The Beginnings Of The London Group Part Two

This post follows on from my last post on "The Beginnings Of The London Group Part One".

The date is now Wednesday 23rd April 1975. The venue Caxton Hall, Westminster, London. The speaker is Alan Adams (pictured below). 

From previous posts, readers will know that Alan Adams had previously been the Vice Warden of the Society of the Inner Light, founded by Dion Fortune. Some readers will be aware of his work through references  in the writings of Gareth Knight, for example, in his biography of "Dion Fortune & the Inner Light", in the letters contained in "Yours Very Truly Gareth Knight" and also, the autobiography "I Called It Magic".  Alan's own public writings are still available under his nom de plume “Charles Fielding” ("The Practical Qabalah", and "The Story of Dion Fortune"). 

The following presents a summary of the London Group’s second public lecture. Details of further lectures will continue to be presented in future blogs. They are an important part on the history and legacy of matters relating to Dion Fortune, her legacy and the continuing branches of her contacts and the magical system she developed. I hope you enjoy them from a historic perspective and are  also able to find some gems their content to contemplate.  

 London Group Lecture Two

2. Cosmogony: God, Humankind and the Universe

Cosmogony is the study of the origin of things; Universe, God and Humankind.

Humankind cannot be considered apart from the Universe it evolves within. Only our essential essence – our spirit, if you will — seems to be unlimited by the world in which we live in. Apart from that, we are very much “Children of the Earth Mother”.

It is often considered that manifested Humankind and the Universe developed together, the several aspects of consciousness in Humankind coming into being at the same time as the equivalent aspects of form in the Universe.

In esoteric cosmogony we recognise basic and dependent units; the Great Unmanifest, the Cosmos, the Solar System and Humankind.

The Great Unmanifest is the matrix of creation. It is the ultimate Reality — totally unimaginable to a finite, manifest being. It is the Source of all things yet cannot, itself be anything, or it would be manifest. Thus, it is the great Negation, the Infinite, the All-potential yet without attributes of any kind. It is the Unknown — and must ever be the unknowable - God.

Out of the Unmanifest, crystallised the Cosmos, which is the totality of manifestation. The word comes from a Greek root meaning “order”. In this argument it represents the entirety of manifest life and substance on all levels, matter, mind and spirit.

Imagine a point in time after the formation of the Cosmos. Units of life — nuclei of intelligent energy — now move within the vast tides of the Cosmos. Some of these may be imagined as having experience in previous Cosmic phases; others are but recently originated. The former are sometimes known in esoteric literature as “Great Entities”; by their greater “mass” they attracted the lesser lives, and these, the “Divine Sparks,” remain within the aura of a Great Entity for the remainder of that cosmic phase.

Consider one of these Great Entities, one “old” enough to have experienced all the phases of the current cosmic cycle. Having registered all the external stimulii, it now enters a subjective phase, a period of internal organisation. The Cosmic background is now habitual, having become a part of Its being. Thus, there is nothing of which to be aware; all is subjective; the Great Entity is aware only of Itself. The process of self-awareness develops a subject-object loop, producing an image of Its own consciousness. The Great Entity’s consciousness, being cosmic-conditioned, produces as Its self-image a replica of the Cosmos in miniature.

Within this system are the Divine Sparks. These, perceiving the structure of the image, work within it, exploring its possibilities and reacting to its constraints; this process gives a degree of objectivity to the image. By their reactions, the Sparks evolve.

From the foregoing it can be postulated that:

1.     The lesser lives serve the Greater Life while themselves evolving.

2.     The Great Entity, while being the creator and architect of Its own System, was not the creator of the lesser lives, the Sparks. These latter, though of almost infinitely lesser stature, were of the same origin and type as the Great Entity.

3.     Everything within the Cosmos evolves; nothing is static.

 

These considerations form the basis of much of the occult thesis. They are, of course, merely analogies of that which is beyond description. Moreover, they are hypothetical; they may or may not be “true”.

 

It is one of the Great Entities who is creator, conditioner and sustainer to this, our Solar System, and who is “God” to this System. The lesser lives - the Divine Sparks - are us, the human race.

 

All manifested life obeys the cyclic law. Cosmos, Solar System and Humankind have their negative and positive phases — birth, maturity, death and unmanifestation.

 

At the end of this Evolution, humankind will have developed to the point where it will have experienced all aspects of the Great Entity's image and added another dimension to it. Thus, the group mass of humankind will be, in one sense, equal to that of the Great Entity. In this state, reciprocal communication is possible, and the human receives the fruits of the Great Entity's cosmic experience. What this may mean to us, we cannot, at our present stage, truly imagine.

 

The Great Entity which is the “God” of our System is one of many such, each one “god” of some system. Esoteric cosmogony recognises several levels of godhood and carefully distinguishes between them, something that the Christian Bible in its translation, spectacularly fails to do. Four levels of deity are commonly considered:

 

1.     The Unmanifest: the Unknowable.

2.     The Cosmos: the First Manifest.

3.     The Solar System: the Solar Logos: the Great Entity of our System. “Logos” means “systematic principle” or “word”. The sun is often taken as a symbol of the Solar Logos, also of Humanity’s true Self considered as a spark of the same nature as the great Fire.

4.     The Earth: the Planetary Logos: the ruling Intelligence of this planet.

I hope you have enjoyed this evening's talk. I will leave you with a quotation from Dion Fortune:-

“What you contemplate, you touch. What you enter into in imagination, you make yourself one with.”

I’m keen to hear questions and views. For those who want to follow up, you will find more threads of the themes I have talked about in Dion Fortune’s received text The Cosmic Doctrine. The London Group teaches probationers a variant of this as part of an evolving and living Western Mystery fraternity.