed soaring psychosis seen in the Garden of Earthly Delights. The connection is so powerful, so clearly shown by the colors that went into the painting that there’s little room left for doubt. There might not have been any seismic activity in 15^th century Flanders or any meridians or ley lines anywhere near that part of the world but clearly Bosch used Sugilite pigments in his painting and they could have come from anywhere!

The final connection for crystal healing enthusiasts is that Sugilite happens to be one of the most powerful stones for calling up what is known as the Violet Flame of Purification, a very special energy of exceptional value to those engaged on a spiritual pathway, indeed on a spiritual quest. Contact with the mineral initiates a cleansing process in which negative influences from a person’s inner psyche and external environment are purged, leading them back in the direction they need to go. Meaning is found in dreaming, possibly in hallucination where imagery is better understood, guiding the seeker on a path to communion with their soul and harmonious accord with its purpose.

Absolutely ideal for Bosch, helping him confirm ever again his chosen religious pathway and means of expressing it. There’s no conflict within him, no conflict with those around him or his peers in The Brotherhood. No trouble with the local powers that be. As I have said, many of his family were painters. Maybe they were getting their spiritual energy and guidance from Sugilite too but without indulging in that little extra! With that in mind, Heironymus Bosch might have said the same kind of thing as kids in California four hundred and fifty years later. Send for the policeman… Love and peace man!

I want you to think of that next time you look at the painting in Lisbon or see a copy of it in a book. Get yourself a Sugilite pendant and light up a spliff. If you don’t go psychotic in ten minutes I suggest you ring up Nick Clegg, and tell him how much you love the Liberal Democrats. It’s only then that you realise you’re somehow inside the painting! You’ve become one of its figures. Going to hell with a poker up your arse or stuck in an orange with a glass tube in your eye and a rat running down it!

SUGILITE AND THE HIDDEN SECRET OF THE HOLY GRAIL - CRYSTAL HEALING: IN PURSUIT OF THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD

It has been my good fortune, often, while selling crystals, to be called upon to give counsel, advice if you will, to the many followers of crystal healing. Later in solitude I would often reflect on the spiritual power and energies of so many of our shared sources of meaning and enchantment. Why had they so readily brought such strength and if I might say, hope, to those who believed and found their faith rewarded? What indeed was the source of their prowess, their power of enlightenment?

In handling and dealing in crystals over so many years these questions had inevitably come to dominate my thoughts. All the more so because I was daily confronted by crystal healing enthusiasts and the stories of fulfillment they told. It was inevitable then that they should become questions of meaning from which I could not escape. Why did one crystal or another create such an effect? What magic lay in them to account for their potency, their spiritual power and energy? My curiosity, mild at first, held charms of consideration and acceptance. Sometimes I’d made connections and seen through the complexities of energy levels. At others, circumstances arose that drew me much further forwards. Particularly with crystals and minerals I could only contemplate in wonder. Such was Sugilite.

Of its great rarity and prowess I have already spoken and like so many others been drawn by its spell. Why was Sugilite so special? So much more than so many others. At first I sought nothing more than to admire and enjoy, but gradually over time I came to ponder more deeply why this mineral in particular had such a spectrum of energy so universally innervating. It was purely by chance, as an interested party, both as a trader and an enthusiast who met and talked to so many people that created the coincidence of putting me right at the center of things. I wasn’t entirely an adept, a convert within the faith. I was also a businessman and someone with scientific training. An outsider if you will. Someone who could be dispassionate. Ask questions uncluttered by emotion and where necessary make cool observation. This brought me to the conclusion that as important as was the chemical structure of the mineral itself, so too was its location in time and space. In particular its geographical and geological setting.

As far as it was known all its primary sources were located centrally within the Middle Earth. The one to which I alluded earlier being at a seismically active site hidden somewhere in Central Africa. Close to a major fault line so to speak. I’d thought nothing of this until I was struck by the fact that Professor Sugi’s own source that triggered the initial discovery had an almost identical location in a Middle Earth rift somewhere in East Asia. Far more important however was that the African source was located precisely at the juxtaposition of two key meridian ley lines. Even so, I was still floundering around in the dark! My thoughts lit only occasionally by glimmers of understanding. Revelations that seemed disconnected. Nothing I could put together that might create a major breakthrough.

It was like I was reaching out in the dark. I felt utterly frustrated. It was all too close. My head too full of it all. I felt a desperate need to get away. Clear it from my mind. I remember how I felt as if it were yesterday. My wife insisting I took a break. Spend a week walking somewhere, maybe high in the Alps where the cold air might bring me clarity. Give me the chance to breathe.

I’ll never forget that third morning. We were high up together, suddenly under a narrow band of oddly coloured green cloud. Strange I thought and remarked on it. My wife came back with her own thoughts. It seemed to be powering straight out of the sun. She’d never seen a bank of cloud so perfectly straight, running in an east-west line like a meridian… only up in the sky not on Earth. It must have been something about the way she said it. A line in the sky not on Earth… A sky-line that was also a meridian! In seconds something clicked in my mind. Not a meridian but something more fundamental… Within the earth itself!  A ley line that doubled as a meridian! A crescendo of thoughts tumbled out of my head. Professor Sugi’s original discovery! Where precisely did it fit within the Middle Earth? Was it, could it possibly be that it too was located somewhere along a similar line?

We cut the walk short and raced back to the hotel. My wife understood. In minutes the laptop was up and running. It’s global ley line program skipping from one set of coordinates to another, locked into my figures estimating the location of Sugi’s source. Nothing so far…The minutes ran by with a flipping over of images until suddenly there it was. A magical moment! The source itself! It had to be and most wonderful of all, perfectly centered at the juxtaposition of a north-south/east-west set of lines. I felt excited beyond words. I’d pinpointed the two sources of Sugilite along both sets of lines. I was on fire, my curiosity running wild. East-west, north-south… where did they lead? I’d made the discovery, established the coincidence but it wasn’t enough. The lines had to lead somewhere. Was it possible that they crossed elsewhere, met again at another location? Somewhere that might reveal a third source of the mineral that was seismically active!

Slowly, carefully now, I traced my line north from Africa and tentatively east then brought the Asian line west. The projections had to meet somewhere, that was clear to me, however there was nothing to prepare me for the surprise I had waiting. I could hardly believe it. There it was! Completely removed from all prospect of seismic activity. Jerusalem! I turned to my wife with a hopeless look on my face, ready to burst into laughter. Jerusalem! Well that was a joke. Something had to be wrong with the ley lines projection.

I remember her standing behind the computer, her face lit with one of her famous wry smiles. A geologist by training she was on top of her stuff. The City itself might not be sitting on a volcano she said jovially but that wasn’t important. The whole area, from Turkey down to the Red Sea had major fault lines running through it. There was nothing wrong with Jerusalem. There could be some kind of deposit anywhere in the region. The Dead Sea Depression was a likely location, so too was the Jordan Valley. Even the Sea of Galilee itself!

My ears pricked up. The Sea of Galilee! I felt my mind going into overdrive. My imagination running so strong that I could barely contain it. I could only think of one thing. It’s direction so singular, so impossibly wild that at first I refused to believe it. If I’d paused for a moment I might have laughed it all off, but no, I wanted everything coming together till it was out of my head in a well formed conjecture. A hypothesis if you will. Something I could sit back and work on. The ideas might be wild but they were nonetheless plausible. The Sea of Galilee… Jesus… A deposit of Sugilite… The Miracles of the Bible… Healing the Sick and the Blind… It was all there before me. It felt as though there was a great silence around me and I at its center. That something had been given to me to see this. To make this connection. It had been there at the time of Jesus. His birth, his life of preaching and his death. There was a great and intimate connection between Jesus himself and the deposit!      

Somehow he must have known of it. Not as Sugilite of course but perhaps as a place. Somewhere from which he took his own strength, his spirituality, his healing energy and his wisdom. A place, a sense he’d discovered emanating from deep within the Middle Earth. Somewhere he returned to and felt its love. Maybe even feeling its power from touch… The walls of a grotto or cave… A fissure in the rock. Perhaps even some small piece of the wondrous mineral itself that he took with him among the crowds to whom he conveyed his message. Bestowing upon them the spirituality that always went with him.

There has been so much written about the life of Jesus. So much written about the Holy Grail. The Roman Catholic Christian Church that grew out of the Synoptic Gospels, stories written hundreds of years after his death, emerged as a new religion, one that abandoned absolutely his Jewish faith and that of his early followers, the Nazarenes - who themselves held to his undeniable Jewish beliefs, practices and worship -  and became something different. This new religion deified a man who was essentially a poor man’s preacher and turned him into something divine, nothing less than the son of God when he was nothing more a man, after which they persecuted the Jews who continued his teaching and wrote them out of history. Indeed they continued this persecution of Jews for nigh on two thousand years, forgetting the original teaching of someone who celebrated the Sabbath and all the Jewish festivals, believed in circumcision strictly in accordance with his faith and championed the rights of women. His celebration of Jewish history in ceremonies such as the Passover in particular was deliberately wiped out of history with The Last Supper.

This was an absolute travesty of reality. The men of the new church couldn’t allow The Passover to remain as a historical reminder of the flight from Egypt so instead they turned Jesus’s breaking of unleavened bread with his followers and drinking of wine into something else, a Last Supper. In short the Roman Christian Church falsified the Jewish character of his life for their own ends. They created something they could control and sold the idea to the Roman Emperor Constantine who knew a good thing when he saw one and used the new religion to unite the warring factions within his Empire, making it Rome’s official religion. He of course privately remained true to what he’d always been throughout his life, an unreconstructed pagan.

The early history of Christianity and its betrayal of the Judaism of its teacher and his family which included his wife and his son is well documented. More complex is the Holy Grail Legend, a story of how one of his followers, whether his wife Mary Magdalene or his friend Joseph of Arimathea held a Passover cup or dish to his body to catch his blood at the time of his crucifixion by the Romans. This is a tale that has been endlessly written about and embellished. The vessel itself came to have divine status with immense spirituality and power, bestowing immortality on its possessor. Needless to say it only got up and running after the establishment of the Christian Church in Rome. There’s no mention of it in the four gospels nor in the Gospel of St Philip and that of Mary Magdalene herself, condemned as a prostitute in later Church writing when she was in fact Jesus’s most beloved follower and wife. The Holy Grail then, containing the blood of the son of God, became a potent symbol of holy virtue and power. Sought after by crusading armies of Christian soldiers, fanatical bishops and popes, adventurers of every stripe and more recently rabid Nazis.

The cup or dish that held the blood of Jesus! In the Jewish faith which all his followers at the time observed, to do such a thing as catch the blood of a dying man in a vessel is utterly sacrilegious. Furthermore they certainly wouldn’t have done this even if he were dead... for whatever reason. They would have regarded such an act as shameful and unclean. The origin of the story originates only in early Christian Church writing and is part of a vast industry of fantasy and myth which includes the Turin Shroud and the great collection of bones of saints and other so called holy relics that became readily available to light the fires of camp followers and cajole out of them a pretty penny for holy Roman coffers.

Even so, the myth still has a remarkable potency. The cup that held the blood of Jesus! The new religion needed such myths, such made up stories, to put faith into the minds of its followers, ninety-nine percent of whom were entirely illiterate. Believed what they were told to believe and thought what they were required to think. If not they’d suffer eternal spiritual and physical damnation in somewhere called hell! Nice one that from a religion of love! But then the teaching of the Christian church has held sway for over fifteen hundred years and still does in the minds of many today. Absolute faith, absolute belief that a cup held the blood of God’s son.

Yes, there’s surely a long way between the unchallengeable word of a Pope and the views of a man who rode into town on a donkey.

That said, what then is the connection between the potent spiritual energy of Sugilite and the story, true or otherwise, of a cup that supposedly held the blood of Jesus? Well, for starters you could put it this way… what kind of connection might there be between a mineral with 12 power energy - equal to that being pumped out on a daily basis by a Blue Supergiant Star like Rigel – and a cup that held the blood of the son of God? I mean, putting it the way a fully paid up member of the Church of England might think let alone the guys in the Vatican, Christ sake, which has the greatest power, some mineral with a wondrous spectrum of energy or the entity that made me, you, and every star in the Universe? Perhaps it all depends on how religious you are. If you take God out of the equation everything’s round the other way. You get Sugilite and a cup with a bit of blood on it. And even then it’s only presuming the legend is true!

Okay, let’s not complicate things. It makes more sense to keep it all simple. Let us suppose that Jesus was just a plain Jewish preacher who somehow discovered the wonderful healing energy of Sugilite and furthermore communicated this spiritual energy to his friends without revealing its source i.e. they all thought that he himself had wondrous powers. Let’s also suppose he used this healing power to do wonderful things. Things that helped people. Cured the sick and made blind men see. Made Sugilite a force for good in the world. Okay, there he was, sitting with his closest friends. It was Pesach and they were all celebrating Passover, the time when Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt. There’s a cup of wine on the table and he breaks a matzo, that’s a piece of unleavened bread, a kind of crisp-bread to you and me, dips it into the wine and eats it. That done he passes the rest of the matzo round to his friends and they do likewise. Today the Christian Church calls it Communion. Actually it comes from the Passover Ceremony.

The cup’s made of wood. Maybe he carved it himself time back. The cup of a carpenter. It’s his cup, full of wine that he’s sharing round the table. It’s a time for rejoicing as they remember their people escaping slavery in Egypt and leaving as free men and women.  Not the kind of thing you see in all the paintings where they sit there looking solemn. Leonardo da Vinci and all the other Renaissance painters wouldn’t have known how they felt anyway. They knew jack about Pesach and the Jews leaving Egypt and even if they did it wouldn’t have meant much anyway. It was dead history. Only the Popes of the Church knew and kept it all hidden. Fuck the Jews anyway. They’d had their time and were nicely buried under the lie of collective guilt for murdering Christ.

So Jesus was there with his friends, drinking wine and breaking unleavened bread. Maybe Mary Magdalene his wife was bringing the Passover food to the table. She’d cooked it all anyway. And their son, Judah, a boy close to ten, was certainly there too. Asking his father the four Passover questions… Why is this night different to all other nights? Jesus allows his son to sip the wine. It’s the Jewish tradition.

And so the scene, solemn though the occasion is in remembrance, is also full of spirituality and energy, of promise and hope for the future. Essentially of joy. It’s not really a Last Supper at all. The Christian Church only gave it that name hundreds of years later when it acted to obliterate the historical Judaism of the man from history itself and make him something he wasn’t. And later the boy in his linen garment ran after his father in the Garden of Gethsemane when the Roman soldiers took him away and was last seen with his mother at the foot of the cross. There was no cup held up to catch the blood. The wooden carpenter’s Passover cup got lost in history like the child, or did it?

The cup carried no royal blood and neither was Mary Magdalene the Grail herself, as some like to think. They were all full of rejoicing on that Passover Night, unaware of what was to come. Truth is, it was the cup of wine they all shared that bound their spirits together. A spiritual energy shared in a spirit of rejoicing. From the wondrous power of that hidden source to a rejoicing in freedom. Even while living under the yoke of their Roman conquerors these people could still celebrate in hope. That one day again they’d be free.

This is the story of Sugilite and the hidden secret of the Holy Grail. It was a Jewish symbol of spirituality, of freedom, not of the blood and death that the Church turned it into. And millions of people would die before the land became free again.

Sugilite and the Passover Cup. Both have the liberating energy of freedom and the great spiritual promise of hope. That’s their connection. The Christian Church never discovered the source. That’s why its pious words sound hollow and empty. How could there be any real love or rejoicing when you were always too busy deconstructing reality. Thinking you could build spirituality out of a corpse when it was always right there in front of you, only you just couldn’t feel it!