I blogged at Delphi’s Daughters on Morgen le Fey.
Another Amazon Review
There’s another review up on Amazon for Beneath the Hallowed Hill. Here’s a link.
Guest Blogger A.J. Walker–Ancient Monuments
Beneath the Hallowed Hill is set in Avalon, home of the Tor and the Twin Springs. One scene takes place in Avebury, the largest megalithic monument in the world. Medievalist and archaeologist A.J. Walker drops by to talk about ancient stone monuments in “Fertility, chastity, and ancient monuments.”
The landscape of Western Europe is dotted with megalithic ruins as well as strange natural rock formations. These enigmatic stones have created an entire mythology around them that’s probably only vaguely related to their original purpose.
Take this naturally cleft stone pictured above in this photo courtesy of Lisa Jarvis. It’s a naturally occurring rock on top of a Celtic hill fort at Traprain Law in Scotland. The little one is called the Maiden Stone, and the big one is the Mother Stone. If you pass naked between them you’ll get good luck and lots of kids. 
This is a common legend for both natural and artificial stones. In European folklore, it seems to be the women who are more interested in them, so it’s no surprise that many of the legends have to do with fertility and childbirth. A married woman had to have children to have status, yet childbirth was often fatal. A little help from the stones must have put many a worried mind to rest!
People were especially attracted to stone circles where one of the stones had a hole through it. Babies would be passed through the hole to give them health or luck, or women would crawl through to ensure fertility. At the Odin Stone in the Orkneys, men and women would join hands through the hole in order to get married. At the Mên-an-Tol in Cornwall, pictured here in a photo courtesy of Jane Osborne. Babies with rickets would be passed through naked to cure them. For some reason these folklore cures often required a person to be naked in public, something frowned on in a traditional society. This added a layer of danger and rebelliousness to the ritual.
The Bhacain in Scotland is different than other stones. It’s a monolith (what we archaeologists called a menhir) but it curves around like a P. In the 19th century, women leaving the Highlands to take jobs in the city would sit under the overhang to ensure they didn’t get pregnant while away from the stern protective gaze of their parents. Most menhirs look pretty phallic and were used for fertility rituals. Perhaps because The Bhacain is a bit droopy it was believed to have the opposite effect!
A.J. Walker is the author of Roots Run Deep, a fantasy novel published by Double Dragon. He works as a medievalist and archaeologist in England.
Guest Blogger Alayna Williams on her Oracle series
In Beneath the Hallowed Hill, I imagine Avalon (the Isle of Glass, Glastonbury) as it might have been. My Morgen le Fey is not a jealous witch out to kill her brother the king, but a great oracle. The power of the twin springs and the Tor still exist today. In her series, Alayna Williams imagines that the famous Delphic Oracle has survived into the present.
Ancient and Modern Oracles
by Alayna Williams
The Delphic Oracle is probably the most famous oracle of the ancient world. The priestess of the Temple of Apollo, the Pythia, wielded a great deal of political influence over leaders who sought both her advice and the advice of the priestesses who served the temple. The Temple of Apollo was sited over a crevasse in the earth emitting noxious vapors, leading to modern-day speculation that the Pythia’s visions were not sendings from Apollo, but toxic hallucinations. The Delphic Oracle operated from roughly the eight century BC until 393 AD, when all pagan oracles were ordered to be dismantled by the Emperor. After that, no one knows what became of the priestesses.
I was intrigued by the idea of an order of women exerting subtle and powerful influence over the ancient world. I wondered what would happen if that order of priestesses went underground and survived to the modern day. What would their role in world events be? In Dark Oracle, the title of Pythia is handed down through generations of women, all oracles with their own unique talent for foreseeing the future. Delphi’s Daughters are a secret organization, nudging world events and gathering information through vast networks of helpers. Their behavior is sometimes sinister, sometimes pure, but always secretive. No one but the Pythia herself knows how the puzzle of world events fits together, and her priestesses are often left in the dark, guessing at her motives.
In the worlds of Dark Oracle and Rogue Oracle, the current Pythia is a pyromancer. She sees the future in dancing flames. The heroine of the story, Tara Sheridan, is a cartomancer who uses Tarot cards to create criminal profiles. Other characters have abilities with scrying, astronomy, and geomancy. Delphi’s Daughters come from all walks of life: they are physicists, soccer moms, artists, farmers, and dancers. They are women just like women you know and walk past on the street. But they are women with a secret.
Tara’s talents were a challenge to create. Use of Tarot cards requires both an intellectual understanding of the ancient symbolism of the cards, as well as the ability to make intuitive leaps from the cards to one’s current situation. Using the cards in her work as a profiler, Tara spends a great deal of time in her own head. She’s not a brash woman who rushes into situations with guns blazing. She’s a thinker, a planner, and it’s simply not in her analytical nature to shoot off at the mouth — or with her guns — when she can get her mission accomplished using less attention-getting means. She is accustomed to having to hide her talents from the people with whom she works, which makes her very circumspect… and isolated. Especially since she’s survived an attack by a serial killer that has left her scarred for life. She’s withdrawn from her work as a profiler and as a member of Delphi’s Daughters.
In thinking about how such an order might survive into the modern world, I imagined the limitations inherent in being an oracle in a secret organization. It would require secrecy, sacrificing a large part of one’s life, and committing to a larger ideal. I decided that, as time passed, fewer and fewer women would be interested in unquestioningly serving Delphi’s Daughters. In Dark Oracle, the order is dying out. Tara Sheridan has left the order after her mother died, refusing to return. After surviving an attack by a serial killer that left her scarred for life, she is unable to bear children. And there are no young women in Delphi’s Daughters any longer.
The Pythia must try to continue the line, whatever the cost. She is challenged to convince the rebellious Tara to return. Or she must find new blood to move into the future, a new order for a new age. And blood will be spilled in the process.
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Alayna Wiliams (a.k.a. Laura Bickle) has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She lives in the Midwestern U.S. with her chief muse, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats. Writing as Laura Bickle, she’s the author of EMBERS and SPARKS for Pocket – Juno Books. Writing as Alayna Williams, she’s the author of DARK ORACLE and ROGUE ORACLE. More info on her urban fantasy and general nerdiness is here: www.salamanderstales.com
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Blurb for ROGUE ORACLE:
The more you know about the future, the more there may be to fear.
Tara Sheridan is the best criminal profiler around – and the most unconventional. Trained as a forensic psychologist, Tara also specializes in Tarot card reading. But she doesn’t need her divination skills to realize that the new assignment from her friend and sometime lover, Agent Harry Li, is a dangerous proposition in every way.
Former Cold War operatives, all linked to a top-secret operation tracking the disposal of nuclear weapons in Russia, are disappearing. There are no bodies, and no clues to their whereabouts. Harry suspects a conspiracy to sell arms to the highest bidder. The cards – and Tara’s increasingly ominous dreams – suggest something darker. Even as Tara sorts through her feelings for Harry and her fractured relationships with the mysterious order known as Delphi’s Daughters, a killer is growing more ruthless by the day. And a nightmare that began decades ago in Chernobyl will reach a terrifying endgame that not even Tara could have foreseen…
ROGUE ORACLE is available now from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.
Laura Bickle – also writing as Alayna Williams
Author of EMBERS, SPARKS, DARK ORACLE, & ROGUE ORACLE
www.salamanderstales.com | www.alaynawilliams.com
First Amazon Review
Beneath the Hallowed Hill just got its first review on Amazon! Thank you Susan! Read it here.
Happy Beltane!
May 1st is Beltane, the day of the May Pole, flowers in your hair and hanky panky to help bring fertility to the world, and the day that my latest novel Beneath the Hallowed Hill ends in a grand meeting beneath the Tor.
In the Celtic calendar, this is the first day of summer, also the time when the Pleiades rise on the Dawn horizon. The word means “bright fire” and it is a solar holiday, the cross-quarter day between spring equinox and summer solstice. People drove their herds between May fires and couples jumped the fire for fertility and blessings. The Green Lord and May Queen preside over the festivities on this day, showing us the union of male and female in all their manifestations. It’s also a good time for a royal wedding.
Beltane stands opposite Samhain in the calendar, two times when the veils between the worlds thin and the faery troops may be seen. On May Eve the Tuatha De Danann arrived in Ireland. This night is called Walpurgisnacht in Germany—”Woods Purging Night” when other worldly forces fill the forest. Celebrants meet on Germany’s sacred mountain, the Brocken, celebrated in Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.
Gwyn ap Nudd is Lord of the Faeries who lives beneath the Tor whom all the characters of Beneath the Hallowed Hill meet on May Eve. He shows each of them a secret.
How beautiful they are,
The lordly ones
Who dwell in the hills,
In the hollow hills.
~ Fiona Macleod
1922
Joanna Russ in Hospice Care
I had the privilege and honor of taking an advanced writing class with Joanna Russ at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was studying literature mostly, but took a few writing classes. Russ stood out as brave in that time of worship of “high literature” over popular or (God forbid) genre fiction. In addition to her excellent critiques, she gave sound advice about how to keep writing in a world in which we’d have to work full time for a while, if not for our adult lives. I remember her suggesting that we might want to take a job that didn’t consume our writing energy so we’d have that left to write during off hours. She suggested not writing junk fiction to make a living, as our “real” work would start to resemble it.
My two favorites of hers are in fiction, The Female Man, with four women who come from the worlds that embody the variety of gender roles often discussed in the 1970’s. Meet especially Jael, warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. But then there’s the librarian waiting to get married.
Her nonfiction is equally revolutionary. I loved How to Suppress Women’s Writing, published at a time when a male student said to me in all seriousness after class once that no woman had ever written a classic nor ever would. Yes, this was in the 20th century. I told him he was a moron and not to talk to me anymore.
Thank you Joanna Russ for all you have done for us—entertaining, teaching and clearing the way!
Turing Test
My novels explore the possibilities of human consciousness–how much can we know and how, is enlightenment a real possibility? Some of my favorite science fiction involves exploring the possibility of machines becoming conscious. Odyssey Five was one of my favorites, but I’m sure you can name many. Zvi Zaks, another Eternal Press author, explores artificial intelligence. The Turing test was designed to see if computers can ever approach consciousness. Here’s what he says about his novels:
With A VIRTUAL AFFAIR, the novel published by Eternal Press, the question of the Turing test (if an observer can’t tell whether questions are being answered by a machine or a person, is the machine ‘intelligent’?) is discussed. The main character, a computer program named Barbara, can pass this test with flying colors if she wants, and people keep seeing her as human. But, as she keeps reminding everyone, she isn’t. Her existence is dedicated to making people happy – but can a computer program know what’s best for humanity?
The second book, IMPLAC (published by e-star) takes place decades after a war against genocidal robots. The hero, Tommy McPherson, finds a lone surviving robot hidden in a tunnel on the moon. He manages to immobilize it, and interrogates it. It says that with the decades spent in hibernation, it’s circuits have mutated so that it no longer hates humans. Furthermore, it can tell Tommy where to find other hidden robots that presumably still do hate humans. The dilemma is obvious: if Tommy believes it, sets it free, and is wrong, it will multiply and resume the war. If Tommy disbelieves it and is wrong, the other hidden robots will eventually awaken and resume the war. An additional factor is that lying is more complicated than telling the truth, and the robots, vicious though they were, had never before shown any ability to lie.