Inside-Out Thinking

myths

I've just  read a phrase in a newspaper which made me smile: 'myths come into play where science throws up its hands'. It's a nice image, but i don't think it's quite right. I don't think science and myth operate in different realms. I've tried to show in my book that they often describe the same things but from the point of view of different forms of consciousness.

So, for example, many of the best-known myths, both biblical and classical, describe the formation of the solar system, the transition for matter to vegetation to animal life, the development of the spine necessary for animal life, the proliferation of biological forms, the evolution of the species from marine life to amphibian to land creatures to anatomically modern human, the floods that marked the end of the Ice Age. Myths, I believe, show that such things were known before they were discovered by modern materialistic science, but known in a different way.

If these myths resonate with us it is, I believe, that this is because we in some sense retain a memory of these events.

Of course it is hard to see how this could be the case from the point of view of modern materialistic science, but from the point of view of idealism it is easier to understand. There is a cosmic consciousness and we are conscious to the degree that we partake of that cosmic consciousness.

observations on the French

They rarely just go for a bike ride you or I might. They shave their legs, put on all the lycra kit, strap on the helmet.. Must take hours..

They don't actually swim in the sea, but stand there, water up to the thighs, legs sturdily apart, looking towards the horizon. (I wondered if this was their version of the English longing for death, subject of a future post, but I don't think so. With the French it looks more proprietorial.)

They never go for a walk in the country. If you try to do this farmers and other locals look at you very suspiciously. As far as I know there is no French Wordsworth and no equivalent to the nature mysticism so popular in Britain and Germany. I don't think the Italians have it either. The countryside is for the French a nice place to have a picnic, as in Jean Renoir's masterpiece Partie de Campagne.

Maybe memories of rural poverty and how hard it's been for peasants to scratch a living still preoccupy the French?

French TV is rubbish to an astonishing and quite puzzling degree, given their preeminence in films and cartoons. (Perhaps they look at British films and find them astonishingly bad too.)

French pop music is also shit. They seem to have no grasp of cool, which in the way we use it has an American-Negro derivation. Perhaps it's because they have a relatively small black population? But I think it's more to to the fact that for them status and therefore style is much more to do with class and money. Great pop music obviously comes from the bottom up, and French elitism must militate against that.

I like the joyful sense of intellectual superiority that French philosophers exude. They don't seem to have the strong anti-intellectual current that mars English cultural life. 

They ARE thinner than us. I was sitting on the terrace of a smart cafe on the Ile de Re - it was like Deux Magots by the sea - when three fat Englishwomen, one of them showing off a slightly pink and very fat back, came and sat down. There was an audible in-take of breath from the French.

Max Beerbohm said something along the lines of the basis of all good manners being in-born kindliness. I don't think this is true in France where they have a most elaborately hieratic and formal system of manners. When the waiter address one of the Englishwomen as Madame or when a silver-haired banker on the next table addresses the waiter as Monsieur, this isn't kindliness but thinly veiled contempt. It's as if they believe they need rigid control because they have a heightened consciousness of the will to power and bestial drives that would otherwise be unleashed.

Because of the bad weather i watched some films, including two brilliant French films that turned out to be on the subject of collaboration with the Nazis - 'les collabos'. One was Le Corbeau, which was made during the occupation and was about a small town in which an anonymous writer of poison letters causes misery and breakdown of the whole social structure. The director, Clouzot, was a collaborator. He didn't work for many years after the war as a result, and has perhaps been overlooked by critics ever since too, but the film is obviously a commentary on the evil caused by the anonymous letters of denunciation that the Nazis encouraged. The other one by, by Chabrol, was La Fleur du Mal. Like many Chabrol films it is concerned to reveal the ruthlessness that lies beneath the surface of the elegant lifestyle of the high bourgeoisie.  In this case the family that lived in a beautiful chateau, ate wonderful food and where the wife was running a campaign to be mayor - so as to keep control of local government finances - had gained their wealth and local pre-eminence as a result of collaboration.

French love of, and intelligent focus on, the good, material things in life is wonderful. I'm sure they look at sloppy English cooking and think How on earth did they allow this to happen? (One small thing, though. I guess home cooking MUST be different, but it's possible to dine out in many different French restaurants over many days without encountering a single cooked vegetable!)

The tenor of esoteric life seems to be different there. Because their North African colonies, there is a strong Sufi colouring, whilst we have obviously been reverse-colonized by India in this regard. Bookshops also seem to suggest there is a strong preoccupation with the magical tradition of Eliphas Levi and Huysman's La-Bas.

Another comparison with Sufism, especially in its popular, peasanty aspects: if you go to a brocante or vide grenier, where the subconscious of the local population is laid out on trestle tables, the prevalence of the occult physiology of flaming hearts and beams of love, of guardian angels and free-floating spirits seems almost shocking in the clear light of French reason. But intellectuals and artists seem to respect all that, at least to the extent that you don't seem to see that imagery used in a kitsch or campy way as you do quite routinely now in the UK and the States.

Their consciousness is very different. I think we've always struggled to understand one another.

the great ancient tradition

I've just been looking at Kathleen Raine's marvellous little book on Blake. Bats appear in some of Blake's illustrations, for example the depiction of Hecate, the witch goddess.

I was also struck by a quote: 'You (the Jews)  have a tradition that man anciently contain'd in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven and Earth: this'  he adds, seemingly madly ' you received from the Druids.'

So here at the end of the eighteenth century we have an expression of an already ancient belief that in the early stages of Creation Adam occupied the whole of the cosmos. This is a reminder, should it be needed, that modern systems such Anthroposophy represent refinements of an ancient tradition - and that that is something that should make us all glad. We are part of a great procession moving through history.

I don't know how come Blake believed the cabalistic tradition derived from the Druidic one. In general I'm not very interested in rivalry between the different traditions as to who came first. I think the key point is that if the clairvoyants who initiate and nurture the different traditions see clearly and accurately, they see the same things!

I believe that the secret history also exists in some way in all of us and that we can in a way remember it. Researching my book often felt like an act of remembering.

While I was away there was a TV program promising to reveal the secrets of the Druids, which I dvd'd. Of course we know very little about the Druids from conventional history - only a few reports from 3 hostile Roman writers and some scattered remains. Based on this and the flimsiest evidence - that a human bone had been snapped in a way that animal bones are snapped when the marrow is to be extracted - it was alleged that the Druids practiced cannibalism.

Even if this bone were being read aright, couldn't this just be an isolated case of a druid gone bad? a perversion of druidry?

Our great imaginative image of druidry, in which the druids appear as a deeply spiritual caste to whom cannibalism would no doubt be anathema, comes largely from esoteric tradition and clairvoyance. Steiner, for example, has some wonderful passages on druids in which their understanding of  the 'sun mysteries' formed a living link between the mystery centres of Atlantis and the Christian mysteries.

And why should we pay these any mind? Partly, i think, because they form an integral part of a coherent history of the world that makes sense of it in ways that other histories can't. It and our lives hang together in a meaningfully patterned way.

please help

My closest encounter with bats was in the company of Michael Baigent of Holy Blood fame.We were in the holy of holies of the temple at Edfu. The guard left his post and Michael pointed out a hole in the wall and said we should explore. We scrambled up into it and found ourselves in a passageway that we followed round as far as the middle of the 'high altar'. Michael thought it would've been used by priests to fake the gods talking.

It was densely packed with bats and stank. Michael warned me not to put my hand to my mouth until I'd washed them. He said that bat shit makes you either blind, mad or dead - I can't remember which. (That explains a lot, you're probably thinking.)

By coincidence, as they say, an Indian correspondent has written to say that recent archaeological discoveries in the temples there have produced more evidence of machines designed to fake divine happenings. I 've no doubt that kind of stuff - hey, what's happening to the type? - went on, but it's important to bear in mind that Edfu, for instance, is very late in terms of ancient Egyptian civilization - at least in its present form.

A modern medium may have certain tricks up his or her sleeve as back up if nothing comes through from the spirit worlds, but it doesn't follow from that that nothing ever does come through.

Today I have to focus on trying to protect the rights of people who work with me. I'm afraid that if I fail, this list will fall apart. So, friends, please pray for me. The meeting's at 3.

Tomorrow I should have more time.

after all it was only a dream

Just before I came back from holiday  had a dream in which I was attacked by a black, leathery bat. What could that portend?

I believe that dreams are genuine communications from the spirit worlds, albeit scrambled. When the soul/spirit floats free of the body in sleep it is less enclosed in matter and therefore spiritual influences are less filtered out - but they are still filtered out to a degree by the current, densely material form of the earth.

I return to work to find out that several of the friends I work with want to leave. I think more and more people in editorial are thinking

This is not what i came into publishing for...

Chislehurst Caves

I went with my son to this extraordinary site in north Kent. There are some twenty miles of subterranean passageways cut into the chalk. In the older parts the walls have been cut with the most care, with a smoothness that suggests they were more than just mines and maybe had a ceremonial purpose. These older parts, also the most labyrinthine, are called Druid, but only in the popular sense of pre-Roman and possibly mystical. The original entrance to this part of the caves was via the top of a hill, then down a spiral passageway.

 This may remind us of the spiral carved on the entrance of one of the tombs on the Newgrange site, and that colloquially 'going to the spiral castle' meant 'to die'.

 And like Newgrange this site was constructed to create amazing sonic effects, echoes of deep sounds lasting over 20 seconds so that one singer can create a chord! (The sonic curiosities of Newgrange did not make the final cut of my book, for reasons of space, but if you want to know how to make waves of smoke process up the central aisle like cowelled monks, I recommend the work of David Elkington.) Of course chanting and other sounds are often used to hep induce altered states.

 Jimi Hendrix played in the caves. Imagine his sounds resonating through this labyrinth.

If the caves were an initiation centre – and I note that some of passageways in the 'Druid' parts seem to have the same proportions as passageways in the Great Pyramid, something I will return to – then the candidate for initiation was given a preview of life after death. He would've been led spiralling down through the spheres of the demons and the dead before ascending again. If the caves were used in this way, it would account for the extraordinarily persistent experience of 'ghosts' recorded in the caves.

When Barnaby and I emerged into the sunlight and went to the café we saw people dressed as demons, trolls and wizards, part of some gaming society, perhaps a bit like the Sealed Knot but with esoteric associations. It reminded me of something I saw at the Frankfurt Book Fair – a group of women dressed as nuns chasing off their busking patch three people dressed in Lycra and masks. These three represented, I think, characters from Ron L Hubbard's SF novels and had moved way from his stand. It was a like a very, very low budget film of the Apocalypse.

Scientific Correctness Gone Mad

At breakfast I heard a news item on the radio today about proposed new trading standards for astrologers that would mean they'd be required to label their work as 'for entertainment only'. The implication, of course, is that astrology doesn't work. 

Then I had lunch with a fellow publisher, a kindred spirit who's had huge success on both sides of the Atlantic in the course of his career – and seen three angels in the course of his life. I'm not sure he'd want me to give his name. But he told me that the Watkins who founded the famous esoteric bookshop of the same name was one of three people with a direct line to Churchill during the war – because Churchill relied on him for astrological guidance in his prosecution of the war.

In my book I try to show how throughout history people who have wielded power have been guided by astrology because they know it works.

Mrs Tiggywinkle and the followers of Aristotle

'Are you an Aristotelian?'

This was the first question Iris Murdoch asked me as we sat down to dinner. It wasn't quite as startling an opener as you might think, as she knew my tutor was the wolrd's top Aristotle scholar.

Iris was good and kind but not chatty.

She said she missed her first editor Nora Smallwood. She said that since Nora no-one had dared edit her and her books had suffered as a result.

'Are you having port in your melon, John?' she said this to her husband, John Bailey, with perhaps a hint of asperity. He was driving them home.

John did indeed have port in the melon and drank heavily throughout dinner, a thoroughly charming man, interested in everyone, sightly camp and equally flirtatious with both sexes. Afterwards they set off into the night in their Morris Minor. Apparently Iris had never passed her driving test, so when John was fantastically drunk, he would operate the pedals and she would lean across him to steer. They had pet names for each other. I can't remember hers for him, but his for her was Mrs Tiggywinkle.

I was very grateful to Roger Lewis for introducing me to them. I loved their combination of high-mindedness and good-heartedness and their complete lack of intellectual snobbery – quite the reverse, they were curious about everything.

It was the quality Roger Lewis brought to his masterpiece, his biography of Peter Sellars. Roger's mentor had been Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann, and Roger brought the same degree of critical intelligence to his subject in popular culture in a way that was new at the time.

Of course Iris Murdoch was deeply immersed in European culture and wrote a book about Sartre. One of my tutors once told me that Sartre was not really philosophy and refused to discuss his ideas in a tutorial. Anglo-American philosophy – I mean the academic kind - is all about technique and tends to be very suspicious of philosophy of life stuff.

In my view that's a pity, because it's the sort of narrowness that puts people off and fuels the anti-intellectual element in English life.

Iris Murdoch was in my mind yesterday because there was something in the papers about the Booker of Bookers – didn't we have that a couple of years ago? - a competition to see which is the best ever winner and a couple of her post-Smallwood books were in contention. Is it a strong field if you compared it with the novels written in a similar period in the nineteenth century?

The initiate I describe meeting at the beginning of my book told me that great writing, great artistic and literary movements, are always seeded by great initiates. (In my book book I try to trace the initiatic roots the Renaissance, Romanticism, Surrealism and Dada.) He said that the fact that this no longer happens is the reason why much literary fiction is so ephemeral theses days.

The Guardian of the Threshold

In one of his comments Michael has mentioned the Guardian of the Threshold - a very interesting area. I suspect Michael may know more than I do, and I'd like to get a dialogue going with Michael, if he'll agree to it,  and others if possible.

This entity is terrifying but has an important part to play in the spiritual ecology of the cosmos, part of it being that it frightens us away from the threshold into the spirit worlds before we are properly prepared to cross it.

I think the Guardian of the T was first introduced into exoteric culture by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton - in Zanoni. Bulwer-Lytton has been highly regarded by many leading occultists, which surprises me, because his novels are overwritten, portentous and clumsy. He was also a poet, and i don't know if it still exists, but there used to be a yearly prize awarded to the worst poet of the year - named after him. As with Crowley's paintings, I wonder how a highly evolved individual could have so little aesthetic sense.

But he was clearly giving expression to a genuine occult tradition. I wonder if anyone knows more of the history?

Sorry to say I have to leave it there. I'm trying to clear my desk to go on holiday. For the next two weeks I'll be on an island off the Atlantic coast of France, which people go to because it's so old-fashioned. There is a computer at the hotel on the reception desk, but i doubt I'll be allowed to amuse myself on insideout thinking. I've lined up a little queue of posts, but I doubt I'll be able to respond to your comments. If you want to comment, though, I'll be very curious to hear what you've been up to when I'm back. 

Twisted Roots

The remnants of the Kray gang - street fighters, including a former bare-knuckle champion from the cobbled streets of the East End, bank robbers, enforcers - used to come to see me at the office. There'd be a row of Rolls Royces and Jaguars down the side of the pub next door – and never a parking ticket for some reason. How did the wardens know?

Sometimes we'd all pile into the pub. They always drank sweet white wine. I don't know if that was their regular tipple or if they thought it was what I'd like. Interesting to watch how a gang of hard men stand around, the body language, the pecking order and so on. Once we had a journalist from South Africa with us. He'd been in war zones and should've known better, but he'd had too much to drink and began to get a bit cheeky with the faces, and I was thinking Please shut up...

Sometimes they'd come and see me in my office. One, the last man in Britain to be flogged with the cat o'nine tails, wore more after shave than anyone I've ever met. It preceded him up the stairwell, so you could smell him coming the moment he entered the building. I suppose it worked a bit the clock in Captain Hook's crocodile. Another would suddenly appear by my desk, having got past reception. He'd been behind Britain's two biggest ever robberies, so the security at Random House was not a problem. Villains like to be paid promptly and I remember this man rang up and said in his quiet deep, husky voice, 'I hope my cheque's coming soon, Mark. Every time I'm going past a bank I'm getting a hard on...'

Another villain – villain is what they call themselves, whilst 'gangster' is pejorative – was so powerful, so feared that he never appeared in any of the other books. He rang me once to tell me how earlier that morning a bailiff had come round to harass his neighbour, and he'd knocked the bailiff spark out with one punch. 'It's better than Viagra, Mark. Ho ho ho! The missus is going to get lucky tonight!'

A disturbing image of how sexuality is twisted up in our innermost nature with the will to violence. I've tried to show in my book how the sexual impulse is also entwined with creativity and – at an even deeper level – with the capacity for thought itself.

All villains want to publish books and they are all more or less boastful. My favourite title for a villain's book came from a manuscript submitted to an editor, a friend of mine at Hodder. I think the villain was called Patsy Manning, but at least I remember the title very clearly. It was

CRUMPET ALL THE WAY