View From The Big Hills

"In the Beginning, when the waters parted, and the Ancestors dreamed all that is, and woke the life that slept, the sky lay on the earth, and the sun could not move, until the Magpie lifted the earth with a stick." - Strandloper by Alan Garner    Are you certain that’s not how it all began? I'm not. An email received a few weeks ago by one of the readers of this blog got me thinking about Alan Garner and one of his most recent novels. I'll come on to th at novel in a moment. Now Garner’s writings have enticed and captivated me since I was an early teenager. Lovingly crafted and enduring tales like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen , The Moon of Gomrath , Elidor and The Owl Service , all helped kindle a fire that has kept stoked within me over the decades.   Often described as “low fantasy”, there is no saccharin sweetness to be found amongst these stories ' pages. Instead they lead the reader on rollercoaster adventures which , amo...

  “Modern life has developed the concrete mind to a high degree. It is a good servant but a very bad master and can provide one of the principal blockages to the manifestation of the true human. Its very nature tends towards formalisation and the precise pigeon-holing of all impressions and data received by it. What it cannot identify and label it will not admit exists, and, as the workings of the spiritual nature are rarely capable of such limitation, they are seldom admitted. So, in the majority of people the spiritual stimuli rarely come through to the physical brain and have little effect on the life.” -          Aquarian Occultism by Susan Rotcliff

    Naneferkaptah tells Prince Khaemwaset of the most holy of secrets.... “In the box of iron there is a box of copper. In the box of copper is a box of juniper wood. In the box of juniper wood there is a box of ivory and ebony. In the box of ivory and ebony there is a box of silver. In the box of silver there is a box of gold, and inside this golden box, the book of Thoth is to be found. But beware for it is guarded by a six miles of serpents and scorpions and many other poisons reptiles. But among these reptiles there is an eternal serpent guarding the box that contains the sacred book…..” - From the Setne II Papyrys

A few weeks ago, in Part One of this thread, I shared some of my initial thoughts about a short yet inspiring and beautiful article on the Signs of the Zodiac written by Maiya Curtis Webb and published in a 1919 edition of The Occult Review. For this blog - Part Two - we now move a little backwards in time, to the other side of the Great War and to what appears to be the one surviving fictional story written by Maiya which is available in the public domain. Her story was published in a March 1913 edition of that same august publication, the cover of which is shown below. The edition of The OccultReview from which the story comes from, Volume 17, Number 3, includes a rare and colourful smorgasbord of articles. A sample of these include:   ·          The New Alchemy, by Ralph Shirley, the then editor of the magazine ·          The Cambridge Platonists, by H Stanley Redgrove ...