Multi-Dimensional Life
A writer on the process of writing
by Moyra Caldecott
Published by Mushroom eBooks at Smashwords
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Copyright © 2007 Moyra Caldecott
Moyra Caldecott has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.
First published in 2007 by Bladud Books, an imprint of Mushroom Publishing
First ebook edition published in 2007 by Mushroom eBooks
This ePub edition published in
2012 by Mushroom eBooks,
an imprint of Mushroom Publishing, Bath,
BA1 4EB, United Kingdom
www.mushroom-ebooks.com
Also available in paperback (ISBN 978-1-84319-549-8)
All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Contents
3 – Hebrides and Iceland in the Middle Ages
I: The Weapons of the Wolfhound
II: Hatshepsut: The Daughter Of Amun
III: Tutankhamun and the Daughter of Ra
7 – Anglo Saxon Britain (Seventh Century)
8 – Stories of the West Country
I: The Green Lady and the King of Shadows
III: The Waters of Sul / Aquae Sulis
10 – Biography and Autobiography
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Introduction
We live in a multi-dimensional Universe subject to multi-dimensional Time, and to try to record one day of one’s life comprehensively is almost impossible.
I can say I was born on 1 June 1927, but what does that mean? Not only is the date subject to question because of the arbitrary nature of our dating system and the changes it has undergone through history, but what forces and events since the beginning of the Universe went into the drawing together of that particular sperm and that particular egg to bring me to birth on that day? In writing an autobiography should I therefore start only with my most recent ancestors? But several books could be written about one event alone in the lives of my paternal grandparents. What made them leave a comfortable life in Victorian England to emigrate to the wilds of Southern Africa in 1880? What hardships did they endure landing a few months after the bloody battle with the Zulus at Rorkes Drift? But even if I could write adequately about this one event, it would only be one thread in a complex weave of events, relationships, joys, fears, loves and hates that made up their day-to-day lives, and subsequently influenced me in my own reaction to the world.
In my novel, The Tower and the Emerald (chapter 9) I tried to express something of the complexity of every given moment. The heroine, Viviane, is being guided by a Celtic monk towards enlightenment. She is sitting quietly, watching a river.
She listened to the birds... noted the sparkle of the water as it hurried over and between the rocks... the green of the bushes that hung over the far bank, some of them trailing branches in the water, continually buffeted...
Then she began to listen to the water...
She began to forget herself and hear only water sounds... complex... beautiful... a hundred different harmonies within the same song. The water spoke, liquid-tongued, lightly lilting each tale a hundred different ways...
She could have listened forever... but Brendan’s voice was calling her... cutting through...
‘What have you learned?’ he asked as she joined him.
‘I have learned that there are many ways to tell everything that is to be told, and that man’s language is clumsy and inadequate. It can tell only one tale at a time, and that tale only one way at a time.’
In this book I refer to the numinous incidents in my life several times, coming at them from different angles, illuminating them in different ways as I learn more through my progression as a writer.
The universe is not only made of matter, subject to the laws of physics, but is infinitely more subtle and complex, some levels of which we cannot even guess at, but which we know are in operation because we feel the effects. Consciousness is one of the most mysterious and powerful forces within it. Even if we distinguish between the three best known types of consciousness — the “sub-conscious” psychologists are so interested in; the “ordinary” consciousness we use to deal with the physical universe in our day to day lives; and the “Higher” Consciousness that we slip into in those moments of enlightenment when we seem to know more than we possibly can — we have not distinguished all the other levels and gradations of consciousness in existence... the consciousness of animals, insects, trees, plants, angels and all the denizens of the Otherworld, let alone the consciousness of the Mystery behind it all we call “God”.
It is not an aberration that most of the world’s teaming millions believe in some religion or other. It is a universal acknowledgement, however badly expressed, that we believe the universe is not only made of matter. Elaborate systems of gods and goddesses, angels, archangels, powers, thrones, devils and demons, saints and bodhisattvas are named and worshipped in an attempt to make sense of the feeling we have that there is more to the universe than the physical. There has to be more. Our experience tells us so. Our consciousness tells us so. But we cannot prove it with the limited criteria science has arbitrarily laid down for us. Nor can we prove it if our spiritual life hardens into dogma and from there into deceit.
We must always remember each event of our lives is not only taking place on the stage we see before us, but is part of a much greater drama we know very little about.
And Time? What makes us think there is only one type of time marching inexorably from the past, through the present, to the future, measured by reference to the relationship of earth and sun? I believe Time and reality are multi-dimensional and it is an impoverished life indeed lived only in one time and in only one reality.
Linear time is the one with which we are most familiar. Measuring this type of time has given our lives order and predictability. We mark birthdays and anniversaries. We make appointments. But it has constricted us and adds to our stresses and anxieties. Everything has to be fitted into the straight jacket of minutes and hours, weeks and months. And not everything can. Our bodies are subject to a more individual orchestration of time. Women talk of the biological clock when they realise they are getting too old to bear children, yet the menopause happens at different times to different women. One man of seventy climbs the Himalayas. Another of the same “clock” age can barely walk or remember. One child reaches puberty earlier or later than another.
I am told that over a period of seven years all the cells in our bodies die and are replaced. This means that as I am now, not a single physical cell in my body is the same as any I had when I left my mother’s womb. Yet why am I convinced I am the same person? I feel there must be more to me than the cells in my body!
Memory is also not restricted by linear time. In memory an event that took hours or years can be re-experienced in the mind in a flash. It has a continuing dynamic, continually upgrading as new experiences occur, changing and moulding according to new understandings and new needs. It cannot be understood only as a chemical or electrical discharge in the brain because it is too creative. I feel it is other than purely physical reality.
In most of my novels I presuppose reincarnation not as a certainty but as a possibility, even a probability. Like three-dimensional chess this adds an exciting complexity to our experience of Time.
In my novel The Ghost of Akhenaten (chapter 1) Mary Brown comments on a picture of the universe taken by the cameras on board the Hubble telescope, suggesting another way we might get the impression we have lived before.
‘We are just part of the choreography of that universe,’ she says. ‘We are, it is true, hurtling through space on the surface of a very small planet, but our consciousness is free of time and space. You can experience ancient Egypt as though it is present in your life now because you can see the bigger picture where everything that has ever happened still exists in some form. You are in a sense seeing two stars separated by millions of light years, simultaneously...’
Linear Time has no place in memory, nor has it in dreams.
Scientists tell us dreams occur in the few seconds when we are not fully asleep, or about to wake. And yet we have long and complex adventures in our dreams that seem to take hours, days and sometimes even years.
But our “subconscious” and our “Higher” Consciousness operate in our dreams. Things lurk in the subconscious for years, flowing like underground rivers in a complex cavern system. Some are temporarily blocked, only later to have their channels opened, while streams from other sources flow through and join at different places.
Our normal everyday consciousness is like water in a bucket on a conveyor belt of Linear Time — limited and constrained — neither aware of the dark streams that run through the subconscious, nor the great shining expanse of the ocean of the Higher Consciousness.
On the night of 19 January 2001, I was having a bad dream about searching and searching for the way home and at every point finding the way blocked or leading nowhere. I was getting frantic when my husband, Oliver, who died in 1989, appeared and said “Don’t worry. You are not lost. You just don’t know the way.”
Our dreams are an extension of our lives into another kind of reality and time. Not only do we collect the flotsam and jetsam of the day and examine it from a new angle, but I am convinced we receive messages from other worlds, other realities.
Centuries ago the writings of Virgil were used as a form of divination. The seeker after wisdom would open the text at random and interpret what was written there as a personal message. I use whatever method I can to access the infinite, whether it be dream, or far-memory or opening a book at random...
One day in 1993, some years after my husband Oliver’s death, I was feeling particularly nostalgic for him. I was in a second-hand bookshop in Queen’s Square, Bath, where he and I had had a happy time some years before.
I was sitting down while my friend was looking for a book. I was tired and didn’t want to get up. But across the room a book seemed to be ‘calling’ me. I couldn’t see its title and at last, impatiently, I rose, crossed the room and took it off the shelf. Its title was Hudibras. ‘What a coincidence’, I thought, because I was at that time writing a novel about King Bladud (The Winged Man) whose father was called Hudibras. I bought the book and walked out of the shop.
Later, sitting on a bench beside Bath Abbey, I opened the book to the title page and realised it was not about the ancient legendary King Hudibras at all, but was a book about Oliver Cromwell and the civil war in England by Samuel Butler, published in 1744. Meditatively I let the book fall open and my eye caught the words:
The news of Oliver’s death being brought to those who were met to pray for him, Mr Peter Skerry stood up, and desired them not to be troubled: ‘For (he said) this is good news... for being ascended into heaven ... He will there intercede for us and be mindful of us on all occasions...’
It couldn’t have been more appropriate for me to get this message at this time! I pondered how many time-lines had crossed to give me that message. The bookshop was one I had been to with Oliver years before when we were still living in London, only passing through Bath. I thought the book was about Hudibras, an ancient British king from the seventh or eighth century BC, about whom I was at that time writing, but it was about Oliver Cromwell millennia later and centuries before my own Oliver’s death. I was sitting outside Bath Abbey built in the thirteenth century, before the time of Oliver Cromwell, but on the site of a place sacred to the ancient people of Britain, possibly a temple built by King Bladud (the son of Hudibras). I was poised at the moment of opening the book in a timeless place raised on a cat’s cradle of time lines from different eras. Samuel Butler who wrote those words in the early eighteenth century could have had no idea what special message it would have for me, a woman in the late twentieth century. Good writing is always thus free from linear time — appropriate to every questing soul.
Medieval Christians under the guidance of Aquinas saw existence as a series of layers, almost like concentric spheres radiating from a central point — “that point being Eternity conceived as an infinitely concentrated singularity”. Present day scientists might claim this point as the point at which the Big Bang occurred which brought about the existence of the universe. (A mystical concept if ever I saw one!)
Eternity is not the same as Everlasting, but outside Time altogether. In it past, present and future are non-existent. We, as conscious spirit, have our essential being in that singularity. It thus may be possible in our lives, temporarily extended in Time and Space, to get a glimpse of what is in Eternity.
When my husband died I avoided asking him for help because I feared it would impede his progress in the Other World — might take him away from doing something else more important. And then I got a message ‘loud and clear’ reminding me that in the Other World there is no Time or Space. He does not have to come from somewhere else to attend to me — because he has never left, just changed.
Because we call it the other ‘world’ we think it is like this one — only insubstantial. Eternity, the After-life, has to be totally, unimaginably different. If we are to understand how God can be aware of every sparrow that falls, ‘He’ cannot be somewhere else looking on. He and the sparrow have to be simultaneously existent, outside Time and Space.
When people say they are living only in the present moment they are deceiving themselves. The present moment is made complex and magnificent by all the threads of multi-dimensional Time that are threaded through it. There is no naked present moment, except perhaps in Eternity.
One of the most important faculties of the human mind, Imagination, is the bridge between the Known and the Unknown. It flashes with images, metaphors and symbols that illuminate the deepest and the darkest secrets of Being.
Myths and legends are produced by the imagination when it is functioning at its most serious and profound level. The body is a finely tuned, immensely complex and efficient instrument, capable of experiencing much more that we commonly give it credit for — and one of its functions is at once to house the ‘growing point’ of the soul, and to protect it from the damage it might suffer if it were exposed to too much transcendent experience, too soon. The imagination tests out the ground beyond ourselves and allows us to explore the way ahead in symbolic form before we have to encounter it in reality. The imagination gives us myths and legends — those marvellous, subtle, complex vehicles of esoteric teaching — to prepare us for our future. In seeking their meaning we are meant to find the meaning of ourselves. (Crystal Legends, Introduction).
The greatest of the themes pursued by the Imagination through Mythic Time is the significant Inner Journey — the Quest of the Soul for Itself. One step could take seventy years or a split second. The Quest can be started when one is five years old, or eighty. It has nothing to do with Linear Time, yet is expressed in terms we are familiar with from Linear Time.
It takes various forms, and often the goal is reached in pursuit of something else.
In the ancient Irish tale of the Journey of Maeldun — the hero sets off to seek revenge for the killing of his father. After years of extraordinary testing adventures in rough seas and on strange islands, he meets the man who killed his father only to find that he has forgiven him, and so outgrown his need for revenge.
I did not realise it at the time, but during the writing of my books I was on a Quest. By mapping it now I hope I might make others aware of the complexity of every given moment, and encourage them to look out for signs and wonders in their own lives.
Chapter One: Bronze Age Britain
“Guardians of the Tall Stones”
which includes the trilogy:
The Tall Stones
The Temple of the Sun
Shadow on the Stones
and the sequel:
The Silver Vortex
I believe that the Neolithic Stone Circles found throughout Britain formed a grid of spiritual energy which linked and sustained the isolated communities which existed in the Bronze Age. Their power could be manipulated by the well-intentioned, as well as the unscrupulous.
I: The Tall Stones
The Tall Stones is the first of four books. It is set in a small, isolated community in Bronze-Age Scotland. Threatened by the evil designs of Wardyke, a corrupt and ambitious priest, the village finds its only defence in the courage of Kyra, a young girl possessed of amazing psychic powers. In order to overcome Wardyke and break his hold, Kyra forces herself to enter the forbidden Sacred Stone Circle, the spiritual heart of her village, and to invoke the great powers of that mysterious place — powers which she does not understand and cannot control.
The writing of the book:
As a child I had various experiences which I suppose could be put under the general heading of ‘psychic’. Moments of telepathy were not unusual for me, nor were sudden sensations of being distanced from my surroundings while powerful insights would come to me, well beyond my years. Sometimes I even felt I was slipping out of my body and could watch events from above. These last sensations (which I later was told were the beginnings of ‘astral travel’) I hated, for they were accompanied by panic that I would not be able to get back in and would die.
After those early years when the paranormal seemed normal to me, I embarked on a rigorous academic education which made me doubt everything that had happened. I enjoyed university and studied hard for degrees in English literature and philosophy, subsequently becoming a lecturer myself. In 1951 I married a very intelligent, rational man who had no time for ‘fuzzy brained’ thinking. Everything had to be proved scientifically or dismissed as nonsense or wishful thinking. Having grown up in South Africa and been sickened by the apartheid regime of the country, we emigrated to England in 1951 and there took part in many protests and rallies against oppression and injustice. We were also very active in the anti-nuclear movement. We had three children and very little money, and everyday life was not easy. But after my thirty-sixth birthday I began to notice that I was still having those strange, inexplicable experiences I had as a child — and no matter how much I tried to explain them away with my rational mind, I could not. After some time my husband began to be less dismissive and gradually opened his mind to the possibility that there might be ‘more things in heaven and earth’ ... He remained to the end of his days a wise observer supporting me in every way he could, while taking care not to take on any idea that seemed ridiculous to him after careful examination. For ten years he ran a publishing house, Wildwood House, with a friend, Dieter Pevsner, and published many books on complementary healing and alternative realities. Ideas excited him and he enjoyed exploring them, but he was always cautious of ‘channelled’ manuscripts. I remember he sometimes wore a badge that read: ‘Just because I am dead, doesn’t mean I’m smart.’
In my forties I suffered from severe and unstable angina and recovered dramatically and miraculously after sessions with Dennis Barrett, a spirit healer. This was perhaps a turning point for my husband — as it was for me.
When I was young I wrote a great deal without actually having enough experience of life to make any real contribution. I was driven by a most persistent desire to be a WRITER. It was not surprising therefore that all of my manuscripts were rejected. Looking back on it now I suspect I had to go through that frustration in order to learn how to write. Each manuscript was better than the last, but still the rejection slips came in. When my little daughter saw a fat packet come through the letter box, she asked me: ‘Are you going to cry, Mummy?’ I invariably did.
Finally, aged forty-seven, I gave up, burned my manuscripts and sold my typewriter. I experienced a wonderful feeling of release as though someone who had enslaved me had suddenly let me go. The burden of trying to be a WRITER had been taken from me. I could turn my attention to something easier.
And then on 23 July 1975 I had an experience that I can only describe as an initiation into what it really means to be a writer.
We were staying with our friends at Newton Hill, near Aberdeen in Scotland. I had angina at this time and was limited in the amount of physical activity I could manage. The pain that gripped my heart from time to time and the belief that at any time I could have a serious heart attack and die, heightened my awareness of everything around me and gave the life of my mind and spirit a daily intensity I had only had before in isolated visionary moments.
My daughter Rachel’s Norwegian friend, Elizabeth, staying with us for the summer, wanted to go horse riding. We took her to stables near Dyce and left her there for a few hours. Exploring the district to kill time until we needed to fetch her, we came upon an ancient stone circle on the top of a hill. The tall stones, threaded liberally with quartz crystals, overlooked forests on one side, and the distant gleam of the sea on the other. Oliver at once started sketching and Rachel wandered off. I sat down in the circle, at first noticing only the plants, the bird calls, the landscape ... and then my consciousness seemed to slip into another dimension — or time. It seemed to me I was part of an ongoing story. Invisible people were around me. I knew their names. I knew what they believed. I knew what they were doing.
When Oliver called me to leave I stared at him in bewilderment, struggling back to the twentieth century and my current persona.
When we returned to London I began to write my experience down. Rachel had picked up a little piece of granite lying within the circle and when I held it the story flowed almost without my having to think about it — as though the stone were transmitting in some way. When I put it aside I struggled for words. It became very important for me to record everything I had learned in the circle. I believed I was about to die and had been given a task by invisible beings that I must complete.
In fact I finished the first of the Quartet, The Tall Stones, in hospital, one long and lonely night after a heart attack. Years later, in 2007, I am still alive and the book is still in print.
My early novels had all been for adults, serious sociological studies about racial prejudice, dysfunctional families and pacifist issues. The last book I wrote, before I gave up, was for children, The Weapons of the Wolfhound. I had submitted it to be published and had almost forgotten it when it was accepted. It was my first published book and an advance copy of it was brought to me in hospital by Strat and Leonie on 1 April 1976. I will never forget the joy of holding it in my hand for the first time.
Rex Collings was interested to see my next book and I think he expected it to be for children. But I wrote it as it came and it can be read at any age. In fact I did not care if it was published or not. Since then I have rarely written a story that does not spring from a passionate and disturbing encounter with the numinous, the supernatural, the spirit-realms, and I know the difference between the slow struggle of writing with my own everyday competence, and the times when my pen is running away with me in a desperate attempt to keep up with thoughts that seem to be pouring in from a higher realm. I would not say I was ‘channelling’ to another person’s dictation, but rather responding to inspiration in a way that uses all the latent possibilities of my own extended consciousness.
The highest sages are at home in many realities, though none I think have ever penetrated to the Most High while still in this world. Most of us have moments when we slip from one reality to another. Some have bad experiences with regions below this one; others experience heights they never dreamed they were capable of. When we insist on the existence of only one reality (as most people do) and try to explain all our experiences in terms of that one reality, not only are we wasting our potential shamefully, but are in danger of becoming ill. The Tall Stones was the first story I wrote of any real significance. It came to me powerfully and strangely when I was not looking for it; it expressed things I didn’t know I knew, and it wouldn’t let me go.
My own experiences of other realities that I had previously been taught to dismiss as ‘coincidence’, ‘hallucination’, ‘chance’, etc. began to make sense as they were written down.
At first I was so excited to discover that I was right to believe that the life we have is multi-dimensional, that I rushed about sampling anything and everything that was connected with this ‘other reality’ — dowsing, astral travelling, telepathy, psychometry, mediumship...
And then I had a dream...
I was on a great ocean liner and we were expecting a visit from some Shining Beings from a Higher Realm. I was laying the table for the feast and excitedly helping myself to little portions from each of the bowls of delicious food I was carrying in from the galley. As a result I was violently sick and had to be put to bed, missing the visit of the Shining Beings altogether.
I knew when I woke that this was one of those ‘teaching’ dreams that stay with you until you have understood its message fully. I remembered every detail vividly. I knew what it was saying. I gave up rushing around trying to sample any and every possible psychic experience, and concentrated on what seemed to me to be my task, the one my whole life had been a preparation for — the writing down in easy story form the insights I had received and was still receiving.
I was having the most amazing and relevant dreams, and when I opened a book at ‘random’, with a particular question in mind, I invariably received an answer. Friends and strangers fed me information in apparently unrelated conversations, and I frequently felt I was slipping in time and experiencing other lives. Thoughts and ideas and knowledge I had had for years seemed suddenly to join together to make a significant pattern. In a sense I wasn’t learning anything new, but what I had known was being illuminated. It was as though I was looking at a familiar landscape for the thousandth time, but a sudden ray of sunlight lit up certain features showing their significance to me for the first time.
The angina made me almost an invalid, but I was living an active and adventurous life without ever leaving the house.
The one book grew into three, which have now been put together to form “Guardians of the Tall Stones”. A sequel, The Silver Vortex, brought the number up to four. The story would still not leave me alone. Quilla, the young bull leaper in The Tall Stones, appeared again in The Lily and the Bull as an aged seer. My novel, Daughter Of Amun, set in Egypt, is about the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, but Kyra’s daughter from the “Guardians of the Tall Stones” pursues her vocation as a priestess and a healer in that book too.
One of the things that has prompted me to believe that when I write these books I’m in touch with something beyond my ordinary self, is that I so often have confirmation after I have written something that it is indeed so.
Questioning why I had written so many ‘yogic’ ideas into Bronze Age Britain, particularly as the time I was writing about was probably before the time of the Vedas and the Upanishads, I read in the Bhagavad-Gita about ‘an imperishable yoga ... handed down ... in succession, by the king-sages from ancient times and yet lost, by long lapse of time, and having to be retaught...’
I believe in the cyclical nature of most things, including knowledge. A Greek scientist, Aristarchus of Samos, taught in the third century BC that the earth and the planets moved round the sun, yet for centuries afterwards people denied it.
Kyra’s experiences of spirit-travel, which in a fumbling and terrified way I had shared in my own life, I found described in Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrine by W.Y. Evans-Wentz (pub. OUP, 1935). ‘The art of going out from the body, or of transferring the consciousness from the earth-plane to the after-death plane, or to any other plane, is still practised in Tibet, where it is known as Pho-wa’. A reader of mine was shown a slab of stone in Australia by an aboriginal ‘wise man’, and told it was where the shaman in ancient times had prepared himself to leave his body so that he could spirit-travel to distant places.
I read about astral travel, which I had not read about before, and I had an experience of my own that was difficult to explain if it is not possible for the ‘spirit’ of someone to leave its body behind and ‘travel’. One evening in May 1976 I was in a state of mystical excitement writing poem after poem on the meaning of the ‘Fish’ symbol in connection with Christ. Later I met a stranger who claimed I had appeared in her dream and prevented her committing suicide. ‘But,’ she said, ‘why did you keep talking about fish?’ It turned out it was exactly the time I had been writing those poems about Christ.
I was also very interested to read about Abaris, a priest of the Hyperboreans, described by Pindar, Herodotus, Pliny and Diodorus of Sicily, who visited Pythagoras, flying in on ‘Apollo’s golden arrow’ and not eating anything the whole time he was with the community. No one knows where Hyperborea is, though the description of it fits Britain very well. If Abaris came from Britain by a kind of spirit-travel, to sojourn, learn and teach with Pythagoras, I wondered if the Pythagorian’s belief in reincarnation and the indestructibility of the human spirit came about before or after the visit from Abaris?
The ‘coincidences’ of reading came thick and fast.
On the same day that I read in John Michell’s City of Revelation that in the school of Pythagoras it was understood ‘that each of the heavenly bodies resonates at a certain pitch, and the prevailing celestial harmony, varying according to the relative intervals between the planets, rings continually in our ears, imperceptible because we have never experienced its absence’, I also read in Scientific American (Special Issue: The Solar System):
Solar Song. When the earth is shaken by a large earthquake, the entire sphere rings like a huge bell (although the vibrations are much slower than audible sounds). It now seems that the sun vibrates in the same way...The oscillation (in the sun) that Hill and his colleagues have observed are believed to be the result of acoustic waves travelling back and forth inside the sun...
This reminded me of what I had already written in “Guardians of the Tall Stones”:
The singing in their heads was the singing of the Spirit Spheres, the myriad realms of God, each voice, the full and separate syllable of each sound making up the secret name of God, only one letter of which was entrusted to each sphere, and our whole universe contained, with other universes, in only one of the spheres.
When I heard about the community of Findhorn in Scotland, which has had the most extraordinary relationship with plants, as Fern, one of my characters in the trilogy does, I opened a book about the derivation of place names, and found that Findhorn is a very ancient name, a remnant from a forgotten language which was in Britain before the Celts. The language of the people of the Tall Stones, perhaps?
When I wrote about sea urchin shells in Maal’s collection of precious shamanic things, I had not read in Evan Hadingham’s book: Circles and Standing Stones that: ‘In a round barrow at Kellythorpe, near Scarborough, Yorkshire, a tall man was found shrouded in a cloak woven skilfully of nettle stems, fastened by amber buttons, accompanied by a bronze knife and wrist of guard made of polished stone and fastened with golden rivets. His body was ringed with sea urchins.’
I had called my people ‘the people of the Magus’, ‘Magus’ being the name of their special star. I was not aware of why I called them this until I read, years later:
We think of the Magus as the possessor of occult secrets, a master of esoteric wisdom, who makes use of this knowledge for his own good as well as for that of his fellow man. He is a white magician, less fond of prodigies than of the contemplation of nature, in which he discovers marvellous active forces where others only see familiar things. For him the power of God is not concentrated in the One, but permeates every being of the universe. (Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion by Kurt Seligmann, Pantheon Books, 1971.)
I could not have wished for a neater summary of what I was fumbling to express in the trilogy.
Most of my books have been set in ancient times: “Guardians of the Tall Stones” and Silver Vortex in Bronze Age Britain c.1500 BC, Daughter Of Amun, Son of the Sun, and Daughter of Ra in ancient Egypt sometime between 1500 and 1300 BC, The Lily and the Bull set in Minoan Crete c.1600–c.1500 BC. The Tower and the Emerald, The Green Lady and the King of Shadows, and Etheldreda in Dark Ages Britain (AD 500–700). Only one has been set in the far future on another planet, Child of the Dark Star. But I never think of the period I’m writing about as a neat little parcel of time that has been left behind and that I am trying to recreate. I feel it is still with us. History is after all a map of waves, and the water in the ocean is always the same. We are ourselves present in the past and the future. I feel this very strongly though I know of no way of expressing it except through story.
My stories can be referenced to Linear Time c.1500–c.1450 BC — but are not limited by it. They can be referenced to the landscape of Britain, Egypt and Crete, but the protagonists are engaged on a spiritual journey that could take place anywhere.
When I write I always draw heavily on archetypal material.
The study of myth and legend has become a passion of mine. It seems to me these ancient stories, honed to perfection against the experiences of countless thousands of people, derive their layer upon layer of significance from their origin in the same reality I found myself in on that dramatic day in the stone circle. They use the diviner’s trick of throwing a symbol of universal significance on to the table before us and letting us make of it what we can. The reason I prefer to express myself in story rather than in ‘straight’ prose is that I feel the realities of life are so intangible, so esoteric and mysterious, so delicate and subtle, that there is no way of conveying them directly. One has to see the meaning in flight like one sees the glance of light on a butterfly’s wing. Pin the butterfly to a board and you have a pathetic shred of the original splendour. If that is enough for you, you will not bother to try to understand the truth that myths and legends embody. If it is not, you have an exciting time ahead with all time and space, and beyond, to play with.
An author, any author, will write into his or her book significant personal experiences, transforming them in the fictional version into something relevant to the characters and thus to a broader humanity. The process of writing fiction involves a continual exchange between the author’s’ own experience and the reach of his or her imagination — the Imagination being a creative act of extraordinary relevance to life.
To try to illustrate what I mean by this I will describe a few experiences of my own written into The Tall Stones.
I have already described how the book sprang from an experience I had in an ancient stone circle, near Dyce, Scotland on 23 July 1975. Sadly, in 1998 I had a card from friends near Dyce, telling me that the stone circle that inspired The Tall Stones is now in a loop of the access road to Dyce Airport and is no longer deep in the countryside as it was when I first encountered it. Were the ghosts of that ancient civilisation, aware that their sacred space was soon to be desecrated, anxious to get their story told before it was too late? I found it extraordinary that when I was wanting to research my book I hardly found any books on stone circles, but after 1976 they came pouring out from publishers and everyone seemed to be interested in them. ‘Ancient Wisdom’ from the Stone circles became a ‘buzz’ phrase for the New Age — which I hadn’t even heard about when I had that experience at Dyce.
In the book, the young girl Kyra is initiated into the priesthood of her Bronze Age community, by the elderly, outgoing priest. A crucial part of her training is to show her how to control her “spirit-travelling” so that she might communicate with other priests across the world. Kyra’s early experiments with out of body travelling are precisely based on my own.
The Tall Stones (chapter 3):
Kyra said, “Well, one moment I was lying there just the same as usual and the next moment my body was lying there but somehow I was not in it.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Were you in the place you saw when you were with Maal?”
“No. I was still here, in this Circle! I could see you as clearly as anything looking at the sea and some birds and not paying any attention to me, and I could see my body as clear as I could see you ... only I was looking at it from outside and it looked dead. I tried to move my legs and arms but nothing would move. I tried to scream out to you but no sound would come. I even tried to open my eyes thinking that would make me wake up. But my eyelids would not move! And anyway I was not asleep. I really was awake, but I was not in my body.”
“Are you sure you did not go anywhere else?” Karne asked, visibly disappointed.
“No!” she screamed. “You do not care about me at all! You just want your stupid questions answered. If I could not have returned to my body I would have died!”
“How did you get back?” Karne asked with interest.
“I do not know. I just tried and tried to get back in and suddenly there was a snap and I was in and everything was normal again except that I am never, never going to try that again!”
In 1974, ‘75 and ‘76 I often had those out of body experiences and I never enjoyed them. Three are particularly worth recording here I think. One afternoon I was lying on my bed resting because of the angina, and I “slipped out of my body”. I remember thinking with relief that my son Julian would soon be back from school and he always called on me in my room to greet me. “When he does that”, I thought, “it will trigger my return”. I heard the front door open and he came clumping up the stairs. “Soon!” I thought. But for once he passed my room and went up to his own room without greeting me. I heard his door shut and his heavy school bag thump down on the floor. I was in despair — waiting for him, waiting to return to my body. Time passed. And then I heard the front door open, Julian clumping up the stairs, passing my room, shutting his own door and throwing his heavy school bag on the floor.
This time it was real, and the shock of realising that I had heard something in advance of it happening, snapped me back into my body.
A year after I experienced this I read a book called The Astral Journey by Herbert B Greenhouse. It described the phenomenon of out-of-body in great detail with many examples. The “arrival phantom” is evidently well known and called “vardogr” in Norway. According to Thorstein Wereide who writes about “Norway’s Human Doubles” in Tomorrow magazine (winter 1955), the “vardogr” is heard as well as seen... there are steps on the stairs, the outside door is unlocked, boots kicked off. When the host investigates he finds the hall empty, but knows that his friend will soon be there.
The second also happened during the angina years when I was resting in an otherwise empty house. This time when I called out in terror someone kind and strong and comforting came into the room. “Strat,” I thought, forgetting that my son Strat was in another town. He took hold of my shoulders on the bed, and as he touched me I snapped back into my body. There was no one there, and yet I had felt his touch physically on my shoulders.
The third was the last time I ever experienced this phenomenon. I described it in chapter 8 of The Tall Stones. During my own similar experience I prayed as I have never prayed before that it would not happen to me again. Later, when I read about astral travel and I wanted to experiment with it, I could not.
But while they were having a happy time poor Kyra was in trouble again. She had managed to “travel” after a few false starts, but this time she found herself in a strange and horrifying situation. She was aware of her body lying on a beautiful golden couch but she was surrounded by a group of terrifying and hideous figures. Each had the body of a man clad only in a loin cloth that shone like metal, and each had the head of an animal, grinning and jeering and leering at her. She tried to get up but found she could not move her body. She tried to scream, but no sound would come from her throat. She realised she was outside her body again and had no control over it. She screamed and screamed, struggled and fought. She could feel herself doing all this, but she could see her body still lying there soundless and inert as though it were dead.
My experience in writing the book is something like the game of leapfrog. I jump over an experience I have in everyday life to reach an imaginative transformation of it. Then I leapfrog over an imaginative event to reach an understanding of an event I had in my everyday life. Backwards and forwards I go between “everyday” and “fantasy”, each illuminating the other, having a marvellous adventure while I learn about myself and about life, the story growing all the time exponentially!
In the novel, unlike me, Kyra went on to master spirit-travelling and became capable of visiting other countries. The countries she visited were based on countries I myself have visited either in real life, or in dream, or in study. I never myself visited them in just the way she did, though I believe such “travelling” is possible. The Yogi masters and sadhus of India, and even some western saints, have been known to appear in two places at once.
In The Tall Stones, Kyra travels to ancient Mycenae by identifying with Maal’s memories. The cup decorated with bulls that she sees, I had seen in Athens Museum after my own visit to ’Agamemnon’s palace in ruined Mycenae. It had stirred my thoughts in powerful ways then, and I knew I had to use it in one of my books. That someone could identify so closely with another’s memories as Kyra did with Maal’s does not seem impossible to me. A vivid and active imagination has helped me to approach this many times — no doubt aided by the power of telepathy.
Another experience Kyra had was based on a piece of labradorite I had that flashed with amazing coloured light from some angles, and an ancient stone sphere I had seen in a Scottish museum carved with concentric circles and spirals.
The Tall Stones (chapter 11):
Tentatively and hesitatingly she put her two trembling hands forward and cupped them around the magical stone. The light within it seemed to go out and it felt like ordinary cold stone.
“Close your eyes.” Maal spoke still with firm authority.
She closed her eyes.
“Feel the pattern of the stone with your fingers.”
Delicately she moved her fingertips over the cold surface. She felt the pattern.
“No. Do not open your eyes.”
She was in a very dark darkness. It seemed darker within her head than it normally did when she closed her eyes. No images whatever came to her, not even those peculiar little wisps of shape that usually seemed to float upon the inside of her eyelids.
She could feel the icy ball of stone within the cup of her hands. Her fingers began to trace the spiral round and round the surface.
It seemed to have no end. Her finger tracing... the groove... the spiral... the sphere.
The spiral never left the sphere and yet never ended... as though the sphere and the spiral were eternal... She began to drift... to feel only the spiral groove going round and round the sphere until at last she lost consciousness of even her own finger in contact with it and was aware only of herself the spiral... herself the spiral...
In this state she was no longer aware of the darkness as darkness but as the night sky, immensely vast and filled with countless stars. When she had looked at the sky at night on other occasions she had seen the myriad sparks of light dotted about apparently at random. Now she was aware of it as an intricate but definite pattern.
She saw it as a pattern, each star linked with each other star in a relationship that was unmistakable. It was as though fine gold lines, as fine as spider’s web, were drawn between each spot of light to make an exquisite network, complex and yet ultimately simple.
But even as she grasped this the vision was altering slightly. The web was not flat but had depth as well. The stars she had thought were all the same distance from her appeared now to vary, some nearer, some further away. The golden threads linked them not only sideways, but backward and forwards as well.
She felt herself moving nearer to them, somehow being among them so that the network of fine gold lines was around her in every direction... stars were around her in every direction.
As the sensation of movement grew she realised that it was not only herself that was moving. The stars, the golden lines, the darkness itself... everything was moving and everything was changing in relationship to everything else in subtle ways at every moment, and yet the overall web of relationship was still there... the threads never broke... only adjusted, stretched and altered.
In Chapter 15 of The Tall Stones, Kyra’s visit to Bronze Age China is based on an extraordinarily vivid dream of my own, no doubt sparked off by a visit to the Chinese rooms in the British Museum.
Although most of the story and the characters in it sprang from my experiences in the Dyce Circle, while I was writing and rewriting it I was also reading and researching the Bronze Age, not only in Britain, but in the countries around the world I believed she had visited in spirit-travelling. I used what I learned, together with my own experiences in different contexts, to flesh it out. It seemed to me a pebble had been dropped into a pool when I stood in that Circle at Dyce, but the story also encompassed the ringed ripples that travelled out from it and which continued to feed me inspiration.
My husband and I visited Crete three times, and the magnificent Minoan civilisation held a particular fascination for me. Kyra spirit-travelled to it in The Tall Stones (chapter 15), meeting the bull-leaping acrobat, Quilla. In the same chapter she visited Egypt, another time and place with which I have always felt a strong connection. There she met the young priest Khu-ren who was to play such an important role in her life as a priestess.
There is no incontrovertible evidence that the ancient Britons had any communication with ancient Crete, though some authorities claim that an indentation on one of the tall stones of Stonehenge is in the shape of the Minoan double axe. Similarly there are speculations about the ancient British connection with Egypt because Egyptian faience necklaces have been found in Ireland and Somerset, and the remains of a boat off the east coast of England has been identified as the type used in ancient Egypt. T.W. Rolleston in his book Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race, mentions an Egyptian ankh carved on a stone chamber in Brittany.
But whether there was physical connection or not (and I ’can’t see any reason why not) in the interplay of time and space that goes on in the human mind, the connection exists.
At Dyce I puzzled about the wide spread of the culture of stone circles; I heard there are many hundreds known in Britain and Europe. Some have been found in Asia and Africa. I wondered how there could be such a homogenous culture over such vast distances at a time when the technology of travelling and communication was so primitive.
At that moment the idea of “spirit-travelling” came to me based on the stories I had heard about certain saints and sadhus being trained to leave the body.
Although I had never seen the great stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire before I went to Dyce, I had heard of it. While I was writing The Tall Stones my friend Michael took me there and immediately I was overwhelmed by it. Touching the stones set up shivers in my spine and I knew that it must be one of the primary sacred temples of the culture I was writing about. These stone circles were already millennia old before Kyra’s people lived, and many different cultures had lived and died in their shadow.
Kyra saw it first as a vision. In The Tall Stones (chapter 15) she spirit-travels there to meet the Lords of the Sun from across the World.
Within the great Circle of Standing Stones she was aware of circles within circles of people moving rhythmically to the music of drum and flute, stepping sideways slowly and with elegance, their arms raised so that the tips of their fingers brushed their neighbours’ as they moved. On a certain beat they dipped their heads and bent their knee in a way that gave the whole ring movement a sinuous serpentine character. As each concentric circle was moving around the Stone Circle in a direction opposite to the one within and without itself, the currents and eddies of invisible force generated were complex indeed.
Undeniable forces and vibrations were set up, currents and eddies of power. She could feel it. She could almost see it. The pulsing of the music added to the intensity of the feeling. The mist that moved with its own serpentine life about their feet added to the impression of detachment from the earth. Everything was charged and potent. She was on a level of reality that she had not known before. Her heart began beating loudly. She had finally reached the conjunction of the Lords of the Sun.
In writing a novel one can play with ideas and concepts that hover on the edge of one’s belief and, while doing so, consider seriously one’s attitude to them.
At about this time I was reading a great deal about reincarnation, in the Hindu and Buddhist religions, and considering most seriously whether my own feelings of “having been there before” at Dyce, Avebury, Crete and Egypt could possibly be due to the fact that I had indeed lived there before. I am still puzzling about it — but more and more inclined to believe it. The fact that the ancient Celts who conquered and assimilated Kyra’s people a few centuries after the book was set, also believed in reincarnation made me think I was not too far off the track.
Another idea I assimilated from my Hindu readings was the way certain sadhus could control their autonomic nervous system to such an extent that they could feign death, be buried alive, and recover. Maal, the shaman priest in The Tall Stones, prepares to control his own dying in a way that the Yogi masters of Tibet and India have been known to do.
The message is, that the Art of Dying is quite important as the Art of Living (or of Coming into Birth), of which it is the complement and summation; that the future of being is dependent, perhaps entirely, upon a rightly controlled death...
To those who had passed through the secret experiencing of pre-mortem death, right dying is initiation, conferring, as does the initiatory death-rite, the power to control consciously the process of death and regeneration...
When Milarepa, Tibet’s saintly master of Yoga, was preparing to die, he chose not only a favourable external environment... but an inner state of mental equilibrium in keeping with his approaching Nirvana. Indomitably controlling his body, which, having been poisoned by an enemy, was disease-weakened and pain-wracked, he welcomed death with a song, as being natural and inevitable.
From the Preface of the second edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated by W.Y. Evans-Wentz.
That the ancient Celts also firewalked was an added incentive to link the two cultures in my mind. I’m not saying that the Bronze Age people of Britain were in physical contact with ancient India. But by humans being part of an interrelated whole, and by being basically so similar, it is not inconceivable that similar cultural practices will grow up across the world.
Certain things are universal to human kind. Religious aspiration is one, and its disintegration into superstition is another.
Many people today still take omens seriously. But what is an omen? Maal gives a good explanation in The Tall Stones (chapter 10):
He wondered if she should tell her that omens are around us all the time. Everything is an omen if we choose to make it so. What makes an omen work is something in ourselves. We sense something from deep within us, on a level in which we are not used to being conscious, and we choose something from the “outside” world to project it on, to make it understandable for us. For instance, she would sense a need to take a journey, a readiness, a ripeness ...and because she was not used to recognising such deep instinctual drives she would see a giant bird flying or a wind blowing a tree in a particular way and she would believe it was an omen telling her to go. She would think the message was coming from outside herself.
If she saw the same bird flying, the same tree bending, when she was not ready to go, she would not see them as omens at all. It was another case of what was reality. The omens were real, but not in the sense the people believed them to be.
He looked at her and decided she was not ready to recognise omens as part of herself. She had too much that was new already to cope with. It would be more comfortable for her to believe as most people believed, that omens were messages from the gods telling one what to do. Making decisions for oneself was always difficult and it was a sign of maturity when one could take responsibility for decisions. Kyra was maturing rapidly, but she was still a long way from this point.