Moving on to Brown Book:4. We now have a passage that seems much more connected to place. The landscape described appears to match with the landscape around the area where the journals were found. We are in an area scoured by mining and on the edge of the Peak District. The author would have seen any number "low moorland pools" and "blasted and barren scraps of earth". So here goes - again a simple alphabetic substitution cipher, starting at R:
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It gathered first in the dark places. In the low moorland pools that lie deep and still, far from our dwelling places, fathomless depths, silent and beyond thought. Those blasted and barren scraps of the earth, changed by time yet changeless. Looking up the sky brooded, making the question significant. Can you feel the change in the earth? Though the mountain still touches the heavens the very soil writhes with the coming turmoil. All is still yet it speaks to the skies. A brooding presence, hidden yet always with us. And it will rise up and when the moon grows dim and the stars shatter and the wolf howls. It is something that has always been known yet comes new to every generation and calls to us across time. And everything is out of joint, a keening wasteland that brings only restless hordes to cover the plains. They move endlessly forwards, closer each day until the ground beneath our feet shakes. This is how it was and how it will be. Will it be suffering or glory? It is never clear. I must make it clear, that is my calling. Others must know in order to fulfil the covenant.
It gathered first in the dark places. In the low moorland pools that lie deep and still, far from our dwelling places, fathomless depths, silent and beyond thought. Those blasted and barren scraps of the earth, changed by time yet changeless. Looking up the sky brooded, making the question significant. Can you feel the change in the earth? Though the mountain still touches the heavens the very soil writhes with the coming turmoil. All is still yet it speaks to the skies. A brooding presence, hidden yet always with us. And it will rise up and when the moon grows dim and the stars shatter and the wolf howls. It is something that has always been known yet comes new to every generation and calls to us across time. And everything is out of joint, a keening wasteland that brings only restless hordes to cover the plains. They move endlessly forwards, closer each day until the ground beneath our feet shakes. This is how it was and how it will be. Will it be suffering or glory? It is never clear. I must make it clear, that is my calling. Others must know in order to fulfil the covenant.
This, to me, has two main themes. We have the "brooding presence" that will "rise up". And what is interesting is that the author doesn't seem to want to encourage or discourage this happening. He or she feels the need to explain this - to "make it clear". Not only that, but to make it clear to others, who need to know to "fulfil the covenant".
This is an interesting change in tone from the other tracts. In the previous writings we have seen a very internalised, almost philosophical, tone, talking of seeking a path or escaping from some kind of captivity. Here in this passage the author is talking about the need to communicate some truth externally. This is the first indication that the tracts were meant to be read by others, rather than being simply the author's own musings. Or at least that the author intended, at the end of whatever philosophical process he or she was going through, to reveal the discovery to the wider world. The question remains - are these journals the way the author intended to communicate this discovery? Or did something happen to prevent the revelation?
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