The Nomadic Alternative – Page 208

Monsters

"Curly cruel big-headed maggots, white great fanged monsters, fierce ravening lions, inky hairy scorpions, red high-flying hawks, rough sharp-beaked griffins, black hump-backed beetles, sharp-mouthed flies, bent long-beaked wasps, heavy iron mallets, ancient old rough flails, streams of poison, high mountains, hard crags, deep gullies, verminous ravines." And the Promised Land to which he escaped was a scintillant island "flower-spangled and floating on the mist". Scented bright purple trees grew there; hazels bore clusters of tawny nuts. Salmon nuzzled their way up green flower-filled rivers. But his wonder voyage was an inner journey as well as a journey of exploration. For the barren waves of the sea are vehicles to ecstatic visions, and later commentators have not decided if the land he sighted on the farther shore were the promontories of mind or Maine.

"[Illegible]" here, in the ritual activity.

The Early Mediaeval Church inaugurated the perpetual pilgrimage as a therapeutic cure for the sins of settlement.

To make him atone for the murder of Abel, God drove Cain from the places of habitation "a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth", a moral leper set aside from normal society, "whom no man might touch". Ambulare pro Deo, "to wander for God", was the penance imposed by the Church to restore a sinner to his lost innocence. As the Emperor Henry IV at Canossa, the penitent wandered barefoot; nudi homines cum ferro.