From Thurles to Thule: The Mark in the Blood

Research: Claudia Lenore

The Mark and the Breath

On a Sunday morning on Maui, a simple question about my own maiden name opened a door that runs from the thunder god of the North to a lady in Tipperary and on to the ice of Greenland. I asked what the letters TH mean, because I sensed a greater meaning behind every letter of the alphabet, and the oldest alphabets agreed.

The letter T descends from the Phoenician and Hebrew tav, which means mark, sign, or seal. Ancient scribes drew it as a cross, an X, or a plus sign, and it stands as the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the seal that completes the sequence. The Hebrew word for truth, emet, closes with tav. In the ninth chapter of Ezekiel, a scribe inscribes a tav upon the foreheads of the faithful so the destroyer passes them by, and that mark sets a protected lineage apart from the rest of humanity.

The letter H carries the breath. In Hebrew, the letter he signals the divine exhalation, and scripture adds it to Abram to make Abraham, sealing a covenant bloodline. Join the mark to the breath, and you hold TH: the sealed and inspired line. My surname, Thompson, means son of Thom, and Thomas comes from the Aramaic Te’oma, the twin. So the name I carried at birth begins with the seal and speaks of duality, the dual soul at the center of my hybrid research.

Thunder from the Sky

Every ancient people remembers gods who came down from above. The Sumerians recorded the Anunnaki, who descended from the heavens to Earth. The Norse placed Thor in Asgard, the realm of the Aesir above Midgard, and joined the two worlds with Bifröst, a bridge of rainbow light. Thor crosses the sky in a chariot drawn by two goats, and his wheels roll out the thunder.

I recognize Thor as an Anunnaki god. The Anunnaki storm lord, Ishkur, whom the Akkadians called Adad, served as the youngest son of Enlil. Zecharia Sitchin linked him to the storm gods of neighboring peoples, among them Teshub of the Hurrians and Hittites, who wields thunder and an axe. Thor carries the same lightning and the same hammer, and I read him as Adad remembered by the peoples of the North. Mainstream scholars trace Thor to a shared Indo-European thunder god rooted in the word for thunder itself, and that root sits beautifully beside my reading: the sky god whose voice gives the storm its name.

A striking number of these descending powers carry the TH signature. Thor, the thunderer. Theos, the Greek word for god. Thoth, who taught in the Emerald Tablets that masters could come down, take birth, and walk among humanity with memory intact, the template for every walk-in and hybrid I study. The Tuatha de Danann, the divine race of Ireland who arrived, ruled, and withdrew into the hollow hills. Thule, the lost northern homeland at the edge of the known world. Linguists trace these names to separate roots. The pattern lives in symbol and sound, a signature the sky people left in the names humanity gave them.

The Lady of Thurles

My tenth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Poyntz, entered the world in February 1588 at Iron Acton in Gloucestershire, the seat of the Poyntz family. She married Thomas Butler, Viscount Thurles, heir to the Earls of Ormond. The sea took Thomas in 1619, and Elizabeth outlived him by more than fifty years. She died at Thurles in County Tipperary on 27 May 1673, and her son James rose to become the first Duke of Ormonde, among the mightiest men of seventeenth-century Ireland.

The Butlers came to Ireland as Anglo-Normans. Their founder, Theobald Walter, crossed the sea with Henry II in the 1170s and received the office of Chief Butler of Ireland, which gave the family its name. Theobald joins the Germanic words for the people and for boldness. The Normans themselves descended from Norse Vikings who settled Normandy, men whose grandfathers raised their hammers to Thor. Elizabeth’s husband bore the name Thomas, the twin. Her title came from Thurles, which English clerks spelled from the Irish Durlas, the strong fort, adding the TH as the line entered the English record. Theobald, Thomas, Thurles: the mark appears at every turn.

Elizabeth’s daughter, Mary Butler of Thurles, married into the Hamiltons, and her descendants include the Earls of Abercorn. From there the line runs through Robert Hugh Hamilton of Ireland to his daughter Mary Ellen Hamilton Sprague, through George William Sprague and my grandmother Bessie Electa Sprague, to my mother, June Alice Shook Thompson, and to me, born Janet Lynn Thompson. Thirteen generations separate us, and the TH seal bookends them both: the line opens in Thurles and arrives in Thompson.

The Hollow Hills

Thurles stands on the River Suir in the heart of Munster, and the land around it teems with doorways to the world below. Some 35 kilometers to the southeast rises Slievenamon, which Irish legend names Síd ar Femen, the fairy mound of Bodb Derg, a king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Elizabeth lived within a day’s ride of a Tuatha hollow hill. To the north, Devil’s Bit Mountain bears the gap where, the story goes, the devil bit off a mouthful of rock and dropped it on the plain as the Rock of Cashel, seat of the kings of Munster.

Farther afield, the ring widens. Lough Gur in Limerick hides an enchanted realm beneath its waters, and the nearby Hill of Knockainey belongs to Áine, the Tuatha goddess of summer and sovereignty. To the north lie Newgrange, home of the Dagda and his son Aengus, and Oweynagat, the Cave of the Cats at Rathcroghan in Roscommon, which tradition calls the gateway to the Otherworld. Farther still, the cave of St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg drew medieval pilgrims who believed it opened into the underworld.

The Tuatha de Danann came to Ireland from the sky and across the sea, masters of craft, healing, and wisdom. When the Gaels arrived, the Tuatha withdrew into these mounds and caves, and there they remain in the stories, lords of the world below. Here the sky people and Inner Earth meet: those who descended from above retreated beneath the ground.

From Thurles to Thule

Draw a line northwest from Thurles and the TH thread stretches across the North Atlantic. It passes the Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis, a Hebridean circle steeped in lunar and otherworld lore, then reaches Snæfellsjökull in Iceland, the glacier volcano where Jules Verne set the entrance in Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The line ends in northwest Greenland at Thule. The ancient Greeks gave that name to the land at the far edge of the known world, the northern homeland of legend, and polar explorers later bestowed it on an Inughuit settlement and trading post. The site became Thule Air Base, and in 2023 it became Pituffik Space Base. Its people moved north to Qaanaaq, New Thule, in 1953. Hollow earth tradition places an opening near the pole, and the northern homeland idea runs through that lore like a vein of gold.

Thurles and Thule share their sound and their seal, though the words spring from separate tongues. For me, the resonance matters. My ancestress bore a title that clerks sometimes wrote as Lady of Thules, and the map carries that name from the strong fort of Tipperary to the edge of the world.

A word of care belongs here. In the twentieth century, the Thule Society and the Nazi occultists twisted the northern homeland and the word Aryan into a doctrine of racial supremacy. Michael Tsarion, who traces Western civilization to Atlantis and Ireland, calls that use of Aryan a gross distortion. The bloodline I describe belongs to all humanity, since every person on Earth carries the genes of the gods who made us.

Two Clans in One Blood

So whose people were these? My own framework pulls in two ways, and I believe both roads hold. If Thor equals Adad, son of Enlil, then the Norse raiders and their Norman grandsons carried the storm line of Enlil into Ireland with Theobald Walter. The Tuatha de Danann, by contrast, bear the marks of Enki: they came over the waters, mastered craft, healing, and magic, and dwelt beneath the earth, as Enki dwelt in the Abzu, the deep sweet waters below the world.

In my bloodline, the two meet. The conquerors of Enlil’s line came to rule the land where Enki’s children sleep in the hollow hills, and the daughters of those houses passed both inheritances down to me. The ancient rivalry between the brothers, which shaped so much of Anunnaki history, lives on as a partnership in the cells of their descendants.

This brings me to the spine of my hybrid research: DNA serves as the key. The sky people wrote themselves into human genes, and the right genetic signature opens portals, chambers, and entryways to Inner Earth. I have stood before such a doorway myself, a city wall beneath Johnston Atoll in the presence of the mother dragon. The gods descended, marked their lines, and breathed life into them. The seal survives in our words and in our blood, and the doors open for those who carry it.

A note on method: tav as mark and he as breath rest on solid scholarship. The TH pattern, Thor as Adad, and the two clans in one blood form my own synthesis, offered as a researcher reads the signs.