View from the Big Hills

The London Group was formed by previous members of two esoteric groups strongly linked with Dion Fortune -- the  Society of the Inner Light and the Society of Western Mythologists.  The former of these groups had changed its direction, teachings and  practices, resulting in a number of members leaving to pursue avenues they believed were more appropriately aligned to serving the needs of the emerging Aquarian Age.  The latter had closed its temple in the early 1970s. It had been a working group founded by three previous members of the Society of the Inner Light, two of whom had lived in Queensborough Terrace.  They left the Society, feeling that new forms were needed for a New Age, and that the Society was running in contradiction to this need. Similarly, Basil Wilby, more well known as the author Gareth Knight, also left the Society shortly after them for the same reasons.  There was new work to be done, and new people were needed to do it.  To that e...

Fare thee well friend... "Life is too short for endless haggling. Take Reason's sword in hand and dare to cut the Gordian knot of language. Leap to the truth, if you can, if you dare, within the confines of a single page. Glance down in passing at the tortured labyrinth of twisted words where generations of philosophers have wandered. Glance down, but do not fall. Do not swoop. Life is too short, and our need too urgent now."  ~ Al Ewigkeit Photograph (c)Ruth Bayer, from Tanya Luhrmann's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft  

“ For the egg was now red-hot, and inside it something was moving. Next moment there was a soft cracking sound; the egg burst in two, and out of it came a flame-coloured bird. It rested a moment among the flames, and as it rested there the four children could see it growing bigger and bigger under their eyes. Every mouth was a-gape, every eye a-goggle. The bird rose in its nest of fire, stretched its wings, and flew out into the room. It flew round and round, and round again, and where it passed the air was warm.” The Phoenix and the Carpet by Edith Nesbit In the biography Dion Fortune and the Inner Light, Gareth Knight writes an illuminating chapter entitled “The Flight of the Phoenix.” Appearing towards the end of the book, the chapter summarises an important transformational point in the story of Dion Fortune and the Society of the Inner Light. Somewhat like a pressure cooker, the weight of circumstances—which had been building in the background since th...