grayson perry ... maps

the spell by margaret barnard

i was intrigued ... the picture isn't famous ... it is owned by a gallery in rye but was not displayed when i visited ... i hadn't known the stories and the poem and the various mythical belief systems ... but somehow it demanded attention, and interpretation ... there had to be some narrative ... it didn't take too long to discover the outline, but i wish the artist had left us some memoir of its creation ...

margaret barnard had lived in southern italy so the landscape might well be one that she knew ...

you'll have to read the linked articles to begin to understand the picture's content ...

http://www.blackcatpoems.com/t/the_sorceress.html

http://www.theoi.com/Text/TheocritusIdylls1.html

http://www.witchcraftmag.us/ghosts/simaetha-and-her-tradition.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hecate

http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Hekate.html

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/29/poem-of-the-week-theocritus-villanelle-oscar-wilde

http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/hekate.html

https://www.thoughtco.com/review-of-ancient-greek-love-magic-120519

https://www.ryeartgallery.co.uk/collection-artists/109/margaret-helen-barnard

hekate's identity and myth is fairly fluid ... evolving and changing in different mediterranean cultures ... so it isn't easy for me the novice to interpret the picture's details

i need to find an informed interpreter ... maybe marina warner can point the way ...


That which distinguishes Theocritus from all other Poets, both Greek and Latin, and which raises him even above Virgil in his Eclogues, is the inimitable tenderness of his passions, and the natural expression of them in words so becoming of a Pastoral.

• John Dryden,     Preface to   Sylvae   (1685)

to temple guiting where i want to see tom denny's little window