There are many of us over the past few years, within and
without the Society of the Inner Light, who have felt the need to do something
about what used to be called “the Last War” by those who fought in it, assuming
it would be the last one in the history of western civilisation. Although they
were soon disillusioned and when war
broke out again some twenty years later, “Last” came to mean, not “Final”, but “the one before this one!”
The reasons for our esoteric engagement in Remembrance Day
celebrations was the realisation that there was much still unresolved in inner
plane terms with regard to many who had been killed, many unidentified, many
completely blown to bits, psychologically maimed even after death, and
still hanging around the battlefields.
This came with the realisation of the existence of an inner plane group
known as the Company of the Light of the Somme with whom we could work in order
to bring release to those who were still in a state of shock.
It resulted in some of us making the trip over to the old
Western Front to feel something of this at first hand, as Alan Richardson has
done, although this is not completely necessary as rituals could be effectively
worked at home. One such is that of ‘The Chapels of Remembrance’ a script of which
has been published in the latest edition of The
Abbey Papers, [Skylight Press] and with a more detailed description of its
initial working in An Introduction to
Ritual Magic [Thoth Publications] with both of which the SIL has been
closely associated. And when such work
was at its height, the performance of a play This Wretched Splendour [Skylight Press] largely inspired by one of the inner plane adepti who fought in the conflict.
Alan Richardson, a contributor to the Inner Light Journal
and biographer of Dion Fortune, has now obviously received a call to do his bit
with this latest book. To my mind it is probably his best and certainly his
most moving. As ‘Sting’ remarks in a
foreword “Under the deceptively simple prose and conversational tone,
Richardson crafts another level of insight which shows how the Somme Offensive
resonated within his own soul a century later. Tensions were passed down from his
war hero grandfather, through his father, and into his own childhood, thus
family conflicts became almost analogues of the Great War itself. ...The book
is never less than informative, with unexpected insights. At times it is
extremely funny.”
So with eyes to see and ears to hear, not only is this an
entertaining, informative and thought provoking read, it is an important book for anyone with any
esoteric sense who seeks some background to any inner work connected with war and
the fall out from it, in this world or the next.
Published by Skylight Press, ISBN 978-1-908011-74-9 176pp.
£11.99 $18.99
1 comment:
In 1995 I spent a week at the Monroe Institute learning how help people trapped in spirit, in what Bob Monroe called the belief system territories. One of the places that I stumbled upon (if it is possible to stumble when one is out of body) was a large pool of liquid that was being used to reintegrate people who had been killed by explosions so powerful that they completely lost sense of any type of bodily form whatsoever. The pool had some kind of harmonic sounds and lights that played through it so that the souls of the dead could begin to reintegrate into some kind of astral form that would enable them to take the next step in healing. My room mate during the week was a US Marine colonel who told me, when I related my experience of the pool and it's use, that soldiers blown up this way were referred to as purple mist. War is a terrible thing, not just on the physical level. I will be very interested to read this book.
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