Round the Herne

 There are quite a few stories told of the legendary Rabbi Loeb who lived in Prague during the 1500s. Several of them centre around his creation of a golem, an animated clay servant possessed of supernatural strength but unable to speak. This was recorded partly because my Jewish friends are celebrating Yom Kippur and partly because of the horrible terrorist attack on the Manchester Synagogue. I've always found the Jewish people I have known to be positive and supportive towards pagans, perhaps because they recognise a fellow minority religion that has often come in for violent suppression.  The nauseating level of anti-Semitism that has been building in this country for some years is deeply worrying. Not only do I worry about what will happen to the people I know (not to mention the much larger numbers of people I don't know), but I am also minded of what someone so famous I have forgotten their name called the Canary in the Mineshaft. When authoritarians get away with attack...

 A reflection on Jung's notions around the Dark Mother archetype and the ideas added by those who came after him (such as Marie-Louise von France, Dorothy Bloch, and Daniella Sieff). This is chiefly for the Suffolk Jungian Circle, who are discussing the topic at the end of the month, but it may well also interest a wider audience.

 Continuing with Longfellow's (1863) narrative poem, "Tales from a Wayside Inn". In this section we have the Spanish Jew's tale in which Rabbi ben Levi meets the Angel of Death, followed by an interlude and the Sicilian's Tale of King Robert, who also meets an angel.

With Halloween just around the corner I am going to record one or two gruesome stories. A friend, Nick, suggested something about a dybbuk - the dibbukim are ghostly entities that possess living flesh, often because they have some task left incomplete in this world that must be done (frequently connected to the idea of teshuva, repenting for wickedness as the dybbuk are decidedly unhappy, often unpleasant ghosts). This tale is a combination of several short anecdotal accounts - too brief to make stories in their own right - overlaid with a brief and ugly snippet of recent history. If you want to understand what a greifer is, have a look here . I hope mashing up stories does not offend any Jewish people who might listen to it (let me know if there's a better version of a dybbuk story that I could record if this one does give offence). I thought about making this tale more graphic, but decided better of it.