Inside-Out Thinking

What do Church Leaders Really Believe?

It sometimes seems to be the case that some Church leaders - we might call the them the Magisterium, after Pullman - seek to impose on their flock a narrow interpretation of Christianity that excludes, for example, astrology, occult physiology - the chakras, the Third Eye etc - and seeking experience of many different types of disembodied intelligence.

While researching my history I saw a lot evidence that Jesus Christ and senior Christians ever since Jesus Christ have been followers of secret teachings. A Jesuit called Athanasius Kircher, for example, seemed to have an amazing number of connections with the leading esoteric researchers of his day. The last Pope was trained in techniques designed to induce experience of disembodied intelligences by an Anthroposophist. (If the Magisterium is tuning in, I mean no disrespect by this. Anthroposophy is Christocentric and i'd recommend these techniques to anyone.)

There is a book not available in all good bookshops called The Message of Fatima. Carrying the imprimatur of the Vatican, it examines the secret of Fatima - a prophecy given to three shepherds in Portugal at the beginning of the last century but not published until the end of the century.

Many people believe that the published version has been edited and that there is an alternative version held back by Church leaders, but let us for the moment look at the published version.

As in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, Russia is here said to play a crucial role in the future history of humankind. I wrote in my book about the extremes of good and evil already observable there. The message of Fatima suggests that if good doesn't prevail, several nations will be annihilated. Lucia, one of the three Portuguese shepherds, wrote that we must not allow the children of Darkness to be wiser than the children of Light, and the message also seems to hint at a great apostasy within the Church.  In the third and last part of the message, as it has been published, a pope, dressed in white, is assassinated by soldiers with arrows and bullets. In a later post I will ask if parallel prophecies related in the last chapter of my book help elucidate this one.

Pickles

'Mr Pickles is in reception'.

There are some people, a handful in a lifetime maybe, with whom one feels great karmic connection. You sense that in your present dealings you are working out relations from earlier incarnations.

These relations are not always friendly. A few years ago I published an exhilaratingly weird book called The Jew of Linz, by Kimberly Cornish, which, taking it's starting point from the fact that Hitler and Wittgenstein were at school together, suggested that these 2 very powerful beings pursued each other from incarnation to incarnation like metamorphosing creatures in Ovid or Taliesin.

As well as these great connections there are also people who keep cropping up from time to time. I think no novels I've read show better the way this happens than the Dance to the Music of Time sequence of Anthony Powell. (Powell had some interest in esoteric matters, and one of the characters in the book is part based on Crowley.)

Anyway, Stephen Pickles keeps on cropping up in my life. When I arrived in Oxford he was already a star. Out of all the scores of dandified young men milling around the Radcliffe Camera and the King's Arms, trying to draw attention to themselves and to promote themselves as the new Brian Howard - model for Anthony Blanche, the flamboyant one in Brideshead Revisited - Pickles was IT. Very handsome in an Italian sort of way with a great leonine mane, he was decidedly glamorous and very famous - known always as just 'Pickles'. His waspish witticisms were widely repeated and it was rumored that he's already designed the sets for an opera in London. I hardly dared speak to him.

Years later we'd see each other in Soho. We shared a fascination for Soho and Fitzrovia bohemianism - Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Derek Jarman, Julian Mclaren-Ross - the model for Xavier Trapnel in Dance to the Music of Time - Dan Farson and Jeffrey and Bruce Bernard. Pickles was right at the centre of this - he had a flat above a delicatessen in Old Compton St and a regular seat at the right end of the bar in the Coach and Horses while I was the  boy from the provinces with his nose up against the window. - though I did get some kind of foothold when I became Farson's publisher.

Pickles then published a book, a book of conversations overheard in pubs, called Queens. It showed an ear for dialogue like, say, Michael Frayn, Julian Mclaren-Ross or Alan Bennett. It's a kind of masterpiece. (That's a phrase Colin Wilson used of my own book. I don't know if he meant to damn with faint praise, but that's not what I mean - merely that Queens is unclassifiable. It's not clear what kind of book it is at all.)

Later - I think it was later, but maybe i've got my chronology confused - we both got into publishing in a sideways kind of way. He was in charge of Quartet for a while, when it built up a list of fiction in translation as good as anyone's. I once went to see Naim Attalah, the owner of Quartet, with my friend Roderick Brown. We were hoping to persuade the great man to fund a new list. Naim called Pickles in, and i remember he gave me an odd handshake. ( I must ask him about that someday.) It came to nothing.

I heard rumours that Pickles fell on hard times then just recently our paths crossed again, when I had the idea of publishing a sort of greatest hits volume of the old children's magazine Look and Learn, and the proprietor employed Pickles to put it together. When we met up to discuss he told he I was survivor in publishing and that was because I was nice and good. I took this to mean good-hearted. So not so waspish then. I don't think any of us are. I once regarded myself as a master of the arts of vituperation - to borrow Bron Waugh's phrase - and i remember Kevin Jackson, now a professor of Eng lit at London Uni, who did me the very big favour of reading my script and saving me from many terrible errors - used to leave Cambridge if he knew i was coming for the w/e, for fear of my sharp tongue. Kevin is someone who keeps coming round in a Dance to the Music of Time way too.

I think something that Pickles and i have in common is a history of shared reading, of great overlap anyway, esp in fiction. In our late teens the great books that told us what life is like were Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Green, Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch. DH Lawrence was on the syllabus in those days.The fashionable undergrowth of literature was William Beckford, Ronald Firbank, Baron Corvo, Cyril Connolly,  Maclaren-Ross, Patrick Hamilton. Now i guess Waugh and Green keep a certain readership, but I know Powell sells so little it's hard to keep him in print and i don't think Angus Wilson is in print at all.

Why do people stop reading very good, even great writers? Perhaps it's another mark of how quickly consciousness changes?

I salute the Guardian Review's love of reading - even if its review of my book was evidently by someone who hadn't read it through! The Guardian Review on a Saturday always wants to you make you read books! Last Saturday it invited people to name authors they thought ought to be in print and Angus Wilson was mentioned more than anyone. There was also a quote from Flannery O' Connor. The first book i edited/published was a volume of short stories with religious themes, brought together to try to show how a sense of numinous can charge and also shape fiction - the one that fascinated me most being by O'Connor. I suppose that was the beginning of the trail of thought that led to the Deeper Laws.

The quote: 'Fiction is concerned with mystery that is lived; the ultimate mystery as we find it embodied in the concrete world of sense experience.' What an inspiring, but also very, very stern thought for anyone with ambitions to write, especially if they are interested in the esoteric.

Staring out to Sea

At a party over the holiday i met some good, kind, clever people who live on Romney Marsh. I sensed they are a bit sniffy about Derek Jarman's gravestone in their local church.

Derek manages to be an uncomfortable presence even in death!

I worked very closely with Derek on his book Modern Nature, mostly at his cottage at Dungeness, interweaving the story of his illness with episodes from his own life. We became quite close, with great admiration on my side, though on one occasion he rang up, in pain and wanting to talk, I sensed, and I was in a hurry to get off the line and do I can't remember what. One of those episodes that come back to haunt you, like when I carried my son, then a toddler, up to a hermit's cell, perched on a rock in Roche in Cornwall. He could have died. Times when you fail as a human being.

Last week i saw a dvd of Derek's film The Garden in the music shop at the bottom of St Martin's Lane, but his films are not much watched these days. Modern Nature is still a wonderful, beautiful book - a top ten bestseller then, something almost unimaginable today when the trade is led by the nose by supermarkets. The garden at Dungeness has also been exceptionally influential. Like Peter Cook, Derek Jarman scattered seeds that changed consciousness. Peter scattered jokes, Derek... seeds.

It's really his aesthetic that has been the great agent of change. The landscape at Dungeness is in many different ways a part of all our mental landscape, a no-man's land, a lawless borderland lying on the edge of waking consciousness, lit up from time to time, as Derek told me, by crackles and flashes from the crumbling nuclear power station. It's a place where he found new beauty in litter and garbage, in wood, metal and plastic washed up on the shore. Art is made out of scrap there and so too are houses!  This landscape looks out over the sea, and is on the border between the material world and whatever lies beyond.

In my book i talk about how in Botticelli's famous painting of Venus we see the ancient belief that shells were precipitated out of the sea, and how this was taken as a symbol of matter precipitated out of the cosmic mind. There is something of this in Derek's driftwood - and driftmetal and driftplastic - sculpture.

Derek had difficulties with the Church - a bit of a worry, as he used to say - because of the Church's traditional attitudes to his sexuality. But he was fascinated by religion and the great questions of life and death. His art - films, paintings, books, garden - addresses the great question that  now confronts us all: How do we get through this great looming materialism that threatens to extinguish the human spirit altogether?

I didn't spot it at the time, because I had not read the occult philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa, but i now see that Derek's writings are larded with quotes from CA. Which confirms me in my suspicion that all the most intelligent people check out esoteric philosophy at some time in their lives.  It's the greatest repository of thinking on the great questions of life and death.

I am a nut

Anyone who shows interest in spirituality is called a nut these days. But there are other varieties, some of whom may wander onto this blog by mistake. I'm talking about those who believe that Freemasons secretly worship the devil.

My guess is that this stuff is put out by extremist Catholics who are saying things that their elders and betters in the Church would not want them to say.

Anyone who genuinely wants to know about Freemasonic spirituality should go to Robert Lomas's archival website. Some old the old Freemasonic documents he has unearthed have an almost biblical density of meaning, and i have been pleased to use them as sources.

Traditions regarding the Morning Star and other heavenly bodes should, i believe, be interpreted in terms of the role of the disposition of the heavenly bodies in giving our consciousness the shape it has. I am not a Freemason, but I see eye to eye on this with Robert Lomas.

Graham Hancock

Graham kindly invited me to contribute a piece to his awesome website, and it's now posted...

Colin Wilson

I hear on the grapevine that Colin Wilson says this The Secret History of the World is the most controversial book he has ever been asked to review - gosh, that must be saying something!

The Secret History of LOST, and other stories

The Secret History of the World shows how many of the great writers have secretly been steeped in a philosophy that is sometimes called arcane or esoteric. Some of them have used their writing to inculcate in their readers an upside-down inside-out, other way round of thinking that subverts the conventional, common-sensical ways of thinking that issues from scientific materialism. As The Secret History... shows, these writers have included Rabelais, Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll.

In fact my book shows that traces, symbols, codes have been left in the world all around us - in public buildings and monuments, churches, famous paintings, music, in the names of the days of the week, fairy stories and many other surprising places.

The secret philosophy also lies at the dark heart of the TV series Lost - as I shall explain more fully in a post soon. Locke, Jack, Sawyer, Hurley and the others are acting according to a code that can also be found, for example, in Gulliver's Travels, The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins and Lord of the Flies.

And when it comes to the secret philosophy all these writers - Swift, Baum, Travers and Golding knew very well what they were talking about...