The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
And further of them that,
once-upon-a-time, went by the south and came by the north, in at the Narvesund via Spartel Head, homing over the Middle Bight that leads to the Hill and navel of the world and to the Two Lands, out from which, as clergymen sing, He called his Son.3
That was hers
that laboured with him that laboured long for us at the wine press.4
David Jones notes
3 See The Heimskringla, The Ynglinga Saga, opening paragraph: ‘It is said that the earth’s circle which the human race inhabits is torn across into many bights so that great seas run into the land from the out-ocean. Thus it is known that a great sea goes in at Narvesund and up to the land of Jerusalem.’
Cf. the gospel Ex Aegypto vocavi filium meum. Matt. II,15.
Cf. the seventh-century-BC circumnavigation of Africa by the sailors of Necho a king of Egypt; they sailed south from the Gulf of Suez to the Cape, home via Gibraltar, to the Delta. They reported rightly that ‘the sun was on their right hand’ for part of the voyage; a report that was incomprehensible to Herodotus, who, two centuries later, wrote, ‘I do not believe them’.
4 Cf. ‘The son of God suffered for us . . . like a lamb among wolves, lions and dogs, labouring all that long time in the winepress of his blessed passion’, from Langforde’s Meditations in the Time of the Mass, a fifteenth-century manual for the laity.
additional notes
DJ note 3: Narvesund: the Straits of Gibraltar.
Spartel Head: the southern entrance to the Gibraltar Strait.
the Two Lands: the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt.
Matthew 2:15: ‘ Out of Egypt have I called my son’. This refers to the story that Jesus was taken into Egypt by his parents in order to escape King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.
see also
for the Omphalos, see page 58.
comments
The seaman also spoke to Elen of sailing over the Mediterranean to Jerusalem. This leads Elen to meditate upon the passion and crucifixion of Jesus.