My 2016 book is now available on Kindle.
From the Preface.
The Michael Line, the Qabalah, and the Tarot was one of the first public presentations I gave in
Glastonbury after moving here in 1995. Since then the material has increased and
I have periodically returned to the subject. It was aired at one of Andrew
Collin’s Questing Conferences in London. I commissioned Yuri Leitch to paint
the artwork now featuring on the cover of this book as far back as 2006 to
accompany my talk at Glastonbury’s first Megalithomania
gathering. A short article featuring two of the landscape tarot
visualisations appeared firstly in the ASH
(Albion’s Sacred Heritage) journal and then Glastonbury’s Avalon magazine in the nineties. It has long been somewhere in the
back of my mind that I should turn it into a book.
This is not a work of
history and archaeology. That’s probably not a big surprise to most people but
there might be a few who get the wrong idea of what realm of discourse I think
I am involved in here. It’s not news to me that the concept of leylines has not
exactly been entirely accepted by academics. I also wouldn’t dispute that the
reasons for that are often valid. The story starts in the realm of psychic
questing, a subject even further out on the fringe. There’s no shortage of
people who start foaming at the mouth when the topic is raised, particularly
the Green Stone story. For the record, I was seriously involved in Questing as
part of a group led by Andrew Collins and I consider the Green Stone to be part
of the greatest paranormal drama played out in Britain in the twentieth
century. What matters here though is how useful that story became in
stimulating some faculty in me that helped the creation of a fabulous framework
for a magnificent journeying. Picking around the minutiae of the original story
would miss the point here altogether.
Andrew Collins included the
Lights of Knowledge story in his original version of The Seventh Sword but the publishers asked him to remove it. I had
the strange experience of reading it again, twenty five years later, thanks to
Andy and Michael Tazzar, who has the manuscript. My account is brief. I hope
that Andy’s full version of this remarkable adventure appears in print one day.
It is the fundamental inspiration for my own material. Without it, there would
have been no Qabalistic tarot Michael Line journeys. The questing of the Lights
of Knowledge and the later ley pilgrimages have very different flavours. Seeing
them together though presents a mysterious and powerful unity, an affirmation
of psychic questing and the numinosity of the sacred landscape.
Some serious adepts of the
Qabalah might get annoyed about all kinds of things. The use of the Jewish
mystical system by western occultists of the last century or so, primarily the
Golden Dawn tradition, is consistently contentious. And the most contentious
point of all is the placing of the tarot into that framework. A nineteenth
century invention we are reliably informed. As to which cards are supposed to
fit the various paths, well that seems to be somewhat variable as well.
I have made use of the
Golden Dawn tarot attributions in this work. They were accepted by Dion Fortune
and, with one notable exception that will feature in the narrative, by Aleister
Crowley, the two most important and influential occultists of the twentieth
century. I make no arguments for anything being set in stone however. I have
simply found that the material worked amazingly well in the context in which I
experimented with it. It served a purpose. It served the purpose of leading me
and, over the years a number of other people, on unique journeys that took in a
diverse selection of ancient mystical sites across an endlessly inspiring
landscape, an expansive journey that left an enduring appreciation of Britain’s
extraordinary heritage and that showed how the magical traditions sit alongside
poetry and history as profound creative vehicles. I certainly seek to stir
poetic sensibilities though my combination of influences. The presence in the
narrative of William Blake helps make that clear.
The wonderful cover
painting by Yuri Leitch is an example of where artistic concerns have taken
priority over magical details. In the Qabalisitc terms later explained here,
the rainbow should connect the lower spheres depicting the White Horse of
Uffington and Silbury Hill and pass beneath the image of Glastonbury Tor. I
felt it worked better passing over all three.
Maybe we can say that the
subject matter of this work is a bit psychogeographical inasmuch as it deals
with the interaction of the human psyche with the landscape and makes use of
some distinct mental mapping techniques to do so. Perhaps that might make some
a bit more comfortable as that is a realm where we are allowed to be a bit
weird and quirky.
I’ve travelled along the
Michael Line in 1991,92,97,98 and 2011. I’m not going to feature any details of
’92 and ’98 here. It’s not because they weren’t great journeys. 1992 was a real
biggie on a personal level. It’s simply a case of avoiding repetition. There
were no innovations to the format in those years.
My friends often joked with
me about how long it was taking to complete my Avalonian Aeon. In the end, it was ten and a half years. In recent
times I have gone to the opposite extreme. The
Glastonbury Zodiac and Earth Mysteries UFOlogy and Glastonbury Psychogeography were each created in two weeks, albeit
making use of some already written material, in both cases with the aim of
launching at a conference. This process has now reached probably its maximum
level of crazy intensity as I have gone from ten years to ten days to create
this work for Laura Daligan’s Avalon Tarot Conference. I sincerely believe it
is a feast for all tarot enthusiasts and leyline pilgrims, presenting
remarkable ideas in a way that will hopefully inspire many to go forth on their
own journeys.
