Moyra Caldecott: author, poet, artist

Guardians of the Tall Stones by Moyra Caldecott, is now available exclusively for the Kindle from Amazon. You can also read it for free with Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

The blurb:

An ancient community is threatened by the evil designs of a corrupt and ambitious priest, and its only defence is the courageous young psychic Kyra.

The Guardians of the Tall Stones is set in Bronze Age Britain, a time when magic existed in the workings of everyday life and the threat of evil loomed in the shadows. This book contains four novels.

The Tall Stones
Kyra’s village is threatened by the evil designs of Wardyke, a corrupt and ambitious priest, and she is its only defence. But to defend her community, Kyra must enter the forbidden circle of stones and call upon its unseen, mystical powers…

The Temple of the Sun
Kyra, the courageous young psychic we met in The Tall Stones, undertakes the hazardous journey with Karne and Fern to the Sacred Temple, where Kyra is to receive her training as a priestess and renew her love for the Lord Khu-ren. But a malevolent spirit still opposes them, and its influence has already permeated the sanctity of the Temple. Kyra is forced once again to face the evil Magician-Priest, Wardyke, whose thirst for revenge and power threatens the balance between good and evil…

Shadow on the Stones
Kyra, priest of the Temple of the Sun, and her husband the Lord Khu-ren, have guided their civilisation to a time of spiritual strength, psychic energy, and communal peace. But there is a shadow on the Stones — the spreading influence of the terrible god Groth, dark god of chaos and barbarity. Only the priests of the Temple possess the power to resist the tides of destruction…

The Silver Vortex
Deva is the beautiful and headstrong daughter of the High Priest of the greatest of the mighty stone circles. She seeks to master the arts of sorcery in order to reclaim her lover from a previous incarnation. Now, trapped by a desire she cannot control, she risks more than herself, and puts the whole community in danger…

For more info, please see the Guardians of the Tall Stones page on mushroom-ebooks.com.

Moyra was born and raised in South Africa, and studied English to Master’s level at the University of Natal.  She met Oliver Caldecott† when she was lecturing at the University of Cape Town, joined him in London in 1951, and married him there.  They raised three children (Stratford†, Julian and Rachel), and moved to Bath in 1987.  Moyra was a prolific writer of poems and novels, building a reputation as a vivid writer on the adventures and experiences of the inner world of human consciousness as well as the outer world of history and society (see: www.moyracaldecott.co.uk).  By gathering intelligence through normal and paranormal means, Moyra created epic tales of wonder and adventure set intimately within the extraordinary worlds of 18th Dynasty Egypt, pre-Celtic Britain, Ancient Crete, pre-Roman Bath and elsewhere, including planets other than our own (see: www.mushroom-ebooks.com).  In yet more books she re-told mythologies of crystals, trees and women, and poured her extra energies into craft arts such as pottery, batik and stained-glass.  Her poetry is particularly profound and moving, and much appreciated in poetic and story-telling circles in Bath, where she was once a city Bard.  With her passing, much wisdom and love has been released into the world that had been contained in flesh.  A celebration of her life will be held in or near Bath in the Summer.

Julian Caldecott

A poem ‘I have no permanence …’ by Moyra, from her book The Breathless Pause (2009):

I have no permanence
as the thought of God.
Tomorrow
He may not think me
as I am,
with name
and birthday
and little bag of tricks.

But That which is He
is Whole and not divided
and everything that Is
is He.

So in Him
my spirit rides eternally
like a drop of water
in the sea.

An interesting article about Moyra, written from an unique perspective, has been posted by Roger Jones, the founder of Ex Libris Books in Bradford on Avon.

7 April 2014
by Stratford

Moyra Caldecott’s children have recently finished moving Moyra into the Woodland Grove Care Home in Bath, and selling her house in Southdown. Her possessions have been distributed, many of them brought to the Home where she is living comfortably surrounded by her favourite objects and artefacts – books, paintings, blown glass, geological exhibits, and so on.

At the age of 87, being unable now to speak or write, construct sentences or find words, she is limited in what she can do. Nevertheless she seems quite happy, and her children visit when they can. Julian is closest, since he lives in Bath. Rachel lives in southern France. Stratford, the eldest, lives in Oxford, but is hampered by prostate cancer which he has been fighting for three years.

We plan to post here information about Moyra’s interests and any relevant activities of her children. This site should be a way to continue Moyra’s presence on the Web. Her numerous published books, most of them remaining in print thanks to the work of Mushroom Publishing, are a stimulus to read as she would read. She was fascinated by folklore and mythology, art, history, and cosmology.

Those subjects and others will be followed here on the Moyra Caldecott web pages. We hope you drop by from time to time!

Stratford, Julian, and Rachel Caldecott

I have a photograph
of the canal in Bath
by the door leading out
of my living room,
taken the day after my husband died.
A house reflected in the canal.
The real house windows are dark…
no lights on…
but the reflection
has windows blazing with light
from the setting sun.
It reminds me
My husband’s earthly life
Was ended, and dark,
But he still lives
in the light of the mansion
in the Otherworld.

I went often to the canal after that.
I did not see the sign again –
the combination of a dark house
and blazing windows in the reflection.
It was a “one-off” symbol
given to me
to teach me
and to comfort me.

I love my friend Anthea’s paintings.
Three pictures,
illustrations of my two books
Myths of the Sacred Tree
and Crystal Legends.
I went to Santorini
with her in 1990.
I climbed a volcano with her,
and watched the sunset
over the Aegean Sea ,
and walked through
an ancient Minoan town,
and brooded on whether
Thera’s volcano erupting
made an end of the Minoan culture
in Crete .

This week the Icelandic volcano
erupting
has disrupted air travel in Europe .
Both my sons,
Julian in Indonesia ,
Strat in America ,
can’t get back to their homes
in England .

Not since Icarus fell from the sky
has man been in so much trouble
flying.
Was it the volcanic ash cloud from Santorini
made Icarus fall,
or coming too near the Sun
in pride?
And would the Icelandic volcano
make an end of our civilisation,
based on flying
and money,
as the Santorini volcano did the Minoans
in Crete?

Mary’s son
holds
a golden sphere –
the world
in pure light.
Past, present and future –
poised
in the palm of his hand.

Mary’s son
holds
the Light
that was before
the light –
the Light
that was before
Mary –
but not before
her son.

Mary’s son
lifts the golden sphere
and throws it at the dark.
‘Look,’ he cries.
‘Now
All is Light.’

Contained in flesh
are we?
No. No!
Contained in the unimaginable
sphere of God’s love.
No small thing
our cares, our fears
until touched
by this touch.
This key
turns us from our fears
and turning
frees us.
Now we know
that we are known…
and cared for.

Small are we?
No. No!
Each fills the universe,
for each the universe
is there.
Now we feel it.
Now we abandon
doubt
and jettison
despair.

Touching this icon
flesh dissolves
and our true containment
contains us.
What was great to us before
now shrinks
and the small and disregarded seed,
the secret and abiding
meaning of our lives,
expands.
With God’s all-seeing eye
we see
and seeing
know.
In His hands
we rest
and in His heart
are blessed.

The dangerous seeing eye
is poised to strike at darkness.
No mild recognition,
but terror,
as meaning leaps to meaning
like lightning on iron mountains.
   Words slit
   in revelation.
The crust of long-accustomed thought
   shatters
and an unfamiliar landscape
   is revealed.

Published in The William Blake Birthday Book (ISBN 9780956199904)

LIFE STORY

Life is woven out of stories…
warp and weft
the threads interplay
and interact.

Mind stories
lying in bed at night
reshaping the day’s events…
reading…
listening…
watching…

Stories shape and colour
the fabric of our dreams and memories.
Words and images
flux and flow…
change… reform…
and give illusion of reality.

Who can unpick the threads
and know
where we begin
or end?

(a poem Moyra wrote in 1946)

The bank has gone insolvent
and is closing now.
The heavy brass doors shut.
The people shout in vain
against the pillrs of the vestibule.
The gods are sending out the bills and we can’t pay.
Too late we see
it was a false invenstment.
We stand
and stare at the bills
and the shut doors
of the bank.

Atlantis: The Crystal in the Bermuda Triangle

(from Crystal Legends by Moyra Caldecott, Chapter 26)

It seems Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic and healer of Virginia Beach, Florida, predicted that Atlantis would be discovered in 1968. In a series of explorations that began in 1968 Dr Ray Brown, a professional diver, discovered what he was convinced was an underwater Atlantean city in the area popularly called The Bermuda Triangle – an area where there seem to have been an extraordinary number of mysterious happenings this century.

Not far from Bimini he and his crew were searching for sunken Spanish galleons in the hope of finding treasure. Immensely strong magnetic readings were registered in the area. Nothing was found on that occasion, but Ray Brown was not satisfied and returned with a fresh crew. This time an accident occurred and Dr Brown experienced death. He describes feeling shock at the blow to his head from the propeller of a fishing boat, followed by a deep sense of relaxation and peace. He felt himself expanding until he not only encompassed the whole world sphere, but the universe as well.

He was dragged out of the water and pronounced dead. Suddenly he felt the life-force returning and jerked as though experiencing an electric shock.

Two weeks later he set off for the same area with four new divers. They were caught up in an enormously powerful tropical storm – a storm which not only damaged their boat but stirred up the sand on the sea bed. It was thus that they found the remains of a huge underwater city. Excitedly they explored it. At one point Brown, who was separated from the others, looked up and was dazzled by the beams of sunlight breaking through the water on to a gigantic pyramid apparently made of highly polished stone – so highly polished indeed that it resembled a mirror.

On closer examination he found it was made of a blue stone that resembled lapis lazuli. He swam round and round it in amazement and on the third pass noticed an opening and swam through it. He found himself in a rectangular chamber with a peaked ceiling (rather like the chamber in the Pyramid of Kephren at Giza, Egypt, I assume). From this ceiling “a two inch diameter gold-coloured metallic rod hung straight downward, and beneath it was a pedestal, on which were metallic hands directed upward. In their grasp rested a perfectly formed crystal sphere. Around the pedestal were seven very large stone chairs.” Brown’s air supply was running out and he knew he had very little time. He tried to dislodge the golden rod but could not. He managed, however, to take possession of the crystal sphere. It seemed to him at that moment he felt an ominous presence in the chamber and heard a voice telling him to leave and never return.

He hurried back to the surface with his prize and, according to the article I read, has it still. It has tremendous energy. Dr Brown has become a healer and uses the crystal in his work. Heeding the warning he never returned to the place where he had found it, but sadly, the four divers who were with him did. All four were drowned. Brown says that no more tragic and mysterious disappearances have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle since the removal of the crystal.

Comment

So many experiences connected with the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis are told these days that one does not know what to believe, or rather, on what level they are to be accepted as reality.

All this may well have happened – literally – and Dr Brown may indeed have a crystal in his possession that came from ancient Atlantis. But whether it did or not – whether Dr Brown was suffering from delusions caused by lack of oxygen or not – the story he tells is rich in mythological significance and as such has a reality we would do well to accept.

He is swimming in the ocean of consciousness. He is dazzled by blinding light (like Saul on the way to Damascus). He sees a pyramid the shape of which, as the ancient Egyptians very well knew, draws one’s awareness away from the “four-square” world and points it towards the heavens. The pyramid is blue like lapis lazuli – the most sacred stone of the ancient Egyptians, brought all the way from the Afghan mountains and used in their sacred images for the eyes of the gods. It is shining like a mirror – the mirror in which one faces oneself – one’s Self. He swims round three times – the classic number of initiation. He enters through darkness into the light interior of a sacred space. The gold bar from the ceiling is conducting the energy from the highest source of spirit to the earth, where the transformer, the crystal sphere, is waiting to receive it.

The neophyte takes the crystal. He has won it, if you like, by a long process of preparation: his vision in the “death” state; his courage in choosing to dive again after his accident; his persistence…

Note that the process started by his looking for treasure in the worldly sense, and ended with his finding treasure in the spiritual sense: the capacity to heal.

Seven chairs are around the crystal. Seven Adepts or Masters must have sat there in the ancient days transmitting the energy to the world. Seven is a number redolent with mythic power. That they sat in chairs suggests that they were in a relaxed state of meditation. They were not frantically working knobs and dials and pushing buttons. The energy was passing through their bodies and in the process becoming safer for humans to use. Brown himself uses the crystal with the energy of his own body, and so the energy transmitted is limited to what his own body can contain and pass on. If he had succeeded in taking away with him the whole Atlantean apparatus without the control of the seven Magi, who knows how much damage he might have done.

Like all sacred knowledge it is guarded against misuse. Those who are not ready for it may not have it. He is warned not to return, and those who do are drowned.

Source

A journal called Spirals edited by Vivienne Verdon-Roe, 1978. Report on a talk by Dr Ray Brown given at the Clearlight Foundation Conference, December 1977.

A poem from The Breathless Pause by Moyra Caldecott

The anniversary of a death

Trying to reconstruct a person
on the anniversary of his death
you must enter
the labyrinth of memory
with its twisting
and its turning,
its sudden shocks,
its false starts
and its blind alleys,
and its sudden revelations
of what you did not know you knew.

Someone emerges
from the shadows,
familiar,
yet unfamiliar…
substantial
yet unsubstantial.
Fading fast
leaving an ache behind…
and a question:
Did you ever really know him?

Moyra at St James Wine Vaults, Bath

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause:

While I was wasting the day

While I was wasting the day
the grass was growing,
daisies opening,
sunflowers
pushing up tall stems.

While I was wasting the day
the bee pushed its way
into a hundred foxgloves
and went home tired.

Now the light fades.
The rain wets my hair.
I smell honey suckle and musk rose
and take a deep breath
for tomorrow.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause:

The net of pearls

Reality is not a straight line
from past to future
through the present…
but a network
of inter connections
going every which way.
When we recognise
the nodes
sitting in a garden at dawn,
watching little finches,
or flowers opening,
a pearl is formed
and shines
even in the night
when we are lonely
and far from home.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause.

Leaving the pond
and the gentle water weeds
a swan rode the ocean.
At first,
because it was evening
and mirror still,
not knowing
the fathoms
of deep and restless currents
stirring beneath
its poised white weight,
it rested easily,
on smooth silver.

But then –
slowly –
it began to feel
the pull and tug of the tide,
the unfamiliar hidden strength
and secret power of the sea.
No longer resting,
it rode the water
like a challenge,
rejoiced to feel
the primal rhythm coursing
in its own small veins.

No longer satisfied
with pools
of still water,
the swan rode on,
and never left the sea.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause:

Dare Darkness Grab Us

Shivering on a very small earth,
the night sky
formidable
with stars,
we pull the comforting blanket
of our love
over us,
and,
curled together,
dare Darkness grab us
and Time scatter us.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The William Blake Birthday Book (ISBN 978-0956199904).

Revelation

The dangerous seeing eye
poised to strike at darkness.
No mild recognition,
but terror,
as meaning leaps to meaning,
like lightning on iron mountains.
Words split
in revelation.
The crust of long accustomed
shatters
and an unfamiliar landscape
is revealed.

Moyra Caldecott will be one of the featured poets on 30th October 2009 at St James Wine Vaults, 10 St James Street, Bath BA1 2TW.

“What a Performance” is an evening of poetry, story-telling, and music and songs. Please go along — the more the merrier.

Although Moyra will be attending, friends will be reading her poems as, due to a stroke, Moyra is unable to speak coherently.

On listening to a poet reading his own poem

Words spin and circle
like diamonds in a whirlpool.
I catch only some
and fill in the blanks
from my own source pool,
inventing my own poem
as the poet’s words
pass by.
A kingfisher’s wing
flashes in the sun
and dazzles me.
I pass out of understanding
into a region
of pure beauty
and coast in
on a different meaning.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause.

Sleeping
with the silver disk
of the full moon
on my forehead…
light shining
through the thick bone.
Watch how it glints
on mind mirrors,
Scatters shadows,
and seeks at last,
the tiny seed thought
that waits for birth.

Before I leave this section another thought has come to mind in connection with those fairy tales. I don’t understand Einstein’s theories but I have been told that he suggested that if you faster than the speed of light, time slows down, so you don’t age as fast as those you left behind on earth.

Now there is an important point I want to make, and perhaps I should have made it at the beginning of this talk instead of at the end.

When I was researching my Egyptian novels I came across the concepts of ‘Everlasting’ and ‘eternity’ set over against each other. When I was young I had always associated them together, believing that they were the same thing. For instance in a Grimm brothers story I read about a diamond mountain in Pomerania which was two miles high. Every 1000 years a little bird came and sharpened its beak on it. When the diamond mountain is worn away, the story said, this would indicate that the first second of eternity had been passed.

In Irish myth I read that the Otherworld was remarkably like our own – but better.

At the doorway to the east,
Three trees of brilliant crystal,
Whence a gentle flock of birds calls
To the children of the royal fort.

A tree at the doorway to the court,
Fair its harmony;
A tree of silver before the setting sun,
Its brightness like that of gold.

Three score trees there
Whose crowns are meetings that do not meet.
Each tree bears ripe fruit,
For three hundred men.
There is in the sid a well
With three fifties of brightly coloured mantles,
A pin of radiant gold
In the corner of each mantle.

[Early Irish Myths and Sagas. Gantz. Penguin Books]

Even in the Bible I read a description of the otherworld using images from this and implying in both cases that That is just an extension of This.

Book of Revelations, Chapter 4:

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, “Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.”

And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine-stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, I sight like unto an emerald.

And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting clothed in white raiment: and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

And out the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.

And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

In this century T.S.Eliot’s poem Little Gidding comes to mind.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered fate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

When my husband died I avoided asking him for help because I feared it would impede his progress in the Otherworld – might take him away from doing something else more important. And then I got a message ‘loud and clear’ reminding me that in the Otherworld there is neither time nor space. He does not have to come from somewhere else to attend to me – because he is ‘here’.

Because we call it the Otherworld we think it is like this one – only insubstantial. It is totally, unimaginably different. For the first time I understood how God could be aware of every sparrow that fell. ‘He’ wasn’t somewhere else looking on as we would from a height surveying a landscape. The sparrow is ‘in’ Eternity with Him.

And we, if we were not seduced by others into confusing ‘Everlasting’ and ‘Eternity’, would know that we, as eternal spiritual beings, are ‘in’ Eternity even now, while we are simultaneously but only temporarily ‘in’ time because we have material bodies as well as our spiritual being.

If we had champagne this evening I would ask you to raise you glasses in a toast to the magnificence of the present moment, through which all the strands of multi-dimensional time are threaded!

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 8
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 9

Fairy stories are sometimes the ‘dumbing down’ of mighty ancient myths. The shining, highly evolved beings of other realms are reduced to improbable little flittering creatures that hide among the bluebells. But nevertheless their stories can still give us the insights we need, and the sentence that starts them all off ‘Once upon a time’ is relevant to this talk. It implies that there is more than one Time, and what we are about to hear is happening in a different Time to the one we know.

A herd boy falls in love with a beautiful maiden he sees standing at the doorway into a hollow hill. He follows her and enters ‘faeryland’ – a realm of great beauty, where nothing is as it is in the world he has known. He has a blissful visit with her of a few days and returns to the ordinary world only to find he has been away for 50 years and everything has changed. His parents are dead, his old companions changed.

This has to be an allegory of the moment we enter the Quest, the path of seriously exploring the Unknown Spiritual realms. It is out of Linear Time. It could take fifty years or a moment. While we are exploring we are on a ‘high’ of spiritual endeavour. When we look around us again – our old companions have changed. This happens all around us. How many marriages do you know that have gone sour because one partner has explored further than the other?

Read these old fairy stories with new eyes. ‘Redeem the unread vision in the Higher Dream’, says T.S. Eliot in his poem Ash Wednesday.

Irish Folk Tales ed. By Henry Glassie Penguin Books 1987 p.256
Usheen’s Return to Ireland (Galway) by Lady Gregory 1926:

Usheen was the last of the Fianna and the greatest of them. It’s he was brought away to Tir-Nan-Oge, that place where you’d stop for a thousand years and be as young as the first day you went.

Out hunting they were, and there was a deer came before them very often, and they would follow it with the hounds, and it would always make for the sea, and there was a rock a little way out in the water, and it would leap on to that, and they wouldn’t follow it.

So one day they were going to hunt, they put Usheen out on the rock first, the way he could catch a hold of the deer and be there before it. So they found it and followed it, and when it jumped on to the rock Usheen got a hold of it. But it went down in to the sea and brought him with it to some enchanted place underground that was called Tir-Nan-Oge, and there he stopped a very long time, but he thought it was only a few days he was in it.

It is in that direction, to the west he was brought, and it was to the Clare coast he came back. And in that place you wouldn’t feel the time passing and he saw the beauty of heaven and kept his youth there a thousand years.

It is a fine place, and everything that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there with a message he will want to stop in it, and twenty years of it will seem to him like one half-hour. But as to where Tir-Nan-Oge is, it is in every place, all about us.

Well, when he thought he had been a twelvemonth there, he began to wish to see the strong men again, his brothers; and he asked whoever was in authority in that place to give him a horse and to let him go.

And they told him his brothers were all dead, but he wouldn’t believe it.

So they gave him a horse, but they bade him not to get off it or to touch the ground while he was away; and they put him back in his own country.

And when he went back to his old place, there was nothing left of the houses but broken walls, and they covered with moss; and all his friends and brothers were dead, with the length of time that had passed.

And where his own home used to be he saw the stone trough standing that used to be full of water, and where they used to be putting their hands in and washing themselves.

And when he saw it he had such a wish and such a feeling for it that he forgot what he was told and got off the horse.

And in a minute it was as if all the years came on him, and he was lying there on the ground, a very old man and all his strength gone.

I sometimes wonder if the tales we hear about the abductions by aliens in spacecraft are not of the same order as these ancient tales of fairy abduction. They could both be symbolic tales thrown up by a powerful subconscious yearning for spiritual enlightenment – or they could be quite literally tales of abduction by extra-terrestrials – both in fairytale times, and in the present day. Who knows how long we have been visited by beings from other worlds?

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 8

One of the peculiarities of being human is our belief in a Golden Age when everything was running smoothly and everyone was happy and fulfilled. From the Hopi Indians who posit various worlds which started off in perfection but were gradually corrupted and destroyed, to Plato who spoke of perfect archetypes, only the shadows of which make up our world; from the high Civilisation of Atlantis to the Biblical Eden – the examples are endless.

Most simply a Time when things were good. But not now. Never now.

Our mistake is to put the Golden Age behind us. It is essentially out of time. The High Culture of Atlantis and the natural perfection of Eden is a template that exists in the matrix of our being, outside Linear Time, part of the multi-dimensional time we truly exist in. Such images of the Golden Age lead us on. We believe that because they once existed they could exist again.

To me the greatest of themes expressed in Mythic Time is the significant Inner Journey – the quest for the Soul 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. The traveller thinks he is looking for one thing but finds something totally other which proves to be more important in the long run.

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.

The mighty Sumerian King Gilgamish, 3000 years BC, set off to try to obtain immortality for himself, having been shocked at the death of his best friend, and having heard that in the ancient days one man, Ziusudra, had been granted immortality by the gods. To him it seemed that everything he had had no more savour than dust if life would be so suddenly taken away.

On his journey to find Ziusudra he endured many hardships that would have turned a lesser man back. A woman at a tavern at the end of the world tried to persuade him to abandon his dangerous and difficult quest and ‘eat, drink and be merry’ with the time he had left. But he persisted and at last came to the great ocean that separated the land of the Living from the land of the Dead. He was given instructions how to cross it without touching it and he came at last to find Ziusudra. They spoke long and deeply and Ziusudra gave Gilgamish a hint as to where the Flower of Immortality was hidden. After more difficult trials he plucked it and set off for home. But at one point he rested and fell asleep and a snake came out of a hole and ate it. He was devastated when he woke up to find the snake had shed its skin and been renewed, while he was still mortal and subject to death.

Wearily and disconsolately he journeyed home, but when he stood on the hills looking down on his city he was moved to joy. ‘What a goodly place’, he thought, and ran down to greet his friends and family.

Many stories from around the world tell of man’s search for immortality only to discover at the end that it is ultimately boring, and mortal life is preferable. I particularly like the Japanese one where a man takes to the sea to escape unwelcome guests and is driven by a storm to land on an island of Immortals. He found everyone so bored they spent their time trying to commit suicide and failing.

Whether these stories are invented for the same reason that it is common to think of riches not bringing happiness, to comfort ourselves for something we cannot have, or they are trying to tell us something more profound. What the hero is seeking is more of Linear Time, when what he should be seeking is something quite different – Eternity. At the end of this talk I want to touch on what I see as the difference between ‘Everlasting’ and ‘Eternity’, but there is something else I must deal with first under the category of ‘Mythic Time’.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7

During the month of October, Moyra is featured poet at St James Wine Vaults in Bath. I don’t have much information at present, but will update this post when I know more…

As far as I understand it the Aborigine Dream Time is at once a mythic representation of the origins of their culture, set in the ancient past, and a state of heightened being they can slip in to the present in which their actions take on a deeply spiritual meaning. In other words it is another kind of Time, very different from Linear. The Rainbow Snake created the landscape in the ancient days as he gouged out valleys and water holes, but he is still present as a mysterious force that shapes lives. Similarly the human exists at once in the Dream Time and in the present. At once in Eternity, and in Time.

Wally Camana in his book on Aboriginal Art says: ‘The Dreaming and the Dreamtime do not refer to the state of dreams and unreality, but rather to a state of reality beyond the mundane.’ James G. Cowen in The Elements of Aboriginal Tradition says: ‘The Dreaming embodies both an historical perspective and an account of First Causes. For it is in the activities of the ancestral beings in their various acts of world creation “outside time” that the Aborigine identifies with when it comes to determining how he should live’ (p. 23).

‘The Dreaming is, first and foremost, a metaphysical condition denoting the working of divine principles dressed up in the garb of totemic heroes. The myth is the expressive vehicle. Men identify with their Sky Heroes by way of ritual. The great ceremonies central to every tribe act as a channel by which Dreaming events are recalled, contemplated and acted upon in the life of the people’ (p. 24).

This is not the only time when reading about the Dreamtime of the Aborigines that I am reminded of the meaningfulness of our own beliefs, rituals and ceremonies. To the Aborigine the spirit of each child exists in the Dreaming before it actualizes in the world. In this instance I am reminded of Wordsworth’s poem:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

[From Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.]

The Dreaming is universal, though it has different names in different cultures – and it never means ‘dreaming’ in the ordinary sense of the word, but in the extraordinary sense. It ‘remakes’ our experience with significant symbolism into something more meaningful than we originally thought.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6

Another very important group of categories I would like to mention this evening is what I will call The Mythic or The Spiritual.

The Mythic

I have written several books about the esoteric meaning of myths, legends and fairy tails, and so when I label this category MYTHIC I do not mean it to be filed in your minds under ‘fiction’ or ‘fantasy’ or ‘just imagination’! To me the imagination is one of the most important faculties of the human mind. I hate the phrase ‘just imagination’. Imagination is the bridge between the Known and the Unknown. It flashes with images, metaphors and symbols that illuminate the deepest and darkest secrets of Being.

[‘Mysticism lives by symbols, the only mental representation by which the Absolute can enter our relative experience’ (E. Récéjac, Essays on the Bases of Mystic Knowledge, trans. By Sara Carr Upton, London: Kegan Paul, p. 3). Symbols ‘have the same effect as direct perceptions; as soon as they have been “seen” within, their psychic action takes hold of the feeling and fills the consciousness with a crowd of images and emotions which are attracted by the force of Analogy’ (ibid.).]

‘In the symbol proper…there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite, the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there’ (Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resantus, p.152).

From Myths of the Sacred Tree by Moyra Caldecott, p.11:

Everything we do, everything we think, everything we are is influenced subliminally by the background mythical traditions of our culture and, beyond that, by the universal mythical traditions of the human race.

From Crystal Legends by Moyra Caldecott, p. 14:

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 than we commonly give it credit for – and one of its functions is at once to house the ‘growing point’ for 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 imaginal 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.

Life is, as you well know, inexplicable. All the religions in the world, all the myths and legends in the world, all the scientific theories and mathematical formulae, laid end to end, cannot give us a glimpse, a fleeting flash, of something that makes us feel we understand so that we can live out our lives with direction and purpose instead of floundering blindly in the dust and wasting our potential.

From Myths of the Sacred Tree by Moyra Caldecott, p.3:

When we talk about the spirit, our ordinary language is inadequate, because we don’t know exactly what the spirit is.

When we see leaves moving on a tree we assume the possible existence of a breeze, and even so do we assume the existence of spirit because of certain otherwise inexplicable experiences in our lives. The language we use when we attempt to talk about spirit is of necessity highly symbolic.

Ibid., p.12:

A myth clothes those deep and mysterious insights into the meaning of life that we all have but sometimes refuse to recognise. Mythic truth is the language of the inner journey, and it cannot be judged by the same criteria we use in a court of law or in a laboratory. It has to sound true against our hearts. It has to fall into place like a ball rolling into the hole that was designed for it.

From Crystal Legends by Moyra Caldecott, p.11:

Myths are among the greatest treasures of the world.

Through the ages certain stories have evolved that are so universal in their appeal and so exactly fit human experience at the deepest level that they help us to cope with what would otherwise be the chaotic and terrifying impact of the outside world.

When scientific and rational knowledge broke away from intuitive and instinctive knowledge these stories – these myths and legends – were dismissed as nonsense and relegated to children. In the households of very rational people, even children were denied their aid. Lately, having discovered that the route these scientists and rationalists insisted we take has led us into an horrifying impasse, and following such great thinkers as Jung and Joseph Campbell, we are trying to reinstate the ancient myths, the healing stories, to their rightful place complementing and illuminating the other types of knowledge available to us.

Story is a natural need, and if we deny ourselves its benefits we may well suffer all kinds of maladies.

In this section I would place the significant Inner Journey, the Dream Time of the Aborigines, and the Vision Quests of the Native Americans, the Grail Quest, and myths of abduction into other worlds.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5

Although this evening I am talking about different types of time – of course I know that there are no clear categories in real life. What I call Linear Time runs into Physical Time, and Physical Time runs into Psychological Time, not to mention Dream and Memory Time. That is why I use the term ‘multi-dimensional’, because although they are different and have their own characteristics and influences, they happen to us simultaneously; they are part of the ‘wholeness’ of our experience.

Under the heading of Psychic Time I would include experiences of psychometry, pre-cognition and automatic writing.

An example of psychometry from my own life occurred when I was given a photograph in a closed envelope and told to hold it and try to ‘see’ it and report what I saw. I described a small impish boy with a cap looking rather like a street urchin at the time of Dickens. My friend showed me the photograph. It was of an elderly lady in black satin sitting at a writing desk. Then, with a smile, he showed me a sketch of the boy I had seen. It seemed he was the spirit guide of the medium in the photograph. So I had ‘scored’ after all. On another occasion I held a stranger’s locket and got an overwhelming felling of suicide. It turned out to have been given to her by her lover at Masada in the Middle East, a place made famous by the suicide of hundreds of Jews during the siege by the Romans in 73AD.

Pre-cognition, premonition and prophecy have always bothered me because I don’t like to think we have no free will – that everything is ordained and pre-determined. When I try to accommodate it in my thinking I come up with the image of a football match, the rules of which, and the roles of each of the players, are pre-determined, but the outcome is still uncertain because it is dependant on the free will actions of the players within the given framework.

I have one case of prophecy to report from my own life. At the age of eighteen some friends and I were experimenting with a Ouija board to contact the dead. We became quite carried away by it, as it seemed to be giving us remarkably relevant and accurate answers to our questions. So relevant and accurate indeed that we became frightened and decided to stop. At our last session one of my friends was told that she would die at twenty-seven, and I would die at thirty-five. When she twenty-seven she did die! So when I reached thirty-five I was very uneasy, even to the point of not wanting to fly because I was convinced the plane would crash. My sensible, sceptical husband talked me out of it and I went on the flight. It did not crash. In fact, as you can see, I am still alive. Did my friend bring about her own death because she believed the prophecy? Certainly African witch-doctors and West Indian Voodoo practitioners can bring about death by fear. Something in my own life changed considerably when I was thirty-five. So, in a sense, the ‘old’ me did die then. Was the prediction was correct – but merely misinterpreted?

If prophets and prophecies exist we have to be careful, remembering the witches in Macbeth who make two correct predictions and thus arouse expectation in Macbeth that their third will also be correct. He brings about the third by his own efforts.

‘Automatic writing’ I think also come into the category of Psychic Time. As it is usually understood, a person can be ‘overshadowed’ by a spirit from the Otherworld to write or draw or compose music. There have been some well documented cases of famous artists, writers or composers ‘coming back from the dead’ to finish unfinished business this way. An experience of this type of my own occurred one morning when I woke from a deep sleep. The person in my dream continued speaking while I was waking, and, without realising what I was doing I wrote down what he was saying. When I read it through at the end, it made profound sense. Unfortunately when I was awake I could not remember who the person was, though in my dream I knew exactly who he was.

Atman was given the secret of the universe as a gift. He was pleased, but he didn’t know what to do with it. At first he tested it in all kinds of ways to find out what it was, but failing to get a satisfactory answer he hung it on a tree as decoration. And then he forgot it.

So it stayed for a long time… an unconsidered trifle… until one day someone came by who recognised it and asked if he might have it.

Atman gladly parted with it in exchange for an artefact and went off satisfied that he had struck a good bargain, rejoicing in his newly acquired treasure.

The one who now had the secret of the universe saw that it was a seed and planted it in his garden, rejoicing in its shade in the heat of the day and was filled with great reverence and love.

All things were clear to him.

All things were good.

Meanwhile Atman began to grow dissatisfied and miserable. The artefact no longer pleased him. He was bored with it. He had done whatever there was to be done with it on the first day and thereafter he could find out nothing new about it.

The man who had the Secret of the Universe however was never bored, its variations were infinite, his interest in it ever deepening.

At last Atman, having realised his mistake came to the man and asked for it back. But now the price was so high Atman could not pay it.

He went away and worked for endless aeons to earn the price of the thing he had sold so carelessly and so cheaply before. “When I get it back,” he though, “I will ever let it go, for indeed, it is the only thing worth having.”

At that moment the man standing under the Tree of Life reached out to him and gave him freely of its fruit.

[Moyra Caldecott, Child of the Dark Star]

Leading on from this I would raise the vexed question of ‘ghosts’.

There are so many reports of ghosts (and I myself once experienced one) that I am inclined to believe in them. But what they are I don’t know. Are they impressions of past lives left in a place rather like a video recording that was made and not quite wiped away – some technical hitch in the Akashic Records and the passing of Linear Time? Or are there indeed souls who were detached from their bodies at death and are still clinging to their old lives on earth instead of moving on through the many and complex realms of the Afterlife?

I am sure we have all had gloomy, fearful impressions in a place, only to find out later that it was the site of a dreadful battle, or a horrific murder.

If Linear Time is the only sort of Time we experience, how can we thus ‘tune in’ to events that have already past as though they are still present? We don’t know how it can be, but we have noticed that a strong emotional charge seems to be a necessary part of it (as with telepathy) and a certain kind of sensitivity is necessary to ‘pick them up’.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4

Most of my books have sprung from similar experiences that could have been ‘far memory’. The Tower and the Emerald was written incorporating an experience I had at a stone circle in Derbyshire, where all the stones are lying down on the earth as though pushed down by a giant hand. There I felt that there was a body buried at the centre who had been cursed so that his soul could not leave that place, ever. He seemed to be pleading with me to release him – but I resisted because I thought he might have been pinned there for a good reason, that is, that he was under the influence of an extremely evil force. I walked away. But that night, and for four nights following, I had a recurring dream in which I was one of the priests that had cursed him and buried him. I saw that we broke both his legs so that he could not run away while we performed the ritual.

I realised I would never be free of the dream unless I freed him. Besides – it seemed to me that on one had the right to deprive a soul of its freedom to repent and be redeemed. I went back to the circle and prayed that he would be released to the care of the Angel Gabriel and the Christ (as sort of celestial probation officers). The disturbing dreams ceased.

Months later, a friend, to whom I had told the story, told me that she had visited a local museum and discovered that there had been a burial at the centre of the circle – and that the body had both legs broken.

My most successful book, a trilogy of novels set in the Bronze Age of Britain, now in one volume called Guardians of the Tall Stones, still in print after 24 years, started off from an experience I had in a stone circle at Dyce, near Aberdeen, in Scotland. I had angina at the time and after several heart attacks was living for each moment very intensely and gratefully. I was only in the circle for a few moments, but felt I had experienced a life time there. I began to write – fast – determined to get it all down before I died.

My main character was Kyra, a young girl who found she had psychic abilities and was therefore chosen to train as a priest in the Temple of the Sun, far to the south, at Avebury.

In 1976 as I lay in St Thomas’s hospital in London after a severe heart attack, not believing that I would be alive in the morning, I watched a star through the huge plate glass windows slowly crossing the sky.

I wrote the following as though it was happening to Kyra at Avebury, but to me it was at once my own experience that night in hospital and the experience I was ‘remembering’ from that ancient time. Linear Time had ceased to exist.

On a clear, moonless and cloudless night, she entered the great Stone Circle of the Temple and lay upon her back on the grass, her feet towards the East where the Sun would rise.

She was alone and the whole night was hers.

This night she must not let her attention wander for an instant.

The Star the High Priest had chosen for her was rising at the moment she lay down and she must watch its progress across the sky, unwaveringly the whole night long. No matter how tired her eyes became she must not let it out of her sight for an instant.

The effect of the high earthen ridge around the Circumference was to cut out all sight of the landscape and the villages around. She was isolated in a Circle of Power in complete darkness, alone with the Stars.

As the night progressed she totally forgot herself lying on the grass. All that existed was the one star she followed, brilliantly in focus, while an incredible pattern of subtly changing points of gold moved round in the background of her vision.

The star she watched not only moved with slow but inexorable majesty across the dark forever hole of the night sky, but grew in brightness and in power until she felt it like a sharp needle point actually penetrating the centre of her forehead.

It seemed to her the earth bank and the Tall Stones surrounding her not only kept the rest of the world out, but concentrated the power of the stars and whatever realms of Reality that lay beyond her normal consciousness, until they grew in strength and became the only Reality of which she was aware.

It seemed to her the needle of the Star she watched pinned her through the centre of her forehead to the earth and she could not move her body. In her stillness she could feel the earth moving. She was no longer loose upon its surface but was joined to it by this thin, sharp beam of force that passed from the Star to her, through her into the earth, and through the earth until it came out the other side to continue its journey…

Her mind ached with the strain of thoughts that were coming to her.

Her forehead ached with the pain of the sharp beam passing through it.

She felt very strange as she turned with the earth, feeling the earth move and the Star stand still.

But the thought she was trying to grasp kept returning until at last her mind could encompass it.

It was the realisation that the beam of force from the star that was passing through her and through the earth, and through the universe beyond, was returning to the Star of its origin from the other side!

As though the Whole Universe was a sphere, yet of such a kind that there was no material solidity to it whatever, and therefore no bounds of inside and outside.

She was like a bead on a necklace, threaded through the line of force that was curving with the Universe.

As she grasped this there seemed to be a kind of brilliant explosion in her mind, or was it in the sky?

But suddenly, from every star in the sky, there seemed to be the same fine beam of light, and each one was threaded through the pain in her forehead, through the earth, and through the Universe beyond and back again to its original Source.

The sky now instead of being black with separate points of light, was criss-crossed with fine arcs of light, each starting in a star, or …

Did they start in her hear?

She could no longer tell if she was the centre from which all the beams were coming, or whether she was the passive recipient of the beams from the stars.

Was she the beginning of all things?

She?

Who was she?

She could not remember her name.

She thought and thought in a sudden kind of panic…

“What is my name?”

But she had no name.

The more she tried to remember the more the beams passing through her head hurt her.

At last exhausted and in agony, she accepted that she had no name.

And with that acceptance the pain ceased, and she lay in wonder, watching the cycles of light weaving their magnificent pattern all around her and through her.

The beauty of it! The blissful peace and happiness she felt that anything could be so perfect occupied her for the rest of the night.

And when the sun slowly rose and the vision faded, she remembered her name.

And with the remembrance she moved and felt pain in every limb.

Slowly she dragged herself to her feet and looked round her with weary and bewildered eyes.

The dawn light revealed the Circle as she had known it before, the grassy bank, the giant Stones. Above her the first flights of birds called cheerfully to their fellows.

[Moyra Caldecott, Guardians of the Tall Stones, p.303]

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3