Sunday 31 October 2010
Witchfather
Saturday 30 October 2010
Tuesday 26 October 2010
temple of high magic
I am so glad I chose to be born to parents who were both practising Christian Spiritualists. This meant, among other things, that from the age of ten I was thoroughly at home with manifestations of the afterlife and the continuing journey of the soul through many incarnations. I was still at school when our first home circle experimenting with spirit photography metamorphosed into a regular weeknightly gathering where my mother in deep trance channelled higher wisdom, such as I had never heard before, from one of her guides whom we knew simply as Father. Sixty years later while staying overnight after speaking in a distant city, I discovered a book about Plotinus and recognised there the neoplatonic vista opened up to me in more than one of those trance addresses.
I have read fluently and voraciously since the age of four. At first I was part of the common impression that if it’s in print, it must be authentic (though I ought to have known better : a photograph of [old fashioned] beehives in an Elementary School text was at variance with my actual experience of working with bees and their hives in a relative’s garden). Only in middle age did I come to appreciate that books which purport to set out The One True Way can be dangerously misleading. On the other hand public and university libraries – as well as the irresistible attractions of bookshops – are a veritable treasure trove, an open sesame to realities and insights on many different levels. Always I found it important to go beyond the printed words on the page and to compare them with my experiences in the worlds of physical reality.
That first commentary on Plotinus, coupled with the remembrance of my mother’s guide, led me under the right conditions to explore some of the resources perceptible to a more intensified consciousness. I would have said I began with Wicca, but it was always Wicca illuminated by my experience of Spiritualism. And that Wicca, when it first discovered me, was of the variety still known then as The Old Religion – with its ramifications set out so nicely in my 1974 purchase of What Witches Do to which I soon added Dion Fortune’s Mystical Qabalah. Half a lifetime later and I discover the esoteric possibilities of a priest and a priestess – just the two of them – working together tuned in to the same wavelength. So it was that in my most recent series of workings, which concluded a while ago, we used elements of Alex’s ceremonial, a drawing down of energies through the frequencies aided by the immediate focus of chakras and enhanced by a vibrant Sephiroth. The re-enactment of the myth of the Chalice and the Blade prepared us for stepping through the portal into the Halls of Learning and beyond.
Now in my solitary state the Inner Bookshop provides me with a copy of The Temple of High Magic in its 2010 English translation of the 2007 Dutch original. I find so much here which, with its differing perspectives, throws new light on my past practices and understandings. Quite deliberately it offers guidance to individual explorers who lack the presence of a neighbouring Magister. A small number of similar individuals able to combine within a common mind are also invited to make use of this strand of esoteric enlightenment passed on, as it is, in a direct line from Dion Fortune via Ernest Butler and Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki. Further back in time it passes through the myths and legends surrounding the year 1453 to the ancient scripts of the Hermetica. We are back in Alexandria with the school of Plotinus and the insights of neoplatonism. A good solid foundation on which to build.
Ina Cüsters-van Bergen
The Temple of High Magic : Hermetic Initiations in the Western Mystery Tradition
ISBN 9781594773082
UK 14-75. USA 19-95.
francis cameron, oxford, 26 october 2010
Monday 25 October 2010
time and temperature
// There - I got the date right today! //
// October used to be the 8th month //
// Which means March was the first month of the year //
// Samhain approaches on the Eve of All Saints //
// BBC people on camera are all now wearing poppies //
{dun ur xmas shopping yt}
Friday 22 October 2010
magic cafe
Thursday 21 October 2010
the past comes alive
brrr ....
Sunday 17 October 2010
after the andrew marr show
Steve Richards turned to the back page of one of the more popular sunday newspapers and there we were – in a parallel universe. We’d been voyaging through the upcoming Day Of The Big Cuts and the other looming problems building a thicket around us and then, all of a sudden, there we were :::: in a parallel universe. A footballer, referred to only by an abbreviation of his name and the club he plays for, a flamboyant footballer is quoted as petulantly proposing not to play unless he’s paid something in excess of 100K EVERY WEEK! Boy oh Boy, what a wonderful world he lives in. Never mind the parallel universes which may or may not concern the philosophers of astrophysics. Here’s a parallel universe right next door to the panoramic newsday studio. OK! Not quite that. Just the back page of one of the Sundays. Worlds apart from the universe tearing large headlines through the front face of the same objective recorder of tunnelling spacetime.
Makes me think that when “me’n’me mates” steps inner the World Between the Worlds - you know what I mean if you’ve been there - we still have our feet firmly on the ground. In the Real World. In a parallel universe. That’s reality for you.
francis cameron, oxford, 17 october 2010
Saturday 16 October 2010
Looking for Bede's Eostre
Easter 2011 is a fascinating example of how the rule works out in practice. [1] look for the vernal equinox :: 23:21 on sunday 20 march [2] find the next full moon after that :: 02:44 on monday 18 april [3] and the sunday after that is easter day :: sunday 24 april. I suspect this is as late in the year as Easter can be .. ..
francis cameron, oxford, 16 october 2010
Friday 15 October 2010
Chopin on BBC4
Wednesday 13 October 2010
Woden's Day
Luka and the Fire of Life
Tuesday 5 October 2010
rosslyn
francis cameron, oxford, 5 october 2010
tuesday 5 october 2010
I find myself musing on my spiritual journey from Paddington (Congregational) Chapel via Spiritualism and the Church of England to Westminster (Roman Catholic) Cathedral and thence to the vivid experience of the Wicca where we step into the World Between the Worlds and are at one with our gods.
francis cameron, oxford, 5 october 2010
education / schoooling
In his English Social History (1944) G M Trevelyan writes (pp 363f) of modern education ‘creating an unwanted intellectual proletariat’.
My own experience both as a teacher and as a pupil led me, some thirty years ago, to the conclusion that education (schooling) was primarily designed to produce only just as much literacy and numeracy as was useful to employers. You needed a workforce which could read and write but not a workforce of men and women who might be able to think for themselves.
Circumstances in 2010 are not the same as in those Establishment-dominated years between the wars but when I read that one in five children now leave school without reaching the required standard in English and Maths, I do pause to wonder for our future.
francis cameron, oxford, 5 october 2010
when I am dead
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget. Christina Rossetti
Monday 4 October 2010
monday 1 october 2010
Sunday 3 October 2010
Berlin, october 1990
In 1988 I was at the annual gathering of our European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. We confirmed the venue for 1989 and accepted a provisional bid from Berlin to host our proceedings in 1990. So it happened that twenty years ago today we were present in Berlin on the day of reunification. We did a tour of the city. The image of the Brandenburg Gate imprints itself on my memory. And – it was the prelude to a great Seminar. francis cameron, oxford, 3 october 2010
Saturday 2 October 2010
'i' for imaginary
I’d been talking with my friend the Imam who, like the Holy Father the week before, expressed concern with the blight of secularism.
The Imam mentioned Richard Dawkins (and his million followers) as the Prince of Secularism. /* caveat : my mind may perhaps have embellished this interchange! */ I responded by classifying Dawkins as a materialist – in the sense that he, as a biologist, is accustomed to handling plants and animals, material objects, which can be scrutinised in scientific laboratories. Our conversation then deviated to the Imam’s exposition of the traits of secularity. I, for once, remained silent. Wondering.
Later I happened to take up with Roger Penrose and with Douglas R Hofstadter, among others, opening the door to the world of ‘the square root of minus one’ : an imaginary number incapable of observation even under the most intense of microscopes.
Yet the square root of minus one actually exists. I came to be aware of its existence when I first moved for the teaching of the C++ computer programming language. I did not then know what was symbolised by the mystical letter ‘i’. I only saw how its properties once entered into the initial planning made the viable outcome possible.
Our lives are not utterly delimited by the materials of laboratory experiment. Consciousness of the imaginary goes with us. Hand in hand.
Pick me a handful of BlackBerries. Yes!
Pluck me a handful of imaginary numbers? Ah!
francis cameron, oxford, 2 october 2010
treading the parallels
I am reading, yet once again, G M Trevelyan’s delightful English Social History : a survey of six centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria. He wrote it before the war (1939) but restrictions of paper and printing delayed its publication in Great Britain until 1944.
As I read I am aware of a certain prospect of Englishness presented to us in my schooldays and I sense it returning now and then to the more leisurely of our television screens. It’s that looking back to a past which may or may not be distant, which may or may not ever have existed in glaring reality. A past viewed, as they say, through rosy-tinted spectacles.
I see it in Michael Wood’s homing-in on a country town community, digging up its past, blowing the dust off somnolent rolls ledgers and charters which then magically ‘bring the past to life’. I see it in the elder Dimbleby’s unhurried dwelling on sceneries and artefacts which belong with bygone ages. I see it even in Michael Portillo’s quasi-misty-eyed railway journeys, Bradshaw always open in his hand.
My thoughts turn to the books and other reminiscences which make those re-creations possible. Trevelyan brings back to life Defoe’s London, still existing among the ghosts haunting the footpaths and alleyways of the City. Other books, when well conceived and well written can do the same. They are the material of visualisation, treading the spaces and enclosures of parallel universes where the in-tuned spirit may also meander at will.
Words set out on the page are the spellbooks of their authors.
Come with me and bathe and bask in parallel universes just as real as those once green hills and valleys now over-covered with manufacturies of stone timber brickwork and plastic. The boundaries are there to be stepped over. The veil between is no more than the flimsiest creation of our own imaginings.
francis cameron, oxford, 2 october 2010