The Origin of Semagrams & the First Crossing of The Hinge
The vast majority of my diary writing concerns things that I find and experience in Hellsborough and The Dark Peak, that, after all, it what this whole thing is all about. This journal entry is different. I wanted to talk about an experience before I ever visited Hellsborough.
This experience was long before I started studying for my PhD, I was still an undergraduate and despite having a lifelong love of all things supernatural, and investigating many strange phenomena in Yorkshire and further abroad, I had never found anything that hadn't already been discovered by someone else, usually many times before.
The study of folklore is a strange thing, some would say a pointless thing - why study old wives tales, they say - what is the point, what can you learn - how does it improve our understanding of, well, anything?
To be fair, this is often my more logically orientated brothers and sisters who work in the STEM fields -- that is Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths -- that raise these things. Likewise, those of us in the arts and humanities refer to them as techies and nerds that are sometimes just missing the point in their headlong dive into the pursuits of wealth, prosperity, the future of humanity, and deeds of that like.
Might it be them, I reason, that is missing something by not learning about the achievements of our forefathers and mothers?
I mean a tale maybe a tale, but it had a genesis somewhere, otherwise it wouldn't have gained any traction to begin with, would it?
Think of the modern day meme. Memes can spread incredibly quickly these days via social media. They change as they encounter different cultures, different ages groups, different tribes -- they mutate, take on lives of their own -- is that not exactly like folklore? Are old wives tales, legends and myths not just ancient memes?
Maybe, but why investigate the origin of memes? My logical friends say. And the argument -- discussion -- starts anew.
Sooner or later someone will mention God. It's always a surprise to me how many devotees of evolution; dedicated biologists and geneticists, also commit to having faith in a supreme being.
Isn't God a meme? An old wives tale?
I just can't reconcile the two at all myself, but I guess that's all good, it's all just a part of life's rich tapestry. Possibly I have been influenced by d'divi - Dunlockslyn
As a folklorist I strive to understand the significance of beliefs. To me, folklore means something –- to the tale teller, to the song singer, to the believer -- no story would be re-told unless it continued to have some relevance to its audience.
This is second part of a journal entry in which I talk about my interests in folklore (read part one)
All cultures have their own unique folklore -- it is all around us, all of the time, it doesn't have to be about old or antiquated tales. Folklore is natural and necessary, it continues to be created, transmitted and perpetuated anywhere where people need to differentiate between "us" and "them".
It is the lore bit of folklore that interests me the most, since lore I believe follows some law of self-correction -- a feedback mechanism which keeps variations closer to their original form, and therefore closer to what was once the truth.
Although I study folklore, my vocation is (or was) the study of systems, so I likely have more in common with the STEMs than they know. A lot of my interest investigates the functions and processes of systems. My goals are to identify and understand a system's closed signalling loop, in which an action by the system generates a change in the environment, which in turn triggers feedback to the system and initiates a new action.
This approach was first used with mechanistic and biological systems, but is now applied to many cultural and societal systems, I use this approach with folklore. Once you start to look at things this way, you start to move away from seeing things on a traditional linear time scale, and you start to see how folklore maintains itself over many generations and over the eons.
The oral tradition of poems is found across all cultures, and the form of the poem remains remarkably consistent. According to systemic theories, this can be attributed to a closed loop auto-correction built into the system maintenance of oral folklore.
The supernatural is only super to nature because we struggle to observe and form natural theories about it. In searching for the truth in lore, I want to observe the unobservable and find the truth of the supernatural.
My travels have led me far and wide, but eventually this place where I sit now, this liminal heatsink that is Hallamshire, drew me in until I was transfixed. I had come across several legends in this area. One of the most famous is that of the Wantley Dragon.
That story recounts a long drawn out fight between a barbaric and blood thirsty knights templar known as Moore of Moore's Hall. It was said that a crazed Moore, unhappy with the performance of his trusted steed after one battle, did swing his onetoe by the tail and mane until dead, before roasting the poor beast over an open fire and devouring its carcass.
The Dragon meanwhile, is living in a cave up on Wharncliffe crags and terrorising the locals by preying upon their children and livestock, as well as devouring whole trees, pillaging forests, and desecrating churches in its endless search to satiate its bottomless hunger.
Desperate to distraction, the Wharncliffe locals seek out the heinous knight Moore and pay him to kill the dragon. The dragon is said to resemble a monstrous winged venomtooth and to kill by squeezing the life from its victims. To this end, Moore has the little mesters of the Dun valley fashion him a suit of armour covered in steel spikes as sharp as razor blades.
The devious knight then waits in a pond for the dragon to come and drink, and when it does, starts a fight with it, dealing it a terrific blow to its undercarriage and then grappling with it until they came to wrestle and the dragon began to squeeze the knight, impaling itself on the sharp spikes of Moore's suit of armour.
Another interesting Hallamshire legend concerns a mythical river beast known as the Loxley Kraken.
This many tentacled beast was believed to live in a place called Hellsborough hole, which according to the legend was at the confluence of the rivers Loxley and Dun, which would place it around the Owlerton area.
My research, and the name Hellsborough hole, cast some doubt on this being the location of the legend, but it is not unusual for such legends to migrate over short distances, and bare in mind that when these stories were first being verbally passed on: First just through chats and whispers and then later through rhymes and songs, the folk who were doing the telling didn't always travel that far.
Consider that the confluence of rivers Loxley and Rivelin, is no more than a mile upstream, and that the name that stuck was the Loxley kraken and not the Dun kraken or the Rivelin kraken. In all likelihood then, the Hellsborough "hole" was the expanse of the river Loxley betwixt its confluences with the Dun and Rivelin, the central point of which more or less, is Hellsborough corner.
You can read a version of the legend here: The Legend of Van Hallam and the Loxley Kraken of Hellsborough Hole
(You'll notice that the hero in this legend is Van Hallam. Obviously if you have visited many other pages on this site, or read any of the Hellsborough Chronicles, you will have come across many encounters between myself and Van Hallam in the present day, which may be confusing. I agree that it is, so I offer these explanations: Van Hallam is a generic term meaning Man of Hallam, or local hero, alternatively, Van Hallam is of a great age, and so it actually is him -- although I have asked on numerous previous occasions and he denies his involvement. Although, he hasn't ever categorically denied it, since he says his memory is sometimes vague. A third explanation would be that someone -- Van or someone else calling themselves Van Hallam travelled a great distance back in time using rockcrust. There are several other explanations, so you'll probably just be better off accepting your confusion).
This is third part of a journal entry in which I talk about my interests in folklore (read part one and part two)
In order to do some proper research on The Legend of Van Hallam and the Loxley Kraken of Hellsborough Hole, I had to get my hands dirty, and get myself down to the places that might be mentioned in the legend and see for myself whatever there was to see after all this time. As somewhere that was instrumental in the industrial revolution, and various earth works will have been undertaken, I wasn't expecting much, but field work is part of the job.
There are several goals of active folklore research. The first objective is to identify traditions within a social group and to collect their lore, preferably in situ. There are many old boys and gals that remember this legend, but details are so generic these days, that anything specific is just too long gone.
There are many other tools I have at my disposal as a folklorist to do my research, but front and centre, is getting down and dirty at the site in question. Which meant really immersing myself into The Masons Arms (properly, The Freemasons), and understanding any shared vocabulary, which could vary by sometimes somewhat divergent shades of meaning; this I needed to use thoughtfully and consistently. I know, a terrible hardship, I'm sure you'll agree.
As a folklorist I also tend to rub shoulders with other researchers, we share tools and inquiries in neighbouring fields. No-one was particularly looking at my Kraken research, but I spoke to many other folks interested and researching the literature, anthropology, cultural history, linguistics, geography, musicology, sociology, and psychology of the Hallamshire region.
As the pub mentioned in the legend still stands, it was at the invitation of the current tenants, that I ventured into its vast underground catacombs. Those tunnels stretch deep, long and fetid beneath that most liminal of junctions above at the crossroads. Those dark archways and blind passageways take you way, way beneath the Loxley river, the red brick channels oozing the dampness and silt of the river. It is like going back in time a thousand years or more. Dark, dank and oppressive with fumes of wet sulphur, mist and murk saturating the ether, clogging your lungs, making you cough heavy phlegm with every forward step.
It was stumbling through this vile snoughing damp, with just the beer light to guide me, that I happened upon a small sarcophagus.
Buried behind a lifetimes collection of brick-a-brack, rubble and detritus, lodged in a tiny hole which could have been made to home it, possibly washed there from Dale Dyke when the reservoir collapsed and caused the Great Floods of 1864 -- but likely not -- in all likelihood, that parcel had survived in its hiding place for generation after generation, going back all the way to shortly after 66 Ma. That package had lain there all along, since it was originally deposited. Lain to rest there by Milting, guardians of The Hinge.
Opening that sarcophagus was nothing if not an anti-climax, I have to admit.
A few pumice blocks, if it wasn't for their uniform shape, and rubbing them with my fingertips -- noticing they were carved rather than formed, I'd probably have discarded them there and then as unimportant shards of worthless rock.
Luckily, those slight indentations sparked my interest.
The smallest of scratches -- but to the untold experience of all those professionals, all those discussions, all those inebriated chats with anthropologists, cultural historians, linguists, musicians, sociologists, psychologists, and the rest, they paid their price in gold. My fingertips recognised something, something of significance. Small, insignificant, tiny scratches on rough stone.
Maybe the most important indentations ever realised? I don't like to blow my own trumpet, but, it's significant, I know.
Lucky they were noticed. Had I not, those semagrams contained in the pumice, the liminal importance of the junction, and ultimately, Hellsborough and The Dark Peak wouldn't have been discovered.
There is drug taking in Hellsborough and The Dark Peak, mainly a thing called rockcrust, which will jack you into the murk and let you experience what is known as scerm, apart from that, there's alcohol and weed, so it makes the off-world almost seem dangerous by comparison. I don't curse much, there is very little cursing on this website, or in Hellborough in general to be fair -- it's all pretty tame, really.
Why do I tell you this? Well, it's all to do with my first time. The first time I came through The hinge. When The Hinge claimed my virginity, is one way I could put it. That first time is exhausting. All that unknown. All that trepidation. All that excitement.
I uttered those incantations, the ones I had deciphered from the milting semagrams -- a semagram that I held onto tightly as the world began to shift, and with no bodily movement, I transgressed The Hinge and came out on the Hellsborough side. Or at least I thought that's what had happened since, moving between parallel universes is nothing but a non-event.
There were no great claps of thunder, no bolts of lightning, no sign from the universe that I had done anything that I shouldn't have done, that I had broken any rules, that any rules had even been broken.
There were two questions in my mind: Had I crossed over at all? And, what now?
To answer the first question, yes, I felt exhausted, but was that just nervous energy being expended after what I had thought I had done? If I had done anything?
Then I fainted. It was then, as my consciousness began to ebb away and my frail mind clutched at the fading straws of my awareness, that I realised -- physiologically, if not in a cognitive sense -- that I was being poisoned.
The murk. It was not initially evident to me when I "stepped" through The Hinge without moving, but within seconds, it had wrapped itself around my alien form, curling up my legs and enveloping my chest; smothering my face.
And then my eyes were open again and I breathed, fitfully at first, then deeply, from the psycmask (as I now know it) that covered my face, purifying my air supply, and filling my thoughts and brain with strange images and sounds that made me feel like I had been transported through some new portal to a world more alien than I could ever have expected to experience.
I passed out again from the sensory overload.
When I next awoke, the psycmask's sensitivity must have been reduced, since the sounds and pictures that now flooded into my mind had a calming effect. Rivers and hills, trees, flowers, flappers and creatures of the forest -- familiar sights to someone not unused to doing a bit of exploring of one's locale.
Words whispered into my feeling: Mutable, fluid, transforming. Informing, advising me of where I am, what I am, where I'm going, where I've been, when and what, and how and who.
And then I am sat upright, aware of my surroundings. I am in a room, it is an old room, possibly the oldest room that I have ever visited. It reminds me of a museum, except it is a museum that is genuine, not one that been thoughtfully curated and dusted down everyday before paying visitors arrive; this room is a lived in room. I am reclining on a chaise longue, my back supported by its back, my legs horizontal. There is a huge mirror, I see myself in the mask out of my left eye, I am an abomination. There are paintings, portraits, military figures; they wear masks, like the one I wear.
What appears to be a giant hand bangs the chair beyond my shoeless feet (where are my shoes, I wonder, I had shoes when I arrived here, I'm sure I did), making me and plumes of dust jump. Then I realise my senses aren't attuned right. The hand is normal sized, it belongs to a slender form with a grizzled chin, and it was a pat, not a bang -- a self invitation for this person to take a sitting position beyond my toes.
Damn good job I took that crust when a did, young'un, that Murk had tha good, was only cos I was surfing t'scerm that a found thee when I did; lucky n'all this old 'ouse sits right on t'junction an we still 'ave these 'eadbangers kickin about, I reckon tha'd been crozzled.
From that day until this, I have never forgotten how Van Hallam managed, largely by accident, to save my life, but I will be forever grateful.