The other day, I finished reading "The Tin Man" by David Austell. I happened to find it in a thrift, a signed first edition, and the cover caught my eye because of this:
AQUAE (wet-cold)
TERRA (dry-cold)
AERIS (wet-hot)
IGNIS (dry-hot).
It reminded me of another book which had a huge impact on me, Brad Steiger's "A Roadmap of Time." Now that book was all about weather/climate cycles revolving around wet/dry and cold/warm. But that was not what this new book was about. The cover also depicted Joseph of Arimathea planting his staff at Wearyall Hill...in Cornwall. Austell draws from the Bible, history and myth to tell an epic tale of a semi-fictional life of Joseph, great-uncle of Jesus the Christ. In it, the tin man, Joseph, who oversaw the tin mines in Cornwall, is himself refined from the ore of tin into gold, and by the end of the tale, he is saved and transformed. I was so moved at the end that I cried, and it's rare for a book to do that.
In the end, the message was akin to UR. Joseph, during a career in the Roman military, killed lots of Belgae, but in the end, he adopted a young Belgae warrior as his own son. The tale also riffs off many old myths from old Britain that Joseph (and Jesus) were there. Yeah, I'm a bit of a British Israelist...