Some significant 50 year anniversaries are about to be celebrated in Glastonbury.
Primarily we have Woodstock, which happened between August 15th - 17th 1969. In the middle of those 3 days, the 16th, we also have the anniversary of the free festival that inspired David Bowie's UFOlogical anthem. I have taken this as the inspiration for a presentation on UK sixties Psychedelic Earth Mysteries UFOlogy, using the strange experiences of visionary Gino Gennaro who encountered 'Venusian fairies' on Glastonbury Tor, as my Blake connection as he went on to produce a strange book illustrated with Blake artwork as a result of the download he received.
There is still time to get involved an maybe recite a favourite Blake poem.
The greatest Glastonbury story I have ever heard concerns the epic 80s psychic quest of Andrew Collins that led him from the Somerset Star Temple to the Giza plateau and proved to be a huge inspiration and foundation for much of his future work.
I have featured this story, with varying levels of detail, in a number of my books, primarily Avalonian Aeon. Around the time of the spring equinox I felt inspired to isolate the story and tell it on its own, adding some fresh material. I have now completed this at the time of the summer solstice, which was the period that Andy completed his great adventure in 1985 and subsequently led a group including myself on a vision quest around the Glastonbury Zodiac in 1990.
Starting with the medieval Essex mystery of the Knights of Danbury, an
expansive odyssey leads to the Glastonbury Star Temple, a secret
Knights Templar ceremony, Black Alchemy, and a Hermetic blend that
reveals the Morphogenesis pattern and process understood and used by a
lost culture before the pyramids. The epic psychic quest was the root
of Andrew Collins later work and the initial inspiration for his
investigation of ancient hybrid strains of humanity from the legends of
the Nephilim to the Denisovans. The book also features the work of
Katharine Maltwood and Frederick Bligh Bond.
The cover art is by legendary psychic Bernard G who was such a vital part of Collins’ early work, particularly cult classic The Black Alchemist. The Glastonbury to Giza story sees him functioning at the peak of his powers.
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.
My book Atargatis is now available globally in Kindle
format. It is probably my favourite work as it covers such a wide
spectrum of subject material.
From the back cover:
A
wild story of complete immersion in a magical mystical lifestyle. An
Astonishing East-West New Age Blend. A Goddess
Extravaganza. Atargatis,
Ishtar, Astarte, Asherah, Tanit, Isis, Babalon, Inanna, Nuit, Aphrodite,
Lilith, Matronit, Shekhina. Psychic
Questing. Green Stone, Sobek Neferu Re, Typhonian Thames, The Temple of the Blue Flame, St Bega: the
Egyptian star, Avebury Form of the
Serpent, Dream Demons, Egyptians and Phoenicians in Ancient Britain. Magical
Fictions. Twin
Peaks, Robin of Sherwood, Jewel of the Seven Stars, The Sea Priestess. Locations across
Time and Space.Margate
Seashell Grotto, Hierapolis, Glastonbury, Hadleigh Downs, Babylon, Shambhala, Brean
Down. Also Includes: UFOlogy,
Fellowship of Isis, Tibetan Buddhism, Past Lives, Reiki, 11:11, Dolphin
Channelling, Rebirthing. Featuring: Dion Fortune,
Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, HP Lovecraft, Whitley Strieber, Carlos
Castaneda, Andrew Collins, James Rendell Harris, Jose Arguelles, Morien O
Morgan, Solara, Graham Phillips, Timothy Wyllie, Elagabalus, James Joyce, Cunning Murrell, Ozric
Tentacles. The Gurus. Osho Rajneesh,
Swami Muktananda, Sai Baba, Meher Baba. Create your own Synchronicity. Hack your destiny code.
A few of my video lectures feature material from the book. I have posted them before here but I present them again together as part of the promotion of the book.
Ten years on from its initial publication, Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus is available in Kindle format.I'm still very
proud of it and feel the sections on the Babalon Working, Jung and the Seven
Sermons, Leary in the Algerian desert, Loch Ness, UFOlogy, the Montauk legend,
and the L Ron Hubbard appendix are pretty damn good.
There are filmed lectures of mine where I have dealt with topics featured in the book. I have posted them on this blog before over the years but I'm gathering them together again together now as part of the promotion for the new format.
The Babalon Working.
A Rune Soup interview about Jack Parsons on the anniversary of his death.
Crowley and Jung: the Book of the Law and the Seven Sermons.
After eight and a half years of work, my book The Occult Battle of Britain is now available as a paperback in the UK and globally in the Amazon Kindle format.
The writing process went in cycles. In the middle of the ebb and flow, I got a number of other books out as well.
When the date for the February 2019 Glastonbury Occult Conference was set, I realised I had an opportunity to launch the book in fine style if I could finish it in time. I think I've now got fairly good at back-engineering projects in order to launch them at events and conferences, so I fully engaged with the process from September 2018 on the weekend of the Glastonbury Dion Fortune Conference, which seemed an obvious time to fully commit to what was involved.
There was further emotional leverage as I was being given the option of also completing the decade of my fifties by getting 3 books out in a 12 month period, concluding shortly before my 60th birthday. The potential satisfaction in this was obviously immense so it helped to intensify my efforts. I succeeded.
Don't expect this level of manifestation from me on a regular basis! It may well be that there is something a bit arbitrary about the big decade birthdays but they do carry emotional power and I have certainly found that there has been something very distinct about each decade of my life. My fifties began in Cairo with me writing my Crowley book. It has been a remarkable experience to go back to it again as I prepare a Kindle edition. It has further helped to frame my fifties. I mention all of this to commend the process of getting creative and dynamic about the great cycles of life.
During the writing of The Occult Battle of Britain, I road-tested the material with public lectures. When launching it in Glastonbury 2019 I gave a presentation featuring some of its contents and also spoke on some of the intense processes involved in leading me to immersion in such a topic at a specific book-launch function.
There are a number of videos which cover different aspects of the enormous perspective I have attempted to communicate through the book.
When giving the above presentation I still thought I would include some of my personal stories of engagement with the Dion Fortune material in the book but later felt it would unbalance the work to its detriment.
Putting on this event in Abbey House Glastonbury on Dion Fortune's birthday in December 2018 was a tremendously satisfying boost for the writing I was then doing, moving into a ever-more intense phase as I faced my self-imposed deadline.
Some of the material on Fortune and Wiligut was featured in the 2016 lecture but I re-framed it for my Occult Conference audience and as part of the process of launching the work with a clear statement of the way in which I was offering up a unique combination never presented in quite this way before.
Later on the same day, at the specific book-launch function, I talked of some of the wild and controversial experiences that led to my interest in the subject and enabled me to view it from a unique vantage point that I would hope is obvious to anyone who reads the book.
This is the back cover blurb.
The Battle of Britain is one of the great epic pivotal stories of world
history, which has been told in numerous books, looking at every fact,
every nuance, in considerable detail. It has become mythological. There
remains a hidden background to the drama of 1940, involving what could
be termed an ‘Occult Battle of Britain’.
The Nazis had their own
Grail Castle, in the form of Himmler’s Wewelsburg. For the first time,
this Black Camelot is placed alongside Glastonbury, renowned for its
Arthurian associations. The story can best be understood as the
culmination of a rebirth of Glastonbury that had begun fifty years
earlier. Wewelsburg was likewise the product of decades of development.
Tracing the two lines in Glastonbury and Germany together reveals an
astonishing, otherwise hidden, story and perspective.
Features: The Avalonians. Dion Fortune, Wellesley Tudor Pole, Frederick Bligh Bond, John Goodchild, Ronald Heaver, Alice Buckton, Rutland Boughton.
The Ariosophists. Karl Maria Wiligut, Guido von List, Rudolph von Sebottendorff, Lanz von Liebenfels, Herman Wirth.
Includes: Winston
Churchill, Adolf Hitler, H.P. Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, C.G. Jung,
Aleister Crowley, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Rene Guenon, Herman
Goring, Victor Goddard, Wolfram Sievers, Heinrich Himmler, Hugh Dowding,
, Anna Kingsford, Rudolf Hess.
Includes: Blue Glass Bowl,
Ahnenerbe, Trithemius and the Age of Archangel Michael, the Spear of
Destiny, British Israel, Lord of the World, the Silent Minute, Thule
Society, Company of Avalon, Melchizedek, Nazi Tibetan expedition,
Tintagel.
After over 8 years of work on this project, which I have repeatedly left and then returned to, whilst writing other books, this 440 page epic is now at the printers and only a few weeks away.
Paul is the author of Avalonian Aeon, Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus, Mysterium Artorius, The Glastonbury Zodiac and Earth Mysteries UFOlogy,, Glastonbury Psychogeography, The Michael Line, the Qabalah and the Tarot, Atargatis, William Blake and the Glastonbury Gnosis, The Occult Battle of Britain, and Glastonia Aegyptiacus.
Paul is available for lectures, tailored Glastonbury tours and Reiki initiations.
