Camelot revisited

The latest contribution to the ‘endless debates’ about Arthurian origins by Dr Andrew Breeze are certainly worth consideration – at their own level. Although my own wanderings into Arthurian tradition over the years have not been limited to geographical or historical speculations. Where is Camelot? Everywhere and nowhere is the best I can contribute to any debate on that question. Which is not quite so evasive as it may sound.

Anyhow, I append a few lines I wrote a couple of years back for the Inner Light Journal that may stimulate some thought and suggestions for further inner knight errantry on the part of fellow companions of the way.  

Camelot Revisited                          

One of my earlier works has recently reappeared in a new edition, namely The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend (Skylight Press). There is an involved and fascinating history to this book and to its origins. It was first published in 1983 following a quite remarkable workshop I conducted at Hawkwood college in 1981.  As Caitlín Matthews, who was there at the time, reported – “It was truly an awesome and splendid thing that we did. The power which we invoked was both visible and perceptible to every sense: the candles on the altar shimmering with a radiance greater than their own. None of us wanted to leave: we were gripped, not by fear, but by longing to remain. One by one the company dispersed to bear into the world the substance of what we had experienced, and to continue the work of the Round Table within our own sphere of life.”  The whole event is reported in somewhat more detail in my esoteric autobiography I Called It Magic.

            This series of workshops was part of an initiative based on the principle of the Externalisation of the Hierarchy to take into the public domain certain techniques that I had learned in the Society of the Inner Light, and from working with the occultist W.G.Gray in the late 1960’s, (whose biography, by the way, The Old Sod, by Marcus Claridge and Alan Richardson is a remarkable insight into the ways (and peccadilloes) of an earlier occult generation).

However, the theme of this particular Arthurian weekend, and much of the power behind it, was largely based on a Society of the Inner Light script called The Arthurian Formula. This had originated as a series of trance communications received by Dion Fortune between April 1941 and February 1942, assisted by her old Golden Dawn mentor, Maiya Tranchell-Hayes, and later supplemented by her remarkably gifted successor Margaret Lumley Brown. The script had formed the basis of the inner work of the Society for the following twenty years in a project known as the Redemption of the Archetypes. Although all was highly secret in those days, in 2006 I was able to edit a published edition of The Arthurian Formula, with an amount of supplementary material on Atlantean and Faery traditions.

But when it comes to the matter of revisiting Camelot, a lot depends on what route one is taking to get there. We need to bear this in mind to avoid being confused by what may appear to be direct contradictions in interpretation. Atlantean? Faery? Celtic? Malory? Mabinogion? Chretien de Troyes? Lancelot/Grail?

The Arthurian Formula, and by extension, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend is largely based on Le Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, a classic of early English literature published by in 1485, and upon which Atlantean theories were grafted by Dion Fortune and Margaret Lumley Brown and their inner contacts.

Atlantean speculations had their heyday in the 1920’s, the ground having been laid in 1892 by a retired American politician Ignatius Donnelly with Atlantis: The Antediluvian World as part of a serious scientific proposition. That is to say whether such a catastrophe as a lost continent was geologically likely or possible, along with comparisons of flora and fauna and human culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Theories were taken seriously enough for the British Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone (unsuccessfully) to seek government funds to send a ship to test some of them out, and for the explorer Colonel Fawcett (also tragically unsuccessfully) to seek remains of a civilisation antedating ancient Egypt in the Amazon jungle. The respected occult researcher Lewis Spence  published a series of works on the subject during the 1920’s and Dion Fortune was familiar with all of these, so that the outlines of the tradition were replicated in The Esoteric Orders and their Work (1927). The more esoteric strands stemmed from Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), the clairvoyant researches by W. Scott-Elliot in The Story of Atlantis (1893), and Rudolf Steiner’s  Atlantis and Lemuria (1911).

Most of the scientific theories seem to have been sunk  by more recent oceanographic studies and the theory of tectonic plates, but the tradition of a lost continent lives on as a scenario that appeals to the popular imagination, and in a way has resurfaced with J.R.R.Tolkien’s evocation of Numenor in The Silmarillion. Not published until 1977 but which may have been written as far back as the early 1920’s, not that Tolkien seemed to rely on anything beyond his own mythopoeic imagination – and nothing wrong with that! And it is quite possible to build a workable Mystery tradition upon them.

Dion Fortune’s long term interest in the matter of sexual polarity as exemplified in her novels and in her early psychological work is also plainly shown in The Arthurian Formula in an analysis of the domestic problems experienced by Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot, and in which the king’s half sisters Morgan and Morgawse play a questionable role. 

Wendy Berg, however, has set a number of other hares running with remarkable pair of books, one theoretical the other practical,  Red Tree, White Tree and Gwenevere and the Round Table, with the suggestion (buttressed by at least a couple of respectable academic works) that the main problem at the court was not that King Arthur fancied faery women to humans, but that the queen herself was a faery. And following up on this suggestion, my own researches into the first Arthurian romancer, Chrétien de Troyes, have convinced me that faery elements played a major role in Arthurian legend, and that far from the emphasis being on chivalrous knights rescuing human damsels in distress, the damsels were more likely to be feisty faery women initiating a mortal knight into inner world planes and adventures. Such is my theme in The Faery Gates of Avalon.

The routes to Camelot taken by Wendy Berg and myself were, respectively the early 13^th century Lancelot/Grail cycle, and the late 12^th century romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Not that Sir Thomas Malory was ignorant of this material, for his Le Morte d’Arthur was a free translation of much of it. But he was a down to earth English knight with an outlook influenced by the culture of his day, that celebrated 14^th century codes of chivalry as exemplified by Henry V, the hero of the battle of Agincourt in 1415.

Quite a natural tendency one has to say, for each generation is likely to see ancient material in its own light, and he certainly tells a good story, if a somewhat prolix one at times. Fast forwarding for some four hundred years we find the 19^th century Idylls of the King by Lord Alfred Tennyson tends to feature the Camelot ladies as languorous Pre-Raphaelite maidens and the knights as decent Victorian chaps whose characters could well have been formed on the playing fields of Eton. 

Nonetheless, before one gets too patronising it should be said that the most powerful working of that 1981 Hawkwood weekend was based upon a reading straight out of Tennyson!  

Our cultural attitudes today might well be characterised by a neo-Celtic influence. When The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend first appeared, it did attract some criticism for being largely based on Malory rather than more direct Celtic material such as The Mabinogion. But although the Mabinogion was translated by Lady Charlotte Guest as far back as 1838-49 there was not a lot of esoteric commentary on it at the time of the publication of The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend.

However this was soon put to rights by the end of the decade with major works by Caitlín Matthews Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain (1987) and Arthur and the Sovereignty of Britain (1989); John Matthews on Gawain – Knight of the Goddess (1990); The Grail Seeker’s Companion (1986) by John Matthews and Marian Green; and R.J.Stewart’s The Mystic Life of Merlin and The Prophetic Vision of Merlin (1986) drawing upon Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain  and Vita Merlini. All these writers were present at that Arthurian weekend – not that I lay claim to inspiring them, but simply that we were all part of a current that began to flow strongly in the 1980’s. And if there is one thing I have learned about practical occultism it is that, like small boat sailing, it is all a question of learning how to go with the winds and the tides – inner or outer. How to pick them up, use them to best advantage, and not be wrecked by sailing too close to the wind!

Looked at in this way, revisiting Camelot is like a voyage to a mystical island  through a network of various shoals and channels, deeps and shallows, that each are navigable with a bit of luck and skill, as long as you don’t stop en route to argue the toss as to which way might be the one and only true. For the best compass is your own character, motivation and intuition.

On that memorable occasion in 1981 when, upon impulse from I know not where, I took up a hunting horn and blew three long blasts at the end of an evocative reading, I had no sooner done so than it seemed as if great doors opened in the West bringing a waft of sea air, and even spray. A mighty figure of the King came through the doors, crowned, with short golden beard, robed, and with the great hilt of the sword Excalibur very prominent, impressive with its jewelled work, in its mighty runed scabbard. With the king came Queen Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Tristram and all the knights and ladies. Larger than life they took up their positions about the Table Round. In the centre rose a column of incense smoke with astral rainbow colours manifesting as the powers of the Grail, the Cauldron, Merlin and Nimuë. The rest can be read up in Chapter 15 of I Called It Magic.

All images that could well come out of illustrations by Arthur Ransome rather than what any historical 5^th century Arthurian dux bellorum might have been like. But like Atlantis, these images well up from the universal mind, rather than any physical historical scenario. For there are many interconnecting spheres that we inhabit, beyond the physical one we are currently anchored to in our outer lives.

And such images from them, once experienced, are never forgotten. But you need to have been there when the gates were opened, to experience the power. Although those gates have by no means since been shut. As was announced at the time from an inner plane source “A light has been rekindled tonight that has for too long been extinguished.”  It still shines if you go and look for it.

Likewise: “The sword is unsheathed and should be kept on the altar in that way.” It too is still there, if  you know how to find your way to the mystic chapel. By the crystal boat of the magical imagination.

 

 

 

 

               

FAERY LORE

An exhibition on the subject of Faeryland at the Royal Geographical Society (of all places!) from the 10^th to the end of September stimulates me to repeat a few lines that I once wrote on the subject.

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 13^th 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 dawn 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 dawning 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 1^st 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 12^th 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?

The Sea Priestess at Brean Down

If any Dion Fortune aficionados take the trouble to visit Glastonbury it is well worth going on to pay a visit to the sea side at Brean Down, the site of her novel The Sea Priestess. And having taken the trouble to go that far – it is well worth girding up the loins to walk the whole length of it to the rocks at the end where the Sea Priestess set up her temple, which is a thinly disguised copy of an old fort that stands at the end of it. At least I presume it still does and has not been made over into a fun fair or burger joint by now. Although as it comes under the protection of the National Trust so the worst excesses of popular tourism may be avoided.

I append a description of the place, along with much else, in an Introduction I wrote for an American edition of The Sea Priestess thirteen years ago. It is still available from RedWheel/Weiser but may have another Introduction by now. In any case, even if you have a copy of that particular edition, what follows is rather more extensive than was eventually published, as the copy editors, bless their hearts, felt I had banged on a bit too much on details of Brean Down, and cut out a few bits.  

However, much of this I gleaned from a most informative book called Brean Down Fort – Its History and the Defence of the Bristol Channel by Nicholas van der Bijl, BEM (Hawk Editions, Cossington Somerset, 2000) that may be hard to find as I bought from a remainder merchant some years ago. But I felt a bit of actual history would be appropriate as a background to the astral visions of Ms. Le Fay Morgan and the efforts of the long suffering Wilfred.  

Much of the ritual they performed appears in the novel although we have since been able to publish the complete script at Skylight Press in Dion Fortune’s Rites of Isis and of Pan that has turned out to be one of our best sellers. Whether you should try this stuff at home is of course up to you!

 

THE SEA PRIESTESS AND BREAN DOWN

At the time Dion Fortune was writing The Sea Priestess, some time in 1936, she had a number of things in common with the main protagonist of her book, Vivien Le Fay Morgan. The most immediately striking was her mode of dress. Dion Fortune had a penchant for large very wide brimmed hats that partly concealed the face, together with a long cloak that descended almost to the ankles, rather like a once famous advertisment for Sandemann`s port; whilst underneath she might sport a scarlet dress. She was also very fond of furs and chunky jewellery, including rings with enormous stones.

            It would be a mistake however, on the strength of this form of esoteric power dressing to assume that author or character were no more than 1930`s poseurs. Beneath the façade was a woman of immense independence of mind and courage of her convictions. It might seem at times even to run to ruthlessness but it was balanced by a soul of great compassion and common sense. And what is more, a highly competent magician.

            The story concerns a high initiate who is about to undertake a major work of sea and moon magic, for which purpose she needs to find a suitable location upon which to build a purpose-made temple complete with living accommodation. At the same time she needs to find a man suitable to train as her assistant in the magical work. With commendable economy of means she kills two birds with one stone by selecting a local estate agent who has the necessarily professional contacts to find a location, together with sufficient artistic skills to help her refurbish and decorate it appropriately. He also has the temperament and personal circumstances that can make of him a capable, if unlikely, magical apprentice.

            Dion Fortune drew from her own experience in the setting of the novel, which takes place in the magical county of Somerset, not far from Glastonbury, reputedly “the holyest erthe in England” and closely associated in popular tradition with King Arthur`s Camelot, the Holy Graal, Joseph of Arimathea, and even more ancient legends that are exploited in the novel as colonial outposts of the lost continent of Atlantis.

The place that the Sea Priestess chose for her Temple can be visited and seen to this day. It lies on that relatively short stretch of English coastline that faces due west, directly upon the broad Atlantic Ocean, without Ireland being in the way. Here a spur of land juts into the sea, a limestone outcrop one and a half miles long and only a quarter of a mile wide. It is an extension of the Mendip Hills of that rise above the Somersetshire levels, and is part of a series of outcrops that include Glastonbury Tor, Brent Knoll, and the small islands in the Bristol Channel that stretch towards Wales, Steep Holm and Flat Holm, inhabited only by birds.

            It forms an impressive southern arm to a bay that embraces the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare, whilst further to the south, in Dion Fortune`s day, was a rough unexploited expanse of sand dunes extending past the village of Brean as far as the smaller resort of Burnham-on-Sea, today largely subsumed by holiday parks. But the headland itself, Brean Down, at the end of which she built her temple, still stands wild and stark much as described in the novel.

Once the property of Glastonbury Abbey in medieval times, it was sold in the seventeenth century to a family of landed gentry, the Wyndhams, who sought to exploit its potential as a harbour to exploit their sideline as smugglers of brandy, cloth and wine. It is now in the care of the National Trust as a site of special scientific interest in terms of its archaeology and natural history, and it is also a designated bird sanctuary.

            To the esoteric enthusiast keen to trace the foundations of Dion Fortune`s imagination the importance of Brean Down lies less in its flora and fauna, or its Neolithic, Bronze Age, or Romano-Celtic remains, than in the rocky outcrop at the very end, which contains the remains of a military fort. This fort, with its moat, underground rooms, and a rough pathway running out to a little cabin that once housed a searchlight, retains an evocative resonance of the temple envisaged by the Sea Priestess.

 We can easily imagine the searchlight cabin as a place of meditation for Vivien Le Fay Morgan, looking out over the dark line of rocks that extend like steeping stones into the sea, over which she trod at night to the alarm of her colleague William Maxwell as the Atlantic rollers broke around her. Rollers which did indeed snatch and engulf the young half-wit boy who had been helping them - an incident which the Sea Priestess remarked with typical sangfroid, was probably part of the sacrifice expected by the gods at the building of any temple of significance. Nonetheless against this chilling assessment it is only fair to point out that she risked her life in a vain attempt to save him.

            The fort was originally built as a defence against invasion by the French in the 1860`s. Abandoned in 1900 it was reactivated during the Second World War when two naval guns were installed against the threat of German invasion. However the Brean Down of the novel is very much as the young Dion Fortune would have remembered it, for she spent her teen age years in the vicinity and returned to establish her own base in nearby Glastonbury from 1922. The road up to the temple of the Sea Priestess can be trodden to this day, as the old single track military road that took supplies to and from the fort.

The imagination of Dion Fortune reached back beyond historical time however, to a priestess from legendary Atlantis arriving in an ocean-going long boat to visit colonial outposts formed upon the western seaboards of Ireland, Britain, and mainland Europe.  Human habitation of the place in the very distant past is not quite so fanciful as might be thought, as proved by the recent discovery of well preserved roundhouse walls at least 15,000 years old on the southern side of the Down.

            In the novel Brean Down is known as Bell Head, and the nearby town of Dickmouth may be regarded as Weston-super-Mare, where the River Axe that has wound across the Somerset levels debouches into the sea. This river in the novel is call the Dick, with a certain play on words in that one part of it, the Narrow Dick, recalls the great River Naradek, of Atlantean legend, that ran past the City of the Golden Gates. Similarly the little town of Dickford upon the same river, may be identified with the village of Axbridge that nestles under the Mendip Hills not far from the Cheddar Gorge, famous for its caves and its cheese.

Of the other local topography the Bell Knowle of the novel may be equated with Brent Knoll and Starber with Burnham-on-Sea. Bell Knowle of the novel is on the course of the original Narrow Dick, and a small watercourse still runs from East Brent into the Axe. In real life Brent Knoll still holds a certain magical ambience. Within living memory, school children climbed it every Good Friday to collect posies, my wife in her childhood being one of them; and in more recent times local opposition caused the building of the M4 motorway to be diverted so as not to desecrate it, and as one drives south it seems, by the bends in the road, to swing from side to side of the carriage way in a magical and disconcerting manner.

            As Wilfred Maxwell and Vivien Le Fay Morgan begin to work magically together, so they recover ancient memories of a previous incarnation, and the local topography takes on the significance of Atlantean colonial times. Bell Knowle contains a cave-like temple, and vines are grown at the landward end of Bell Head, within the paws of the headland that reminds them of a couchant lion. Here they also see a port, and indeed one did exist in Roman times, for in the course of ages this low lying land has been in turn salt marsh or even shallow sea to make of the Down an island. 

            Vivien`s relationship toward William Maxwell is however the important theme of the novel to which this ancient landscape forms a background. It reflects Dion Fortune`s own feeling toward men in general during the period at which she wrote this novel. It was a time when she was also performing her Rite of Isis to invited audiences at the Belfry, that strange temple in London that she later described in her subsequent novel Moon Magic, and it is excerpts from this Rite that are extensively quoted in this novel too.

Its purpose is to awaken her male partner to his full potential by acting as a priestess mediating a goddess to him. At the end of this experience he should have achieved greater psychic and spiritual wholeness, having met and realised the deeper and subtler powers of the feminine.  He has become an initiate of the goddess if we choose to put it in esoteric terms – whilst she, as the adept, in pursuit of her own magical destiny, passes on, uncommitted, to her next assignment from the inner beings for whom she works, represented in the novel by the shadowy figure known as the Priest of the Moon.  

The Rite of Isis, with its evocation of the powers of the archetypal feminine, although largely the fruit of Dion Fortune`s genius, has in large part its source of inspiration in the Dionysian and Orphic traditions of pre-Olympian Greece. There is evidence to show that at about this time Dion Fortune had just read and been much impressed by Jane Harrison`s Prolegomena to a Study of Greek Religion.

This work, with its somewhat forbidding academic title, was first published in 1903. Its author was a remarkable woman who, at a time when it was extremely difficult for a woman to gain a university degree, had not only done this but had broken into the enclosed male preserves of classical studies, studying under Sir James Frazer, author of the famous work The Golden Bough.  With her book she shook to the core the cosy conservative male establishment of Edwardian academe by approaching the religion of the earlier ancient Greeks from the standpoint of  evolutionary anthropology.

Jane Harrison`s book also vastly stimulated Dion Fortune when she came upon it some thirty years later, and there are parts of ancient rituals quoted within the text that have a close resonance with phrases from the Rite of Isis, as the initiate or the newly deceased approaches “the secret well beside the sacred tree” announcing “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven but my race is of Heaven alone.” 

            In practical psychological terms what Vivien Le Fay Morgan does for Wilfred is to release him from the hen pecking dominance of his mother and sister, release and develop his repressed imaginative and artistic talents, incidentally cure him of asthmatic attacks at the same time, and lead him to meeting and marrying a local girl with whom he seems set fair to live happily ever afterwards.

That this is done by recourse to ritual magic may be thought a little unorthodox in more conservative circles, but Vivien Le Fay Morgan evidently paid scant regard to these, whilst at the same time leading a life of virginal rectitude as uncompromising as the incumbent of an enclosed religious order. This is a side of the Sea Priestess which is apt to be forgotten by latter day aspirants to her as a role model.

            However, Vivien Le Fay Morgan is not going to the immense trouble of locating a likely site for a sea temple, and having it built and decorated virtually from scratch, purely for the regeneration of  William Maxwell. She intends to perform works of higher magic within it, and what he gets out of helping her with it is his incidental reward, or the just dues for the service he has put in. In all successful operations of magic the books have to balance at the end of the day.

Just what her magical aims and methods may be she tries to explain to Wilfred, in Chapter 17, and of course one aim of the novel itself was to give some instruction about practical magic to the reader, at a time when esoteric secrecy was taken very seriously and thought best not to be expounded as fact. Strange as it may seem, she had even felt uncomfortable about being accused of revealing too much in her innocuous textbook The Mystical Qabalah. Fiction was her way of slightly raising the veil of secrecy.

As she explains to Wilfred, her first aim is to make a “magical image” of herself,  but this is something that she cannot do unaided: “For me to make a magical image of myself is auto-suggestion, and begins and ends subjectively. But when two or three of us get to work together, and you picture me as I picture myself, then things begin to happen. Your suggestion aids my autosuggestion, and then – then it passes outside ourselves, and things begin to build up in the astral ethers, and they are the channels of forces.”

Something of what she means by this is immediately demonstrated when, stoking up the Fire of Azrael, she evokes within him a powerful vision of times from the remote past. And this is an experience which is not entirely subjective, for it has “signs following” in a great storm that lashes the place, together with the personal crisis of a severe asthma attack in which, slipping into unconsciousness, Wilfred, as he himself describes it, “meets the sea-gods”. There follows a passage of Dion Fortune writing at her evocative best, about the images he sees in the driving waves at the height of the storm on a fitful moonlit night between the dark of wind torn clouds.

As for Vivien herself, she reveals that she works under instruction from a discarnate being who is referred to only as the Priest of the Moon. It is under his instruction that she is undertaking this work, one of the goals of which is to contact herself to the ultimate spiritual source, known to Qabalists as the Great Unmanifest, the formless power behind the fount of creation itself.

This in turn relates to the great zodiacal tides of the precession of the equinoxes, whereby in the coming Age of Aquarius the old gods will be coming back, after another manner. Her own part in this is to make the way clear for the realisation of the divine feminine as part of the cult of the Great Goddess – who as Our Lady Isis comprises all goddesses, of the corn, of the dead, of the sea, of the moon. As she states, in Chapter 19, the magical work that they  do together is to break a trail for those who come after: “we shall bring back into modern life something that has been lost and forgotten and that is badly needed.”

This “something lost and forgotten” is something rather more than sexual relationship as a biological function, whether for reproductive purposes or for mutual diversion. Rather is it “a subtle, magical relationship that is very rare.”  As she goes on to explain: “People think that sex is physical and that love is emotional, and they don`t realise that there is something else between a man and a woman which is magnetic in just the same way as the compass turns to the pole; and it isn`t in them any more than it is in the compass, but it is something that passes through them and uses them, and it belongs to Nature. It is the thing that has kept me young, Wilfred, when I ought to be an old, old woman, and it is the thing that is making you, who used to be a mother`s boy, as quarrelsome as a cock on a midden.”

In this, is she is hinting at what alchemists of old referred to as the Elixir of Life or the Quintessence of the Elements or the Gluten of the White Eagle?

From explanations and beginnings such as this she teaches Wilfred how to help her in working of her Rite of Isis, and it should by now be obvious that there is more to working a ritual than reciting lines from a script. Magic is an art that requires the simultaneous linkage through the subconscious mind of the practitioner with an inner objective world that has been variously called the Anima Mundi, or latterly, if somewhat inadequately, the collective unconscious. 

In the course of realising this Wilfred comes to terms with the Priest of the Moon, the shadowy figure behind Vivien Le Fay Morgan in the ritual that they are working. It is an inner contact, and one about which he wonders, quite reasonably, whether it is but a figment of his own subconscious mind, implanted there by suggestion. To some extent it may be, but to leave it there is to be content with a mere half truth, for imagination and suggestion are but a priming of the pump. Once primed, the pump surges with objective force from a source that is beyond personality or the individual subconscious.

As Wilfred describes his contact with the Priest of the Moon,  the over riding impression is an awareness of a distinct dynamic personality: “The Priest of the Moon had personality in a very marked degree, and if he was a product of my subconcious, I am proud of it. There were times, not infrequent, when I used to wonder what he was, and whether I was deluding myself, or whether I was loopy; but each time I met him afresh I knew what he was, beyond all doubting, and he left his mark on me.” 

In his words, Dion Fortune is also confiding to us her own experience of this area of esoteric work, and her sentiments could be confirmed by most competent practitioners of the magical arts.

The Rite of Isis having been successfully performed, Vivien Le Fay Morgan disappears from the book and from Wilfred`s ken – to reappear in different circumstances in the subsequent novel Moon Magic. Her immediate disappearance coincides with a rock fall in the cave temple in which she has been working, perhaps suggested to Dion Fortune by the explosion at the fort that caused its closure in 1900. 

However, the magical function goes on. It has been successfully passed on to Wilfred and to his new wife Molly, together with the contact with the Priest of the Moon, who continues to work with them in what Wilfred can best describe as a waking dream. In these concluding chapters of Wilfred and Molly the development and work of two initiates in the world is described, indicating that magic is not only the prerogative of those rare examples of advanced initiation like Vivien Le Fay Morgan whose life is dedicated to nothing but the pursuit of the magical arts. 

Thus the novel, in addition to its narrower function of a demonstration of a magical operation evoking the powers of the Sephirah Yesod according to the theoretical principles outlined The Mystical Qabalah, serves also as a practical illustration of the principles that Dion Fortune outlined in her two earlier text books written immediately after she had founded the Fraternity of the Inner Light,  The Esoteric Orders and their Work and The Training and Work of an Initiate, upon which her earlier students were trained, and whose principles remain true to this day.

 

The Sanctuary at Chalice Orchard

Looking through the notes I compiled when I was writing  Dion Fortune and the Inner Light  back in 1999 I realise that the chalet at Chalice Orchard I recently referred to as the Shrine was in fact called the Sanctuary.  But no doubt, as the saying goes, a rose by any other name will smell as sweet!  And such a place played an important part in her work.

 Dion Fortune and Thomas Loveday acquired Chalice Orchard in 1924.  Up to then they had no headquarters of their own at Glastonbury, and most of the work performed so far had been either at Alice Buckton’s guest house at Chalice Well or in an old farm house in Chalkwell Street. (It was here that Dion Fortune experienced her celebrated vision of a salamander after a fiery accident with an oil lamp!)

The Fraternity of the Inner Light was formally founded in 1927, along with the Inner Light Magazine, although the first mention of Chalice Orchard by Dion Fortune is in the May 1927 issue of The Transactions of the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society (of which she happened to be president for a brief period) . She wrote:

“We are betraying no secret of the Mysteries if we remind our readers that ‘the holiest earth in England’ is Glastonbury. The veil is very thin there, and no sensitive soul that makes the Glastonbury pilgrimage returns as it went. It is for this reason that a pilgrimage centre has been founded there, and those who seek the hidden side of things may go thither and meet others like-minded to themselves.

“When the power-tides are flowing it is very necessary that all should be ‘of one mind in one place’ if the power is to be brought through in its strength. The critic and scoffer close the doors of the soul and the angel of the threshold turns back as he is about to enter the guest chamber. Only where knowledge and dedication have control of the conditions can the mental atmosphere be made that is necessary for the manifesting of the power-tides upon the physical plane.

“In the Chalice Orchard Club we have made a centre where these conditions can be maintained, and we cordially invite all those who seek the door into the Unseen to come to us there and share with us the wonderful atmosphere of the Isle of Avalon untainted by scepticism and heedlessness. In the old apple orchard high upon the shoulder of the Tor stands a little wooden building dedicated to the service of the Masters and the opening of the soul. All who seek that opening are welcome.

“Here will be found a realisation that the two aspects of force, spiritual and elemental, are necessary to the completion of life. Some parts of Glastonbury, such as the Abbey, are purely spiritual; other aspects, such as the Tor, are purely pagan. Under the apple trees in Chalice Orchard, we seek the realisation and harmonisation of both; the spiritual aspects bringing inspiration and devotion; the pagan aspects bringing joy, power and beauty.

“I may not tell the seasons of  pagan power, but the Christian Path has no secrets, and we invite all who seek the Graal to come to join us at Chalice Orchard for the great Christian festivals, and especially for the one that now draws near, the glorious feast of Pentecost. High up above the green water-meadows on the shoulder of the Tor, looking out across the Severn estuary to the hills of Wales, a low wooden house hides among the apple trees. Its doors stand open to all who seek the Way across the Threshold by the Western Gate.”

The chalet called ‘the Sanctuary’ was erected in 1932, following an appeal for funds.

“We want to establish at Chalice Orchard a sanctuary for meditation and practical occult work, and we ask all those who are interested in our Centre there if they will contribute to the fund we have opened for that purpose.

“Glastonbury is essentially a place of pilgrimage. No one who visits it can fail to realise its strong spiritual atmosphere. We feel that it would be of very great value to have there a quiet place set apart for prayer and meditation, where those who desire to do so may enter into the silence.

“We are therefore asking all those who realise the significance of Glastonbury and who have felt the inspiration  of its influence, and especially those who know and love the little hostel in its sheltered garden, to contribute to this fund in order that we may make a sanctuary and keep a perpetual light upon its altar.”

The importance that Dion Fortune laid upon a Sanctuary is revealed in comments from one of her inner contacts about the one they established at their London headquarters.

“You must maintain very carefully the sanctity and isolation of this home. It is for that reason that you are isolating your Sanctuary, and great power will concentrate there. Keep the lights dim there, and allow nothing to disturb it.

 “It is well for you to accustom yourselves to this means of communication. It is perfectly normal. I am just as much alive as you are. You must learn to accustom yourselves to the idea that man is consciousness, not a vehicle, and then there will be nothing strange to you in the idea of contacting consciousness. It is one of the chief bases of occult work that the imagination takes the initial step. Faith is the basis of all things. If you have faith, determination, and courage, you can achieve anything. It depends on no one but you.

“There is more power in meditating in silence, but you should invoke aloud. By invoking aloud you give rise to certain vibrations, which have an important effect because they have their correlation with the subtler planes. You invoke aloud in order to bring through from the subtler planes to the physical, but when you meditate you aim to go to the subtler planes.

“It is so much easier to go on to the subtler planes than you realise. First you imagine yourself to be there, and then you will yourself to be there. People usually reverse the process. It is necessary to make the form before you pour in the force. You do it now to a greater extent than you realise – you are functioning on two planes, you have more vision than you bring through to conscious consciousness.” (cf. Dion Fortune & the Inner Light  pp. 96-97 – Thoth Publications, 2000).

As regards further details of such form building see also my own Magical Images and the Magical Imagination (now also available as an e-book)  or indeed Dion Fortune’s Magical Battle of Britain, the editing of which in 1993 brought through some very live contacts to me, that resulted in The Abbey Papers, a very comprehensive demonstration of form building for a variety of purposes as seen from the other side. (All Skylight Press).

 

Dion Fortune and Glastonbury Tor

 My thanks go to David Walker who with his wife Corinne  runs the Enchantment book and esoteric merchandise shop at the foot of Glastonbury Tor for his clarification of just what is on sale for auction of the Dion Fortune associated bit of real estate. It is NOT the original Chalice Orchard but a slice taken out of it on which a very nice modern house was built round about the late 50’s. So if anyone is delving in their back pocket for something to spend at the auction, read the small print and make sure exactly what you are bidding for.

However, it is possible that DF spent some time on the space involved, depending on whether one of the original chalets, known as ‘the Shrine’ was located on that particular spot. I recall visiting the place back in 1954, as I described in I Called it Magic, and if my recollection is right the Shrine chalet was down towards if not in that area. I was shown it by Mary Gilchrist, who lived at Chalice Orchard at the time. It was in a rather sorry state, used to house what looked like old furniture, although it still had a certain amount of inner whizz bang about it, and would have last been used by Dion Fortune in 1945 following  its dedication and esoteric use by the group in the nineteen thirties.

However, the past is past, and we needs must embrace change when it is due. The Tor is still there and available to all – in recognition of which I append a little piece that I wrote a few years back, largely based on Dion Fortune’s Avalon of the Heart . It can form the basis of a pleasant little meditation whether you are physically there or not.

Dion Fortune’s vision of the Tor

If Joseph of Arimathea set his sights on Glastonbury Tor to identify the final goal of his long journey, for Dion Fortune it was above all a focus of elemental power and inspiration. Upon its shoulder she built her home, a guest house, and a sanctuary.

As she saw it, it was a Hill of Vision for anyone whose eyes have the least inclination to open upon another world. And she describes, in Avalon of the Heart, how, on many occasions, the tower is reported to have been seen rimmed in light. And she tells how a warm glow, as of a furnace, may beat up from the ground on wild winter knights; or the sound of chanting be heard from the depths of the hill; or towering forms of shadow and light seen to be moving among the ancient thorn-trees that clothe the lower slopes.

            But wonderful though the view from the Tor might be by day for the many pilgrims and tourists who climb it, far more wonderful, she says, is the sight by night for those who dare to climb it in the dark. Or most wonderful of all, perhaps, to climb the Tor at sunset and watch the sun go down over the far Atlantic, when from the Tor one may see two sunsets – the sun himself in his glory in the west, and his reflection upon the clouds in the eastern sky.

Whilst to see the moon rising through the rose-pink glow of low clouds over the darkening marshes is a thing she found never to be forgotten. As the lights come on in the town at the foot of the hill, at any rate in her day, they were seen to form a five-pointed star, for there are five roads out of Avalon – to Wells, Meare, Street, Butleigh, and Shepton Mallet – and the houses, following along these roads form a perfect star of light about the Tor with its tower.

            But there is one time above all others when it is well to ascend the Tor at nightfall, and that is at the full moon of the autumnal equinox, round about the Mass of St Michael. The nights are coming cold then, but the days are still warm with the afterglow of summer, and the cold of the darkness, chilling the warm breath of the meadows, causes a thick but shallow mist to form over the levels.

Through this the cattle wade knee-deep as in water, and trees cast shadows in the moonlight, black upon silver. As the night closes in, the mist deepens. Like a rising tide in an estuary it fills the hollows. Trees and barns slowly drown. Only the few scattered knolls like St Bride`s Beckary remain as islands in the white gloom. Gradually they too fade as the mist thickens, and Avalon is an island again.

            Local folk call this shallow mist that lies upon the levels the Lake of Wonder. And then perhaps to the eyes of vision may be seen coming slowly, a black barge, rowed by a dumb man, bearing the three weeping queens who bring Arthur, wounded unto death at Lyonesse, that he may heal him of his grievous wound in the green coombs among the apple trees.

            Into this Lake of Wonder Sir Bedivere flung the magic sword Excalibur, graven with strange runes in an unknown tongue. And the white arm of a Lady of the Lake, rising from the rushes, seized it to draw it under. And we may recall that Excalibur, was a gift to the human Arthur from the world of Faery, and to the world of Faery it was in due time returned.

But what of the other hallows of the Graal, the spear, the cup, the stone, or the cruets of white and red? Great mystery surrounds their origin as well as their fate. If we read the earliest Graal stories, we find there is much to suggest that the Graal itself had a faery origin. Was the rich Fisher King in his boat upon the waters, who directed Percival to the mysterious castle that was at first invisible to the eye, one of the Faery kind?

            In later legend the Graal winners took a strange boat, called the Ship of Solomon, in which they took the Graal to Sarras, which seems an inner aspect of the Holy Land just as Logres is an inner level of Albion. What was the mission of Joseph of Arimathea in all of this? Is the belief that he was bringing back the Graal to Avalon, a realisation that the Hallows were about to be returned to their faery origins?

            All these speculations, and many more, may come to us when, in Dion Fortune`s words, the Lake of Wonder rises from its faery springs under the Hunter`s Moon.

But, there are also visions of a different kind that can be seen from the height of the Tor by day; one of which Dion Fortune had witnessed twice and says is a sight never to be forgotten.

In the ordinary heat of day, she recalls, there are times when there falls upon the Glastonbury levels what is known locally as the Blight. A strange heaviness that will not turn to thunder is in the summer air. The sun glows dully like a copper disk through the low lying clouds, and in the oppressive dimness and heat, nerves are on edge with restlessness and uneasiness.

            On one such occasion, driven desperate by the oppressiveness of the levels, she and her companions set out to climb the Tor. Up and up through densest mist they climbed, moving in a sphere some ten feet in diameter, shut in by a white wall impenetrable as stone – until they reached the very summit. And there, from a white blindness, they came out of the mist as suddenly as a train runs out of a tunnel. For the crest of the Tor was above the cloud line.

The sky was of that deep indigo blue often seen at Avalon – a blue that should be seen through the boughs of an apple tree in blossom. From marge to marge no cloud flecked its depths, but below their feet there stretched to the very horizon a rolling, billowing sea of purest white, with purple in the hollows. While above their heads was the tower, its shadow flung far out over the cloudy floor. It was as if the world had sunk in the sea and they were the last of mankind. No sound rose through the mist, no bird circled above. There was nothing but blue sky, grey tower, billowing mist and blazing sun.

Physical though this vision might have been, and possibly because of this, I think this simple image is as important as any of the visions of the legendary tales. It is an image of the elemental powers as they exist at their most direct and most obvious way. Earth, Water, Air and Fire. The Air of the inverted bowl of the blue sky above. The Earth of the stone of the tower below, its foundations in the earth. The Water heaving and billowing within the mist all about. And the Fire of the great Day Star shining on all from above.

It provides the foundation for a fundamentally important symbolic structure to link between the Powers of the Above and with the Powers of the Below. The Power within the Heavens and the Power within the Land. The Heavenly Light with the Earth Light. The Overworld with the Underworld.

If you are familiar with the structure of the Tree of Life,  you may like to experiment with it.

DION FORTUNE AT GLASTONBURY

Anyone who seeks an instructive and enjoyable day out on Saturday 26^th September might like to think about a trip to Glastonbury where an all day seminar on Dion Fortune is taking place in the Town Hall from 9.30.am. I attended the first couple of these and was delighted to see that at least one or two folks had found it worthwhile to make the trip all the way from California (Hi there Filomena!)  Sorry I can’t be there myself this time but the years weigh a bit too heavy on the old carcase. However, whoever comes might possibly catch a glimpse of me on the higher spiritual levels, or even the upper astral – although don’t  push your luck!

Full details can be found on the Company of Avalon web site www.companyofavalon.co.uk and there is also a link, I am told, via http://www.companyofavalon.co.uk/The%20Dion%20Fortune%20%20Seminar.html. I hope I have got that right, but am currently lacking the presence of my grandchildren who are my essential guides when it comes to wrestling with all this new fangled technology.

Cost of the day is £14 which is a bargain in anyone’s money. If anyone however should have from £150,000 to £200,000 to invest in a bit of cultural real estate  Dion Fortune’s old home and headquarters at Glastonbury is said to be up for auction on 22^nd September. Details available from Cooper & Tanner, 41 High Street, Glastonbury, BA6 9DS (Telephone 01458 760029)

Anyhow, for any unable to attend either function I append a little travelogue of my own about Glastonbury, that  I once wrote for Michael Howard’s excellent magazine The Cauldron a while ago.

The Different Faces of Glastonbury

The first time I saw Glastonbury, as I have recorded in my esoteric autobiography I Called It Magic, was as a romantic young RAF corporal astride my motorbike looking down at the Tor from the Shepton Mallet road, in 1953, imagining myself to be some kind of knight errant. A view, as I said “once seen, never forgotten”.

I came to know it better, as indeed I came to know myself better, over the years – but in both cases no easy answers are forthcoming. We are all of us, more complicated creatures than we easily realise, and so is a sacred site and west country town like Glastonbury.

Indeed, at times I have been led to think, that if this is “the holiest earth in England” I would hate to see the tackiest! Although I suppose it depends upon how deep one wants to delve.

On the surface show, the last time I was in Glastonbury attending a spiritual event, as we debouched from our high minded gathering I heard a local resident referring to our like as “the scum” that besmirched his fair town. And I suppose he had a point. I am old enough to recall the time when it had more the ambience of a charming west country backwater without the pervading atmosphere of joss sticks and spliffs. Although even in the 1960’s it was not uncommon to see signs up at public house doors – “No Hippies!”  The hippies have I suppose now come and gone but have nonetheless left, I suppose, a kind of cultural imprint of sorts.

Not of course that the place was not always considered a little bit “odd”. For the upside of that, one can do hardly do better than consult Peter Benham’s excellent book The Avalonians. And this goes back to the 1920’s and even further – although in those days they were perhaps a little more genteel about it.  

As far as Avalonians go, I have to say my own particular esoteric mentor, Dion Fortune, was something of a late comer. She fell in love with the place, put down roots at the foot of the Tor, and wrote a virtual love letter about the place, somewhat inaccurate in parts as love letters tend to be, but nonetheless moving, published in 1934 as Avalon of the Heart. She certainly mixed a heady cocktail out of the place with evocations of Merlin, the Holy Grail, the Celtic saints, Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Thorn, the Abbey, the Tor, Chalice Well, King Arthur, Morgan le Fay, even the lost continent of Atlantis.

And she demonstrated an early exercise of her psychic faculties in company with Bligh Bond at the Autumnal Equinox of 1921 with a paper that became the core of inner work with her Fraternity for many years. That there was an unbroken line of descent of spiritual power connecting directly with the elemental powers of the soil, in which are the roots of the soul of the nation, that is to say, of those who inhabit the land. And that which was noble in the pagan was carried on into Christian times. Head in London, heart in Glastonbury was how she tended to express this in her practical work, with headquarters in Bayswater and hightailing it down the Great West Road, possibly in the side car of Thomas Loveday’s motorbike, to her chalet at the foot of the Tor, where she wrote amongst other things, her magnum opus The Mystical Qabalah and supporting novels.

 In her capacious mind there was no great divide between the pagan and the Christian, which she felt confirmed at Whitsun in 1926 when a spiral power had them all spontaneously dancing on the Tor along with an unequivocal call from the Elemental kingdoms “Come from the depths of your Elemental Being and lighten our darkness – Come in the name of the White Christ and the Hosts of the Elements.”  Just what was meant by the “White Christ” – who apparently entered the Underworld to preach to the Elemental Kingdoms during the first Easter – has recently been further explored by Wendy Berg in Red Tree, White Tree (Skylight Press 2011) along with the current revival of interest in the faery tradition. Married up to the symbolic objects allegedly brought to Glastonbury by  Joseph of Arimathea. Red and white cruets that have some connection with the Grail tradition and other weapons of Arthurian tradition which, like Excalibur, originally came from faery sources – otherwise called the Lake. (Odd that Glastonbury was pre-historically a lake village!) Powers that originally came from the faery world being duly returned to it.

There are obviously deep matters here that tend to go rather deeper into magical and mystical territory than is commonly supposed. What we might regard as bubbling away at the bottom of the cauldron. Although the superficial view may only see the scum that floats on the surface.

This at times can have its amusing and disconcerting side. I recall a visit to Glastonbury to show some Greek friends over the Tor, which happened to coincide with an official religious ceremony of sorts. This was accompanied by holy music blaring from loud speakers, along with the unusual sight of nuns scurrying up and down the Tor, rather as if an ant hill had been disturbed. And one was reminded that the orthodox religious like to make a claim on the place that is every bit as important as the neo-pagan or the esoteric.

The whole situation was amusingly encapsulated for me by the sight of a somewhat prim and proper religious procession proceeding toward the Tor which was spontaneously joined by a young lady, bare foot and festooned with wild flowers, stoned out of her head by God knows what, attracted out of Chalice Well gardens to dance alongside and within and the more staid procession. That, in a sense, was a caricature, to my mind, of Glastonbury all over!

However, there is of course more to it than that. And it seems to me that Dion Fortune had it about right in crediting the place with being a harmonious meeting point between many strands of the spiritual powers of the land. (Well perhaps not too harmonious!) There is a certain great mystical peace manifest among the abbey ruins just as there are about the town points of stimulus to the ancient powers of the land, and there need be no conflict between them. Although I suppose, a certain amount of effervescence might be expected in the confluence of the red and the white. Dragons fighting, but not in anger. Even if we humans do like to take sides like supporters at some cosmic football match.

Something of this effervescence comes out in unexpected ways. One such being the attack on the Glastonbury thorn on Wearyall Hill. Who knows what is at the back of all that? And I do not suppose that even those who perpetrate it know. Even if they think they do.

Glastonbury has a way of coming back at you, even when you least expect it, even if you want to pretend it isn’t there. It has a certain powerful magnetism. I have found it in my own affairs. Helios Book Service, which I launched with my old partners John and Mary Hall back in the early sixties, up near Cheltenham, ended its days in Glastonbury. Sold up when John and Mary retired, it showed a brave face at a corner site at the bottom of the High Street for a couple of years before going to the wall. And on a more positive note, when invited to give a talk in the Assembly Rooms at a Dion Fortune memorial conference in 2007, a young lady came up and started a conversation that ended up with my being persuaded to write my autobiography. Something I swore I would never do as I always preferred looking forward to looking backwards.

However, looking backward does have its points. The subject of my talk that day was on the Faery Tradition in Arthurian Legend, which somehow seemed to strike an octave with Dion Fortune’s introduction to faery in 1920 at the performance in this same hall of Rutland Boughton and Fiona Macleod’s The Immortal Hour. What goes around, comes around. And particularly in what Dion Fortune described as a “three ring circus” such as Glastonbury.  From faery rings, to the ring of the Glastonbury zodiac first noted by Dr John Dee, to the continuing ring on the inner of the Abbey bells, there is something for everyone there. Even Tesco’s supermarket.

As Sir Gawain, and other heroes like him found, when confronted with the prospect of embracing a loathly damsel, you only have to take her on her own terms for her transformation to take place. But it is all in your own mind!

[from The Cauldron magazine, May 2012 www.the-cauldron.org.uk]