The Mark of the Horse Lord

Since I first read William Golding's Free Fall (1959) 32 years ago, I have been convinced that it has the finest opening paragraph in English literature:

I have walked by stalls in the market-place where books, dog-eared and faded from their purple have burst with a white hosanna. I have seen people crowned with with a double crown, holding in either hand the crook and flail, the power and the glory. I have understood how the scar becomes a star. I have felt the flake of fire fall, miraculous and pentecostal. My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are grey faces that peer over my shoulder. I live on Paradise Hill, ten minutes from the station, thirty seconds from the shops and the local. Yet I am a burning amateur, torn by the irrational and incoherent, violently searching and self-condemned.

This passage, and many more in Golding's oeuvre, carry linguistic and poetic echoes of Thomas Thraherne's Centuries of Meditation. In both cases the English language flows like molten lava. Free Fall is as good as it gets for me. But the second best opening paragraph, in my view, comes from a children's novel published in 1965, The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992):

In the long cavern of the changing-room, the light of the fat-oil lamps cast jumping shadows on the walls; skeleton shadows of the spear-stacked arms-racks, giant shadows of the men who crowded the benches or moved about still busy with their weapons and gear; here and there the stallion shadow of a plume-crested helmet. The stink of the wild beasts' dens close by seeped in to mingle with the sharper smell of men waiting for the trumpets and sweating a little as they waited. Hard to believe that overhead where the crowds had been gathering since cock-crow, the June sun was shining and a fresh wind blowing in from the moors to set the brightly-coloured pennants flying.

The English language simply isn't deployed like this in fiction any more. The obsession with toning down 'purple prose' and filtering out unnecessary words has led to a flattening and hollowing out, which renders unfashionable much of the colour and vitality Sutcliff displays here. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary adult novel, let alone a children's book, beginning with such a burst of rich, imaginatively-charged prose. 

The quality of writing stays at this level throughout the book's 21 chapters. Phaedrus, a young gladiator in second-century Roman Britain, is awarded his freedom but, as in Colin Wilson's diagnosis of modern man, doesn't know what to do with it. Thrown into prison after a drunken night's revelry, he is sprung from jail by representatives of a Gaelic tribe from the western isles of what is now Scotland. He is asked to impersonate their former king, who was disposed of by the queen of a neighbouring tribe, and become the figurehead the Gaelic leaders need if they are to regain their kingdom. Phaedrus accepts, and the story flows organically and fluently from there.

Sutcliff's descriptions of people, places, and the natural world are atmospheric and richly-textured. Her characters are rounded and believable. The story seems to spring from them fully formed - like Athene from the head of Zeus - as if the tale already exists in some archetypal world of Platonic Forms and Sutcliff has merely picked up its wavelength and written it down in one sitting. Any author who creates this impression in the reader's mind is clearly, in my view, a great artist. The reality of even gaining access to that primordial realm, then crafting and shaping a story out of what one encounters there, is always (in my experience anyway) a colossally tough affair.

From about Chapter 13 onwards, the storytelling goes up a level again, as if the authorial presence has vanished and the story has taken on a life of its own and is telling itself. It's an extraordinary achievement, and one of those books that when I finished it I struggled to get my bearings for a few days as I had become so immersed in the fierce, elemental wildness of the Celtic fringes of the Roman Empire.

The Mark of the Horse Lord is full of big ideas as well - loyalty, honour, magic, faith, fraternity, trust, the bond between men and women, and the use and abuse of power. It's a tough, realistic read, despite the glittering prose, but the adult themes are explored in a manner that in no way undermines the innocence of Sutcliff's young readers. On the contrary, it's an education in what makes people tick - what they'll fight and die for, and how far an individual is prepared to go to become something greater than he currently is.

Many of Sutcliff's novels, such as The Lantern Bearers and Outcast, feature a Phaedrus-like figure as the main protagonist - a young man with a broken family struggling to find his way in life. Though her books have been enjoyed for decades by both sexes, I would say there is something particularly valuable here for young men, particularly in an age like the present where so much confusion and disorientation reigns concerning traditional male values and the role of men in society. The Mark of the Horse Lord is the story of a warrior - a man who has to fight every inch of the way - in himself, in his own community, and in the wider world of tribal and imperial conflict. Phaedrus finds his journey from gladiator to king tough going to say the least, but he sticks to his guns, trusts his intuition, does what he feels in his gut to be right, and grows in the end into something almost Arthurian, far more royal and archetypal than the impersonator and figurehead he was originally supposed to be.

The best thing of all about this book is that it posits a world freighted with meaning and value. It stands, as such, as a terrific antidote to hopelessness and despair. The ending may not be conventionally happy, but I found it deeply fulfilling in all the ways that matter. There is a pattern and harmony behind the plot's cut and thrust which Phaedrus begins to sense as the novel approaches its conclusion. But it only reveals itself and he only enters into it when he is ready, and that is what occurs at the very end of the book. 

Sammy Mountjoy, Golding's narrator in Free Fall, sees the world shot through with the Divine after his release from solitary confinement in a German prisoner of war camp:

Beyond the trees the mountains were not only clear all through like purple glass, but living. They sang and were conjubilant. They were not all that sang. Everything is related to everything else and all relationship is either discord or harmony. The power of gravity, dimension and space, the movement of the earth and sun and unseen stars, these made what might be called music and I heard it ...

What happens to Phaedrus on the last page of Sutcliff's novel belongs, I believe, on a deeper level again. It is a coronation and a consummation, an initiation into the mythic depths of sacred kingship. You will have to read it to find out! I promise you, it will stay with you forever.

Nationalism must be Romantic to be effective

 Picture by Caspar David Friedrich

The age of Nationalism was a brief interlude, of a couple of generations, after the decline of Christian faith began during the ruling classes, during the 19th century. All the effective Nationalist movements were substantially Romantic - that is, their appeal was to a mystical ideal of Nation, and to spiritual goals such as Glory - rather than to (for example) economic self-interest or any other materialism.

Which is one why Nationalism is a dead duck in the West, now - because the mass of people are absolutely incapable of that kind of yearning Romanticism based on the nation.

And one reason they are incapable is that all the major social institutions in all the Western nations have been infiltrated, conquered and subverted by materialistic Leftist bureaucracy and a hedonistic mass media. Instead of Romanticism we have sex and statistics. And that is what people 'believe in' - insomuch as they believe-in anything...

We are not Romantic about the material actuality of our Nations - but we can be Romantic about their spiritual and mystical realities - But, only if we believe that these realities are really-real...

The spiritual revolution will come from that about-which we are really-Romantic - spontaneously, from the heart, strongly such that it occupies our daydreams and lends us courage.

The scope of the revolution will be determined by the number of people thus aligned.

The effect of the spiritual revolution is utterly unpredictable - because when our metaphysics has changed and our aspirations are transformed - everything will look different.

We will then, but not until then, know what we ought to do, and will be energised and inspired to do it.

In the mean time we should nourish our hearts, strengthen our thinking, and attend to what is Romantic to us.

Miserere Nostri

My last post spoke of the need for penitence. It's a recognition of our many sins and failings, and of our utter dependence on God. At the same time, God wants people able to stand on their own two feet and face the iniquities of the world with courage and without being downcast by them. He also wants us to recognise that we have goodness and truth within ourselves. We are not simply worthless sinners. We are sons and daughters of God, children of light who, given time, can grow into gods ourselves.

But it all must start with repentance. I find this perfectly represented in music by one of Albion's greatest composers who was working in one of the times of its greatest creativity, even though it was a hard and cruel time in many ways. Thomas Tallis lived from 1505 to 1585 through a period of religious upheaval and constant change. But in these often difficult years he produced some of the best music ever made in England. This brief piece is a seven part canon and expresses the feelings of the true penitent with deep emotion. It also seems very suitable for Lent.

Repentance is like a cleansing of the soul. Of course, this is not a one off thing. We will constantly fall back, but if we are sincere in our desire to amend our lives then every failure will spur us on to greater efforts. It's an extraordinary thing but God will always forgive us as long as we recognise our shortcomings. Whenever we turn to him for help it will be forthcoming, though not necessarily in the way we might expect since God is working in the long term not just to save us in the conventional Christian sense but to bring us to a full and complete union with him in which our heart and mind are transformed into pure love and truth, and our very being is transfigured into light.

The modern person often doesn't like the idea of repentance because it seems feeble. You are passing your burdens onto someone else and admitting your weakness. You are giving up which is unmanly. I understand this. But true repentance is simply admitting that you have taken a wrong turning at a very deep level and become 'addicted' to ego. Its consequences are very far from feeble for once you have repented of your past sins it is time to 'fight the good fight' and try to change for the better. Believe me, that is the hardest fight anyone will ever undertake. To be sure, God will help you but you have to do the work yourself. God will not do it for you even if he will support you as you do it. But if you are to change who else can do it but you yourself? If God accomplished this work for you then you would just be his slave and he doesn't want slaves. He wants free spirits, but free spirits dedicated to the good and the true and the upliftment of the world.

So forget about repentance being for the weak. It is actually for the strong, those strong enough to tackle themselves and admit they are wrong.

True Awakening Demands Deep Penitence

It seems to me that the way things currently are going any spiritual awakening is unlikely unless people are brought low by suffering. We are just too comfortable and too set in our materialistic ways to change course unless something dramatic, which forces us to change, takes place. I believe the powers that be have sought to avoid a scenario of suffering for some time but, spiritually speaking, humanity has just gone from bad to worse and is currently as far away from God as it has been for a long, long time. Our culture and our politics are all corrupt, our religion, such as it is, is ineffective and when we do turn to some idea of spirituality in the modern spiritual but not religious way, it is usually on our own terms and with no real sense of the Creator. Hence any spirituality of this sort is directed towards personal growth and does not include the metanoia that is essential for any genuine awakening.

We need to change and we need to do so at the roots of our being. Change in the spiritual sense cannot simply be an external thing. It is not just swapping one set of beliefs for another, supposedly more enlightened. Even if the new beliefs are truer, more spiritually correct, that is nowhere near good enough. Real change requires substantially more than just changing one's thoughts or even one's behaviour or way of life. It requires deep penitence, something that goes right down to the very core of what we feel ourselves to be and leaves our old self lying shattered and in pieces on the ground. Do you remember how Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader turned into a dragon? Perhaps that dragon was just the materialised form of what he really was like inside. He became in body what he already was in soul, and it was only when he experienced a radical restructuring of the soul that he was able to be liberated by Aslan from that terrible dragon exterior. What if we too appeared outwardly as we are in our souls? Is that a challenge you would wish to take up?

We have to remind ourselves that before Jesus could carry out his mission, the way had to be prepared by someone of a much rougher disposition. Someone who called out evil for what it was and who actually ended up paying with his life for this. He did not accommodate himself to the world or to the authority of the day. When he condemned sin, he did not pull his punches. He simply spoke the truth. John the Baptist had the mission of calling the people to repentance. Jesus could not have spoken to these people unless they had first been awoken to their sinful state by John. Once they had started to see themselves as they were then Jesus could direct them towards understanding how they should be. But there could be no spirituality without prior repentance. The ground of the soul had to be ploughed and tilled before the seed could be sown. A hard ground could not have taken the seed.

At the moment, the ground of the human soul is very hard. What can soften it up so that the seeds of renewal can be sown? Heavy rainfall is probably what is needed. Nobody can look forward to suffering but we have brought this upon ourselves by our arrogance and vanity, by our rebelliousness and cold-heartedness. (By the way, a sentimental age such as ours usually is cold-hearted, the sentimentality replacing true feeling.) If we will not turn to the truth of our own accord that will create a reaction in the fabric of being. We are not being punished. We will just experience the consequences of our anti-life behaviour

There is no moving forward without repentance. And this is a matter of the will for real spirituality is not so much about overcoming ignorance, as in many Eastern approaches to spiritual truth (even though that is important), as about reorientation of the will. It is in our wills that we are bent and it is that we must address if we are to awaken from our spiritual sleep. Maybe it will not require suffering, let us hope so, but realistically how long can we continue as we are now?

The Great Return

The Welsh writer and mystic, Arthur Machen (1863-1947), has become without doubt a highly influential figure. Artists as varied as H.P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Moore, and the late Mark E Smith, creative mastermind behind Manchester post-punk pioneers, The Fall, have all claimed inspiration from him.

Machen is most widely seen these days as a purveyor of 'weird fiction', with stories like The Great God Pan and The White People viewed as early, and very unsettling, examples of the horror genre. He is also famous for his short story, The Bowmen (1914), which tells the tale of a phantom squadron of bowmen saving the British Army from destruction in France. Machen was a fine journalist, and he wrote the story in a journalistic style, which was taken as fact by many readers and gave rise to the legend of the Angels of Mons, who were said to have appeared to retreating British forces in September 1914.

Machen's most interesting books, in my view, are his novels, The Hill of Dreams (1903), The Secret Glory (1922), and the novella which is the subject of this post, The Great Return (1915). Machen's recognition of a deeper, richer reality behind the surface phenomena of daily life comes across particularly strongly in these stories. In this respect, as in others, Machen can be considered a precursor to Charles Williams. Like Williams, he was a High Anglican with a deeply mystical bent and a fascination with occult lore. His father was a clergyman, and the young Machen would have followed the same path but for a financial crisis which necessitated him leaving the family home and relocating to London to earn a meagre living through a variety of odd-jobs. Machen writes exceptionally well, as does Williams, about that city. This passage from The Three Imposters is especially reminiscent, I feel, of the perambulations around London Williams describes in War in Heaven and All Hallows' Eve:

Before me was the long suburban street, its dreary distance marked by rows of twinkling lamps, and the air was poisoned by the faint, sickly smell of burning bricks, deserted as that of Pompeii. I knew pretty well what direction to take, so I set out wearily, looking at the stretch of lamps vanishing in perspective: and as I walked street after street branched off to right and left, some far reaching, to distances that seemed endless, communicating with other systems of thoroughfare, and some mere protoplasmic streets, and ending suddenly in waste, and pits, and rubbish heaps, and fields whence the magic had departed. I have spoken of systems of thoroughfare,, and I assure you that walking alone through these silent places I felt fantasy growing on me, and some glamour of the infinite. 

Machen was born in Caerleon, South-East Wales. The town's Arthurian heritage and its Romano-British ruins made a strong impression on his imagination. The Great Return is also set in Wales, in a small village on the South-West coast called Arfon. The narrator, at one stage, climbs a hill and sits among the ruins of an ancient fortification called the Old Camp Head, which looks out over the sea 'towards Cornwall and to the great depths that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where fragments of dreams - they seemed such then - might, perhaps, be gathered into the clearness of a vision.'

Machen is not a great prose stylist and his stories are often constructed in quite a clunky fashion. In my view, however, it is passages like this which show why he is so compelling and influential. There is a real sense of the British Mysteries in his writing, and he has the ability (like Williams again) to bring those mysteries alive in a memorable and evocative manner.

In The Great Return, the Holy Grail appears in Arfon, bringing healing, transformation, joy and peace to all who come into its presence. That's the plot in a nutshell. The Grail comes and the lives of men and women are transformed. Spring morning consciousness, to borrow Colin Wilson's phrase, is the order of the day. That's all there is, and at this level of spiritual and imaginative encounter, that's all there needs to be.

I think this is also how it will be at the end of time. I really do. Sure, there will be wars and revolutions, earthquakes and tsunamis, totalitarian régimes, and economic and social meltdown. We will look at all these phenomena and see them as 'signs of the times' and so they are, but they are also nothing to be afraid of. Not ultimately. Not fundamentally. In his 1945 masterpiece, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, the French metaphysician, René Guénon (1886-1951) delineates with pinpoint accuracy the headlong erosion and inversion of values which mark the times in which we live, the final stages of the Dark Age, or Kali Yuga as Guénon calls it, following the Indian terminology. According to the Hindu doctrine of the Four Ages, which Guénon subscribed to, the Dark Age will cede place, as surely as night gives way to day, to a new Golden Age (Satya Yuga). 

Our difficulty, here and now, is that we do not know how much further the Dark Age has to run. We might already be close to the nadir or, conversely, our fall - like that of Milton's Satan - may still have dizzying fathoms to come. We might conceivably have to plunge all the way down - to a self-created Hell - enslavement to an Artificial Intelligence demanding worship and obedience like the bodiless 'Head' in C.S. Lewis's, That Hideous Strength. We are not in charge of the timescales. Guénon teaches us that the Dark Age has to run its course as per the parameters set down for it at the foundation of the world. The world grows increasingly materialised until it is as far from its spiritual source as mid-winter is from mid-summer. Then the switchback occurs and the spiritual becomes once again the dominant paradigm. The transhumanists view this kind of pabulum as outmoded superstition, of course, to be outgrown at the earliest opportunity, but they have tunnel vision and are merely acting out the roles pre-ordained for them as men of the Dark Age. Their fall is as inevitable as the changing of the seasons and the rising of the sun. It will be as spectacular and comprehensive as the fall of Numenor or Atlantis.

Guénon also explains how, as we get closer to the Golden Age, some of the light from this era to come will find a way of shining into the darkness of this present time. We should remember as well, as Christians, that the Golden Age for us is not just a block of time but is in fact the coming of a Person who, like the Grail in Machen's story, brings healing, transformation, joy and peace. 

The signs of His approach, as with His first advent, are likely to reveal themselves in a manner we have not anticipated and at a time and place we do not expect - a provincial backwater, not unlike Nazareth, perhaps - a place passed over and left to rot by the shifting tides of politics, finance and fashion - a run-down industrial estate, let us say, on a ring road just outside Middlesborough. People turn up for work on a Monday morning, and already by lunchtime a thousand unobtrusive miracles have taken place. Old feuds are forgotten, horizons are widened, workplace politics are recognised as irrelevant, broken families are made whole, and faces shine with light, laughter and joy. No-one knows how or why this change has happened. No-one cares either. All the workers know is that it feels good, right, natural and true. 'It's always been this way,' they say to each other. 'It could never be any other way. We just forgot it for a while.'

It wouldn't surprise me if a tremendous act of healing, bordering on resurrection, also occurred in the locality - on a nearby council estate, maybe - very similar in its details to Machen's account of the moment Olwen Phillips, a sixteen year old girl in the last stages of consumption, begins her recovery:

She said she woke up in the deep darkness, and she knew the life was fast going from her. She could not move so much as a finger, she tried to cry out, but no sound came from her lips. She felt that in another instant the whole world would fall from her—her heart was full of agony. And as the last breath was passing her lips, she heard a very faint, sweet sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. It came from far away, from over by Ty-newydd. She forgot her agony and listened, and even then, she says, she felt the swirl of the world as it came back to her. 

And the sound of the bell swelled and grew louder, and it thrilled all through her body, and the life was in it. And as the bell rang and trembled in her ears, a faint light touched the wall of her room and reddened, till the whole room was full of rosy fire. And then she saw standing before her bed three men in blood-coloured robes with shining faces. And one man held a golden bell in his hand. And the second man held up something shaped like the top of a table. It was like a great jewel, and it was of a blue colour, and there were rivers of silver and of gold running through it and flowing as quick streams flow, and there were pools in it as if violets had been poured out into water, and then it was green as the sea near the shore, and then it was the sky at night with all the stars shining, and then the sun and the moon came down and washed in it. And the third man held up high above this a cup that was like a rose on fire; "there was a great burning in it, and a dropping of blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret. And I heard a voice that sang nine times, 'Glory and praise to the Conqueror of Death, to the Fountain of Life immortal.' Then the red light went from the wall, and it was all darkness, and the bell rang faint again by Capel Teilo, and then I got up and called to you."

This is the Great Return. It is also the way the world ends, not with a whimper, nor with a bang, but with a high and holy chant, the ringing of a bell, a vision of goodness and purity, and a soft, warm light which grows and swells until the whole world, from the North Pole to the South, is suffused with its radiance. The fetters of the Iron Age snap and fall asunder. The Great Restoration is at hand. The dream, as Lewis writes in The Last Battle, is ended. This is the morning.

Why Does God Allow It?

This post follows on from a comment on Bruce Charlton's post on his blog about the transhumanist agenda and the demonic corruption of the world. See here. The commenter asked why God allowed the demons to manipulate our world to the extent they do. Why are we left defenceless against their onslaught? What chance do we have?

Well, it may sometimes seem as though God has turned his back on the world but that is not the case. However, I'm afraid the answer to the question as to why he allows what is happening today may not be palatable to everyone. For the fact is that the events of this time constitute a test to sort out the sheep from the goats. That is not the demons' intention, of course, but it is why God permits their action. Yet we are not left defenceless. We have outer support from the teachings of religion, especially Christianity, but also some of the supplements to it that came about in the 19th and 20th centuries. Note I say supplements not replacements. We also have our own inner knowledge. Yes, we do, every last one of us, if we will but hearken to it and accept the wisdom of that still, small voice within. We all have a connection to the divine inside our hearts and if we ignore that it is our own fault and responsibility. Though mainstream religion is like an ebbing tide these days, there is more access to spiritual teachings than probably ever before. Perhaps there is too much and the variety and variation in quality can be confusing. Nevertheless, we have the ability to discriminate true from false, high from low, superior from inferior if we are faithful to the best within us.

You see, we have to grow up, spiritually speaking. No longer can we rely on a Church or an outer authority to tell us what to do and show the way. All have been corrupted but even if that were not the case we still have to go beyond the need for outer authority. That does not mean we should reject legitimate authority, but we have to learn to become our own authority as well. We tell a child when it is growing up that, until it learns to discipline itself properly, it has to accept some outer discipline. The pattern repeats itself in spiritual terms. But we have gone beyond the stage where we should rely on full outer discipline. We are no longer children. How can we be really spiritual if we are not so from within ourselves and of our own accord? 

God has not abandoned us but he is allowing temptation so that we may learn to resist it. If he did not, we could not grow properly. We would remain stuck at the stage of children who never leave home. Intellectually, many of us may have grown up, in one sense anyway, but we are still at a fairly low level spiritually. And yet it is not so low that we cannot make some spiritual efforts. We do have the wherewithal to pass the test of today if we will exert ourselves and make the attempt to unshackle our minds from the indoctrination that currently postures as truth. But we have to do this on an individual basis. Each one of us must make the steps to free him or herself as an independent being. Certainly, we can be helped but if we are to be free then we must make the effort, intellectually, spiritually, ourselves. And we cannot just return to a religious attitude of the past where we are the sheep and the shepherd instructs us. That does not mean that we should reject the past and deny all shepherds. But we have to think for ourselves and not just follow where we are led.

 God allows evil so that greater good may come. That is not to say that God is the origin of evil. Ends do not justify means. But evil is there and so God uses it. The basic law of the universe, especially as regards human beings, is free will. God cannot prevent what is happening for, if he did, he would be removing the reason for the creation of humanity. But what he can do is turn it against itself and use it to make souls more aware of the true good. When it comes down to it if we don't do this it is nobody's fault but our own. We are responsible for ourselves. We don't have to go where we are pointed. It is a test of our moral integrity and courage, and if we are not equal to the test then the blame can only be ours. You might think this is heartless but it is not. If we show signs of turning away from the world then God will be there. He will guide us and direct us to people and places that can help and support us. But it won't be obvious or easy because that also would remove the effectiveness of the test.

At the end of the day, it is about two things. Honesty and courage. If we are honest to what is inside ourselves then we know that the world we see being remade before us is a lie. But then we need courage to stand against that and not allow ourselves to be browbeaten by 'good' opinion. We should not be frightened of seeming foolish in the eyes of the world. We should not worry about being branded naive or even mad or, a popular shaming tactic today, 'extremist'. That is not to say that the falseness of today's world will not bring about real extremists (individuals motivated by hatred) in reaction to it. That also is part of the dark forces' tactics. They justify one evil by opposing it to another. But if we are motivated by love of God and truth then we need have no fear. 

Jesus said to his disciples that if they followed him, the world would hate them. The same thing applies now. Don't make that a thing to be proud of though. There are many traps open to the soul when it turns away from the world and towards God, and pride is the main one. But if you submit yourself, heart and soul, to God then you are secure against all attack. You will not necessarily escape suffering or condemnation but why worry about your outer self, especially when this is the way that the soul earns its stripes?

One final thought. It is not actually God who allows the evil of today. It is us. We have opened the door to it and given it the hold over us it now has. God cannot be held responsible for our own sins. You might say, why should a child growing up in this corrupt world be held responsible for the corruption? I'm sure that this is taken into account when the reckoning is due. Passive followers will not pay so heavy a price as active enablers. Nevertheless, even a child has the spirit of truth within it and the opportunity to respond to that.


Note: What I didn't mention in the main body of the post is that this time has been widely predicted in many traditions from all over the world, and the reason that was possible is that evolution proceeds in cycles. Now is the time when matter is most 'materialised' so there is a certain inevitability to our spiritual alienation. It forms part of a pattern, not that that is a reason to succumb to it or a justification for so succumbing.

Past and future spiritual awakenings...

I am beginning to feel surer that past spiritual awakenings are a poor guide to what is possible and desirable now.

I have come across many, many prophecies, predictions and intense wishes that some kind of force will beam-upon, spread-across, grow-within The West in general, or the UK in particular... so that a great mass of people will undergo a positive spiritual change: will becomes Christians, and/ or will develop a higher form of consciousness.

Clearly there is a yearning for rescue, for being-saved, for being-developed, for being overwhelmed (like it or not, and insensibly) positively by some external benign influence...


I can accept that such things happened in the past  - for example in the Old Testament, where the focus is mostly upon the group, the tribe, the family of the Ancient Hebrews. They seem to stand or fall together.

But my reading of the 'tenor' of the Gospels, especially John's Gospel, is that this era was ended by Jesus - and I suspect that such revivals and awakenings of this 'mass' kind since Christ have only been of 'remedial' value; they have not, and could not, actually lead to genuine theosis of the kind that God wishes from us and made possible by Jesus.


The simple reason is that for us to become more-divine we must become more agent, more free; and in particular we must consciously, explicitly and actively choose to become more divine.

In the past and starting from a less self-conscious situation, it was possible and useful for a group of people to be unconsciously acted-upon by some beneficial external influence - but here-and-now I think that such mass influences, such unconscious influences, can only do harm and not good.

Certainly, the main thrust of demonic activity looks to be in the direction of reducing Man to the mass - by totalitarian monitoring and control, by getting our emotions and thinking locked-into technology which will take-over and drive our emotions, fill our thoughts.

Almost everything from governments, officials and the media is tending to get us to join-in mass events, movements, emoting... to corral us into campaigns, demands, fashions, trends, opinions; to be swept along, overwhelmed, carried by forces beyond our control...

I presume that this colossal effort is because such mass movements of mind are intrinsically evil -  intrinsically hostile to divine destiny and hopes.


Yet thought is free - real thought of the real self is utterly free and true. We can know what we need to know directly and unmediated, and such knowledge is of universal and permanent effect. This is precisely what the demonic powers need to ignore, confuse and deny.


The individual awakening to reality - that is the unit of awakening. The only mass awakening can be a mass of individuals - but nobody and nothing can make this happen.

It can only happen by a multitude of individual decisions - decisions made in full consciousness and explicitly.

Thus nothing can cause an awakening; and, although awakening can be made difficult, nothing can prevent it.

The next step is up-to each and every one of us; and the sooner we stop looking to someone or something else to do it to us - the faster it can happen.