HIGHLAND CREEK STRUCTURE

View from January, 2012

With the Highlands now in mind, if we head due north from the sunken barges (that is, again, to say "street grid north" as opposed to magnetic), past the aforementioned Guild with its own strange assortment of salvaged ruins, and up Scarborough Golf Club Road to Ellesmere, we arrive at a small subdivision with streets honouring such mythic names as Pegasus, Castor, Minos, and Helicon. Beyond that is a section of unnamed wilderness where the West and Central branches of the Highland Creek conjoin in a deep, wooded valley. Pressing north just a little further, along the Central Highland to somewhere just shy of the 401, we encounter the remains of a quite unusual structure overhanging the creek on the west bank.

A seemingly haphazard framework of random notches and jutting angles, this large concrete ruin vaguely recalls the otherworldly architecture hinted at in certain works by Lovecraft, where maddening structures are built in a "unknown inverse geometry" of "vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars"...but, of course, only vaguely. Nevertheless, aside from noting it as roughly 10 feet at its highest point, 20 feet at its widest, and 30-35 feet in length, this object remains rather hard to describe, suggesting no other construction that the author is personally familiar with — although its terminating eastern face does somewhat resemble the "concave angular brackets" of the East Don ruin.

As noted above, this structure sits in the middle of an officially unnamed area (although certain maps have designated it as a northern extension of Morningside Park). In search of relevant toponymy we may remark on its inclusion within the greater "Woburn" community, named for a village in Bedfordshire which the ONC has as meaning "(place at) the crooked or winding stream," from the Old English woh + burna. In our local context this stream would presumably be the "Highland" which, despite its apparently Scottish overtones, may owe more in etymology to its original Mississaugan name Yat-qui-i-be-no-nick which roughly translates as "creek emanating from the high lands."

Eastern face, 2012

Another stream we might touch upon here is the aforemention Helicon, which once flowed from Mount Olympus through the sacred city of Dion, and is perhaps most famous as the river in which a band of Thracian maenads (female acolytes of the god Dionysos) washed their hands of blood after having torn the fabled bard Orpheus asunder. The name "Helicon," however, is most commonly linked with another feature of the ancient Greek landscape, a mountain further to the south in Boeotia — although it too has its fluvial associations, namely as being the home of 3 mythical springs: the Aganippe, reputed source of poetic inspiration, sacred to the Muses (and, thus, also to Orpheus); the Donacon (see our previous discussions of all things "Don"), into which Narcissus gazed until his death; and the Hippocrene, formed, it is said, by the very hooves of Pegasus himself. Here we find an overt connection between two of the four nearby street names already mentioned. What relation, beyond general Grecian lineage, they could have to the Creten king Minos, or the Spartan prince Castor — and why only this half of the famed Dioscuri has been so honoured, and not his twin counterpart Pollux — remains unclear.

In attempting some answer, we might note that, while both brothers were distinguished in horsemanship and often depicted with horses in iconography, Castor was especially so, being singled-out in the Iliad as the "horse tamer" or "horse breaker" of the two, thus drawing a faint line between Pegasus and himself. Meanwhile, King Minos is perhaps most strongly associated with the Minotaur, said to be the offspring of his wife Pasiphae and a sacrificial bull of Poseidon, whereas (by some accounts) Pegasus was sired by Poseidon and the gorgon Medusa through a mixture of sea-foam and the blood of her decapitated head (severed by the demi-god Perseus). Furthermore, another, legitimate child of Minos and Pasiphae was their daughter Phaedra (meaning "bright," as before), who, through fatal love, will forever be linked with Hippolytus, the "unleasher of horses."

As seen from the north, 2012

At this point we might also note that, included among all these streets of Hellenic myth, is one Netheravon Road, which recalls a certain Wiltshire village at the eastern edge of the Salisbury Plain, roughly 5 miles north of Stonehenge. Now, while that fact may be of some interest in its own right, what is, perhaps, more germane to the topic at hand is that Wiltshire lays at the very epicentre of the so-called "White Horse" phenomenon; a series of geoglyphs carved into the chalky limestone hills of Britain from prehistoric times until the present day (recalling, here, the chalk mining of our deneholes). Of the two dozen White Horses that have so far been documented, more than a half of these equine hill figures can be, or could once be found in Wiltshire — with the oldest and most famous, the Uffington White Horse, laying just across the county line in Oxfordshire.

Pegasus, of course, is rarely depicted as anything but pure white in colour; although, admittedly, none of the White Horses are ever depicted with wings. Castor and Pollux, however, famously abducted and bred with Phoebe and Hilaera, daughters of "Leucippus" — the "white horse" (noting similarities to the Latin "Lucifer" via the shared PIE root of *leuk- denoting both the "whiteness" and "brightness" of "light") — and have also been connected, through comparative mythology, with other twin horsemen of Indo-European stock; from the Ashvins of Hindu myth to the Ašvieniai of Lithuanian lore, both of whom herald the rising of the sun each day in chariots pulled by flying horses. These, then, bring to mind that great pan-Eurasian solar deity (and sacred bull-slayer) Mithra, syncretistic "twin" of numerous gods (Helios, Apollo, Ahura Mazda, Varuna, and, as some would claim, Jesus Christ) who rode his own chariot drawn by four white horses — not to mention Hengist and Horsa (both of whose names relate directly to "horses"), the legendary leaders of Britain's first Saxons, who have been linked to certain of the White Horse carvings by means of their standard, the Saxon Steed; a white horse emblazoned upon a red field, thought by some to serve as a template for the White Dragon of Arthurian tradition. We have already noted in this structure some architectural similarity to the East Don ruin. What now of our theoretical Proto-Indo-European deconstruction of the East Don's "Tomar" Villaway from *to + *marko, or "the horse?" — and what, then, of the "red horsemen of Donn" mentioned before that?

South face features, 2012

Further connections between these characters might be made on celestial grounds. Both Pegasus and the Dioscuri (in the form of Gemini) have been enshrined as constellations, whereas Minos may be linked with the constellation Taurus as representing both the Minotaur and his father, Zeus, who assumed the form of a bull in wooing his mother Europa. Likewise, though being the progeny of Zeus, Minos was raised by the Cretan king "Asterion" (literally "star"), while his wife Pasiphae was herself daughter of the solar god Helios (refer again to Mithra, and to the solar/astrological association of the "red king" above). Stronger connections, however, might be found in the areas of death and the underworld. Castor, we are reminded, was the mortal brother of the pair, and upon his death at the hands of Idas (in revenge for their abduction of the Leucippides) was restored to life by Zeus on the condition that Pollux trade places with him in Hades. Ever since they have been alternating life for death, never to share the same plane of existence, which may explain the absence of Pollux on our maps today. Minos, on the other hand, held firm ties with underworld themes both in life, through his deadly subterranean labyrinth, and then in death by serving as one of three judges of souls in the infernal realm.

These associations are bridged by the famed inventor Daedalus who both designed the labyrinth and then drew Minos to his death at the court of King Cocalus. Between these two events occurred the imprisonment and winged escape of Daedalus and his son Icarus from the labyrinth, with the subsequent death of Icarus (who, as we all know, soared too near the sun) mirroring the fate of Bellerophon who attempted a hubristic flight to heaven upon the back of Pegasus. Later we have Minos locating the fugitive maze-maker by having him unwittingly solve the problem of threading the spiral of a seashell (recalling the trick used by Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, in escaping the labyrinth). We now must note that "Helicon" comes down to us from the Greek helikos, or helix, which refers to any sort of spiral shape. Then, returning underground, we shall also note that the river Helicon was, at least partially, a subterranean stream, flowing for "about twenty-two stades" beneath the earth according to the Greek geographer Pausanias. Finally, we come back to "Netheravon" which translates quite simply as "lower river," and perhaps now evokes dim scenes of the nether-regions of Hades with its own set of five infamous "lower" rivers; the Styx (river of hate), Phlegethon (river of fire), Acheron (river of woe), Cocytus (river of lamentation), and Lethe (river of oblivion).