View From The Big Hills

I only met Kathleen Raine once, shortly before she died. Even as an old person towards the latter stage of her life she carried a strong inner fire in her eyes. Beneath this wonderful old lady was an Initiate of Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light. A great critic, poet and writer, she did much to illuminate our understanding and appreciation of the works and lives of such giants as William Blake and W.B. Yeats. She was truly passionate about and very much influenced by both these earlier poets. The influence of Plotinus and a deep vein of Neo-Platonism also ran through her work. Born in London at the start of the 20th Century, where she grew up, as a young adult she drifted rather erratically from job to job. Through one of these later jobs she chanced upon a meeting with a relative of the great Indian mystic Rama Coomaraswamy Tambimuttu, who invited her to contribute her poetry to his new magazine, "Poetry London". Getting involved in that magazine, she ve...

Ella Young was a rare breed indeed. An Irishwomen, she was brought up in a Protestant family as a Presbyterian, later becoming an ardent Irish Nationalist, who helped hide ammunitions and weapons after witnessing the "terrible beauty" of 1916 the Easter Uprising.   Friends with many trail blazers in the Emerald Isle's rocky history - Maud Gonne, William Butler Yeats and George Russell (known to most as the poet and visionary "AE") - she collected a vast array of Celtic stories, legends and myths from country folk. We can be grateful for the treasure trove of material she collected and saved for perpetuity. When the Treaty between England and Ireland was signed on 6th December 1922 creating the Irish Free State, she felt betrayed and hatched a plan to emigrate to the United States. She believed the conditions of the proposed Free State broke up and destroyed much of the magic of the Emerald Isle. By 1925 Ella had come to the United States, bringin...

"Let us feel and obey the urge aroused by the great need of healing the serious ills which at present are affecting humanity; let us realize the contribution we can make to the creation of a new civilization characterized by an harmonious integration and cooperation, pervaded by the spirit of synthesis."  - Roberto Assagioli, Founding Father of Psychosynthesis. Will Parfitt first introduced me to Psychosynthesis in the late 1980s when he came along to talk to my North Kent / Charlton House Green Circle group about his then relatively new book, "The Living Qabalah". I had just bought his even newer book with the unreplicable title, "Walking Through Walls." "Walls" looked at a range of different systems and methodologies for overcoming those things which block us from reaching a greater potential. Star Trek, Psychosynthesis, Timothy Leary's "Circuits of Living" and Qabalah were some of the diverse range of topics cover...

"Thus will you obtain the glory of the whole universe. All obscurity will be clear to you. This is the greatest force of all power because it overcomes every suitable thing and penetrates every solid thing." - The Emerald Tablet of Hermes -

  I don't normally react deeply or positively to Methodist hymns. As my favourite Gospel singer, the late Larry Norman, sang in the early 1970's, " I don't like none of  those funeral marches, I ain't dead yet!" As a child, Methodists always came across as being even nicer than Anglicans. More a case of "cake and more cake" rather than Eddie Izzard's "cake or death." However, recently, when I heard Irish songstress Joanne Hogg sing the first two verses of an Iona song, "Empyrean Dawn," my heart melted and my spirit soared: "How wonderful this world A fragment of a fiery sun How lovely and how small The smallest seed in secret grows Thrusting upward and so soon The bidding of the Light The bud unfurls into a rose The wings within the white cocoon Are perfected for flight The migrant bird in winter fled Shall come again with spring And build, in this same shady tree" Beautiful imager...