' The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous
find pleasure in hills '.
Confucius.
It is said that for one who has achieved total
mastery of the I Ching and complete insight
into yin and yang, the casting of coins or
yarrow sticks becomes superfluous, because
he or she discerns the hexagrams wherever
the eye alights. Everything is always revealing
the rising and falling, the ebbing and flowing,
which the yin-yang symbol encapsulates.
Thus the sage is able to foresee outcomes
and to foretell events, just as a boatman who
dwells by the seashore can predict the next
high tide.
What appears to the uninitiated as some kind
of supernatural power is just the result of
understanding the way things work, the way
they are. Everything that arises offers hints
and clues as to the correct course to follow.
But here we are back to hermeneutics !
To arrive at the correct interpretation is the
difficult part...
The mountain upon which I dwell is named
Mons Angelorum in some of the ancient
documents. It received this title, ' Mount of the
Angels ', because an Irish saint called Brynach
dwelt upon its rocky peak for a while.
The story goes that his needs were ministered
to by angels. The angels then directed him to
follow a pregnant white sow, and the place
where she gave birth to her piglets was to
be the site where Brynach should build his
church.
His church is still here, after some fifteen
hundred years. He is said to have had a
wolf which wore a bell around its neck, to
lead his cow home, and would not begin
mass on his day ( April 7th.) until a cuckoo
had been heard.
John Jones, vicar of Brynach's church in the
1840's, helped Lady Charlotte Guest with her
famous translation of the Mabinogion tales.
Amongst other places, Brynach is said to
have been to the Holy Land on his various
peregrinations.
The church has many fascinating aspects,
including an ogam inscription, of which there
are many in Pembrokeshire, probably relics
of the period which followed on from the
collapse of Roman rule, when, from the
end of the fourth until the early sixth
centuries, Irish settlers arrived in the area,
then known as Demetia.
The tales of the lives of those early Welsh
saints - David, Brynach, Padarn, Illtud, and
others - indicate that they were great travellers
forever moving across land and sea to
Ireland, Brittany, Cornwall, and all the way to
Jerusalem and back, which must have been
a formidable journey in the 6th. century.
Illtud, who lived as a hermit in a cave on
the Gower, was probably the most renowned
of the prominent Celtic christian teachers of
his time.
Nennius, c. 800, relates that Illtud watched
from his cave and saw two men in a boat
coming towards the shore. They were guided
by a mysterious stone, ' skimming through the
air '. In the boat they had a body in a coffin,
which they would not name, but which he
was told he must bury. Illtud built a church
around the grave, and the stone continued
to hover above. Illtud used it as a pillow.
Some sixty or so years ago, the writer, T.H.
White visited the remote western coast of
Ireland, and heard rumours there that there
was such a stone in the possession of the
people. He spent five months investigating
the matter. In English, it was called the
Godstone. Its name in Gaelic was pronounced
' nee-vogue ', spelled Naomhog.
The keepers of the Naomhog dressed it in
new clothes once a year and credited it with
various miraculous powers. The deserted
islands that he visited were littered with the
remnants of the last five or six thousand
years of time's passage.
Mounds of sand mixed with human bones,
skulls and seashells, carved stones, bee-hive
huts, stone circles, whale bones, and ancient
graves of saints, hermits, pirates and Vikings.
The Godstone had been taken as a heathen
idol by a Catholic priest, broken, and thrown
into the sea. But when he had gone, the
people had retrieved it. Talking to them,
White got the impression that prehistory,
history, and the present, all existed at the
same time and on the same plane.
Although White never found the Godstone,
he concluded from the various evidence he
gathered, that it had been the pillow of
some hermit who had lived, during the
Age of the Saints, upon one of those tiny
and remote islands at the extreme western
edge of the Eurasian continent.
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