Here is a phone video recording of my recent presentation at the Glastonbury Occult Conference concerning some of my Abbey adventures and the attitude I cultivated towards them.
I felt it would be worth including some of the images from my powerpoint, some of the texts I quoted from, and a few additional details to complement the experience of watching the video. I’ve taken some brief material from my William Blake and the Glastonbury Gnosis and The Occult Battle of Britain. This is a post that requires the watching of the video. It is not complete in itself.
Johann von Heidenberg was a sixteenth century abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Sponheim in Germany. A noted all-round scholar, he massively expanded the existing library there and left an enduring legacy in works he wrote under the name of Johannes Trithemius. A reputation for mystical occultism accompanies him. He was a tutor to Cornelius Agrippa, one of the great magical writers of the age. Britain’s John Dee made use of the most famous work of Trithemius, the Steganographia. It was a multi-layered work that combined a consideration of using cipher code to communicate and angelology.
In De Septem Secundeis, id est Intelligentiis Sive Spiritibus Orbes post Deum Moventibus (Concerning the Seven Secondaries, or Spiritual Intelligences, Who, After God, Actuate the Universe), written in 1508, Trithemius presented a system dividing history into sections lasting 354 years and four months. Each period evidenced particular qualities determined by its rulership by one of the seven planets of antiquity in which abided presiding Intelligences, meaning angels. They run in a reverse sequence to the forward motion of the week that begins on the day of the Sun and moves through Moon-day up to Saturn day. Thus: Oriphiel Saturn, Anael Venus, Zachariel Jupiter’ Raphael Mercury, Samael Mars, Gabriel Moon, Michael Sun. According to Trithemius, the world would enter into an Age of the Archangel Michael in November 1879.
Rudolf Steiner considered that the movement he founded was a Michaelic Mystery School expressing the rulership of the archangel in the current era.
My 2023 Michaelmas Steiner-flavoured Abbey event involved me discussing his visit to Tintagel, the legendary location of Arthur’s birth, at the site of his supposed last resting place in Glastonbury.
Steiner believed in what he termed “Arthurian Mysteries”, an initiatory current of esoteric knowledge that served as a conduit for astrological gnosis from the days of Egypt and Babylon into the Christian era with Arthur as a sun king particularly attuned to the Michael force. He stated that Tintagel had once been a Mystery Centre in the manner of Eleusis. It supposedly dated from around 1100BC. Before Christ physically incarnated, it had been possible to make a spiritual connection with him. During a previous Michael epoch this had occurred with the Arthurian knights.
He also had plenty to say concerning medieval mysticism at Chartres Cathedral.
‘the schools of philosophic thought which once influenced earth’s greatest thinkers, still, although they have passed away from us as visible units here, have sway over the spirits of their votaries in the heavens, and that they continue to work in accordance with their respective ideals, influencing those on earth whose minds may be sufficiently attuned to their ideals to feel their power. So it is, we are told, with the Company of Avalon, a group of souls who are impregnated with the devotional Ideal which was translated into architectural symbol by the Benedictine brethren of old time. These, the “Elect of Avalon,” combine as a united spiritual force in an effort which is really one of response to those of us who, of our own volition, have attuned ourselves to their “vibrations.”
From The Company of Avalon 1924.
It is very important to note that Anthroposophia was believed by Steiner to actually be a spiritual being which inhabited a realm that would have been very familiar to the ancient Gnostics. Anthroposophia descended to earth from the cosmos. This began in 1902 when the German section of the Theosophical Society was founded. After Steiner’s death, Anthroposophia as a Being was neglected by the movement on the whole. In the last thirty years or so, this has started to change.
If John Michell is to be believed, the architectural form of Glastonbury Abbey allegedly conforms to the geometry of the New Jerusalem. Different Kabbalistic realms deal with varying levels of form. Geometry is clearly important as the formless divine emanates into descending forms. What is experienced as a feminine energy as a goddess on one level, can also be expressed through geometry on another. The Jerusalem of Blake’s prophetic book is both a city and a woman.
In the New Testament Revelation Ch21v2, John ‘saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’
My wild reverie is to contemplate Our Lady of Glastonbury, as revered in the great medieval Abbey, as a form of the Sophianic Shekhinah, the divine presence in which the ancient goddesses of the old cultures of the Middle East, Asherah, Astarte, Ishtar etc cohered as the Bride of God in Solomons Temple.
Throughout medieval Europe the Virgin Mary was the form in which the old goddesses survived and the Sophianic wisdom remained. The ruination of Glastonbury Abbey that occurred during the Dissolution of the Monasteries can be felt as analogous to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple when the Shekhinah departed and prayers for the restoration have been said ever since. Rare visionaries connect with her still. The Holy Spirit Shekhinah feminine, the Bride, Jerusalem, departed and the poignant yearning for the rebuilding has been partly inspired by the pain of that loss.
The Abbey isn’t getting rebuilt but that divine feminine has notably configured anew immediately adjacent to it
We now have in Glastonbury what I consider to be a profound psychogeographcal zone that functions as a kind of Jungian waking dream, whereby some potent alchemy is being worked with archetypes of the divine feminine.
It is all happening along a stretch of a few hundred metres of Magdalene Street, and that name in itself is enough to set off a chain of associations.
Fulcanelli’s alchemical interpretation stated that the first substance, the prima materia from which the universe was created, ‘the very essence of things’, is one and the same with Mater. The cathedrals dedicated to the Virgin are alchemical temples demonstrating God’s creation of life, ‘the transformations of the original substance’ for, ‘in the Ave Regina, the Virgin is properly called root (salve radix) to show that she is the principle and beginning of all things. “Hail, root by which the Light has shone on the world.”’
