Very excited to post the cover for the next Will Rees. Although it will be published in Great Britain this fall, it will come out here in the States next spring.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The Shaker Murders
After the events in A Devil’s Cold Dish, Rees and family return to the Shaker community of Zion seeking refuge. But Rees barely arrives when the body of a murdered Shaker Brother is found in the washtub. More murders quickly follow. Surely no Shaker could be the murderer!
I am happy to announce this sixth Will Rees mystery will be published by Severn House, coming out in the United States next spring (2019.) I just finished the edits on the ms and sent it off. The seventh book, working title Simply Dead, will be published the following spring (2020).
I am hard at work on the eighth.
When I have a finalized cover, I will post it.
New Will Rees books coming!
I am excited and very happy to announce that two new Will Rees books have been accepted for publication. “The Shaker Murders”, Rees number 6, will be coming out next spring. Number 7, working title “Simply Dead” (Not crazy about it), will be after that.
I am working on the next Will Rees; “A Circle of Dead Girls” which is set against the beginnings of the circus in the new United States.
Snakes and serpents, oh my
The iconic statuettes from Bronze Age Crete are of women (priestesses probably although some scholars claim they are the Goddess) with snakes twining up their arms and around their waists. Snakes were sacred in this Bronze Age religion.
Snake Goddess describes a number of figurines of a woman holding a serpent in each hand found during excavation of Minoan archaeological sites in Crete dating from approximately 1600 BCE. By implication, the term ‘goddess’ also describes the deity depicted; although little more is known about her identity apart from that gained from the figurines. The ‘Snake Goddess’ figure first discovered was found by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans in 1903. The figurine found by Arthur Evans uses the faience technique, for glazing earthenware and other ceramic vessels by using a quartz paste. After firing this produces bright colors and a lustrous sheen. The figurine is today exibited at the Herakleion Archeological Museum in Crete. The snake’s close connection with the Minoan house is believed to indicate that the goddesses shown in these figures are Household Goddesses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Goddess
The shedding of their skins was a symbol of rebirth and regeneration. One of the resources I read said that the snakes were allowed to live in the houses. (I am not sure how she knows that.) If so, I’m sure that the presence of the snakes kept down the mice.
Currently Crete does not have native venomous snakes and it is thought that there no venomous snakes in Crete during the Bronze either. So, of course I had to wonder if the asp was ever imported from Egypt.
(I think everyone knows that Cleopatra is supposed to have committed suicide with an asp. According to my research, however, it was a mixture of poisons including opium and wolfsbane. But I digress.)
The asp’s bite is very venomous. The victim dies in about four minutes.
Nor’easters
As those of us in the northeast face the fourth storm in less than three weeks, I am reflecting on first and second. My neighborhood lost power for a week or more. And when we got it back, the Internet remained out. A tree had come down just a mile or so from the house, blocking the main road.
My husband and I were pretty lucky. We have town water and sewer so no running around filling jugs with water. We have a gas stove so I could cook on the top burners. And we have a generator that we used to run the freezer, refrigerator and one outlet where we powered our devices.
Our power came back about two hours before the next storm hit. Although it went out again the following day, it was only out for a few hours.
On the following Saturday we drove around the area. The local Stop and Shop was the only store open in the mall and it was dim. All the freezers were covered with plastic. We were just about the only people there. The streets were empty. And no wonder: the gas stations were closed, the CVS was closed. Our gym was closed for almost 8 days. It was like walking through a zombie movie.
Now, my question is why don’t the power companies gradually bury the lines? Most of the lines around here were put up in the fifties and sixties. That is 60+ years ago. These storms happen every few years . They fix whatever broke and now that they have put bandaids on the punctured artery move on. I realize it would be too expensive to do it all at once, but why not gradually? It seems like a bad business plan to me.
I was discussing this with one of my younger colleagues. His take: That this is the fault of the baby boomer generation on down. We’ve allowed this to happen. We’ve allowed the CEOS to get huge salaries and basically ignore the infrastructure of the companies they run. I can’t say I disagree. Because I know that we will have more wild storms and everyone will lost power again.
The Magnificent Horse Part 2
he new God-centered religion and the status of women intersected.
Patriarchy went with these mounted warriors and the status of women took a nosedive. This culture worshipped male Gods and was stratified with warriors at the top, priests next, and craftsmen below. Warriors were buried with their weapons and sometimes their horses.
Take the Mycenaeans, for example. The Acheans were one of the first waves to hit Greece. In my previous blogs about Helen of Troy, I talked about her status. She was a princess, semi-divine, wealthy and the heir to the throne. Not her brothers – her. So the transformation of a women’s status was gradual. However, she could not choose her husband and her life was marked by rape and violence. At least the Mycenaeans were influenced by the earlier Bronze Age culture. As successive, and more warlike, waves of invaders came down eventually even Crete was breached and its cities sacked and burned.
We all know that the Jews are credited with the first monotheistic faith. Not so fast. According to Elinor W. Gadon, the very early Jews also worshipped a Goddess – the Queen of Heaven. In Jeremiah the prophet speaks out against her, saying that the Hebrews were exiled from Judea because of their neglect of Yahweh. (When they were exiled they went to Babylon which was at that time transitioning from Goddess worship to God worship. (Maria Gimbutas – The Living Goddesses.) But I digress, Anyway, according to the Bible, the people retorted that Judea fell because the rituals to the Goddess had been neglected after they’d been forbidden by the Deuteronomic reforms. (Jeremiah 44: 15-19).
By the time of the Classical Greeks and Romans, the status of women was in the cellar. Women were no longer permitted to leave the courtyards of father or husband except on certain religious festival days. In Greece homosexuality and pederasty were institutionalized. It makes a sort of sense if women were so devalued, their only value that of producing heirs, how could they possibly deserve love? In Rome women had no names but that of, first their fathers, and then their husbands.
The situation certainly did not improve with the advent of Christianity. Augustinian uses urine and feces to describe childbirth and refers to women as all that is vile, lowly and corruptible. We know one result of such passionate misogyny: the witch trials of the 1600s. According to Gabon (The Once and Future Goddess) thousands and thousands of women were burned at the stake. Estimates range from 100,000 to 9,000,000 (including women who died in prison). In some villages there were no women left alive.
Because patriarchy has lasted so long we now think of it as ‘normal’. But gradually everything is changing. I started my research with Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who first excavated Knossos. As I read through his writings I found his prejudices on open display. One example: despite all the frescos featuring women, he insisted they must all be of Goddesses. (And a lot of them are.) But his rationale was that there had to be a king, women could not possibly hold the power and the importance demonstrated by the art. And that is why the Bronze Age Civilization has been called the Minoan civilization, after Minos the King referred to in the Theseus myth. (This is not even historically accurate. If there were such a king, he would have probably been a Mycaenaen.)
The agrarian societies were pretty peaceful. That certainly has not been true of all that has come after, up to and including today. War and conquest has continued pretty much unabated for millennia.
Well, I have gone pretty far afield from my study of horses. Would patriarchy have conquered all without the nomadic horde? Maybe. Maybe not. After all, many of the American Indian tribes still take counsel from their ‘Grandmothers’. But I think it is pretty clear that the domestication of horses changed everything.
The Magnificent Horse and its importance – Part I
The horse has arguably been more important to human history than even the dog. Both have served as work animals, that is true, but the horse has altered the course of civilization.
Yes, the horse has drawn the plow. Certainly very important but oxen also were used to pull plows as well as other vehicles – carts, wagons and the like. But the major importance of horses, unlike any other animal, was their use in war.
I previously blogged about the Botai – the Eurasian nomads of the steppes. They have been credited with domestication of the horse and its gradual transformation from the wild genus to the domesticated one. The horse gave the steppe dwellers a tremendous advantage: mobility as well as an elevated position from which to rain down blows. They were fast and could travel great distances. And they did. Successive waves of these warriors swept into India and across Europe, right up to and including recorded time. Think Genghis Khan.
This culture had no arts to speak of. Their pottery, according to famed archaeologist Maria Gimbutas, was poor quality, especially when compared to the pottery of Crete. But they had weapons and with horses they were almost unbeatable.
What were the civilizations they swept across? Almost all were agrarian, peaceful and Goddess worshipping. They made sacrifices for good harvests and easy births. They didn’t have a chance. Crete ‘s culture survived because it was on an island. (And on the island it was peaceful- their cities were not walled.). A remnant survived in the British Isles. (the Picts – remember Hadrian’s Wall? Built by the Romans, it was designed to keep the Picts away.) And the Basques who still speak a non Indo-European language. And Scandinavia managed to hold on to their culture. They successfully resisted Christianity for hundreds of years, converting at the point of a sword, and then grafting their sacred pantheon on to the Christian God.
But I digress.
This is what these mounted nomads brought with them.
Language
Almost all of the languages spoken now, especially across Europe, is classed as Indo-European, although pockets of the earlier languages remain. Basque, for example, is still spoken today. According to Gimbutas, the Basques continue some of the traditions as well that stretch all the way back, probably to the Neolithic. In Crete and Anatolia place names from the early civilizations remain. Knossos, for example, is not Indo-European.
Written languages too were affected. The Cretans had three languages. A form of hieroglyphics (and yes, Crete and Egypt were neighbors and trading partners so probably there was some cross-fertilization), Linear A and Linear B. B is newer and was deciphered in the fifties. It is a form of early Greek, an Indo-European language. The other two remain mysterious.
With the Indo-European invasion, writing disappeared along with the fine pottery and many other examples of the civilization.
Wild Horses
Despite domestication, true wild horses continued to live in Eurasia for the following millennia. I don’t mean the horses in North America that we call wild. These are domesticated horses that escaped human control and went feral. The wild horses of Eurasia had the more robust skeletons, heavier hair, and an almost uncanny skittishness of humans. (One of the traits that was bred into horses was an increasing tolerance of humans.) Forrest reports that wild horses were captured and bred into the more domesticated herds. One mare submitted to a halter but left her foal behind when she fled back into the steppes in early spring. The final wild horse was declared officially extinct in 1969. Who would have guessed it would be so recent?
There are has been an effort to reestablish horses in Mongolia with the Takhi, horses that still bear the genetic signature of the original wild horse breeds, on the steppes,. This is part of an effort to repopulate the steppes with some of its original inhabitants. Other animals included in this effort are the red maral deer, Mongolian gazelles and argali sheep. Like the original wild horses, these are very wary of human. I suspect that trait may help them survive.
Next: Why horses are important.
More about Horses
As humans began using horses for transport – and war-horses rapidly became very valuable. Forrest quotes a Mitanni horseman as saying a trained horse was worth twice as much as an ox and even an untrained horse twice as much as a cow. For many cultures horses became too valuable to eat. The first talking horse in literature, (in cuneiform dating from the seventh century) the horse says ‘My flesh is not eaten’. He has become too valuable and not just in money. A horse lends prestige. A trained horse was essential for warfare (the horse is a ‘glorious creature’ clothed in copper armor). Where would the chevalier be without his steed?
By the time of the Old Testament, horses were forbidden flesh. Forrest reports that Romans, who happily consumed dormice and ostriches, would only eat horsemeat in extreme poverty. Christians, who moved away from the strict dietary restrictions and ate pork and shrimp, kept the one forbidding horseflesh. There are cultures now who eat them. True. When Christianity moved into pagan German and east to the steppes of Eurasia it moved into territories where the horse had been eaten for centuries. It took a long time to establish the taboo. Among these ‘barbarians’, horses played a mythological role and were sacrificed and eaten as part of the rites. Like the bull in Ancient Crete. horses were divine. After sacrifice they were eaten, partly because it was believed eating sanctified flesh took the divinity and the other attributes of the animal into the human body.
In France, in an effort to encourage eating horseflesh, horse banquets were arranged in the middle 1800s. There were a lot of horses and a lot of starving poor.
To this day, people in some countries such as the U.S. and Great Britain do not eat horsemeat. In France, however, horseflesh turns up on menus, sometimes to the chagrin of a diner whose French is not up to the translation. This happened to a friend who, when she discovered what was on the plate in front of her, went supperless. I share her revulsion even though I will happily consume chicken.I cannot imagine myself eating either horse or dog, the two companions that have shared our journey through history.
Early horses
I picked up a book called The Age of the Horse: an Equine Journey through Human History by Susanna Forrest. It confirmed most of what I remembered from my childhood but also included so much more information. So much I am still trying to organize it in my head. This is what happens in research: one starts on one thread and then is drawn into many different paths.
Eurasia is the only place where the wild horse survived after the last Ice Age. A lot of archaeological digs have taken place here but because of the many milennia that have passed there is a lot of uncertainty about the when of certain milestones. For example: when was the horse truly domesticated?
Besides Forrest, I also looked at some other sources. A Natural History article by Sandra L. Olsen (a zooarchaeologist from Carnegie Mellon) confirms that after hominids arrived cut marks on the bones made by stone tools begin appearing.
These early horses – and I use the term loosely since there were several different species – shared some common characteristics. Heavy heads, heavy hair and round bellies. Skeletons indicate they did not vary much from one another. There is no recognizable ancestor of the Shire horse or the Arabian. (Of course humans had a hand in creating horse breeds. Once horses were domesticated, humans began selective breeding for favored characteristics).
So the wild horses were hunted first. When were they domesticated? It is thought they were first domesticated – or beginning to be domesticated – about 6000 years ago. Some archaeologists believe a culture called the Botai were the first (although I suspect domestication was one of those jumps forward that took place in many places). It is hard to know. The arguments rest on interpretation of skeletons and teeth wear. This was the Copper Age but the Botai may not have had copper. Although archaeologists believe the wear on some of the skeletal teeth and jaws indicate use of bits, they were probably from rawhide and no trace of them remains. Proof of bits and bridles, however, means that horses were herded and maybe ridden.
We do know the Botai ate horses. 90% of the bones found at their villages were from horses. The remnants of horse blood and mares’ milk has been found in their pots so some domestication must have occurred.