Candles for the Equinox

Today is the official autumnal equinox - "by convention, equiluxes are the days where sunrise and sunset are closest to being exactly 12 hours apart" so says Wikipedia.

It's also when John Crow and the friends of Crossbones Cemetery will be celebrating a night vigil for the 'unwanted dead' of Southwark. I'm lighting candles for them too, since I can't get down to London. Crossbones is an unconsecrated burial ground dating from at least the 16th century, for 'single women', a polite way of saying prostitutes. Nicknamed 'the Winchester Geese' as they were licenced by ... wait for it, the Bishop of Winchester!! His palace was on the South Bank of the Thames outside the City of London's boundaries, and where the players from the Globe, Shakespeare's contemporaries, tricksters, jesters, jugglers and whores all enjoyed the freedom of the Southwark 'pleasure gardens'. Though His Grace was happy enough to make money off the Geese, he never allowed them to be buried in hallowed ground.

Now - having found the original graveyard site, urban shaman and poet, John Crow aka John Constable, writer and broadcaster, has determined that the story of the Goose (his spiritual guide, an incarnation of one of the Bishop's licenced prostitutes) be known and that Transport for London be stopped from building on the graves of the 'unwanted dead'.

For tonight in Hell
They are tolling the bell
For the Whore that lay at The Tabard,
And well we know
How the carrion crow
Doth feast in our Crossbones Graveyard.

John Crow's Riddle


The dead are always with us - and should never be forgotten and left to wander in a lost eternity!