i / c j .

**>• 85 S
: w .

r*f>'

P r ic e 2S. 6 d .

P o s ta g e 3 d .

THE

OCCULT
OBSERVER
A Q u a r te r ly J o u r n a l o f O c c u ltis m ,

A r t a n d P h ilo s o p h y

CONTENTS
The Dignity of Occultism
Marxism and the Occult ELI
Percival at Corbenic A P o e m by Rachel TAYLOR

The Great Zodiac of Glastonbury Ross NICHOLS

Rejuvenate Your Horoscope Julian SHAW
Tree Forms and Nature Spirits Ernest HOPKINS
Patterns of Culture and Cosmic
Plan Dr. W. B. CROW
Aphorisms on Observation QUAESTOR
The Symbolism of the Eagle George H. BROOK
Black Magic in Modern Art IV John HARGRAVE
The Bee is Strong A P o em by R. MEDNIKOFF
Aleister Crowley G. J. YORKE
Designs in Fantasy QUAESTOR
Coda: a S u m m a r y
Edited by Michael JUSTE
Assistant Editor: Ross NICHOLS
OFFICES: 49a Museum Street, London, W .C.i.
HOLborn 2120.
 J U S T P U B L IS H E D
HIGH M A G IC'S AID
by S c ir e
The author reveals in this work a fascinating and intriguing
aspect of early medieval witchcraft and magic. Little has been
written about the people of early England; their pagan worship,
their modes of life and the rich colour of that time.
Here is an exciting tale carrying the reader through an historical
period when worship of the secret witch-cult was practised in spite
of the persecution of the Church.
The author has woven—in a light and readable manner—
detailed descriptions of the rituals and ceremonies of magic circles
with formulae and invocations.
8vo. cl. 350 pp. Postage 6d. price 10s. 6d. net.
Published by
MICHAEL HOUGHTON
49a M useum S t r e e t , L o n d o n , W.C. i .
A F E W C O P IE S S T IL L A V A IL A B L E
THE D I V I N E VISION
A Key to the Greater Mysteries
by C. R. S t e w a r t (Major C. G. M. Adam)
with an Introduction by Michael Juste.
Each chapter is a highly concentrated series of thought-provoking
paragraphs written by one who has had what all students seek,
practical occult experience, and the chapter dealing with conscious­
ness sweeps away the muddled approaches to stages of spiritual
realization.
This work should be of profound importance to those genuine
seekers to whom the mysteries are still mysteries,
cr. 8vo. cl. 180 pp. Postage 4d. 5s. 6d. net.
Published by
MICHAEL HOUGHTON
49a M useum S t r e e t , L o n d o n , W.C.i .
JU S T P U B L IS H E D
T O G A :

The Method of Re-Integration

by A l a in D a n ie l o u
This is a fully authentic account of the aims, methods, results and
different forms of Yoga and will interest not only the mystic and
student of the occult but also the doctor, the psychiatrist and the
anthropologist. Built up mainly with quotations from published and
unpublished Sanskrit sources (with the original Sanskrit texts as an
appendix).
8vo. cl. 165 pp. Postage 6d. 16s. net.
obtainable from:
THE ATLANTIS BOOKSHOP
49a M useum S t r e e t , L o n d o n , W.C.i .
Telephone HOLborn 2 1 2 0 . m . iio u q h t o n
T h e

OCCULT OBSERVER
Volume One Number Two Summer, 1949

IF VISIONS
If visions could be frozen,
And wraiths of Babylon
In ghostly gold and purple
And gods they gazed upon,
Again our eyes illumined,
The roses of our day
Would vanish into vapour;
Our art would burn away.
If visions could be frozen,
Lost Eden’s beauty rise,
And Pan’s frail piping echo
Old faerie rhapsodies,
Our senses would be wedded
every flower and bird;
The gods of golden ages
Would once again be heard.
★ ★ ★
Editorial
THE DIGNITY OF OCCULTISM
In the beginning there are the small darknesses: the
mind in chaos, and for many there is no Genesis. They
are born and they move and they die within a long night.
Cradled in chaos, they drift, indifferently on, without
curiosity or purpose; and of such is the kingdom of the
unawakened.
Now for a few the waters of the mind are suddenly
stirred: whether through vision or voice, there flashes the
swift light of the soul; darkness is rent and the senses
65
 know they have been sleeping. But bright intimations
reveal more than a purpose; they reveal that somewhere
are hidden Eldoradoes, bright territories, the Hesperides,
veiled and welcoming. Yet these secret territories are
neither forbidden nor imaginary; neither have the
mysteries been lost nor forgotten; but the way to these
places must be earned, and inflated values about oneself
will not be recognized.
When the mind reaches more profound levels, it dis­
covers a richness as though thought had been dipped into
reservoirs of royal dye—tyrian purples of the imagination
—activities and relationships to godlike forms and celes­
tial matters; and these flash hints and volts of wisdom;
fragments from a cosmic unity; messages from secret
citadels.
Occultism is essentially aristocratic; though its boun­
daries are wider than this world, it demands from its true
subjects integrity and straightness. Thus few discover or
are permitted to find the secret door. Beyond all the
mysteries reigns wisdom, whose qualities dignify, whose
understanding raises up those who would follow from the
dust and decay of this world.
Glib solutions by scientists only solve material dis­
comforts, but completely fail in the subtler fields of
phenomena. Crude reasoning has led to a monstrous
and paralysing dark, though with the use of reason and
mechanics faith and muddled theologies could no longer
be acceptable; for the traditional religions had long ago
cast aside the spiritual mechanics called under other
names: magic, alchemy, divination and astral forces—
with the taunt of‘paganism and idolatry’, but left a gulf,
a place without foundations; a state of emptiness to be
filled in by theological phantasy and scientific specula­
tion; though neither intelligible to the intuition nor to
the reason; for both emphasized in the narrowest of
limits—human dogma.
It is an unhappy fact that the sciences either ignored
66
r

or treated with contempt the occult techniques. Yet in

the earliest literature of mankind, hints of man’s re­
lationship with the gods have been revealed, systems
described and conveyed through the written word and
through the rituals of secret societies.
The orthodoxies having failed you and turned you
upon yourself, you must turn spiritual navvy and dig;
yet into no soft clay but into a subtle and slippery one.
And it is, as far as you can ascertain, a perilous task.
Like labouring in a cave with only an occasional flicker
of the intuition to guide. You are also doubtful concern-
J ing the existence of any treasure. If only the words
‘Open Sesame’ could be used, and behold, all the glitter
and opulence of cosmic treasure be revealed.
Only when reaching responsibility are the psycho­
logical and spiritual structures of the Universe permitted
to be comprehended; before that, they seem unsolvable
mysteries. The intellectual stares through the mist of
his arrogance and there is darkness; the mystic sees
through vortices of emotion and senses an amorphous
unity.
If there is a secret and hidden architecture, a com­
plicated pattern and plan operating and over-shadowing
our lives, why is mankind left in ignorance of such forces?
Because such systems are beyond eye-range must they be
non-existent? Many leaders being equally blind and
impressed by scientific data add to the bewilderment of
the inquirer. Yet such blindness and crudity applies
only to a small section of humanity: the West. The
superstitious ignorant East knows better; their fears and
superstitions, their rituals and taboos have evolved from
records of an ancient arcanum, astral life memories
during sleep, and sensitivity to elemental entities who are
always with them. From the primitive sensitive emerges
a wholesome respect for the unknown with childish inter­
pretations of the Universe; but from the spiritualized
sensitive, aware of similar phenomena, comes a love and
I 67
 adoration and~great wisdom teaching: for both accept
the activity and existence of these hidden territories and
peoples.
‘But why are we of the West without this knowledge?’
This question is constantly asked. One could give many
reasons. The scientific hoi poloi, the intellectual lumpen-
proletariat, the dithering theologian and many philo­
sophers whose gullets are choked with discussions and
whose minds are a debris of prolegomenas, all have
succeeded in having the astral gates slammed upon
them through conceit and self-interest; though adm it­
tedly they are unaware of being locked out. Groping
within their own darkness, they denounce and deny:
patronizing the sensitive and compelling the confused to
accept their interpretations. Finding no place or crevice
for their grubby minds to enter the protective walls of
spiritual places, they declare them to be non-existent.
With peevish bias the materialist bludgeons and
attacks dreamer and prophet, denying the nobler
horizons they might see. Such are the mental generals
and captains over the armies of man to-day; though
beyond their small and tragic victories, over their helots,
hidden yet dynamic, are the galaxies of consciousness,
the splendid forerunners, those who have ascended and
who have refined—though countless incarnations—the
shining defenders of the occult faith, who guard their
treasures from the clamorous and conceited urchins of
mankind.
The mysteries are aloof and keep their silent counsels.
Their protections are subtle, and though the minds of the
unready and inquisitive may probe and reach out, if they
occasionally glance through the gates, they usually mis­
interpret the moment of vision and blink it out as a result
of an ill-conditioned imagination.
The truth is, the deeper study o f occultism is too rich,
too vast; it demands so much from the individual, th at
only a hint, only a fragment is carefully given to the
68
seeker, who often feels it is grudgingly given and not
generously. This is not so. The bright unknowns who
watch and compassionately guard the pilgrim, control
the load and carry much of the burden till spiritual
consciousness has matured; till sublimation and re­
integration clarifies, and truths are comprehended in
their undistorted importance; for would it be right for
the child mind to be shown the purgatories and paradises
of the cosmos?
Now before interest in occultism was reawakened
medievalism was in power; the books of light were
sealed and in dust. Long winter froze the mind and
Ignorance ruled the sad centuries, grew arrogant and
the luminous hierarchies of Nature sank into memories
of a peasants’ folk-lore, and the great mysteries were
riveted into the adamant of dogma.
Through the centuries freedom was a forbidden terri­
tory; only through secret devices could the mind attain
spiritual wealth. Minds were homeless save in the narrow
cell and enclosed cloisters where doctrines and rituals
led one way only: to the narrow creeds of the Church.
Yet through the distance and the dust came the thrust
and power of new deliverance, and through reason and
the labour of Science dogmas were exploded. But the
nobility of the new tyrannies began to reign; aristocrats
of the practical: the bomb as an orb, the test-tube as the
sceptre, and the chromium-plated wheel as the crown.
All rituals of utility in the name of reason. ‘The old gods
are dead; long live the new gods!’
Medievalism and its incense, its stained glass and vest­
ments, its solemn intonings, is scattered! Now the light
of reason reigns: a proud and powerful race of minds,
but—barren because godless.
All life travails upon the rack of evolution, and only
mechanical devices can give it comfort. As religion
brought dusk to the mind of man, science would bring
dawn. Science would disentangle and unravel, break
69
 open nature’s box of tricks and make, for the first time,
meaning from the discordant and uneconomic jumble of
nature’s blind gropings.
And the spirit of man? The fiery and imponderable
spark that can neither be caught nor analysed? This was
the unknowable, the non-existent, also the unnecessary;
the mythology of the primitive and the beliefs of the
childhood of man. This was also the superficial inter­
pretation given by muddled thinkers, who confused
qualities with quantities. But this was in the adolescent
age of science; that aggressive youthfulness when pro­
found mysteries were solved by shallow certainties. Yet
in the history of human progress, this dynamic dynasty
was brief; for the impregnable fortress of reason had
locked out intuition, that quality through which comes
illumination.
Now the material sciences begin to grope beyond the
blue-print. They have distilled and analysed and refined
beyond all discoverable substances until they have
reached—in a collective sense—the abyss about which
the student of the mysteries has heard—that great dark­
ness which is a leap to light. Newer schools of psycho­
logy have built a few ramshackle bridges; but the few
discoveries have revealed greater complexities.
Yet though the physical sciences began with anthems
of praise they are concluding with requiems of despair;
for they had released the fiery furnaces of the atom and
with it the menace of the irresponsible. To use the
thunderbolts of nature man must be stronger than
nature. Nature has her dignity and will protect herself
behind her bright augoides: for science has dissolved its
foundations and now treads a firmament of fire.
I- The matrices of Nature are no longer accidental
patterns but the vital alphabet of a cosmic tongue;
difficult to decipher, yet becoming ever clearer as the
intellectual method co-operates with the intuitive.
THE EDITOR
70
 M ARXISM AND TH E O C C U L T
By E LI
Whether we like it or not, Marxism is one of the most
powerful forces operating in the world to-day, and it is
perhaps surprising that it has not received more atten­
tion from professed students of occult philosophy, for
behind the cruder propagandist extravagancies of
Marxist literature, there lies a profound and well-
developed system of philosophical thought, known to its
adepts as Dialectical Materialism. The very success
which this system of thought has had among large
numbers of ‘intellectuals’ in all countries should lead us
to examine its basic postulates, and to see wherein lies
both its strength and its weakness. This, then, is the
purpose of this article, to present a critique of Marxism
from the occult standpoint, and to show how Marxist
philosophy has made use of certain occult concepts for
its own ends, often distorting them in the process.
While the suggestion that this is being done consciously
cannot be entirely ignored, there is little or no evidence
of any conscious knowledge of occult processes in the
formulators of Marxist thought, Marx, Engels, and
Lenin, or in the ‘Thirteen Men of the Kremlin’ of to-day.
But, as John Hargrave is showing us in his series of
articles on Black Magic in Modern Art, black magic may
be used subconsciously by the surrealist painter, and in
the same way it may be used subconsciously by power-
blinded politicians and propagandists (and not only by
those of the Marxian ilk!) and an element of black magic
certainly appears in some types of Communist orations
and publications, whether they be addressed to the
‘masses’ for whose welfare such tender sentiments are
expressed, or to the small coteries of intellectuals that are
the driving force behind all Communist activity every­
where.
7i
 For an idea to succeed and gain currency, however, it
must correspond to certain traits in man’s psychological
make-up, and a successful mass movement must—how­
ever subconsciously—have established some kind of
rapport with the occult forces, ‘good’, ‘evil’ or indifferent,
that govern human affairs.
Marxism, the birth of which can be dated at the
publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, was
conceived in suffering and the parallels with the origin
of Christianity are striking. Both were born in an epoch
when, to a superficial observer, the stability and power
of the governing minority seemed assured, and when
luxury and opulence had reached a degree hitherto un­
known, and yet underneath the surface world-changing
events were taking place, and these were to lead to the
downfall of that society whose permanence and wealth
seemed so well assured. And the wealth and prosperity
of the ruling-classes was based on a more inhuman
exploitation of subject races and classes than the world
had ever known before. To the downtrodden and
lonely slave and freedman of the Roman Empire
Christianity offered Hope, just as Marxism did to the
poverty-stricken and oppressed industrial proletariat of
the mid-nineteenth century.
Love or the Class War?
But the Hope offered differed radically: while Chris­
tianity sought to unite the various elements in the
Graeco-Roman world, Jew and Greek, bond and free,
on a basis of Peace and Love, Marxism preached class
hatred and class war, though it cannot be said to have
created them, for they were to some extent inherent in
the social structure on which the industrial capitalism
of the nineteenth century was based. While Christianity
offered the individual a way of escape from oppressive
material conditions, Marxism said there was no way of
72
individual escape at all; the individual could only be
liberated by the political emancipation of the whole
working-class. Marxism had a strong human appeal in
that it also preached ‘liberation’ (though not in any
occult sense) and exposed the evils of a cruel and vicious
economic and social system, and although it advocated
unremitting class war against the bourgeoisie who were
thought to be responsible for this state of affairs, it also
propagated the idea of social solidarity among the
toiling masses themselves.
The political, social and economic doctrines of
Marxism are those which are the most widely known,
but underlying them all is the Marxist philosophy of
Dialectical Materialism, whose basic postulates we must
now examine.
This philosophy categorically asserts that matter
existed before mind, and it equally categorically rejects
the idea of the survival of the human mind in any form
after bodily death. The term ‘dialectical’ distinguishes
this form of materialism from the mechanical materialism
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, now almost
universally discredited. Marx adopted the Hegelian
dialectic, but gave it a purely materialistic turn. This
system of philosophy asserts that every phenomenon
interacts on others, and so cannot be understood in
isolation, and so Cause and Effect cannot exist in any
absolute sense, as every effect again reacts on its cause:
the ground is wet because it has been raining, but the
moisture on the ground will evaporate into the atmos­
phere and so influence the possibility of further rain.
Thus phenomena must be considered not only in their
relations with other phenomena but also in their
evolution. All stability is only apparent: everything has
its origin, its evolutionary existence, and its final decay
and disappearance. But this evolution is not a merely
gradual change, but proceeds b y /‘evolutionary leaps’
on the basis of another principle, the transformation of
B 73
quantity into quality. This principle must not be
understood in a purely verbal sense, as in the scholastic
discussions of how many stones make a heap, but as a
fundamental law of nature. The favourite example
given is that of water: water can be heated gradually,
but at a definite temperature it makes an evolutionary
leap, and ceases to be water at all, and becomes steam.
Evolution, then, is creative: Nature is continually
creating new forms'^and each new synthesis has a dif­
ferent character from its constituent elements. It is this
concept of creative evolution that most distinguishes
Marxism from purely mechanical materialism, and this
creative evolutionary process, so far from being simple
and regular, proceeds in spirals; there are regressions as
well as advances, and both may proceed at uneven
speeds and with many interruptions and leaps; but when
a line of evolutionary progress returns to its point of
departure it does so at a higher level, and so evolution is
represented by the figure of a spiral. Everything returns,
but at a higher level of development. Evolution pro­
ceeds because each form, each phenomenon, contains
within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and so it
evolves through its own internal contradictions into its
opposite.
Old-fashioned Marxian Materialism
From this excessively brief and inadequate account it
may at least be seen that from one point of view Marxism
takes a point of view just the opposite of that of the
Occultist: the Occultist views matter as a stage in the
development of universal spirit, whereas to the Marxist
mind is a product of evolving matter (though not a mere
by-product, in Marxian thought: Marxism rejects epi-
phenomenalism.) In its theory of cyclic evolution
Marxism has touched on a fundamental truth, but the
hopeless inadequacy of this even as an explanation of the
material universe can be seen by comparing it with the
74
occult teaching of the Yugas and the Rounds, which ex­
presses a similar conception but in a far more grandiose
and completed form. Marxist analysis here is not merely
inadequate, but is quite incomplete, for it leaves out
spirit entirely, and it is not true even of the material
plane. Moreover, the Marxist rejection of subjectivism
is philosophically indefensible, and the Marxists them­
selves well understand that their system falls to the
ground if we admit that reality has no objective existence
outside our perceptions: ‘If subjective experience and
states of consciousness are our only data in apprehending
reality then ‘religious’ experiences are as valid as any
other and the whole world of occultism and superstition
is put on a par with the world known to science.’
(Quoted from A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy published
by the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, p. 270 in the
English translation).
Nor does Marxism give us any guide to conduct, apart
from urging us to participate in the ‘class war’ and it
gives man no hope of any higher destiny apart from the
ultimate abolition of the exploitation of class by class.
It is not a kind of inverted occultism, or ‘theosophy
standing on its head’ and in its unrevised form it no
longer deserves even to be called scientific, for although
it rejected the purely mechanical approach of the nine­
teenth century scientific materialists, its basis is still the
framework of nineteenth century science, and it ignores
the vast development of psychology, not to mention
parapsychology and psychical research. Its claim to be
scientific is outmoded, and it is only a superficial des­
cription of certain aspects of contradictions, but theore­
tically there is no reason why it should not agree with
Jung when he says that (individual) problems cannot be
solved in their own terms because every problem ex­
presses a necessary polarity, but they can be trans­
cended by raising consciousness to a new level. A con­
tradiction cannot be resolved logically in its own terms,
75
and the Marxists admit this; but this statement also ex­
presses a profound occult teaching, and the Marxists,
while applying it to social and economic questions,
completely lose sight of the individual, and ignore his
possibilities of expansion of consciousness and of the
acquisition of knowledge by methods other than those
of laboratory-science. The longings and strivings of
individuals are irrelevant, says the Marxist, except in so
far as they can be related to the class struggle.
The Unholy Trinity of Symbols
We can agree that human aspirations and individual
problems can seldom be satisfied or resolved in their own
terms; but every occultist knows that they can be trans­
cended by spiritual development of which Inner Peace
is the fundamental prerequisite: the Marxist can only
recommend still further conflict with the environment
by taking up arms against the whole social system.
It is true that there is a form of Yoga known as Karma
Yoga, but the essence of Action, if it is to lead to spiritual
development, is that it be selfless action: and while no
one denies the heroism and self-sacrifice of many Com­
munist militants, which in the fulness of time may well
lead to another stage in their spiritual progress, the
action is not selfless in a yogic sense when it aims at
creating or perpetuating conflict which must in due
course react again on the active agent.
While the Marxists reject all occultism as superstition,
it is incontestable that they have come to use, almost in
the manner of black magicians, certain symbols well-
known to the occultist, symbols of undoubted elemental
power. The traditional symbol of Communism is the
Hammer and Sickle: this is supposed to represent the
union of industrial workers and peasants, but anyone
acquainted with occultism will readily recognize it as a
union of the Sickle of Saturn with the Hammer of Mars
(or possibly of Vulcan). The conjunction of Saturn and
76
Mars is of unquestionable power and strength, but it
cannot possibly be termed harmonious. Again, it is not
without significance that the Red Army has adopted
the pentagram—the symbol of Earth—as its emblem.
This amounts to an evocation of the forces of Saturn,
Mars and Earth, an unholy trinity of frustration, strife
and discord, and whether or not the Communist leaders
know what they are doing, these forces cannot fail to rend
them in the end: nor do they fail to do so, as is shown by
the periodic purges and liquidations of former Com­
munist leaders both in the U.S.S.R. and elsewhere.
Revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children; like
Mars, it is caught in the net of contradictions arising
from its base greed for power and domination to which
it is not entitled, and which it can only obtain by force
or fraud.
In conclusion, then, it may be said that despite the
energy and courage of the Communists, their philo­
sophical system results in an unconscious utilization of
black magic in which occult truths exist in perverted
form, and so far from representing a Way Out from the
economic and social disturbances of our times, Marxism
provides a Way In for further discord, strife, disharmony
and chaos: for it leaves out God, and all that makes man
anything more than a brute.

77
 PERCIVAL AT CORBENIC
RACHEL ANAND TAYLOR
Is it lost, the lonely sea-road of pine and cypress and laurel
That leads to the Sacred Castle over the spun sea-spray?
To the hushed white hall still strewn with its ivory roses and
coral
Does the Masque of the Lance and the Cup take its
marvellous mournful way?
Who is the jasmine-pale Damsel that bears the Mazer
Over her head with its pointed coif and floating veil?
Who is the Weeper behind her? Clothed in soft silver and
azure,
Who is the Adon-boy that carries the Spear of the Graal?
And what of the Fisher-King, carved on the bier of his
trances,
Waiting with smooth-combed curls in his Easter white
and gold
Mid his vigil of paladins, poised as from ritual dances,
That wear the Sign of the Dove, whose beauty shall not
grow old?
Still stands the destined Knight, aloof in his passionate
patience,
His hand over his eyes? Is he doomed to fulfil or to fail?
Shall he dare the hells and the heavens of the strange
illuminations,
Initiate at last of the dread mysterious Graal?
Lo! Is he here and now, Love’s own ethereal Lover,
To speak the miraculous Word, unseal the Sterile Hour
With his muted violin voice, that the Wounded King recover
And all the wild Waste Land sing into fruit and flower?
That all the sad Waste World, by its Five rejoicing Rivers
Be washed of its blood and tears, an Earthly Paradise ,
The vines and wheat and roses reply to the Word that delivers
And ships ride white in their havens, and stars come back
to their skies?
But the Courtesy of the Graal is long long since passed over:
Even through the Spring and the jonquils, rides hither no Logos, no
Lover.
78
 THE GREAT ZODIAC OF
GLASTONBURY: I
By ROSS NICHOLS

A System Six Thousand Years Old

Perhaps the most intriguing addition to the mythical
lore of England in the present century is the apparent
revelation, by aerial survey and by patient identification
of local names with Celtic-Arthurian myth, of a ten-
mile-wide Zodiac in North Somerset, outlined by
‘rhines’ or dykes, ancient paths and earthworks, and
taking advantage of all available natural features such
as rivers. The startling implications of such a complex
topographical structure at the very early date claimed,
2700 b . c ., have led to considerable scepticism; indeed
informed archaeological opinion has hardly yet pro­
nounced upon the matter.
The latest antiquarian opinion on the origin of the
Zodiac is that it evolved in Babylonia from incidents in
the life-cycle of the hero Gilgamesh, himself super­
imposed upon some still earlier seasonal hero figure.
Robert Graves in ‘The White Goddess’ opines that
originally it was based on a thirteen-month lunar
calendar of trees. The Zodiac may be speculatively
dated from a time and place when its quarterings coin­
cided with appropriate festivals in some region; when,
that is, at the Shepherds’ Festival of the Spring Equinox
the sun rose in the Twins, and at the summer solstice
in the Virgin (Ishtar, the love and mother goddess); when
the Archer coincided with the Autumn Equinox, the
hunter’s season of Nergal; and when the time of most
rain, the winter solstice, occurred with the rising of the
Fish. Gilgamesh kills a bull, has love passages with the
goddess and adventures with scorpion-men, while his
deluge story links with the Water-Carrier. That is, the
79
 original Zodiac was in use at least in the early third
millenium b . c ., for about 3800 b . c . already the Bull was
ousting the Twins from the Spring Equinox house.
According to archaeologists the Egyptians took over the
signs with alterations, perhaps 2000-1600 b . c . ; -it may
be held, however, that both drew the Zodiac from the
same source, which the occultist may believe was the
lost continent Atlantis. At any rate the Egyptian is the
later by our records, and the precession of the Equinoxes
had disarranged their original seasonal scheme; Leo
replaced Virgo and Aquarius Pisces. These dates mean
that to estimate a Zodiac as being earlier than 2000 b . c .
is now by no means an archaeological improbability.
But in 1800 b . c . the Bull itself was displaced by Aries the
Ram, and the Zodiac re-arranged for Gilgamesh as a
Shepherd King to lead the year; just as the Greeks later
gave the Zodiac story the parallel shape of the Argo­
nauts’ voyage for the Golden Fleece (ram). Now the
equinoctial line of the Glastonbury Zodiac indicates a
time when the sun is just over half-way between Aries
and Taurus; it may be dated with some certainty, for the
base line of the central triangle at Butleigh, to whose
centre points the finger of the Archer figure, is an
equinoctial line of 2700 b . c .
Some archaeological evidence exists of colonization in
Britain by a people of Sumerian affinities near about the
alleged date of the Zodiac. The Sumerian creatures at
the quarterings of the year are the Bull, the Lion, Man
(Sagittarius) and Bird (Phoenix), as on the standard of
Sargon II of Assyria: Sargon, whose ships are supposed
to have reached the tin mines ‘beyond the Western sea’.
The name Sumer may indeed be that ‘Summerland’ of
Somerset whence in the sixth Welsh Triad the patriarch
Hu Gadarn is said to have conducted the Cymry to
Wales. Further, the ecliptic, or line of the sun’s course
through the Zodiac figures—‘the furrow of the heavens’,
as it was poetically called—is found to correspond with
80
the way travelled by the Arthurian knights in quest of the
Graal, the signs answering to their adventures.
The First Mighty Labour of Britain
Briefly, then, an equinoctial lay-out appears to link
Babylon, Egypt—whose temples after a certain date are
equinoctial in their orientation—and Glastonbury. The
common link and origin of these will be suggested a
little later. The apparent form of the Glastonbury
creatures is a representation of the constellation shapes
themselves as seen directly in the sky above, not a mere
ring of Zodiac signs. That is, they form a reversed map
of the heavens in effigy: ‘as above, so below’:
Heaven above, Heaven below:
Stars above, stars below:
All that is over, under shall show.
Happy thou who the riddle readest.
They formed in fact at once a true Caer Sidi, or castle
of the gods, and a Caer Arianrhod, or temple of the
heavens. Such a hidden great work was written of re­
peatedly by Welsh bards as the first ‘mighty labour of
the land of Britain,’ the second being Stonehenge.
Hints of a mysterious land of hidden giants or arcane
knowledge in the West of Britain are strewn freely over
early British poetic literature.
The thesis is, then, that in the sub-historic period
when the marshy sea-land of North Somerset with its
hill-islands was being drained and tracks and defence
works established, a deliberate large-scale design was
carried out whereby a Sumerian Zodiac pattern of con­
siderable atronomical accuracy was created on an enor­
mous scale, several of the figures being over three miles
long, utilizing some natural outlines, such as the wind­
ings of the Parret and Bure Rivers and the shapes of the-
Polden hills, marking the rest by trackways, the lines of
the ‘rhines’, and perhaps by plantations, and signalizing
significant points by earthworks.
c 81
 For the information concerning these alleged outlines,
and indeed for the publicizing of the whole thesis, re­
course must be had to the writings of Mrs. K. E. Malt-
wood, who for years has brooded over the Glastonbury
shapes and synthesized miscellaneous lore bearing on
them. The material for this and the following articles
will therefore largely be drawn from the Maltwood
oeuvre.1
On an ordnance survey map the area may be identi­
fied by describing a circle of five miles radius centred on
the hamlet of Butleigh. Near the centre of this circle of
ten miles lies to the south-east Barton St. David, coin­
ciding with the body of the mystic dove or goose. To the
north, the former Island of Glastonbury (Avalon) forms
the shape of the phoenix, at the beak of whose reversed
head is the blood-red Chalice or Challis ‘Blood’ Spring.
To the west, the village of Street is similarly largely
coincidental with the head and forepart of the ram or
lamb. Southward, Somerton, the ancient capital of
Wessex, and Charlton Mandeville fall mainly within a
fore-paw and the rump of the lion; while Keinton
Mandeville is on the verge of the corn-baby-sheaf of the
Earth Mother, Virgo.
The Origins of Druidic Beliefs
It is inevitable to those interested in the British
mystical tradition to enquire what bearing this ap-
1A Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars: ‘Air View Supplement’
to this: The Enchantments of Britain, by K. E. Maltwood, F.R.S.A.
Other works used are: Lewis Spence, The Mysteries of Britain; Sir
John Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, 1886; Lady Charlotte Guest, The
Mebinogion; poems of Taliesin, the Barddas and Welsh Triads and
The High History of the Holy Graal passim; Robert Graves, The White
Goddess; Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain; The
Observations of Bell, The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Babylonian Legend of
the Creation, from the British Museum; Plutarch, passim; Nennius,
Historia Brittonum; E. A. Wallis Budge, Amulets and Superstitions;
Mme. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, and Dr. Layard, The Lady of the
Hare.
82
parently new discovery has upon the already-known
early beliefs in this country commonly associated with
the term Druidism. However uncertain we may be of
much of its teaching, some of it seems by now to be well-
established by comparative study of texts and by recent
archaeology. The latter has been especially enlightening
on origins. Instead of being forced to look eastward to
Egypt and elsewhere for the origins of various elements,
it now appears that we can reasonably attribute the core
of both Egyptian and the proto-Druidic religions to a
common origin in North Africa.
The Neolithic long-barrow men who traded, settled
and built along the north-west of the British Isles on the
way to the Baltic, were definitely African in origin.
There, as in Spain, they left prolific evidences of their
cult of the dead. The date tentatively given for their
arrival has been 2000 b . c ., the middle Minoan period;
but it may well have been earlier. In any case the late
Palaeolithic culture upon which they impinged also has
most definite traces of the cult of the dead. As early as
1400 b . c . Aurignacian burials proved this—aeons earlier
than Egypt. Megalithic remains associated with these
Old Stone Age peoples show that the common origin of
this belief was somewhere in North Africa, and that it
then spread eastward to crystallize later as the cult of
Osiris in Egypt, and northwards via the abundant
remains in Spain to Brittany and Britain. Osiris appears
about 3400 b . c . at Abydos in the First Dynasty. It may
well be therefore that, if the cult of the Cabiri or ‘Twins’
was indeed the North African cult whence Osiris came,
a similar cult may have spread northward with the great
stone monuments to the dead as far as Britain long
before the archaeologists’ date of 2000 b . c .
In Britain there followed invading waves of the
‘roundheaded’ or Celtic peoples, traders coming via
Central Europe. They enriched culture on the physical
side, but seem to have taken over these Iberian religious
83
 ideas completely. Thus the cult of Bealteine or Beltane,
at one time universal in Britain and with traces of sur­
vival to the present day in Ireland and Scotland at least,
is identical here and in Morocco.
Waves of further invasions and wars from Ligurian
and East-Germanic peoples swept the European conti­
nent, but seem mostly to have checked at the Channel.
Thus it was that in Britain there seems to have developed
a more systematic and unhindered religion based on the
cult of the dead, even as eastwards in Egypt the pecu­
liarly static conditions of civilization enabled that extra­
ordinary continuity of Pharoahs and Osiris-figures
through the centuries.
Britain, when the curtain rises, a little fitfully, on
history proper, was known to Caesar as the origin and
training-place of the cult of Druidism; a statement that
other evidence confirms. Roman and Greek notices of
Druidism are unanimous in their strong assertion of its
cult of the dead. Druidism obscured itself in the period
of the Saxon invasions, although it is from the fifth
century that the historic Arthur comes. It evidently
revived later.
Our task here, however, is to relate Druidism to the
Glastonbury Zodiac, which is perhaps best done by first
giving a brief outline of Druidic mythology, then seeing
what parts of the Zodiac are referable to it.
The Osiris of the West
The core of the layout of this, as of every Zodiac, is the
ecliptic line, and the very centre of the Druidic arcane
teaching was modelled on this ‘furrow of the heavens’.
Man rose with the sun from Annwn, the abyss of creative
force, parallel with the Egyptian Nu, through which
nightly Osiris passes; it seems in various aspects to be
chaos, hell, or even a magical land. Any psycho-analyst
would at once recognize it as an archetype of the
Jungian id, the ‘seething cauldron’ of the unconscious.
84
Man traverses earth or Abred, the sphere of human life
and visible creative matter, performing perhaps the
twelve tests of the sun-hero, and at death sinks in the
west into Gwynvyd, the place of the tested and purified
spirits. The highest or innermost of these spheres or con­
centric circles of creation, is the abode of the Divine,
Ceugant.
Into the initial place of chaos and suffering, which also
seems to be death—perhaps of the unperfected spirits—
the hero-god who is the sun has gone before man, ex­
ploring the secrets of death and emerging with them to
instruct him. But man must also undergo this hallowing
experience, and in initiatory rites must follow the sun-
hero, who in Britain appears earliest as Hu or Hesus and
in Egypt as Osiris; he who later is Hu Gadarn, the
patriarch of the Welsh Race, but earlier was the supreme
God; he whose attributes seem largely to be taken over
by Arthur, with his mystical suffering and occlusion, his
‘round table’ of the Zodiac, the vigil of the initiate and
the earnest promise of his coming again. The three
queens of Arthur are the three seasons of his mate the
earth.
Beneath the supreme Hu are the god-agents of crea­
tion, the male force Celi or Coel, and the cauldron
goddess Keridwen, the pair being imaged as a white
bull and cow—a very ancient image associated with
India. Celi, ‘the Hidden One’, seems to have been the
mistletoe god with his white pearl-berries of insemina­
tion; one remembers the mistletoe sacrament of the
legendary Druidic rites. He lingers most clearly as a
name perhaps in the Cole dynasty of Colchester.
Keridwen is the English Demeter or Ceres, the
‘goddess of various seeds’, the White Goddess of Mr.
Robert Graves and prototype of many goddesses who
were probably local figures—Ana, Dana or Donu,
Brigantia or Brigid, even Ma-Gog, the wife of Gog or
Ogmios. Hers is the cauldron of the world’s womb and
85 '
of initiation, bringing forth Taliesin the sun and sum­
mer, and Anaddgu the night and winter—the principle
of pairs of opposites, one might say. Taliesin eventually
becomes surrogate for Hu, perhaps when Arthur became
a more underworld and fertility figure; he sits in the
golden chair of the wheel of the heavens.
Solemn processes of initiation and revelation centred
about Keridwen with her cauldron, as about the earth-
mother Demeter at Eleusis. Three heavenly drops had
been stolen from heaven or Ceugant, and to obtain
inspiration the mystic descent into Annwn must be
made, where they were to be found in the Cauldron of
Inspiration, which eventually identifies with Annwn
itself and with Keridwen. In more modern language,
and robbing it of its mystic significance, this would seem
to mean, putting it baldly, that the poet or prophet must
descend into the unconscious id to obtain his true ‘flow’.
[In the next article the signs with Druidic parallels will be
given in detail.]
★
REJUVENATE YO U R HOROSCOPE
By JULIAN SHAW
Many ardent amateurs of astrology resemble travellers
who find, to their joy, that with a little goodwill and
much misinterpretation, they can make their simple
wants made known in a foreign tongue. But, again with
a little goodwill, they would probably have fared just
as well if they had not had twelve lessons before they
started. Astrology is not just another of the occult arts;
it has been called the science of the sciences, and it is
deceptively simple. That alone should make anyone
look at it carefully before deciding to study it, for it is
impossible to study it without, consciously or uncon­
sciously, putting it into practice on some level of ex­
perience.
86
 It is simple, for any intelligent person can learn how to
cast a horoscope and use the traditional interpretation
of houses, signs, planets and aspects in a short time. And
as practice makes for proficiency if not perfection, the
intelligent exponent of the traditional rules who is
methodical can handle a large number of clients with
the speed of a National Insurance doctor.
But a time comes when the astrologer, if he be a
student, not only of his clients’ maps but of his own,
comes upon innumerable snags. A little accommodation
here, a blind eye there and things come right again;
but after a time there are more snags and he may well
begin to wonder: ‘Is there really anything in it or is it
just a case of mass-hypnotism?’ We have agreed to believe
certain things; we fix them in our minds and in our
clients’ minds, and then we progress them.
Zen Buddhists have a saying: ‘To him who knows
nothing of Buddhism, mountains are mountains, waters
are waters and trees are trees. When he has read the
scriptures and known a little of the doctrine, mountains
are to him no longer mountains, waters no longer waters,
and trees no longer trees. But when he is thoroughly
enlightened, mountains are once again mountains,
waters once again waters, and trees once again trees.’
These articles are addressed to students who are
already versed in the rules of astrology, but who feel
imprisoned rather than liberated in their own horoscopes.
When that is the case, no matter how scientifically you
calculate the horoscopes of your friends or clients, you
will be unable to let intuition dictate your judgment.
A client does not want to know technicalities: he wants
to know if he is going to change his residence, lose his
job, have an operation or gain a legacy (death in the
family). You will not need to satisfy him on these
points if you can give him a formula by means of which
he can deal with his own problems as they arise. If you
cannot do this, let the practice of astrology alone.
8 7

h- J lU w .. ^ 5*4.
 Two New Astrological Rules
In studying your own map, you may know too well
that disobliging square, that easy-way-out trine. You
may even have tried the magic word synthesis and lo!
it stares at you from the mirror. Same old face!
Perhaps, you come to think, the Puritans who spoke
disapprovingly about ‘drawing aside the curtain of the
future’ were in the right of it for the future, even the fami­
liar blend of ‘rain with bright periods’ or ‘fair weather
with occasional showers’ can sound extremely dull.
Now the Puritans were talking through their tall hats,
for the future, as a static landscape with an iron curtain
in front of it, is just a nightmare. The only way to im­
prove the future is by being different now. Right now.
Just forget about the map of your nativity for a moment
and come back to the fact it symbolizes. Your father
begat you, your mother conceived you and brought you
forth. Father, Mother, Child.
In astrology, the signs may be analysed as four ele­
ments in three modes. The modes are: Cardinal, or the
generation of power; Fixed, or the concentration of
power; and Mutable, or the distribution of power.
These three modes correspond to the roles of the family
trinity. The father, whatever his sun-sign, is generative;
the mother, no matter how positive her sun-sign may
be, is concentrative, and the child is distributive, all in
relation to each other. If sign and function agree, as in a
Cardinal sign-father and a Fixed sign-mother, there may
be an easier pattern, but not necessarily a brighter child.
It seems reasonable to remember that the native of a
horoscope is not a special creation, and that his parents
do come into the picture.
The rule for the first stage in rejuvenating your horo­
scope is: Find the sun-signs ofyour parents and relate them to
your own sun-sign.
The practising astrologer will raise some points here.
He will recall that parents are frequently clearly marked
88

. .•!. •. I . t .i
in their child’s horoscope by planets. Saturn in a posi­
tion to restrict may be the perfect symbol of a repressive
father. Jupiter, weakly placed, may be no benefic but
the symbol of a foolishly indulgent mother.
A second objection may be that the Sun in a child’s
horoscope is traditionally held to represent the father;
similarly the Moon may represent the mother; when the
child becomes adult, his parents no longer control him.
These objections are perfectly valid within the frame­
work of an ordinary reading, although they may be
dangerous if taken by themselves, but they have no
bearing upon the validity of this new rule which does not
deal with the parents as named persons with specific
colour, shape and nationality, but as representatives of
the pure power of the zodiacal signs concerned.
The second stage of the rule is: Regard your father's
sign as indicative of yourfuture, your drive; your mother's sign as
indicative of your inheritance on mental and emotional levels.
The value of considering the three sun-signs quite
apart from the horoscope is that questions of character
and destiny do not arise. You are considering the signs
simply as channels of power.
Parents' Signs Mean Freedom
Prediction about the future is one of the least desirable
branches of professional astrology for it tends inevitably
towards fatalism; it is hard for the amateur to avoid the
conclusion that failure stares him in the face when cer­
tain patterns form. Study of your father’s sun-sign,
divorced from aspectual considerations, will swing you
free from a sense of fatality. No matter which one of the
twelve it may be, that sign will give you a dynamic
quality in all you undertake. And if you feel the need of
garnered experience, draw treasures from your mother’s
sun-sign and transmute them for your own use. You will
then be well-prepared for whatever life may bring. The
recognition of your parents’ sun-signs may be a very
D 89
 effective method of freeing you from your physical and
psychical inheritance, often a burden and a breeder^of
compulsive activity.
‘Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running
back,5wrote Emerson and many so-called psychological
treatments are of the pitchfork variety. It is not enough
to recall infantile conflicts with authority to free your
own healthy impulses; the particular incident may be
resolved and the ghost of the parent laid; but if the
procedure be done without true understanding, the
result is amputation. We must make a cure out of the
disease. By accepting our parents’ sun-signs, we not
only free ourselves from compulsions, we also free them:
an important point. The old commandment ‘Honour
thy father and thy mother5, may then find a new inter­
pretation.
The Link Between Past and Future
We are linked for life to our parents’ sun-signs; but we
should break the tangled psychic chains, forged in
infancy and adolescence, as soon as possible and, by an
act of will, accept instead the relationship with the two
signs. The psychological gain will be tremendous. You
will free yourself, you will free your parents; and new
currents of inner sympathy will flow between you. This
part of the process is, perhaps, even more important
when parents are dead than when they are still living
for our memories of the dead are too often a mixture of
remorse and resentment, or else, with pious withdrawal,
we embalm them; in the one case we poison ourselves, in
the other, we promote spiritual gangrene. To make a
new link with the sun-signs will bring to us two currents
of energy which will perpetually renovate our psychic
structures. And if the parents are alive, we shall be able
to look at them as human beings instead of as gods
turned monsters.
When you have accepted the two additional sun-signs,
90

r. ■*cr£r<
 you will find that the limited importance of your own
sun-sign has been replaced by stability of structure. To
gain meaning from your sun-sign in natal astrology, you
look anxiously to see its relationship with the planets.
This new rule, for the time being, leaves the planets
outside.
Take this triangle with you as earlier you may have
taken a trine involving Jupiter in ill-balanced enthusiasm
or a square relating to Saturn in shrinking depression.
Take it with you, and let the Moon wax and wane,
Mercury go retrograde and direct and Uranus send out
his lightnings unheeded.
Students of Oriental systems may regard the three
signs as vehicles for Atma-Buddhi-Manas, and here the
accent on your own sign must go. Atma—the will, the
father-sign; Manas—thought, the mother sign; these two
are united by Buddhi, love-wisdom, your own sign which
illumines the two. It has a special meaning for you
between the future you create and the past you investi­
gate and make your own. When you cease to place an
accent on it, in the sense of fatality, it will give to you
that unpredictable sense of grace which, like beauty,
only comes when it is not directly sought nor demanded
as a reward for services rendered. It will be the fore­
runner of the development of intuitive understanding,
an essential for mastery in the art of astrology.

★
TREE FORMS AND N ATU R E SPIR IT S
By ERNEST HOPKINS
From Veils of the Invisible, a Manuscript

Climbing a slight eminence, I found myself in an

almost circular glade, over which brooded and quivered
a singular light, the very essence of glamour made just
perceptible to the sharpened senses of a meditative
i 9

I l i U V W k iliU o
1 f\.\ W | fl HI
wanderer. And I was aware of a great multitude of those
beings which have been known in the Principality from
the remotest days of Celtic antiquity as ‘tylwyth teg’ or
‘bobe bach’—those little people who are identical with
the fairies of Saxon folk-lore. And how fatuously has our
vaunting science sought to discredit the underlying truth
of many a legend of the unseen still potent to delight the
trusting innocence and natural intuition of many a gifted
child! Would, too, that some true scientist, fortified by
erudition, would come forth in all his courage to assert
to an incredulous world how much more of truth there is
in Aladdin’s magic lamp, the wondrous beanstalk, or the
glass slipper, than in a myriad fairy tales bearing fan­
tastic titles about an ‘expanding universe’ and the like!
The trees formed the audience of a remarkable ritual
which was proceeding in the centre of the glade. The
first thing I noticed about them was that, in addition to
the special atmosphere of the locality, they further im­
pressed the soul as having captured, by their deep in­
audible respiration, a coppery quality of vigorous light
which impressed itself on every branch and leaf, till I
found myself thinking that, even on the most Stygian
boreal night, when scarce the steely glimmer of so much
as one star might be discerned athwart the tossing in­
tricacy of muscleless arms above, the roughest as the
smoothest stems would yet radiate a dim cheering
luminousness on the benighted stranger, comforting him
even to the hour when dawn might bless the errant
world anew. To-day, however, I enjoyed not only the
twin atmospheres of fragrant air and resinous timber,
intensified to the point of visibility, but also a balmy
warmth of sunlight filtered and sifted after a thousand
hazy fashions. But the most remarkable feature of all
about that vigilant circle yet remains to be told: tiered
and terraced like some populous amphitheatre of old, it
showed me every known species of tree, such as had never
flourished together in one clime, but were to-day united
92
by some exquisite witchery which now perplexed human
eyes for the first time with the brilliance of unaccus­
tomed pleasure.
Many there were whose names I could not recall, if
ever I had heard them. The humble hawthorn I beheld
towering gigantically, while the slender-waisted willow
fearlessly partnered some eminent oak of prodigious
girth and venerable mien. The lilac bloomed profusely,
most delicate of charmers; and in incredible friendship
stood the luxuriant palm side by side with one silent
pine redolent of the loneliest Baltic uplands. Biscayan
olives were prolific there, too, plantain and mango,
‘nectarine and curious peach’ and many an anonymous
fruit of untold scarcity. My own favourite, the beech,
forking at tremendous height, reared vastness of ever sub­
dividing boughs beyond the reach of sight, while round
him, like some gorgeous monarch’s satellites, spread
tangled regions of bamboo cane. There grew the banyan
next to the birch, and yonder exotic giant must surely
be the Californian sequoia in all his aloof supremacy.
The very bank Ophelia wandered, her sweetness un­
alloyed in the shadow of death, was replete with all its
tiny blossoms, drooping pathetically yonder: yet from it
rose the Lebanese cedar, famed in Hebrew song, to add
yet further sublimity to this Welsh scene.
Yew, fir, elm, ash, what need to name them all?
There they held their world congress, and I was the sole
representative of the orphan outcast race whose name
has become as Ishmael’s. Yet what they meant to tell
me was still unclear, and might have remained so, even
if I had summoned up sufficient temerity to call on any
familiar seeming one for a spokesman. So I turned my
gaze with added interest to the centre of the glade.
The Flower of All Flowers
The moment I did this, a complete attunement was
established between myself and the proceedings there.
93
Like a lofty hollyhock, or vast sunflower, yet unlike
either, now manifold petalled to the eye, now belled in
stupendous daffodil wise, grew the most glamorous and
tallest flower that ever had been seen, so that its Protean
face burned and beamed at the level of my eyes, now
toxic like a poppy, now meditative as a pansy, now
simple as a daisy, or intricate again as the many-con­
voluted rose whose secrets dwelt yet freshly in my
memory. Lily and tulip in one, how shall I describe
thee, O universal scented, save by repeating paradoxes
till imagination wearies and can gather no more? The
most astonishing thing, however, about the Magic
Flower (the only name it bears in Elfin lands), was its
rapidity of transformation, which enabled it, as I have
hinted, to run the whole gamut of the graces of all
possible gardens in a few brief seconds, only to begin all
over again, striking out a new series of yet more delicious
variations of the one floral descant which has borne
witness to the work of the nature spirits ever since the
vegetal phase of our creation began. And the sturdy
watchfulness of the trees might have become insufferably
awesome to me, had not that rich smile of fluid gold
continued to mollify their arcane austerity.
The workers on the flower who were constantly calling
all manner of scintillations from the surrounding atmos­
phere, appeared to be in the likeness of two sexes, like
ourselves, but with one important difference, for I
observed at the outset, that no attraction was ever felt
by one towards another without adequate return; while
their bodies interpenetrated one another so completely
as to become indistinguishable for short spells: after
which they parted swiftly and cleanly, to resume their
labours with great joy. There were seven hierarchies of
them, each dyed from sensitive head to tapering feet in
one of the colours of the solar spectrum: except that in
every group the diaphanous, elongated wings which
sprang from the shoulders showed all seven colours, the
94
typical hue of the class being always dominant, however.
Nevertheless, each fairy had the wings patterned in a
unique design of his or her own. I gathered they were
very proud of this personal feature, albeit in an alto­
gether innocent way: for all manner of strife and com­
petition are quite unknown among them. They have
thus all the individuality they can need or know of, being
tirelessly devoted to one common toil.
The customary theory of colour gives three primary
shades, blue, yellow, and red, between which no relation
is presumed, unless it be a certain ratio of wave-lengths.
Their blending is held to produce a pure white light, but
this is really quite an inconsistent theory. Attempts to
mix these pigments actually produce melancholy, in­
determinate colours very often, deficient in brilliance
as are none of the originals. The secondary colours,
however, are quite readily obtained by blending blue
and yellow to make green, blue and red to make violet
or purple, and yellow and red to yield orange. The
seventh of the hues into which all light is broken on
passing through a prism remains something of a mystery.
It differs but slightly from violet, though it is held to con­
tain yellow also; yet rather than being lighter, it is per­
ceptibly darker. Also, indigo might be expected to
occupy a terminal position, before violet or after red,
instead of which it is found between violet and blue.
This puzzling uniqueness, this position that should
be conclusive, yet somehow remains otherwise, I found
characteristic of the indigo fairies also. They, no less
than the others, collected atoms industriously, extracting
inconceivably subtle essences from them and poising
themselves alertly in positions about the head of the
flower; but, while the other groups completed their
several contributions with spontaneous glee, the indigo
fairies appeared to withdraw again, their endeavours not
fully accomplished. It was a mystery almost impossible
to make wholly explicit. And their whole bearing was
95
distinguished by a gravity quite foreign to the other six
classes of their companions.
The Radiations of Flower Fairies
These, indeed, carried on their labours with that rapid
efficiency, coupled with a cheerful irresponsibility, which
normally distinguishes a class of girls busily employed on
needlework. The division of their duties seemed to be
almost exclusively determined by the order of certain
vibrations and the resulting pigments: while in each
class it could still be discerned that a few were more
evolved and alert than the remainder. These, however,
so far from arrogating to themselves any false sense of
superior authority, or displaying any arbitrary manner­
ism, were especially considerate and pleasant in the
constant assistance and encouragement they afforded
their less fortunate companions. Turn by turn, I silently
concentrated my mind on each category, realizing as I
did so that their toil was momentous to man himself,
remote from his concerns as it might have been con­
sidered; for they were obviously embodying some of the
eonian forces, in a manner exempt from that planetary
discipline which often undoes the best intentional en­
deavours of human schools of esoteric lore; and I antici­
pated that the beneficial radiations thus concentrated
would continue to make themselves felt without apparent
diminution for a period of several thousand years.
It is a process resembling that known to the modern
physicist as ‘radioactivity’. Interesting to us at this point
is the calculation which has been made of the ‘half life
periods’ of certain of the grosser elements. The con­
clusion reached is that the discharge referred to con­
tinues to undergo equal division ad infinitum; thus being
never exhausted at all within the field of time and space;
for i +i +i +T^, etc., is a series which can never reach
unity.
In our common conception, the strengthening of a
96
colour causes it to become less luminous, and of a grosser
degree of materiality: but the fairies, being composed of
the actual substance of light, not of its reflections from
more or less opaque bodies, an opposite rule prevailed
here: so that the most delicately violet fairies emitted a
radiation less charming by far than those whose purple
deepened into heliotrope. A worthy name, for it was an
occult sunlight indeed which shone richly forth from
their virtual swarthiness! And it was from a small
minority almost sable in their sunniness that I derived a
clear realization of the nature of the virtue they were
concentrating for the secret blessing of the human race
at some future period of emergency happily yet hidden
from our furthest sighted apprehension.
Few human languages have existed in a settled form,
or displayed unbroken continuity, for more than a trivial
fraction of our planetary history. And though being,
like its concreter products, conditioned, though by no
means wholly determined, by the mould in which it
operates, the attribution of mere names to realities so
profound, and natures so expansive, as the psychic and
spiritual virtues, is almost sure to lead to misunder­
standing.
But the violet virtue was essentially cultural: like the
collective mood of a group of artists drawn together into
some most fortunate meeting, where differences of up­
bringing, temperament and experience, so far from
producing conflict, serve only to heighten and clarify
the creative individuality of each member of the school,
while also diffusing a generalized atmosphere which
each acknowledges with a permanent gratification all of
his own. In the violet petals and sepals of the magic
flower are held in suspense or solution innumerable
lyric scintilla, harmonious views of landscape, or per­
haps the human countenance at its most expressive,
noble sculptures or buildings, and superbly concerted
symphonies.
97
 The Creation of Precious Stones
The secret significance ofjewels, discussed by Blavatsky
in relation to Apollonius of Tyana, that wonder-worker
esteemed in his time little, if any less highly, than even
Jesus, came into my mind as I absorbed more and more
of that loveliest and most inward of the six colours, so
that I doubted not how new and ever more precious
stones were being built up in the secret recesses of the
earth, and ended by wondering what mighty Sage, born
under an appropriate planetary influence, might eventu­
ally be the first wearer of some flashing, consummately
chiselled stone of identical hue to that in which I now
luxuriated, while endeavouring to bring my understand­
ing to completion. Yet in course of this meditation, I
never lost sight of the human group to which it related:
indeed, I found myself more and more definitely re­
leasing my own store of accumulated vitality in the hope
that the great love I had sensed might flourish the
sooner, a nucleus of realization in a society still largely
dominated by the psychology of frustration and futility.

P A T T E R N S O F C U L T U R E AND
C O SM IC PLAN
By Dr. W. B. CROW

Everywhere in nature the observant eye can discern

patterns: the arrangement of the angles of crystals, the
leaves of plants, the petals of flowers, the shells of mol­
luscs, the scales of fishes, the architecture of bones. Use
of instruments like the microscope, the telescope and
X -ray apparatus reveals further designs: the cells in the
tissues of living things, the chromosomes in the cell, the
98
molecules in the crystal. Evidence is even produced for
orderly arrangem ents of the electrons and other sub­
atomic particles in the atom itself. A t the other end of
the scale the planets are arranged in orderly sequence.
Psychologists now speak of patterns of behaviour, and
anthropologists of patterns of culture. These conform to
some of the same laws as those o f organic structure. W.
K. Gregory1 says: ‘T he song of the peacock is as m uch
an organic design as the pattern of his tail coverts, and
to the same general class of phenom ena we m ay refer the
behaviour patterns of social insect states and those of
Homo sapiens in a given period and country’.
In the study of m an we are bound to take cognisance
of social groups: the family, the tribe, the nation, the
empire. These are especially characteristic of natural
man, the so-called primitive m an of the intellectualist
anthropology. In m odern times, owing to the rise of
rationalism in politics, there is a tendency for such
groups to disappear. T he belief in the conscious p lan ­
ning for hum an life in all its aspects, imposed by power-
grasping political groups im bued with m aterialistic
philosophy, is disrupting natural societies which have
existed for centuries.
However, even in the world to-day we see ab u n d an t
evidences for organization developing in harm ony with
cosmic forces.
In ancient communities principles are exhibited which
are at work in the atom, the molecule, the cell, the plant
and animal body, the solar system. T he native hum an
community is analogous with each of these, as they are
with one another. Analogy however must not be con­
fused with similarity. There is parallelism whilst each
organism, hum an, sub-hum an or super-hum an, retains
its individual peculiarities. H um an communities follow
a common pattern and tend to group themselves in
1 The Transformation of Organic Designs. Biological Reviews,
Cambridge, 1936.
99
higher communities. In this we can see hopes for a
World State not based on intellectual ideology but on
cosmic formative forces.
Progress towards this must be based, not on the fads or
whims of a few intellectuals, nor on the dictates of self-
appointed supermen, but on an understanding of
the arcane principles of cosmic architecture. In order
to control the forces of nature scientists have gradually
developed theories which come very close to the ideas of
the alchemists and other initiated hierophants of the
Middle Ages. Is it not probable that in dealing with
sociological problems, men will similarly be forced to a
point of view which has been secretly known to initiates
throughout the ages? Already the recognition by psycho­
logists of the importance of the Unconscious points in this
direction, whilst not a few anthropologists are beginning
to warn politicians to keep their hands off primitive
folkdoms.
Our Untrained Scientists
Unfortunately our scientists are not trained, as are
initiates in cosmic architecture, in the fundamental
principles underlying their work. They are not able to
connect up the various branches of science as they would
if they had access to the Cerebrum Mundi of the Rosi-
crucians. Important as is the collection of detailed
knowledge, the extreme specialization necessary for this
too often goes hand in hand with a quite unnecessary
ignorance in other directions.
With the old science of astrology restored, for instance,
it is possible to see a unity in human cultures, each suc­
ceeding the other in planetary or zodiacal sequence,
each with its own peculiarities, symbolized by its god or
patron saint, each with its beautiful parallelism with
others while retaining its own individuality, and all
together forming part of the great girdle of the divine-
human King of the Gods.
IOO
 There is a unity of plan in the structure of primitive
societies which reminds us strongly of the sort of har­
mony which pervades organic structure, e.g. the regular
repetition of patterns in the atoms of different chemical
elements, the homology underlying the anatomical
structure of related animals. Affinity can be traced even
in some details between cultures otherwise remote. We
see this, for instance, in the mythology, religious rites
and social organization of peoples.
In mythology we have drawn attention to similarities
between the most diverse systems in our Mysteries of the
Ancients. All over the world there is a common religious
symbolism. At first seen as a confusing mass of con­
tradictory absurdities, mythology becomes, on analysis,
a remarkable system of universal symbols. Everywhere
we find traces of belief in the triune God, the four ele­
ments, seven planetary spirits, twelve zodiacal figures.
Everywhere we have allusions to the theme of death and
resurrection.
Nothing appears more confusing, at first, than the
ancient Babylonian mythology. Yet Hugo Radau1
whilst engaged in copying and translating some of the
oldest religious texts from the Temple Library of Nippur
found, to his great surprise, that the supposed Babylonian
polytheism was ca monothestic trinitarian religion’, its
supreme Triad corresponding with (i) Yahveh or Elohim
of the Old Testament, and the Father in the New; (ii)
Malak Yahveh of the Old Testament or Son in the New,
and (iii) Ruach (Mother or Spirit) of the Old Testament
or Holy Spirit in the New. This triad is, however,
equally well seen in the Trimurti (Bramah, Vishnu and
Shiva) of the Hindus and the corresponding Horus,
Osiris and Isis of Egyptian Mythology.
Long lists could be made of the same figures in all
religions and even the practice of combining the Three in
one image with three heads is seen in Christian icono-
1 Bel, the Christ of Ancient Times. Chicago, 1908.
IOI

mi mum n Tiiiii if wni

graphy, in Hindu and Taoist symbolism, and even in
pagan Europe. An interesting example of the latter we
noted recently, shown on a Polish postage stamp of 1929,
where the ancient Slav god Swiatowit is shown with
three faces.
Religious rites are remarkably similar in all parts of
the world except where rationalistic attempts have been
made to free religion from supposed idolatry. The centre
of the rites is always an altar of sacrifice in which the
Divine Victim is sacrificed with appropriate symbolism.
Even the details of this procedure, e.g. the use of certain
formulae of invocation and benediction, the lighting of
flames, the burning of incense, the purification with
water, are the same in remote parts.
Rationalists have condemned these acts as ‘magical’.
Anthropologists have spoken of the essential similarity of
magic and religion; but whilst magic in the wide sense
covers religion, there is an anti-religious use of occult
forces which is better referred to as black magic. For the
same forces which are used for social regeneration may
be used in the acquisition of power by individuals for
anti-social purposes.
Society in Need of Guidance
Social organization is also comparable in most remote
parts, literally from Peru to Timbuctoo, and is also based
on arcane principles. The king is the centre of govern­
ment and the source of justice. But the king derives his
authority from the initiated priesthood. He is crowned
by the sacred hierarchy or himself combines the func­
tions of ruler and high-priest. In turn he delegates some
of his functions to the chiefs or nobles and knights of the
chivalric orders. In England this feudal system was in
vogue in medieval times but as the arcane knowledge on
which it was based came to be little understood abuses
crept in and it was finally abandoned.
No two individuals are alike and a truly organic social
102
system can never be built up by reducing all to a com­
mon denominator. The modern tendency to ignore the
vocation of individuals and to reduce everybody to a
mere number in a totalitarian State is one of the most
obvious symptoms of degeneration. Society must not be
planned by a group of intellectuals. It must grow out of
the synthesis of the will of its constituent members.
Guidance and advice of the initiates must be sought, not
the arbitrary dictates of a few self-appointed racketeers
or glib-tongued politicians, hurriedly elected in the
excitement of a popular agitation.
But where is such guidance to be obtained? To answer
this question we must study the mystery religions of the
ancients. Man has never been without Divine guidance.
From time to time, when human affairs have become
intolerable, great world teachers, as they are frequendy
termed, have appeared. This term is liable to be mis­
leading, as what these great beings say is more liable to
argument and misunderstanding and is less important
than what they do.
This term is less liable to objection, however, if we
consider the term education in relation to its derivation.
Then we find that to educate means to draw out. That
which is to be drawn out are the powers latent in man.
It is certainly not ordinary emotion or thought to which
the initiated teacher makes his appeal. It is something
much deeper, which the Jungian psychologist of to-day
calls the collective unconscious and designates as irrational.
But the latter has laws of its own and is far superior to
the weakly intellect of the conscious mind. It is of the
same nature as t h a t which produces the structure of
the atom, the arrangement of the petals in the plant, the
beautiful order of the cosmos.

103
/
 APHORISM S O N OBSERVATION
By QILESTOR

''For he hath the blessings of Uriel and seeth high and low: the
secret strength of adamant places and the source of the rafters of
the rainbow. His sight is with the wing, the petal and the rock.
His sight is in the heart of man and can weigh his sorrows; his
sight can measure conceit and innocence. For he hath the blessings
of Uriel the deep-sighted Angel.’
The Universe is based on reason and mechanics. Its
emptiness is only apparent, all is activity with meaning.
And the spiritualized mind expects the unexpected. The
commonplace scene may reveal a mystery, the air a
hidden pulsation; within stillness, great activities lapping
the uppermost fringes of perception. The essences, stored
in the vats of a profound consciousness, overflow, gush
and cascade in rainbow richness till such a mind is en­
throned in the blazonries and symbols of the cosmic
archives.
To one with full awareness space is no longer empty;
influences no longer invisible. The atmosphere pulsating
and rhythmic and infinite in extension. The seed of an
idea is seen almost simultaneously as a magnificent tree;
ideas possess a royal richness.
There are no trivialities to the illuminated mind; all is
significant. Size has no value; only quality and intensity.
To observe with intensity is to dig deep; to observe
shallowly is to be superficial however much information
be obtained.

To observe with the eye of the artist is to see pattern

and colour, designs and harmonies; delicate nuances and
all subtle shades in form. The untrained eye observes
shapes and colours, but cannot integrate and give them
meaning. But the capacity to observe does not belong to
the eyes alone; the ears observe, the touch, the taste:
104
all these are doors to an expansion of consciousness.
The difference between the artist and the intellectual
is that the artist listens-in, the intellectual thinks it out.

The awareness of the animal brings appetites and

desires. The awareness of the mind brings perspective
and proportion. The awareness of the imagination
brings a capacity for creation and patterns. All these
harmonized through observation can lead to illumina­
tion.
When we attempt the final analysis of a term we fre­
quently admit defeat. If we bring to it a wide range of
experience and thought it changes like a chameleon; it
has so many relationships, so many contradictions; yet
upon such quicksands of thought we erect impressive
structures of philosophy; chapels and cathedrals of
theology, and the monotonous buildings of reason. Yet
with all this activity we discover that we have but sharp­
ened the instruments for analysis. Persistent probing,
however, can lead to unanalysable certainties, those
intuitions that are the observations of the soul.
As the capacity for observation becomes more highly
trained, questions and replies, problems and solutions
are almost simultaneously solved.

A fool can be intense, but the result can be only an

emotional splash; yet the comprehensive intensity of a
wise man can enrich permanently. Deep observation
relates the apparently unrelatable. Herein lies the
difference between the engineer and the inventor; they
use similar material, but the inventor uses his head whilst
the engineer uses his hands.
To observe demands flexibility of all perceptions.
Habit and tradition show you what you expect to see;
flexibility overflows such limitations and hence dis­
coveries are made.
105
 An idea is no use till it is like an illumination; till it
grows in the consciousness as a force and an urge; as a
necessity to be born; as a demonstrable fact.

To see without thinking is to have a starved mind; is

to be a pauper amid riches; a beggar brain.

When observing always bear in mind the duality

underlying all activity, and when disentangling these
two states most problems may be solved.
Yet we are also observed. Few realize how we are
watched and protected; otherwise the streets would be a
shambles, our so-called lucky escapes, unlucky ones.
Thus is the observer observed and—unless it is his destiny
—protected.

TH E SYMBOLISM OF THE EAGLE

By GEORGE H. BROOK
The word ‘symbol’ was used by the ancient Greeks to
denote the two halves of a tablet which it was customary
to break between friends as a pledge of hospitality.
Gradually the meaning extended to include the engraved
seals by means of which those initiated into the Eleusinian
Mysteries made themselves known to each other. In its
larger sense the word came to include all oracles, omens,
messages from the gods, military passwords, badges,
tokens and pledges of every kind.
Now a symbol does not aim at being a reproduction
but rather a representation of an idea, often of an ab­
stract nature. In our everyday life such symbolic repre­
sentation plays a much greater part than one would
imagine. For example, a wedding ring is a symbol, so
is the shaking of hands between friends, and the images
on our coins are all symbols of one kind or another.
106
 Primitive man, overawed by the forces of nature,
showed reverence for the four elements: Fire, Water,
Earth and Air, and the Sun, Moon and Signs of the
Zodiac may be taken to indicate the origin of his science,
his religion and his philosophy. The mysteries of birth,
death and immortality were depicted by ideograms,
hieroglyphics and symbols of every kind. The study of
primitive culture reveals some amazing parallels in these
symbolic ideas. One outstanding feature is the way in
which the eagle has been chosen as a symbol by every
ancient civilization, surviving to this day, for example,
as an image on coins and as a psychological archetype.
These two apparently disconnected instances are in fact
related to each other although the link will not at first
be perceived.
Our earliest references take us back to ancient India
where the eagle, named Garuda, serves as the vehicle of
the god Vishnu, carrying him on his back to the very
heavens. In the earliest Tantrik texts there is a hymn to
Vishnu, one verse of which runs as follows:
‘The shadow of the great wings
‘Of the King of Birds, thy carrier,
‘Obscures the sun.’
This Indian Garuda was often represented with two
heads and possessed the power of destroying serpents.
Ancient Egypt used the white and black eagle as
lunar mythological types, and in Central Asia the Turan-
ian Hittites had myths connecting the eagle with the owl.
The Zoroastrians used the eagle as a symbol as long
ago as 600 b . c . The Persian bird called Simurg was ‘ the
ever blessed, glorious and mighty bird whose wings dim
the very sunbeams’.
Without agreeing with the contention that mythology
is due to a ‘Disease of Words’, a study of philology does
help us to solve a puzzle. The Book of Deuteronomy
likens the God of Israel to a Rock—His work is perfect:
‘As an Eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her
107
young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth
them on her wings, so the Lord alone did lead him.’ Our
unknown poet idealizes God as an Eagle and a Rock.
Why should this be?
The word £Rekh’ was the Egyptian word for the giant
eagle, for which bird the Arabic was ‘Roc’ as readers of
the Arabian Nights will well know. The ancient Cornish
and Breton syllables ‘Er Rok’ meant Eagle and Great
Fire. Again, the Assyrians represented the god Nisrock
as having the head of an eagle, and the word ‘magni­
ficent’ resolves into ‘Oniseroch’, meaning the One
Light, the Great Fire. In Nineveh, the portals of the
temple were guarded by statues of eagle-headed human
figures. Some carvings show eagles engaged in conflict
with human-headed lions and bulls. Here is our first
indication of an archetype. The fact that the eagles
always win is interpreted as indicating the superiority of
intellect over mere physical strength.
The Serpent Fights with the Eagle
In all early myths, the conflict between the Sun or
Sky and the Clouds is depicted as a fight between an
Eagle and a Serpent. Already by Homer’s time the bird
had become a symbol of victory. We learn from the
Iliad that the Trojans were on the point of abandoning
the assault on the Greek entrenchments, having seen an
eagle which held a serpent in its claws take flight after
being wounded by its prey.
There is a passage in the ‘Agamemnon’ of Aeschylus
wherein the chorus report an omen in the form of two
eagles (Agamemnon and Menelaus) feeding upon a hare
(the city of Troy). The psychological implications of
this story are fully worked out in Layard’s book The
Lady of the Hare. A silver coin of King Akragas {circa
400 b .c .) shows the two eagles and the hare. There are
many Greek myths in which the bird plays a prominent
part, but space does not permit of even a brief mention
108
 of them all. The eagle stood by the throne of Zeus,
slept on his sceptre, placed eggs in his lap, and under­
took the office of flying out to recover his thunderbolts.
All this is shown on many coins of the Greek city-States.
A Tyrian tetradrachm of Alexander has an eagle on the
reverse, and Roman coins previous to 105 b . c . used the
symbol on their coins. A book would be needed to en-
numerate all the Biblical references to the eagle, the
stories all being borrowed from older myths. To take a
few from the O.T.: among the perils with which the
Israelites were threatened in case of disobedience, the
Book of Deuteronomy says:
‘The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from afar,
from the ends of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth.’
In the Book of Job we find an allusion to the rapid
flight of time: ‘My days are swifter than a post; they
flee away; they see no good. They are passed away as the
swift ships, as the eagle that hasteth to the prey’.
Like other birds of prey, the eagle, after shedding his
feathers in early spring, reappears with fresh vigour, and
in his old age assumes once more a youthful appearance.
David in the 103rd Psalm alludes to the mercies of
Jehovah . . . ‘who satisfieth thy mouth with good things,
so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s’.
After the Roman conquest, the symbol came to be
loathed by the subject peoples, being a mark of their
degradation. This is an interesting example of the change
of meaning in an emblem, for during the Mosaic period
the eagle was regarded as typifying the Holy Spirit. Its
portrayal with two heads is said to have recorded the
double portion of Spirit miraculously bestowed upon
Elisha.
Much of our speculation as to the meanings of symbols
is derived from the imperishable evidence of rock carv­
ings on temples, and perhaps more than anything else,
from the inscriptions on ancient coins. The R om an
money in circulation during the first century bore eagles
109
as symbols of conquest and possession, and the use of the
Roman standard is too well known to require any ex­
planation. The bird was shown standing on a fulmen or
thunderbolt until the establishment of the Empire, when
the fulmen disappears. The eagle no longer symbolizes
the coveted dominion, but united rule. On the coins of
Augustus the eagle stands on a laurel wreath or on a
globe. Later he appears on a sceptre or altar. From the
time of Trajan he appears on coins of the consecration
type, standing with spread wings to indicate an emperor,
or perched on a sceptre for an empress. At the time of
the Tetrarchy the eagle’s head often adorns the neck or
breast of the emperor. On coins representing victories
or triumphs, e.g. the money of the legions of Mark
Antony, the eagle is crowned by a trophy between two
standards.
The Symbol Spreads and Develops
As Rome fell into decadance, symbols lost their mean­
ings and sank into mere decorative art motifs. But the
eagle did not die; it was made to serve another purpose.
The adoption, for political reasons, of Christianity as
the official religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine
during the fourth century, brought many peculiar
problems to be solved by the then reigning priesthood.
Pagan gods were canonized and pagan symbols Christ­
ianized. This was in order to prevent insurrection of the
populace which could have followed the introduction of
too many innovations and destruction of old religious
traditions and ceremonial.
As the eagle was the symbol of Jupiter, borrowed, like
so many things, from the Greek Zeus, it was necessary to
retain the bird. In the Apocalypse the eagle appears as
the symbol of John the Evangelist. The pagan god
Chronos was transformed into John, and his eagle
symbol went with him. St. Ambrose preached a sermon
on the text: ‘Thy youth is renewed like the eagle’, saying
that this foreshadowed the Resurrection. No doubt for
110
this reason we have the pagan survival of eagles carved
on^ baptismal fonts,\ and almost every village church
has a large brass eagle serving as a lectern.
The emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Conrad,
headed a crusade in the year a . d . i 147. As so often hap­
pened, most of his vast army perished on the way, owing
to disease and hunger. At this period the eastern part
of the old Roman Empire was still being governed from
Constantinople. During his stay in this city, Conrad
noticed that the Byzantine Empire bore a double­
headed eagle, signifying the ancient double empire of
East and West. He adopted this as his arms, where it
survived for eight hundred years until the dismember­
ment of Austria following the first world war. With one
head, the same bird had been the symbol of Charle­
magne, founder of the Holy Roman Empire. The Czar
Ivan III took the double-headed variety as his badge as
early as 1472, this again surviving until the revolution
of 1917.
Then there are the Prussian, Napoleonic, American
and Mexican eagles, to say nothing of the many heraldic
uses of the sign. In heraldry one sometimes encounters an
eagle perched on the summit of a ladder, this repre­
senting the scala perfectionis, with the eagle as the goal of
vision.
The Mexican use of the bird is an amazing example
of the diffusion of culture. In the year 1519, Cortes first
made contact with the Aztec armies. The standards of
the Mexican chiefs depicted an eagle with outspread
wings. Tradition states that this ancient race, when
looking for a site for their city, searched for an omen,
which appeared when an eagle was found wrestling
with a snake. The scene of this fight was taken as the
site of what now is Mexico City. Yet it seems unlikely
that the Aztecs had heard of Homer. In the presumably
Redskin folk-lore of Smoky Mountains witch-boys ride
on eagles, as we have seen in that remarkable stage
111
success in London, The Dark Side of the Moon. Did a
northward migration carry this symbol from the Aztecs?
And then again, had the Druids of our own country
any contact with this myth? In pre-Roman times Mona
was the seat of the Druids. This holy spot was dedicated
to the god Hu, who was carried up to the skies on the
back of an eagle along the path of Granwyn the Sun-god.
This is identical with the Tantrik tale of the Garuda bird.
Thus we can understand how the very persistence of
this idea has caused a chain to be forged linking the
present psychological archetype with the Tibetan and
Indian mandala. When in Zurich the writer discussed
this very problem with C. G. Jung, who asserts that birds
are intuitive flights of mind when appearing in dreams.
The eagle is well-known in alchemy, the two wings
representing premonition or intuition.
Other forms are the winged Mercury, angels, genii,
all archetypes of fantasies and intuitive ideas. Much valu­
able work remains to be done in bringing into the light
these lost ideas. The eagle is but one symbol among
many. All the civilizations discussed in this article have
vanished. The empires are broken, their once teeming
cities in ruins or buried beneath the sands. But their
symbols have survived their outward forms, and now
take on fresh life as we press them into the service of
modern psychological analysis.
★
BLACK MAGIC IN M ODERN ART
(<Continued)
By JOHN HARGRAVE
IV
The Artist's Choice of Subjects
All right. Yes. I know. The Dead Donkey’s Hind
Leg. It was bound to happen. I’ve had some letters
about Part I of Black Magic in Modern Art. All wanting
to ‘argue the toss’. No use. I decline the invitation, and
112

1 ir r m
 continue the Assertions. The truth about anything is not
arrived at by Argument, but by Experiment and
Observation. I ’m a professional working artist, and a
professional writer. I don’t argue. I'm an ideopraxist. I
read any amount of stuff that I don’t agree with and
don’t like, but I don’t start any argumentation about it.
I counter it and destroy it by making the Positive Asser­
tion based upon observation and experiment. And if you
don’t like what I’m saying about Modem Art, you must
either ignore it, or find your own way of counter­
acting the effect of my assertions. But argue with you,
I will not—for very good magical reasons, and not because
I don’t know how to argue. Argument is not merely a
waste of time and energy, but leads always to exactly
what the congenital ‘democrat’ doesn’t expect—intel­
lectual dogmatism based upon word-quibbling. (Example:
Marx’s ‘dialectical materialism’ and the resultant Com­
pulsory Slave-Labour Police State).
What I wrote in Part I of this essay (see occult
o b se r v e r for May, 1949) was written long before Sir
Alfred Munnings kicked over the traces and spilled some
‘horse sense’ about certain aspects of Modern Art, and
especially about the ‘art’ of Henry Moore. While that
kick-up in a horse-box was going on, a young dance-
band musician who reacted strongly against the
Munnings’ outburst, nevertheless, on the spur of the
moment gave the following vivid description of some of
Moore’s wartime drawings of human beings—‘They
look like Anderson shelters made of slippery-elm’.
And blitzed human beings, huddled together in fear,
did look like that. I saw plenty of them. And that is the
first indictment. Moore was drawing (with artful dis­
tortion that exaggerated the magical, or psychic, over­
charge of his subject) fear-stricken human beings. He
painted what was all around him—Fear. He concen­
trated upon a subject charged-up and over-charged with
Bomb-Terror.
IX3
 1
».**hi*afcBnL

I submit that he (i) did not know the inevitable

magical effect of putting that subject on paper with
powerful exaggerative distortion; or else that he (2) knew
what he was doing, wished to do it, and did it.
‘But,’ you may say, ‘in the midst of War-Terror, what
is an artist to draw—“Cherry Ripe”, or “Bubbles”?’ Quite
definitely, the correct answer is: Well, that would do
much more good than drawing terror-stricken human
beings that look like tubes made of slippery-elm. Why?
Because: Like begets like, and: What you imagine, that you
become. What the artist imagines and sets on paper, or
canvas, he makes the picture-gazer become. Moore was
‘turning’ human beings into fear-stricken drainpipes
made of slippery-elm—but I doubt if he knew what he
was doing (and what his drawings and sculptures are
still doing). The majority of modern artists are playing
j with Magical Forces they don’t understand, don’t
‘sense’, and don’t know how to control. Therefore, they
are a danger to themselves and everyone else.
They thought that by countering ‘pretty-pretty’ with
‘ugly-ugly’ they were being more honest, more realistic,
nearer the Truth. But Hans Christian Andersen (1805-
75) knew, instinctively, that an Ugly Duckling who does
not turn into a Beautiful White Swan is merely a symbol
of depression and misery that ‘gives off’ the sinister
(magical) breath of hopelessness, and is not a fable
radiating (magically) the joyous breath of Life.
The modern artist, without knowing it (so depraved
are his five common senses), tends to paint, more and
more, subjects that are Ugly, Painful, Horrible, and
Beastly. He does not know that The Beast without
Beauty is, or should be, merely revolting. ‘Look!’ he says,
‘how beautiful the Beast is!—and how Sloppy, Senti­
mental, and Pretty-Pretty this stupidly idealized Beauty
is. Let me show you the “beauty” of the Beast. Don’tyou
see what a Fine Fellow he is? He’s horrible—yes. But
look at his brutal apd distorted strength! True, he’s
114
 sadistic—but he’s a Tough Guy! He’s quite disgustingly
ugly, but even that will fascinate you—if you stare long
enough at my picture of the Beast, and come to appreciate’—
(that’s the Perverting Word!)—‘the horrible beauty of his
beastliness! You must learn to appreciate what at first
may seem revolting. It only seems so because you have
been taught to believe that this Stupid Chocolate-Box
Girl, called “Beauty” , is beautiful. Soon you will come
to appreciate that there is Beauty in Ugliness, Beastli­
ness, Horror, Cruelty, and Snake-Pit Depravity. It is
simply a matter of educating yourself to appreciate
Modern Art. Then you will understand it—and enjoy
it. It’s just the same with Modem Music. . . . In time,
you will come to appreciate it . . .’ And they do.
Of course, the modem artist isn’t as forthright and
straightforward as that. He isn’t yet consciously evil,
only half-consciously so, or not at all. He does not yet
consciously choose evil subjects: they come seeping, or
flooding, into his emotional set-up, because he is ‘open’
to them. He is like a ‘negative medium’ in a trance-
state. He ‘receives’ whatever influences happen to come
into him, and evil influences (images) find their way into
him because he has nothing—no standard of Good and
Evil—with which to filter the psychic forces.
He is surrounded by life-destroying subjects. He sees
no reason for avoiding them, because they do not strike
him as being in any way sinister or evil. And as the most
powerful influences in our phase of so-called civilization
are all warped in one direction—towards Planned
Misery, Conditioned Slavery, and Mass Terror—those
are the influences that impel him to ‘choose’ evil sub­
jects. He is swamped by evil forces.
The pictorial artist and the sculptor have not yet gone
as far as the novelist, the playwright, and the film-writer.
We have not yet had Tate Gallery pictures of Belsen
Beastliness, showing all the horror, pain, and slow-
motion sadism of the Nazi or the Soviet concentration
U
5
(slave-labour) camps. But, most certainly, Belsen Art
is on its way. And the picture-gazing public will ‘come
to appreciate’ it. And as they ‘come to appreciate’ it,
so they will sink further and further into a condition in
which Belsen cruelty has more and more attraction,
more and more morbid fascination, less and less impulse-
revolt against it. ‘What of it?—I couldn’t care less’,
already the mass-slogan of our post-war world, will
reveal the deadened life-impulses as pictorial and
sculptural art becomes more and more Brutal and
Ferocious; while, at the same time, the jaded nervous
system of the general public will crave Uglier Ugliness,
Beastlier Beastliness, and Cruder Crudity up to the point
of complete mental derangement—i.e. Mass Insanity.
The modern artist does not know that by painting his
Chaotic Deformities he has a magical influence upon the
public and so speeds the Gadarene stampede towards
psychic, psychological, and physical aberration, dis­
ruption, and final disintegration. Further to that (and
here is magical information that will only be acknow­
ledged by the operative magician): even if a picture—
whether of Ugliness or Beauty—is never seen except by
the artist himself, the act of projecting it is magical and
has a Good or Evil effect (influence) upon the whole
community, and upon the whole world. Further to that:
even if the picture is never painted, and therefore never
seen by the mortal eye of anyone, the act of imagining
(;visualizing) the subject has its effect. The artist, like the
scientist, and everyone else in our modern ‘spivilization’,
has much to learn. Only the few will be able to do so,
and, even so, only the few who are able to ‘sense’ the
truth of what I am saying and have the courage to put
it to the test by actual experiment. Most people have the
itch to argue; only the very few, those filled with bold
humility, dare to plunge into experimental action.
Most artists suffer from the itch to ‘express themselves
in paint’, little realizing that their ‘selves’ are not only
116

hmi i n n m i 11 Trim
 not worth expressing in paint or anything else, but that
by expressing their warped, stunted, and all-too-often
shockingly deformed ‘psychic entities’ (there’s a couple
of stupidly intellectualized jargon-words for you, when
the word ‘spirits’ has far more accurate meaning!) they
are spewing invisible poison-dew upon metals, plants,
animals, men—in fact, the entire universe.
If all that happened was a clutter of worthless can­
vases daubed with paint, it would not matter very much.
But Blood Cults and Slave States grow like fantastic
monsters out of the ‘harmless’ (God help us!) daubing
and dabbing of men and women whose spirits are either
‘dead’ or crippled. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’—
and their fruits are mostly Dead Sea produce, petrified
pods of dehydrated Poppycock that burst at a glance and
give forth the death-whiff of the Living Dead.
Those Who Know know that the visible (clubfoot)
deformity of Dr. Josef Goebbels had its magically evil
effect upon his poisonous propaganda. Ugliness begets
ugliness: like begets like.
Nor is it ‘blind chance’ that the Catalan painter,
Pablo Picasso, now a man of sixty-eight, should take an
active part in the Communist-sponsored Paris demon­
stration of Sunday, 24th April, 1949, in which (the Press
reported) ‘tens of thousands of delegates chanted, “We
will never fight against Russia!” ’ and in which ‘youth
groups marched in uniform’, while Mr. Zilliacus, M.P.
for Gateshead, ‘took the salute’ with other well-known
Left-wing fellow-travellers. Picasso’s ‘art’ is harsh,
irritable, angry, and full of hatred and revenge. It
therefore creates the psychic atmosphere in which the
Mass-Slave-Labour Police State of Soviet Communism
can take shape and flourish. It is the ‘art’ of Dead
Materialism. And although Hitler ‘hated’ it and would
not have it in Nazi Germany, it was, nevertheless, one of
the occult forces that brought Hitler and Hitlerism to
power—since every form of Fascism is, in fact, the in-
117
evitable by-blow of Communism, as Communism is the
by-blow of Capitalism. They are all three alike: and like
begets like, only more so!
V
The Artist and his Technique
We have now made the following assertions:
1. The artist is a magician, whether he knows it or not.
2. Art has a Good or Evil effect upon the whole community.
3 The artist has a responsibility to the community as a
whole.
4. The artist using Good Magic does not paint horrible
subjects.
And we will now add:
5. The artist using Good Magic does not use a horrible
technique.
What is meant by that? Fancy having to explain!
That shows the degree of cultural demoralization already
reached. A horrible technique is one that creates the
sensation o f ‘dissociation’, and, by creating the sensation
(through the mortal eye) assists in bringing about actual
dissociation in the dictionary meaning of that word.
(‘Separation; disunion;—opposite of association;—the dis­
solution or breaking up of complex mental states, as in dis­
orders of personality.’—Webster's International Dictionary).
A horrible technique (one that creates, or ought to
create, a sense of ‘disorder’ in the psyche of the looker)
is composed of (1) harsh, angular, and broken lines;
(2) representations of harsh, angular, and broken planes',
(3) ‘shrill’, ‘screaming’, ‘muted’, or ‘murky’ colour; (4)
‘blotched’, ‘spotted’, ‘erupted’, or ‘muddled’ brushwork,
or pigment-laying.
The work—or rather, the dreary ‘doodling’, splodges,
squirts, and constipated corrugations—of the majority
of modern artists (so-called and self-styled) shows all
the above signs of dissociation; and therefore the work is
Evil, because, by Sympathetic Magic, as well as by
Coritagious Magic, the looker-at-the-picture (whether
118

1
 he knows it or not) is, to this or that degree, devitalized in
spirit, mind, and body, and so is more than ever liable
to be enslaved by mass-cults projected and enforced by
governing cliques and power-lusting dominators. Re­
member: That is Evil which devitalizes and enslaves.
Modern Art devitalizes and enslaves because it (i) sets
up images of the Decay and Disorder now only too
visible in the world; and (2) represents these images by
means of techniques that make Decay and Disorder
strangely fascinating.
The result of Modern Art (dating from about 1900)
upon the individual, and therefore upon the community,
is what anyone with a grain of common sense—let alone
‘occult knowledge’—would expect: i.e. dissociation
(‘disorder of personality’) exhibiting every phase and
form of spiritual, psychological, and physical ill-health,
from nervous tension to ‘borderline case’, and so to acute
insanity.
Disordered artists paint disordered pictures and produce dis­
ordered communities.
Yes, I know how you (most of you) hate to be told this,
and how you will want to argue and argue about it, in
the hope of finding some word-quibble to show that I am
wrong. But if you have the ability and the courage to
experiment with disordered pictures upon ordinary citi­
zens, you will find that I am right, and that, by giving
systematic ‘doses’ of this pictorial poison, your victims
will show definite signs of increased nervous disorder,
irritation, lack of energy, dullness, depression, senseless
spasms of anger, foolish bouts of sniggering laughter,
sleepiness during the day, broken sleep at night, bad
dreams, a tendency to talk aloud to themselves without
being aware of doing so, headaches, skin eruptions, and a
whole host of so-called ‘minor ailments’ that they never
suffered from before.
But why not try a healing picture, instead? Or don’t you
know that there is such a thing, or what, exactly, it is?
ii9
 THE BEE IS STRONG
R. MEDNIKOFF
‘There’s magic in them words,’ «
God’s carcase said to me,
‘magic an’ love.
‘Stand quiet as you like an’ think on ’em—
‘the bee is strong.
‘Always remember when you’re needin’ heart-strength
‘that the bee is strong.
‘An’ that’s what I tells myself
‘when I’m a-fearin’ for me creatures—
‘remember the bee is strong.
‘Then I stops me fussinV
That’s the talk he gave to me;
an’ so I set to watch the bees a-buzzin’ by.
‘You’re strong,’ he says, ‘I tells ’em,
‘but they just kep’ on buzzin’ by.’
Now that’s what happened more than long ago,
but ’twas only yesterday the magic of them words first came
me way.
Aye, the bee is strong;
strong with love that’s strong with purpose.
An’ now I’m knowin’ me own bee’s been buzzin’ about near
hopeless
in this busy world of tragedy.
‘When you’re needin’ heart-strength, remember,* he said,
‘the bee is strong.’
Heart-strength I’m needin’ now,
an’ now I, the bee, am strong;
strong with love that’s strong with pity for its purpose.
An’ the pity is I’ve little for so big a need.
O world, a-hivin’ in hate but needin’ pity,
remember
the bee of love is strong.
120
 ALEISTER CROWLEY
A Biographical Note
B y G. J. YORKE

Aleister Crowley was bom of Plymouth Brethren stock

and brought up strictly in their beliefs. While still a boy
he revolted and identified himself with that Beast in
Revelations whose ‘number is six hundred three-score and
six, for it is the number of a man’. This apocalyptic
thread ran through his life, so that he signed his letters
The Beast 666, and even designed the mark that was to
be branded on the right hands and foreheads of his
followers. With the same love of theatrical display he
masqueraded at different times as Count Vladimir
Svareff, Lord Boleskine, the Abbot of DamCar and Sir
Alastor de Kerval. Life was never dull where Crowley
was.
On coming down from Cambridge he became a
Neophyte in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
taking as his motto Perdurabo.—‘I will endure to the
end’, which he did. Under the tuition of Allen Bennet
and Macgregor Mathers he learned the theory and
practice of astrology, divination, skrying, the ritual
magic of the Grimoires, the numerical Qabalah and the
correspondences of the Tree of Life. Above all, he
sought first the Knowledge and Conversation of his
Holy Guardian Angel as taught by Abramelin the Mage,
then direct contact with the Secret Chiefs of the Order,
in whose existence he believed. Being of too positive a
nature to see easily himself, he generally used women to
skry for him, checking their results by the Qabalah.
When, however, he set out to prove the Enochian system
of the Elizabethan Doctor Dee, he looked into his own
shewstone of star sapphire and travelled right through
the Thirty Aethyrs from t e x to l il .
12 i
 Crowley tired of the laboured techniques of ritual
magic, though he enjoyed vibrating their barbarous
words of evocation. He carried in his pocket-book the
Abramelin talisman known as segelah for ‘finding a
great treasure’, but he never tried to acquire a familiar,
and he only once succeeded in evoking a demon—buer —
to partial appearance. In a long life he only sacrificed a
few sparrows, two pigeons, a cat, a goat and a toad, and
of these the cat and goat were killed at ceremonies ex­
temporized by request. Most of his operations were
restricted to invocations, of which those of Jupiter in
the Paris Working were the most successful. He never
attempted the transmutation of metals by alchemical
formulae nor to create an homunculus, and he never
celebrated or was present at a Black Mass.
Not content with Western occultism, Crowley studied
an Arabic system under a sheikh in Cairo and Shivite
Yoga together with Hinayana Buddhism with Bhikkhu
Ananda Metteya (Allen Bennet) in Ceylon. He mas­
tered virasana, a mild form of pranayama and the basic
technique of samadhi, but this cathartic side of Oriental
mysticism did not appeal to him. His knowledge of
Arabic was limited, of Sanskrit and Chinese nil. He
never entered Tibet, nor did he meet any of the famous
Indian gurus of his day. The Bagh-i-Muattar and his
pseudonym Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji
were typical leg-pulls, while his translations of the Yi
King, Tao Teh King and Khang King are paraphrases.
Climber, Painter, Lover
An astrologer and teller of fortunes, though seldom
for money; a teacher of magic and yoga who had done
what he taught; the editor of and almost sole con­
tributor to the Equinox and the International; a poet of
considerable output though not the greatest English poet
of all time as he often asserted; the author of two
mediocre novels, several plays and that little masterpiece
122
 of pornography Snowdrops in a Curate's Garden', a rock
climber with several records and two Himalayan ex­
peditions to his credit; a near-master at chess; an accom­
plished Qabalist; a painter of so qliphotic a tendency as
to shock Berlin at his exhibition at the Porza Gallery in
1931; an inspired chef; the inventor of those memorable
eagletails (cocktails) Abu ben Adhem and Kubla Khan
Number One; the confidant of children; an exotic lover;
a scribbler of vitriolic postcards and unintelligible tele­
grams; a personality so vital and explosive that the
legends about him are legion—Aleister Crowley was the
most colourful man of his day.
In Cairo in 1904 he was playing half-heartedly with
magic and whole-heartedly with his first wife Rose,
whom he called Ouarda the Seer, though she knew
nothing of magic and cared less. One evening he tried
her out with vision and she passed back to him instruc­
tions from a spirit called Aiwass to sit at his desk from
noon till one for the next three days in order to take
down a message from the ‘Secret Chiefs’. Doubting, he
did so, and to his astonishment received for the first and
last time in his life a direct voice communication which
is now known as Liber A vel Legis, the Book of the Law.
1

It is a crazy prose poem in three short chapters contain­

ing a few prophecies, one at least of which has been ful­
filled. Parts are unintelligible; parts only make sense
when interpreted by Greek and Hebrew Qabalah, the
number thirty-one being one of the keys and ninety-
three the link between the two systems. Egyptian god
names abound, while Christianity is blasphemed in no
uncertain language. The use of wine drugs and sex are
ordered in the worship of Nuit. Rabelais and Med-
menham Abbey are echoed in the slogan: ‘Do what thou
wilt shall be the whole of the law’; but the corollary,
‘Love is the law, love under will’ is original in this con­
text. It is a powerful message for the ‘few and secret’
who are to rule ‘the many and the known’. It has
123
already sent one Professor of Mathematics off his head.
At first Crowley dismissed it as crazy, and to his dying
day he never brought himself to ‘sacrifice cattle little and
big: after a child’. Soon after writing the manuscript he
mislaid it, and only found it accidentally some years
later when looking for a tennis racquet in the lumber
room at Boleskine; but by 1912 it had mastered him.
He devoted the rest of his life first to understanding,
then, as Logos of the Aeon and Priest of the Princes, to
spreading the Law of Thelema. In this latter task he
failed.
Whatever Crowley was, he was not a charlatan. He
believed, he worked, he suffered, he had power. He
failed to put over the religion of Thelema in his lifetime,
which, considering its nature, is not surprising. The
Christian world regards him as one of the Devil’s Con-
templatives. His few friends will not see his like again;
but his still fewer disciples mourn the passing of a
Magus.
★
DESIGNS IN FANTASY
by George Orwell: Seeker andWarburg, 10s.
n in e t e e n e ig h t y - f o u r ,
The above is the logical work arising from a defeated economic
idealism. In George Orwell’s book the principle of Evil reaches its
climax: a terrible indictment of a despiritualized and Godless state
of society: one of many books now published revealing a dawning
revulsion against a growing bureaucracy. Though a monstrous
fantasy, it possesses a subconscious relationship to the lower astral
hells.
George Orwell has discovered certain truths, but only the dark
half of them, the paradoxical teachings of the Tao.
This is an important book; a prophecy and a warning that a
materialistic Utopia can lead to the greatest tyranny of all: a lust for
power to dominate every form of nobility without fear of any ulti­
mate punishment.
The brutalizing crescendo and cynical conclusion will leave the
reader with a sense of alarm and futility: here is no light, no hope,
no bearable future; a sense of eternal psychological darkness where
124
Evil dominates all, where progress is paralysed. It seems that after
the glow of the red light our intellectual begins to perceive the black
light: an abyss into which science is leading society. Man cannot
stand still, and economic ease leads to greater confusions and greeds:
inflating the stomach and diffusing man’s leisure into childish
pastimes add nothing to culture, but make man an easy victim to
growing psychological diseases till, as George Orwell sees, all man­
kind is gripped by a planetary insanity where lies and truths and
good and bad mean the same; where two and two make five, and
where there is no history, facts being deliberately entangled and dis­
torted into the texture of man’s consciousness.
This is a bitter book, emerging from a frustrated heart and mind
that does not acknowledge nor believe in the personal immortality
of man, whose idealism has gone sour; and who is not intuitively
aware that beyond the intellectual boundaries many have received
nobler intimations of consciousness, and that beyond our small
individual experiences are greater beings above as well as below
who watch and comprehend our struggles, and who may—using
natural laws—play their subtle parts in our everyday activities.
The dogmas of materialism are as bad as the dogmas of any
Church. It is possible that the blueprints of a bureaucracy might
lead to George Orwell’s monstrous conclusions, or, before that, to
suicide of society through the atom bomb. Yet there is the third
way: the middle way, the way of the Tao, the way of balance,
wherein one can see the eternal paradoxes but with an illuminated
understanding.
MAGIster l u d i , by Hermann Hesse: Aldus, 15J.
(Translated from the German; a lengthy work, and therefore im­
possible to give it a comprehensible review in our limited space).
Scene, a .d . 2000. Again the dark ages after a terrifying war and a
great medieval darkness; but here is a nobler understanding of
man’s relationships: man a spiritual being.
Magister Ludi or the Bead Game is apparently the cultured syn­
thesis of all the arts. One might translate this as the awareness of all
the microcosmic activities and the dynamic details of an inner cos­
mic consciousness.
Again we come to the eternal dualism; but here it is mature, and
spiritualized.
Joseph Knecht is one who obviously reaches mastership—one who
has attained a cosmic consciousness; who has the permanent spiritual
vision and full control. This work’s symbolic patterns and poetic
sensitivity is highly original; the magical quality of music; the
125
powers of association and harmonious blendings of all elements and
matters.
Of great interest to the student in Occultism are the posthumous
writings of a Master, wherein are related the stories of three incar­
nations: the Rainmakers, the Father Confessor and the Indian Life.
Music seems to be the integrating influence, but one might sym­
bolize all the philosophic descriptions as the spiritual game of life;
but not in the shallow emotionalism of most, but in the deeper sense
of the divine pilgrimist and the attainment of super-control.
The author reveals very considerable scholarship and reading in
numerous facets of occult doctrine and the arts.
Here the nature of man’s possibilities is pitched very high, and
through a leisurely and dignified pilgrimage Joseph Knecht reaches
a spiritual maturity and then realizes still greater ascents before him.
Hermann Hesse’s world of the future shows nobility and the
justification of man’s existence on this planet.

CODA
A Summary
In this second number the net of occultism has been
spread more widely than in the first. In the Dignity of
Occultism the Editor in this approach explains the secrecy
of occultism by showing the essential sacredness of the
subject and its development in opposition to materialism
and dogma through the centuries. On the political
plane, eli applies the test of occult beliefs and symbol­
ism to Russia, and finds distinct evidence of the repeated
use of the symbols of black magic, as well as of an utter
opposition of doctrines between Marxism and both
occultism and Christianity. An evocation of the Ar­
thurian legend in verse, Percival at Corbenic by rachel
a n a n d t a y l o r , precedes the first part of an exposition of
the Glastonbury Z°diac by ross n ic h o l s , in which he traces
the history of the Zodiac and sets forth the observations
which, if the deductions drawn are correct, make North
126
 Somerset’s artificial topography the most interesting
archaeological, cultural and even philosophical dis­
covery of the century. He proceeds to relate this to the
Druidic beliefs, an undertaking which will be completed
in the next issue in a survey of certain of these giant signs.
The practical astrologer is then given suggestions by
ju lia n sh a w how to Rejuvenate Your Horoscope by applying
new rules bringing in the parental horoscopes also, the
due recognition of which brings freedom to the individual.
A singularly beautiful series of pictures of the invisible
processes of creation by spirits follows in Tree Forms and
Nature Spirits by ernest h o pk in s ; archetypal trees and
flowers and the work of the beings known as fairies are
described in some detail: d r . w . b . c ro w demonstrates
the parallel patterns in all religions in Patterns of Culture
and Cosmic Plan, and points out the need of democracy for
guidance by the great world teachers in order to draw
out man’s latent powers.
quaestor ’s pithy Aphorisms on Observation precede
george h . brooks ’ Symbolism of the Eagle. This traces the
content of the bird’s meaning from India and Egypt
right through to a present-day play on the London stage
and to its significance in psychoanalysis.
jo h n h a r g r a v e continues his fervent denunciation of
Black Magic in Modern Art, much of which he finds
chaotic and having affinities with materialism and the
totalitarian State. The artist of the good magic does not
use a ‘horrible’ technique. A lyric of the heart, The Bee
is Strong, by r . m ednikoff , in its moving simplicity
illustrates another magic. A biographical note on the
occultist who has had most notoriety in this country in
recent times, Aleister Crowley, by g . j . y o r k e , explodes a
few legends about his activities.
Designs in Fantasy reviews two books of instructively
opposing tendencies: visions of the future one of which
by orwell is a ghastly nightmare of the logical conse­
quences of materialism, the other showing how man’s
127
latent possibilities may lead to spiritual control of a high
order.
Pressure on space and other considerations have led
to the regretted omission of Fergus Da v id so n ’s article on
Platonic Numbers.
The Autumn number will include an article by
ronald d u n c a n , Occult Interpretation of the Golden Flower
of c. j. ju ng by jo h n h a r g r a v e , The Essence of Ouspensky
by Bernard brom age , The Prose of Francis Thompson by
v. bannister , Witchcraft in Scotland by fr a n k a . king and
Tantrik Hedonism by ger ald y o r k e . The Great Zodiac of
Glastonbury will be concluded by ross nichols , and cer­
tain books interpreted in Designs in Fantasy.

Many articles are being received for this journal. We

are always pleased to receive and willing to encourage
writers whose work is of high quality, thought-provoking
and expressing some occult approach, either psychologi­
cal, artistic or scientific: length 1,000-3,000 words.
Stories of a fantastic or occult nature are also acceptable.
R. N.

★ ★ ★

COPYRIGHT, I9 4 9
BY M IC H A E L JU S T E
T O W H O M A N Y A P P L IC A T IO N F O R U SE O F T H E
M A T E R IA L IN T H IS M A G A Z IN E S H O U L D B E S E N T , A T
4 9 A M USEUM S T R E E T , L O N D O N , W . C . I

Printed in Great Britain by the Alcuin Preae, Welwyn Garden City, Herta.
 THE ATLANTIS BOOKSHOP
49A M useum S t r e e t , L o n d o n , W.C.i .
Telephone HOLborn 2120. m. h o u o h t o n

We are specialists in all branches of occultism and will gladly

give advice to enquirers.
When visiting London please call at the above address.
We are also interested in purchasing large and small collections
of books on Magic, Yoga, Astrology, Alchemy, Folk-lore, etc. Also
good miscellaneous items in art, sets and colour prints.
We can recommend the following books which have just been
published.
T H E W I S D O M OF C HI N A
an anthology compiled and annotated
by L in Y uta n g
In this magnificent anthology, Lin Yutang, one of the best-loved
writers of our time, has collected a treasury of the wisdom and ideals
of life that have guided the thinking and living of the millions in
China, as found in the utterances of their writers and philosophers.
Here, in authoritative translations, are the best of the sacred books
of Confucianism and Taoism; there are important new translations
by Lin Yutang himself of Laotse, Chuangtze, Mencius and Con­
fucius, etc.
Lge. 8vo. cl. 516 pp. Postage 8d. i2r. 6d. net.
T H E S P L E N D O U R T H A T WA S E G Y P T
M a r g a r e t A. M u r r a y , D . l it t .
Though it is impossible to compress the long history of Egyptian
civilization within the limits of one volume, Dr. Murray has suc­
ceeded in giving a rapid survey of the main elements which went to
the making of the splendour that was Egypt. The book is written for
the general reader and is divided into six sections, Prehistory,
History, Social Conditions, Religion, Arts and Sciences, and
Language and Literature, and therefore covers briefly the whole
subject.
Over 200 illustrations in line, half-tone and colour.
Demy cl. 354 pp. Postage 9d. 30J. net.
T H E T I B E T A N B O O K OF T H E D E A D
or
The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to
Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering.
by W . Y. E vans -W en t z
with Foreword by SirJohn Woodrofle.
Deals with the Importance of the Bardo Thodol, its symbolism
and Esoteric Significance, etc.
8vo. cl. 2nd edn. 1949. 248 pp. Postage 8d. i 8j . net.
p l e a s e w r it e f o r o u r c a t a l o g u e n o . 17. Over 800 titles listed.
Price 3d.
 T h e

OCCULT OBSERVER

S o m e C o n tr ib u tio n s f o r th e A u tu m n N u m b e r :

T H E A R IS T O C R A T I C C R E E D : E d ito r ia l

A n A r tic le b y R o n a ld D U N C A N

T h e O c c u lt I n te r p r e ta tio n o f th e

G o ld e n F lo w e r J o h n H A R G R A V E

T h e G rea t Z o d ia c o f G la s to n b u r y

P a rt II R o ss N IC H O L S

T h e P ro se o f F r a n c is T h o m so n V . B A N N IS T E R

W itc h c r a ft in S c o tla n d F ra n k A . K IN G

T h e E ssen ce o f O u sp en sk y B ern ard B R O M A G E

T a n tr ik H e d o n is m G e r a ld Y O R K E

O b s c u r ity in O c c u ltis m G eo rg e H . B R O O K

D e s ig n s in F a n ta sy Q U A E S T O R

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

T H E S P R I N G N U M B E R

C o p ie s o f th is a re s till a v a ila b le . I ts a r tic le s in c lu d e :

John Cowper POWYS The Unconscious

John HARGRAVE Black Magic in Modern Art
Michael JU STE A Parable: Illustrated
John HEATH-STUBBS The Mythology of Falstaff
James K IR K U P Poem, and translations from Henri
Michaux
Ross NICHOLS Scheme of Soul

P r ic e 2 s . 6 d . n et