Gareth Knight's Blog, page 8

DION FORTUNE AT GLASTONBURY

Anyone who seeks an instructive and enjoyable day out on Saturday 26thSeptember 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 22ndSeptember. 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 Glastonburyto 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 Glastonburythorn 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]
 

TOURISM AND PILGRIMAGE ON INNER AND OUTER PLANES

We will commence by building and entering the Sacred Abbey. This is a magical image that, besides having its prototype expressed upon the physical plane in numerous examples throughout the world, is also fashioned  in the world of the imagination. It is a design or pattern that was first conceived in the heavens, but is increased and contributed to by all who have worshipped, worked or walked with reverence within it.
We take as our model the pattern of the great constructions for which the High Middle Ages had a particular facility. It was indeed part of the historical mission or destiny within the Divine Plan of this period. The Divine Plan is the restitution of the fallen world back toward the original perfection, and these buildings served as bridges between Heaven and Earth. A Heaven that might be conceived as a true and real terra firma, and an Earth that is and was like a floating island, that had slipped from its attachment to the main land and which was being secured by having the links remade, by these bridges or means of access to the heavenly main land.
Each abbey or cathedral has its own unique individuality. (We shall henceforth use the term ‘abbey’ because although cathedral fits the usage as well, an abbey has the tradition of a connection with a contemplative order – which adds far greater power and depth.) It is an application of what we spoke of in the beginning, about the flow of the waters of consciousness. An abbey is like a deep pool in a garden. A pool containing life of another order of existence, that, standing in the common light of day, we may gaze upon in wonder as we look into the depths at the hints and shadows of another mode of life.
Thus the vision serves its purpose, for unlike any garden pool, here are links to a greater world, the heavens themselves. But insofar that any garden pool has its own characteristics, is an expression of its immediate milieu, so is every abbey unique in that it is a separate pool of consciousness. One in which the pilgrim soul can be immersed, cleansed, refreshed, baptised, made new.
This is sensed by the crowds who still flock to these places, despite the secular assumptions of contemporary society. These are a temporary shallows, we have to say, that will lead in time to new depths. For humankind is like a river, which will in time lead, by whatever devious meanders, to the universal encompassing sea. The modern consciousness in its present historical diversion senses its own shallowness and seeks for pilgrimage in the guise of what is now called tourism. A shallow substitute in its way, for the ancient pilgrims faced a harder journey than is found or expected today, but what it lacks in quality is made up for in quantity. And the pursuit of being ‘taken out of themselves’ is rendered faster, more varied, than ever it could have been in olden days. The same human needs and instincts remain in search of expression. It is only the mode and means that vary, according to the climate of specific historical times.
The same applies, although in slightly different ways, to those who travel to ancient sacred sites, or to historical buildings where important events of state took place. Each of these in their way are centres of power, within the body of the human consciousness. Pools or basins hollowed out by great events, or persistent custom, or dedicated ceremony, which can still contribute to the sacred cultural heritage.
And a spring of such kind is increased by its use. This may be by the intelligent and devoted application of a few individuals, as in the upkeep of some obscure ancient site or shrine, or the wider flow of masses, uncomprehending in the main, to major public sites. Even though the conscious contact may be shallow, little realised at the time of the visit, much may be gained by the individual soul. Some resonance will remain that may in future time and in another place, (perhaps not even of this world), cause the recognition of a heavenly pattern within the soul and of its true origin.
The Abbey Papers pp.41-42

The Magical World of the Inklings

There are some who call the Inklings the Oxford Christians and see their work as a form of orthodox evangelism inspired by the Holy Spirit. Christians they no doubt were, each in their way, but their orthodoxy is debatable. And although we would not go out of our way to quarrel with those who hold this view, it seems an oversimplification. As I hope I have shown, when we read, so to speak, the small print of their unwritten manifesto, it is no simple orthodoxy that informs their work. It is rather a demonstration of the growth of the human spirit in a multidimensional universe that is rendered visible to us by powers of perception within the human imagination. Barfield was the great theoretician of all that this implies, but all the creative work of Lewis, Tolkien and Williams is steeped in it. This is the power behind their work, and the message that is there for us to learn.
In the work of the Inklings we have, in short, the vision and power of the ancient wisdom, the secret doctrine, call it what we will, but without the withdrawn cultishness. Such sectarian withdrawal has been a temporary aberration, imposed for historical and cultural reasons over the past three or four hundred years. But the time has come for the abandonment of enclosed fraternities, secret rites and the camp-following psychic fringe.
In the work of the Inklings it is all laid open to the world, much of it in the guise of children’s or popular literature. It is expressed and demonstrated in terms that speak directly to the imagination. We simply have to be prepared to open ourselves to it, and so play our part in the practical expression of what enclosed adepts used to call  LIGHT – IN – EXTENSION.[Concluding pages of THE MAGICAL WORLD OF THE INKLINGS by Gareth Knight. Skylight Press]
“Because of the combination of information, understanding and insight on which it is founded ‘The Magical World of the Inklings’ is more than outstanding. It is not in the same league with anything I have come across.” OWEN BARFIELD

“It is only recently that the full play of Lewis’s neo-Platonism is reaching a wider public. Nobody has more revealingly shown the occultic and mythical character of this world-view, and its influence on Lewis’s fiction, than did Gareth Knight in his superb book ‘The Magical World of the Inklings.’ DR ANDREW WALKER – Director of the Centre  for Theology and Culture, King’s College, London; founder and former director of the C.S.Lewis Centre.

Hello Pluto!

 Hello Pluto! You were discovered in the year I was born. Were you named after my imaginary childhood friend, Mickey Mouse’s dog – or was it the other way about? I really would like to know!
Funny thing, the human imagination. I see already that one of the dark areas of Pluto’s moon has been designated ‘Mordor’ by our scientist friends. Are we planting human hang-ups into other parts of the solar system? The same way that we assume any interstellar interaction to be a copy of the way we behave on planet Earth?
As Anthony Duncan remarks in his recent book “To Think Without Fear” :
‘We project our own problems upon others and we project our own hostilities and insecurities upon everything strange or alien. Our mental images of inter-planetary travel are demonised by our obsession with “Star Wars”. Being children of Adam and Eve, we take it for granted that Cain will always kill Abel. Our first instinct (faithfully manifested in our fictional literature) is to call in the military!’
‘I refer, of course, to that phenomenon generally known as the Unidentified Flying Object, or more popularly, as The Flying Saucer.
‘This phenomenon carries with it something of a blessing in that it throws all our learned disciplines into an equal measure of disarray. It challenges every respectable world-view and is, needless to say, the subject both of silly official “cover-ups” and of the consequent – and increasingly threadbare – “disinformation” campaigns that accompany such activities.
‘We are bound, sooner or later nevertheless, to ask ourselves at least a minimal number of the questions these phenomena suggest.
‘What is it that appears, and disappears, both from our sight and from our radar screens and appears to defy all known laws of flight and aerodynamics?
‘What is it that defies our present knowledge of astronomy, of physics, of astrophysics and all the rest? Where do these things come from, and how, and why do they come at all?
‘What is this that, by its very nature, must constitute a challenge to the religious insight and theological thought of every kind? What might its relevance be, in the context of such insights as we have? Why is this challenge unheeded and why does the theological mind remain firmly and comfortably buried, ostrich-like, in the sand?
‘What of the ever-growing multitude of reported encounters with human-like, or humanoid, beings connected with U.F.Os? What of the considerable number of reported abductions and return, or men, women and children? What of their examinations by curious and evidently interested – but essentially benevolent – humanoids, clearly anxious not to cause harm?
‘Our world-views are challenged and, as a consequence, the challenge is either ignored or denied. We retreat into compartmental thinking and, at best, give this kind of experience a watertight compartment of its own. Witnesses are usually said to have been the victims of hallucination, suggestion – almost anything as long as they don’t have to be taken threateningly seriously. Seldom does “the scientific” reveal itself as being so subjective and essentially unscientific as – in some at least – of its dealings with those who claim encounter with persons who would appear to be extra-terrestrial.’
Anthony Duncan speaks not without some personal experience: ‘Some two or three years ago we became aware of being “visited” in some way, usually at night, by persons who we came to understand as alien to our own Earth and humanity....’

As a consequence his book ‘To Think Without Fear – the Challenge of the Extra-Terrestrial’ came to be written in an endeavour to answer some of the questions – both scientific and theological – thus raised. 

The Silver Net

By the contact and internal co-operation with inner plane helpers, you may be led to ways of service that would not be possible by any other means. Connections can be made, small, seemingly inconsequential or coincidental, that nevertheless form an essential part in operations of the brotherhood of light. You may only seldom glimpse their significance or magnitude but these links are fundamental in importance because they are ‘earthing’.
In this work you needs must have much faith, and this we try to establish by these contacts to which you, in your fullness as human beings in the world of matter, can respond. And so faith, over the years, gives way to experience and knowledge.  A knowledge of something of what we are and what we try to do, and the means whereby we try to do it.
If this were ineffective or delusory it is hardly likely that you would continue to cooperate with it. It is no idle solitary occupation that feeds upon illusions or self-satisfaction. Indeed you are tested, often quite severely, on some parts of the way.
You form part of a brotherhood, a sisterhood, that is as yet invisible to you. A gleaming net of starlight that shines like a web in the morning dew, crystal reflecting mirrors of dawning light of the day star.
You yourselves are, did you but realise it, reflecting and recording instruments of this star shine. For as spiritual beings you have the links, the inward antennae, to capture and respond to the resonating message of the stars. This message, this network of communication, of help and succour, is ever about you, like the far more material and gross waves of sound and radio.
You live in a cacophony of earthly generated noise, upon the physical and electro-magnetic levels. The radiating network  of the star waves is equally real, equally accessible did you but fashion the right equipment and accurately tune it. That equipment is within your own mind and soul. Did you but know it you are walking receivers, indeed I might go so far as to say it is the reason for your whole existence. Yet there are so many non-functioning or malfunctioning examples of apparatus that non-functioning often seems to be the norm. Yet if all human spiritual transceivers were properly and truly functioning then the face of the world as you know it would be transfigured.
So be aware of that silver net. It is also a stairway, a star way, an extended version of Jacob’s Ladder. By it you may climb. By merely holding on to it, you may become aware of vibrations within it from afar off, even to the highest, and to remote and spiritual regions you dream not of. Perfect civilisations, expressions in perfect matter of the divine will and grace. Worlds that may seem impossible to your occluded senses.
For this net is also one of harmony. Like a great harp, whose every interval is attuned to cosmic harmony. It is a visual image of the harmony of the spheres, the peons of praise of the worshipping angels – the Seraphim, the Cherubim. It is indeed an angelic network of light, to which human spirits in Earth can become gradually attuned.
The Abbey Papers  pp. 98-100
 

Forget ET and think Mr Spock?

In a learned book published today Professor Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University argues that aliens who resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth like planets recently discovered by astronomers, although his theory begs the question of Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox – why, if aliens exist, have they not made contact?
But maybe they have. In looking through the late Rev. Antony Duncan’s papers in search of material to publish I came across some records to suggest as much to someone I knew, but who kept quiet about it at the time.  There are limits to what a psychically gifted vicar can admit! “To Think Without Fear” (Skylight Press) contains his record of contact with at least three types, and to members of his family, along with the social and metaphysical implications.
Well, he did not keep entirely quiet about it; he hinted as much to me at the time but I did not take him seriously – although I did quote some of it, somewhat jocularly, in “Christ & Qabalah” (pp. 195-199) the record of our association over forty years.
But some of the implications of what he wrote in some of his poetry are indeed only just coming home to me:
As Universe and Universe converge, the heavens fall into their melting-pots.
Reordering of Inner Space is consequent upon a change of Mind; a train of thought pursued towards a new fulfilment.
Hands are stretched across infinities of inner depths to seek, to find a hand beyond imagining by either questing mind....
Opening lines of “All Things Converge” (‘Christ & Qabalah p.194)
All fascinating and quite challenging stuff! New dynamics for a new age?

Reflecting upon Images

Time is like a linear cut-out of a two-dimensional carnival pageant that can be seen curving round the external grounds of the abbey. This is difficult to describe, and more so to explain, but we do best, I fancy, simply to present you with images, as they appear on the inner planes. Reflecting upon these images (and ‘reflecting’ is an accurate word) strange though they may seem, can cause you to gain another perspective upon what seems to your material consciousness to be an all-encompassing quantum. It is far from being that, you have my word. But as a young child has first to learn to come to terms with modes of perception on the physical plane, so does man have like problems when passing from physical life into the conditions of the inner planes.
And once focused upon the inner planes, it is an additional skill to be able to look from there and see accurately and well into the outer.  It is rather like staring into a dim and murky pool, with qualities that not only refract but distort the light. However these are in accordance with codifiable laws laid down by the builders of form upon the etheric sub-planes. One’s sight is obscured by having to gaze through the etheric, the level of scaffolding and struts, so to speak,  that hold the structures of the outer world together in coherence.
Thus communication between inner and outer worlds is a specialist task, whether one is upon the inner or the outer planes; that is to say, looking out or looking in. And why it is that sometimes one may have confusion or distorted communication from those whose desire for service exceeds their trained or natural abilities. This is a problem which affects all. One can even have disoriented angels, as well as disoriented and confused mediums, adepts and initiates.
Thus is magic, in all its forms, a difficult and noble science. It is an intimate attempt at penetrating the Veil of Isis. It is a way that is not forbidden – only difficult. It is like a man standing at a very thick wall, with a hollow tin or glass placed to his ear, striving to receive communication from the other side. That is the situation with ordinary untrained man. As one progresses so the wall becomes thinner, more translucent and transaudient, until it is of the texture of a fine veil. But one can pass through it in full consciousness (I speak not of temporary states of trance, vision or psychic perception) only at death.
 [The Abbey Papers, p.46]
 
 
 

Contacting the Western Masters

Over the Summer Solstice there has been some interest in an old tape recording of mine called “Contacting the Western Masters”. We hope to be able to  reissue it some time but converting ancient technology is a time consuming business and we have much else on our plates at Skylight Press. Hopefully, some time within the next twelve months.
In the meantime anyone seriously interested could do a lot worse than take a look at a couple of books of mine. "The Abbey Papers" contains scripts of contacts with these particular masters and, if you were to read these through in a meditative manner, that could work just as well as listening to a tape. Also my little book "Magical Images and the Magical Imagination" gives detailed guidance on making similar contacts.
I make this suggestion along with a cautionary quote from “Letters of Light”, the magical letters of William G Gray to Alan Richardson, a recently published by Skylight  – “By the way, don’t attempt  to ‘hear words’, just ‘get it by contact’. The contact will sort itself out into English via your mind in its own time. In fact it is silly to expect English or any other human language on that level, for no one speaks like that there.”
In other words, what matters is a ‘mind to mind’ contact on an intuitive level – which is how I have learned to work - apart from rare occasions such as the ‘Abbey’ contact that came upon me all unexpected and unsought for while editing the war letters of Dion Fortune. 
More details of these titles can be found on the Skylight Press web site.

MIDSUMMER MUSINGS

I was once approached by a respected academic asking for my take on the life and work of Dion Fortune. He found it difficult to account for what he perceived as her first being a kind of ‘wishy washy’ Christian mystic and then turning to the Qabalah and coming up with some pretty hot pagan stuff in her Rites of Isis and of Pan.
Well first of all we need to disabuse ourselves of the thought that Dion Fortune was ‘wishy washy’ about anything, along with the assumption that there is anything  ‘wishy washy’ in Christian mysticism. Although there is indeed plenty of quite ‘wishy washy’ pagan stuff  about these days, including soft porn fairy fantasies, although I don’t suppose that bothers Old Horny too much!
I have been quite intrigued by this problem over the past year or so, in making a study of the life and work of the occultist Paul Sédir, who, after distinguishing himself as one of the leading lights in French occultism, was brought up short by the life and work of a gentleman called Nizier Philippe who just went around healing  people.
Monsieur Philippe seems to have been a down to earth Christian mystic of a far from ‘wishy washy’ kind. Not that he was particularly welcomed by the church, which may have felt a bit upstaged by him, for even when he was a child the local curé was worried that his unusual powers might come from the devil.
Nor did the adult Monsieur Philippe enjoy a very good reception from the medical profession, who felt their livelihood threatened and tried to close him down by taking him to law on several occasions. And when as a young man he sought medical qualifications as an intern at the local hospital he was slung out for curing people unofficially on the side. The crunch point came when he cured the leg of a patient who was due to have it amputated next day. Whatever the feelings of the patient might have been, the surgeon was far from grateful!
The shock of  Monsieur Philippe was no less to members of the contemporary occult establishment in France, including Papus, author of The Tarot of the Bohemians and various textbooks on magic – who was also a qualified doctor and specialist on hypnosis,  but who virtually became a Christian mystic in the face of Monsieur Philippe’s powers, regarding him as his ‘spiritual master’.
Paul Sédir was another occultist considerably impressed, and in trying to come to terms with it all, wrote an intriguing book called Initiations, which I translated last year. It is an intriguing work because it hovers between traditional occult theory and practice (both Eastern and Western) and the brute fact of Christian mysticism at its most direct – not only in the matter of instant cures, or resuscitation of the recently departed, but bizarre shifts in time and space.  
Such things cannot be produced to order of course, “the Spirit  bloweth where it listeth” but there seem to be some for whom it blows in a favourable direction;  whom Sédir came to call ‘Friends of God’. And in particular one known as ‘Theophane’ in his book, leading Sédir to speculate whether there are such ‘divine incarnations’ in the modern world in light of the one who said he would be “with us until the end of the world!”
A key question for many in the esoteric world who may regard themselves as Christian is whether such an Incarnation of ‘the Word’ was a once and still on- going personalevent  rather than some  remote ‘Christ Force’ blowing our way if we happen to tap into it in meditation.  Or, at the other extreme, may see the gospel story simply the fate of an idealistic, ‘highly evolved’ young man who got the wrong side of the religious and political establishment of his day.
According to Monsieur Philippe not taking the New Testament at face value is a  bad mistake. Paul Sédir came to agree with him, to the point of almost regarding the four Gospels as a magical document if taken literally. He records in Initiations the surprise of some Eastern adepti at Westerners not realising that fact. And I believe the Dalai Lama may recently have hinted as much.
But when it comes to the Divine, then the field of operation becomes somewhat beyond  astral visualisation or mental callisthenics;  spiritual qualities are required. Indeed the theory is laid out in the Qabalah in the doctrine of the Four Worlds, in which the Tree of Life is regarded as operative at four levels. The Material, the Formative, the Creative, and the Spiritual. Assiah, Yetzirah, Briah, Atziluth. Or Physical, Elemental, Angelic, Divine.
The closest that spiritual qualities can be described is in somewhat hackneyed two thousand year old terms –  Faith, Hope and Charity.  And all three are very much positive virtues, rather than passive or ‘wishy washy’ ones. And although St Paul plumped for the last when trying to deal with the stroppy and argumentative Corinthians, the first was the one that Jesus kept reminding his followers that they lacked. Presumably because those of little faith may well be on the way to becoming hopeless and loveless too! Let alone being able to move mountains. Even the mountains of our own unbelief.

LETTERS OF LIGHT

If you buy only one more book this year make sure it is this one - from Skylight Press.

Letters from old magus W.G.Gray to the young enquirer Alan Richardson back in 1969/70.

If you want a second opinion go see Peregrin Wildoak's review of it on his blog site https://magicoftheordinary.wordpress.com

Words of wisdom for anyone beginning on the occult path - and well worth thinking about for anyone further along the way.