Day 4 of the 5-part series A Sainlty Soul Abducted by K.G. Watson
McNeil bit his tongue. He knew how dangerous it was to speak in anger. He ground his teeth and waved Liam on. Better to get this over. There was not much left in the pile of paper beside his chair.
Liam, too, had to draw a deep breath to regain some composure. “These are a list of sources that refer to events surrounding St. Patrick on a very broad timescale. Patrick was born and died in about 400 CE. Drogheda was 3500 BCE. Brian Boru was about 1000CE.” He touched each collection as it stuck out from the pile. I want to use the Book of Kells as another exhibit in my case. As you know, this book was a copy of the four Gospels and is dated from about 800 CE.”
McNeil was well acquainted with this source. He’d visited it where it was on display at Trinity College in Dublin. Sure enough, Liam started with the missing pages and the cover that someone had torn off for the jewels it used to contain that embellished it.
I want to use this to show that there was likely an ‘underground’ within the Church at the time – a fifth column whose presence went back to at least St. Patrick. Patrick was ordained, as we both know, but his voiceprint supporting a liberation point of view lived on after he died, and I suggest the evidence is here.” He tapped the top of a collection of photocopies of the elaborately illustrated pages.
“Though the pictures were painted in extraordinary detail with some figures smaller than a millimetre, nobody has spent much time asking how that could be. Ground glass lenses were an invention to come – almost 800 years later. Yet here is evidence that that could be easily explained if the artist was looking through a glass as the details were built up. I cite your own work on the 100+ calves that gave up their hide for the vellum. I answer the source you question about the blue pigment. It was Lapis Lazuli, and at the time, the only source on earth was modern-day Afghanistan. How did the crystals make their way across half the world to Ireland?
Well, they did. There’s the proof. And since they did, it is no stretch to imagine that a hand lens, sufficient to the task, was also collected on the way. So when someone had enough sins, and the wealth to buy forgiveness from them appeared, the exotic materials and technology were at hand for a highly skilled illuminator to go to work. The managers focussed all their attention on the words that were repeated or missed. When lenses next crossed the theological table, Galileo had made one and put it into a telescope that showed the moon was cratered, not perfect, as the Church claimed that God had made it. God doesn’t make battered work. It was the lens’s fault. It was the demonic eye. Looking through it distorted God’s beauty.
Nobody knew, or had forgotten that the Book of Kells might have used another demonic eye in its creation. The book’s purpose was to be a worthy addition to the world of writing. But I can find no protest that the original Celtic symbols that portrayed a circular theological view entirely at odds with the linear view of the church at that time were on page after page. Here, in the most historic book of their time, was the plain evidence of the parallel acceptability of the circle of life surrounding the words that said life was just a line – birth, death, heaven. And the Christian managers never noticed, or if they did, were prepared to explain it as pretty decoration. They chose not to see the encouragement for Ireland to rise again, and again and never give up.
