View from the Big Hills

"The real battle lines are not between East and West, "Socialism" and "Capitalism", or even between "a-theism" and "theism"; but between enlightenment and ignorance, between imagination and blind short-term greed, between vision and bigotry; and in this battle it is vital that the forces of Light should join hands at every possible point, and stand together in whatever context they operate." ~ Zachary Cox Deep in the hubbub of North London during 1988, Zachary Cox published No. 26 of  Aquarian Arrow , with the Shield of Gaia shining brightly out of its pages. As I've reflected on Zach's life in the past few days, my memory of this edition of Arrow has perhaps been one of the strongest in light of what many of us did as a result of it. Now Arrow was a forward thinking journal published by the  Neopantheist Society from 1978 until the early 1990s, featuring occult thinking of the time, wicked satire, poetry, letters, decent...

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  

London. The year is 1977 and the Sex Pistols, Damned and The Clash are taking on the disco, pop and rock establishment. Bowie is across the Channel in Berlin recording Heroes with Brian Eno. One person seems fairly much oblivious to the noise in the bedsits, pubs and clubs. Zachary Cox is frustrated. His love of good poetry has taken him on a quest for more published works from Swinburne yet he becomes increasingly dismayed at what he finds some 70 years after the poet's death. His thinking at the time is summarised in his own words within the foreward of “Swinburne 77,” a little book he subsequently publishes that year:- “It is a sobering fact that ….there is no complete edition of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne in print nor even an edition of any one of his complete volumes of verse. All that can be found are 'selections' – selections made by lesser and later poets, who appear to be determined to select only those works which match up to the em...