Cretan Genesis of a spiritual adventure story
Living in Greece opens the creative spirit to new possibilities. After I had moved with my wife and daughter to Athens the idea for a novel came like a bump in the night. In fact, most of the ideas and scenes for Time Sphere occurred to me in the wee small hours.
With Greece struggling as the poor man of Europe it is easy to forget that the nymph Europa was carried by Zeus, in the form of a bull, to Crete –the mystic isle at the very south of Europe. I wanted to craft a tale that would show imaginatively, how wisdom and flowed from Egypt to Greece and then up through Europe.The initiating idea was to do it through the eyes of seven children in different epochs between Ancient Egypt before the pyramids, and ‘now’. I realised I couldn’t tell seven separate stories and keep sufficient narrative tension and so Rhory, an English schoolboy, became the main character holding the various threads of the plot together. The need for this story to be told in three large bites also became clear, and Time Sphere is the first of a trilogy.
The story gets underway when Rhory, visiting the British Museum, goes on a whim to the Egyptian Rooms. Here he thinks he is seeing a reflection in the glass of a cabinet of a French school-girl he has noticed, but it turns out to be the presence of Shoshan, a young priestess from 5,000 years earlier. This connection is picked by the nefarious Society of Secrets, rich and powerful people who wish time to flow in the direction of their advantage, something this irritating schoolboy is putting in jeopardy.
By weaving in Dimitris, a Greek lad who is also thirteen years old, I could present the interesting story that the great druid Abaris and the great sage Pythagoras knew each other, uniting the fire religion of the North with the mystical teachings that Pythagoras and acquired in Egypt. I have tried to avoid being didactic in the story, hinting at spiritual truths rather than spelling them out in dialogue.
The Society of Secrets (SOS) who dog Rhory’s steps represent many things, but not least those forces that in our current era tend to entirely hide spiritual realities under a heavy pall of materialism. They relate also to the spiritual force of duality illustrated by the God Set in Ancient Egypt and Loki in the Norse religion. It has been truthfully said that occult power is at its zenith when people no longer believe it is real. That is true in our materialistic era. The SOS represent that too and use a talented psychic to give themselves various advantages.
At the edge of this tale is Theano. She is an historical character who is said to have been born in Crete. Invited at a young age because of her flawless mind to become a priestess at Delphi, she met Pythagoras. He, now an old man, recognised her as a twin soul and they married. They had four children. On his death she took over and ran his school. Dimitris, who meets Rhory, is Theano’s younger brother.
There have been some intriguing moments in choosing the elements of Time Sphere. Shoshan, who is a follower of the Goddess Maat –or truth –received her name because it appealed to me as a sound. It was only later that I found it stood for ‘lotus’. (There is much symbology in the lotus flower, with its roots in mud and water and the flower opening to the sun.) Later still I discovered that the Nile in essence has a lotus shape seen from above and that the lotus plant was central to Egyptian ideas of spiritual awakening.
Finding a setting for this story that did not have to come entirely from the imagination was crucial for me and so I drew on my experience of Horsham in Sussex (England) and renamed the town Hammerford. This allowed me to locate Rhory for some key scenes at a local all boys’school, Scrivener’s, and to draw on some real events that –on writing them –sound unlikely, but actually happened. I did indeed see a boy at Collyer’s Grammar School insist a first year (year seven in today’s money) put the blade of a screw-driver in his mouth, or else. And a fellow school mate of mine did once bring a grenade to school as well. The capacity of the bandstand in Horsham Park to act as a portal between times is not something I ever tested, and I doubt that it has a Mythraic Temple hidden below, unlike the one in Hammerford Park.
Murray Morison May 2014
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