INTRODUCTION TO THE SEMINAR

INTRODUCTION TO THE SEMINAR.......Mike Harris

WELCOME …old friends and new.
Last year you said you wanted to do this again, so here we are,
again under the aegis, perhaps even the summons, of DF.
Magic is all about synchronicities, signs following.
We had to find a theme for this year and straight after last year
Basil suggested that we address the dealings that DF and her
fellow Avalonians had with the world of Faerie and what we’ve
gone on to do with that legacy. Meanwhile I needed a venue and
booked these Assembly Rooms and that synchronistic penny then
dropped because this was of course where The Immortal Hour,
which is probably the most detailed, evocative and acessable
work on Faery, was performed as an opera watched by an
entranced young Dion Fortune all those years ago.
To introduce our speakers: Gareth Knight has, for not few years,
been rightly considered as THE international authority on the
Western Mystery Tradition in both a scholarly and practical
sense and particularly upon Dion Fortune and her work. He also
happens to have trained Steve and I but there’s something in the
small print that says he can’t, even so, be held responsible.

Alan Richardson is a writer, mainly on magical subjects,
including again, a biography of Dion Fortune, having sat at the
feet of Christine Hartley and WG Gray. Despite the latter
experience he writes excellent prose largely uncluttered with
alliteration.
Steve Blamires is like me a one time pupil of Gareth Knight and co
founded with me the rather precociously named Company of
Avalon. Steve has lived in the USA for quite a long time now, but
is an Irish speaking Scot hailing from the isle of Arran. He has
written a number of books on various aspects of the Celtic tradition
and is an authority on William Sharp aka Fiona Mcloed. Who
of course wrote The Immortal Hour which so impressed Dion
Fortune in this very hall all those ago.
Then there’s me . But mostly ladies and gentlemen there’s
you…without whom none of this would be taking place.
Just before we pitch in I must ask you to be aware of the fire exits
and we would be grateful if you turned off mobiles and phone
your turf accountant or therapist just during the breaks. There
will as last year be our first speaker, then a half hour break for us
all to catch up with each other in which tea, coffee etc may be
purchased in the café. Then after the second speaker we’ll break
for an hour and a half’s lunch, which should be at about twelve
thirty returning at two. Then Steve will speak at two , followed by
another half hour break and Basil will give the final address.
Straight after that we’ll open it up for you to ask …even tell…us!
The idea is of course that you not only listen to us but that we all
try and take the opportunity of this gathering to natter to each
other.
There is ofcourse no smoking in any enclosed space on the face
of the planet …so those who feel the need will need to gather
outside somewhere. You may also wish to peruse the little table
we’ve set up at the back which sells books and our ritemagic cd’s
which are electronc books by all those who are speaking here
today and even by one or two who aren’t. There’s also other bits
and bobs of relevent literature which you may find useful.
So it’s time to introduce Alan Richardson our first speaker, who
will be familiar to most from his enchanting performance at last
year’s conference. Esoteric researcher extrodinaire and writer of
many, many books including biographies of Dion Fortune and WG
GrayAlan is going to speak on Faery Hills…whoever Sidhe
is…get it…faery pun.

AVALON AND FAERY...Mike Harris
When I had to come up with a title for this conference, which had
to tack DF and her associates to Faery I naturally scribbled down
Dion Fortune, the Avalonians and Faery. But when I got to think
about it I realised that I had in a sense defined Avalonians as
those seeking Faery. I had therefore I suppose suggested that
Avalon is in effect the last bus stop before Faery. So if
Glastonbury, dominated by the Tor, the great rath of Gwynn ap
Nudd, king of Faerie, is equated with Avalon that seems Faery
nuff (sorry! They’re won’t be many more of these!).
Certainly a lot of the smart suited expedient world beyond here,
would suggest that those who come here as either temporary or
permanent Avalonians are away with the Faeries. But in our own
terms we are , to use that awful esoteric cliché “seekers”. Dion
Fortune was a seeker, so was Fredrick Bligh Bond, so of course Dr
Goodchild, who in a sense started it all, and his friend William
Sharp, who wrote a play which Dion Fortune saw performed to
music in this very hall, Alice Buckton and Tudor Pole ….and long
before them John Dee and before them again St Collen from
Lllangollen who met Gwynn ap Nudd on the Tor and before him
perhaps Joseph of Arimathea. And now…us.
We’re all Avalonians peering just down the road into Faery.
Question is what is it and why do we want to go there? ..or rather,
being the hesitant human beings that we are, why do we want it to
come to us?
When I was looking for a Toklien reference in preparing this my
hand wandering along the bookshelves, synchronistically, as it
does, fell upon the works of George Macdonald. Now Macdonald
was a cleric of Scottish extraction somewhat in the mould of
Robert Kirk, author of the Secret Commonwealth. CS Lewis
acknowledged his debt to Macdonald in writing The Narnia
books. Having as it were Dion Fortune on my shoulder I was
naturally persuaded to select from Macdonald’s works…Lilleth
and as a preface to that edition I saw this brief piece by Thoreux.
This for me encapsulates that “just down the road” relationship
between Avalon and Faery.

I TOOK A walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the
setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its
golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble ball. I
was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining
family had settled there in that part of the land called . Concord, unknown
to me, —to whom. the sun was servant, who had not gone into society in
the village, —who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure
ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow.
The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not
obvious to vision, their trees grew through it. I do not know whether I
heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline
on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The
farmers cartpath, which Ieads directly through their hall, does not in the
least put them out, —as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen
through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not
know that he is their neighbor, —not-withstanding I heard him whistle
as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity
of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on
the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of
no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were
weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing
was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum, — as of a
distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking.
They had no idle thoughts; and no one without could see their work, for
their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed
But I fiind it difficult to remember them, they fade irrevocably out of my
mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect
myself. .It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best
thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy If it were not
for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

That prettymuch sums it up for me. That’s why I live where I live,
where I have my roots.
And where I live is where Avalon, just down the road from Faery
got a lot written about it a very long time ago. What grew up in
the place where I now live was a large chunk of what is now called
the Mabinogion, and its related material like the Hanes Taliesin
and the legends of giants like Idris and so on. This of course was to
become the prototype of the Arthuriad and make no mistake, the
Arthuriad is, or was in its original conception, all about our
relationship with faery. …about living next door to a paradisal
state but not quite being able to get there.
I don’t think that Dion Fortune fully appreciated this when she
came to work on what has become known as the Arthurian
formula during the second world war. …but more of that in a
moment.
Dion Fortune was born just up the coast from where I am now In
Llandudno under the little Orme on Craig y Don. The rock of Don
whose children form the Faery Pantheon of the Mabinogi. Don is
the Welsh equivilant of the Irish Danu, of Tuatha de Dannan fame,
the elder race, the Feary race, who lived just beneath the surface of
the earth.
A generation before Dion Fortune a family called Lidell built a
house over on Llandudno’s west shore and they had a daughter
called Alice…. of Wonderland and Looking Glass fame. It was
Alice who came up with that phrase which encapsulates the
interaction of human and Faery kind.
“Well now that we have seen each other, “ said the unicorn “if
you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
Yes if you like” said Alice.
Neither Dion Fortune, Alice Lidell or Lewis Carrol knew
consciously that they were living almost on top of a vast network
of Bronze Age mines, a very real prehistoric evocation of the
underworld at the heart of which is Faery. In a chamber at the
heart of those mines archaeologists have found the skeleton of a
cat and some bramble seeds. As if a dead cat had been placed there
in repose surrounded by branches. Alice’s Cheshire cat perhaps.
We are never quite sure what our own Avalon’s are next door to,
like Thoreaux we sense its there, we feel the need to be aware of it
and interact with it, we know that its important…but…

This “next door to Faery” thing is of course something which the
Welsh bards were always banging on about and for those who
don’t know, this is how Avalon came to be.
The interaction between humankind and Faerykind was seen as
the interaction of red on the human side and white on the Faery
side. Hence here in this particular Avalon we have the red and
White springs and Gwynn’s hounds with white bodies and red
tipped ears and up in Snowdonia, Merlins red and white dragons
and so on. In the proto Arthurian Welsh literature everything that
comes from Annnwn has a form of the adjective white…gwynn or
gwen as its prefix or suffix…Ceridwen, for example the
underworld Cauldron Goddess, Gwynn ap Nudd our Faery friend
on the Tor, the Awen that flows from the underworld of Annnwn
is wen…white. Arthur’s ship that sails into Annwn is Prydwen
and most significantly Gwenhyfwr , Gunivere whose name means
something like white shadow.
The common or garden apple sums this up being reddish on the
outside and white on the inside. So when Merlin first emerges in
the Black Book of Carmarthen poems, he is in Cellydon, in a
wilderness, then at the first glimmerings of inspiration follow on
from post traumatic stress, Merlin Madness, he poetically invokes
“sweet apple trees”.
HOLDS UP APPLE.
The Welsh word for apple is and was AFAL …hence Afallon.
Today in Welsh we would say not Avalon but Afallon, but we are
assured by those who research such things that in the time of the
bards Welsh had not yet adopted the f as v and double l
conventions and it would, in the then Welsh, or more importantly
then Universal Brythonic British language which proto welsh was
have been pronounced AVALON.
FLIPCHART

In the first instance we had two worlds interlocked an archetypal
world which we may want to call either a heaven world or
archetypal world or star world, according to our taste in
terminology and a world of proto creation, a kind of paradise, an
evermore that was locked to it. Then comes our world.

Hence our famous Avalon Vesica Piscis.
But the important point is that you need to get into this (lower
Avalon) to get to this “Higher” Avalon.
The first paradisal world the sort of Eden or Tir nan Og or Annwn
or Faery which was locked to the starry worlds disappears at least
to our perception, rather like Atlantis once joined to Lemuria
supposedly disappeared. Just like the way that the Elves left
Middle earth and so on. All these things are ways in broad terms
of saying the same thing, as long as we don’t get too nitpickingly
literal about it. Metaphorically our Faery world, our world of first
creation disappears below the earth, into the underworld, as in
the somewhat convolouted account of the Tuatha de Danaan in the
Irish Book of Invasions. The only ways to and from it are lakes,
springs and so on. The Faery lady of Llyn Fan y Fach, for example,
comes out of a lake …like the Arthurian Lady of the Lake..,.she is a
Graig Annwn an ancient concept of welsh folklore literally a wife of
the deep, a wife of Annwn, a Faery woman. Other ways in are
caverns, or like the Irsh Bran, journeys across the sea, or into the
wild wood like Merlin or the Hobbits in Mirkwood or the mines of
Moria. Like Alice we have to force ourselves through narrow
circumstances and openings, the narrow opening that the vesica
piscis represents, to return to the area or the symbol. Like the
Grail, of first creation and thus to the womb or cauldron of the
creation to which we belong. Not least we have to force ourselves
through painfully narrow openings in rational consciousness and
fight a few personal dragons on the way..
This metaphor of going into the past beneath the earth to a land
that once was most logically explained best by our ancestors by the
old tomb as womb metaphor featuring prehistoric funerary sites.
Thus when the Faery Tuatha de Danaan went beneath the earth
the highest ramparts of their underearth kingdom stuck up in the
shape of Neolitic and Bronze Age sites, with Newgrange
representing the outer precints of the Sidhe of the Dgada himself.
In the Welsh literature Taliesin takes Arthur through the seven
Caers Annnwn and he calls them Caers or forts because he is using
a pun. Caers were defensive earthworks, mounds with a small
palasaide on top. Once abandoned they were just mounds of earth,
exactly like burial mounds..for which they could easily be
mistaken.
Again the images of squeezing oneself through narrow openings,
was a tomb womb one of going back to source which eminently
fitted that of Neolithic burial chambers, with their narrow
entrances opening out into womb like chambers being a deliberate
gynocological metaphor in their own time for going back to the
beginnings of things…that is the paradisal beginnings of things.
The caves into the Tor, notably at the White Spring where St
Collen confronted Gwynn would seem to sum it up. The Tor like
Newgrange or Cadair idris or whatever is a rampart of Faery that
sticks up from the underworld.
But the interesting thing with this in relation to Neolithic and
Bronze Age sites is that inner outer interaction, not least
interaction with faery is facilitated by a synchronisation of
PATTERNS. That is after all what ritual magic attempts to do on a
number of levels. Now the patterning of not a few Neolithic and
Bronze Age structures uses a fivefold geometry. There are the five
great trilithons at Stonehenge for example, lunar aligned stone
rows frequently use five stones. The underlying geometry of
circles like Moel Ty Uchaf were, as Professor Thom pointed out
pentagrammatical geometry and so on.
So we again look to our humble Avalonian apple as a way in as a
synchronisation of metaphorical patterns and cut it
CUTS APPLE.
And at the heart of the apple we find a natural pentagram.

This synchronisation of physical patterns to meet our near
neighbours in Faery reminds me of a tale that the late Anthony
Duncan once told me about a strange old vicarage he lived in.
Tony duncan lived in a rectory where one of his kids saw a little
man in a brown Habit. He asked his father “Do Franciscans wear
brown habits?”
“Yes” said Tony “But how big was he?”
“About three feet tall”
“Not a Franciscan” said Tony.
Later Tony saw the little man and the stairs diosappeared to reveal
a waterfall. The place was a gteway to Faery. The thing was that it
depended upona precise pattern. When furniture was moved it
upset the pattern and the gateway and the Faery man had to be
consulted if any such rearrangements were anticipated!
The bards elaborated such interactions with Faery. And its
something that I’ve elaborated I wrote a book called Merlin’s
Chess (available on cd in this very hall) which cites the importance
of Gwyddbywll that is chess or originally magical chess. Alice you
will remember becomes part of a chess game.
But when we look at the Mabinogi stories like the Dream of
Macsen Wledig and the Dream of Rhonabwy and the Lady and the
Fountain, there is a recurring theme of magical chess which is
played between humankind and Faery, not necessarily in the sense
of competing and winning and losing but to arrive at an equitable
pattern by which humanity and faery may have constructive cohabitancy.

This is also a theme in the Immortal Hour, although it was
dumbed down a bit in the operatic version that Dion Fortune saw
in this hall but again there’s an evocation of the well documented
Irish bardic use of magical chess to synchronise with faery. If you
use red and white squares 13 by 13 by the way, it works better
and forget the usual pieces, number of pieces and conventions of
modern chess.
Later on the Mediaeval Arthuriad of Mallory and so on, dumbed
down the faery thing and made it quite taunting when it did
address it. Thus Dion Fortune, without the benefit of the
schloraship and access that we now have talked about “the
pathology of non human contacts” when she talks Faery and when
she uses the word pathology we know that its something that she
disapproves of. Similarly when she comes to work on the
Arthurian Formula with Maiya Trenchell Hayes she talks about
Arthur being spoiled for Guinevere by his association with faery
women, failing to understand that Guinevere IS the faery woman.
Yet in this very hall and dancing on the Tor she was herself drawn
into Faery. Indeed she described herself as a changeling.
The Faery of the Arthuriad was not only a problem for Dion
Fortune. We find Tolkien justifying his own rewriting of British
mythology mythology in a letter to Milton Waldeman in 1951 and
saying:
“ Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful
as it is, it is imperfectly naturalised….
For one thing, it’s Faerie is too lavish and fantastical. For another
and, more
important thing, it is involved in and explicitly contains the
Christian religion. For reasons which I shall not elaborate, that
seems to me fatal. Myth and Fairy story must contain in solution
elements of moral and religious truth (or error) but not explicit,
not in the known form of the primary real world.”
I think that what he is saying is that the mainstream Arthuriad
latterly tried to shove its own world, a world of mediaeval
Christian dogma down the throat of Faery. It’s a view with which I
have a deal of sympathy and it’s a view echoed in the very ancient
story of the Faery woman of Llyn fan y fach
The standard Arthuriad of Mallory, which DF largely relied upon,.
. So even Tolkien, who was both a mythographer, a devout
Roman Catholic and a great traditionalist, found it completely
unsatisfactory to the extent that he had to write his own…so what
hope for the rest of us!
Certainly Faery can be a dangerous place with reports of many of
its denizens being either indifferent or hostile to humankind…and
who can blame them?
I was about seven when I first saw faeries. It was at a time when
my little world was becoming destabalised. My father had just
been recalled by the army with the prospect of fighting in Korea.,
my mother was naturally upset and distracted and worse than any
of that I had a little sister who had learned to walk . I saw light
outside the window one night and looked out and there on the
lawn beneath the cherry tree I saw them dancing. I had
unconsiously invoked them to restore the status quo of my little
world..
Whenever our world goes topsy turvey we go, as it were, to
Avalon as that stepping stone into Faery. Both individually and
collectively.
When the folksoul is anxious the search for faery…whether we call
it that or something else…flourishes.
In 1930’s Britain you didn’t have to be very perceptive to know
that the world was destabalising, that roots were being pulled up.
Faery has a lot to do with sovereignty, and the first little hiccup in
sovereignty was the abdication of the king. This was moreover a
king who went on to be sympathetic, as many of the english
nobility were, to the rise of Italian facism and German national
socialism. In what Churchill subsequently called the Gathering
Storm people who knew intuitively or otherwise about this
peculiar relationship between these two worlds of humankind and
Faery kind began to get down to work and as the storm broke and
the dark years between 1940 and 1944 the mythologies which
encapsulated Avalon as the next stop to Faery were reworked and
promoted.
In these years Maiya Trenchell Hayes DF’s one time mentor in
the Golden Dawn returned to work with her, to prompt her to
work on what became The Arthurian Formula….at the core of
which is humanity’s relationship with Faery…more of which in
a moment.
In 1940 Graves had returned from Mallorca and settled down in
Devon to write what he thought was going to be a work on Jason
and the Argonauts and instead began scribbling The Roebuck in
the thicket, which of course became the White Goddess. The
pillar of this rather rambling thesis is of course the early Welsh
material which later became the more universal Arthuriad.
In the same period Bligh Bond returned from America and for
some inexplicable reason settled in the shadow of Cadair Idris
actually by design or intuition in the hamlet which forms the
Arthurian polestar of terrestrial starmap and in the place where
the early Mabinogi and proto Arthurian material was preserved in
document form before being collated in the National Libray of
Wales at Aberystwth.
Bond’s return to the original Faery proto Arthurian Wales when
Britain stood to seriously lose her sovereignty may be starkly
illustrated by the fact that in the summer of 1940 my father was
being trained at Barmouth to be an officer whilst Bond was just
down the road at Llanelltyd. One night my father was called out to
man a roadblock and strongpoint about a mile and a half from
where Bond was living at the time, because it was thought that the
German operation Sealion for the invasion of Britain was actually
under way. Thank God it wasn’t
Tolkien came there too at intervals to write in a cottage some
several miles down the same valley. Throughout the war Tolkien
sent drafts of TheLord of the Rings to his son Christopher who
was serving in the RAF. ..in much the same way that DF was
sending out her war letters.
This was not and is not a new phenomenum. In perceived crisis
we move to Avalon and towards Faery .
The bards wrote much of the proto Arthurian material down in
and around Geoffrey of Monmoth’s time did so when Wales was
under seige from Norman England. Thus a way ofLife, not least
of a place where the original Brythonic language of Britain was in
essence still spoken was under threat. The late nineteenth, early
twentieth century Celtic revival promoted by Yates, Lady
Gregory, Lady Guest in Wales and not least William Sharp
followed on the heels of things like the Irish Potato Famine, The
Highland clearances and the supression of the Welsh language.
We turn to Avalon, to mythologies which evoke an interaction
with faery, as Tolkien does as the arthuriad does, as the welsh
Taliesin and Mabinogi material does, when our sense of place and
roots and wellbeing and certainty are under threat.
Presently, collectively there is an overwhelming feeling that we
have everything and yet we have lost something. It’s a background
anxiety which is taking neurosis to epidemic proportions. The
WHO reckons that a HUNDRED MILLION new cases of
depression are reported every year.
As the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis, herself a depressive, who held
down an executive position with the BBC, says:
As our standard of living improves, our capacity to enjoy it is
jeopardised. As the world becomes smaller, a terrifying internal
desert is opening inside us. The terrain is largely unmapped and
dangerous.
In other terminology this is the wasteland of Arthurian myth that
occurred because Arthur failed to make his accommodation with
Guinevere and with faery.
Somebody once said that for the inside to have meaning there
must be an outside and that’s the outside I’m here promoting
today. It doesn’t matter whether your Faery is all Cottingly and
goassamer wings or a bunch of gobsmacked Hobbits looking up at
the ethereal shining figure of Galadriel.
The question is “do you do the deal with the unicorn”, like Alice
did?

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