This work describes a mystical quest or journey, from form to void and back, enacting a significant theme of European literature, that of paradise lost and paradise regained. In a centruy in which a human being first set foot on the moon, this seeking is an attempt to come ashore upon the Earth in its perennial first morning. The "Turtle" of the title derives from the diver myth found in Siberia and North America, in particular among the Maidu Indians of California. Diving to the floor of the abyss to find intuitions of the world to come ashore upon, "Crossing the Kedron" [John 18:1] offers a series of texts describing one individual's spiritual initiations and transformations, Gethsemane self-encounters and purifications. Prepared over 12 years, the work enacts a Dantesque, shamanic journey, a vast voyage across Hindu, Buddhist and Christian waters. It invites readers to plumb their own depths and emerge renewed.
This work describes a mystical quest or journey, from form to void and back, enacting a significant theme of European literature, that of paradise lost and paradise regained. In a centruy in which a human being first set foot on the moon, this seeking is an attempt to come ashore upon the Earth in its perennial first morning. The "Turtle" of the title derives from the diver myth found in Siberia and North America, in particular among the Maidu Indians of California. Diving to the floor of the abyss to find intuitions of the world to come ashore upon, "Crossing the Kedron" [John 18:1] offers a series of texts describing one individual's spiritual initiations and transformations, Gethsemane self-encounters and purifications. Prepared over 12 years, the work enacts a Dantesque, shamanic journey, a vast voyage across Hindu, Buddhist and Christian waters. It invites readers to plumb their own depths and emerge renewed.
JOHN MORIARTY, writer and philosopher, was born in Kerry in 1938 and educated at Listowel and University College Dublin. He taught English literature at Manitoba University in Canada for six years, before returning to Ireland in 1971. Sometime gardener, lecturer and broadcaster, in 1997 he hosted a major RTE television series,‘The Blackbird and the Bell’. He is author ofDreamtime(1994/99), and the two other volumes ofTurtle Was Gone a Long Time: Crossing the Kedron(1996) andAnaconda Canoe(1998). He lives down from the Horse’s Glen at the foot of Mangerton Mountain in north Kerry.
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