The Romance of the Faery Melusine

Skylight Press which has been going for just a year is about to publish its twentieth book which will be the result of ten or so years of my own investigation into the world of faery tradition entitled THE ROMANCE OF THE FAERY MELUSINE. For details go to the Skylight website  http://www.skylightpress.co.uk/
This is a natural follow up to my two books recently published by RJStewart Books THE FAERY GATES OF AVALON and MELUSINE OF LUSIGNAN & THE CULT OF THE FAERY WOMAN, details on http://www.rjstewart.net/

While I am about it I might as well fill you in here with an article on my general progress in this direction, recently published in the excellent pagan journal THE CAULDRON with a follow up in THE INNER LIGHT JOURNAL. It is entitled FAERY LORE and here it is.

Faery lore has always been with us, as long indeed as faeries, but only in the last twenty years has it come to such prominence. This largely thanks to R J Stewart who has published some very practical books on the subject, starting with The UnderWorld Initiation in 1985, passing through Earth Light and Power within the Land in 1992, to The Living World of Faery in 1995 and The Well of Light in 2004. These have been particularly stimulating works because they present us with an important challenge.


They call upon us to do something about it, with particular reference to the doctrine of the Threefold Alliance – the mutual recognition of the interconnection of the human, animal and faery worlds. And how we can make the necessary connections by means of structured visualisations in conjunction with certain sites, such as standing stones, earthworks, forest paths, springs, pools, wells, woods, trees, meadows, crossroad tracks or the confluence of waters.

In the pursuit of otherworld experience we have, of course, to take care that such contacts are not subjective fantasies. Faeries are not quite such wish fulfilment figures as they are sometimes made out to be, and so we should not regard the quest as some kind of otherworld dating agency. Those forlornly seeking fulfilment of unsatisfied desires should stick, for their own good, to the human sphere. If you cannot make it with one of your own kind then you are not likely to have much luck with one of the Shining Ones!

In my own experience the start of any worthwhile contact has come as something of a surprise. The initiative came from the other side. When I found myself whipped up into some kind of spiral of euphoric awareness, with aura lit up like a Christmas tree, to discover I was standing in muddy shoes over a spring, in close proximity to a rowan tree. Or coming across part of a hedgerow where trunks of oak and ash formed pillars each side of a hawthorn gateway, to find it open before me on the level of inner awareness.

First comes the experience, then the realisation. Following upon this, if you are lucky and play your cards right, a deepening relationship forms from which friendship, companionship, guidance and teaching may arrive. At any rate, to a born scribbler such as myself, the consequence has been the writing of two books (The Faery Gates of Avalon and Melusine of Lusignan and the Cult of the Faery Woman) which are meant to be subtle guides and stimuli to action rather than otherwordly street maps.

Above all they seek to be modern. The study of old traditions of faery lore that have come down to us in legend and ballad can be very fascinating and indeed instructive but they speak of other times and other conditions. The faery world moves on as does the human one, and means of intercommunication now are not the same as once they might have been.

Indeed older forms of tradition speak not so much of intercommunication as of complete transition. Either a human is lured into faery land – or a faery enters the human world – visitors in an alien environment to that in which they were born. And such adventures tend to end in grief. Either the human being cannot find the way back, or if successful crumbles to dust, having been away for a very long time indeed in a different time dimension. Or the faery is driven back to fairyland because the human being breaks faith in some way, unable to unwilling to fulfil the conditions of such an unusual relationship.

There are of course rare cases where a successful transition seems to have taken place. The most celebrated being the 13th century Thomas the Rymer and his seven year dalliance in the hills with the Faery Queen. Or the successful recovery of Tam Lin from fairyland by a persistent and courageous human lover. All of which demonstrate that we are not dealing with a fluffy bunny kind of world when we approach the faery condition, but nor, on the other hand, are we consorting with demonic agencies as monkish scribes have tended to describe them.

Apart from ballad lore, which R J Stewart, as a musician has explored in some depth, there are other areas in which it is profitable to look, particularly in medieval times when humans and faeries seem to have been more closely connected than they are now. Perhaps because humans tended to believe in them more. On the one hand are the historical traditions of certain families that have claimed faery ancestry, and on the other early versions of Arthurian legend.

Three ancient families in particular spring to mind – those of Bouillon, of Anjou and of Lusignan.

The first concerns King Lothair of Lorraine who allegedly met a faery in the woods who bore him seven children, one of whom became the Knight of the Swan who sailed down the Rhine one day in a boat to champion Beatrice of Bouillon who was having some trouble with a local lord. He married Beatrice’s daughter Ida but left her when (despite his strictures) she became too curious about his origins.

The second was the powerful and widespread family of Anjou. An early member of the family, Fulke the Black, was said to have married a water sprite, who bore him at least two children before disappearing through the roof of the church in great distress when compelled to attend the consecration of the mass (an obvious monkish interpolation). This monkish libel did not faze the family at all in after years. Richard Coeur de Lion in particular revelled in being a member of “the Devil’s Brood!”

A third instance is that of the family of Lusignan, which like the town named after them near Poitiers, was founded by the faery Melusine, who originally hailed from Scotland, and returned to Avalon when after some marital strife her husband publicly called her a demon.

Taking into account the time scale of these family histories any such actual intermarriage would appear to have taken place a little before the turn of the first millennium. Was there a window or door of opportunity that opened between the worlds at that time, making such interchange possible? And is there a cyclic connection with the sudden upsurge in faery interest that has occurred to us at the turn of the second millennium?

One thinks of the elfin mythology of Tolkien that seems to have sparked much popular contemporary interest. But how much and in what way do we tend to believe in such things nowadays? I only know that when interviewed by an American radio show host I was asked to speculate a reason for this remarkable interest in Tolkien’s elven otherworld. I said that maybe it was because people were subliminally realising it to be true that we shared the world with another order of existence. At which the interviewer hastily interjected that they dared not broadcast such a possibility! Shades of Orson Wells causing a panic with his radio broadcast of H G Wells “War Between the Worlds” in the early days of radio? Are the alleged faery folk with whom we have shared the planet for millennia any more dangerous than science fiction invaders from Mars?

Who knows? What I have found intriguing is that descendants of all three families mentioned above played a leading role in the Crusades. Which suggests that for whatever reason the Christian west felt the need to go marching off to Jerusalem – then regarded as the centre of the world – the Faery powers felt the same way too!

Thus in 1099 a leader of the 1st Crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon became the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, and in 1101 his brother Baldwin its first king. Then thirty years on, when that line had died out, Fulke V of Anjou married the heiress to the kingdom, the princess Melisende, thus establishing the Anjou line on the throne. And by a similar process of marrying an heiress to the kingdom, the crown passed to two Lusignan brothers, first Guy who, had married the princess Sibylla, in 1186 and then Amalric who wed her half sister Isabella in 1198.

There is plenty of room for conjecture here as fascinating as holy bloods and holy grails, which has given me plenty to mull over for some time to come. But there are more significant indicators of a close human faery interconnection to be found in a close reading of Arthurian legend.

Particularly early legend, recorded a couple of hundred years before Sir Thomas Malory set pen to paper in about 1370 to produce Le Morte d’Arthur. Admittedly it is a classic of English literature but in which, despite Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake, much of the faery content is lost. Sir Thomas, a contemporary of Henry V and Agincourt, was more focused on the conventions of feudal chivalry in the human world. To find the faeries coming out of the woodwork we need to go back to around 1170 when Chrétien de Troyes, the court poet of Countess Marie of Champagne, was versifying the first Arthurian romances. Not that Chrétien (who thought himself a very modern 12th century man of the world) entirely believed in faeries, but he was drawing his material from older sources who did.

And when we examine his stories in depth, we realise that the commonplace romantic scenario was not so much human damsels in distress calling upon knights to go and solve their problems. It was more a case of a faery woman acting as initiator of a human knight into the faery world.

This seems to have been the case with regard to Erec and Enide, (Geraint in the Mabinogion version), for although it appears to be Erec who is taking the initiative, it is really Enide who is calling the shots and leading him on into his various adventures, ending up in ruling a dual kingdom with her. Similarly Yvain after certain rites at a magic fountain is led on by Lunette through a series of tests that end up with him married to the faery Laudine. Even in the Grail romance Percival has his Blanchefleur and Gawain his Orgueilleuse of Logres as intermediaries on the way to very faery locations – one the Graal castle and the other the Castle of Maidens. And Lancelot’s adventures to rescue Guenevere plainly take place in a faery kingdom. All this I have spelled out in some detail in The Faery Gates of Avalon, in the hope that it will encourage others to go back to the tales, keeping an eye out for the faery dynamics, which become obvious once one knows what to look for.

This also applies to slightly later versions of Arthurian Legend such as the Lancelot Grail of 1220/30. Wendy Berg has shown in her remarkable work, Red Tree, White Tree - Humans and Faeries in Partnership, (Skylight Press 2011), that this stratum of legend leads to the conclusion that Queen Guenevere herself was one of the faery kind.

This view of Guenevere is no new agey fad, for the possibility has been seriously put forward by academics of some distinction, in Guinevere, A Study of her Abductions by Professor K G T Webster in 1951, and Lancelot and Guenevere by Professors T P Cross and W A Nitze in 1930. It is simply that Wendy, with her keen esoteric sense, has brilliantly illuminated a neglected academic thesis, and shown the whole Arthurian scenario in a new light. The light of Faery.

Guenevere was abducted on a number of occasions, but rather than passing her off as some kind of Persephone figure connected to the cycles of nature, a role which she really does not fit, a more likely possibility could have been the faery world trying to get her back! We find much the same kind of situation in Fiona Macleod’s The Immortal Hour where the faery Etain is taken back to fairyland after having wandered into the human world and been married to the Eochaid, the High King of Ireland.

Following this theory through leads to some startling conclusions as to the origin and destiny of the Grail Hallows, which as sword and lance and cup and stone, came originally from faery land. And which – like Arthur’s sword Excalibur – need to be returned there. Hence the need for the legend of Joseph of Arimathea returning the Graal to Logres, from whence it had been taken to Sarras (the inner side of Jerusalem) by the Grail heroes in the Ship of Solomon. Whilst the two cruets associated with his mission back to Glastonbury, one containing a red liquid and the other a white, signify amongst other things, the sap of the red tree and the white tree, the human and faery blood lines.

This provides the prospect for some exciting esoteric work. As Wendy points out, if it was the duty and opportunity of the knights (of whom we are the modern equivalent) to seek out the structure and nature of Faery, one way of doing this today may be to give more attention to way showers such as Melusine, Etain and Gwenevere. Those who left behind their birthright in the Immortal Clan to enter the human world. And there the challenge rests. Are we capable of responding to “the faint call of Faery” and taking steps to answer it?

An Anthology of Occult Wisdom Volume 4

Just published - the latest book in this fascinating series edited by Debbie Chapnick - this one containing 40 years of writings from the archives of Dolores Aschcroft-Nowicki, Dion Fortune, W.E.Butler and Gareth Knight.

This one contains four training papers from the early 1970's by W. E. Butler. 

Half a dozen records of personal occult experience by Dion Fortune dating from the 1920's and early 30's including some Occult Notes on Atlantis & Lemuria, here listed as anonymous, but probably also from Dion Fortune with additional later material by Margaret Lumley Brown which I included as an Appendix in my edited version of The Arthurian Formula (Thoth Publications 2006).

Five very practical lessons by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki from the early 1970's including detailed instructions on preparing the traditional magical weapons of wand, cup, pantacle and sword - plus herbs and incense magic.

A dozen articles by me first published in The Inner Light Journal from 2002 to 2005, later issued in PDF form only by Ritemagic under the title Dion Fortune and the Lost Secrets of the West which includes besides this leading article first delivered as a talk to the Temenos Academy in 2003 a follow up lecture on The Western Esoteric Tradition in Popular Culture later that year.

The other articles comprise The Dweller on the Threshold; Journey to the Moon (a comparison of three 32nd Path Workings by myself, Dolores, and Alan Adams (aka Charles Fielding) of the London Group); Fantasy Belief and Reality; Chretien de Troyes - the first Arthurian Romancer, (my first shot at what developed into a book published by R J Stewart in 2008 entitled The Faery Gates of Avalon); The Elemental Tides; Do You Believe in Fairies?; Dion Fortune and the Mystical Qabalah (my Introduction to a German edition of Dion Fortune's famous title); Is there a Psychic in the House?; The Magical World of Dion Fortune; The Red Rose and the White.

Altogether just over 250 pages for $25.00 plus postage from Datura Press - full details on how to get it from http://www.daturapress.com/ and daturapress@gmail.com

A History of White Magic

Some time in 1977 the Managing Director of Mowbrays, a prestigious religious publishing house was looking in his shaving mirror one morning and was suddenly struck with the thought of publishing a History of White Magic. Goodness knows where that came from! Were inner plane friends of mine beaming psychical suggestions via the looking glass? Was he an unconscious medium?


Having embarked on this unconventional train of thought his first problem was to find somebody to write it. His search eventually came my way at the suggestion of my Anglican friend and mentor Anthony Duncan, via his friend and spiritual advisor, the Benedictine monk Dom Robert Petitpierre, both of whom had a reputation in ecclesiastical circles of knowing something about this bizarre subject.

I had reservations about this offer, having had unfortunate experiences in trying to deal with other conventional religious publishers and was still undecided when I began to receive a strong and persistent impression to consult the I Ching. I am not much given to divination, finding that my own intuition sees me well enough through most vicissitudes of life, however, so strong did these impressions become that I dusted off my copy of the I Ching and cast the oracle of yarrow stalks.

The result was the hexagram Ts’ui, “Gathering Together”, which has as its general interpretation: “Success. The king approaches his temple. It furthers one to see the great man. This brings success. Perseverance furthers.”

This was encouraging enough for me and so I went forth “to see the great man” and duly signed his contract!

A History of White Magic duly appeared in January 1979 and attracted more general interest than any of my other books so far. I was invited to talk about the book on BBC Radio 2, on Anglia TV and at a number of local radio stations. One clerical gentleman (who had not read the book) wrote to say how appalled he was at its publication by a respectable religious publishing house – but it was very well received in the esoteric field, even compared to Dr Bronowski’s famous television serial The Ascent of Man. I would not have put it in that class myself, but it had its influence and was translated into French and Greek and later had an American incarnation as Magic and the Western Mind.

It now resurfaces in a new edition published by Skylight Press. And I hope it may continue to serve another lease of life as a means to approach intelligent laypersons who seek some kind of explanation of what magic is all about. In the esoteric world we tend to live in a kind of cultural ghetto and my aim in being given the opportunity to write this book was to use it as a chance explain that it is not necessarily a weird and offbeat flight from reason, but a way of looking at the world, and experiencing parts of it in greater depth, that had ever been with us. Indeed had once been regarded as a noble science and philosophy. And as a use of the high imagination as an aid to the evolution of consciousness, from the ancient Mystery Religions, through Alchemy, Renaissance Magic, the Rosicrucian Manifestos, Freemasonry and 19th century Magical Fraternities up to the modern age.

To quote from the Foreword to the first edition written by the distinguished poet and Blake and Yeats scholar Kathleen Raine: “Magic” is a word whose associations are both glamorous and sinister; Gareth Knight, well known to his readers as the most down-to-earth and pragmatic of magicians, by seeking to show what magic really is and to what body of thought it belongs, dissipates both these illusions. At the same time he shows how real is the world upon whose laws the operation of “magic” (and of prayer for that matter), depend. It is the world of “imagination”, consciousness itself, the secret “prima materia” of the alchemists.

Or as the Hermetic Journal was moved to review: It is obvious from the beginning that we have here a work revealing the author’s spiritual maturity, a work with a definite message and structure, rather than the piecemeal gathering of snippets of information which often is offered in books with this sort of title, by inferior authors with little occult understanding.

To check this out for yourself you can do no better than visit www.skylightpress.co.uk and purchase a copy for your own use and as a means of enlightenment for your inquisitive friends.

The Old Sod

Anyone who is interested in seeing what the life of a dedicated magician is like could be recommended to take a look at the recent biography of William G Gray just published by Skylight Press, written up by Alan Richardson and Marcus Claridge (W.G.G.'s godson) from the old boy's unpublishable and allegedly libellous autobiography. There they will find the reason for the choice of their somewhat startling title, (which was largely chosen by W.G.G. himself), and it  may also explain the reason why, as an enquiring friend of mine put it, ritual magicians sometimes seem such rather irascible folk. I don't know that we all are, but a lot can be put down to what pioneers like W G Gray had to put up with in previous decades - his main interest in life being completely ignored and misunderstood. He was a great pioneer and creative thinker who moved things on in a very substantial way that is still little realised by those who benefit from them. He had to wait until his late fifties before he received any public recognition and I count it as one of the better achievements of my life that I first published him - with The Ladder of Lights and Magical Ritual Methods, ground breaking works on the Qabalistic Tree of Life and on practical magic - and then later with the remarkable Rollright Ritual which did much for traditional pagan ways of working. This is shortly to be reissued by Skylight Press, along with Working with Inner Light, notes which he made when I was working with him in 1965/7 that formed the basis for his early books. You can read more on the Skylight Press website or blog which are easily linked from here.

The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury

Following the recent desecration of the Holy Thorn at Glastonbury I have been led to seek out my old records to find a working I once did - in fact the first public directed visualisation I ever performed - at Hawkwood back in the morning of Sunday 24th May 1981. After thirty years it seems that there is still something of a need for it. You are welcome to meditate upon it or use it as you will as a re-affirmation of the roots and growth and flowering of the spirit of the holy thorn. There is a blessing on all who serve.

The Spreading of the Blessing of the Holy Thorn

We commence by visualising the walls of the hall in which we sit. These soon disappear and we find ourselves standing in the countryside outside, aware of the life of nature all about us.
The figure of Merlin appears, with that of Nimue‚ as a fair girl in floral dress bedecked with wild flowers.They lead us across a field to a stream, which we cross, paddling through it, and we then turn right to follow the stream down the hill, which towards the end becomes very steep and leads into a lake.
We proceed into and under the lake aware of the fishes and underwater natural life about us, the sand and gravel under our feet. We come, as the water deepens and the light less bright, to a wall of dark green weed. This is parted by Merlin and Nimue‚ to reveal a hall of dark green, in the centre of which is a great cauldron, about which stand nine maidens. The contents of the cauldron seeth and bubble as if full of vibrant life, and the maidens give each of us a small amount of the contents of the cauldron to drink, from small shell cups.
Upon drinking these waters of inspiration we find ourselves rising upward from the cauldron toward the surface, and as we do so we are aware of lines of golden light. These, we realise, are strands of a golden net, and upon breaking the surface we see we are within the net of a crowned, purple robed Fisher King in a small boat.
We clamber into the boat and it gently takes us toward a great beautiful castle on an island. We disembark, and proceed up the broad drive, through wide entrance gates, into the great hall of the castle. There the Fisher King indicates a small door, open before us and to the right, wherein we can see a room, richly furnished, in which, upon a couch, lies a very old, bearded King. He is being fed by a maiden, from a chalice and dish with wine and a communion wafer. The maiden, dressed like a princess, rises when she sees us, and comes and indicates that we follow her through another narrow door before us. Beyond the curtained doorway we find ourselves on a spiral stair which leads a long way upward, deosil, until we come to a small chapel, hung with purple velvet with a silver altar in the East before us. Upon this is a large cup, of the same design as the smaller one held by the maiden, and over it a spear. Upon the blade of the spear great drops of blood slowly form and drop into the cup. The maiden gives each of us, as we kneel, to eat and drink of the wine and the host.
Upon our receiving this sacrament the ceiling of the chapel opens wide above us to reveal an expanse of clear blue sky in which the sun is shining. We find ourselves ascending through the sky.
After a while it seems that we are at a level where there is a crystalline surface beneath our feet upon which we can stand. At the same time we see a large boat floating, as it were, on this same crystalline surface. It has three bare masts, of red, green and white. In its prow is a knight in golden armour with a white red cross shield, who appears to be Sir Galahad. And on a bier in the centre of the vessel lies the body of a fair maiden, an empty chalice upon her breast.
We ride in the boat for some distance and then it seems as if the boat becomes two. One form of the boat remains with us aboard it, floating in the crystalline sea; the other rises higher toward the Sun. As it nears the Sun the knightly form of Sir Galahad turns into the figure of Our Lord, and the maiden rises from the bier, and turns into the figure of Our Lady. The boat itself, on which they stood, turns into a great silver dove. Above them is the great gold shining orb of the Sun.
As we watch, a figure walks out of the Sun, radiant, robed and bearded, carrying a staff. We realise this to be, as it grows nearer, Joseph of Arimathea. He approaches our ship and suddenly strikes his staff into the deck. Immediately it shoots forth branches, leaves and flowers of the hawthorn - and the masts of the ship do likewise.
We fill our arms with great bundles of may blossom and descend through the sky, aware of the form of our native land below us. As we descend, may blossom falls with us, like gentle snowflakes or confetti, and we scatter it upon the land below us, which is stretched out in time as well as space. We are particularly aware of our loved ones, and all those with whom we work and play. Then, as we near the surface of the land, we concentrate upon and home in upon the physical place from whence we had started.
We reorientate into our bodies and go forth refreshed, to mediate the forces we have contacted to the world about us.
+ + +

Company of the Inner Abbey course

John Porter, who worked within the Gareth Knight group for 20 years and is also a student of Rudolf Steiner's teachings as well as being an ordained priest, is willing to take anyone interested through a course of study based on Experience of the Inner Worlds and other Gareth Knight titles. For details go to www.companyoftheinnerabbey.com

Experience of the Inner Worlds

Skylight Press has just produced a brand new edition of my Experience of the Inner Worlds, first published in 1975. Produced for the purpose of training my immediate students in the Gareth Knight Group (latterly Avalon Group) it met with some initial opposition but over the years has apparently become regarded a classic textbook in many spiritual and esoteric circles.

But don’t just take my word for it… have a look at some of the comments by readers of earlier editions, reprinted from various review sites such as Amazon and Goodreads:

“This book is required reading for ANYONE looking to bridge the gap between traditional Christianity and the esoteric world of metaphysics. Gareth Knight is one of the true descendants in a line of metaphysicians bringing forth teachings from a highly spiritual source.” (Isis Music, USA)

“If you have any fondness for both the esoteric and Grail Myth, you’ll really like the approach of this book. Each chapter is well written yet concise and concludes with easy but practical exercises which build upon each other effectively.” (Boudicca, Germany)

“Readers are, I’m sure, familiar with the level of hands-on experience Gareth brings to the table. This book provides fresh insights that make it an excellent companion to his Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, a long time staple on any serious esotericists bookshelf.” (Bokhara, USA)

“More than a systematic study it is a series of pictures, of hints for future pursuits that – just to give an idea of the turns this book takes – include the grail, the Sefer Yetzirah, Dante, Simone Weil, alchemy, sufi mysticism, the cloud of unknowing, renaissance magic.” (QWFF, Italy)

“The abstract analysis and concrete points of concern are very fine-tuned to provide great support to the practical applied exercises rounding-out every well-developed chapterial Theme of Experience of the Inner Worlds.” (Kevin Kiersky, USA)

“Considering its comparative brevity (about 250 pages) and high readability, the book’s scope is vast, treating as it does the Cube of Space, the Hebrew alphabet, the Crusades, the Grail mythos, Jungian psychology, inner planes communication, meditation and ritual.” (Michael K. Kivinen, USA)

“Each chapter of this book concludes with a practical lesson, mostly visualisations. A highlight of this book for me was information given in chapter 5 regarding secret hermetic and alchemic symbols. This is information that I have not found in any other book to date.” (Dragan, Australia)

It is available now direct from Skylight Press or from various Amazon and similar sites. For more details go www.skylightpress.co.uk

Yours Very Truly - Gareth Knight

Having been encouraged to gather some notes with a view to writing my autobiography I came upon a number of letters written to a variety of correspondents over the years. Some of them seemed worth publishing as they stood, throwing a vivid light upon what I was up to at the time - illustrating parts of my life as they were lived, and discussing some interesting topics of perennial interest to students of the Western Esoteric Tradition.

There used to be an old saying that “life begins at forty!” I don’t know about that but certainly it is borne out in a certain sense in that the letters only start in my 39th year – anything before that is shrouded in epistolary darkness. However, my forty years since then, from 1969 to 2010, have hardly been devoid of recorded opinion or incident, which you are welcome to share with me.

The letters are to some 70 different people, and vary from learned discourse with academics, through exchange of strange experiences with esoteric colleagues, to providing answers to general enquirers who wrote asking me for information.

The book must be the quickest I have ever written, having taken only a week to select and type up the contents. On the other hand, it must be the one that took me longest to write - in dribs and drabs over forty years. May you find it a worthwhile companion.

Just published at £13.99 by Skylight Press - full details on www.skylightpress.co.uk

This Wretched Splendour as magical theatre

I have briefly mentioned the remarkable play This Wretched Splendour in the past, but have now come upon a most perceptive and esoterically intelligent review of it, by Peregrine Wildoak, whose Australian blog "Magic of the Ordinary" is often worth a look. Anyhow - please read on his words of wisdom here:

I do not normally read, much less enjoy, contemporary play scripts. In fact the last memorable one was way back in the 80s, St Bob’s stunning piece of guerrilla ontology, Wilhelm Reich in Hell which left me reeling and shaking at the final page. Rebecca Wilby’s This Wretched Splendour did not have such a dramatic impact, but is equally as impressive and stunning in its own way.
On the surface this play should hold little interest for magical and esoteric folk: a short script set in the trenches of World War I Belgium, it charts the transformation the arrival of a new officer makes to a group of depressed and (most likely) doomed soldiers. However, the play is literally a talisman, a condensation of inner forces, contacts and blessings made available on this plane via the medium of literature. The impetus for the play seems to have come from Rebecca’s connection with “David Carstairs”, one of the most persistent and personable Inner Contacts within the broader Dion Fortune tradition and lineage. Gareth Knight, Alan Richardson and others have written about the Carstairs contact, but in This Wretched Splendour Rebecca Wilby writes with the Carstairs contact. The result is a tangible piece of magic, holding both inner and outer riches.
These days there are any number of ‘magical novels’ and novels by magicians. Most of these are products of the individual writer – not that there’s anything wrong with that. This Wretched Splendour, though obviously the work and product of Rebecca Wilby has the inner planes, via Carstairs, woven into its very fabric. It is thus something more than a play, just as Dion Fortune’s novels are more than novels. Reading This Wretched Splendour enriched and effected me at both deep subconscious levels and ‘higher’ transpersonal levels.
Subconsciously, by reading this play we are connected and opened to the reality of the living history of this ‘war to end all wars’. Though nearly a century ago, the wounds and scars remain and effect us all. It warped and maimed a generation, as well as providing impetus for much change. As esoteric folk, we know the effects such momentous events have within the soul of a nation, of the world. In the words of one of the characters, Conor:
There’s a death here that goes beyond the bodies that writhe and twitch in the mud. There’s a death of the soul of man, and the final fall of Adam.
The final fall of Adam. Through these five words, Rebecca Wilby masterfully sums it up. The sheer scale of horror (with thousands dying before breakfast in some battles) is incomprehensible to our modern minds, accustomed to hearing the names of individual battle deaths. The almost preternatural violence must have seemed apocalyptic and I think helped give rise to stories such as the Angel of Mons, even though the general consensus relegates this as a myth or illusion. Experiencing hell encourages us to invoke heaven. My great-grandfather, who somehow survived the entire war (after enlisting underage in 1914), insisted to his dying day he had seen the angels.
It is only recently that psychology has begun to look at this ‘trans-generational trauma’, trying to make sense of these deep soul wounds. This play takes us into the genesis of that trauma. It also, through the presence and words of an inner contact, contains the seeds of healing and redemption, for us personally and our society.
Transpersonally, by having the presence and words of an inner contact within this play it becomes a well crafted invitation to enter mystery. The inner contact Carstairs was a young British officer who died at Ypres, where this play is set. Soon after his death, he became a kind of mediumistic control for Dion Fortune, often introducing and explaining the teachings of ‘higher’ masters and adding a much needed human and humorous element to the proceedings.
Carstairs, the inner contact, is obviously main character of the play, David Cartwright, a central sun illuminating and fructifying the other characters. Here we see the very clever writing of Rebecca Wilby, as the Cartright character is not only made different to other characters by conventional artistic devices, but by using a few channeled lines from the actual Carstairs contact and weaving his presence into the words, there is a distinct ‘feel’ of the ‘other’. If we are in sympathy with the character, this can then take us into realms not known through ordinary plays.
Towards the end of the play Cartright, like Carstairs, dies. There is not a lot to this scene, no gaudy descriptions or action, something which serves the play very well. The presence of the Carstairs contact in a play describing his own death is not only ironic but an very powerful occult tool. The play is then the material basis for the mystery of the broadness of death, the continued existence of the soul in one form or another.
Added to this, there is a richness of subtle esoteric symbolism and action throughout. This is not always clearly delineated and will play more on the subconscious of the reader than on the conscious. Again, I compare it to Dion Fortune writing about how her writing of the Sea Priestess was designed to mimic the motion of the waves. There is much within the structure and form of This Wretched Splendour that will illuminate the open reader. Of course, there are occasional overt moments of spiritual potency drawing on esoteric lore, such as this call to the battlefield dead:
Let the dead arise! Out of the shell craters, out of the mud, out of the filthy slime, let the dead arise! Out of the broken trees, out of the barbed wire entanglements, out of the wretched trenches, let the dead arise! Out of the burning earth, let the dead arise! Let the undead arise! Rise up now, see the light in the West. Kick the fifth of battle from your heels and rise up. Follow the western splendour. Go! Go to the real Western Front!
Rebecca Wilby has done a wonderful job in the creation of this play. It deserves wide readership by the esoteric community. Do not be put off by the form, a play script, the subject matter or its ‘fictional’ content: this play has much to offer the esoteric and magical student. When we read it we are sharing in a highly successful magical action – the grounding of inner knowledge and redemption. It is thus a gift to us all.
This Wretched Splendour can be ordered from Skylight Press, www.skylightpress.co.uk.

Red Tree - White Tree by Wendy Berg

I began to write this book after I had been handed a glass of red wine and a voice in my head said: “If you drink that, you’ll die.”

Such is the opening line of Wendy Berg’s seminal new book on the Faery tradition in the Arthurian and Grail legends: the beginning of a trail which led her to a complete re-evaluation of the powers behind the fellowship of the Round Table, and which, as it unfolds, throws a whole new perspective on some of Britain’s oldest and most enduring legends.

Red Tree, White Tree is no ordinary Arthurian or Fey commentary but rather a completely comprehensive and enchanting spiralling-back through history to its first annals and beyond. Wendy, co-author of Polarity Magic: The Secret History of Western Religion with Mike Harris, works admirably through what have been formerly disparate texts to find new connections and syntheses. Her skilled exegesis includes a webbing of biblical texts (both canonical and apocryphal), the Qabalah, the Mabinogion, the bardic traditions of Taliesin, Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others, to make some extraordinary discoveries. This book will appeal to historians, literary scholars, mythological schemers, grail seekers, and esoteric practitioners alike.

In my view this is the most important and challenging book on Arthurian and Grail tradition for many a long year.

Red Tree, White Tree, priced £12.99, is available from Amazon and all the usual retailers, and can also be ordered direct from Skylight Press.