Glastonbury Abbey, Henry VIII, and Bad Taste

As a Glastonbury Abbey season-ticket holder, I am on the mailing list for news on upcoming events. I recently received notification of an upcoming Audience with Henry VIII in the Abbey Museum in October. A notable Henry impersonator will provide a "very amusing and interesting talk".

Anyone with even a modest knowledge of the Abbey history would probably do a double-take on this. I was moved to a Facebook rant. "I would really like to chill with the fuckpig responsible for the ruination of the place who sent his hit squad to brutally murder the old man in charge in an atrocity redolent of some dark sacrifice that still resonates centuries later". I'd like to expand that a bit here to enhance the expression of my disbelief that anyone could think this event was a good idea, full of scope for humour.

Here is an extract from my Mysterium Artorius that covers Henry's role in Abbey history.

 

In November 1539 onetime Renaissance wunderkind Henry VIII perpetrated perhaps the greatest British cultural atrocity. His dissolution of the monasteries was carried out in a needlessly wanton manner. 

 

What happened at Glastonbury was the worst example of the entire process. The elderly abbot, Richard Whiting, was set up on a blatantly false charge of treason. 

 

Along with two colleagues, he was sentenced to death. 

The King’s Einsatz Kommando hit-squad stretched and tied the old man on a hurdle. This was dragged by a horse through the town, past the Abbey, and up to the summit of the Tor, where gallows had been erected. 

There the three men were executed. Whiting’s head was removed and placed above the Abbey gate. The rest of his body was cut into four pieces that were displayed in nearby towns.

Geoffrey Ashe raised some disturbing points about the ghastly scenario in King Arthur’s Avalon. It would require considerable effort, in wet and muddy November, for a horse to drag a man tied to a hurdle up to the top of the Tor. The construction of the gallows there was no easy task either. The summit is renowned for the strong winds that often blow across it. If the sole purpose of the deed was to instil fear in the population then why not choose the front of the abbey, in the middle of the town, where everyone could potentially see it? There’s an unsettling hint of impractical stranger motives amongst the executioners. The three bodies strung up on a hill suggest a blasphemous parody of the crucifixion and archaic sacrificial rites.

 

The Abbey library was trashed. Pages of priceless manuscripts were found as litter in the streets. The bones displayed as Arthur and Guenevere’s were lost. Who knows what modern forensic science could have told us if they were still available? The monks were dispersed. Before long the majestic edifice of the building was pillaged for raw material. One of its later owners used explosives to blow great holes in the walls to satisfy his materialistic priorities. The Grail chalice of British Christendom disappeared, leaving a wasteland behind.

I find it more than passing strange that the History section of the Abbey website spectacularly evades mention of the horrors of 1539. The Whiting murder is completely ignored! This is all it says.

"In 1536, during the 27th year of the reign of Henry VIII, there were over 800 monasteries, nunneries and friaries in Britain. By 1541, there were none. More than 10,000 monks and nuns had been dispersed and the buildings had been seized by the Crown to be sold off or leased to new lay occupiers. Glastonbury Abbey was one of principal victims of this action by the King, during the social and religious upheaval known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries."

http://www.glastonburyabbey.com/history_archaeology.php?sid=c99e7810cbe4b6dcafab4eb75aa7bda0

It should be a really fun evening in October. Glastonbury Abbey has a Facebook page. I posted a comment on there. If the event seems a tad grotesque to you, maybe you might like to do likewise.

https://www.facebook.com/GlastonburyAbbeySomerset?ref=bookmarks

 

 

Avalonians & the Ariosophists Glastonbury lecture.

 

Thursday October 15th. 

Red Brick Building, Morland Road, Glastonbury, BA6 9FT

18:30 for 19:00 start. Admission £5.00

The subject of Nazi occultism has been glamorised by the Indiana Jones films. A core of truth remains. The 1940 ‘Magical Battle of Britain’ saw occultist Dion Fortune arrange group visualisations featuring an inner realm within Glastonbury Tor involving Arthur and the patrolling of the shore by mighty angels to offer psychic protection against the Nazis mythic power, during the time when defeat and invasion seemed imminent. Some of the roots of her ‘Avalon of the Heart’(her book on Glastonbury) sensibilities can be found in the first decade of the century in the work of Wellesley Tudor Pole, with his finding of the Blue Glass Bowl ‘Glastonbury Grail’ at Beckery, and Frederick Bligh Bond and his unorthodox psychic archaeology in the Abbey. During the same period, German mystics Guido von List, and Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels were creating a body of work known as Ariosophy, an Aryan Theosophy, that provided inspiration for Himmler’s SS, whose Grail Castle Wewelsburg was the polar opposite of the Tor in 1940. Cross-referencing, comparing and contrasting Glastonbury and Germany in the years leading in to the Great War, provides fascinating indications that the spiritual conflict that climaxed in 1940 began far earlier. Includes the extraordinary tale of how a sister of one of Tudor Pole’s ‘triad of maidens’ who helped find the Blue Glass Bowl admired and met Hitler. This material will be framed within the perspective of Rudolf Steiner’s belief that the world entered into an epoch controlled by the Archangel Michael in 1879.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wellesley Tudor Pole

 

 

 

Guido von List

Frederick Bligh Bond

Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels

1969 BABY

 

Maybe I should be promoting my lectures or writing some profound stuff here but I'm a tad fatigued. Just spent 4 days and 5 nights looking after my 2 young children while their mother had a well-earned break. Went for a full moon 5 mile run when she returned. Lectured on Crowley and Loch Ness. Brain frazzled. Allowed myself to enter a You Tube reverie. I was led into a consideration of what a powerful formative influence 1969 was for a 10yr old. I went down memory lane with music I actually remember from then and mixed in retrospective knowledge of Woodstock, Manson, and Altamont. It was a fine experience and maybe you might enjoy it as well.

I remember the accursed Jimmy Savile had a BBC Saturday night TV show that predated Jim'll Fix It. I first heard this song on it and was wildly enthused, running out of the room to tell my parents about it. Maybe I prefer the Fields of the Nephilim version these days.

There were still optimistic visions redolent of the summer of love 2 years before but the cusp was approaching.

This was a great song for a 10yr old to hear. I'm not embarrassed to say that my poetic sensibilities may well have been first stirred by it and that I still like it now.

It was late on a summer Sunday afternoon. We had been visited by relatives. Sandwiches, crisps and fizzy pop in the garden. Time for tidying up. Washing up being done in the kitchen. Back door open, radio on. This started playing. I was in the garden when I heard it. Cold tingles ran all over me. Yes, I'm the author of Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus but this is awesome. The quality of emotion in it is pristine.

Paul Morley wrote an inordinately long and indulgent book to air his theory that Kylie Minogue's Cant Get You Out of My Head is the greatest pop record of all time. Someone could probably do the same for this.

We don't remember the pop culture of 1969 just for the Archies though. Other things have superseded them.

Superb Glastonbury Occult Conference in October

I'm very pleased to be part of this outstanding event and to be getting another opportunity to speak on one of my favorite subjects, the connections between Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead and Crowley's Book of the Law as featured in my book Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus.

Aleister Crowley and the Loch Ness Monster Glastonbury presentation.

Boleskine House near Loch Ness. Onetime legendary lair of Aleister Crowley.

I am repeating my Typhonian entertainment in Glastonbury on September 9th for the local branch of the Wessex Research Group.

The event starts at 19:30. Entry price is £5.00.

Venue is The Avalon Constitutional Club, 50 High St, Glastonbury,  BA6 9JF.


Aleister Crowley is the second most famous inhabitant of Loch Ness, having owned a home there in the early years of the last century. Occult folklore has suggested a link between his activities and the later return of the monster. This appears to be absurd but can lead into a fruitful surreal consideration featuring the magick of Crowley's Aeon of Horus in connection with monster hunting and UFOlogy. The lecture material is based on the chapter Loch Ness Leviathan and the Boleskine Kiblah in my book Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus.

 

It will be a remarkable mix of material.