Alchemisland

Doesn’t add much but an obelisk’s tip symbolically represents benben, a primeval mound which rose flarelike from oceans of ever-enfolding chaos to became the first habitable land. In certain versions of this cosmogony, a ‘great god’ or ‘father god’ uses the terra firma as a foothold for the construction of the cosmos, and amidst waves that would make Turner gasp and drop his paintbrush begins to sing the song of creation.

In early physical representations benben is depicted as a simple mound, later as a more pyramidal mound and eventually in the stone pyramidal form we recognizes today – the mound was later anthropomorphized into a mound deity whose name I cannot recall.

In Ireland’s county Sligo smolders the great mountain Benbulben steeped in arcane fairy lore, which local myth dubs a ‘thin area’ where transterran, transhistorical and transdimensional communions with the otherworld are invoked.

I wondered in some cosmically connected way do relations exist between Benbulben and the Egyptian myth of the faraway land where the sun was born. Soooo many ancient megaliths with profound solar alignments in this region (4000 in county Sligo alone).

I perceive phantom allegiances, methodical sympathies, between the mummification and entombment practices of the Egyptian elite and the bog burials practiced in Europe, themselves likely the exclusive domain of a nobility which contemporary archaeology illustrates as incest positive, including intermarriage and breeding between brother and sister.

Many countries, provided they do have bogs, which occur when land becomes waterlogged due to extensive or rapid deforestation, have extracted eerily pristine corpses, many of whom bore marks of ritual sacrifice, the anguish of adrenaline-soured terminal prologues carved upon their stubborn countenances like rude runes on a Pict’s bicep.

Owing to the rarity of sufficiently-developed bogland, the Bog Bodies in the KINGSHIP AND SACRIFICE room of Kildare Street’s National History Museum is a treasure that must be seen.