Anyone who has done any serious
magical or spiritual work will confirm that it is, in some way,
about our involvement in, and our eventual liberation from, time.
The outer consensual world (by which I mean the delusional world
of our modernist culture) is heavily bound by time. Not by time
as an impersonal or cosmic power, but time as a dominant concept
that binds this artificial society together in an unnatural and
life-damaging manner. Try being late for work frequently, to test
this profound theory.
Time is not merely a dominant concept,
but a tool of control deeply embedded within our culture. However,
we all know that time is not an absolute truth, but a relative
concept. Time runs slowly when we are waiting for a train, or
listening to a business presentation, but all too fast when we
are enjoying something pleasant. Individual spiritual and magical
work gradually loosens up the rigid domination of time, and leads
us into the wider fields of what might be called universal consciousness,
including a deepening sense of collective or ancestral time. This
collective is what we should explore, when we think of the pagan
ancestral past. Not limiting ourselves to a set of published theories
on ancient culture and religion, but also seeking out a living
collective consciousness of time, and ancestral experience of
the world. The interaction between this collective consciousness,
and the individual in his or her present consciousness, is a powerful
tool for spiritual and magical transformation.
So what about collective time? Really
we should think of times, plural. There is, for example, PST or
Pagan Standard Time, which waiteth long and long and longer for
all men and women equally. In my ancestral Gaelic culture we have
Irish time, or Highland time, which is like PST but less urgent.
The old pioneers in the Wild West used to talk about Indian time,
of course, in the same way, and the phrase Mexican time is often
heard in a derogatory sense (usually from those superior folks
enslaved by Corporate Time). By comparison, the oriental Taoist
concept of “time” proposes cycles that come around
repeatedly, whereby time is a series of loops rather than the
linear idea prevalent in the West.
The monster of rigid linear time
is the ultimate product of post-Christian materialism, right down
to our obsession with ever increasing clock speeds in computer
chips. Of course, this time monster began to straighten itself
out and stomp around much earlier in the Christian era, as the
idea of logic began to triumph over intuition. Intuition is often
free of linear time, but logic demands linear time, or, more pertinently,
creates linear time as its essential medium.
So, not to waste any further
time on the matter, time varies according to collective
consciousness and culture. Anyone who has ever tried to reach
a technical support team by telephone will confirm this readily,
albeit in more vivid and evocative language than I would be allowed
to publish on these august and worthy PanGaia pages.
But what about ancestral time? Was
time a meaningful concept to our ancestors? Did they have any
sense of time similar to our own? And how might we grasp this
today, when our lives have been so blatantly abused by the tyranny
of the clock, and, more recently, the tyranny of processing clock-speed?
I am wary of escapist romanticism,
and, sadly, it seems to me that many of our ideas about ancestral
cultures are wildly romantic, and often based upon averse reactions
to our own present day problems rather than on historical or archaeological
evidence. So when I think of the remote ancestral past, I try
to apprehend it in two distinct ways, both of which I would recommend
to you, and which I will describe briefly.
The first is to establish some very
simple facts on what, beyond reasonable doubt, did the ancestors
actually do? You do not need a lot of facts or research, but you
do need some firm foundation to rest upon.
We can draw some simple but important
conclusions from direct examination of what the ancestors actually
did, rather than speculate about what we hope they might have
done, or through wishful thinking about what they might have done
that we would also like to do today, if we only had enough
time. Such as lying around in a war free world eating fruit
and making love without guilt. Well, my Gaelic ancestors certainly
did not do any of those things: they were warriors, men and women
both, they were cattle herders and meat eaters, and…. oh
good…. at least from Roman times until the late Christian
era they were famous for their liberal attitude to free sex. Or
infamous if you were a Roman writer or a Christian missionary.
Presbyterianism and Catholic prudery came much later, thank goodness.
We should think of the Ancestors
in a wider sense, not as one race or ethnic group, but as the
sea of ancestors world wide, with special reference to those from
whom our main currents of consciousness and our heritage derives.
So I am not thinking of Celtic ancestors, but the megalithic cultures
that predated all European, Mediterranean, and North African civilizations
and racial groups. They are the ancestors in the dawn of time,
and there is something of them in most of us. When it comes to
the megalithic people, we certainly have, if you will appreciate
the pun, some rock-hard evidence of what they did. Evidence that
they fully intended us to have, and wish us to explore in this
day and age.
The second way of approaching the
ancestral past is to explore what may be revealed in meditation
upon ancestral consciousness…. what may be learned from
the inner contacts themselves. This is a natural human ability,
which anyone can enter into. After all, our present individual
awareness comes, in part, from that same ancestral consciousness.
We will return to this later, and a practical meditative method
is described at the close of this article. But please read the
preamble, or you will miss some helpful material that contributes
to your meditations in general, as well as to the specific form
described below.
The first method, that of considering
what we really- know –for- sure they did, brings us to some
significant conclusions, and I will outline a few examples of
these before moving on to the second method. You will be able
to find more for yourself, especially if you research in archaeological
or anthropological reference sources. Look for simple hard facts
on the ancestors rather than complex theories.
At this stage I should emphasize
that we must be grounded in some basic factual knowledge, and
have some foundation of general history, otherwise fantasy may
prevail. Furthermore, we live in an age where ignorant nonsense
can be disseminated easily. I am thinking, as one example of many,
of Edain McCoy who published in one of her pulp-pagan books that
the ancient Irish held the potato to be sacred. Unfortunately
for this “expert” the potato did not reach Ireland
until the 17th century, and dependence on the potato was, in fact,
the cause of the terrible Irish famines that decimated the population
in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, with a few quick flicks of
the keyboard (taking no time at all on historical verification)
mythic inaccuracy was effectively combined with a flippant, shocking,
and deeply insulting ignorance of one of the darkest most heart-breaking
periods of modern Irish history. Far from being sacred in Ireland,
the potato, introduced by the English landlords, is regarded as
the cause of misery death and forced emigration.
Ms McCoy’s absurdity on this
and other purportedly wiccan and Celtic subjects has been commented
upon by several reviewers, and widely exposed, yet it is typical
of the false traditions, poor research, and total failure to truly
connect to ancestral consciousness that can sometimes be found
in spiritual magical and pagan publications and teachings. So
we can shout loudly “ all hail to Spudach daughter of Tuberach,
daughter of Mashach!”, but only as we do serious research,
and never invoke these goddesses lightly, for their power may
backfire upon you if you publish.
Ancestral evidence of time-frames
Contrary to the popular idea that
ancestral races had no clear sense of time (something widely taught
in general or popular history), we have evidence that they had
a sense of time far wider, far more embracing, than we do to today.
Modernist time is all short-term: the quick fix, the instant buck,
the fast track to profit and promotion, and, of course, the speedy,
oh-so- speedy rapid and immediate utterly totally accessible Internet,
where, for example, (providing you can access it in the first
place) you can find many ways to enlarge a penis or lose weight
or get an instant decision on a loan, but anything of more value,
such as the origins of the Potato Goddess, takes substantially
longer (if you will excuse the play on words).
The ancestors thought not in terms
of minutes, but in terms of thousands of years. In Britain and
Europe archaeology has repeatedly confirmed that the ancestors
took many generations to build the standing stone circles, the
chamber tombs, the alignments, those megalithic ritual sites that
predate the Pyramids of Egypt and command our enduring awe and
reverence. Many generations! So the obvious but deeply enlightening
conclusion is that they did not build them solely for themselves.
They built them for us. Their sense of time was vast, and included
generations yet to come. When I first understood this, at an ancient
site, I had profound insights into ancestral awareness, and came
into a more full communion with the ancestors as a result. As
I said above, think of what we know they did, without speculation,
and consider the millions of tons of rock hard evidence that reveal
long term commitment through time. This one fact alone gives us
more insight into the consciousness of our pagan ancestors than
almost anything else that we might discover.
Time, Memory, and Prophecy
Still staying with our first method,
we can also consider the movement of ancestral consciousness through
time. This mapping of ancestral time has recently received a lot
of popular attention, in various ways, such as discussions of
the Mayan prophecies, which extended for many centuries, and,
conveniently, if uncomfortably, for us, come to an apocalyptic
end sometime in this century. A similar idea is found in the Prophecies
of Merlin, (1) dating from the 12 century CE as a text, but deriving
from earlier bardic traditions of prophetic poetry,, which also
tell us that there will be an apocalypse during the first third
of this century. An “apocalypse”, just to be clear,
is not something deriving from the Book of Revelation in the New
Testament. There were many apocalypses and related texts current
in the Greek and Mediterranean world (at the time of the Roman
Empire) before that proto- Christian book, now part of the Bible,
was produced. The idea of a planetary change is at the root of
all prophetic traditions worldwide, and similar themes are found
in all apocalyptic texts, mainly that a phase of the world shall
end in a dramatic way, prior to a new phase opening out.
Prophetic calendars, apocalyptic
visions, all encompass many centuries. They indicate an ancestral
interest in long- term time…something that we do not have
today. Donald Trump does not build for the generations yet to
come, and he calls Central Park the “wasted acres”:
Microsoft develops its software by testing its flaws directly
on the public then providing a slurry of ongoing fixes, and our
products are generally constructed to collapse and be replaced
within a very short time frame. This leads me to a curious meditation,
which I would recommend to you strongly.
Compare the enduring stones of our
megalithic ancestors, to the structures of our present day culture.
Or, if you wish, compare television news that evaporates within
a few hours, to the long- term vision of the ancestral prophecies,
which aimed to cover millenniums.
Stellar time and ancestral consciousness
Like the builders of the megalithic
circles, the prophetic writers, inscribers, or depicters of our
ancient cultures, based their future visions, handed through the
generations as sacred geometry and sacred poetry or art, upon
the movements of the living stars. Just as the megalithic sacred
sites and ancient temples were aligned to stellar patterns, so
were the prophecies (such as the Mayan and the Merlin) based upon
astronomical/astrological patterns and calculations, fused with
inner vision.
By comparison today millions of
people base their inner sustenance upon the short lives, loves,
and scandals of media stars, and live vicariously through them…because
there is “no time” for anything else at the end of
a long day of commuting and computing.
The ancestors’ detailed and
long term concern about future generations, both in the building
of ritual sites and in magical or spiritual records and long term
calendars, implies that the ancestral sense of time, far from
being a dreamy collective, as we often find proposed, was based
on stellar consciousness and observation. Furthermore, the ancestors
were able to extrapolate future patterns from their deep involvement
with stellar patterns. In other words, the ancestors had a better
sense of relativity and the interaction of time, space, and planetary
life, than the high-tech modernists. We are frustrated when our
laptops do not boot up within 40 seconds, but they encompassed
millenniums, without needing microchips or Microsoft.
This encompassing of long cycles
of time is found to reach backwards as well as forwards, in ancestral
cultures. Anthropologists and folklorists have amassed evidence
that the oral traditions, worldwide, often preserve knowledge
for many generations. Not preserved as factoids or data-bites,
but as stories and songs that carry the images and practices of
remote cultural sources. One of the most remarkable sources of
such material is the large corpus of traditional magical ballads
found in Europe and America, which preserve mythic patterns from
pre-Christian times.
A more immediate example of this
long-term memory process, from my own experiences occurred during
a visit to an ancient site in Northern Ireland. The remains of
a megalithic chambered tomb were in a farmyard, right next to
the modern house. When we knocked on the door to ask permission
to go through the yard, the farmer’s wife answered, with
a baby in her arms. As the television blared inside, she said,
with utter seriousness, “ you can go in, but an ancient
king is buried there, and anyone who disturbs him will lose the
use of their arms and legs”. This kind of folklore, that
some low anonymous mound is really an ancient tomb, has been confirmed
many times by modern archaeology, and published in academic books
that are never read by the country folk who preserve such knowledge
handed down for thousands of years.
Besides, such oral memory stories
have been on record for at least the last four hundred years,
originally reported by scholars from the words of ordinary people
who did not read or write: yet they asserted, accurately, that
ancient kings were buried in the sacred sites. Curiously, the
Chinese Whispers theory of collective memory, whereby almost anything
is garbled if it is passed along the line, is still how we moderns,
inaccurately, conceive of unwritten history. Dr John Dee, the
Elizabethan magus, took the ancestral stories of buried kings
seriously, asking for, and receiving, a royal patent to dig up
ancient mounds for buried treasure. He knew that the peasants
preserved information from the remote ancestral past, through
stories and songs handed down in collective memory.
So when I think of the pagan ancestors,
I think of that seemingly remote past when people took centuries
to build temples of stone and align them to the stars, and of
mysterious processes whereby the ancient cultures could perceive
and predict patterns far into their own future. But I also think
of the collective memory that links us back to the ancestral consciousness,
preserved in folkloric oral tradition well into the 20th century.
That link exists in each and every one of us today. Providing
we turn off our little clock-bound toys and open to that other
vastness that enfolded our ancestors…the vastness of living
with the spreading stars rather than merely existing with the
spreadsheet.
So the first method, to find a few
basic facts about what the ancestors did, with regard to time
and consciousness, is found in stones and stories, megaliths and
myths. Not in books or films about grunting cavepersons (some
of them voluptuous, others brutish), or in absurdities about temples,
mummies, and curses. Nor is it solely in inspired constructs such
as Robert Graves’ three ages of Matriarchy, Patriarchy,
and Magic, a poetic theory that has substantially influenced modern
paganism and goddess consciousness (2). Influenced us for the
good, I should add, as it leads us away from the absurdities of
a materialistic view of history, time and socio-economic changes,
superstition and politics, and opens the way for a mythic sense
of history, a differing interpretation of the facts. We must rest
upon the foundations that the ancestors left for us, if we are
to find a sense of continuity and long-term awareness in our fragmented
isolated antagonistic modernist world.
Let us now move on the second method,
which is working directly with ancestral consciousness in meditation.
Communing with the ancestors beyond time
Back in the hazy innocent 1970’s,
almost a land beyond time in themselves, I wrote a manuscript
for private circulation among a small group of British magicians.
It was called The UnderWorld Initiation (3). Subsequently this
book was published (due to the machinations of Gareth Knight,
now head of the Society of the Inner Light), and launched upon
a baffled readership. To my surprise, what grabbed people most
was a short item that I had added, almost as an afterthought,
called Tomb of King. I described therein my inner or spiritual
contact with a prehistoric ancestral king, whose sacred tomb is
a mound on the island of Jersey, off the coast of France, but
in British territory. Twenty years later, when I worked on the
Dreampower Tarot with artist Stuart Littlejohn, we included an
image of this contact, where he appears as the King of Ancestors.
This contact had come suddenly,
when I opened out to the consciousness of the megalithic site,
during an afternoon visit, and though this was not the first time
I had communed with ancestral consciousness, and was, and still
is, one of the most precise and clear contacts of that type.
Rather than repeat what is in the
book, I will outline for you the method that I used to make contact.
In the years since, I have taught this method at many classes
and workshops, and there are now hundreds of people who practice
it. You do not have to be at a megalithic site to do this, but
if you are able to make a trip to one (remember that there are
some on the north eastern seaboard of the USA, as well as in Europe),
it will be well worth the effort.
1 Be still, stilling your sense
of time, space, and movement.
2 With your inner vision, build
strongly the image of an opening or tunnel before you. This is,
traditionally, a dolmen arch, with two upright stones right and
left, and a horizontal capstone. Do not just see it, but feel
it, try to feel it through your body.
3 At the far end of the tunnel,
inside the mound perhaps, is an ancestor. He or she will become
aware of you, as you extend your awareness within. You may wish
to form a simple intention that you are seeking the wisdom of
the ancestors, especially with regard to human relationship to
the earth, sky, stars, and sea. This is not hard, for such wisdom
is seeded into our very cells.
4 Do not enter the tunnel, but go
to the threshold. Typically the ancestor will appear faintly within.
That is all that you need: do not go in, and do not attempt to
drag the ancestor out!
5 Commune awhile in Silence. What
comes will most likely not come as words, but as wordless intimations
or feelings. Do not ask selfish questions…this is an ancestor,
not a therapist. Be ready to receive that greater consciousness
that watched the stars for generations, that flow of human wisdom
that transcends personal time. Your problems will fade into a
different perspective.
6 Utter whatever respects or acknowledgements
are appropriate, and draw back gently from the communion. Let
the vision of the tunnel or dolmen fade.
7 Return to your outer consciousness,
and write notes if you wish.
This method can be used anywhere, and you do not have to be at
a sacred site. For most of us, this is the method that we will
use in regular practice. If you practice it, then make a pilgrimage
to a megalithic site, you will be astonished at how beautifully
and gracefully the ancestral powers will receive you. Of course,
for you have honored them in advance, and you have already Opened
the Way.
NOTE: If you are able to go to a
stone chamber, or even a natural cave, first be comfortable with
it. If it feels unclean or abused or damaged, do not work with
it. Your first intuition is always the best. Second thoughts or
rationalizations should be discounted. Assuming you have found
a place where you can work, there is one major difference between
working with a chamber, and with the vision (as above). You must
go inside the chamber, and see the ancestor as coming to the threshold
on the outside. But, of course, it is a different Outside.You
can contact me by email, contact us.
Sometimes replies will be slow, so be patient. We took centuries
to place just one stone, not so long ago, so a few days for an
email is nothing.
R J Stewart
1 See
www.dreampower.com for a translation and commentary, or Merlin:
The Prophetic Vision and Mystic Life, R J Stewart, Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1995 for an extended exploration.
2 Graves, Robert, The White
Goddess, Faber, London. Numerous editions.
3 The first in the series comprising
The UnderWorld Initiation, Earth Light, Power Within the Land,
R J Stewart, all originally published in the UK. All three volumes
are currently in print, published Mercury Publishing, USA.Other
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