POKIN' ROUND OXFORD
ALL SAINTS
All Saints Church stands close to Carfax in the very centre of Oxford on its own crossroads formed by The High Street, The Turl (Thor) and King Alfred's Street. It was designed by Henry Aldrich, composer and Dean of Christchurch Cathedral in 1776 using in some measure the ideas of the Freemason, Nicholas Hawkesmooor, principally in the tower.
Nicholas Hawksmoor was a protege of another Freemason, Christopher Wren and a prolific architect designing a number of Gothic style buildings around England including Blenheim Palace (begun 1705), the Clarendon Building, Oxford,
All Saints church is now the library of Lincoln College whose most famous 'old boy' was John Wesley.
Built on the site of an ancient sacred site.
Bleak life interfaces with political conspiracy when a friend of a prostitute is impregnated by Queen Victoria's grandson. The prostitute threatens to go public with that information unless she's
Excerpt from a revue by Richard Gehr for Village Voice of:
FROM HELL
By Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell:
paid 10 pounds hush money. The Crown's damage control arrives in the form of Sir William Withey Gull, a highly ranked Freemason and royal physician. In addition to keeping the girl and her three friends quiet, he avails himself of the opportunity to reassert patriarchal order through a series of savage though surgically precise acts of murder. Part metaphysical mystery and part early police procedural, From Hell aims to explain the violence men have historically directed toward women. Its scariest chapters are those in which Sir Gull waxes philosophical on the Dionysian architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose Christian churches, with their Freemasonic and pagan overtones, loomed large in London's 19th-century cityscape. For Gull, these buildings represent "the war 'twixt sun and moon," with London's architecture mapping patriarchy's struggle to overcome a matriarchal heritage that extends back to when Brutus of Troy seized Britain in the name of the moon goddess Diana. Gull is obsessed by London's phallic obelisks and overpowering churches, which displaced
All Saints 'flaming' spire
earlier pagan symbology. "You see," declares Gull to his henchman, Netley, "man's pattern of control grows faint amidst the tumult of these times. . . . The ancient symbols must be REINFORCED. . . lest we should fall before the scythe-wheeled chariots of some new Boadicea; perish on Diana's altars, reinstated and impatient for her reckoning."
All Saints Emblem
National Westminster Bank
The Mitre Inn sign
Enlightenment on THE MEANING AND ORIGIN OF ALL SAINTS DAY explained here
So now you know. And don't go asking any awkward questions like, 'Why did Gregory 111 dedicate a chapel to 'All the Saints' on this date in the first place?'
