“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings

hast thou ordained strength…”

KJV Psalm 8:2

I passed the entire night in the hinterland between sleep and waking. It is that odd state where the body rests unresisting but the mind wanders down strange pathways, making connections between seemingly random things and finding answers to questions we did not know we needed to ask. Therefore, when I woke, exhausted and feeling rather low, I simply blamed the fitful night.

It had not even occurred to me to take the leaflet that seriously. I don’t like the things, but I am only going to be taking the damnable pills for a short while and adding steroids to the current handful of pills, as opposed to being waltzed off to hospital, seems a far better option. I had them once before for pneumonia and, beyond the usual sleep disruption and digestive problems, I…

‘In former times the soul was feathered all over’

Plato

The third ritual of the workshop weekend was named Deadshaw Sick after the strip of land that divides the lands of the living from the lands of the dead at Barbrook. On one side of the stream are the hut circles that mark the place of a settlement, on the other, the stone circles and cairns of their dead. It was there that the Seer had come into consciousness, and there too that we had spent a strange afternoon after the previous workshop. The land had seemed alive in an indescribable way, as if we had somehow ‘lost’ centuries and were vouchsafed a glimpse into a distant past and the stone circle ‘showed’ us how it could have been used. On that day, the land itself formed the ritual space of purification and offering and we could see quite clearly…

Jerome, my newly-found Mayan Shaman friend, was born in Belize, and had travelled before settling, for the present, in Yucatan, Mexico.

I had been surprised at how vividly alive the Mayan culture was in this part of Central America. It was not just a done-for-tourists thing, it was deeply real; an identity with a gentle, spiritual and creative race, even down to the carefully-preserved ancient Mayan language that an increasing number of the region’s people speak.

Initially, I had presumed that what was Mayan had been contained in what is now Mexico; but its peaceful ’empire’ had stretched far along the narrow strip of land that links the Americas.

“Everyone was poor in Belize,” he said. There was no regret in his words, it was simply how things were.

“How things are…” His eyes flashed the deeper meaning up at me as we sat, otherwise alone, in the quiet of…

Sunlight on the River
(copyright 123rf.com)

…we may have to go back a little before we can begin. Say two years? All the way back to the “River of the Sun“ in 2015, and the long-awaited “next post”, often promised but always failing to materialise. I suppose the key to its desire for immediate attention, under the (apparently) unrelated title of “The Feathered Seer“, might (just) be gleaned from events arising one Freaky Friday.

But of course, you don’t know how yet: there are pieces of that particular puzzle missing, and some of them won’t necessarily become apparent till The Feathered Seer – Part 3, at which point we might get round to the titular weekend. (I know! The suspense is killing me, too…)

The “River of the Sun” was to be our third Silent Eye (A Modern Mystery School) weekend in as…

‘All of you undisturbed cities,

haven’t you ever longed for the Enemy?’

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Burn and Grieve.”

The title stared back at me from the screen. It seemed prophetic. Mute fingers poised, I wondered what on earth had possessed me. How could I possibly write anything that would meet the expectations raised by the previous workshops? I didn’t even have a proper story! Nothing that would hold up as a five-act ritual drama, the format Steve had pioneered as the template for the annual workshops.

In previous years, Steve had taken us from a lost mountain monastery to ancient Egypt via an unexplored planet. Stuart had followed with the woven tales of the Foliate Man. All of them wonderful stories. Me? I had a handful of whispering stones, a few fragmentary glimpses into a debatable past and a speculative theory or two. For a moment, only three of the…

”The spirit is so closely linked to the body as a thing

that the body never ceases to be haunted.’

Georges Bataille

We had chosen five of the ancient and sacred sites of the local landscape as inspiration and setting for the story of the Feathered Seer. Unlike the Circles Beyond Time workshop, we could not take our Companions out into the landscape for the rituals. Instead we chose to bring the landscape symbolically within the sacred space created and hallowed by the intent of the Companions. Even so, the village once more saw strangely garbed figures wandering its fields in the pre-dawn light.

It is a measure of the trust we have in each other that we can ask the company to rise before dawn, donning robes and cloaks, to walk though the village streets to the hillside, there to enact whatever ritual we have devised with which to…

In Yutacan, where Mayan mind

Once ruled a fabled land

A mighty structure stands its side

It is a temple of the wind

Tumul its name, once whispered wide

Upon this jungled horn

An ancient place, revered its past

Where paintings crown the work of sides

Where throngs of people shuffle past

The guardians used to stand

In stern Castillo, facing seas

To read the fates and seek what lasts

In thirteen, four, and nine beneath

The learned Maya homed

Within their Four their patterns bore

The lasting truth of their belief

Pale shadow now our vision sees

Of order once so fine

But stop the crowd and touch the wind

To feel the peace before decline.

©Stephen Tanham

Alethea Kehas and Barbara Walsh holding a photograph of Obi.

*

For those Companions who study the Silent Eye Correspondence Course the Sunday morning of our April Workshop is a special time.

It is then that we mark their progress through the three degrees of the course with a ceremony designed to ratify each stage of that process.

This year we were delighted to acknowledge Alethea Kehas and Barbara Walsh who completed their Second Degrees and Maurice Obioha Nwankwor (Obi) who completed the Third Degree of the course and thereby became the first of our students to achieve this beginning…

‘Initiation cannot be conferred by human hands.

Not all who reach the Portal will pass the Threshold.

Not all who knock will see that door held open to the Light.

Initiation cannot be bought, nor can it be earned through effort.

It is not a goal, but a beginning.

It…