The old mother Europa? The new mother America? Katherine? Erden? The first great miracle to appear on earth was the emergence of love in the mother lizard. And the first great bewilderment to appear on earth was the emergence of taboo: having learned of love from his mother, a son was not to return this love to his mother. Caught in flesh and caught by flesh. Even so, O Lord, how marvelous are all Thy fleshly works. Magnus King 1 His mother was of good lineage. She was born in 1812 at the ancestral seat of the Worthingtons in Wessex, England. Her father the old earl lamented she wasn’t a boy, but he loved her nonetheless as his firstborn and named her Henrietta after a favorite uncle. The Worthington name went far back into hoary Anglo-Saxon times. It belonged to a family of Old Frisians known as the Wurthinga or the Woartelinga, meaning “root people” or “people of the root.”
