francis cameron: October 2012

I ask myself : What is the single most important thing in your life so far?

My answer is clear and beyond any doubt : Being born to parents who were practising Christian Spiritualists. Both were psychic, healers, and public speakers.

I was dimly aware of this even while I was still in my elementary school, My mother could explain to me, quietly and simply, the nature of the resurrected Jesus on that first Sunday in the garden after the crucifixion. My school teacher, who had introduced us to the Bible story that morning, had no explanation beyond the bare words of the text in the King James Version. My mother spoke to me of materialisation, how “Touch me not” and a lack of recognition indicated a process developing but not yet complete. That was quite sufficient for me in those very early days.

When I was just ten years old - this was at the beginning of 1938 – we started to go to a little Spiritualist Church in the front room on the first floor of a building along the Harrow Road. My mother and my father often conducted the service. I played the harmonium to accompany the singing of the hymns. And it was here I first began to experience the powerful reality of psychic energy and to make my first tentative steps as a clairvoyant.

My brother and I spent the summer holidays of 1939 with an aunt and uncle in South Wales. After the Prime Minister’s broadcast on Sunday 3 September we stayed there until it was relatively safe for us to return to London for the autumn term of 1942.

By the following January, my life was settled into a pattern that was to be repeated with variations for much of the rest of my life.

My daytime job, as it were, was as a sixth former at Mercers’ School in the City of London. Here I sometimes played the organ for morning assembly. The hymns sung and the prayers spoken were constituents of a sort of noncommittal English Gentleman’s practice of Christianity. Social acts which began each school day because this was the recognised code of behaviour. There was never any sense of connection with anything beyond the school hall. Natural but never supernatural.

On Saturdays I was a Special Talent Exhibitioner in the Junior School of the Royal Academy of Music.

And on Sundays, at fifteen years of age, I was the organist and choirmaster for St Peter’s Church in Fulham. It was my initial introduction to High Mass and Solemn Evensong with Benediction within the orbit of the Church of England. It was very different from anything I had previously experienced. I may not have realised it at the time, but there was a palpable sense of reverence for the Real Presence amid the sumptuous celebrations of the liturgical action. A completely different atmosphere from the nonconformist services of my younger days.

Mercers’, the RAM, and St Peter’s, Fulham, was my life in the outside world. Life at home had a special quality of its own. Activities conducted in private and in contact with ‘the other side’.

On one evening each week I sat with my parents and a colleague in a séance devoted to spirit photography. As part of the proceedings my mother moved into deep trance so that a guide from the spirit world could use her voice to communicate. In the course of time the trance element of our séances grew in importance. We opened our doors to a rather larger number of people and a regular guide from a higher level of consciousness channelled his spiritual wisdom in the form of a general address followed by individual guidance for each one of us in turn.

We had a little party for my seventeenth birthday on December 5th, 1944, and a few weeks later I was a full-time student at the Royal Academy of Music.

Days at the RAM were bliss. It was easy to make friends. We were young professional musicians working together.

On Sundays, as a professional musician, I played the organ for Church of England services. I was devoted to my job. Determined to provide the best possible music to complement the Book of Common Prayer and to contribute to those communal acts which were Mattins and Evensong. There was a sense in which each congregation was its own social entity. Yes, our prayers were addressed to ‘Our Father, which art in heaven’ but the deity was, at best, so distant as to be almost out of range. It was not until much later I began to appreciate how the banishing of the reality of the Divine Sacrament had left an empty void which was hard to fill with any sense of the numinous.

It was in the evenings at home that I began to fully appreciate the continuity of life beyond the confines of each individual earthly incarnation.

It began, now and then, as I practised the organ in our living room. It was as though I moved through the symbols set out on the printed page to a connection, an engagement, with the composer of the music. It was not, perhaps, that then I set out to perform each piece of Bach as Bach might have played it. It was more that I moved away from simple earth consciousness into a state where I connected with the edges of the infinite.

And as I sat and practised on our elderly upright piano, there was one composer with whom I began to feel an affinity which was personal and special. This was my music. These were pieces I had written in that earlier life. In other words, I was beginning to experience the reality of the continuous life of the psyche and the spirit embroidered, as it were, with episodes when the fullness of life was experienced via the medium of a succession of temporary mortal bodies. Each generation preparing the way for the next.

I was influenced, too, by the guide who spoke to us at each of our weekly séances. His teachings I was later able to identify as neoPlatonist. The concept of the original Perfect Unity breaking apart with the desire for life and then, at the very moment of separation, wishing to return to that original state of perfection. But it was too late. The energy spread out and away from the centre. The rate of vibration slowed as it moved. Its nature changed. The kosmos came into existence. With each life, as we learn, the desire to return to the incandescent centre is there to create tangible steps in that direction.

In the course of time I have become aware of some of my previous incarnations. I have met once again with some of those with whom I shared a previous life – or a succession of lives. On a few very special occasions I have passed through a time slip and relived episodes in the company of the companion with whom I had walked for a while.

I freely admit there have been times, sometimes extending into years, when I have lost sight of that very special objective. When I have gone, seeking wisdom, along a different footway. Of my own free will and inclination I became part of the Roman Catholic domain. In the end I did not find the authoritative voice of truth I was seeking. But, when responsible for the liturgical music at Westminster Cathedral, I experienced, during two invaluable years, the annual procession of the liturgy from birth to death to resurrection – and back again.

And so it came to pass that, at the exact moment of my life, when the conditions were exactly right, I was reconnected with the infinite, the planes of reality beyond the mundane reality of this world. The door was opened. I chose to step across the threshold – a liminal experience - into an early manifestation of what I came to know as the Wicca – which others readily condemned as witchcraft and the work of the devil! It wasn’t and it isn’t!

I reengaged with circles of sacred space and the melding of psychic energy. Around me and beneath my feet I felt the energy of the earth and the almost imperceptible changes from day to day, from summer to winter and back again. The companionship of gods goddesses and other spirits was as it had been from my youth up.

And now, as my 85th birthday looms around the corner, I review the comings and goings of this present interlude as I prepare for a return to the untrammelled life of soul and spirit. I shall be guided through the balancing of the karmic books and encouraged to consider the possibilities that can lie ahead. I shall make choices. I shall return.

francis cameron, oxford, 25 october 2012

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I am re-reading Andrew Marr’s account of Edwardian political affairs in his ‘Making of Modern Britain’. More often than not I find myself filled with gloom. So many of the events of a hundred years ago are being replicated today.

I am reminded of my ten years as a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1960s. How difficult it was to introduce new ideas. How it took two years to introduce an alternative harmony syllabus. Alternative, not replacement. “I am quite content with things as they are. I see no need for change.” The words of one of my senior colleagues.

Marr fills in for me many of the details which were only outlined in our wartime history classes. A century ago, reform of the House of Lords seemed a dire necessity. Today the matter is still unresolved.

Then it was Home Rule for Ireland. Now it’s Home Rule for Scotland.

Somehow I feel it’s not the haves fighting a desperate rearguard action. It’s more like a state of being disengaged.

francis cameron, oxford, 22 october 2012