While John was on his Sob Rock tour in April 2022 (with a huge spiritual alignment in a Jupiter Neptune Conjunction), his wonderful created “memories” of the late ‘80s (when I was in high school), I was here in New Mexico writing the manuscript for my La Madeleine and discovered that when I was 15, in 1986, right in his rewriting these now romantic early years, the remains of an archaeological boat, “the oldest freshwater boat ever found,” was discovered along the shore near Magdala, the home of Mary Magdalene.
It matched the mosaic of the boat uncovered in 1977.
La Madeleine would have walked across the mosaic with her own feet because of its prominence in a main villa near the water, and if she did, most likely also with Jesus.
But the mythology is also tied by the very art they were walking on and the type of boat to Penelope and Odysseus.
The boat was radiocarbon dated to her and Jesus’s lifetimes there, and even had a pottery cooking pot and oil lamp like they would have used. And so, unlike almost every other Jesus and Mary relic that can hardly make literal claim to be dating to the very years, here was an actual boat that they could have actually been in, and just like they would have seen and taken on the water between their cities, Capernaum and Magdala. It had been preserved in the clay for two thousand years right where Mary would have stood on the shores of the water, perhaps even looking at Jesus.
Before this was discovered, there was some artwork excavated the year John was born, in 1977, in a villa on the shore of Magdala. The mosaic in the floor of the villa just off the water is “one of the earliest mosaics with ship depiction” and the “technique apparently following the black-and-white style” [ . . . ] “especially known in Italy (1st-3rd centuries CE)” [ . . . ] and “reflects tight art connections with the early Roman Empire of the 1st centuries BCE-CE” (Zaraza Friedman’s “The Ship Depicted in a Mosaic from Migdal, Israel”).
Thus, beneath Jesus’s and Mary Magdalene’s very feet was a depiction of a boat with which they were familiar and it being tied directly to Italian art. With the “Gospels” also showing a strong connection to the Homeric epics and Odysseus, the details of the artwork show how ancient Greek mythology was playing a role right at their feet. Zazara shows the connection:
“An earlier example of pointed broad stem similar to the Migdal ship is evidenced by a sailing ship (associated with the story of Odysseus), depicted on an amphora dated to c. 330 BCE. On the port stem of the Odysseus ship is depicted an oculus with eye-lashes. The brownish-red tesserae placed on the port stem of Migdal Ship, also indicates an oculus. Odysseus’s ship has a crew of four rowers, one helmsman and Odysseus tight to the mast.”
But of course we know he doesn’t stay there. Just as I had been writing about the Madeleine’s arrival in the South of France, here I discovered a very boat and Odyssean artwork at Magdala that would make true the arrival of the art and its aliveness on the other end of this, at the kiss, at le Petit Rhône at the Delta.
John Mayer performing his new song “Drifting” at Madison Square Garden on 15 March 2023
Read More in “John Mayer and the Revenge of the Count of Monte Cristo”
Here are my own mosaic tiles in which I put together the weave, the wonderful interlacing, and published it in 2018. Here is An art detail of the ‘Until Shiloh Comes’ Cosmic Flow Tapestry:
Here is a picture of the entirety (but it’s actually about six feet across):
Taylor plagiarized it for “Me!”, including putting herself atop the Sistine Ceiling, one of the topics of my work, and dancing with legal briefcases snubbing my copyrights:
