Inside-Out Thinking

Hail to the Lizard Queen!

When I saw this title to a review of The Secret History of the World by Hilary Mantel in the Guardian yesterday, I smiled. It's hard not to - there's an amusing illustration of a man making hand gestures.

But she reviews my book as if it's about sinister conspiracy theories of evil, possibly demonic men controlling people against their will. There's none of that my book.

I've written my book to suggest that this popular, knee-jerk reaction to the secret societies - conditioned in part by The Da Vinci Code, I suppose - is mistaken. The secret societies have been guardians of an underground stream of alternative spirituality . This has from time to time risen to the surface to help prompt humanity - gently - in one direction or another.

I think it may have something important to say to us now.

I suppose there may be societies of men bent on evil, but I think it's probably unwise to dwell on that without any evidence. The initiates I have met have been good, perhaps even saintly.

THE REAL MEANING OF HALLOWEEN

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF HALLOWEEN

The spiritual world has its seasons too - and as with the natural world, these seasons are tied to the movement of the heavenly bodies. Halloween and All Saints day - the Day of the Dead in other cultures - mark the mid-point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice - and traditionally this is the beginning of winter.

As we've noted before, when the natural world begins to die, the spirit world comes alive.

And traditionally Halloween was more holy than horrifying.

The feasting traditionally associated with Halloween is to draw the dead to us, to make them nostalgic for the pleasures of the material world.

Think of the Day of the Dead and all the grisly fun in that imagery.

English mumming - from which we get mummers meaning actors - began when people would dress up like the dead to make them feel at home, to greet them in a playful sort of way. The word mummer comes from the mum-mum sound they made imitating the walking dead's attempts to speak.

Halloween was a time when you might commune with your ancestors, when prayers were more likely to be heard and when the spirit of prophecy was strong. Girls would bob for apples - traditionally the fruit of Venus because the 5 point pattern pips make in a slice of apple mimic the pattern Venus makes in the sky over a 40 year  period - in search of love. If you were successful, you'd put the apple under your pillow and hope to dream of the man you'd marry.

So Halloween is like a great turning point in the year, like the opening of a great door in the cosmos - and the spirits come pouring through.

Goblins, ghosts and the spirits of the dead, these are the lowest of the denizens of the spirit wolrds. But at the beginning of winter we also begin to look forward to the deep mid-winter, when the greatest spirit involved in the destiny of the planet is reborn...

THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR AND THE VATICAN

The BBC online news service has reported that the Vatican is about to release papers which will exonerate the Templars.

A damaging accusation against them came from confessions exacted under torture - that they worshipped a goat-headed demon called Baphomet.

As part of their initiation ceremonies they were required to undergo an altered state, a sort of after death experience - to experience what we all experience after death, whilst still alive. After death we are attacked by demons who tear our sins from us - the purgatory of Christian tradition.

The torture the Templars were subjected to was so extreme - in one case a knight was made to carry charred bones that had fallen from his feet - that they again entered an altered state - and saw again the king of the demons.

DONOVAN AND DAVID LYNCH

... are on stage together at the BFI on Oct 21st. A curious connection?

Esoteric philosophy creates these. There's a passage in Donno's book, The Hurdy Gurdy Man, when he's playing at a huge open air concert - I think maybe the one that gave rise to the phrase 'flower power'. When it starts to rain, he calls on the crowd to join him in a magic spell to stop it.

Donovan's initiation was into an Oriental school, but what's important to all esoteric streams is the primacy of mind over matter. First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is..

Lost on a Desert Island

Writers steeped in esoteric lore have often set their stories on an island on which their characters are marooned - from Swift to William Golding in Lord of the Flies. Ostensibly these stories are about how exotic life is on the island, but, of course, the underlying thrust is that life on these islands is exactly like our day to day lives here and now. These esoteric writers are trying to highlight aspects of our lives that normally get overlooked.

The central conflict in Lost is between Jack, the man of science, and Locke who calls himself 'a man of faith'. But Locke's is clearly not the faith of a 'two up two down missionary position' Christian. Locke is exploring the deeper laws that describe supernatural patterns in our lives - laws that have long been the focus of esoteric thought.

More Dawkins

Those clips of Dawkins taking the piss out of healers in Glastonbury and elsewhere keep replaying in my mind.

Anyone who is not satisfied with bog-standard Christianity and wants to experiment with alternatives, anyone interested in alternative healing and spirituality, in astrology, in Cabala or Sufism is thought to be a 'bit nutty' by the scientific materialists who regulate our world-view.

I've written my book to show that there is an august intellectual tradition behind all these explorations, to show how they all hang together and that they present a unified and coherent view of the world to set against the scientific-materialist one.

I also show that many of the great minds of history have held this world view, most of them artists and writers, but also some scientists, some of them even greater scientists than Richard Dawkins.