COMMUNICATION - CONSULTANCY - PERSONAL GROWTH - WISDOM TRADITION AMYDON-EXETER CENTRE 113 To His Eminence Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger To Reverend Ian Paisley, MP To Sister Dominic Savio, CP To and from Melanie Small CARJ SouthWest To Jean Hutton FRSA To Father Felix Donnelly PhD To Mrs. Doriel S. Hall (Dayamurti)   To His Eminence Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Piazza del S. Uffizio 11 00193 ROME Italy Thursday, 4 August 1994 - Feast of St. John Vianney Dear Cardinal Ratzinger, Betroffensein = Getroffensein? The Passionist Sister living in the United States of America who, I am told, "adapted" from Martin Bialas's original German Das Leiden Christi beim hl. Paul vom Kreuz (Paul Pattloch Verlag, Aschaffenburg, 1978) as The Mysticism of the Passion in St. Paul of the Cross (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990) challenges non-German-speakers and, in a sense, presents you as challenging them through her, in this passage on pages 217-8: The bipolar structure of theology Etymologically, theology means the study of G-d. Defined as such, theology's first premise is that the human spirit's primordial question regarding the existence of G-d may be answered affirmatively. The cognitive act leading to this fundamental option is structured in a bipolar manner. One element in this structure consists of the argumentative-syllogistical act of human reason. Because this type of cognition is executed on a purely abstract and theoretical plane, the human subject is actively busy. The second structural element is of another kind. It lies in the domain of the personal. Therefore, the human subject, after having stretched his intellect, assumes a passive-receptive attitude of openness and lets himself be impressed by the inner power and dynamism springing from the "Object" of study. J. Ratzinger in his article Ich glaube an Gott, den allmaechtigen Vater (10-18) comments in this regard, "What is being spoken of here is direct experience: the knowledge of G-d and the avowal of G-d represent an active-passive occurrence, be it either of a theoretical kind or of a practical one; this is an act of Betroffenseins [this concept cannot be translated adequately]. Thought and action may respond to it, or it may be freely refused." This Getroffensein calls the human person to do something and requires an answer on the subject's part. The Apostle Paul describes the response in terms of glorifying G-d and giving him thanks (Rom 1:12). This act of Betroffensein plays a great role in the "existential interpretation" of the New Testament, as R. Bultmann has explained in his theology. Undoubtedly Bultmann here touches upon an important concept, although the overemphasis of this element and the conclusions drawn from it do not correspond to the intent of the New Testament. We call this answer faith. Faith is, however, possible only when the subject is open to G-d and G-d himself "communicates" to the individual person the fundamental capability of being a "listener of the word". This two-part act of knowing G-d is of great importances for self-understanding and for the task of theology, because every theological reflection is built upon this "fundamental act". Theology must, therefore, always keep in mind this reference to the theoretical-abstract and to the personal-existential poles. Only then will it be able to act powerfully in history and in the transformation of the human person. In terms of its power to transform the person, the power of theology does not primarily reside in the acuteness of its reasoning or in its conclusions. Rather, its efficiency depends essentially upon the measure in which it succeeds in bringing the process of theological reflection into touch with the personal state of "involvement", which is increased by the contemplation of the respective "Object".... Yesterday evening on British Channel-4 Television (9-10pm) a former Catholic nun, Karen Armstrong, was shown travelling to Rome, Ireland and Africa to present the argument that Pope John-Paul II is a religious fundamentalist, determined to create a brand of Catholicism based on an all-powerful papacy! I am told that Father Martin Bialas is among the foremost Passionist theologians, and I am assuming he would agree with me that a pastoral appraisal of Karen Armstrong's documentary would not focus primarily on whether or not she had got her facts right, but on the extent to which her work serves to bring the viewer into a more deeply self-involving state of at least potential at-One-ness IN G-d [three words perhaps not translatable into German, but not, I suspect, too far removed from your own Betroffensein and Martin Bialas's aenigmatically different and, so far as I can discern, utterly unexplained Getroffensein]. Watching Karen Armstrong's programme until the end, I saw and heard our Holy Father, suffering as well as fatigue and, almost, tears in his voice - there was a perceptible near-choke in his throat, confide: "Mi domando che mondo darà questo permessivismo etico?" Instinctively, I Englished those words to-and-for-myself as: "I can't help wondering what world will come out of our present climate of ethical permissiveness?" Needless to say, the English captions printed at the bottom of the TV-screen for the benefit of non-Italian-speaking viewers of the programme did not convey this sense at all. Instead, it so interpreted the Italian as to make it evidently confirmatory of the programme's own fundamentalist thesis! Joseph Blenkinsopp wrote in 1992 (The Pentateuch - An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible, Doubleday, New York, p. 28): “What should be affirmed at the present juncture is the need for coexistence between different interpretative systems with their quite different but not necessarily incompatible agendas. We need an edict of toleration to discourage the tendency of new theories to proscribe their predecessors. This might, for example, encourage us to recover the insights of the patristic writers or the great Jewish exegetes of the Middle Ages. It would leave us free to look for the aesthetic aspects of the 'text in itself' without feeling obliged to condemn the quite different project of the historical practitioner.” Some such Edict of Toleration would certainly be favoured by all members of the Neith Network (cfr enclosed explanatory documents 1-3). Emanating from the Holy See such an Edict may, I also venture to suggest, be a potent means with which to increase the likelihood of 'the Vatican's' life and operations being more openly and generally understood as quality-enhancing and enabling, rather than of their being continually misunderstood and misrepresented as fundamentally opposed to the legitimate growth-needs of all G-d's children in process of development in aeternum (as Paul taught us, Faith, Hope and Charity remain). I hope to spend 14-16 September in Middlesex University with H.H. the Dalai Lama, when, undoubtedly, reference will be made to these words of Dom Bede Griffiths (Universal Wisdom, Fount, London, 1994, p.43): Each religion has to undergo a death and resurrection - a death to its historical and cultural limitations and a resurrection to a new life in the Spirit. To that End, I ask your blessing, wish you every joy for the coming Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary…     To Reverend Ian Paisley, MP House of Commons Palace of Westminster LONDON SE1 Friday, 5 August 1994 Dear Reverend Sir, Writing from Jesus College, Oxford, on 27 February 1934 about the Schweich Lectures of the British Academy which he had delivered in 1933, Stephen Langdon, MA, at that time Shillito Reader in and Professor of Assyriology, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and Membre Correspondant de l'Institut de France, affirmed: The influence of Sumerian religion and culture upon the whole history of western Asia down to our era, and continued in the Jewish calendar to our day, in the Syriac Christian calendar, and in the religious year of the Sabeans of the Middle Ages, can be traced and proved.* * Babylonian Menologies and the Semitic Calendars, Humphrey Milford, OUP, London, 1935, p.vi. One of my London Roman Catholic friends who is outstanding for his grasp of contemporary economic and political realities is a sincere admirer of your own presentation of the arguments in support of the cause you so energetically defend. Partly as a result of that, I have been wondering for some time what is the actual historical truth behind your continuing claim, unless I am mistaken, that the Roman Catholic Pope is primarily the successor of Babylon's Great Harlot. Popular books supporting that claim are readily available, of course, but Integrity IN Truth means a lot to me. Have you read Langdon's earlier Tammuz and Ishtar - a Monograph upon Babylonian Religion and Theology containing extensive extracts from the Tammuz Liturgies and all of the Arbela Oracles (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1914), which carries a Preface dated 11 March 1914, with an indication that he was at that time the Shillito Reader in Assyriology? These pages represent also a reaction against the trend of Assyriological interpretation of Sumero-Babylonian Religion, which has hitherto emphasized the magical side of this religion in a way wholly out of proportion to its purer ceremonies and deeper theology. (o.c., p.v.) Tammuz in Babylonia and in those adjacent lands to which it spread was a cult of sorrow, death, and resurrection. (p.1.) The name itself is Sumerian and means the 'faithful son'. (p.2.) The cult evidently originated much earlier, for when our epigraphical sources for Mesopotamian history begin, we have already before us a highly developed religion. It would not be venturesome to assert that this mystic cult of death and resurrection is one of the earliest forms of worship known to us, and so far as our sources permit us to speak, precedes the lower form of incantation and magic [emphasis added].... Certain it is that the son of a virgin mother, whom the shadows of the nether world each year claimed as a divine sacrifice for man and beast and vegetation, forms an important part of the earliest known religious worship. (p.3.) A virgin mother and a divine son who suffer death and return to life. It is he whom the Sumerians called the damu-zi, the 'faithful son'. (p.5) The title 'faithful lady', or 'faithful queen', is parallel to that of Tammuz the 'faithful son'. Both titles probably reflect the ancient idea that these deities died for the life of the world, and of the two titles, nin-zi-da and dumu-zi-da, the former may well be the older... [not only is she] a divine mother who assists the birth of all life and perishes that it may revive, but she is the matron of rulers and the incarnation of justice. (p. 72) The strongest evidence is at hand for supposing that the first deity worshipped [in the cult of Eridu, centre of the worship of Ea, by the ancient Sumerians] was Mother Earth under the specific name, 'Goddess of the vine'. The vine is not an indigenous plant in Mesopotamia. (pp.7-8.) Thus, according to Stephen Langdon, the original Sumerian Religion from which the Babylonian and, therefore, to a notable degree the later Jewish and Christian cults derived not only their liturgical calendars and rituals, was primarily inspired by the purest and noblest of aesthetic, spiritual and ethico-socio-political ideals. Only much later in Babylon was it contaminated by and, indeed, perhaps utterly transmuted into that abomination of abominations which, if I interpret your own position rightly, is what the Roman Catholic Church is heir to. Langdon himself felt that this regrettable abasement was never total, even in Babylonia. His many books witness to the credit-worthiness of his own position, which is succinctly expressed: In due course of time... the licentious nature of her worship was unfortunately retained. This was the feature of her cult which made the greatest impression upon Herodotus. In book 1, chapter 99 of his history he describes that shameful law of the Babylonians which sent every Babylonian woman once in her life to the temple, the goddess of love, to sacrifice her honour for gold. The historians tell us that the Assyrians called this goddess Mylitta, and this, no doubt, means Innini and not [emphasis added] Nintud." (ibid., p.73.) During the more than seven years in which I taught part-time in Brixton and then full-time in Wormwood Scrubs prison I grew to know the 'high-ranking' serving commissioned officer member of the IRA, Sean Docherty (if that is the right spelling of his name) quite well. These were the years immediately following his arrest for having blown off an MP's wrist, a horrible crime I never in any way condoned at the time; neither do I do so now! Later, when he had been transferred to the Maze and was, I suspect, one of a group then on hunger-strike there, I wrote a short letter, which was published in the Catholic Herald on 14 August 1981, pleading with any such strikers (I hope in terms appropriate to their circumstances) to avoid being unduly swayed, either positively or negatively, by outside influences of any sort - domestic, political or 'religious' - but to remember the primacy of the individual conscience, to seek inner integrity and peace in the presence of G-d, and only then to judge, decide, and act (or refrain from acting) accordingly. Other than that, until today, I have never responded (other than by prayer, which, of course, I do still agree is crucially important and decisive) to the repeated suggestion made to me by the Jerusalem-educated, Polish Roman Catholic volunteer-lady membership-secretary of the Westminster branch of the United Nations Association, Mrs. Wanda Fry, that I should 'do something' to help solve the terrible problems in Northern Ireland. At that time I was a NATFHE trade-union-branch-secretary, and earning my living as Head of the Department of Languages & Liberal Studies in the ILEA's Streatham & Tooting Adult Education Institute. I occasionally attended UNA meetings chaired by Lord Ennals or some other pro-UN person in committee-rooms either in the Lords or the Commons, and I, therefore, saw at close quarters (1) the sincerity and goodwill of many cross-party and non-political peace-promoting individuals and groups, and (2) the all too frequent naïveté and lack of practical realism in many otherwise well educated and socially sophisticated self-denying philanthropists. Hence, I have not, until today, ventured even to tip-toe in where not only angels fear to tread.... At Christmas 1987 I spontaneously resigned from my at that time still secure £20,000pa London job, in order as a lay-theologian who also happens by individual personal vocation and training to be both an unemployed member of the ordained R.C. priesthood and a thirster after Justice to commit myself exclusively to the quest for a better Future for the whole human family. Not too surprisingly, I have not made this an economically viable business. Instead, after sustaining a personal financial loss of more than £14,000 in 1988-89, I have since survived on Income Support here in Exeter, unsuccessfully seeking appropriate paid work, and devoting all my remaining time to my quest for Integrity in Truth. As I told Bruce Kent a few months back, when he was visiting Exeter to attend the AGM of the local branch of CND, an increasing number of scientists who accept the theory of evolution also maintain that the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens would not have occurred until about another two million years in the future, had not relatively wise extra-terrestrial agents intervened to speed up the process. Together with the world's perhaps foremost living expert on Ancient Sumeria and related matters, Zecharia Sitchin of New York, whom I hope to discuss these matters with personally shortly after his expected arrival in England next week, I now believe it is most likely true that some of the inhabitants of the planet Nibiru - for which '+' has from time immemorial been the astrological symbol, and which has a 3,600 years' orbit round our Sun - first landed on Earth 432,000 of our years (but, and this is the, to me, decisively important factor that transmutes otherwise merely imaginative-symbolic-mythological accounts of the remote past into factually and even mathematically precise literal histories of concrete events) only 120 of their own years) ago - long before the Deluge - and that, as recorded both in the Book of Genesis and in its original sources, not until about 248,000 years ago (i.e., 52,000 years after Adam's first creation) did they expel us from their Garden of Eden and expect us to fend for ourselves on this Earth they had laboured so long and patiently to make habitable. If you can make time to read them for yourself, Bear & Company publish all Zecharia Sitchin's books in hardback, and so far these comprise The Earth Chronicles, Volume 1 The Twelfth Planet; Volume 2 The Stairway to Heaven; Volume 3 The Wars of Gods & Men; Volume 4 The Lost Realms; Volume 5 When Time Began; and the companion volume Genesis Revisited: Has Modern Science Caught Up with Ancient Knowledge - And Provoked a War of the Worlds? as well as a related PAL-system (suitable for UK) VHS-format 1-hour video "Are We Alone?" linking together Sitchin's interpretation of surviving Sumerian cuneiform cylinder-seals, archaeological remains and historical documents with the current situation in astronomy and space-research, including the likelihood that some thing or person on Mars recently put out of commission the Phobos II space-craft which was attempting to photograph activities on its surface while in orbit around Phobos. (This video is available from PAT VIDEO INC., 630 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY 10036.) The dust-jacket on my copy of The Wars of Gods and Men incorporates a NASA colour photograph of the Sinai Peninsula taken from space which particularly impressed Bruce Kent. It also carries a summary statement of Sitchin's, I think, well argued claim that such photographs "reveal evidence of a huge nuclear blast in the Sinai that took place thousands of years ago, suggesting this to be an ancient battlefield of the primordial 'gods'," to use what we can now understand is not the best translation of the original Sumerian/Hebrew expression 'Anunnaki' or 'Elohim'. "The Great Flood, the Trojan War, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - these and many more cataclysmic events in human history are explained" by reference to the documented comings and goings of these friends of ours, the 'Watchers' (which is what their Ancient Egyptian title, Neteru, means) who are, presumably, for the most part still alive, and, therefore, it is not unlawful to suppose, still interested in, and concerned about our present and future prospects as an at least potentially rational species! "At the close of 1983, astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California announced that IRAS - the infrared telescope mounted on a spacecraft and launched under NASA's auspices with the cooperation of other nations - had discovered beyond Pluto a very distant 'mystery celestial body' about four times the size of Earth and moving toward Earth. They have not yet called it a planet" (o.c., p.110), but Sitchin's very full documentation from ancient sources convinces him that "the ultimate finding is in no doubt." It is no part of my intention in writing this letter to attempt to win you over to Sitchin's position. Although I am looking forward to meeting him personally very soon, I have already furnished him with an 11-page critique of his most recent (August 1993) When Time Began. The crucial point in evaluating the essence of Sitchin's findings is, although the author nowhere explicitly manifests any awareness of this blindingly obvious question: If, as he claims, in Sumerian, the word for 'word' also means something rather like 'Rocket', 'Space-Craft', or 'UFO', was the Sumerian word used properly of flying-machines and only metaphorically of words, or the other way round, or does this way of formulating the question imply a dichotomy that would never have been a relevant consideration for persons then living, whether the humans approximately like us from whom, he suggests, we all of us today descend, or the seemingly immortal giants or gods and goddesses from outer space who created us about 300,000 years ago, and introduced us, as well as to many other wonderful things, to the Secret Mysteries of the all-creating Word? Although the general reader would probably accept Sitchin's discussion on pages 132-9 of his very first book as a sufficiently representative survey of the most important meanings from among the thirty-odd nuances of the Sumerian word 'MU' (viz., (1) that which rises straight; (3) sky-chamber; (3) an oval-topped, conical object; (4) heights; (5) fire; (6) command; (7) a counted period; (8) that by which one is remembered; (9) name), no competent theologian, philosopher or depth-psychologist is likely to remain satisfied with the following passage, which Sitchin appears to have written in entire good faith: "The universal application of 'name' to early texts that spoke of an object used in flying has obscured the true meaning of the ancient records. Thus G.A. Barton (The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad) established the unchallenged translation of Gudea's temple inscription - that 'Its MU shall hug the lands from horizon to horizon' - as 'Its name shall fill the lands.' A hymn to Iskhur, extolling his 'ray-emitting MU' that could attain the heights of Heaven, was likewise rendered: 'Thy name is radiant, it reaches Heaven's zenith.' Sensing, however, that mu or shem may mean an object and not 'name', some scholars have treated the term as a suffix or grammatical phenomenon not requiring translation and have thereby avoided the issue altogether. It is not too difficult to trace the etymology of the term, and the route by which the 'sky chamber' assumed the meaning of 'name.' " I appreciate that your in-the-world commitments preclude your having as much free personal time as I have been favoured with in which to sift the wheat from the chaff in all that has so far been published about these questions, and I acknowledge that, in any case, each person has a uniquely individual vocation from G-d, and that Faith alone truly Saves. The plea I am making is that you should, out of respect for Integrity and Truth, out of your undoubted personal Love for True Justice, harken to Joseph Blenkinsopp's wise recommendation: “What should be affirmed at the present juncture is the need for coexistence between different interpretative systems with their quite different but not necessarily incompatible agendas. We need an edict of toleration to discourage the tendency of new theories to proscribe their predecessors. This might, for example, encourage us to recover the insights of the patristic writers or the great Jewish exegetes of the Middle Ages. It would leave us free to look for the aesthetic aspects of the 'text in itself' without feeling obliged to condemn the quite different project of the historical practitioner.”† † The Pentateuch - An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible, Doubleday, New York, p. 28. I am sorry not to have been able to write more briefly this letter which I feel G-d wills me to communicate to your good self now. Thank you for your courtesy in reading it and in considering the various aspects of your own current situation to which it so clearly and directly has many applications, some of them obvious, others, perhaps far from obvious, even more decisive for the Future Good G-d calls us all to enter into by His Grace alone. Please also pray for me. I enclose three recent non-commercial documents I have prepared about the nature and purpose of the Neith Network. With personal best wishes…     To Sister Dominic Savio, CP 1 January 1995 Dear Edna, Prayerful greetings for your personal well-being and growth IN the unity of Truth throughout these last five years of the second millennium! My deep and lasting thanks for gifting me with a smudged (pp. 6-7) but entirely legible and otherwise excellent copy of your labour of love, Elizabeth Prout 1820-1864 - A Religious Life for Industrial England (Downside Abbey, Bath, 1994), even though, when I reached p. 173, I was left wondering what precisely were the merits of Blessed Paul's forty days at Alessandria? Also, unless creatively original spelling is a virtue Italian Passionist Fathers share with your Fr. Gaudentius Rossi and with one of my own writer-friends, Robin Hood's likely living descendant, John Pope de Locksley, line 15 on p. 318 should have ended: "A Miglior Vita Nel Corso". Paragraph 2 on p. 181 appears to be the fulcrum of the whole book which invites comparison with M. K. Ashby's superficially vastly different Joseph Ashby of Tysoe 1859-1919 - A Study of English Village Life (Cambridge University Press 1961; new edition: Merlin Press, London, 1974, reprinted 1979) of which E. P. Thompson wrote in his Introduction: "One does not often see in one's lifetime the publication by a contemporary of a book which one is certain will become a minor 'classic': that is, such a book as Gilbert White's Selborne, Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, or George Sturth's The Wheelwright's Shop. Joseph Ashby of Tysoe will certainly join this company. It shares their economy and precision of observation or (as with Rutherford) compels with a similar indisputable authenticity of feeling. But this book is no throwback to some earlier literary mode. It is the expression of a complex contemporary consciousness, both in its sense of historical process and in its reconstruction of a community's culture. A mind wholly immersed in that culture could not have stood sufficiently apart to take in its shape and structure; a mind wholly detached from it, and returning to it only through historical evidences, could not have unlocked its gestures, its human exchanges, its unarticulated meanings. That is why only this author could have written this book. And that is why its form - part biography, part auto-biography, part historical reconstruction (from many deftly-concealed sources), part imaginative recreation and inference - is exactly right. It is a carefully-considered, consciously-wrought form. This is certainly not a book which flowed from its author's memory unbidden. Examine chapter 4 and the disclosure of the matter of Tysoe's Town Lands. The artistry is superb and the reader is scarcely conscious of it: he reads and enjoys the story. But what is the artist doing? We start with young Joseph's initiation into working life. But this is also an initiation into a new dimension of the community culture and into its history as it endures in the minds of the shepherd, the carter, family and neighbours. We are not given the Town Lands story all at once." If your new life of your Foundress is referred to during the Process for her eventual Canonization, Fr. Rossi's comments may very well ease the task of the advocatus diaboli. On the other hand, in the light of your statement on p. 125 that Rossi's letters to other sisters "always upheld [Elizabeth's] authority, inculcating respect and deference towards her", a prudent reader may wonder to what extent Rossi's way of addressing the Foundress was a reflection of that part of Paul of the Cross's Rule which you quote on p. 175? Moreover, whatever the explanation of your Congregation's so far relatively modest numerical - as distinctive from qualitative - growth, in view of the Spanish proverb: "G-d writes straight on crooked lines" and of the fact that in some contexts the Italian "e storto" means no more than "is in a muddle" or "doesn't see quite straight", one does well to remember that Father General Anthony Testa's assessment of Rossi, "in materia di governo farebbe rovine" (p.203), was not a formal testimony delivered under oath! Blessed Philip Rinaldi SDB who, along with Blessed Innocent de la Inmaculada CP, was raised to the honours of the Altar by our present Holy Father on 29 April 1990, recommended all members of the Salesian Family to "think well of all, speak well of all, good do to all," and I feel sure he would agree with me that this courtesy should be paid to the 'dead' and not only to the 'living', to 'pagans, infidels and heretics' (p. 312, note 164) and to such persons as Canon Hugh Stowell of Salford (p. 57) and not only to those who, broadly speaking, are at least sympathetic to your own pro-anawim ideology (p. 214), admirable as that may be. Accurately to discern in each particular set of circumstances how this may best be achieved is no easy task and cannot be achieved without the assistance of the Holy Spirit. Reading your book will, I hope, prove of real help to many. Permit me to quote briefly from A Master in Education - Letter of the Supreme Pontiff John-Paul II to the Reverend Egidio Vigano Rector Major of the Society of St Francis of Sales for the Centenary of the Death of St John Bosco (31 January 1988): "The Second Vatican Council declared with clear vision that 'ours is a new age of history'; and... the Church notes with concern... the need to come to grips with the profound cleavage between the Gospel and culture.... The first and fundamental cultural fact is the spiritually mature man, that is, a fully educated man, a man capable of educating himself and educating others.... Education... consists in fact in enabling man to become more man, to 'be' more than just to 'have' more and consequently, through everything he 'has', everything he 'possesses', to 'be' man more fully." (p.2) "Jesus Christ is the chief way for the Church: the way leading from Christ to man." (p.10) "If an encounter is to be educative there must be a deep and continued interest which leads to the acquiring of a personal knowledge of each individual and at the same time of the elements of the cultural condition they have in common." (p.14) St John Bosco's "educational message needs to be studied at still greater depth, to be adapted and renewed with intelligence and courage.... so as to find in his legacy the starting point [italics mine] for a present-day response to [young people's] difficulties and expectations." (p.15) In applying that wise admonition to your good self and to those for whose personal development you in any degree share responsibility, you may learn from John Reader's Local Theology - Church and Community in Dialogue (SPCK, London, 1994) and, I venture to suggest, even more ambitiously yet humbly from my own writings, both published and unpublished, across the years, which your own historical research and historiographical preoccupations have hitherto prevented your meditating at sufficient depth. It has been apparent for some time that one positive way of promoting woman today (to use one of our Holy Father's expressions) would be to legislate that all female religious hitherto bound to the recital of The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary be encouraged instead to pray The Divine Office, being especially careful not to omit the Office of Readings, which can nowadays be read in the vernacular, so that souls are richly nurtured and nourished from the treasury of the Church's written wisdom. I don't know whether your choice of "depended" rather than "depends" to begin p. 216 line 4 is to be interpreted as theologically significant, but I was pleased to notice your mention of "Yates" on p.233 note 48, while the substance of p. 288 note 79 left me wondering whether or not the Mount uniforms were ever actually made by the Sisters themselves? I seem to remember they were not exactly cheap! Finally, although I do take on board what you say about Bishop Turner's kindness on p.297 note 287, but has Bishop Holland made a search in the Secret Archive of his Diocese where, I would have thought, there ought to have been kept at least some reference to the Commission of Canons and to its final Report? If you wish to consult any of the titles above mentioned and have difficulty in obtaining a copy, I shall be happy to loan you mine. Meanwhile, in case they are of interest, I enclose a piece from Lancashire Life (August 1985) about rambles from the "Jumbles to Holcombe, via Helmshore", a copy of the 1967 official Book of Bolton (J. Burrow & Co. Ltd, Cheltenham & London), of W. E. Brown's Bolton as it was (Hendon Publishing Co., Nelson, 1972) and of what is, in fact, my editorial revision as well as translation from the Italian scarcely completed manuscript of S.S. Acquaviva and M. Santuccio's Social Structure in Italy - Crisis of a System (Martin Robertson, London, 1976), which I don't think you have yet seen?…       To Jean Hutton FRSA Director: Development Grubb Institute Cloudesley Street LONDON N1 0HU 7 April 1995 Dear Jean Hutton, Jesus of Nazareth affirmed: "I have come that they may lay hold of life in all its fullness." (cfr. John 10:10.) Our present task, as, perhaps, King Charles the Martyr clearly foresaw, is, therefore, to re-member the 'Church' as authentically catholic communion. In humble love and service I pray that in your hands the enclosed annotated copy of my recent RILKO Lecture may shed a gleam of Light on the path ahead. Ninety-nine other copies of that statement, founded on St. Paul the Apostle's insistence that human solidarity in authentic shipwreck (cf. Acts 27:31) is the natural bedrock in which True Faith is rooted - Fidei coticula crux, are being distributed as best as I know how…     To Father Felix Donnelly PhD 8a/45 Stanley Point Road, DEVONPORT North Shore, Auckland, New Zealand 21 April 1995 Dear Felix, I dedicated the greater part of yesterday and the early hours of today to your books, One Priest's Life (1982) and Flames & Ether - A Personal View of Sexuality (1984), which have just been given to me by Denis Hopkins of Wellington, who has been in regular correspondence with me ever since we were introduced to each other in the way he has already mentioned to you. Denis has also chosen to send me a copy of his own 8- and 4-page letters to you of 15 March & 2 April 1995, together with a photostat copy of your 2-page letter to him of 27 March. Natural courtesy, human kinship and our shared sacramental participation in the Mystery of the Royal Priesthood of Jesus Christ pleasantly oblige me, therefore, to write to you at once and as succinctly as circumstances permit! Much water has flowed under the bridge since 1984, so I hope you will forgive my provisionally assuming that you still stand by most of what the only two books of yours I so far know state to be your own position. In Flames & Ether (p. 41) you join most recent Catholic writers in using "natural law" differently than "lex naturalis" which, as I have grown to understand that expression, primarily encodes the great mediaeval theologians' faith that the Holy Spirit connatuarally empowers Christians to pattern their lives in accordance with those of Jesus, Mary and the Biblical Saints of both the Old and New Testaments, as these gradually become known to each individual Soul in prayerful contemplation. Your reference to Lot's neighbours in Sodom (p. 51) indicates that you and I differ in our evaluation of the various exegetical interpretations of the relevant Old Testament passages. My own position in 1973 was summarized in Ecstasy & Vendetta - the making and unmaking of a Catholic Priest (Peter Davies, London - Melbourne - Toronto - Johannesburg - Auckland, 1973, ISBN 432 06540 7), developed and in some ways modified subsequently, and needs now to be interpreted in the light of my definitive 31 March 1995 extended paper The "12th" Planet, which incorporates the authoritative September 1993 revised text of my Mirror of Justice. Most libraries used to keep copies of Ecstasy & Vendetta, and I enclose both the paper above-mentioned, and my 1978 Voice In The Darkness, which was not very effectively distributed by the publishers when it first came out. I don't dissent from your claim (p.76) that the elderly do well to devote energy to living, but I am strongly convinced that more also needs to be done to encourage those of mature age in particular consciously and deliberately to allocate some portion of their time to the extremely vital task of preparing themselves for the work of dying and, indeed, for their own uniquely individual personal way of entering into their subsequent post-'death' role in the Communion of the Pleroma of Christ Risen, already accessible to us by Grace. Your reference to celibacy (p. 78) suggests you view it as, sadly, many priests appear still to do, as a non-sexually-active role, notwithstanding your appreciation of the fact (p. 80) that "a celibate is not a non-sexual person." Nothing in either of your books, nor in your choice of bibliography, indicates your assigning any positive value to the Tantric tradition, and while I share your recommendation of the Song of Songs (p.117), hope that, possibly in the light of some of my own enclosed references, you may also grow to understand the subtler aspects of Bodily Communion the inspired writer invites us also at the proper time gladly to celebrate. "Therapists may follow a number of approaches" (p. 85) excludes nothing, but "both psychoanalytical and behavioural theories are useful; neither is sufficient in itself. Two counsellors working together can often be effective in treating sexual dysfunctioning" is far less explicit and comprehensive than helpfulness requires!.... Wilhelm Stekel's method of psychoanalysis is, in my experience, often clearly preferable to Freud's or Adler's. Jung's psycho-depth-dynamic approach, properly used, is vastly superior to any strictly psychoanalytic method but clearly, in today's circumstances, needs to be widened in the way that Helen M. Luke has so marvellously taught us to seek to do.... I have annotated a few of my enclosed notes here and there, in case this may afford you some additional light not locally available to you. Chapter Eleven, unavoidably perhaps, is the least satisfactory part of your undoubtedly to many helpful because refreshingly personally honest manual. Those sources which now convince me that the Adam was in all likelihood created some 300,000 years ago by a process that involved both genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization, also persuade me that the modern scholars you mention (p.110) as rejecting the validity of the traditional link between the 'forbidden fruit' and 'carnal knowing' are seriously in error, and that their error has practical anthropological and not merely abstract implications for our Being. Integrity IN Truth I seek with all my mind and heart. You wrote (p. 113): "In general, I have no great sense of the Catholic Church's access to total truth. The record of its teaching errors is considerable." It partly saddens me that your life experience, education, training and growth has not yet endowed you with any great insight into the historical dimensions of the hidden life of G-d's Spirit in and through human history. On the other hand, I heartily agree with Pope Leo XIII and yourself that all issues need to be honestly opened up and fully discussed - in Love. Although you do not clarify the context in which one person shared with you his belief that "heaven would be like one long unending orgasm" (p.118), and seem to be startled by such a belief being held at all, it is my understanding that some of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's unpublished papers express a substantially similar view. My enclosed Letter to Tantric Explorers of 3 February 1995 relates. Your bibliography helpfully complements my own, but is, I feel, insufficiently balanced as it stands. One Priest's Life carries us back to 1982, may, like your earlier books, have already been very extensively and variously reviewed when it first came out and is, in any case, a privileged-status work, since no outsider is qualified to tell an autobiographer what is and what is not significant in and about his life. Ecstasy & Vendetta is a very different book, and you may like to look at it. In any case, I am grateful to Denis for sending me your life-story, and I am grateful to you for writing it when you did. Again, my own comments are few. "What I had failed to appreciate was that most of the youths referred to the hostel were seasoned in their dealings with helping agencies." (p.74) Although you do not say this, I suspect that responsibilities were thrust upon you more than once that you were insufficiently educated, formed and trained effectively to shoulder. I also feel that the emotional truth of St. Paul's "Bear ye one another's burdens and so you will fulfil the law of Christ" had not yet redeemed you from the wrong sort of individualism nor enlightened you about the inner meaning of team-work. "In many ways most of the popes of this century have been disasters." (p.81) Even allowing for your only slight knowledge of French when you were studying with Lumen Vitae in Belgium, I find it very hard to understand how you would justify that conclusion. Following St. Paul the Apostle and Martin Heidegger the philosopher I certainly see that echte Naufrage - authentic shipwreck is, and always will be characteristic of life lived under the sign of the Cross, but Nibiru, the Planet of Crossing, is only astrologically unfavourable, i.e., dis-astrous, if we refuse to associate ourselves with the Church's Easter Vigil "O felix culpa!" Your perception (p.88) that America has "tended to take Rome more seriously than Rome takes itself," contains some truth, I think. "Celibacy has meant I have been forced to channel most of my energy into work and keeping busy. But that has not been the only reason for my over-working.... Somehow I picked up the message in my early life that validity for one's existence came through what one did, and possibly what one was." (p.109) I venture to suggest that your full maturity, if you ever achieve it (or have it bestowed on you as a charism), will include acknowledgment of the concrete truth that in your individually personal case, as a unique priest with a unique vocation, there was nothing (taking the long view) in the least bit wrong about any of your childhood learning-situations or about the personality traits and skills to which they conspired to give rise. The secret is to grow to make good use of them - to transmute even hurricanes into sunlight! As St. Francis de Sales taught - "Each plant is meant to grow and flower in the garden in which it was planted." And the Spanish proverb: "G-d writes straight on crooked lines." The example of the great mystics teaches us that celibacy does not force anybody to channel energy into busy work; meditation, silence, inner listening are eminently sexual experiences or, as I prefer more exactly to say, in-periences. Where Martha scatters herself in following the Master, Mary gathers Him into her Heart to be with him. How sad when seminarians are not helped to respond to this second vocation! You say (p.116-7) that you "rubbished" the Hail Holy Queen "for its negative attitude to life and had excluded [it] from the religious syllabus as it talked of "mourning and weeping in this valley of tears." You would, had you been able, have done better to teach others to understand that "this valley of tears" primarily refers to the unconscious depths of the human mind and heart, which is also "the field" mentioned by Jesus as growing both wheat and tares - tares, imperfections, emotional problems, scotomas, etc., which Jesus wisely asks us not prematurely to uproot and eradicate, but patiently to work with until harvest time comes.... All the spiritual writings of Francis de Sales remain a goldmine of lessons in discernment. Bishop, later Cardinal Delargey's "During the year many comments, favourable and otherwise, on what you are doing have been made to me, but I prefer to trust your own sincerity and G-d's grace and letting things work out as His Providence decides," which you quote (p.129) alongside his admission that "my own reservations could be the result of ignorance," is extremely helpful, even now, especially if you appreciate it is also the voice of your Guardian Angel. Like Jesus, we need an Angel in the moment of our Agony. Treasure such words, as I am sure you do. "I have been mainly unconscious of other people's love for me." (p.136) Volumes to explore here in retrospect! "The resignation of elderly popes." (p.185) You seem not to attribute any positive value to old-age's less congenial manifestations. I wonder why, even though I know you have had far from an easy life yourself. As you wrote, "my own health still gave me little cause for rejoicing." (p.187) "Being public property is difficult." (p.199) Despite all that, as one reviewer of your Candles in the Wind put it (p.203): "The author has put into practice what he has written about. He has set the captives free, given sight to the blind, released those who are prisoners within themselves, and most of all, filled people with a belief and appreciation of themselves as individuals." Hence, Mary Whitehouse wrote (p.206): "There are, to my knowledge, very few books indeed about young people and their parents which offer the depth of understanding and hard experiences which characterises this one." Fulsome praise for what your then Ordinary, Bishop Mackey, characterised as - save for its author being unusually a priest - a "rather commonplace expression of secular humanism." If my own brief remarks appear critical, and if my enclosures strengthen that impression, it is not only because I sense you still have much to learn as a Christian and a priest, but also because I along with many non-Christians today would feel you still have much to learn as a human being, indeed, much to learn as a participant in the life of this ever developing cosmos. "I've spent much time and prayer in thinking over what I believe." (p.207) I am glad to know that. Since this book is presented to your readers as one which originally was written by you as an instrument of self-therapy, a question arises about the near absence of references to your personal life of prayer. I have not been asked to play the Devil's advocate. During the canonical process prior to the canonization of St. John Bosco who, like you, worked very hard on behalf of the less fortunate, the question was asked: "When did Don Bosco pray?" But Pope Pius XI, who was then present at the meeting, retorted: "The question you should be asking, rather, is when did Don Bosco not pray?!" This may be much truer of you than your books suggest.... "I have a personal identity with Jesus Christ and see him as a model of caring and hope." (p.239) Although that can, in the light of your book, be construed as support for Jesus qua philanthropist rather than Jesus qua The Way, The Truth & The Life, hope looks forward to tomorrow. "The story is not ended" (p.245) Your account of your final meeting with Bishop John Mackey before publication in Zealandia of his pronouncing of a canonical censor on you (p.213; p.215) is notable: "At that moment all I wanted to do was to get out of the room as quickly as possible. The situation had become embarrassing for both of us. The Bishop was friendly; we could have been finalising some routine transaction as there was no anger or condemnation present. I said good-bye and walked out to my car at the back of his residence feeling strange and rather unreal." As I read it, notwithstanding your claim to specialist expertise in sexual matters, notwithstanding your assertion of your own at least relative competence in counselling homosexuals, notwithstanding your awareness that every person is a sexual being, neither at the time nor later do you mention having felt any need to explore the sexual dimensions of the relationships you have had and have with persons of your own gender. In the absence of some such exploration, one unresolved question on the table is - were those who opposed you, and who gave moral or pastoral or doctrinal reasons for opposing you, really opposing you primarily for those reasons, or were those reasons the conscious or unconscious camouflaging of a more personal form of opposition, an opposition motivated by emotional and, at least in part, sexual considerations? A brief section in your Preface explaining your view of this question and its ramifications might have been appropriate even in 1982. What you do say about your feelings (p.222) suggests to me that you could have quite easy written such a section.... perhaps your editor wished to reduce you from a human being to an emotionally flaw-free crusader for a cause? "My life's work has been totally absorbing and enjoyable." The things we writers write! I hope the above is not entirely otiose. I shall not be sending a copy of this letter to Denis Hopkins, but you are entirely at liberty to do so, in whole or in part, should you so wish. My correspondence with Denis is extensive. Several of my letters to him have been quite long. Nevertheless, I have found it neither practicable nor desirable to attempt to respond in detail to the stream of topics he chooses to touch upon. What I have done, instead, is to make him the gift of various books and papers, by myself and others, relevant to one or other aspect of his current and likely future circumstances and superfluous to me at this stage in my development. Because of distance, postage has been expensive, but we are all members one of another, and books are not written to rest idly on shelves. As a focus, other than specific points made in my letters, I have recommended to him, as I do to all with ears to hear, Bernard Lonergan's Insight; Helen M. Luke's Kaleidoscope, Joan D'Arcy Cooper's writings, the anonymously and only posthumously published Meditations on the Tarot - a Journey into Christian Hermeticism and, since one needs to crawl before walking or running, also Sallie Nichols's Jung and Tarot - An Archetypal Journey. I teach that we, in community, are all individual persons, that the more mature we grow to be, the more distinctively individual we know ourselves and show ourselves to be. Hence, my priority aim, both as teacher and, if necessary, 'therapist', is to nurture and nourish growth in that process whereby each one learns how to free himself to be, to have life, and to have it more abundantly…     To Mrs. Doriel S. Hall ( Dayamurti) 1 Beacon Hill Park Churt Road HINDHEAD Surrey GU26 6HU Wednesday, 7 June 1995 Dear Doriel, The Preliminary LibrArian I+N the Neith Network's Hermetic Function You are probably already aware that the Lucis Trust are organising a meditation meeting to begin at 6.30 p.m., on Monday, 12 June, at the Charing Cross Hotel (adj. Charing Cross Station) to inaugurate World Goodwill's celebration of Tuesday, 13 June, as World Invocation Day, when "people of goodwill from all parts of the world, and from different religious and spiritual backgrounds unite in invoking" the "higher energies" of "light, love and spiritual will" with the aim of "building a more just, interdependent and caring global society." Also because Tuesday, 13 June 1995, is the first centenary of my father, the Raja Yogi, Levi Hamer's birth, I hope to be present at that meeting, when my pleasure will be increased if I can also meet you there as well? If nowadays I am always encouraging all persons within the Neith Network individuallly to read deeply and, in particular, to meditate the mutually complementary writings of Joan D'Arcy Cooper, Bernard Lonergan and Helen M. Luke, as well as the anonymously and posthumously published Meditations on the Tarot - A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (ISBN 1-85230-222-4) within their only proper context - The Book of Life, it was my father's exemplarily indefatigable study of the British Empire Universities Modern English Illustrated Dictionary that first set my still frequently hesitant feet in prudent motion along the path of Hermetic Mastery. My immediate predecessor in office after forty years of concentrated meditation had this to say about The Hermit - and my "citations" of his words "are not due to literary considerations, nor to a display of erudition," since the Preliminary LibrArian is primarily neither a writer nor an academic. They are "evocations" of that anonymous master of "the tradition," so that he, too, "may be present" with his "impulses of aspiration" and his "light of thought," as I share with you what I can of those matters that are closest to my heart: "Now, the distinctly practical teaching of the ninth [Major] Arcanum [of the Tarot] is that it is necessary to subordinate the directing intellectual initiative, as well as the flowing spontaneous movement of thought, to the 'heart of thought,' i.e. to the profound feeling that is found at the basis of the thinking that one sometimes designates 'intellectual intuition' and which is the 'feeling for truth'. It is also necessary to subordinate both spontaneous imagination and actively directed imagination to the direction of the heart, i.e. to the profound feeling of moral warmth that one sometimes designates 'moral intuition' and which is the 'feeling for beauty'. Lastly, it is necessary to subordinate spontaneous impulses and designs directed from the will to the profound feeling which accompanies them that one sometimes designates 'practical intuition' and which is the 'feeling for the good'." (Meditations on the Tarot, pp. 228-9; the words earlier quoted from the same author are taken from his Foreword, pp. ix-x, which very helpfully concludes: "Your friend greets you, dear Unknown Friend, from beyond the grave.") My seventh reading of these Meditations will be followed by others, but suffices to clarify that, so far as I am concerned, this book, notwithstanding its imperfections, has more than earned its central and cardinal place among the select few mentioned in par. 3 above. "Each mode of experience and knowledge when pushed to its limit becomes a sense or engenders a special sense. He who dares to aspire to the experience of the unique essence of Being will develop the mystical sense or spiritual touch. If he wants not only to live but also to learn to understand what he lives through, he will develop the gnostic sense. And if he wants to put into practice what he has understood from mystical experience, he will develop the magical sense. If, lastly, he wants all that he has experienced, understood and practised to be not limited to himself and his time, but to become communicable to others and to be transmitted to future generations, he must develop the Hermetic-philosophical sense, and in practising it he will 'write his book'." (Meditations on the Tarot, p.42.) No doubt you will have noticed those words: "dares..., wants..., wants..., wants..., he will...." Robert A. Powell, the English translator of the original French manuscript, has faithfully conveyed its sense. "The great work of spiritual alchemy or 'ethical Hermeticism' is the transmutation of the substances ('metals') of the other [chakras or] lotuses into the substance of the heart ('gold'). 'Ethical Hermeticism' (a term employed in Russia for spiritual alchemy) aims at the transformation of the whole system of lotuses into a system of seven hearts, i.e. to transform the human being entirely into heart. In practice, this means to say the humanisation of the whole human being and the transformation of the system of lotuses into a system functioning by love and for love. Thus the wisdom revealed by the eight-petalled lotus [i.e., the 960- or 1000-petalled Crown chakra] will cease to be abstract and transcendent: it will become full of warmth.... The intellectual initiative of the two-petalled lotus [i.e., the 96-petalled Third Eye] will become 'compassion-filled insight' into the world. The creative word of the sixteen-petalled lotus [or Throat chakra] will become magical: it will have the faculty of illumining, consoling and healing. The heart itself, or the twelve-petalled lotus, which alone of the centres is not attached to the organism, and which can go out of it and live - by the exteriorisation of its 'petals', which can be rayed outwards - with and in others, will become a traveller, a visitor and anonymous companion of those who are in prison, those who are in exile, and those who bear heavy loads of responsibility. It will be an itinerant Hermit, traversing ways leading from one end of the earth to the other, and also ways through spheres of the spiritual world..., because no distance is insurmountable for love and no door can prevent it from entering.... The science of the ten-petalled lotus [or Solar Plexus chakra] will then become conscience, i.e. the servant of G-d and neighbour [and Joan D'Arcy Cooper's detailed and authentically original discussion of the chakras in The Ancient Teaching of Yoga and the Spiritual Evolution of Man (pp. 51-74) most helpfully amplifies this teaching]. The six-petalled lotus [or so called Spleen chakra], the centre of health, will become that of holiness, i.e., harmony between spirit, soul and body. The creative force of the four-petalled lotus [or Root chakra] will then serve as a source of energy and inexhaustible élan for the long way of the itinerant hermit, who is a man of heart, i.e. a man who has regained his humanity." (Meditations on the Tarot , p.227.) On pp. 184-5 of his book the same author, therefore, clearly differentiates his own sustaining and over-arching Hermetic function from the abstract and quasi-academic pursuit of systematic understanding on the one hand, and from any deliberately practical prioritisation of ceremonial magic on the other. Although, in other words, he holds in high regard and has, indeed, made a careful study of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's Archeometry or the System of Principles and Criteria for all Philosophical, Religious and Scientific Doctrines of the Past, Present and Future, he never attempted to compose the 'Archemometry of past, present and future Archeometries,' as Bernard Lonergan may in some sense be said to have done, and I have no plans to develop the existing corpus of my own writings along those lines. Also, although he greatly esteems Eliphas Levi and Martinez de Pasqually as ceremonial magicians, neither he nor I have inherited the task of attaining to the 'zodiacal operation of the evocation of the twelve Thrones'! "The source of the life and viability of the entire Hermetic current through the course of the ages is to be found neither in intellectual theory nor in magical practices. It is quite precisely stated by Hermes Trismegistus." (Meditations on the Tarot, p.185.) "For speaking as a prophet speaks, I tell you that in after times none will pursue philosophy in singleness of heart. Philosophy is nothing else than striving through constant contemplation and saintly piety to attain to knowledge of G-d; but there will be many who will make philosophy hard to understand, and corrupt it with manifold speculations... philosophy will be mixed with diverse and unintelligible sciences, such as arithmetic, music and geometry. Whereas the student of philosophy undefiled, which is dependent on devotion to G-d, and on that alone, ought to direct his attention to the other sciences only so far as he may... be led to revere, adore, and praise G-d's skill and wisdom... For to worship G-d in thought and spirit with singleness of heart, to revere G-d in all his works, and to give thanks to G-d, whose will, and his alone, is wholly filled with goodness - this is philosophy unsullied by intrusive cravings for unprofitable knowledge." (Asclepius i; trsl. Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. i, Oxford, 1924, pp. 309 and 311.) Another disciple of Hermes, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, in a Letter he wrote in 1797, without subtracting anything from his earlier and long-expressed admiration for the concretely practical magical achievements of some of his friends and for the brilliantly enlightening writings of others among them, set out to explain his own growing consciousness of his quite different and uniquely individual vocation to the "inner way", the experiences and realisation which, for him and, indeed, for any person called to be a Hermit "surpass in value the experiences and realisations of magic, theurgy, necromancy and artificial magnetism." (Meditations on the Tarot, p.184.) "This sort of clarity (issuing from the practice of the rites of high theurgy) must belong to those who are called directly to make use of it, by the order of G-d and for the manifestation of his glory. And when they are called there in this way there is no uneasiness about their instruction, for then they receive, without any darkening, a thousand times more notions, and notions a thousand times more sure than those of a simple amateur such as myself.... Wanting to speak to others, and above all to the public (via books), is to want - to no purpose - to stimulate and to work up a vain curiosity, rather for the vanity of the writer than for the benefit of the reader. Now, if I have made errors of this sort in my earlier writings, I would continue to do so if I were to persist in marching on the spot...." (Quoted from Robert Ambelain, Le Martinisme, Paris, 1946, p.113.) What I have so far written and quoted in this Letter may help to explain why, having circulated as I have done various published and unpublished writings of mine composed between Autumn 1950 and Spring 1995, I have now grown to appreciate that writing is not the Preliminary LibrArian's function. "The Hermit holds the lamp which represents the 'luminous point' of transcendental synthesis [i.e., the superconscious gift of Pefect Night first granted by Isis to Hermes]; he is wrapped in a mantle, hanging in folds for deploying the particular qualities which have their place in the [conscious] region [of the seven-coloured Rainbow]; and he supports himself with a staff for feeling his way in the [sub- and infra-conscious] domain of darkness, in the region of the reversed cone culminating in the 'black point'. He is therefore [neither a Pythagorean Platonist nor a Peripatetic Aristotelian nor, least of all, a Sceptic, but] a Peripatetic Platonist (en route around [the Rainbow]), making use of [a prudent] scepticism (his 'staff') while he walks." (Meditations on the Tarot, p.220.) The transcendent vastness of what I have been taught to call the Neith Network comprises "the physical, vital, psychic and spiritual worlds: their structure, forces, beings, their reciprocal relationships, their transformations and the history of these transformations" - past, future and present NOW. (Ibid., p. 189). It is more than enough to keep me fully occupied! Although, read deeply and taken together, the authors I have quoted "speak much more about this central initiation which, through our union with G-d, can teach us all that we must know..., there is very little about the descriptive anatomy of those delicate points concerning which you would like me to disclose my view," as Louis Claude de Saint-Martin put it for me in his already quoted letter dated 1797.... I hope to stay in London for a few days. Meanwhile, shalom!… - Shalom & Welcome! -       © The Neith Network Library 2004 Webmaster: ExtraReverendDoctorColinJames Hamer, The Rainbow Programme Creativity House, 9 Oxford Street, St. Thomas, EXETER, Devon EX2 9AG, U.K. This page updated 15:00 7/4/2004.