He was born in Bristol, a city where his family has lived for more than 500 years. His surname, Palmer, suggests that sometime before the Reformation his ancestors were professional pilgrims. They were called Palmers because they brought back palm leaves from the Holy Land to show their clients (who had hired them in order to gain some merit in heaven without actually having to make an exhausting journey themselves) they had done the trip."
Though it was well past noon , Martin Palmer had a disorientating manner of saying "Good Morning" to assembling individuals for this fascinating and illuminating walk around Glasgow haunts of my childhood , putting a fitting , revealing picture to many things that were in my mind mysteries of youth , the truth as revealed by Martin was more wondrous than anything of the imagination.
No one plucked up the gumption to correct Martin as to do so would have seemed a crass and crude way to address such an amiable and gentle soul.As the time for the walk to commence approached with the clocks about to announce 1 pm some more patrons joined our party to be put on the backfoot by Martins genial "Good Morning".
The tour began , at the beginning.The point of the founding of Glasgow , a still preserved grassy knoll which was a bank of a burn which is still said to run beneath a roadway under the bridge that links Glasgow Cathedral to the Necropolis.
Martin explained religious Christian settlements in Celtic lands would sprout near the supply of water , for use of full immersion baptisms.All early churches would have an East-West orientation with the burial grounds to the South of the complex , and the North being the side of the devilish dark side , a tradition resulting from the old Bible citing most enemies of ancient Palestine came from the North , the town of Megiddo being the most Northernly town in the Judaic Kingdom being sacked more than seventeen times in just over two centurues.This town is built on the hill from which we get the word Armageddon.A concept of Northern enemies also exists in Chinese culture of which Martin is a renowned expert scholar.
In later years , Martin informed us , the Calvinist and Protestant churches in the area around the cathedral were orientated to a North-South direction as a form of protest against popery.
In the centre of the square is a statue to King William , the closest the protestant religions got to a patron saint to replace catholic sacred symbols.
Then we went down the High Street , High streets throughout Britain are named because they would lead to a High Cross in the market area which would symbolise the presence of the Almighty , forming a sacred bond to all deals of a commercial or trading nature which would take place in this area which came under the influence and rules of the Church , with all traders and their activities being bound to honour promises of transaction made in this market or be answerable to the Church authority.
Then we went past a shop called Ladywell , this is near the spot the Church subsumed the Celtic rites of religious worship at water sources therefore christianising them by renaming the wells from deities to reverence for the Maternal Family of Jesus.Martin related a remarkable linguistic journey of words we have for rivers and waterways that begin with the phonetic "dh" , this being a word of sanskrit origin for sources of water.This means Celtic words for rivers like "Don" , "Dee" and even "ClyDe" have a Sanskrit source emanating from the movements of peoples many centuries ago.This means there is in fact a connection between our word for river "Don" and the ones in Russia called the "Don" and "Dneiper" and "Dniester".The name "Ladyann" Wells is a play on the ancient Celtic and Sanskrit names for dieties of water sources.
Then we came to Blackfriar Street , the place i grew up in.When i was a kid this area was a rat-infested slum , so bad that people came from all over Europe to see an example of the only working example of a Victorian slum.The only consolation we had was the reassurance from the students of dereliction that the only place worse they had seen was in Naples.The street had three closes , some warehouses and areas used by the Fruit and Cheese Markets ( hence the manna which was a lure for the rat-about-town aristocracy of the vermin world) and FOUR pubs.Martin told us Blackfriar street is actually in the section that was occupied by the Franciscan Monks.The gentrified backclose remains i remember as a gooey congealed burst drained communal outhouse laundry and some outhouse toilets shared by many houses were built on the foundations of the Franciscan church.
Martin revealed a part of History which should make us re-visit the "Dark Ages" in a different light of which the Monks and Monasteries were vital and essential solutions that under-pinned a long and necessary period of consolidation from the ecological and agrarian disaster that precipitated the collapse of the Roman Empire when a mixture of corporate run agrarian markets and heavy taxing of the very grassroot farmers that husbanded the land took place in a climate of supra-state monopolies of three massive entities pursuing a ultra-capitalist profit without replenishment model in which they avoided taxes and granted themselves bonuses like the bankers of today.The result was the tax-burden required to bail out these corporations when they collapsed on homestead farmers was such that it was not worth farming the land.The Monks and Monastaries took up the burden , taking many centuries to get land production to pre-implosion levels.
The tour ended in Royal Exchange Square , where the present day MOMA ( housed in a mansion once belonging to a tobacco lord who made fortunes in the slave plantations) , hence Church and Saints replaced by Military Generals , Banking institutuions and Merchants making fortunes from the exploiting of the Human Commodity.The irony is the building is protected by its own secular patron saint - Wellington.
Palmer rightly pointed out the Merchants , Generals and Bankers who promised an everlasting progress in the worship of the material to the exclusion of Devine values have somewhat lost the faith of their flock and followers.Maybe it is time for the Sacred to re-enter our lives.
And with that we bid each other "Good Morning" and went of to our Evening engagements.
Palmer is Secretary General of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a secular, non-governmental body founded in 1995 by HRH Prince Philip. ARC helps the major religions of the world to develop environmental programs based on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices.
In this video below he sets out the logic and sound reason of a faith based approach to environmental solutions that can work in harmony in our climate and times.
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