The Way of Awen: Journey of a Bard

Kevan Manwaring

O Books UK £14.99 / US £29.95

 

Despite thousands of years of adaptation, the archetypal muse of ancient Greek myth remains just as diverse, mysterious and eternally diffuse. But isn’t this exactly as it should be?

    While the source and nature of inspiration, whether leading to artistic or scientific genesis, may still puzzle us, the 21^st-century quantum world-view, revealing the participatory structure of all energy fields, including that of our own consciousness, provides us with a new paradigm for creativity.

    As Kevan Manwaring says, in one description, the ‘way of awen’ - ‘awen’ being the Welsh word for poetic inspiration - is ‘joining in the dance of creation’, but following your own muse rather than the crowd.

    Could there be any better metaphor for the flow of inspiration into the human imagination than the quantum realm, which is quite magical in its "dance" of unpredictability and indeterminacy. To be inspired is surely to connect with that divine, potent, cosmic energy, replete with potential and creativity, that surrounds all of us.

    Historically, the notion of transcendence has been present in the description of awen as the divine inspiration of bards in the druidic tradition. And this latest work from Kevan, a novelist, poet, storyteller and teacher, and a former Bard of the city of Bath, is all about living life creatively along this venerable path.

    Few writers have done more than Kevan over the years to inspire people to unlock their creative potential. Building on the foundation of his The Bardic Handbook (2006), he now explores the journey the bardic initiate must undertake. This training took 12 years in the ancient bardic colleges, but here the course is telescoped into 12 months, or lunar cycles, using the legend of Welsh bard Taliesin as a touchstone for the stages of development towards self-actualisation.

    The second part of The Way of Awen comprises insightful and often-revealing extracts from Kevan’s journals and notebooks, detailing some of the highways and byways of his own bardic journey over two decades. Thus, unlike The Bardic Handbook, this new book is not a manual but a personal, intuitive account based on the authenticity of Kevan’s own experience and ‘response to the awen’.

    More bards are needed to bring healing and hope to the world with their words and music, he says, so the training process needs to be speeded up. ‘In an age of climate change, peak oil and geopolitical tensions we need validated bards working in communities now, not in several years time,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow may be too late.’

    See Bards and Druids page for more about Kevan

　

 

The Dark Man: The Shadow That Follows Us All

Deborah Wells

O Books UK £11.99 / US $24.95

 

This is an intelligent and perceptive guide to dealing with the dark side of our personalities or, in the terms of the psychologist Carl Jung, confronting one’s Shadow, upon whom Deborah Wells draws deeply, along with Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, ancient mythology and Clarissa Estés, the American poet and Jungian psychoanalyst.

    According to Deborah, the Dark Man - the ‘man in the long black coat’ - can be ghoul or guide, and many things in between, but is far from simply being evil personified, as he is able to bring messages of reassurance, direction and hope.

    This dark spectre, known often also as Hades, Set, Pluto, the Bogeyman, Lucifer or simply Death, has always accompanied the human race, with misunderstandings and falsehoods surrounding him resulting in untold anguish and suffering. He arises from our unconscious, taking many forms, one imagining him, for example, as the onset of fear or anxiety, some indeterminate frightening or threatening presence, a tempter or a dark-mood inducer.

    A writer and teacher who lives in Yorkshire, England, Deborah considers who or what the Dark Man may be, the forms he can take, the environment in which he is found, the work he performs and the role he might have in your own life. She stresses that the Dark Man is neither abstract phantom nor fairytale demon but a powerful, living entity which is a fundamental part of us and our world, whether we regard him as an archetype, a law of nature or an old god. She wants to open our eyes to this universal phenomenon so that we can restore our ‘natural balance’ by engaging with him.

    Deborah feels sure we all have at least one ‘Dark Man’ experience to recount, but I suspect many of us have ‘Dark Woman’ encounters we could describe, too, which can be traced through to the Kali, Hecate or Medusa myths. Jung posits the Terrible Mother archetype, for instance. I, for one, can testify to this, so perhaps Deborah could write a sequel!

    However, as Clarissa Estés writes wisely in her poem Abre La Puerta, in Theatre of the Imagination, which seems to refer to such transformational encounters: ‘All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below.’

    In a strange way, we need the Dark Man in order to see the light.

 

 

Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms

John Ayto

Oxford University Press UK £9.99 / US $16.95

 

Stepping up to the plate can be a walk in the park if you know your onions!

    Here in the third edition of this indispensable volume are explanations of more than 6,000 sayings, similes, proverbs and phrases - an increase of nearly 700 over the previous edition of 2004 - from contemporary English and around the English-speaking world, both modern and historical.

    It’s a fresh look at the colourful expressions – sometimes quirky, sometimes profound - that make English the rich and intriguing language that it is, and it’s based on Oxford’s language monitoring, the world’s largest dictionary research programme. Many entries include additional features that give more detailed background on the idiom in question, such as the examples above.

    Did you know that ‘flavour of the month’ originated in a marketing campaign in American ice cream parlours in the 1940s, when a particular flavour would be specially promoted for a month at a time? That ‘off the cuff’ refers to the rather messy practice of writing impromptu notes on one’s shirt cuff before speaking in public? That to be ‘taken aback’ was adopted from nautical terminology that described a ship unable to move forward because of a strong headwind pressing its sails back against the mast?

    The book features a handy thematic index so that idioms can be easily found by topics such as crime and punishment, love, secrecy and sex. 

 

 

Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint
John Cornwell
Continuum £18.99

 

With the impending beatification and probable canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-90), and Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK this September (2010), this is a timely and instructive work which draws a warts-and-all portrait of a ‘literary workaholic’, and celebrates arguably the greatest writer on modern religion in the English language.

    When Newman’s grave was excavated in 2008, with a view to his remains being transferred to a more auspicious location for public veneration, pending his possible canonisation, no human remains were found.

    Newman, following the dictum ‘dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return’ had seen no reason to delay the process, and so had given instructions that his grave - in an oratorian burial ground in the Lickey Hills in north Worcestershire - should be filled with a rich mulch to accelerate the process of decomposition.

    Neither were any remains found of Father Ambrose St John, the lifelong friend and companion with whom Newman had been buried in accordance with his dying wish. St John had died 15 years before.

    Now that one of the two celibate priests was destined for sainthood, media speculation was revived about their relationship. Naturally, there were suggestions that Newman was gay, pitching him into the media spotlight after several generations of neglect, and ignoring the spiritual implications of his burial demands. Cornwell tackles the question of Newman’s sexuality in some depth - the relationship with St John is described as ‘passive’.

    Cornwell promotes Newman as a key religious influence for the 21st century, arguing that his greatest gift to the Catholic clergy could well be the example he set in his own priestly life. At a time when the Catholic ministry is in crisis, Newman can show how a priest can live a celibate life while enjoying a mature same-sex relationship.

    Newman’s literary output was prodigious: theology, philosophy, poetry, history, sermons in their hundreds, fiction, hymns - his letters fill 32 volumes - and James Joyce regarded him as England’s greatest prose writer.

    After a number of substantial Newman biographies in the last century, Cornwell, an award-winning journalist and author, and an objective historian of the modern Catholic Church, offers a concise and more accessible account of the saintly but controversial scholar who was once dubbed ‘the most dangerous man in England’ by the Vatican.

    Newman’s credo was to seek and follow religious truth wherever it led, causing his conversion to Catholicism at age 44 - and his subsequent vilification by Protestants. It wasn’t until Newman explained himself in his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita. Sua, one of the great spiritual classics of modern times, that he freed himself of accusations of dishonesty.

    He had renewed the spirituality of the Church of England, and influenced the reforming spirit of the Catholic Church. One of the earliest Christian supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution, he stressed the role of conscience over authority. A complex character who, doubtless paradoxically to some, was able to represent doctrine and dogma as well as innovation, Newman brought many new ideas to the Catholic Church.

    With continuing disagreement in the Catholic Church over reform, Cornwell’s book may be seen as controversial in some quarters because of its view of Newman as a dissenter, despite his being championed by the Pope in recent times. Newman was always clear that until change in the Church was fully embraced by the people, then it could not become doctrine.

 

 

Echoes of the Goddess A Quest for the
Sacred Feminine in the British Landscape

Ian Allan £19.99

Simon Brighton and Terry Welbourn

 

Is the earth goddess trying to return to guide us once again? The arrival of this beautifully illustrated and deeply researched book is itself evidence of the re-emergence of the archetypal figure from the depths of our collective psyche where it has long lain submerged.

    The phenomenon might be seen as part of the response, exemplified by the “green” movements, to severe threats to the ecosphere: psychological discomfort caused by destruction of the environment could be re-activating the symbolic deity. Some are now hearing and heeding the call of the goddess behind her “echoes”.

    Of course, the expression “Mother Nature” is still used affectionately in relation to our natural environment, but we have largely lost the original reverence for the earth and have ceased to acknowledge the Great Mother, or “great provider”.

    Ancient peoples, however, did honour the goddess, and it is the aim of Simon and Terry (pictured right and below, respectively) to show how the monuments and artefacts our distant ancestors left behind provide evidence of this, from holy hills, wells and shrines to stone circles and underground chambers, ecclesiastical buildings and folklore, legends and fairytales - all of which are found to have links to the worship of the divine feminine and reverence for the earth spirit.

    Terry and Simon wanted to find out what happened to the earth goddess after she was toppled from her lofty role under the patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition. How was it that the old religions became synonymous with evil and the sky became heaven and the earth became hell as Christianity took hold - yet why are Christian churches often built on pagan sites, and why do so many contain pagan imagery?

    These are the kinds of question they tackle, and they conclude: “Even after centuries of marginalisation, the goddess has remained with us – and she has now found new ways of asserting herself.”

    Inspiration for the book can be traced to a chance visit that Terry and Simon made to the Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire nearly 20 years ago when, “fuelled by awe and 6X beer”, the pair chatted with locals and visitors and learned about Druids, ley lines - and the mythic Great Mother for whom their five-year quest involved travelling the country to discover the significance of the ancient goddess and the earth spirit in pre-Christian Britain.

    Along the way, individually, they had contributory projects: Terry photographed almost every significant prehistoric monument in Britain and contributed some of the photos to The Modern Antiquarian, Julian Cope’s 1998 guide to megalithic sites, and Simon wrote a book about the Knights Templar, published in 2006, and contributed photos to the illustrated edition of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

    Thus the wide range of Echoes of the Goddess is partly accounted for by the authors’ own areas of knowledge and, they say, it generated “moments of real insight and epiphany” as they compared notes and set out on their mission.

    On the first page of the first chapter, we find, significantly, a picture of the High Street at Glastonbury with a “Goddess Temple” display board, illustrating how the modern “goddess movement” has found a natural home in the town, the centre of Britain’s “New Age” spirituality.

    This timely and revealing book, which provides many new insights into pagan art and ritual, enables us to see Stone Age and other heritage sites, medieval churches and even the landscape itself, in a new light, and encourages an understanding of our ancient forebears' oneness with the natural world.

    And to aid the curious traveller, there’s the useful addition of a chapter-by-chapter gazetteer with map references of key goddess locations.

    Terry Welbourn is a graphic designer from Grantham, Lincolnshire, who is now writing a biography of the archaeologist and psychical researcher T. C. Lethbridge, and Simon Brighton has an MSc in forensic psychiatry and lives and works in West London.

 

 

 

Waking from Sleep: Why awakening experiences
occur and how to make them permanent

Steve Taylor

Hay House £10.99

 

Less than a year after publication of Colin Wilson’s Super Consciousness: the Quest for the Peak Experience, comes this work on the same subject, although, surprisingly, there is only one (indirect) mention of Wilson, the key pioneer in the field over the past four decades, and Taylor’s title even has hints of Wilson’s The War Against Sleep, of 1980, about the psychological theorist George Gurdjieff, who has no mention at all but who was crucially concerned with human “awakening”.

    Having said that, Taylor has written a valuable and very readable book with a new and important moral slant on the “awakening experience” – the “epiphany” or “peak experience” - those rare ecstatic moments of inner freedom, of acute delight, when one suddenly awakes, as if from sleep, from the restrictions of normal, everyday consciousness and experiences overwhelming affirmation of life and of the universe, and moves closer to selfhood, that quality that constitutes one’s individuality.

    Taylor, a researcher in transpersonal psychology at Liverpool John Moore’s University, explores the ways in which humans have induced these experiences through history, including meditation, sex, sport, drugs and sleep deprivation, how they can occur spontaneously through nature and the aesthetic experience, how heightened consciousness was natural to some past peoples, and still is in places, and how we might make “wakefulness” our normal condition once again.

    Like Wilson before him, Taylor helps us to understand the mechanisms of these vital experiences, and how they may point to our future beneficial psychological development on the evolutionary spiral: “In higher states of consciousness, we glimpse the future of evolution,” Taylor says, echoing Wilson precisely.

    We carry the evolutionary process forward and help to make the universe more conscious of itself – Jung’s “myth of meaning” – and, indeed, evolution does seem to be impelling us to wake up. It has been argued that, throughout evolution, there have been emergent properties in the brain and in consciousness with underlying biochemical explanations. It may be that such novel properties are developed in the brain at a certain stage of complexity, and that the increasing incidence of the peak experience is a demonstration of one such faculty, with the purpose of developing brain functions to a higher level.

    The danger is, though, that our overdeveloped egos might prevent us getting any further along the evolutionary path, Taylor warns. Thus he introduces to the subject a timely moral imperative which should be taken account of urgently - that we need to wake up on behalf of the human race, the world and “the whole evolutionary process that has taken life from the first single-celled amoeba to the astoundingly complex creatures with a hundred-billion-celled brains such as us”.

    The medium is indeed the message, and Taylor does us no small service by drawing attention to it in these times of moral crisis.

     Throughout the history of literature, art and philosophy, not to mention religion, there are references to and examples of the life-changing power and value of the awakening experience – particularly in the past 200 years, the antennae of mystics and poets have twitched vigorously to it. Now the rest of us need to catch up.

 

 

Destination of the Species:
The Riddle of Human Existence

Michael Meacher

O Books UK £9.99/US $19.95

 

The first thing I feel I must say about this book from the MP for Oldham West and Royton is that, strictly speaking, the title should be Origination of the Species, as only the final six pages approach the question, implicit in the title, of “where are we going?”

  I realise that this would not have been such a saleable title - it obviously lacks the pull of the prophetic - but Meacher is no oracle and does not offer an answer to the question other than to suggest that our salvation lies in spirituality, an “emergent property” of evolution which has been neglected. This is hardly a new idea.

   However, taken as a concise treatise on the evolution of the universe and the origination of the human species within it, this makes for an excellent handbook, hubris-deflating in the conclusion that humans are not the pinnacle of evolution, but “one stage along the way in a ceaseless process, just one species among many, with intelligence too little matched by wisdom and self-restraint for our own good”.

    Meacher qualifies this by saying that we are nevertheless a key part of an overarching cosmic plan, citing the recent concept, which has entered both scientific and theological thinking, of a creative universe reflecting spontaneous transition to higher complex states driven by underlying cosmological organising principles - indeed a “cosmic blueprint” which the universe is self-realising as it develops.

    Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Meacher demonstrates that, throughout evolution, there is no evidence of steady progress towards the “human apogee”, of a preordained plan, and that we are here fortuitously. He might have considered how human consciousness creates objective existence and meaning, and how it is also a spiritual function with the potential for the kind of self-transformation which he regards as vital to solve the world’s problems.

   The book, he says, is the result of more than a decade of musing on the question of what he really believes about human existence, why we’re here, and what is the purpose of the universe. In this, he has drawn exactingly on the latest developments in the fields of science, philosophy and theology, “sceptically searching”, and commendably avoiding the promotion of the views of science or religion, even concluding that the two spheres are mutually complementary. For this, the book is well worth reading, but don't expect a big pay-off at the end!

  

 

Celia and the spirit of the Sinixt

 

If you listen to the voice of your intuition, your inner guide, says author Celia Gunn, amazing things can happen.

    Indeed they can – and do. In 2010, a Canadian film will be released based on Celia's 2006 book, A Twist in Coyote's Tale, telling the remarkable story of how she played a leading role in helping a group of Native American people restore their ancestral burial grounds.

    Sharing in a shamanic tradition, it was a spiritual journey for Celia (pictured) which she describes as "the most profound experience of my life".

    The Sinixt, or Arrow Lakes, tribe were the first Native Americans in Canadian history to ask for the bones of their ancestors to be returned to them from a museum. And from 1987-93, Celia joined them in their struggle to have the remains returned to their ancient burial ground.

    They were successful, but the film, with a working title of The Bone Game, a docu-drama being completed by Frog Mountain Films in British Columbia for first showing in spring 2010, also highlights the continuing fight of the Sinixt to overturn a ruling made by the Canadian government in the 1950s that they were an extinct people.

    In the film, Celia, who lives near Bath, England, is played by an actress, but appears in an interview at the end. "For anyone to have a film made about a part of their life is a most amazing thing," Celia told me. "I can't really believe what's happening. It's really exciting. The film company have added the option into my contract to go on to make a full-length feature film if they can generate interest through the docu-drama.

    "But there are very big issues at stake here, so big that it puts a lid on any egotistical glamour kind of feeling I might have. In these matters concerning indigenous peoples, the most effective way to have any result is to raise public awareness about great injustice, and that can put pressure on the government to do the right thing, much more than any political or legal process."

    The film was very important because of the battle by the Sinixt to have the extinction label removed. In 2005, the grand-daughter of the Sinixt head man was the first of the tribe to be born in the ancestral lands in more than a century but, in the eyes of the Canadian government, she did not exist. "And to have a voice when you are considered extinct is extremely difficult," said Celia.

    How The Bone Game came to be made is an extraordinary story in itself. In 1993, just before Celia returned to the UK, she had a silver ring made by a jeweller in Nelson, British Columbia, as a gift for her husband-to-be, Anthony Thorley.

    Unusually, it was in the design of a prehistoric henge and, when Celia returned to Canada in 2006, just after her book was published, she visited the jeweller, an American, Max Frobe. It turned out that not only had Max and his wife Virginia taken part in a Sinixt protest in 1989, but they now ran Frog Mountain Films, and jumped at the chance of filming Celia's book.

    "It's a lovely story, how this film came into being," said Celia, "of how spirit works, and how if you learn to follow your impulses and heed the voice of your intuition, which is your inner voice, the most extraordinary things can happen."

     A Twist in Coyote's Tale (Archive Publishing, 2006) is available at £16.99, paperback, ISBN 978-0-9542712-5-1. See Resources page for link to Celia's EarthSkyWalk website where you can find out about her current activities.

 

Archive Publishing £8.95 

 

Celia Gunn’s new novella is an extremely potent effusion, both romantic and erotic, which tells of a life-changing encounter between a young Englishwoman, Kathy, and Joe, an American Navajo Indian.

    Anyone who has read Celia’s remarkable autobiographical work, A Twist in Coyote’s Tale, will see where her inspiration lies. A Dark Wind is set in Northumberland where Celia grew up, and the background to it is a film crew on location for a movie about Lancelot, the champion, rescuer and clandestine lover of Guinevere, in the aftermath of Arthur’s death.

    The Arthurian legend - some researchers argue Arthur was based in the North of England and not in Wales or the West Country - forms an emblematic counterpoint to the taut, psychological realism of the book’s main theme. Altogether, it’s an audacious contrivance but it draws the reader deeply into the strange and sometimes malefic alchemy of the cross-cultural relationship of Kathy and Joe. Mythopoeic imagination and a kind of tough sentimentalism - if that’s not too oxymoronic a phrase - lift the narrative into heady realms.

   Significantly, for me, the principal characters evoke the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the hierosgamos or “chymical wedding”, where the soul mediates between body and spirit. Likened to the storm and the rainbow, the couple enact the mysterium coniunctionis through the spiritual water represented by the sea, which stands for the life principle and marriage-maker between man and woman.

   This is a memorable and mystical love story which functions both symbolically and viscerally - cascades of striking similes scorch the imagination like sparks from a flint - and envelopes the reader richly in the renovating power of myth.

 

Existential Criticism: Selected Book Reviews

Colin Wilson

Pauper’s Press £14.95

 

Visitors to Mysterious Planet will be aware of the connection to Colin Wilson, the prolific author, critic and thinker who has been in the forefront of the pantheon of New Age science and philosophy for the past four decades.

   But Wilson is also the founder of the optimistic “new existentialism”, an offshoot of which is the existential criticism of which he has been a proponent for half a century, and which requires both close reading of a literary text and insight into the psychology of the author.

   Edited by Colin Stanley, Wilson’s bibliographer, this is a lively and rewarding selection of about 30 book reviews written by Wilson throughout his career and which exemplify his unique and consistent method. Here we find immensely entertaining and insightful reviews of, to name a few, Kingsley Amis, Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E M Forster, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells and Oscar Wilde.

   Wilson rejects Derridean attacks on the “metaphysics of presence” in favour of a humanistic criticism which elucidates an original meaning, or centre, of a novel which can be approached, and sometimes reached, through perceptive reading. The standard of value of existential criticism is existence, the opposite of the limiting personality.

   It is ironic, to say the least, that Wilson, who was probably the first in the 20^th century to spell out a literary theory of any kind, should have been swamped by the multi-faceted explosion in literary theorists from the 1970s who failed utterly to take him into account.

  The turn to theory in academia was the revolution, and not the techniques of existential thinking which Wilson said he hoped would become commonplace in England and America when he wrote his seminal essay on existential criticism which appeared in the The Chicago Review in the summer of 1959 – this was reprinted, with slight amendments, in his 1965 book, Eagle and Earwig (in fact, Wilson’s first reference to existential criticism came in an article on Aldous Huxley in The London Magazine in 1958).

   As an ideas-led critic, rather than a text-led one, Wilson stands in the illustrious line of Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, George Eliot and Henry James, all of whom tackled the big general issues affecting literature which also came to be the concerns of critical theorists in the late decades of the 20^th century.

   Wilson believes that existentialism is the key to the creative development of literature. While his theory embraces humanistic formalism, it takes it up another notch - to evaluate literature by assessing it in terms of its capacity to satisfy the depths of human need, to clarify the image of "what we are yet to become" on the evolutionary spiral. Wilson wants to know what, fundamentally, an artist is saying, what concepts of human purpose lie in the basic assumptions of the work, and how far the work succeeds in revealing existence as potentiality.

    Indeed, a deeply demanding form of criticism, but one which is just as relevant in today’s world as when it was originally conceived, if not more so.

 

 

 

    Rodney, from Stanthorpe, Queensland, tells me he began writing the book in the 1970s and that it’s a “total obsession” with him. “In the last three years, my ideas have taken off like wildfire and my simple goal is to share them,” he said. And that’s what he’s doing now. A New Earth and a New Universe can be downloaded free by visiting the website at free-ebooks.net and clicking on Philosophy.    
    “The ideas are overwhelming and very puzzling to me if I regard the world as four-dimensional and limited to the way things appear to my bodily senses and personal experiences,” said Rodney. “But I’ve been adapting for decades to the idea that a fifth dimension truly exists in the world and universe, and that it’s responsible for universal unification and the zero separation of all things (as well as the parts of each thing) on Earth, in space and in time. I now accept the concept totally, and belief in it is fundamental to who I am.”
    A New Earth and a New Universe is a ground-breaking and mind-stretching read which I would recommend to anyone interested in where the latest directions in science and philosophy may be taking us.