You might want to view this
short film from furtherfield.org first before reading
(QuickTime preferred). Or...listen / download a lecture about
polyfaith! here (part one) here (part two) and here (part three)
My friend Erica Tetralix died. She gave me the task of fulfilling
her dream which was that people would enjoy the parts of Edinburgh
that were so dear to her in her life. She also loved tourists and
sympathised with people on a budget, so she devised, with my
posthumous help, this free way to enjoy the city. It's a beautiful
gift for both transients and residents. It's popular with
backpackers, parents and children, cultural groups and well,
basically anyone.
There are several ways of looking at the tour; such as tourism
itself, walking activity, educational project (schools can do the
tour), peace process, inter-faith exercise, public transport
survey, aesthetic travel, "a living outdoor museum" or like many
people do this, as pilgrimage to remember the living and the dead.
Oh, but before we go any further, is the photo above Japanese
calligraphy or a paint spillage on an Edinburgh street?
POLYFAITH is of my most popular projects ever and nearly
18 months of my life in the making, I'm saying only a little about
the project here as I want you to visit the project site (link at
bottom of page).
This is a highly unusual and totally free tour of Edinburgh that
you can either enjoy from afar, or in actuality, going around the
places with either the printable map, or with the recommended added
dimension of the mp3 files as you visit the locations with an ipod
/ other mp3 player / portable CD player (you can burn with files
from the site).
Obviously I hope you will actually come to Edinburgh and do it in
person. Polyfaith has also (unintentionally) served the purpose of
being a permanent monument to a fascinating Edinburgh character. Oh
and before we go any further, is the photo above Japanese
calligraphy in an art gallery or a paint spillage meticulously
rendered twice it's original size in an art gallery?
By the way, some of the above is not true.
Depends who you speak to.
Click here to view a short movie about polyfaith.com
commissioned by furtherfield.org
Decide for yourself at www.polyfaith.com and do the tour!
Can't wait? Here's an excerpt from The Pagan Station of the
tour.
Sometime in the nineteen nineties, I don’t know when, Erica heard
about the Edinburgh Beltane Fire Society.
Being a plucky try-anything-once pensioner with attitude she craved
joining in a pagan fertility festival. This was and still is an
annual pagan celebration and evocation of the fertility of the land
and animals held at springtime.
On the last night in April, Beltane takes place on Calton Hill – a
location which we will kind of skirt round again, near the end of
our Tetralix tour.
The main traditional element which was common to all Beltane
festivals was the fire which gave it its name. Erica was a fan of
cult Scottish horror film The Wicker Man and secretly had a kind of
pyromaniac streak, maybe she was a subdued arsonist!? Perhaps it
was the energy of fire, like the Shiva Lingam tower of fire that
powered her physics brain.
Anyway, she had heard you could actually volunteer to be part of
the Beltane procession, there would be performance meetings and
rehearsals and the like. She had agreed to meet up with a woman who
would give her the right Beltane contacts, someone she’d heard
about via the then fledgling internet. She met a Scottish
practicing witch called Maria McKinnon. They had coffee in The
Botanical Gardens.
Erica told me that Maria, far from being some nutcase, was a highly
intelligent and beautiful thritysomething woman with a phD and a
smile to melt any heart.
Anyway, Maria passed on Erica’s contacts to the Beltane fire
society and it all seemed to be fine. But there was a natural pause
in their conversation as Maria sipped coffee quietly, Erica wanted
to ask Maria another question, maybe the real question but she was
a bit scared. She plucked up courage and asked if Maria, could, you
know, being a witch actually cast spells?
She said of course! It’s not a million miles away from praying. But
it would have to be something relatively small and possible within
the laws of the universe. This appealed to Erica greatly. So she
asked her to make some of the holly bushes around the edge of the
botanics grow noticeably faster than the rest. Maria said she’d
give it her best shot. She said, it’s not an ideal time of year,
and she wasn’t that experienced with Holly. She said it is really
used in the winter solstice, not the spring, and anyway, it was
usually used to make magick spears and historically, if the cause
was just, a spear made from the thick trunks and branches could be
better than any other wood.
BUT
Perhaps making a spell to repay the holly in the other direction,
so to speak, to give love to the holly, not to take from the holly,
to make holly grow might be good. Maria liked it. She said we take
from nature all the time, but we rarely give anything back. In
casting a spell, she couldn’t let Erica see what she was doing, but
she promised that the spell would work between the end of the 31st
of April and the first few minutes of the first of May when she was
a mile or two away on Calton Hill. Well, this was great said Erica
as it would be the icing on the cake for her Beltane debut.
Erica was to be one of the white women in the procession the Hag
aspect of the goddess. This pleased her. She appeared on Calton
hill in front of 2000 people with fifteen other women all younger
than she, dressed in a shawl and bonnet, singing a lament to mourn
the passing of summer, but also as an affirmation of the year to
come.
She loved her theatrical evening.
But coming down from the hill, she told another white woman, Morag,
about the spell and did she think it would have worked yet? “I
don’t see why not” said morag who was now smoking a joint which
Erica said was her first and last taste of cannabis. Let’s go and
see!
So they arrived here at Aboretum place, at the spot, on the
perimeter of the botanical gates exactly where Maria had promised
to conduct the spell. No large Holly Bushes. Anywhere. Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
But Erica loves this bit of the story, they were just leaving the
scene when a slightly doped up morag tripped and fell over a lump
in the pavement. Erica looked down on her and they both giggled.
Erica hadn’t had this much fun in a long time she told me.
What Morag had tripped over were holly roots, almost breaking
through the tarmac of Aboretum place, fresh lumps found in the
tarmac pavement almost looking like a relief map of a landscape!
Maybe it was! Maybe Maria’s spell had worked after all. The roots
were reclaiming the streets!
Now as you will know by now, these lumps are still there. And if
you speak to anyone in the botanics, as I did when I was doing
research for this, pretty much everyone says they just appeared
pretty much overnight, sometime in the nineteen nineties, they
don’t know when.
Listen / download a lecture about polyfaith!
here (part one) here (part two) and here (part three)