Talking Heads

A first excursion to the Church of St. John the Baptist at Chipping Barnet (from ‘ceap’ or ‘cheap’ meaning a market); which overlooks the road leading to London to the South and the hyperborean regions to the North. 

 Directionality is important here as we are on the road, Barnet being a stopping point before the noise, smell and crush of London and its Hi- and Lo-life. 

A ‘meaningful coincidence’ as its book of local ‘saints’ for April 14th, situated at the rear of the church, was for Mary Carbery (1867-1949), and her paean to the wandering life, the soul that is attracted to the wilderness and a diet of locusts and honey. In a different age might the Baptist have opened a hipster organic café for post-veganuary refugees in this place? More on this book later.

The walls of the church are made up of nodules of flint an old protection against the faerie and the devil. Perhaps we should be on our guard as the fae must be particularly active in this place.

Out front are two branches tied together by a rope that remarkably forms an inverted pentagram with a cross, seemingly, hastily thrown over it to contain the beast. Is this an example of a Christian false-flag Satanic panic?  Maybe we should be doubly on our guard today.

Our patron saint being headless and sited upon a hill the thoughts naturally turns to stories of heads buried under-the-hill, something which London boasts under Tower Hill in the form of Bran the Blessed. As Brian Haughton explains in his ‘Haunted Spaces, Sacred Places: A Field Guide to Stone Circles, Crop Circles, Ancient Tombs and Supernatural Landscapes:

“The mythological origins of the Tower of London are described in a fascinating tale in The Mabinogion, a group of stories from medieval Welsh manuscripts, parts of which probably date back to older Iron Age tradition. The tale involves Bran the Blessed (“Bendigeidfran” in Welsh; probably “Blessed Crow”), the giant king of Britain, who invades Ireland and is fatally wounded in the foot by a spear during a battle. At the end of the battle only seven of Bran’s followers remain alive. Before he dies, Bran orders his head to be cut off and carried to Bwynfryn (‘White Hill’) in London, thought to be the site of the [White] Tower, where it is to be buried facing in the direction of France. As long as the head of Bran the Blessed remains buried in this place, no invaders from across the seas can come to the island of Britain.”

The crow family is also represented in the church by the small chapel/tomb of Thomas Ravenscroft situated to one side of the main altar.

A head buried under a hill connects us with the underworld and the seer who has the foot in both worlds. his body above and his consciousness communing with the spirits. As Tobias Churton points out in his book on this saint, we have the incarnation of spirit into matter from heaven in the form of the dove. As Jake Stratton Kent remarks in Geosophia the underworld of the dead evolved over time and took its place in the heavens. 

Thus the Church of St. John the Baptist is our local node connecting North and South, above as well as below through time. Such a node ‘makes holy’ or sacralises and reminds us that in Christianity’s early years the making of saints was not the prerogative of a centralised bureaucracy but was a grass roots local movement taken over to establish control and orthodoxy. 

A visitor to Cornwall can attest to a profusion of saints there established before the iron grip of Rome reached out to snatch away this power. So it is heart-warming to see that the Diocese of St Alban, another headless saint to which Barnet belongs, re-introducing this practice by making its own book of days. This takes the form of local historical figures who are to be venerated for their virtue and example allotted to the calendar. As the introduction  to Barnet’s own ‘Golden Legend’ makes plain these ‘saints’ are not above but from the people. The fact that they share the same selfish impulses as the rest of us and yet were moved by a ‘Holy Spirit’ to some service for their community or the wider world can only validate further the power that lies under-the-hill.