How may we actually, in practice, assist in sustaining and developing the spirit of Albion?

In a nutshell; by being fully here and fully conscious - such that my own thinking of that time, place and nature is woven-into the evolving web of creation.


To backtrack and explain... There is an attuning to time, place and the nature of things which we may turn an epiphany - a passive, absorptive, time-less 'snapshot' of a situation.

You may recall such things from early childhood: a numinous picture (or perhaps sound, or smell); deep, engaged, lively... and detached. We have, in a state of raised sensitivity, taken a true-impression. 

Such epiphanies do not affect creation - they are not, at any level creat-ive. As I said, they are the true impact that Life has upon-us.

This is in its essence dreamlike, child-like, a resurgence of the primal consciousness of Man lost-in-Nature; still metaphorically in the womb of the Earth Mother...

Such are valuable; yet they do not sustain or develop Albion. They are Albion affecting-us - a memory that is valued; but tinged with regret because gone as soon as registered, and powerless to prevent it.


More is possible, desirable and - indeed - ought-to be aimed-at by the lovers of Albion.

My example here is of Albion-overseas - of New England, in the United States - and with reference to the mid 19th century world of the Transcendentalists of whom the first I came to know was Henry David Thoreau.

I can illustrate the epiphanies by an example from a library: looking at the cover of The Heart of Thoreau's Journals in Bristol City Library, one Friday evening late-opening... losing myself in an appreciation of Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts - where Thoreau spent two years, two months and two days in a hut he built for himself as an experiment in living: living for the real things.

The next step - and the first step that is actually of material assistance to reality - is to appreciate as a Segment of Life. Not a passive impression; but a state active, alert, wide-eyed, curious - in which my thoughts and the unfolding-reality unite and are woven-together.

The example is again related to Walden Pond; this time an early morning circuit of the pond with my wife in the Fall of 1998; a magical hour in which reality un-folded, and folded-into memory and anticipation, with an unexpected inevitability.

The 'magical' state of consciousness, when sustained in this fashion, becomes a part of ongoing creation - so that creation becomes, to that extent, enhanced by our personal self-awareness.

The effect is permanent, and made distinctive by the human consciousness.


But more can be done than this; when our real-divine self is active, and generative, and in Primary Thinking - which is creative in a primal sense. New thoughts emerge which are uncaused and never have been before - and these thoughts are in loving harmony with the divine unfolding of creation.

This is what JRR Tolkien called Subcreation, and Owen Barfield called Final Participation. So, this is the rare kind of primary creativity which is not given value by its public communication nor by public appreciation nor by any excellence it may posses... but which has intrinsic, instant and permanent value in reality: that is in God's creation.

Such is woven-into and changes creation; not only by its origin in human consciousness, but by its actual addition to the scope and realm of attained creation. After it, everything is somewhat changed and forever.

(The value of any subsequent communication of it, as art or science of anything else, is secondary and inessential - the permanent value is during the actual transformational-process of creation.)


My personal example is the process of selection, sequence and transition that went into the making of my radio documentary Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy, which included Thoreau's words and references to Walden Pond.

For several hours together, I was in an elated and hyper-aware state - and felt not just an external sense of what was right and effective, but that this also came from within my real self.

I have little doubt that those solitary and ecstatic hours of mine left their permanent traces in the web of creation, as it relates to that expression of Albion's spirit that is New England; and that was shaped at Walden and its environment, by Thoreau and others; and which continues and always will as an aspect of God's creating.

The Resurrection

I have never understood people who claim to be Christian but don't believe in the resurrection. That surely is the whole point of Christianity and it demonstrates who and what Christ is. If it's not true, Christianity is built on a lie so why bother with it even if you think its moral teachings are helpful? I grant that the resurrection can be seen as a metaphor but it's a true metaphor. It's the point where myth and reality coincide. For the life of Jesus was the one occasion in history when something utterly real has happened on Earth. Everything else approximates, to a greater or lesser degree, to transcendent archetypal pattern but Christ is the pattern embodied in its perfection.

I see the resurrection as something you would never have thought possible before it happens but then when it does happen you realise it actually makes complete sense. We all suspect that death is somehow an offence to life, a cruel insult, and to see it defeated in this way has a kind of cosmic logic to it that goes far beyond mere earthly reason. It is confirmation of a truth felt in the heart but not known outwardly until it actually takes place when it seems (for Christ, it would not seem so for anyone else) almost inevitable.

The surrounding events of the resurrection also fall into a pattern of deepest truth. The ignominious death representing the nadir of disillusion and despair. All is lost, all hope and joy destroyed. We have reached the very bottom. But then the wonder of the resurrection and the confirmation that Christ really was who he said he was. You might say it's all too good to be true but that saying only has any rationale to it in the context of a meaningless universe. If the universe has meaning, which if course it must or we would not even have the conception of meaning nor would we feel the lack it, then nothing is too good to be true. Truth and goodness are one and the same. That is why we all crave goodness as we do truth, and recognise them as right. 

And after the resurrection Christ didn't just disappear completely straightaway or else carry on teaching as before, making grand public appearances in Jerusalem. That too seems right. We have entered a new cycle. To return to his previous ministry would have somehow been vulgar and ostentatious. He has risen from the dead but he's not a show off! He doesn't want to force people to believe in him. He wants them to come to him because of an inner movement towards truth in their own hearts. So he stays and he teaches for a certain period and then he ascends into heaven with his risen and transformed body, leaving his disciples to spread his word. All is just as it should be. The important qualities of dignity and beauty are observed. There is glory but there is also reticence. There is no brash shouting about this momentous event but it is left to speak for itself. It is a sacred thing and is treated as such.

Nowadays many people apparently don't even believe that Christ existed never mind that he rose from the dead. The churches have not done this story any favours by reducing both it and Christ to a humanistic level in which the main message is to be nice to each other and treat everyone as equals in terms of this world. But this was not the message of Christ at all. He came to give us the life more abundant and save us from the spiritual death of a materialistic existence. He pointed us towards the higher life centred in the reality of God and demonstrated what this was by dying to his earthly self and then being reborn in a new spiritual state in which the old nature was not destroyed but transformed into something higher. But this old self could not be reborn until it had been allowed to die, and the lesson is that we cannot become like Christ until we too allow our old natural self to die, and this includes the relations it has to the world and to other people on its own level. 

It seems to me that the modern churches don't emphasise this anywhere near enough when it should be central. They don't say that the old self must die to be transformed, but that it must just become better. Stay the same, keep its old centre but be more inclusive and brotherly. This was summed up by C.S. Lewis as the difference between nice people or new men. To be a new man requires the death of the old man not his improvement. He does not become better, he must become new. Not changed but transformed. Resurrection must always be preceded by death. Jesus taught this and he demonstrated it. It is the central fact of his life and mission.

If the resurrection were just a metaphor, it would be worse than a lie because it is purported to be true. Which is not proof it literally is true but if it is then that changes everything. You can reject it if you like but if you do you are rejecting something fundamental about God and his self-revelation to the world. You cannot say it is just a symbol and keep Christianity. It is a symbol but that of which it is a symbol is only possible for us because it was acted out in this physical world by Christ thereby creating the possibility of spiritual rebirth for all humanity. Without the energy released by his crucifixion and resurrection, we would still be living in darkness with escape from this world through the rejection of self the only spiritual possibility. Christ redeemed the material world because he sanctified it through first embracing it and then transforming its darkness, thereby making possible the salvation of creation and its eventual integration with spirit. 

The resurrection is the triumph of spirit over matter but in this victory matter is not rejected, dismissed or denied but raised up and glorified in and by spirit.

The Last of Logres

The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey

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There is one particular aspect of the Arthurian mythos which, as far as I am aware, has not been reflected on as much as it should. After the Last Battle and Arthur's voyage to Avalon, a number of surviving knights join a monastic community which, in Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling, The Road to Camlann (1981), later develops into Glastonbury Abbey:

'Within half a year came Sir Blamore and Sir Bleoberis, and little by little certain others of the old lost brotherhood of the Round Table. And when in due time the ancient Archbishop died, Sir Lancelot, whom he had made a priest while he yet lived, stepped into his place and celebrated Mass for the rest as he had done and for all who chanced to pass that way.

'So they continued for seven years, living in prayer and poverty and giving their help and comfort to all who sought it; and keeping the last light of Logres alive as they kept the honey-wax candles burning on the rough altar, while the darkness flowed in over the rest of the land. For though Constantine, Duke of Cornwall and a young kinsman of Arthur, had taken the High Kingship and led his troops to battle under the dragon banner, he was not Arthur, and there was little that he could do against the Sea Wolves and the Old People from the mountains and the North.'

What is notable here is that the knights seem to intuit that the time for action is past and the time for contemplation has begun. Martha cedes place to Mary, you might say. The knights could, of course, have carried on the fight, pledging their allegiance to Constantine or forming a resistance movement in the hills. But no, they understand that fighting is behind them now and that the Round Table has served its purpose, leaving behind a glorious legend that will inspire the men and women of Albion for centuries to come. They recognise that something different is required from them, a prayerful, inner-directed counterpoint to the years of struggle and striving in the outer world. And this new orientation bears fruit in unexpected ways. After Sir Lancelot's death:

'Sir Bedivere and several of the brotherhood remained at the little church and its hermitage all the rest of their days, gathering others to them, so that at last the place became an abbey again; and later still, mighty and beautiful stone buildings arose where the little wattle church and its surrounding bothies had been. And men began to call it Glastonbury.'

The Sea Wolves sweep across the land, but the little church keeps the flame of faith alive, becoming a 'mighty and beautiful' abbey, a foretaste of the Christendom that gave us the great cathedrals which stud the land like jewels, from Carlisle to Salisbury and Canterbury to Durham. These mighty edifices - these 'sermons in stone' - are storehouses of spiritual energy, worthy successors to the stone circles of the Celtic and neolithic eras, and becoming increasingly popular. Visitor figures have been up for a while now, with Choral Evensong especially well-attended. Their finest hour may still be yet to come.

It is good to reflect upon these themes on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, two days of apparent defeat and despair. As Saturday evening in Jerusalem shades into Saturday night, nothing seems to be happening at all. There is nothing more to happen in any case. All is over, finished, consummated. Or so it appears.

But how deceptive appearances can be. Transformation is a mysterious, unquantifiable thing. Its ways are not our ways. Think of the tiny seed in Jesus's parable which grows without fanfare or headlines into the mightiest tree in the forest. This should give us hope on the micro-level too - all those occasions when we feel stuck, frustrated and shorn of inspiration. 'I've nothing to show for my life', we sometimes say, but we don't know that yet. We don't know it at all, in fact. For Jesus's followers on Holy Saturday, everything looked done and dusted, yet all the while He was setting the spirits of the dead free in Hades and breaking the power of death. The real work - Christ's Harrowing of Hell being the great archetypal example - goes on in secret and in silence.

Why are there no good leaders, and only bad leaders, in modern Albion?

I believe that we need to have confidence that events are extremely malleable to Divine Influences - such that God can arrange matters so Real Life provides the experiences we personally need to learn-from - and when these recur it is because we have not yet learned.

By Real Life I means your life and my life, specifically - I am not talking about people you know about only by Hearsay... from the mass media, reading books, seeing movies or whatever.

Here and now we in Albion live in a world without good leaders, and no good leaders are even 'on offer'. We must assume that if leaders were going to be helpful, then we would have them - at the least we would be given the opportunity to choose good leaders.

God can do this! God has done it often in the past when the right person has emerged at the right time and done the right things - but God is not currently doing it.

As all our major leaders are incompetent, corrupt, indeed active agents of evil; then we should assume that this situation contains a lesson we need to learn and have not learned.

England Led the World Into Materialism

England was probably the first country to adopt the mindset that led to the materialisation of consciousness and the present-day attitudes in which God has no place. It was a pioneer in many areas that formed the contemporary world. You can't trace this back to any single formational event or time but Protestantism was certainly one step towards the separation of the natural and supernatural worlds, and then the English Civil War was another. One religious, the other political. The fact that both of these things may have had positive elements to them is beside the point. The basic truth is that they opened up a gap between the spiritual and the material which, once opened, could be expanded exponentially until the point was reached at which the spiritual was so far removed it no longer existed in any real sense and could just be denied reality. That is now. Consciousness has effectively contracted to the material which is not just perceived as primary but as all there is. This has affected even religion which is largely earthbound and moribund these days. That contraction may have been beneficial in some areas, such as the development of certain qualities of selfhood and the exploration and dominance of the physical world, but these cannot be said to compensate for the spiritual loss that has accompanied them.

It might be pointed out that these external events were just the manifestation of inner changes in consciousness which brought them about and therefore they were secondary, and that is perfectly true. Nevertheless, they also hastened the process of materialisation and grounded it in a way that enabled it to proceed and spread much more rapidly. And it was in and through England that this largely (though not exclusively, of course) came about.

The development of the physical sciences really started to take off in England in the 17th century with the founding of the Royal Society a seminal moment, and thereafter there are too many English scientists at the leading edge of their disciplines to count. Newton and Darwin are obvious examples of people whose work changed the world but there are many more. Again, this was not something that was limited to England but if anywhere was the centre of this work then it was England which was also where the industrial revolution first took hold. The same is true with regard to the new socialist political movements. When I lived in France I used to enjoy teasing the French, still viewing their Revolution through rose tinted spectacles, that the English had killed their king long before they had killed theirs.

So, blame England for the modern world!

But there is another side to this story. Alongside the prosaic, matter of fact qualities of Englishmen of the 18th and 19th centuries there existed the romantic Englishman, best exemplified by her poets whose names are too well known to require mentioning, but also appearing in other forms of literature and perhaps too in a special concern with landscape and natural beauty. And I would say that it was chiefly in England in the 19th and 20th centuries that new approaches to spirituality began to be explored, often in clumsy ways, it is true, but the intentions were generally good, and the aspiration to higher things real. The reaction against materialism first took place in the country that was principally responsible for it.

At present, any opening to spiritual awakening that seemed possible at various times over the last 150 years appears to have gone away. We are currently more locked into materialistic attitudes than ever. Even the revivals of the New Age, self-indulgent and foolish as they often were, seem to have faded away. Perhaps the damp squib that was 2012 was responsible for that. Some people look to Brexit as indicating a stirring of some sort but that seems wildly optimistic to me. Brexit is a patriotic reaction to the destruction of this country's individuality but in the vast majority of cases the people who voted for it were not considering spiritual factors.

Nevertheless, I do consider that Britain still has a part to play in the spiritual awakening of the world. As does America which is one reason why these two countries are relentlessly attacked and their inner integrity constantly undermined by the powers dedicated to the destruction of spiritual truth. Sometimes great light and darkness are to be found in the same place which makes sense when you consider that the devil would naturally focus his guns on the areas of greatest threat to him. So, although there is much darkness in this country there is also light but, paradoxically, that is less easy to see largely because it is a spiritual thing and works mostly behind the scenes. But it is there and we have to do our best to foster it, both in ourselves and in the world around us. Even if a few little candles of light remain that will eventually be enough to light others and eventually banish the darkness.

England led the world into materialism. That had a purpose at the time but its time is past. It is now time for England to remedy the situation and try to lead the world back out of the materialistic despond. She must rediscover the spiritual light at her heart and set it up on top of a hill so that it can be seen by and inspire all. She will not be alone in this but it is possible that, just as Rome was first the centre of an empire and then became a spiritual centre, so the pattern might be repeated in England or the United States, the destinies of both countries being intertwined to a degree, I believe.