World-Historical Karma: a remembrance weekend story

Here is a brief personal family story that links two immense world-historical events, the fall of Singapore and 9/11, and ponders the mysteries of destiny.

I never met by father’s brother Bert. He was swept up in the gigantic events of the Second World War. Barely weeks after marrying, he was called up and sent to the Far East, leaving his newly pregnant bride behind. It was his misfortune to find himself in Singapore.

After Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the Japanese lost no time in putting their enormous geo-political plans into operation and rapidly attacked British colonial targets. The most strategically important was Singapore on the tip of Malaysia.

One of the great jewels of the empire, the city was heavily fortified all around its sea-front but a belief that the Malaysian jungle terrain was impenetrable to any invading army had left its land-side undefended. This proved to be a catastrophic error.

The Japanese moved with great speed and ferocity and despite having smaller forces captured the city in February 1942 after the British and Allied troops were forced to surrender. Appalling savagery characterised their conduct throughout the entire campaign. Australian soldiers who had surrendered were doused in petrol and set alight. In Singapore itself, nearly two hundred patients and staff at the Alexandra Hospital were killed for sick kicks.






It was the greatest British defeat in the war and in many ways our entire history. Retrospectively it probably signalled, more than any other event, the dissolution of the British Empire. The myth of white European superiority, already well-dented, was essentially destroyed. Nothing would ever be the same again.

My uncle Bert was amongst nearly a hundred thousand Allied soldiers taken prisoner. All that is known of his fate is that he ended up as a prisoner working on the notorious Death Railway of Bridge over the River Kwai fame. He never returned.






I’m not going to linger over the kind of treatment the prisoners received. I do consider it to be an essential part of any education that purports to cover the twentieth century to include the details and would refer those interested to Lord Russell of Liverpool’s masterly The Knights of Bushido.









In Remembrance




Bert’s son Edward never knew his father. He was by no means alone in coming into incarnation with such a destiny at that time. In due course he made a success out of his life and in turn raised a family of his own. Christmas card round-robin letters informed the greater family of his sons’ welcome progress. One of them left Britain for America and secured a job working in one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.







In early September 2001 various circumstances arose that led him to decide to take a holiday off work on the 11th in order to play golf. As a result he escaped another enormous event on the greater world stage.

I can’t help but note a strange symmetry in the life of a man who never knew his own father due to his involvement in a huge historical event but whose own son was spared a similar fate.

Millions died in the conflicts that characterised the twentieth century. Part of the horror that accompanies this comes through a feeling of meaninglessness and general futility. There’s no doubting that a lot of the suffering makes no immediate sense at all.

Rudolf Steiner spoke often of karma, group souls, reincarnational processes and hidden forces at work behind world-historical events. I’m inclined to feel that my little family story gives a glimpse of such things in motion. I tend to think they are more widespread than many would suspect once one is able to spot them. The presence of any such episodes serves to change one’s attitude to the mystery of how we find ourselves alive in this particular epoch and what we might become involved in. It helps to loosen the grip of a grim materialism.

By way of a concluding pause for thought: Steiner had his own version of the Christian Anti-Christ known as Ahriman after the principle of darkness in the ancient Zoroastrian religion. The founder of Anthroposophy carved a striking image of him.







He believed that this being would actually physically incarnate in 1998. An ever-greater immersion in materialism, characterised by an abuse of science, philosophy, and politics were prophesied.






A supposedly unenhanced photo of the 9/11 nightmare seems to show an image of Ahriman manifesting in the smoke. Steiner believed that our acknowledgement of the greater perspective of spiritual principles would help us collectively navigate the current dark epoch.

L Ron Hubbard and the Babalon Working

I have decided to post a long piece that will be an appendix in my upcoming Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus. I like to think it's fairly unique in comparison to other treatments on the same subject in as much as I am not a rabid Ron hater and therefore have perhaps spotted a few potentially interesting things that others might have missed. Although there are references to topics covered earlier in the book this is a fairly self-contained piece.


Scientology accounts of L Ron Hubbard’s life leave blank the incredible period from 1945-6 when he was involved with Jack Parsons and the legendary magical Babalon Working. An extensive account of this episode has already been given but LRH’s role is so contentious and mysterious it is worth considering separately. I believe I have brought together data that has not been thus arranged before and that it does at least a little to unravel some of the calumny surrounding LRH in this context and suggest that he might be a bit more interesting than his denigrators would contend.

With each passing decade Jack Parsons becomes increasingly well known. He may now be a candidate for the title of coolest man of the twentieth century, being referred to by Richard Metzger as the ‘James Dean of the occult’. Whatever one might feel about the nature of the spiritual forces he invoked, a quick perusal of his writings soon reveals a powerful and passionate advocate for freedom. He was obviously a quite incredible man.

The general feeling of Hubbard’s role has scarcely developed at all. Occultist lovers of Parsons see Ron as a scoundrel who laid Jack low by cheating him out of a large sum of money and running off with his former partner. We will see how when confronted with the story of the Babalon Working the Church of Scientology portrayed LRH as a man on a covert Intelligence mission to infiltrate and undermine the Parsons scene.







With Peter Moon’s Montauk books the possibility of a wider perspective began to present itself. As we have seen, Moon was able to offer unique insights through having known both L Ron Hubbard and Marjorie Cameron. She recalled how the two men had been like brothers and she herself was not hostile to Ron. She even added a detail missing from other accounts that Hubbard had actually contacted Parsons again, years after their tumultuous parting, when Dianetics had just appeared. He invited Jack to invest in it! This might be seen as colossal nerve on his part but it hints at a bigger picture of their interaction.

Is it possible to create a narrative that in some way allows the different versions to all be essentially true? Beyond Moon’s beginnings I’m not aware that anyone has ever really tried to do so. This is a tentative speculative attempt that may well be an imaginative fiction. I’m not asking anyone to necessarily endorse it. I would hope it might be found interesting and show that when approached in the right spirit this compelling topic still has some open doors.








On October 5th 1969 the London Times published a lengthy article going into considerable detail on L Ron Hubbard’s involvement in the Babalon Working. This information had never been disseminated before and was known only to a few occultists. Given that Scientology was a topic of some controversy at the time it was quite a story. Before long the church responded with a threat of litigation unless the story was withdrawn. The paper eventually agreed to print a statement from Scientology in December which was written by Hubbard himself. All subsequent enquiries to the church concerning the Parsons period in LRH’s life are simply referred back to the original statement.

‘Hubbard broke up black magic in America: Dr Jack Parsons of Pasadena, California, was America’s Number One solid fuel rocket expert. He was involved with the infamous English black magician Aleister Crowley who called himself “The Beast 666.”Crowley ran an organization called the Order of Templars Orientalis over the world which had savage and bestial rites. Dr Parsons was head of the American branch located at 100 Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena California. This was a huge old house which had paying guests who were the USA nuclear physicists working at Cal Tech. Certain agencies objected to nuclear physicists being housed under the same roof.

L Ron Hubbard was still an officer of the US Navy because he was well known as a writer and philosopher and had friends among the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation. He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad.

Parsons wrote to Crowley in England about Hubbard. Crowley “the Beast 666” evidently detected an enemy and warned Parsons. This was proven by the correspondence unearthed by the Sunday Times. Hubbard's mission was successful far beyond anyone's expectations. The house was torn down. Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and destroyed and never recovered. The physicists included many of the sixty-four top US scientists who were later declared insecure and dismissed from government service with so much publicity.’

To begin with, it is important to set the statement in the wider context of the time period it appeared in. Hubbard and his church were already receiving a lot of flack and had black propaganda being flung at them. A year before, in 1968, LRH had commissioned an investigation to try and figure out where it was coming from and decided that a global cabal of big-pharma psychiatrists were heavily involved.

Less than one week after the Times article, on Crowley’s birthday October 12th for those appreciative of such detail, Charles Manson was arrested. It wasn’t long before he became the biggest story in America and all aspects of his past were being investigated. Perhaps the biggest issue was how he was able to “program” his followers? Where might he have learnt mind control techniques? It soon surfaced that he had received fairly extensive Dianetic auditing in prison and used a lot of Scientology terminology. It appeared that he did check out the organisation on his release. One of his followers took a somewhat mysterious journey to England and some unexplained deaths and unsolved murders cluster around it.

Scientology distanced itself from the Manson connection. They weren’t exactly the only ones. Charlie had spent a lot of time at the prestigious Esalen Institute, a place where some of the biggest names in the Human Potential movement put on events. Manson was there very shortly before the Tate murders but people weren’t exactly queuing up to talk about it. The Hollywood set that Charlie and his girls provided a rent-a-drug-orgy service to went a bit quiet too. Of course they did. I consider it to be perfectly straightforward that Scientology would want to play down any Manson connection. His major warp-outs derived from other sources, primarily his own head.

Nonetheless there is material circulating on the internet that states that Charles Manson was a Scientologist in a manner virtually suggesting he was a fully paid up member and that somehow LRH is responsible for his crimes or variants thereof. This is entirely untrue and unreasonable. In fact those that know the Manson story in greater detail will be aware that in the last crazy days of Helter Skelter one man named Paul Crockett persistently stood his ground against Charlie and even helped some of his followers break free from him by effectively de-programming them. He was able to do this because of a strong background in Scientology.

The OTO weren’t looking too good then either. Jean Brayton’s Solar Lodge achieved notoriety through the decidedly unpleasant episode, mentioned earlier in the Strange Days section, of the child chained in a box in the desert. The subsequent trial was widely reported at the end of October 1969. The actions of one lodge were not representative of the organization worldwide but try telling that to the media. The Times article showing some kind of Hubbard involvement with an OTO linked scenario appeared just a few weeks before the Boy in the Box trial was reported. It is again understandable that a damage-limitation exercise would be deemed necessary. The ‘savage and bestial rites’ may be reflective of that peculiar situation.

The kind of cultic milieu that Manson arose from and was later so well portrayed by Ed Sanders in The Family seemed to be very interdependent. One part of the equation was the Process Church which had undoubtedly been founded by two former Scientologists even though the end result was a long way away from its source.

As for Crowley, after his Sgt Pepper appearance, 1969 was the year that he really began to re-emerge with the reissue of the Confessions. We have seen that the legend of infamy hasn’t gone away and isn’t likely to. In many minds Crowley equals black magic equals evil. Is it that much of a surprise that at the end of ’69, an OTO Crowley Manson association was the kind of thing Scientology could do without. The Crowley connection is there though. It does rather seem that the interest continued after his break with Jack Parsons and this will be investigated shortly.

Beyond that, what about the basic story that LRH was sent in as part of an Intelligence operation to infiltrate the Parsonage? It makes sense that considering the circles Parsons moved in he would be thought of as a potential huge security risk. Hubbard, who, regardless of controversies around his biography, definitely did have a military background, would have been absolutely the perfect person to send in on such a mission. It’s also fairly obvious that the chances of finding corroborating information in any government documents are virtually zero. If such a mission ever existed no paper trail would ever lead to it.







One of the biggest realms of contention in Hubbard’s biography concerns his military career during the Second World War. Dedicated Ron haters have spent considerable time going through an enormous number of Scientology publications comparing details given of that period of time. There are undoubtedly inconsistencies. Ron spoke of medals and wounds and some interesting exploits. Russell Miller in Bare Faced Messiah attacked these stories armed with other documents that paint a picture of Ron as incompetent or problematical and leave the impression he was an out and out liar.

In today’s conspiratorial climate it’s rather interesting to find someone who has published extensively on CIA black-ops, the Kennedy assassination, and a whole other bunch of controversial topics coming out with a startling extended defence of Ron and his military career. The man in question was no stranger to controversy himself and has been harangued as an unreliable fantasist but the fact that his take on LRH even exists is notable.



Fletcher Prouty



Fletcher Prouty may be best known for being an advisor on Oliver Stone’s JFK movie. The character designated only as X played by Donald Sutherland was based on him.





The man does seem to have had a most intriguing military career. After joining up in 1941, within a month of LRH, he had a distinguished war in the air force and worked in the mid-fifties from US Air force HQ for a decade creating a system of “Military Support of the Clandestine Operations of the CIA”. He moved in the highest circles and retired with quite a collection of medals. His knowledge and experience led to his authoring of a number of contentious works, primarily The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Prouty spoke of a global elite behind international events and believed that the CIA manipulated the notorious Jonestown cult mass suicide/murder.





Considering LRH and Scientology are so often on the receiving end of paranoid conspiracism it’s rather intriguing that Prouty spoke out at length in their defense. Although never a member, he was hired out by the Church to investigate and hit back at what they considered to be black propaganda against themselves and in particular their founder.

When Bare Faced Messiah was published Prouty wrote a long letter to the publisher protesting in the strongest terms about the general tone of the work and what he took to be its selective abuse through omission and distortion of source material. This letter is readily available on a number of internet sites. Inevitably it has in turn likewise been denigrated but its contents are rather intriguing and provide the source for some of Peter Moon’s material on Ron in the Montauk books.

Prouty seizes on Russell Millers playing down of what he considers to be crucial data, mentioning only in passing that in 1941 Hubbard was posted for training as an Intelligence Officer. This is the information that changes ones awareness of all the rest. He further runs through Miller’s data highlighting areas that show to someone with Prouty’s background that,

'Almost all of Hubbard's military record is replete with markings that signify deep intelligence service at the highest levels. Many of his records, copies of official records, revealed that even the originals had been fabricated in the manner peculiar to the intelligence community in a process that we call "Sheep Dip”. I myself have supervised a lot of that function in the offices I managed during 1955-1964.

"Sheep Dip” is a process that provides, customarily, three files. One is the true civilian record of the agent. One is his agency or military true record. The third is his "cover” personality and all that it takes to support it.

Thus when one researches these files, in a routine manner, he may get copies from any one of three...or of various kindred files that are maintained for special reasons. Some of Hubbard's records are kept in from 8 to 18 files as is clearly noted in codes on the records.’

Prouty also noted that a Washington Congressman named Magnuson had written to President Roosevelt urging him to personally ensure Hubbard's request for active duty was processed quickly, a procedure that was ‘most unusual’. ‘Miller failed to note that Hubbard's first Active Duty Orders were signed by none other than Chester Nimitz, later the famous five-star Admiral and hero of Pacific campaigns. A small code number on those same orders identifies Hubbard as being placed on duty with Naval Intelligence’.

Miller mentioned in passing that Hubbard went ‘on a four-month course in 'Military Government' at the Naval Training School, Princeton,’ and was later ‘transferred to the Naval Civil Affairs Staging Area in Monterey, California for further training’. Prouty asserts that these were important high grade establishments.

‘Unlike MI-5's Peter Wright, Ron Hubbard was of the old school. He never revealed important intelligence sources and methods.’ The inconsistent tales of where he was and when and what he was doing were partly to fulfil old obligations. He nonetheless felt it acceptable to let it be known he had a somewhat colourful war.

Prouty also stated that Ron was very familiar with the dark mind control direction that the newly formed Nazi infiltrated CIA was taking that would lead to MKULTRA. A lot of the source material they would abuse is there in the background of his own research prior to Dianetics. In this version of events he chose to break ranks and use the ideas for good. Of course there are plenty of people who would never endorse this idea but it needs to be stated for the sake of balance and the possibility that it might actually be true.

The official Church statement on breaking up black magic in America might just be Ron being ironic about some of the original intentions of his mission as he was given it. In 1969 it was obviously not true in any literal sense.

LRH has been portrayed as virtually a dribbling deranged nutcase. I’ve already noted that he started taking flack from the Feds round about the same time as Wilhelm Reich and for broadly similar reasons. The difference is that he handled it and not only survived but thrived. Indeed, over a period of decades when assorted governments and intelligence agencies were on his case he managed to create his own departments within Scientology to deal with such hassle. This side of the church has always been controversial and likely to attract bad publicity but it has held its own, fought fire with fire, and generally played the spooks at their own game. The name of the game was set out by LRH in minute detail. Quite clearly it was a subject he knew about. He was in fact bloody good at it. No other self-help guru, mystic or occultist in history comes anywhere near it. Pathological dysfunctionals won’t last very long in such scenarios. Hubbard was together enough to play it whilst formulating all of the Operating Thetan material for which Scientology is now so well-known and misunderstood for: Xenu etc.

Some might look askance at a spiritual movement that involved such activities. The same people might be captivated by the legend of the Knights Templar, a fabulously wealthy organisation that protected and served its esoteric interests through money, espionage and warfare. The devil-worship accusations thrown against them tend to be seen as vulgar and stupid. Those guys are generally considered to be pretty cool. Reich died in prison. Gnostics and heretics down through the ages have been massacred for want of the knowledge of how to survive and protect themselves. It is perhaps useful to look at Scientology activity in that light.

I don’t think it is at all unlikely that Hubbard could have been working on some kind of covert mission when he got to know Jack Parsons. That brings us to the next problem. It is clear that LRH was a full-on participant in the proceedings. In fact his visionary material considerably shaped the details of the magick rites. There must have been something occurring in the scenario that served his own mystical process. Most accounts are hampered by a predisposition on the part of the writer to view Ron with hostility. This is often coupled with a tabloid mentality towards Crowley. Such a combination is unlikely to produce any new insights even when the source material has been used.



Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron



A good example is Bare-Faced Messiah. The author detests his subject and goes out of his way to portray Ron as liar, madman, etc. There’s a whole chapter dealing with the Babalon Working. Firstly, Crowley is referred to as a ‘sorcerer and Satanist’. Jack Parsons was ‘worshipping the Devil’. His home had become the ‘headquarters of a black magic group which practised deviant sexual rites’. It’s clear that Russell Miller hadn’t got much of a handle on the western mystery tradition. To describe the OTO Gnostic Mass regularly performed at the Parsonage as a deviant sexual rite is to allow one’s critical faculties to descend to the level of a fundamentalist Christian. There are written accounts from other residents who likewise had no real understanding of Thelema and Parsons passionate libertarian mysticism and simply thought in terms of “people in robes chanting equals black magic”. Miller is happy to set his scene with such material. Add to that a number of skewed facts concerning Parsons its clear that the mystery of Hubbard’s involvement will not be solved through Miller.







A pivotal event in Hubbard’s life that may shed some light on his involvement in the Babalon Working was recalled on various occasions by his onetime literary agent and major sci-fi aficionado, Forrest Ackerman. Interviewed by Russell Miller he spoke of an occasion in 1947 when Ron told him how he had died on an operating theatre during the war and “rose in spirit form, and looked back on the body that he had formerly inhabited. Over yonder he saw a fantastic great gate, elaborately carved like something you’d see in Bagdhad or ancient China. As he wafted towards it, the gate opened and just beyond he could see a kind of intellectual smorgasbord on which was outlined everything that had ever puzzled the mind of man. All the questions that had concerned philosophers through the ages -When did the world begin? Was there a God? Whither goest we? – were there answered. All this information came flooding into him and while he was absorbing it, there was a kind of flustering in the air and he felt something like a long umbilical cord pulling him back. He was saying “No, no, not yet!”, but he was pulled back anyway. After the gates had closed he realised he had re-entered his body.”

After establishing with a worried nurse that he had effectively died he jumped up from the operating theatre and dashed home to get “ two reams of paper and a gallon of scalding black coffee” and within two days produced a manuscript he was calling Excalibur or The Dark Sword. This legendary work is the cornerstone of the official Hubbard biographies. It is said to contain the very foundations of everything that came afterwards. It is a legend because it was never published. Ron liked to tell how those he showed it to were immediately overwhelmed with suicides and madness resulting.

Ackerman has a date and context for this episode that is at variance with the usual timeline. A modest preface from Excalibur has been published and bears a date of New Years Day 1938. The near-death experience happened under the influence of gas anaesthetic at Dr Elbert E Cone’s dental office in Bremerton, Washington. There is no mention of the gate and the great download of knowledge but in this version he returns agitated with the feeling of still being in contact with something that if he could remember would give him the secret of life. This state endured for days until one morning he awoke with enough recall to start on the great manuscript. We shall return to the gate and Babalon after noting another tale from Ron’s early days.

The young Hubbard was a daredevil glider pilot. Nobody doubts this. He told a rather interesting story in the thirties to fellow writer Arthur J Burks. On occasions when he ran into trouble a red-haired smiling woman would appear on a wing and all would be well. Burks speculated on her as a possible guardian angel. Hubbard would name this being the Empress by the time he met Jack Parsons who mentioned in a letter to Crowley that he believed Ron to possibly be in contact with a higher intelligence of some kind that may have been his guardian angel. There is an incredibly evocative fragment concerning the early days of Dianetics when he was asked by an associate how he had managed to write the work so quickly and he hinted that it was in certain respects a kind of automatic writing dictated by the Empress.






In The Montauk Book of the Dead Peter Moon discusses the LRH 1938 “Gate” experience and notes how Babalon is taken to mean gate and therefore the two things hang together. I believe the links can be established in some detail through the Qabalistic framework of Crowley and Parsons’ magick.



Tree of Life from Kenneth Grant's Magical Revival.


The Qabalistic Tree of Life is depicted with three vertical columns linked by twenty two paths. The middle pillar is taller, connecting upwards to the point of white light (known as Kether) whence the formless breaks through into the realms where it will become form. The tops of the left and right hand pillars are joined by a path that passes between them beneath the level of Kether. This path lies just above the veil of the abyss which we have given so much attention to.

The abyss contains the controversial zone named Daath where Crowley encountered Choronzon. It is known as Knowledge. Spheres called Understanding and Wisdom top the left and right hand pillars.

The assorted paths have attributions with the tarot trumps and Hebrew letters which are ideograms, meaning they are taken to broadly resemble artefacts in the world such as a hook, house, or camel. The letter associated with the path just above the abyss that runs between the two pillars is Daleth. It means door. In the Golden Dawn/Crowley tradition, its tarot card is the Empress with a planetary association of Venus.



Empress from Haindl tarot.One of the better depictions of the daleth doorway.


Whether or not he knew this before entering the Parsonage, LRH would more than likely have become aware of this magical data during the initial brainstorming before the Babalon Working. It doesn’t seem unlikely that he might have recalled his experience with the great gate and his ongoing connection with the Empress and found a lot of things starting to make sense. Babalon, residing across the abyss, primarily in the sphere of Binah partook of many of the qualities of Hubbard’s red-haired Empress.

It would be easy enough to interpret the near-death experience in magical Qabalistic terms. LRH was briefly catapulted across the abyss to the Daleth doorway where Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom were downloaded. The Daath side of it is covered by the fact that he had to virtually die to get there and faced the struggle of bringing back what he had found. Being a writer already who was famous for his prodigious fast output was a major bonus here. The experience fits the framework very well and the level of energy, power, and influence he went on to wield were entirely uncommon.

So Hubbard may have gone in to undermine the scene but would soon have experienced a conflict of interest. The forces invoked were extremely powerful. We have noted the resonance with the saga of Dee and Kelly. Ron took action that did indeed detonate the scene when he went off with a large sum of Parsons’ money and his former partner, the girl ‘rescued’ in the 1969 statement.

There are indications that Hubbard’s interest in a Crowley-flavoured magick continued. This means that the official Scientology line only covers some of the story. It does not address whether LRH actually found any interesting lines of enquiry when he came into contact with Crowley’s work and is therefore incomplete but also worded in such a way that it cannot be said to be untrue.

A controversial court case in 1984, the details of which do not concern us here, made visible some documentation relating to the period after the Babalon Working. The details were covered in the anti-scientology work A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack. Similar problems are faced to dealing with Russell Miller’s Babalon chapter.

The waters have also been considerably muddied by the fact that L Ron Hubbard Jr, generally known by his childhood nickname “Nibs” spectacularly fell out with his father and has sounded forth for decades, most notably with a Penthouse interview in June 1983, with the most outlandish accounts imaginable of his experience of dad as a drug crazed, woman beating, baby aborting, megalomaniac, sexual tyrannosaurus, black magician. Those temperamentally predisposed to be Ron haters have completely accepted this material and rehash it uncritically. Blue Sky is no exception.

In Penthouse Nibs told how when Crowley died dad ‘decided that he should wear the cloak of the beast and become the most powerful being in the universe.’ ‘I believed in Satanism. There was no other religion in the house! Scientology and black magic. What a lot of people don't realize is that Scientology is black magic that is just spread out over a long time period. To perform black magic generally takes a few hours or, at most, a few weeks. But in Scientology it's stretched out over a lifetime, and so you don't see it. Black magic is the inner core of Scientology --and it is probably the only part of Scientology that really works. Also, you've got to realize that my father did not worship Satan. He thought he was Satan. He was one with Satan. He had a direct pipeline of communication and power with him. My father wouldn't have worshiped anything. I mean, when you think you're the most powerful being in the universe, you have no respect for anything, let alone worship.’

‘Hitler was involved in the same black magic and the same occult practices that my father was. The identical ones. Which, as I have said, stem clear back to before Egyptian times. It's a very secret thing. Very powerful and very workable and very dangerous. Brainwashing is nothing compared to it. The proper term would be “soul cracking.” It's like cracking open the soul, which then opens various doors to the power that exists, the satanic and demonic powers.’

In a 1984 taped interview Nibs went on to say that “the same individual that transmitted the various Magick tech to Adolf Hitler as a young man also transmitted them to Dad. And like Dad, Hitler, when he came to power, promptly had his teachers and the occult field in general wiped out”. This is classic material that will run forever in cyberspace getting more and more distorted as dark forces paranoid types with progressively less knowledge make use of it.

The Empress called in the Archangel Michael in guardian capacity at one point in the Babalon Working. Bearing in mind his role in the Revelation War in Heaven as God’s bouncer when it comes to rebel angels it seems a tad odd that the supposed Satan worshipping badass portrayed by Ron Jr would want his help.

Some kind of extensive Hubbard diary full of “affirmations” came to light and had brief quotations aired in the court case referred to in Blue Sky where it is stated that ‘Hubbard hypnotized himself to believe that all of humanity and all discarnate beings were bound to him in slavery.’ This detail has been pumped-up to giant proportions in the Ron as black magician mythology.

The fabled document is not available for inspection but I am inclined to feel it may be part of an experiment by Ron to follow or create his own version of Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel ritual Liber Samekh, presented in Magick as the distillation of his experience with the Abramelin procedure. The ritual is intended to be performed daily by anyone engaging in a serious HGA intensive. The four elements and Spirit are invoked with assorted visualisations that we have already noted with Jung. At the end of each section this “affirmation” is recited: ‘Hear me, and make all Spirits subject unto Me; so that every Spirit of the Firmament and of the Ether: upon the Earth and under the Earth, on dry land and in the water; of Whirling Air, and of rushing Fire, and every Spell and Scourge of God may be obedient unto Me.’ It may appear a tad full-on to a tabloid mentality but it’s really about profound balance as much as power and the one can’t happen without the other. It’s not proof of a Ming the Merciless mentality.

Another document that got a brief court airing was described by LRH himself as “The Blood Ritual”. Those with their minds conditioned by Dennis Wheatley novels, horror movies, and Fundamentalist Christian fulminations will start twitching at the mere sight of the words. Only a few details were revealed. Ron and his “rescued” woman mingled some of their blood together to become one in the context of an invocation to Hathor, an Egyptian goddess of love quite similar to Isis. Nibs mentioned that dad also knew his Empress as Hathor. Maybe we can actually go along with him there. Blue Sky manages to find a way to make this seem like more malevolent sorcery.



Hathor


Hathor was an Egyptian goddess of Love and Beauty whose myth cycle links her with lion-headed Sekhmet who on one occasion, which started as a mission of justice, went on a destructive blood-drinking rampage that threatened to destroy the human race. We have here a definite sense of Babalon and that ancient unity of the divine feminine that was fragmented by Christianity whereby seemingly contradictory aspects can exist together.

Jon Atack focuses on Sekhmet as “destroyer of man” and produces an interpretation of the Blood Ritual that is surely transparent in its desperate desire to paint as black a picture as possible. ‘To Crowley, Babalon was a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Shakti, who in one of her aspects is also called the 'destroyer of man'. It seems that to Hubbard, Babalon, Hathor, and the Empress were synonymous, and he was trying to conjure his 'Guardian Angel' in the form of a servile homunculus so he could control the “destroyer of man”.’ “Guardian Angel” and “servile homunculus” don’t really blend together that easily. They are somewhat disparate concepts. Homunculus relates back to the moonchild idea in the Babalon Working whereby a conception is manipulated to embody a non-human force. And there’s no indication that Hathor was intended to bring forth Sekhmet. If that was what he wanted then Hubbard would have mentioned her by name. A group of other deities including Nuit, Re, and Osiris got a mention as well but no Sekhmet. Perhaps the best clue comes from the inclusion of Mammon in the forces invoked. This is a Biblical concept for extravagant wealth, sometimes considered to be a demon by those who needed to control people through selective poverty consciousness. In modern terms it sounds like Ron was using the Secret to put in a cosmic order for mega-bucks. He’s not alone in such activities. If you want to bring abundance and money into your life you don’t stir up the destroyer of man!

In his epic 1952 Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures, one of the most important foundations of Scientology, Ron did have a few things to say about Crowley. “The magic cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries in the Middle East were fascinating. The only work that has anything to do with them is a trifle wild in spots, but it's fascinating work... written by Aleister Crowley, the late Aleister Crowley, my very good friend .... It's very interesting reading to get hold of a copy of a book, quite rare, but it can be obtained, The Master Therion . . . by Aleister Crowley.” And also, “One fellow, Aleister Crowley, picked up a level of religious worship which is very interesting - oh boy! The Press played hockey with his head for his whole life-time. The Great Beast - 666. He just had another level of religious worship. Yes, sir, you're free to worship everything under the Constitution so long as it's Christian.” The “good friend” designation is certainly interesting as the two never met. The book referred to as The Master Therion is Magick, where Liber Samekh can be found.







Whilst it was only moderately controversial and potentially problematical to mention Crowley in 1952, by 1969 things had got a lot worse and this was before Nibs got involved. The Philadelphia Doctorate Crowley quotes, taken from original recordings, can be found all over the internet in video exposes by Christians, cult bashers and suchlike in the usual manner. In the Nibs mythology dad was going home every night during the lecture series and reading Magick to get ideas for the next day.

There are always going to be people who warp-out on Crowley and Hubbard. Put the two together and there is very little chance of any rational discussion. We can begin to see why the 1969 statement was made and why it has remained as essentially the only Scientology statement on the subject. It really wouldn’t matter what else they might ever say, occult gossip will have its way.

Just supposing Hubbard had come out and admitted to a big interest in Crowley and significant experimentation with his work on the basis of the Beast’s remarkable knowledge and experience of the world’s magical and mystical traditions and how nobody interested in such topics could afford to ignore him, that checking him out constituted an essential part of a general education in the mysteries of consciousness. Would the results have been any more inspiring? Of course not. The same level of negativity would still circulate.

A lot of comparisons between Scientology material and bits of Crowley and the Golden Dawn have been made with the implication being that this reveals the secret core of the Church. I’m not going to examine that here. It’s possible to find all kinds of other big influences as well such as Freud and Korzybski. Hubbard was always looking for what worked and he wouldn’t necessarily keep it in its original context.

A student of comparative religion could probably place Scientology in with the Gnostic revival. There are many common themes. We are immortal beings trapped in a prison world by a lapse in our awareness often caused by external agencies whose purpose is served by keeping us that way. It is possible to awaken, become free, and regain the full power of our divine potential. In this Ron possibly absorbed some Thelemic Gnostic nuances via Parsons but was maybe also affected by what Jung experienced with Abraxas and what Phillip K Dick experienced as the Nag Hammadi plasmate generally in the airwaves. Nonetheless, coming to birth in the UFO Cold War fifties, his creation was unique.

Jack Parsons and the Witchcraft

I am currently giving considerable attention to completing my Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus and hope to have it available before christmas but felt I should acknowledge the season by posting a short piece from a section in the book on the rebirth of witchcraft. Some of this, particularly the Parsons quotes,was actually written on the night of Halloween last year when a loud party in the house next door kept me awake and I decided to make the most of it. In fact I deliberately began writing down the words from the Book of Babalon at exactly midnight. It is essential to enjoy and find spontaneous magick in the creative process.




Jack Parsons



‘And she shall wander in the witchwood under the Night of Pan, and know the mysteries of the Goat and the Serpent, and of the children that are hidden away.’ ‘Gather together in the covens as of old’. ‘Gather together in public, in song and dance and festival. Gather together in secret, be naked and shameless and rejoice in my name.’ ‘The work of the image, and the potion and the charm, the work of the spider and the snake, and the little ones that go in the dark, this is your work.’ ‘This is the way of it, star, star. Burning bright, moon, witch moon.’ ‘You the secret, the outcast, the accursed and despised, even you that gathered privily of old in my rites under the moon.’ ‘You the free, the wild, the untamed, that walk now alone and forlorn.’
Liber 49. The Book of Babalon.







‘We are the Witchcraft. We are the oldest organisation in the world. When man was born, we were. We sang the first cradle song. We healed the first wound, we comforted the first terror. We were the Guardians against the Darkness, the Helpers on the Left Hand Side.’
Jack Parsons. The Witchcraft.



The Book of Babalon dates from 1946. It is remarkable how much it carries a very strong feeling of what later became known as Wicca. The question is whether there are any direct connections or if it is a case of Jack Parsons being prophetically in tune with something that expressed itself similarly and all-but simultaneously through other people as well? Alongside his Gnostic leanings, Parsons had a passion for the idea of witchcraft. Towards the end of his life he was very keen to try and instigate a revival of the old paganism and set up a group he called “the witchcraft”. His basic policy statement from his writings on the subject has a familiar tone.

‘We are on the side of man, of life, and of the individual. Therefore we are against religion, morality and government. Therefore our name is Lucifer. We are on the side of freedom, of love, of joy and laughter and divine drunkenness. Therefore our name is Babalon.’

Although there is no direct evidence that Jack Parsons was familiar with Aradia a few motifs in his work are strongly suggestive of its influence. Firstly there is Lucifer as god of the witches. A number of contemporary Wiccans prefer to avoid this topic as it brings in the possibility of a Biblical ambiance that might not take too much development to bring in Satan and the whole Burning Times mythological package they are trying to erase. Others have eloquently defended what could be termed the Luciferian gnosis and affirmed it to be a thing of beauty that no fundamentalist Christian could ever understand. It is now more generally accepted as part of the greater Wiccan mythology that Luciferic covens have long been part of the scene.

Liber 49 also seems to echo Aradia with an instruction for the would-be witch to ‘Be naked and shameless’ .One of many excellent phrases that Gerald Gardner assembled and passed into general Wiccan use is sky clad, meaning nude. His groups assembled thus. Later critics have pointed to his predilection for Naturism as an indication that he used Aradia as justification for bringing his personal tastes into what was simply a cult of his own invention. Regardless of whether that point is fundamentally accurate or not the practice has a history that sits very well with what one could term Wiccan mythology.

Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, groups of Christian heretics appeared who decided to emulate Adam and Eve before the fall and live naked. Across the planet numerous sects have done likewise or at least gathered temporarily in such a manner.
Their intentions have much in common if we can accept the theories of Mircea Eliade. All of these nudists were seeking a return to an imagined primordial paradisiacal state before a fall into history began. If we look at Gardner’s witches they were hoping to partake of something as old as the Stone Age, something from the very dawn of humanity, a time of a purity and oneness with nature that has since been lost. That state could be regained. Parsons may well have been similarly motivated.



German mystic nudists celebrate the 1926 summer solstice.




Modern Wicca has often tried to get away from the popular mythology of witches as practitioners of malevolent sorcery. This was what led to the murderous persecutions and it’s understandable that modern adherents want to rehabilitate the archetype. There’s no getting away from the basic theme of spells and magical battles and suchlike throughout witchlore. A big difference between Jack Parsons and the adherents of Murray and Gardner is that the Thelemic wildman was fascinated by phenomenon of manifestation that would scare the crap out of most people, and above all, the image of witch woman as being attractive in proportion to her potential dangerousness.






Parsons concept of Babalon was significantly advanced by his reading of Jack Williamson’s novel of lycanthropy and witchcraft, Darker Than You Think. The lead character is enthralled by a red-headed, green-eyed witch named April Bell who he soon discovers is guilty of sorcerous murder which does nothing to diminish her attraction. There is a memorable scene that was depicted with pulp-art finesse on the cover of early editions where the hero has transformed into a sabre-toothed tiger and the witch-woman rides naked on his back. This is very reminiscent of Crowley’s Babalon (with which the author was unfamiliar).






Gerald Gardner made his largely undocumented trip to America in 1947. He had just been initiated into the OTO and there was only really one functioning group there at the time. There is a possibility that he may have met with members of the Agape Lodge, even Parsons himself. A number of internet sources state this as if it was an established fact. It isn’t. Parsons had been expelled from the OTO and was out of favour with Crowley by then. He was still in contact with some of his old associates but wouldn’t have been an obvious person for Gardner to seek out.





The American occultist Allen Greenfield, who we will meet again in a UFOlogical context, took an interest in the Jack Parsons aspect of the mystery. He corresponded with Doreen Valiente who was well aware of Liber 49 and Parsons specific witchcraft writing. She acknowledged the striking similarities with what was brewing in Britain and wondered if there had been more direct connections. The problem is that we can find no clear quotes from Parsons in Gardner or indeed any mention of him in extant personal material. A direct meeting between Parsons and Gardner has to remain as no more than an excellent occult rumour. The nudity theme may well be another indication of powerful ideas that were in the airwaves then. Parsons deserves to be noted as a prophetic figure is this context and the rebirth of witchcraft to be a phenomenon influenced by tangential ripples from the Babalon Working.

Crowleymas commemoration

Leon Kennedy's portrait.


On this date, in 1875, Aleister Crowley was born. To commemorate that I am posting part of the introductory sections from my upcoming Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus in greater detail than previously available. Although it serves as a scene setter (and hopefully appetite wetter here), I think the piece works on its own as an initial defence of Crowley against his critics and indicator of what an extraordinary and fascinating man he was.

After the text, what I consider to be a bonus, the recent performance by Marc Almond of Tango Song, actually written by Crowley himself and never recorded before.




THE ENIGMA: BEYOND THE LEGEND OF INFAMY


“What Einstein did for physics and Joyce for the novel (and Picasso for painting, and Pound for poetry, and Wright for architecture), Crowley did for the mystic tradition.”
Robert Anton Wilson. Introduction to Israel Regardie The Eye in the Triangle.


I believe that Aleister Crowley was the most comprehensive prophet of the twentieth century in all of its diverse, ecstatic, terrifying glory. There are immediate problems in trying to understand why that might be the case.







Crowley has accrued around himself a remarkable legend of infamy. In the nineteen-twenties, during his lifetime, the British press described him as the “wickedest man in the world.” “A man we’d like to hang.” Here was the King of Depravity. A bisexual drug addict who practised the worst forms of black magic. Since his death the reputation has expanded still further until it’s easy to find accounts describing him as a practitioner of human sacrifice.






One particular quote seems to represent the hardcore of the legend of infamy. It’s in Crowley’s 1928 book Magick, from a chapter entitled “On the Bloody Sacrifice.” “For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.” In a footnote Crowley then says “he made this particular sacrifice on an average about 150 times a year between 1912 and 1928.” The quote is thrown up again and again in exposes by Christian authors and even allegedly serious occult writers. The very last sentence of Crowley’s “Bloody Sacrifice” chapter says “you are likely to get into trouble over this chapter unless you truly comprehend its meaning.”

So let’s think about this one. We’re being asked to take this passage as evidence that Crowley murdered 150 children a year from 1912 to 1928. That’s 2,400 of them. This would make him unique in the annals of crime. It’s strange how he got away with it really. Rather odd that we have no record of any of the victims. No witnesses. No evidence. Although expelled from some countries and refused entry to others, he was never arrested for any offence, let alone served a jail sentence. Some of his books were banned, even burned as pornographic. He lost a libel action in Court. The little matter of those 2,400 child murders seems to have been ignored.

Perhaps there’s another explanation. Crowley was a great jester and a man who loved to write in code. He put cryptic meanings into his books that only those with a certain commitment to the subject would be able to understand. Although he didn’t mind being upfront and shocking in some of his poems, Magick was a serious work which he hoped to see remain in print and reach a wide audience. By 1928 he’d seen himself condemned in the kind of cultural climate that was making works like James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover unavailable through their use of material related to sex. Crowley’s magickal practices involved sex. The “male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence” was his sperm. It’s as simple as that. The “Scarlet Woman” of Crowley’s magick and the mysteries of the “bloody sacrifice” appear, amongst other things, to be connected to menstruation and a whole secret tradition surrounding that.






As a human being he had many failings which rendered him sometimes a sad tragic figure and often showed him as reprehensible in his relationships. He inherited a fortune that would be valued in the millions today and was able to live a superb romantic life for over a decade. A complete lack of functional intelligence, which he readily admitted to, meant that he entirely squandered his resources and was reduced to becoming in effect a ruthless beggar who thought nothing of wasting the generous gifts of friends on high living whilst those close to him starved. And he did suffer himself. Two of his young children died. The loss of his fortune and the lack of commercial success and acclaim of his literary work, along with the unprecedented vilification in the press and his prolonged slide into a wretched heroin addiction with an attendant long-term weakening of his general health, was assuredly a major test of his gigantic egotism. Through all this nonetheless, he did demonstrate a stoic determination to disseminate his ideas and this never failed him even in his last frail days in a Hastings boarding house.

Yes he did, here and there in rituals during his career, kill an animal, and I personally don’t approve of that.

He didn’t however, as another persistent story states, kill his “occult son,” named Macaleister. The tale is that, at some point in the nineteen-twenties, Crowley had a “magickal” son who he had named Macaleister. The two of them performed a ceremony to raise Pan. Something went horribly wrong and Macaleister was found dead the next morning. Crowley, reduced to the level of a naked, gibbering idiot, ended up in an asylum in Paris.

I first came upon this tale in an introduction by Dennis Wheatley to an edition of Crowley’s novel Moonchild. The story gets retold in many shallow surveys of the occult and variations of it continue to circulate and expand. It may seem strange that this dramatic episode is absent from the works of his principal biographers. Surely the hostile John Symonds could have created a damning chapter out of such lurid material? Basically the whole story is a complete fabrication. Macaleister never even existed.

It has often been suggested that, towards the end of his career, he was perhaps insane, at least senile, and basically a spent force. The fact that he was undeniably dependent again on heroin during his later years is usually taken to imply a complete decline. In reply to this I would simply suggest taking a long hard look at the work he produced during that time. The Book of Thoth remains to this day perhaps the greatest of all Tarot decks. It’s creation involved six years of work with artist Lady Freda Harris. That represents a tremendous amount of application.

It does rather seem that the legend of infamy may be some kind of smokescreen of nonsense. What lies behind it?







Crowley was a poet hailed in numerous literary journals as a genius. His work was included in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse but he was also responsible for what has been considered to be some of the vilest pornography in the English language.

Crowley has also been considered to be either a monstrous degenerate or pioneer of sexual freedom for the endless lovers, both female and male, that he had throughout his life.





At one time he held some of the world mountaineering records having climbed higher in the Himalayas than anyone else.






He played chess to a standard approaching that of a Grand Master and was able to simultaneously manage two games whilst blindfolded, thus displaying extraordinary abilities of visualisation and concentration.









Crowley was one of the first westerners to immerse themselves in the study of eastern religion, having travelled extensively in Arab countries, India, and China. Beyond the studies of the many translators of the time, in the first decade of the twentieth century, he practiced physical and mental yoga with great dedication. Many works that later became famous in the West were familiar to him such as the I Ching, Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, Dhammapada and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

He was the first person of any note in the West to systematically experiment with the full range of consciousness expanding drugs ie, cannabis, mescaline, ether, cocaine and heroin. For better or for worse, the psychedelic revolution of the sixties was inspired more by him than anyone else.






First and foremost though, Crowley comes down to us as the magician. A member of the most famous occult group of the nineteenth century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he went from there to believe he had received in 1904 a communication from a non-human entity, an angel for want of better terminology, who dictated to him a scripture for a new age or Aeon. This work was The Book of the Law and it contains the phrase which is most strongly associated with him, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” He came to refer to himself as the Great Beast 666 thus guaranteeing the horror and hostility of many Christians. What did he really mean by this?



Photo of the Stele of Revealing taken in 1997 by Andrew Collins



We find in the book things that seem to be fascinatingly prophetic of the Nazi era and the psychedelic sixties. There are also early indications of themes later to become increasingly visible in New Age and pagan circles; the return of the goddess and the deities of Egypt.

A case can be made for Crowley’s influence in the mid-twentieth century rebirth of witchcraft that has proved to be a crucial aspect of the ever-expanding general pagan revival.

One of the most distinctive oddities of the years since the Second World War has been the UFO phenomenon and the culture that has arisen around it. Here again, remarkably enough, his presence can be discerned.

His influence can be seen in the life of a military theorist who inspired the Nazis, a rocket scientist who had a moon crater named after him, the founder of the most controversial and powerful recent new religion, and the psychedelic psychologist who helped turn on the sixties flower children.







This was one man. And this is the enigma of Aleister Crowley. Picture the effeminate homosexual side of Crowley and Crowley the pornographer. Can we then see this man 22,000 feet up the Himalayas without oxygen? Can we see the junkie likewise? Could we picture Quentin Crisp or Sid Vicious in that context? As Thelemic writer Gerald Suster clearly stated in The Legacy of the Beast, “debauched degenerates don’t set world mountaineering records.” Contrariwise, how about Chris Bonnington? Can we see him returning from an Everest trip to write a book of mystical or pornographic verse and proclaiming himself to be Logos of the Aeon of Horus? When, on one occasion, Crowley was camped out on a glacier, he insisted on packing with his climbing equipment leather-bound editions of the great poets. He would retire to his tent to drink champagne and write his own epics. What about some of our recent esteemed poets such as John Betjeman or Philip Larkin? Can we imagine them performing a magical ceremony in the Great Pyramid or rites of sex magick with prostitutes or taking psychedelic drugs? As for yoga, can we imagine some of the sweetness and light types who get attracted to it composing poems such as On the Delights of Passive Pederasty, and Of Dog and Dame, or going big-game hunting?







This indeed is the enigma of Aleister Crowley. We all have different facets to ourselves but in Crowley they are written large. Very large. Any one of his different aspects would serve most people for a life’s work. How can we get to the essence of the man?


To affirm Crowley's total affirmation of life, here then, from the album Digital Angel by Othon is guest performer Marc Almond with the Beast's own Tango Song.





Most piccies and Crowley quotes copyright OTO.
Colourised image David Bersson.
Leon Kennedy painting National Portrait Gallery.






Still hope to have this on the street before the end of the year. Won't be shy in publicising it when it's ready.


Love is the Law.

Orson Welles War of the Worlds and the start of the UFO era

In my upcoming Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus I look at subjects I consider to be distinctive manifestations of the new epoch prophesied in The Book of the Law. These are primarily the Nazis, the psychedelic sixties, and the UFO phenomenon.

As part of a preamble to an extensive consideration of UFOlogy I mention Orson Welles legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast. As it lends itself to a format where pictures and videos can enhance the text, I decided to post some of it as a blog entry.

Although the modern UFO era effectively began in June 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine anomalous aerial phenomenon that a newspaper reporter referred to as Flying Saucers it is clear that there is a prehistory that is in fact a huge study in itself. One event clearly demonstrates that many people were already primed to respond to the idea of visitors from other worlds who might have hostile intent.







Perhaps the most famous radio broadcast in history was made by awesome Orson Welles and his co-writer Howard Koch, with their Mercury Theatre Company on October 30th 1938. They presented HG Wells classic account of invasion from Mars The War of the Worlds in a format that suggested it was really happening in the present moment with music being interrupted by newscasters telling a progressively more apocalyptic tale. Simulated live outside broadcasts depicted sounds of carnage and destruction.

Although the programme was clearly identified at its beginning as fiction and this was briefly repeated in the midst of the story it seems that many listeners, perhaps randomly tuning in from other stations, believed that it was genuine and some kind of mass panic ensued. Real American locations were featured.




Grovers Mill monument.



Grovers Mill in New Jersey was the initial landing site and a commemorative monument there now records the fact, a measure of the magnitude of the event in American folk memory. As New York itself came under attack the outside broadcast was apparently cut off as the reporter succumbed to poison gas.




The whole broadcast is easily available online. This short extract is a good indicator of the mood evoked.


How many people were affected and to what degree has been debated at length for decades. There is no doubt that in some cases the responses were extreme. Poison gas was smelt. Heat rays were felt. Gunfire was heard. Martian machines were seen. Flames of conflict were visible. Families left their homes to escape.

Things got understandably confused in the town of Concrete, Washington. A power failure at a local electricity station that began with flashes of light left the whole place in darkness. To those who had been listening to Welles up to that point it got difficult to figure out what was happening.







The next day the New York Times carried some impressive details. “In a single block at Heddon Terrace and Hawthorne Avenue, more than twenty families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture. Throughout New York families left their homes, some to flee to near-by parks. Thousands of persons called the police, newspapers and radio stations here and in other cities of the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids.”


Quite why the broadcast was able to stimulate such an intensity of response has in my opinion never been satisfactorily explained. The gathering storm in Europe certainly played upon the American psyche. Earlier on in the year the crisis over Czechoslovakia that was resolved in Nazi Germany’s favour with the wretched piece of paper brandished by Neville Chamberlain as “peace in our time” had seemingly boosted the sale of radios in America to an unprecedented extent. The tensions with Japan that would ultimately lead to war were already present. Okay, so people were a bit stressy about another war. An invasion from Mars is surely another level of the game.


There are rumours that the whole episode was part of a deliberate mass psychology experiment. It has also been suggested that when UFOs and close encounters started to become widely reported a decade later the authorities adopted a cover-up approach believing it had already been demonstrated what the public response to such news being validated might be. All of this remains difficult to prove. What is clear is the phenomenon of saucer mania did not emerge from a vacuum.


I couldn't resist including this as an afterword.

The 1953 movie of War of the Worlds has a lot going for it. It displays the psychology of that decade very effectively. This section contains the still powerful scene where the priest goes out into the valley of death to meet the Martians. Although I’m a great fan of the Speilberg Cruise version there is nothing comparable in it. The movie demonstrated the shifting values of the time in as much as the priest lags behind nuclear weapons in the scale of escalating response. The scene has a sense of the death of an old dispensation and is therefore redolent of the disturbing third chapter of The Book of the Law, especially considering that the agents of destruction are from the planet attributed to Horus. The climax of the movie backs away from this being set in a church and having the feeling of prayers being answered but the power of this sequence is a thing unto itself.

Tintagel of the Heart

“Something eternal - universal - the very breath of freedom lives in this land. It stretches out, embracing the whole of humanity. It still speaks to us through the hills and the valleys, the rocks and caves mentioned in the Arthurian legends. The winds and the waves sing of it, the atmosphere is full of it. It is necessary to find contact with this invisible Power which, in only one of its forms, appears as the Arthur of the legend. This Power in reality is the Eternal Spirit of this country ---. Could we but realize this, a cultural element would be born again, English in its innermost depths. It speaks to all human beings wherever they live and to whatever nation they belong.”
Walter Johannes Stein. Is King Arthur a Historical Character?






In August 2004 Mysterium Artorius was still a single chapter in my work in progress Avalonian Aeon. I had already found a wonderful quote by the Anthroposophist Walter Johannes Stein from an article entitled Is King Arthur a Historical Character? that is included in a modern anthology called The Death of Merlin and placed it at the start of the chapter. During a visit to Tintagel I attended a kind of arts and crafts outdoor event centred around a re-enactment of Arthur’s last battle at Camlann. On a stall there I found a copy of the original journal published by Stein that his article appeared in. The Present Age dated back to January 1936. I bought it for £1.00.



Walter Johannes Stein



I immediately knew that when sunset came I would stand on the cliff edge looking out from Camelot Castle Hotel across to the ruins of Tintagel Castle and down at Merlin’s Cave and recite aloud the whole quote as it seemed to fit the scene to perfection. This was a great example of the wonderful inspiration I received at Tintagel during the writing of Mysterium Artorius. In that spirit here is the entire chapter Tintagel of the Heart from that work mixed together with other pieces from elsewhere in the same book and Avalonian Aeon joined by some new material to form a unique mix for this blog entry. It forms a companion piece to the Sept 29th Dion Fortune Glastonbury Qabalah .

Writing about Glastonbury in the 1934 Avalon of the Heart Dion Fortune wondered if we “miss much when we abandon the ancient custom of pilgrimage?” “Every race has its holy centres, places where the veil is thin”, that contain, “power to quicken the spiritual life and vitalise the soul with fresh enthusiasm and inspiration.” “Glastonbury is a spiritual volcano wherein the fire that is at the heart of the British race breaks through and flames to heaven”. I feel that the same sentiments apply to Tintagel.

Just like Glastonbury, regardless of the strong historical arguments against the validity of their Arthurian connections, something seems to connect the legendary locations that frame his life from conception to burial. The fundamental factors are landscapes that profoundly impact on the human psyche, places that will inevitably attract a numinous mythology. Many would agree that the area around the cliff-top castle ruins by the sea carries an archaic feeling of tangible magic. The larger locale contained holy wells, waterfalls, mysterious mounds, and the chapels of enigmatic druidic Cornish saints.




Paul Broadhurst's book is the best intro to the wider area.



Imagine the end of a perfect summer day. The all but cloudless sky has become a symphony of gradations of portentous pink focused on the sun setting into the sea. As its reflection touches the water, a rippling ray spreads out from the horizon back across the foaming Mediterranean turquoise waves to the beach, like a sword of shimmering light. From a vantage point up on the cliffs, amongst a riot of small wild flowers, looking across at the ruined castle and down to the entrance of the famous Merlin’s Cave, one can forget all the intellectual arguments of history, feel the Arthurian mythos alive in the very air, and believe. Wordsworth’s famous lines on the landscape around Tintern Abbey come readily to mind.

“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things.”











Rudolf Steiner (pictured above)visited Tintagel in 1924, not long before his death. As he gazed upon the castle ruins, his clairvoyant vision dissolved the barrier of time. This was the man who talked about the “Arthurian Mysteries,” an initiatory current of esoteric knowledge that served as a conduit for astrological gnosis from the days of Egypt and Babylon into the Christian era with Arthur as a sun king. He came to believe that Tintagel had once been a Mystery Centre in the manner of Eleusis. It supposedly dated from around 1100BC. He wrote that,

“—Spirit power lies heavy round the mount,
And mighty images of soul storm from the sea.
The play of light and air rings magic changes,
Which strongly penetrate the soul anew
Even today, after three thousand years —”







Merlin's Cave



The fact that Steiner even visited the area in the first place was probably largely down to the one man who can be credited with virtually single-handedly reviving its Arthurian charisma and creating the modern tourist industry.







Tennyson’s Idylls of the King was a massive success whose immediate influence extended through decades. Such was the extraordinary effect on the area’s fortunes that one wonders whether the poet was a reincarnated hierophant of the original mystery school returned to initiate a new cycle. Something seemed to be ripe and ready in the greater scheme of things.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain contains the first written account we have that names Tintagel as the place of Arthur’s conception. Why would he have done that? Modern archaeology has shown that the now ruinous castle was not constructed until after Geoffrey’s work. It may well be that it was intended to gain prestige through association and also to clearly show Norman control of an earlier power site.

Archaeology has established that during the post-Roman Arthurian era Tintagel was a high prestige site, probably royally connected, that was the centre of extensive trade with the Byzantine Empire. Oral tradition of some kind may have preserved the memory of Tintagel’s prestige during the time of Arthur. In Geoffrey of Monmouth Arthur was conceived at Tintagel. The association has developed from conception to birth. Tennyson had him washed ashore on a wave at Merlin’s Cave down on the beach beneath.

Amidst the atmospheric nuances of the landscape I have detected a poignant melancholy. It seems reminiscent of the Glastonbury Abbey mood, where a sense of tragic loss is sometimes discernable. There is good reason for this.

The Black Death of 1348 is well known. A third of Europe’s population perished. Strangely neglected in the general sense of European history is an epidemic during the time of the most powerful Byzantine Emperor, Justinian. The whole Mediterranean world was trashed by it. The pestilence reached Britain in 549 through the Byzantine trading routes. It seems likely that it may have entered the country at Tintagel.Decades of climatic degeneration had already created a wasteland. The Romano British kingdoms were devastated by the plague. It has been speculated that the population was reduced by 60 percent. A number of locations seem to have been completely abandoned. Tintagel went from golden citadel to centre of death in a virtual instant. This would surely have registered in the locale as a huge inexplicable trauma. The place seems to have ceased to function for centuries.



Camelot Castle Hotel.
"Can you recall a time when you did a masterpiece of creation?" L Ron Hubbard



The cliff top opposite the ruined fortress is dominated by the largest building in Tintagel, the hotel now named Camelot Castle. It seems as if the genius loci has decreed that a castle-like building of some kind needs to be strongly visible in that area. Originally built on the crest of the Tennysonian wave at the end of the nineteenth century, some of its rooms command views possibly as exquisite as any in the country. Over the years a cavalcade of diverse famous people have spent time there. Elgar had been inspired to write some of his second symphony. AA Milne, Noel Coward, and Winston Churchill make for an extraordinary mix. The fifties Arthurian Hollywood epic, Knights of the Round Table, had been partly shot in the area and Guenevere Ava Gardner had stayed, enjoying herself so much that she allegedly still haunts the place.



Arnold Bax


The most famous work of one of the leading figures of the great British musical revival of the early twentieth century, Arnold Bax, was inspired by Tintagel. In the midst of an intense love affair, he had spent an idyllic six week holiday at the hotel. He was moved to compose a “tone poem”. The fifteen minute piece tried to evoke, “the ruined castle, now so ancient and weather-worn as to seem an emanation of the rock upon which it is built,” with its Atlantic vista amidst the lingering presence of the Arthurian mythos. Wind, sea, and legend blend together. As someone who came to musical consciousness through Rock A-Z, it took a bit of effort for me to get into it but it was well worth it.







Steiner and his small party, including the visionary artist Eleanor Merry who had arranged the trip, spent some time at the big hotel as well. To the modern mind, Camelot is a fortress of the imagination, of creativity and spirituality. The new castle that exists in the same physical space as the hotel can serve that function.



A typical Ted Stourton vision of Camelot Castle Hotel.


In an interesting continuity following through from Steiner’s theories on art and the importance of light and colour, the remarkable modern impressionist, expressionist, “Abstract Realist”, Ted Stourton would later help establish Camelot Castle hotel as a matrix of creativity, producing a gigantic corpus of work and encouraging others to come and do likewise. Stourton and fellow hotel owners John and Irina Mappin honour the awesome genius loci of the Tintagel of the Heart in the present day.


I find it astonishing that such a small area could be such a fount of inspirational energy. At times in the summer, golden mists come off the sea and render the castle island invisible. This is suggestive of an Avalonian otherworld. Jung had come to Tintagel and later had an important dream whilst in India that seemed to reflect its influence. It featured a mysterious Grail Castle-type island citadel. It was suggestive of a mandalic representation of the structure of the Self.

I can imagine a timeless realm where a procession of illustrious people who have visited the castle and Merlin’s Cave walk amongst countless shades back up the hill as golden mist and shadows ebb and flow around them. Steiner, Jung, Thomas Hardy, Swinburne, Tennyson, Elgar, Bax, There was no way Dion Fortune hadn’t been there as well. She was amongst them.

During the period that John Cowper Powys, Katherine Maltwood and Fortune were recognising certain qualities of the landscape of Glastonbury and helping to reawaken an accompanying spirituality, so Steiner’s recognition of Tintagel’s former spiritual function also helped to realign and reawaken it.







A powerful modern manifestation of this can be found in the middle of the town. The Hall of Chivalry is a testament to the vision of one man. Frederick Thomas Glasscock (pictured above) was a hugely wealthy partner in the custard firm of Monkhouse and Glasscock. TV presenter Bob was a direct descendent of the other partner. Glasscock had an abiding passion for the Arthurian mythos. After his retirement he had moved into a large house and made massive alterations to it in order to create a Hall of Chivalry.







It was a major labour of love. Fifty types of stone from all over Cornwall were brought in for its reconstruction. Seventy two stained-glass windows were commissioned showing assorted heraldic devices and legendary scenes. The larger ones were of exceptional quality, worthy of a great cathedral. They were positioned in accordance with a precise scheme of colour that allowed rainbow light to fall upon the Hall. There were two round tables, a sword in a stone above an altar, and a throne.










Galahad. You really have to see sunlight shining through this to appreciate it.


Glasscock created a chivalric order, the Fellowship of the Round Table. Local men were initiated. Teenagers had a grade of Pilgrim. Younger children were Searchers, singing songs about the sagas. When the place was officially opened on June 5th 1933, five-hundred people attended. A musical programme included the Pilgrims March from Wagner’s Tannhauser. The combination of sound, costume, and diffused coloured light must have been extremely effective.











Two paintings from an Arthurian series by William Hatherell displayed in the Hall of Chivalry.




Anyone with a taste for Arthuriana would have been aware of this Tintagel development. And that leaves uncomfortable possibilities hanging in the air. There were certainly Grail enthusiasts amongst the Nazis. At the beginning of that decade, before they even came to power, Rudolf Hess had despatched Dr Karl Hans Fuchs to Scotland to check out Rosslyn chapel, a location little known in those days for its esoteric potency. His mission is a matter of historical record for he lectured to the Edinburgh branch of the Theosophical Society during the visit. The Hall of Chivalry opened within six months of Hitler becoming chancellor. The new regime was looking for style models to assimilate.

In 1934 Himmler took control of a Schloss at Wewelsburg in Westphalia. See my Sept 29th blog entry for more details on this.I do wonder if Tintagel’s Hall of Chivalry may have been a direct influence on Wewelsburg.

Glasscock died in 1934, en-route to America in an attempt to spread his Order, as Wewelsburg came into being. It seemed that his work was still-born, at least on the outer plane. Glasscock’s Will bequeathed the Hall to the local Masonic Lodge of which he was a member. It was used by them and hired out for wedding receptions and so on. By the eighties the Masons only used it occasionally. It had become a gift shop and tourist attraction.

In my more mystical moments I have pondered on the possibility that Glasscock’s attempt to found a new Order of Chivalry was a response to Steiner’s impetus. He would probably have known of the visit. There is one work by Steiner and one about Anthroposophy in two bookcases full of old Arthurian volumes in the main hall. Anthroposophy considered itself to be a true Rosicrucian school. Glasscock was known to be keen on Rosicrucianism as well as Arthur.












The whole place seems to tremble on the edge of the etheric. I find it easy to intuit mystical nuances suggestive of vast spiritual forces at work there. It’s like a chapter that got left out of Spear of Destiny: the Hall of Chivalry, alight with rainbow colours shining through visionary windows onto knights, pilgrims, and searchers, the air thick with incense and the rising sound of choirs, the whole scene hanging between Steiner’s Goetheanum and Himmler’s Wewelsburg. That’s quite a mix to contemplate whilst watching a summer sunset near the castle ruins.




The Seal of the Holy Grail (Transformation of Evil) by Baron Arild Rosenkrantz.


Most of the text in this blog entry comes from Mysterium Artorius.

Glastonbury Qabalah. An expansion of Dion Fortune's magical wartime work.

To commemorate the feast of the Archangel Michael, the signature date on my book Mysterium Artorius, here are some appropriate extracts from it (considering his role in the great War in Heaven), some of which can be found in the preview section of its website. The Glastonbury Qabalah section also appeared in Avalon magazine in 1997. The form this material takes here is a unique blend for this occasion.







Remarkable events occurred during the Second World War that I have come to feel represent Glastonbury’s finest hour so far. It seems strange to me that they are not better known. To any occultists of the time it was obvious that the Nazis were making use of magical techniques. They had helped to mobilise a nation’s consciousness through the manipulation of folklore and mythology. The energy unleashed by this was immensely powerful and had easily swept all before it.




Dion Fortune






Dion Fortune felt that a British response was urgently needed. We had plenty of traditions of our own that could be invoked. The mediocrity represented by years of appeasement and non-entities like Neville Chamberlain needed to be transcended. What followed was a new departure in the history of magic.




Dion Fortune as magical priestess by Chesca Potter.




Shortly after the start of the war, letters were sent out every week to a group of associates across the country. They contained details of visualisation meditations that were to be carried out in unison every Sunday morning. The focus became Glastonbury Tor. Imagery gradually built up over a period of months. The participants would find it coming to life and developing of its own accord. Feedback would be exchanged and this would influence the next sequence. It was believed that messages from discarnate sources were received.







To begin with, the scene consisted of a large cavern inside the Tor. A red rose on a cross of gold hung in the air.






For those initiated in the Golden Dawn tradition this was seen as a more detailed glyph covered in magical symbols.



Tor Rose Cross and Qabalistic colour rays by Yuri Leitch.



Three rays of light, red, purple and blue, emanated from a point above and behind the cross.










The fully developed form of the imagery saw Christ at the apex of the converging rays. The purple light was central, reaching down behind and beneath the cross.



Our Lady of Glastonbury



At its base could be seen the Virgin Mary, holding a chalice.







The red beam came down at an angle to the left of the cross and culminated in an image of Arthur, sitting on a white horse and holding Excalibur aloft.










To the right of the cross, the blue ray projected a vision of Merlin, holding an orb of sovereignty. The imagery was arranged over the broad schemata of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, a design and philosophy that Fortune had written a whole book about, it having formed the basis of her magical education.

To me, it seemed a very powerful equilibration of Britain’s pagan and Christian heritage. When it mattered, they functioned from a space of unity. From this inner plane realm, spiritual forces streamed through into the soul of the nation fortifying it against the potent will of Nazism. That’s what Dion Fortune and her associates believed and my temperament inclines me to agree with them.

My sense of that time was hugely expanded by the unbearably poignant powerful feeling of the Tor as the spiritual heart of the nation, from where the guardians of the Grail fought the forces of darkness. There was something else that amplified my feeling for the magical Battle of Britain even further. I’d been fascinated by the subject of Nazi occultism since the start of the decade. I had done a dissertation on it towards my degree. I saw something very clearly that Dion Fortune may never have known the details of.






Himmler had taken control of a Schloss at Wewelsburg in Westphalia. He had lavished immense time and resources into turning it into a Grail castle for his SS. People can argue about the extent of Hitler’s occult interests and their effect on his career but with Himmler, there is no doubt of the matter.









The SS were quite clearly conceived of as a modern chivalric order after the manner of the medieval Teutonic Knights. Schloss Wewelsburg was a place for their elite. It was a shrine to German history. There was actually a circular table there around which twelve men would gather.









Ceremonies took place in the crypt that one can only speculate upon. Without doubt, processes of a meditational, ritualistic and occult nature were generally engaged in over a period of years.







We don’t have to go as far as Trevor Ravenscroft in The Spear of Destiny as to see Himmler as some empty shell manipulated by demonic forces, but the man’s track record speaks for itself. Wewelsburg was his spiritual base. It was believed that many ley lines passed through it. This was where he and his buddies like Reinhard Heydrich recharged their batteries.





The thriller writer Duncan Kyle wrote a novel about Wewlesburg. It’s a tale of espionage rather than occultism but its title evokes the magical reality: Black Camelot. The place can be thought of as a kind of antithesis of Glastonbury, it’s polar opposite.There is no mention of it in Dion Fortune’s published letters of the period. It does seem that the Nazis managed to keep the place secret. How appropriate that the Tor, our British inner plane Grail castle, situated in a landscape imbued with Arthurian associations, functioned as the focus of spiritual resistance.

There’s been a tendency in recent years to try and detrimentally deconstruct the myth of the finest hour. It really does seem that Hitler was never completely committed to invading Britain. His main concern was always Russia. The construction of fleets of apparent invasion barges at channel ports was, on one level, a form of psychological warfare. Coupled with the Luftwaffe bombing campaign, he hoped to intimidate Britain into surrender. Therefore, so some have argued, the Battle of Britain wasn’t really that important after all and so on. Our stiff upper lip, fight them on the beaches attitude had nothing to do with the reality of the situation and subsequently, by some trick of logic, becomes devalued. I shall merely say by way of response, that the number of people who knew where Hitler was really at was very small. None of the German soldiers along the French coast had any sense of being involved in some huge ruse. Their superiors were not in on the joke either. As the barges got built, all were full of apprehension and excitement for an imminent huge undertaking. A lot of plans were drawn up for it. The pilots of the planes that bombed Britain were not exhibiting the relaxed disposition of a bunch of guys out having a laugh. They were potentially open to attack at any moment and therefore the whole business was clearly a matter of life and death to them. To the British public and armed forces, the threat of invasion was perceived as the most fundamental and urgent reality. It brought out a quality of response that has become the stuff of legend. The basic point is this: invasion may never have been as real a possibility as it seemed but the morale and character demonstrated by the British in the face of that apparent threat was real and nothing can diminish that. Period.


At the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1995, I was inspired to recreate Dion Fortune’s visualisation of the inner realm of the Tor. The result was entirely satisfying and I gave considerable attention to it during the time of my moving to Glastonbury shortly after. On December 6th 1996, in acknowledgement of her birthday, I put on a public event in Glastonbury with the intention of using the same material again to see how a group of people would respond to it in the modern world. I was very aware, through reading the wartime letters collected together and published by Gareth Knight as The Magical Battle of Britain, that Fortune believed the Glastonbury work was not just relevant to the immediate circumstance of the war but also to the regeneration of the national consciousness in the future and the birth of a New Age.









As the time drew near I found that I spontaneously thought of vivid imagery that developed from the original core to create a full Glastonbury Qabalah. Notice that I term it a Glastonbury Qabalah, not the Glastonbury Qabalah. I claim no exclusivity or definitiveness about it. It may mutate as time dictates. The main point is that cultivating a feeling for “British music” and the Grail epoch material so important to the western mystery tradition was a vital precondition for the appearance of such inspiration. Much work was later done with this revival and expansion of Dion Fortune’s work, including an episode on the night of Princess Diana’s funeral, but that forms part of another tale.

This material is presented in a form which can be used for pathworking visualisations if desired.

The Company of the Avalon of the Heart invite you to join them.

Come, by whatever means, to the cavern in the Mount of Illumination, where the brethren assemble and those who come in light appear. In the air hangs, in a blaze of light, a red rose on a cross of gold or, for those with such a background, the Golden Dawn Rose Cross in all its complex detail. This image is of the sphere of Tiphareth, realm of the sun, equilibrium and harmony. By its light is the cavern made visible. A celestial perpetual choir intones unseen in the background.

Be aware that a winding stone staircase cut in the rock joins the cavern with other chambers above and below it.

Beneath is a path that reaches deep into the earth where dwell ancient ones, ancestors, faery folk, elementals, chthonic deities.

Immediately above the cavern is a Hall of Learning, a library, where volumes of arcane knowledge await the seeker. Look in its books for answers to your deepest questions.

Above this is a Grail Chapel. A place of devotion and grace, of sublime spiritual power. This corresponds to the physical space of the church and monastery atop the Tor.

The Tor tower is the physical sign of an inner plane Watchtower where a silent watcher, cowled and cloaked, stands in perpetual vigil, seeing the inner tides of the destiny of nations.

All of these places are accessible but let those who would join the Watcher’s vigil take heed of the warning that here is a place of power not suitable for all.

Having sensed the other chambers of the Hill of Vision focus again on the cavern lit by the Rose Cross.

Above the cross, from the realm of Kether, the most high, a sphere of white light appears. Within it as vision and presence emerges the figure of Christ. He wears a diamond encrusted crown of pure white brilliance flecked with gold.






Beneath the cross appears a purple sphere of light. Yesod. Within it a vision of Glastonbury Abbey on a full moon night. The Virgin Mary walks along the centre of its ruins. She wears a black cloak covered with shining silver stars. A crescent moon adorns her head. She carries a Grail Chalice. The geometric grid plan of the Abbey foundations light up in silver from beneath the ground. The presence of the monks of the Company of Avalon can be sensed all around.




The monks of the Company of Avalon from Glastonbury Abbey

To the right of the centre of the cross a blue sphere. Chesed. Within it, seated on a stone crystal throne, is Merlin. He is dressed in blue-violet and deep purple and is holding a diamond sceptre and orb. Representing the most archaic of lineages, he wears a stag-antlered headpiece. A unicorn can be glimpsed somewhere behind him.

Opposite, to the left of the centre of the cross, a red sphere forms in the air. Geburah. Here is Arthur, sitting on a stationary white horse, holding aloft the sword Excalibur.

So is a cross formulated that harmonises Glastonbury and Britain’s Christian and Pagan heritage. Around the four points of the Rose Cross the images hover in their spheres of coloured light in the great cavern. Four more spheres will now join them.




Joseph of Arimathea with the Glastonbury Zodiac by Yuri Leitch



On the right above Merlin’s sphere, but a little below the level of that of Christ, a grey ball of light appears. Chokmah. In it a vision of Wearyall hill. It is daylight. A grey mist surrounds the foot of the hill like a sea. The sky above is a clear spring blue. Across it can be seen shining the outline forms of the Glastonbury Zodiac. The Holy Thorn comes into focus. It is in bloom. Joseph of Arimathea is standing with his right outstretched hand around its trunk. He is facing to the left towards the Tor so we see in profile his bearded face.









Opposite, above the sphere of Arthur, comes Binah. Firstly a black sphere like ink. In that deep dense liquid darkness many flickering points of light can be seen. Moving nearer to them in vision they reveal themselves as innumerable candles. The location is the Chalice Well gardens at night. Many are present for a rite of silent contemplation. In the inner sanctum around the well-head, the vesica piscis cover is raised and its metalwork shines with reflected candle light. Standing to its left and facing right, wearing a black outer robe of concealment, is Morgan. A raven is perched on her shoulder. In the shadows behind, sensed more than seen, is another presence. A mature woman. Dion Fortune herself.




A vision of beauty triumphant


Beneath Merlin and the cross but above the level of Mary, on the right forms a green sphere. Netzah. In here is Chalice Hill in spring sunshine. The Tor can be seen behind. All around are spring flowers. Bees hover and buzz about them. Now comes a naked Venus like Botticelli’s. She wears a head-dress of roses. Women looking like the graces of Primavera accompany her. They are the Melissae, the Bee Priestesses. This is the inner plane realm of their secret garden. They are keeping bees for an alchemical nectar. Somewhere beyond the Tor they work their rites of the Chalice of Green Fire to bring a vision of beauty triumphant to earth.

Opposite, beneath Arthur, an orange sphere. Hod. Bride’s Mound as it is physically today. Superimposed upon the scene its inner plane reality as sanctuary and powerhouse of Brigit. A perpetual flame is burning. Priestesses go about their duties. Brigit stands to the forefront holding a snake staff.









Within the cavern now is access to a complete Glastonbury Qabalah and the chambers of the cavern itself. Any of these realms can be worked within. Perhaps connections seek to be made between them. And the conduit of manifestation, the earthing in Malkuth, is we ourselves and our lives that change through connection with these ideas. And it is the land itself. Following the end of an epochal century of word-historical destiny, Great Britain needs to take stock of its sacred history and inner resources to regenerate itself for the vast unknown future.

Let there be no misconception that because Christ, Mary, Merlin and Arthur represent old traditions that they are now ineffectual, outmoded and generally redundant. These forces were, at one point in the war, bravely invoked by Dion Fortune to purge the nation of all that was corrupt and inert so that progress could be made. This can be done again. Masks that these beings are given by different eras can likewise be purged and their raw essence remains. Arthur and Merlin are no staid Victorian gentlemen when they are contacted today. Indeed, during the two minutes silence on VE Day 1995, before the lighting of beacon fires across the nation, Arthur Pendragon was seen by one person as naked and powerfully ithyphallic within the Tor. The mysteries of Sophia and the Magdalene are now explicitly inherent in the Abbey vision of Mary. And an ever more enigmatic and powerful Gnostic, Essene, Buddhist, Druid, Magician, revolutionary (the list is endless) Christ calls the many emanations of the One to unity at the divine heart that is Consciousness itself. Is it any wonder that the totality of the mystery that Glastonbury represents is activating ever more strongly and that a beacon shines from the Mount of Illumination? Light your own torch from it and go forth. Now is the time.






Most of the text of this blog entry comes from Mysterium Artorius.


www.mysteriumartorius.co.uk