Sacred River.

[Simon E.]

I live near the River Thames.
From where I am writing it glides just a few feet away
.Apart from a decade spent in the west of England for professional reasons, I have lived near it all my life.
Its name is a mystery, it means 'dark' in the old Celtic tongue which precedes my Saxon forebears by a thousand years. The derivation of that name is from the same Indo-European root as 'tamas'...

It rises in the green hills of Gloucestershire from a damp womb in fields and makes its way to Oxford where it undergoes a name change and becomes the Isis as it makes its way past the college walls and towers of that ancient town. It has always been seen as sacred and set apart.
Along its length small votive offerings are frequently taken from the water, many precede the Romans. Small bronze replicas of arms or legs or eyes or ears thrown into the water by those who suffered disease of the body part represented. Unsurprisingly the greatest accumulation of votive offerings is found in those parts of the river which meander through the Old City of London which when it was the Roman city of Londinium had a large number of temples to the Gods. Occasionally evidence of darker sacrifice emerges in the form of bound and chained human skeletons.
To Londoners even now the Thames is simply 'The River'.
This morning just after dawn I looked at the growing lambent light on the water and it was easy to imagine the scene when in the Ninth century CE Viking boats sailed up the Thames and burned and sacked the Abbey. Its remains are about 30 minutes walk from here.
After the River flows through the City it continues under bridges which stand where once Old London Bridge spanned its banks, on the bridge were houses and shops and churches from one bank to the other.
Still, annually Priests, from the churches each side of where the bridge stood, throw Christian votive objects into the dark waters in an act of continuity going back one thousand years before Christ the Christian objects having supplanted the Roman, Celtic and Saxon objects.
The River then flows on to the cold North Sea through a huge and largely unpopulated estuary area where wading birds feed and breed in large numbers on the sandy marshy banks and wide skies where every view is Dickensian.

[amanitamusc]

Wonderful! Thank you Simon.

[Simon E.]

You're welcome.

There was a mist on the river this morning. An early harbinger of Autumn...