Many of its 526 pages are, I believe, in several ways especially relevant to the present interests and concerns many who attended the U.K.'s Cambridge-based Institute of Marian Studies' July 2002 Summer School in Lampeter, where the University campus is only a few miles away from the very centre of the already perhaps 12,000-years-old Pumpsaint Zodiac.
Jean Houston's description of David's book as "astonishing", if read as a convenient portmanteau assessment of its contents' relative literary and cultural merits, vigorously commends it to our attention; if also taken as a reflection of her personal impressions of the actual text, "astonishing" is praise, since it was Jean who inherited the whole of Margaret Mead's not inconsiderable library. How Plato and Aristotle might envy her!
Although Francis Bacon also loved books, it is to a wise reading of The Book of Nature that he primarily directs our attention. Associate Professor of Architecture Bodvar Schjelderup of Trondheim is another fellow pilgrim who has long understood that Nature's most cryptic secrets are all couched in the language of mathematics.
David Elkington has poured into his book much thought, much energy, much love. Much more will, no doubt, be lavished on his future publications. We thank him in advance.
"Thou art That." "I see in you a very beautiful reflection of Self." Or, as had also already been said: "Geeeh… 'e's us". "Resonance" is a good word.
One week-end, seven years ago, David Elkington's name cropped up in conversation at a Tantric Yoga seminar in Plymouth. Something resonated. "Resonance" is a keyword in J.D. Solomon's philosophy of language, as it is in the then new edition of David Ash & Peter Hewitt's The Vortex - Key to Future Science (Bath: Gateway Books, 1994) - three significant authors omitted, in company with Zecharia Sitchin, from David's bibliography.
" 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.' The more direct translation," we are told (p.348), "is 'The Lord of the beginning created'." Sitchin's translation is better and importantly different: "The Lord of beginning created the gods, the heavens and the earth."
One of David Elkington's own keywords is "interesting". Perhaps "truth" will come later.
Dixon's "freeserve", now Wanadoo, even more recently made an offer many of us couldn't refuse. I rejoice in their success, but haven't put all my eggs in one basket. Variety is the spice of life. The Neith Network Library lives I+N resonance.
In 1950 my father's take home pay was £4 a week. Today a fireman wants £30,000 a year. Is there any reasonable explanation for that difference? Though happy when business thrives, my busy-ness, which, at least in intention, is exclusively that of the Lady of All Nations, of Saint Paul Shipwrecked and, consequently, of Martin Heidegger and of David Elkington's page 67: Neith, is neither "about" money nor, I+N Essence, financially dependent, which is just as well, as I am not financially rich. Echte Naufrage, genuine shipwreck is a very rich vein of Heideggerian thought.
Actively to incorporate both in heart and mind all that little wytch Joan D'Arcy Cooper, Joseph S. Ellul, Kurt Schildmann, John David Solomon, Marco Todeschini, myself, too, and a number of specifically and individually significant others have contributed to our present attunement is a pleasure, a privilege, and a challenge. May our joint efforts be ever and ever again refined and improved…
No Zen temple is ever structurally complete. This page is for ever I+N The Building.
Ingrediénte Dómino in sanctam civitátem, Hebræórum púeri resurrectiónem vitæ pronuntiántes, cum ramis palmárum: "Hosánna", clamábant, "in excélsis".
Those teenagers who had by then assembled in Jerusalem as harbingers of our all one day living in anticipation of resurrection, kept on yelling: "Wow! Yippee!" - right from the very top of their heads; and that's only one of The Lord's ingredients for this holy city, still very much in the making… (From the Second Responsory for Palm Sunday, our paraphrase-translation.)
In 1995 Inner Traditions International of One Park Street, Rochester, Vermont 05767, USA, first published in English Kenneth A. Symington's translation from the original Spanish of César S. Calvo's The Three Halves of Ino Moxo - Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon, first published by Proceso Editores, Iquitos, Peru, in 1981 as Las tres mitadas de Ino Moxo.
Chapter 6 of Part II is entitled: "Don Hildebrando reads from the air a book by Stefano Varese." Calvo mentions this book as having been published a few months previously. Don Javier, a sorcerer, remarks that, although he has never seen either Varese or his book, he is very familiar with the contents of the latter, adding, by way of explanation:
The thoughts of well-meaning people live in the air. They inhabit the air as we do our houses. Before they are placed in books, and only by thinking them, and even if they are never written, they already live in the air… And without our knowing it, without our understanding in our heads, the ideas and souls of ideas that inhabit the air nourish us and encourage us. Mæstro Ino Moxo taught me how to read the air, to distinguish and select the thoughts that live in the air…
I have never seen that book by your friend Varese you told me about. Nevertheless, I have read it several times. For example, it doesn't matter if one day they were to burn all of the copies of that book, because the thoughts, the doubts, the certainties of the person who wrote it, like generous, great truthful spirits, live in the air, and they belong to us.
Some years ago a friend of mine, normally responsible for one particular section of the British Library at Wetherby, briefly managed the whole of it one Summer, the big chief being absent on holiday. In a section to which otherwise he would never have had access my friend notices one especially fascinating book. He took it home and read it through the night, replacing it next day.
His next step was to write a letter to the author at his home address, which had been given in the book, requesting a meeting. A date was set, this author received him most graciously, and their conversation went well.
Just before my friend took his leave, the author asked: "Why exactly did you write and ask if you might come and see me?"
"I liked your book a lot," he said.
The author opened a drawer in his desk and drew out his only copy of that valuable manuscript. "I really must do something about getting it published," he concluded.
Focus is important. Yet the urgent may encroach. Events happen. This forms part of our response.
A puzzling sentence appears under the heading, Nativity, on page 236 of In the Name of the Gods:
The father god, Vishnu in the Hindu myths, Zeus in the Greek… miraculously inseminates the prospective mother, a virgin, in a process famously known within Catholicism as the Immaculate Conception.
Since, in the Roman Catholic Church's official Calendar, 25 March is the Annunciation, 15 August is the Solemnity of the Assumption, 8 September is Our Lady's Birthday, 8 December is the Immaculate Conception, and 25 December is Christmas, within Roman Catholicism the Immaculate Conception, nine months prior to Our Lady's Birthday, cannot be the famous "process" here mentioned. No doubt, like Max Heindel, the learned author of The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception and Freemasonry & Catholicism (Mount Ecclesia, Oceanside, CA: Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1937; 1995), David wishes to avoid any institutional restriction of the universal meaning of "Catholic". He is not alone in this.
Doctor Vivienne Crowley, a lecturer in Christian Theology at King's College, London, and the esteemed author of Principles of Jungian Spirituality (Thorsons, 1998 - see especially p.131), has, moreover, written about the Immaculate Conception in a way that identifies it with what she, at the time of writing that book, thought was the Roman Catholic Dogma of the Assumption:
In 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. This meant that in Catholic teach, Mary the Mother of Christ, was, like Christ, conceived by a miraculous intervention by God and without her parents having sex.
Needless to say, there is nothing in official Roman Catholic teaching that either states or implies any such anomaly. There is an important sense in which all theological mysteries are One. I have yet to be convinced that calling it all either the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption helps our understanding of doctine to develop, any more than I think anything is to be gained by either David's or Vivienne's tendency to identify Gnosis with gnosticism!
I wrote to Vivienne about this two or three years ago, without however our having as yet had any opportunity to explore in sufficient details the highlights and the shadows thrown by her inevitably brief remarks (on the same page) about the Immaculate Conception:
It must be remembered that the Catholic Church has strong prejudices against sexuality. Mary's 'immaculate conception' meant that whereas all humankind in Christian teach is born in a state of what is called 'original sin' (i.e. separation from God caused by Eve and Adam eating the apples of the Tree of Knowledge), Mary was not. This does not make her wholly divine but it does put her on the road to divine status; something which is being pursued by a strong movement within the Catholic Church today.
Here is the essential text of Pope Pius IX's Dogmatic Definition of the Immaculate Conception:
… Ad honorem sanctæ et individuæ Trinitatis, ad decus et ornamentum Virginis Deiparæ, ad exaltationem fidei catholicæ et christianæ religionis augmentum, auctoritate Domini nostri Jesu Christi, beatorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli ac Nostra declaramus, pronuntiamus et definimus, doctrinam, quæ tenet, beatissimam Virginem Mariam in primo instanti suæ conceptionis fuisse singulari omnipotentis Dei gratia et privilegio, intuitu meritorum Christi Jesu Salvatoris humani generis, ab omi originalis culpæ labe præservatam immunem, esse a Deo revelatum atque idcirco ab omnibus fidelibus firmiter constanterque credendam… (Bull: Ineffabilis Deus, 8 December 1854.)
And here is that of Pope Pius XII's Dogmatic Definition of the Assumption:
… Ad Omnipotentis Dei gloriam, qui peculiarem benevolentiam suam Mariæ Virgini dilargitus est, ad sui Filii honorem, immortalis sæculorum Regis ac peccati mortisque victoris, ad eiusdem augustæ Matris augendam gloriam et ad totius Ecclesiæ gaudium exsultationemque, auctoritate Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, Beaotrum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli ac Nostra pronuntiamus, declaramus et definimus divinitus revelatum dogma esse: Immaculatam Deiparam semper Virginem Mariam, expleto terrestris vitæ cursu, fuisse corpore et anima ad cælestem gloriam assumptam… (Apostolic Constitution: Munificentissimus Deus, 1 November 1950 - notice how this date focuses Our Lady's relationship with all Saints.)
Postponing almost everything I would like to add by way of clarification, exposition, commentary and discussion, it is interesting to notice that where Pius IX clarifies first in order to assert second, his more legally alert Successor first makes his assertion and only then clarifies it; for both Pontiffs the actual definition follows. This is because no Dogmatic Definition is ever a new revelation. Revelation is ontologically prior to Doctrine; this latter, however, is normally epistemologically and psychologically prior to each individual Christian's personal self-appropriation of the Mystery, which is, indeed, One.
Immaculate and Powerful - The female in sacred image and social reality, edited by Clarissa W. Atkingson, Constance H. Buchanan and Margaret R. Miles was first published by Beacon Press, Boston, in 1985 as part of the Harvard Women's Studies in Religion Series; I have the 1987 UK (Crucible paperback) edition. Barbara Corrado Pope is there identified as Director and associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Oregon. Her 27-page annotated contribution, "Immaculate and Powerful - The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century," provides a useful overview of relevant events.
What Barbara Corrado Pope says about the Immaculate Conception is accurate as far as it goes. I also suspect that for most elderly or middle-aged Roman Catholics, such as myself, 8 December is so obviously linked to 8 September that no confusion between it and either the event of the Virgin Birth or that of the Annunciation, that followed the former and preceded the latter in both logic and time, has ever arisen.
For many persons, moreover, historical and material facts seem almost without religious importance; for them, the spiritual appears almost entirely symbolic. Despite the current vogue for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, no mere lapse into word-games ever helps, but authentic attention to language retains its importance. "In the Beginning was the Word."
J.D. Solomon's writings are in this respect highly significant. Noam Chomsky's expressed disapproval contrasts markedly with A.J. Ayer's attentive interest. At least part of the explanation is that Solomon examined Chomsky's work only in the final chapter of The Mind's Ear, a chapter that was added only at the proof-reading stage, so that it was, unfortunately, published with a surfeit of typographical errors. If any PhD student or post-doctoral researcher wishes to sort these out as definitively as possible, in order then to relate Chomsky's and Solomon's contibutrions less inadequately both to each other and to today's main issues, as J.D.'s literary executor and the current custodian of the J.D. Solomon Archive, I am happy to do what I can to assist.
Twenty-one years and seven months have gone by since Archbishop Luigi Barbarito, when Apostolic Pro-Nuncio, very kindly conveyed to me his good wishes and assured me of his prayerful support for the work of Creativity House, with the aims and objectives of which he was already well acquainted. In his homily during an evening Mass he celebrated in the Sacred Heart Church in Exeter on 1 July 2002, the present Nuncio, His Excellency Archbishop Pablo Puente, reminded his hearers that:
We cannot live in another century or in another world. We must live in the century and in the millennium that have begun and in the world that G-d has given us. The important thing is to be convinced that today Christ wants to speak to the world in a concrete way also through the parable of our Christian lives, according to the diversity of callings and of gifts. The lives that seem the humblest and most silent, often are words of G-d of infinite value.
As Joseph Blenkinsopp has written (The Pentateuch - an Introduction to the first five books of the Bible, Doubleday, 1992, 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.
On 24 February 1997, for example, in a letter to the hermetic astrologer Robert Powell, I committed myself to a view that contrasts with David Elkington's view of Ra, when I wrote:
Convinced that Ra is not the Sun but the now "12th" planet Nibiru/Marduk that, according to the Enuma Elish, fashioned our Solar System by dividing Tiamat into Earth and the Asteroid belt… etc., I strongly suspect that, whatever is true of Tycho, at least as far as ancient initiates (who also knew about Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) were concerned, astrology will have been more Nibiru-focussed than Sun/Moon/Earth-centred, and, certainly, that in such a hermeneutic perspective, much if not all of what you have so far learned from others or grown to understand for yourself will vastly benefit from appropriate reconsideration… and, of course, will need a different Ephemeris.
Little wonder that Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) feels we all need to learn to read the Bible afresh. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is, I believe, good as a first point-of-reference, but there are "many mansions"; the human pilgrimage proceeds in distinct stages - neither do we all of us travel at the same speed.
According to David Elkington's Index, Robin Hood features on pages 115-8 and 313, but I met him very much sooner, on page 11. Also, although Robin isn't mentioned at all in the Index to Hamlet's Mill, he is significantly present there, on pages 354-5.
David Furlong's The Keys to the Temple (Piatkus, 1997) is one of all too few publications that have so far taken any notice of Joseph Ellul's factually based attempt to clarify what things were really like Before The Flood.
Like Carl Jung and Laurens Van Der Post, David Elkington pays less attention than Sitchin, Ellul and I do to the scientific realities behind the great myths they explore, and the psychodynamic explanation for such differences is, I believe, better clarified in terms of Marco Todeschini and his associates' cybernetic typology than it was by Carl Jung's earlier and already valuable, but very much vaguer, theory of psychological types.
I want to thank David Elkington for several times emphasising in his book the resonant presence of ultra-low frequency hyper-long waves within our field of at least subliminal awareness. Although Hamlet's archetypical mill-stone turns quickly enough, the revolutions its movements ineluctably precipitate have, as J. D. Solomon was fond of reminding me, only very rarely engaged our primary attention.
Just as sounds muffled in a vast canyon may yet continue to ricochet, so the interface between field and particles, individual and cosmos, time and eternity persistently facilitates the coming to birth of genuine inquiry. Different persons use words differently because each individual is, and is meant to be, unique. I+N our view, usage is abused more often than one might sometimes wish. On the other hand, the best crosswords are never easily solved.
When I visited a cyber-café in Canterbury on 22 February 2000, I learned that The Neith Network Library's on-screen counter had by then recorded exactly 222 hits during the fifteen months or so that I had been making it freely available world-wide. That 222 is, I believe, like the contents of David Elkington's book, truly "astonishing".
How these facts and their sequel will be found to relate to the contents of my websites, to Kurt Schildmann's there mentioned epoch-making decipherment of the Indus Valley texts, as well as to the Pumpsaint Zodiac near Lampeter, to the Glastonbury Mariophany, to the future Pope John XXIII's 1933 prophecies and to the events of 11 September 2001, needs to be explored further.
Several different 'places' or 'locations' have now been mentioned. I whole-heartedly endorse the Dalai Lama's encouragment of 'pilgrimage'. Like David Elkington and David Furlong, I recognise the deep significance of locale and the spiritus loci.
However, like J.D. Solomon, I also agree with Professor George Livagra, the Argentinian founder of New Acropolis, that "Ancient Thebes" is "a state of mind" - and with my first teacher of Ascetical & Mystical Theology, the world- renowned Maltese theologian, Don Nazareno Camilleri, that our "Heavenly Jerusalem" is, even more profoundly, 'a state of soul', 'process'… .
Yogi Publication Society (Des Plaines, Illinois: ISBN 0 911662 54 5) has already reprinted Arthur Edward Waite's marvellously suggestive and significantly complex The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal - Its Legends and Symbolism considered in their Affinity with Certain Mysteries of Initiation and other Traces of a Secret Tradition in Christian times (London: Rebman Limited, 1909), which includes (pp.443-487):
When the particular set of claims connected with Glastonbury began to be manufactured about 1150, to centralise a wide field of interests at a defined point, Joseph of Arimathæa was substituted for St. David. There was the supposed body of Joseph, there was the phial which he brought containing the Precious Blood, there also the body of King Arthur, and by imputation the Sapphirus, the lost altar of the Welsh apostle, the last of these recalling rather plausibly, and accounting for, the Lapsit exillis, or exilix of Wolfram… The Celtic Church held that the Roman Pontiff was the successor of St. Peter, but the patriarch of Jerusalem - who ordained the Apostle of Wales - was the successor of Christ… but so far as we are concerned the dead can bury their dead… The Latin rite prevailed because it was bound to prevail… The Holy Graal is the Catholic Quest drawn into romance.
Publication did not mean Waite's search was over and done with. For the rest of his life he remained indefatigable in his personal quest. Mrs. K. E. Maltwood in her The Enchantments of Britain or King Arthur's Round Table of the Stars (Victoria, B.C., Canada: Victoria Printing & Publishing Co., 1944; Cambridge, U.K.: James Clarke & Co. Ltd, 1982 - this latter, more recent edition, sadly, omits several excellent illustrations present in the original) mentions that soon after her A Guide to Glastonbury's Temple of the Stars and its fully illustrated Air View Supplement had been published (by John Watkins, 21 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London WC2), Waite travelled up to London to see her, and with great sorrow remarked:
I have spent all my life in quest of the Holy Grail and have not found it; stars and maps did not interest me and now I am too old to revise my life's work.
St. David should not be forgotten. The Roman Church is the heir to Celtic Christianity, which, as regards Wales and the West Country, had earlier established itself as the heir to a British Christianity which was, in its roots, not Celtic, but Iberian. Eric C. Wetherill's wise words (quoted in the R.I.L.K.O. Journal (no. 60, p.5) are timely:
Memory dims after two or three thousand years. Humanity has lost the ability of recollection of the very first beginnings of mankind.
http://www.rilko.net
Lost? Or merely forgotten? Amnesia can be cured. Mary Caine, writing about the Kingston Zodiac, has suggested some memory of ancient land-patterns remains registered in our collective subconscious.
In fact, on my 61st birthday a tiny, shy, delicate voice, channelled by her friend Joan, said to Sheila Jeffries (cf. Cornwall's Landscape Zodiac - An Exciting Discovery Revealing Secrets of the Ancient World, St. Keverne, Elderberry Books, 1996, p.9; 56):
At the time of the flowering of the apricot, you will find the information that you need at the place of many waters.
For several years I worked with Apricot computers, and apricot also happens to be the colour of my official ceremonial attire. On numerous occasions Sheila heard the clear voices of angels:
Nine thousand years ago we visited this place and erected a pillar of stone… We came again to this land just three thousand years ago, in a different way… God has many families in the universe and all of them are good…
Readers familiar with my other web-pages will appreciate that, both as a philosopher and as a theologian, I feel it is essential to distinguish between "G-d" and "god", between "Angel" and "angel" - but, as Gilbert Ryle knew better than most, ultimate questions are seldom likedly to be addressed well, when they are asked prematurely.
Late one night in April, Roc [R. Ogilvie Crombie] was walking down Princes Street in Edinburgh.
Suddenly he stepped into what he could only describe as an extraordinary atmosphere. It was denser than air and made him feel warm and tingling… Then he realised that he wasn't alone. A faun, taller than he, was walking beside him. It radiated tremendous power. They walked on in silence for a few moments. Suddenly it turned to Roc and whispered, "Well, aren't you afraid of me?"
"No", replied Roc… I feel no evil in your presence… I see no reason why you should want to harm me… "
"Can you give me a reason?", demanded Pan.
"It may be because of my feeling of affinity with your subjects, the earth spirits and woodland creatures", explained Roc…
"Do you love me?"
"Yes!"
Pan looked at Roc with a strange smile and a deep glint in his mysterious brown eyes. "You know, of course, I'm the devil!", he whispered. "You have just said you love the devil!"
No, you are not the devil", retorted Roc… (The Vortex, pp. 102-3). This is no more than a short extract. Another chapter considers Fatima and several more recent Marian apparitions, too.
Father Terence O'Brien SDB, at one time a member of the training-committee of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, and also my spiritual director for many years, frequently used the word, "vortex"…
The Independent Review for Thursday, 22 August 2002, assures us not only that Goths are back in fashion (where they ever out of it?), but also that netiquette is against long emails. That's why this isn't an email - or alternatively, an attempted one-line reply to some of the many lies and half-truths that seem to be a recurrent feature of the highly amusing Fortean Times magazine's electronic discussion Forum!
A recent issue of Fortean Times featured Father Herbert Henry Charles Thurston SJ, 1856-1939, to whose writings Father O'Brien also occasionally referred.
Writing, well done, may effectively communicate much that speech can't, and vice versa. E-mails are fossilized phone-calls; chat-rooms and bulletin-boards, though useful in their own ways, are, I venture to suggest, as currently managed, sometimes not much better.
According to a Press Release issued by Deacon Delian Bower, Communications Officer for Plymouth Diocese, on 27 August 2002:
Bishop Christopher Budd today strongly condemned the treatment of Father Patrick Kelly - a priest of the Plymouth Diocese currently working in Zimbabwe.
Fr. 'P J' Kelly has been interrogated on three occasions by President Mugabe's security organisation - the Central Intelligence Organisation - for alleged promotion "of opposition politics".
Subsequently, he was visited by so-called war veterans who ordered him to "stop spreading subversive politics" or leave his parish, St Gabriel's, Yanga, in the Diocese of Mutare, eastern Zimbabwe.
Fr. P J has always been on the side of the people and would not agree to stop speaking the truth about justice in Zimbabwe. Therefore, he has been forced to leave his parish for his personal safety.
I have spoken to Fr. P J on the phone and he told me that a member of his parish was beaten up by the Central Intelligence Organisation after being interrogated.
Bishop Budd stressed: These events have nothing to do with white farmers in Zimbabwe occupying most of the good land and everything to do with the fundamental attitude of the Mugabe government to its own people which is an unjust one.
Fr. P J was ordained in 1967… He was assigned to Zimbabwe in 1998… Fr. P J, 60, was born in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo, Ireland… He is now in a safe house.
In conversation with the priests of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Plymouth on Monday, 1 July 2002, Archbishop Puente, said: I can tell you that at my priestly Ordination, during my first Mass and indeed through the whole of my life, I have had one idea constantly in my mind: we must never get used to being priests. Each day must be life the first day, feeling always in our hearts, in a very vivid way, the imposition of hands and holy oil. To be priests is difficult and becomes more complex every day…
Canonically laicized priests have, in a sense, more freedom than their regularly incardinated brethren. It does not follow that their lives are either less difficult or more simple!
Carrifran is a magnificent ice-carved valley in the Southern Uplands of Scotland. Six thousand years ago a huntress discarded her broken bow there in what is now a peat bog. She was, perhaps, playing her part in the community preparation of a feast for the eagerly awaited home-coming of some sea-faring men. Many such details remain, for the moment, unclear, even though Kurt Schildmann has shed quite a lot of light into hitherto dark places. Certainly, that bow is the oldest ever to have been found in what is now Britain.
Please continue to watch this space, and do, please, visit our companion websites. There is, please G-d, much more to come!
Copyright © CreativityHouse, TheNeithNetworkLibrary 2003
This page first published Feast of Pope Saint Gregory the Great, 3/9/2002; updated 00:00 GMT 25/12/2003.
