Tuesday 22 November 2016

The Gurus and the Second World War video presentation.





Here is a video of my presentation for the Glastonbury Positive Living Group in September.

Although complete in itself it does sit well alongside my earlier lecture on Dion Fortune and the Occult Battle of Britain.

Primarily focused on Meher Baba, it also includes material on Narayan Maharaj, Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother.

The important second half tells personal stories of my father's experiences in India and Burma and how a mysterious destiny was gradually revealed. With this, the story opens out to contemplate the spiritual connections between Britain and India.

Thanks to  Chillfilms for the recording and to Samia and Dave of  Glastonbury Positive Living Group

Tuesday 6 September 2016

New Book. The Michael Line, the Qabalah and the Tarot.






Having been booked to appear at the upcoming Avalon Tarot Conference to give a presentation of my classic material on the Michael Line, the Qabalah and the Tarot, a wild idea occurred to me. Could I get a book together on the subject and manifest it in time? This was on August 11th. The conference is on September 10th/11th. A month. I had to check with printer as to when they would need the work if I wanted it in time. I also needed my graphics man, the redoubtable Bernard Chandler, to be available. It turned out he was soon to go on a family holiday. I was scheduled to be working 8 hour shifts in a warehouse in the coming week. It was crazy. 

I brought together some material from my other books and some magazine articles and wrote quite a bit of new stuff. In terms of what I did, the project was completed in 7 days that included 2 where I worked 8 hours in the warehouse. This provided a surreal contrast to the ten years it took me to write Avalonian Aeon.

From the back cover.


The Michael Line,

the Qabalah & the Tarot

is a unique adventure that brings together
the Earth Mysteries, Psychic Questing, magic, art, creativity,
 history, and mythology,
 in a powerful blend that presents
 a transformative way of approaching a sacred landscape.

Includes
The Archangel Michael and his Age.
The Paths of the Dragon.
A Maltwood Mystery and the Sun and the Serpent.

The Green Stone and the Lights of Knowledge.
Ancient Egyptians in Britain. A Qabalistic path.

Albion Rising: the 1991 Michael Line Rally.
Landscape tarot and artefact retrieval.

1997. General Election Cycles of Time.
Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune.

2011. Royal Wedding Cross of St George.
Seven Barrows and the Belinus Line.


Featuring
Graham Phillips, Dion Fortune, Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller,
Rudolf Steiner, John Michell, Aleister Crowley, William Blake,
Andrew Collins, Katharine Maltwood.

80 pages. £9.99



Monday 5 September 2016

Avalon Tarot Conference






There's a great tarot conference in Glastonbury this coming weekend.

I'm giving one of my best presentations, The Michael Line, the Qabalah and the Tarot, on the Sunday.

I will be in splendid company. Do come along if you can.



Michael Line Temperance card. Artwork Yuri Leitch.



Tuesday 5 July 2016

Glastonbury Romance 2003: the Daemonic Genius of John Cowper Powys Video





Here is a 40 min lecture I gave to the Powys Society Conference in August 2010, not long after Avalonian Aeon was published.

Thanks to Raymond Cox of the Powys Society for permission to reproduce.

Why did it take me over ten years to write Avalonian Aeon?  There are good answers here. I always knew that the book would feature John Cowper Powys in a big way as I wanted to convey the extent of his influence and inspiration upon me. It seemed likely that I would need to re-read his thousand-page epic novel A Glastonbury Romance again. I actually ended up reading it 3 times in a 12 month period. This seems absurd but quite remarkable events occurred during that time which seem inseparable from my readings of the novel. These events were powerful and disturbing. I make my case for the artist as magician and Powys as one of the great magi of Glastonbury in that he communicated something vital about the place that none of the other luminaries of his time, Dion Fortune and Frederick Bligh Bond for example, managed to do.

So here is a complementary telling of my story of Abraxas in the Abbey also told in my Crowley and Jung lecture and the story of a terrible murder.

The contents of this lecture have since been published in my Glastonbury Psychogeography.




Saturday 18 June 2016

Babalon Working video lecture




I'm very pleased to finally be able to post a video of a lecture I gave at the March 2015 Glastonbury Occult Conference.

The Babalon Working is an enduring interest of mine for many reasons, primarily the amazing cast of characters involved. This lecture brings together material in my book Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus and includes quite a lot of my unique take on the controversial role of L Ron Hubbard in the proceedings. Being as I'm fairly unusual in occultist writers in not having a default hate position on LRH, I feel that has enabled me to see a few interesting things others might have missed.


Monday 9 May 2016

Magical Battle of Britain Video




Here is a video of my recent Glastonbury presentation.
It is nearly 2 hours long.

 It was given on April 21st as a benefit for the Library of Avalon. 

This was the same evening that beacon fires were lit around the country as part of the Queen's 90th birthday celebrations. There was one on Glastonbury Tor and there is a brief visualisation to link in with it in the spirit of Dion Fortune's 1940 workings featured about 50 minutes into the video.

The material is a glimpse into the immense amount of information and ideas I have gathered for my long-term writing project on this subject.

Includes Dion Fortune, Wellesley Tudor Pole, John Goodchild, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Rudolf Von Sebottendorff, Karl Maria Wiligut, Glastonbury, and Wewelsburg.

Thanks to Tim and Janet Hale for filming it.

Wednesday 4 May 2016

Guest Blog Post: Wirral Park Roundabout Mystery




A piece adapted from material in my latest book Glastonbury Psychogeography has appeared as a Guest Blog Post on Particulations, the site of academic Psychogeographer Tina Richardson. My thanks to her for featuring it.





 

Friday 15 April 2016

Mysterium Artorius now available on Kindle



My first book, Mysterium Artorius, is now available on Kindle in UK and USA.


Buy the Book in USA

Buy the Book in UK


Nine years on I'm still very proud of this work and the ground it covers.

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Southend Glastonbury Cremation Ground Mandala Initiation.





Here is a 92 min video of my recent presentation for the Glastonbury Positive Living Group.

I thank Samia and Dave for inviting me to do it in full knowledge of the nature of the material involved.
Initial impetus from a conversation with Divyael.

Also yay to Chillfilms who recorded the basic footage.

I have added some imagery and music.


This is an incredibly strange, powerful, intense, potentially disturbing story. It is most definitely adult material and includes some strong language. If easily triggered, do not watch!

Twenty years after the events described I feel that I can't wait any longer to get it out there in some form. I've always intended to write a book about it but I have no idea when I might find the time to do this justice and I have never felt that this extraordinary tale was just for me so I'm uploading it for all those who might be going through their own distinctly weird spiritual dramas in the modern world and looking for some maps of the territory to assist them.

After I turned into a dolphin in Glastonbury and took Reiki and Osho sannyas initiations in the same week, I was thrown into an extraordinary initiatory ordeal involving past lives, serial killers, Sai Baba, a Kali machete murder, the Southend werewolf, and the Whore of Babylon. This is a tale of how Shakti Kundalini does its thing in the modern world. 



Friday 1 April 2016

New Book. Glastonbury Psychogeography








After my presentation earlier this year I realised that I had enough material for a book and couldn't resist the challenge of putting it together at a rapid pace. It is a unique blend of Psychogeography and Psychic Questing

Some of the material in it has been repurposed from Avalonian Aeon.  

The material on Jung and Crowley featured in my Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus appears again but in a hugely expanded context that shows what was going on in my life whilst I was putting it together. This includes my discovery of Jung's visit to Glastonbury and a heretical episode with psychic questing pioneer Andrew Collins involving Abraxas in Glastonbury Abbey.

What I have have called the Wirral Park Roundabout Mystery deals with powerful events in the Glastonbury of the nineties that occurred on opposite sides of it: the burning down of McDonalds and the fatal outbreak of Legionnaires Disease.

From the back cover


GLASTONBURY PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
is a unique blending of Psychogeography and Psychic Questing, providing some remarkable perspectives on the historical mythic landscape of Glastonbury and its powerful genius loci. The works of great visionaries provide a context for the modern experiences of the author.

Includes
The View Over the Hawksmoor Matrix.
The Visionary Cities of William Blake.
The Daemonic Genius of John Cowper Powys.
Great Memoria:  the Eternal Abbey.
Wearyall Hill and the Fisher King's Song.
Collector of Souls: the Park Wood Murder and Twin Peaks.
The Wirral Park Roundabout Mystery.
Glastonbury Romance 2003: the Artist as Magician. Wisdom of the Dream.
The Visit of CG Jung to Glastonbury: Abraxas in the Abbey.
Kentucky Tescopolis: the Non-Place Membrane.
Holy Thorn Trauma.

Featuring
Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, William Blake, John Cowper Powys, Frederick Bligh Bond, Dion Fortune, Andrew Collins, John Michell, Arthur Rimbaud, Aleister Crowley, CG Jung.

121 pages. £11.99 




USA to follow soon.

 





Wednesday 6 January 2016

Glastonbury Psychogeography




My first public event of 2016 is a presentation entitled

 The Psychogeography of the Wirral Park Roundabout.


It takes place in Glastonbury on Wednesday February 3rd at
 the Red Brick Building, Morland Enterprise Park, Morland Road, Glastonbury, BA6 9FT.

Entry is £5.00 with doors opening at 7:00 for a 7:30 start.

I will feature material that has been percolating in my head for decades.



John Cowper Powys meets JG Ballard. Psychogeography is a literary mythopoetic mode of understanding the effects of environment on human consciousness. Powys portrayed a conflict between two different levels of Glastonbury, the realm of the Grail and the domain of worldly concerns, business and industry, in his great novel Glastonbury Romance. This tension is played out in modern times with extraordinary intensity in one of the most powerful and generally unacknowledged zones in Glastonbury, the area centred on the Wirral Park (B&Q) Roundabout and its megalithic standing stone. 







Wearyall Hill and Beckery are the gestation points of the modern Glastonbury mythology, being the sites of the Joseph of Arimathea story and Blue Glass Bowl event respectively. John of Glastonbury also links the two places with a nebulous story of a convent of nuns on the hill and the strange journey of Arthur to a Grail chapel at Beckery where he received a crystal cross from the Virgin Mary. This brought the motif of the Chapel Perilous to a locale which in modern times became the location of a veritable wasteland of industrial decay.


View of mythic Glastonbury from decapitated Holy Thorn.




View from behind Holy Thorn to Glastonbury non-places (B&Q, Tescos etc).



 
JG Ballard expressed alienated post-modern sensibilities whereby the road and the car carry isolated people from one indistinct all-but-identical place to another and strange extremes of events and behaviour result. The Wirral Park Roundabout has a multitude of modern non-places clustering around it: two chain hotels, a supermarket, fast-food outlets, a petrol station, garden centre, and so on. An A Road takes innumerable people past it every day. 



Glastonbury non-places.



It is as if a strange membrane exists between mythic Glastonbury and the relentless spread of non-places that attempt to impinge upon it. In this unique area, conflagration and death have  resulted. I will discuss the outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease, the McDonalds arson, the Holy Thorn decapitation and much else.  

Maybe I might see some of you there. It is possible that a short book might manifest from the material one day ---