Origins

BOOK REVIEWS FROM ANDREW COLLINS

The cream of the crop in the Collins household reviewed
December 2007

Books reviews is something I don't usually do, although recently some transformatory titles have appeared from friends and associates which through merit alone I feel forced to mention.

Paul Weston MYSTERIUM ARTORIUS (Avalonian Aeon Publications, 2007). Paul Weston has been one of the most outspoken supporters of psychic questing for nearly 20 years, having been a member of my questing group when material for books such as THE SECOND COMING, THE SEVENTH SWORD and THE CIRCLEMAKERS was unfolding on a day-to-day basis. Since then he has moved to Glastonbury, given outrageous talks across the town, and generally attempted to write the definitive history of psychic questing from his personal perspective - this magnum opus being his ever promised AVALONIAN AEON, five years in the making so far! Frustrated that it is taking too long, Paul has culled stand alone material from the book and expanded on it for an intermediary publication entitled MYSTERIUM ARTORIUS, which rewrites the development of the Grail mysteries with reference to their impact on the Glastonbury legends. Not enough has been done in this area of study and so Paul's work is a major new contribution to the Glastonbury mythos, which includes a complete path working based on the cabbalistic resonations of the different Glastonbury holy sites as reflected in their Arthurian or Grail attributes.

For more information on Paul Weston's MYSTERIUM ARTORIUS and how to obtain copies click here.

 




Yuri Leitch, GWYN: Ancient god of Glastonbury and key to the Glastonbury Zodiac (Temple Publications, 2007). It was eighty years ago that British born artist and sculpter Katherine Maltwood decided that made up from the hills, roads, rivers and field boundaries around Glastonbury is a gigantic terrestrial zodiac, created by visiting Sumerian priests around 2800 BC. Its existence was confirmed, she said, by local folklore and legends, reflected within the rich symbolism of 'Perlesvaus', the 'The High History of the Grail', written by either a Knights Templar or monk at Glastonbury abbey sometime around AD 1210. Not unnaturally, other than die hard earth mysteries enthusiasts and Glastonbury's Avalonian residents, academics have never taken Maltwood's terrestrial zodiac seriously, its importance becoming even more watered down as each generation new examples are proposed in every corner of Britain. Yuri's GWYN redresses the balance by demonstrating that Katherine Maltwood was on to something with her representations of landscape giants, but that they were not necessarily part of a terrestrial zodiac. Figures such as the Dundon giant (which I myself was led to originally through psychic questing in 1983) and the Girt Dog of Langport reflect legendary characters in a localised myth cycle fixed upon the rising and setting of star constellations as viewed within the Glastonbury landscape in ancient times.

 The key to unravelling this mystery is the figure of Gwyn up Nudd (prounced 'nuth', or something similar), Glastonbury's resident hunter god and leader of the Wild Hunt before the Anglo-Saxons overran Wessex and ousted the remaining Britons to Wales, where they became Welsh, a word meaning 'foreigners'. Thus Glastonbury's role as a star temple and island of the dead was lost in the mists of Avalon, although this itself is a topic Yuri bravely challenges, showing that there is no verifiable historical evidence, literary or otherwise, to adequately show that Glastonbury was ever Avalon. A Celtic otherworld named Ynys Wittrim, meaning the Isle of Glass, yes, but not Avalon, as in the resting place of Arthur. Indeed, Yuri also tackles head on Joseph of Arimathea's place in Glastonbury's long history, demonstrating - as I did in a lost chapter for TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GRAIL (2004, click here to read) - that Christianity did not arrive at Glastonbury until the fifth century, and that claims by the abbey that Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury are simply medieval confabulations.

To pour salt on the wounds of all Avalonians, Yuri additionally shows that King Arthur's body was never discovered at Glastonbury, again something I realized when writing TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GRAIL. I think that trouncing Glastonbury's super legends, as Yuri calls them, is dangerous but vital if we are to move forward with our understanding of Glastonbury's prehistory, for at present no academic takes the town's claims seriously (other than England's great maverick historian extraordinaire Professor Ronald Hutton, but he's not in a position to do anything about it). GWYN is an example of a new breed of books on Glastonbury, which is kicking out the long-held sacred cows and paving the way forward for a new era of interest in Glastonbury's real past times.

For more information on Yuri Leitch's GWYN and how to obtain copies click here.

 

 

Nicholas Mann and Phillipa Glasson, THE STAR TEMPLE OF AVALON (Temple Publications, 2007). What a year it is for Glastonbury. Three great books that transform the way we think about the town's prehistory, with this superb offering from Nicholas Mann and Phillipa Glasson being the third and final one. This book is a marvellous addition to every bookshelf, for it ignores the Glastonbury super legends in favour of unravelling its ancient astronomies based on the presence locally of a suspected community of astronomer-priests around 3000 BC. It was at this time that a phenomenon only recently recognised was celebrated for the first time - this being the sun's slow ascent up the eastern slopes of the Tor at midwinter, the transitionary point of the year, when the dark days are once again overpowered by the return of the sun. Yet the bigger revelation is not itself this annual solar phenomenon, still visible today, but the location - the 'back sight' - from which it can be seen. This is an elevated area of land known today as 'the Mound' that crowns St Edmund's Hill, one of the four ancient hills of Glastonbury (the others being Wearyall Hill, Chalice Hill and, of course, the Tor).

Having realised the terrible importance of the mound on St Edmund's Hill, which is today more popularly called Windmill Hill (after a wind device of this description that once dominated the spot), the question becomes what else went on there in the past, for next to nothing is known about the site's archaeology. This is a fact not helped by the presence all around of modern housing estates, and the modern usage of the location as a public playing field. This then becomes the authors' journey. They shakily demonstrate that St Edmunds Hill was once thought by old residents to be hallowed ground, and point out that various old stones once existed in the area, according to early Ordnance Survey maps.

Cue the use of computer sky-programs - their controls set for the year 3000 BC. Revelation after revelation emerges as it seems that in this distant epoch the constellation of Orion, the hunter god, rose out of the Tor as viewed from the Mound on St Edmund's Hill around the November cross-quarter day. Suddenly, we are back to Gwyn up Nudd, which Yuri Leitch, Nicholas Man and Phillipa Glasson all have realized was personified in the heavens as the constellation Orion, making sense of his home being Glastonbury Tor, and his annual rule commencing at Samhain, modern Hallowe'en (who says I am against the significance of Orion in prehistory).

There are further star alignments which demonstrate not only the significance of the Mound as a major observation point in the local landscape, but also the importance in other star constellations by our Neolithic forebears. Aside from Orion, the stars of Crux - the Southern Cross - play a role, as do those of Cepheus the king and our old friend Cygnus, the celestial swan, which I have shown played a powerful role in the stellar theology within's Avebury ritual landscape 5,000 years ago (see THE CYGNUS MYSTERY). Avebury is just 50 miles from Glastonbury.

Perhaps the only gripe with THE STAR TEMPLE OF AVALON is something that Yuri has had heated discussions with Nicholas Mann and Phillipa Glasson about, and this is usage of the term Avalon to describe Glastonbury. As Yuri points out in his own book, Glastonbury is not Avalon - this was a medieval invention of the ever-ingenious monks of the abbey, who wanted to make the town the destination place of the wounded King Arthur after his fall in the Battle of Camlann. Yuri's current work shows clearly that Avalon has only ever been in one place, and that is Burgundy in France, where there is even an 'island' of 'Avallon'. From this Avallon came the great mystic and churchman Hugh of Avalon, known also as Hugh of Lincoln. He was an important visitor to Wessex during the very era in which the Glastonbury legends had their inception. Curiously, his totem was the swan, for it was said that such a creature accompanied him as a pet on his journey through life.

I adhere to the school that insists we should stop calling Glastonbury Avalon, even though I suspect that asking Avalon Tyres or any other local business to desist from using the name is likely to fall on stony ground.

What I like about THE STAR TEMPLE OF AVALON is that it smashes through the out-of-date Glastonbury super legends and gets down to the nitty gritty of the town's real past, which is one full of Neolithic temples, star lore and pre-Christian myth cycles, all long ago banished into exile in Wales.

Highly recommended.

For more information on Nicholas Mann and Phillipa Glasson's THE STAR TEMPLE OF AVALON and how to obtain copies click here.






Whitley Strieber, 2012: The War for Souls. I read the author's COMMUNION back in 1987, and there is little question that this book redefined the nature of the alien abduction experience. It brought the Greys, the term that came to be applied to the bug-eyed, big-headed alien on the book's cover, into popular consciousness like no other publication before. Indeed, henceforth it became unfashionable to see any other type of ET entity, including the now passe tall Nordic types; very 1960s, darling. I even caught an abductee changing pictures of his pre-COMMUNION alien entities into the now more acceptable Greys with their distinctive almond shaped eyes - very telling indeed.

More perversely, COMMUNION, and more importantly the true-life experiences of the author, who until the writing of the book had been a mainstream horror novelist, introduced the world to the dreaded anal probe - a triangular Toblerone-shaped device encountered during missing time. Such an impact did this device have on human consciousness that 'South Park' might never have made it past the pilot episode had it not conceived of a plot featuring alien greys and Cartman having an annal probe, which then opens to become a homing device for the aliens.

Such thoughts might make it a little difficult to take seriously anything what Whitley Strieber might write post COMMUNION. But that book touched a nerve with thousands of people who have experienced strange nocturnal visitations from bedroom visitors and suffered inexplicable blinding lights or penetrating beams whilst trying to get a good night's kip, my own wife included. There was something awkwardly believable about the events described in COMMUNION, and so people did take him seriously, making it an outright bestseller worldwide and spurning a whole generation of alien art, merchandise and pulp paperbacks.

Since 1987 Whitle Strieber (pronounced StrEEber, I know, I got it wrong on stage recently) has written various sequel books including TRANSFORMATION (1988), THE SECRET SCHOOL (1997) and the recent novel THE GREYS (2006), which pulled no punches about the truly dark nature of the alien encounter, and yet was still a 'New York Times' bestseller.

Whitley Strieber, along with his wife Anne, have also run the syndicated radio shows Dreamland and Unknown County for many years, to which I have been a frequent guest. Indeed, my friendship with Whitley goes back to the early 1990s, when we were first introduced by Graham Hancock. Recently, I was honoured to spend time with him and Anne, along with Dreamlands presenters William Henry and Linda Moulton-Howe, at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and I have to say I found myself mesmerised by his personal take on human interaction with what he calls 'the visitors'. I now find it difficult to actually dismiss such claims, having instead concluded that in the alien abduction the scientific and medical communities have a huge headache ahead of them attempting to sort out this contradictory and often confusing subject in future generations (so why not start now).

Spurred on by Whitley's wisdom in these areas, I purchased and read his latest novel 2012: THE WAR FOR SOULS. Now, most people look upon the coming events of 2012 as transformatory for human coinsciousness - life changing even, despite the fact that on paper we are looking at little more than the cessation of the Maya's roughly 5000-year Baktun calendar cycle, and an alignment between the midwinter sunrise and the centre of our own galaxy the Milky Way, as viewed from the earth. What will happen beyond the gathering of literally 100,000s of people at ancient and sacred sites worldwide on 21 December 2012 is anyone's guess, leaving Whitley to give his own take on the subject. Yet his dark apocalyptic vision for this day is not going to be to new age tastes, even if it is just a novel. Floating the idea of gateways between parallel worlds gradually opening around this time to allow trafficking between three in particular, he envisions mysterious plasma light forms working on behalf of lizard-like entities sucking out the souls of human beings, leaving them no more than mindless extras in a George A. Romero zombie film as they shuffle towards their ultimate doom as food fodder in another dimension - not a nice vision of the future.

What makes the book so unique is that in one of the three worlds featured - our own - the main character is a flawed writer named Wiley Dale who is clearly Whitley Strieber himself - his family life and very real past problems being laid bare to the reader. He becomes the conduit between the parallel worlds, writing about the other two as they gradually collapse into his own. It is a brilliant and unique writing standpoint, made all the more pertinent by recent announcements that parallel worlds do exist. How much we can interact with them is still a matter of debate, but the growing number of mystery beasts and strange entities roaming our world tends to suggest it is more than we care to believe (check out UFO CRASH IN BRAZIL (2005 and not a 'crash' at all) by Roger K Leir and THREE MEN SEEKING MONSTERS by Nick Redfern (2004), both of which are fantastic reads and show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the veils between this world and the next are thin indeed). Worries that H P Lovecraft might have been right when he wrote about the Great Old Ones being banished to a parallel world where they ever await their return now seem chillingly real indeed. In all, a fabulous book, and one which shows that the author is not some new age guru pandering to the wants and needs of UFO believers, but is at the cutting edge of human understanding when it comes to interaction with life in parallel existences. Excellent stuff.

For more information on Whitley Strieber 2012: The War for Souls and how to purchase copies click here.

Origins