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A common question I am asked when giving talks, is how my interest in all this stuff began. Since most of my talks are of a Masonic nature, and I tend to keep my Masonic and ‘extra-mural’ interests separate, I normally answer by saying I was attracted to Freemasonry at an early age, that my grandfather was a member, and that I joined my English village Lodge as soon as I was 21.
However, real life is always rather more complicated!
I was raised as an Anglo-Catholic, singing from a very young age in churches where the priests wore fabulous regalia, and carried monstrances beneath shimmering ombrellinos, to the sound of Mozart and the smell of Prinknash incense, preceded by banks of candles. I was reared in boarding school (Brighton College), and for the first 18 years of my life spent more time at school than at home. However, my mother’s family was no stranger to the esoteric world. Some saw ghosts; others detected presences; still more read the tarot or used crystal balls. So to me, this seemed to be the normal way of the world.
I should add that, at least in those days, the school curriculum was quite advanced. By the time I was 13 I had read all the Narnia series of C.S. Lewis, all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, most of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, had memorized close to 100 poems, and devoured many of the classics. There were no computer games, after all! This both helped me to read books of any level of complexity, and also to hypothesize and visualize from an early age.
There were three books I read in my early to late teens which would have a profound effect on my spiritual development. At the age of fifteen, in 1972, I purchased Alfred Douglas’s book “The Tarot”, Paul Hudson’s “Mastering Witchcraft”, and later, Pick & Knight’s “Pocket History of Freemasonry”. In those days there was of course no internet, no New Age section in bookstores, no amazon.com. The only Tarot deck available (until the arrival of Douglas’s simplified set) was the Rider-Waiter deck, considered the province of hippies and Bohemians. People sped up when passing a store smelling of incense – after all, they must be trying to mask the smell of that evil drug marijuana. These first two books I proudly but nervously kept locked away in my truck box, to be read when nobody else was around (not an easy feat in a boarding school!).
Each provided a profound lesson in my spiritual quest. The Tarot book taught me how to read the cards, and a chapter entitled ‘The Esoteric Tarot’ introduced me to Lull, Agrippa, Levi and the first mention of McGregor Mathers and the Kabbala. The book on Witchcraft gave me the confidence to put my religion in context (indeed I spent several years attending services in any Church, Synagogue, Mosque, Temple I could locate in my home town of Brighton – there was even a Spiritualist Church nearby, which was probably the most fun). There was one exercise in particular, which asked the reader to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, in order to “visualize great iron shackles struck off your hands and feet by bolts of lightning”. This truly helped me to put my Christianity on a personal footing, and begin to question the dogma of the monolithic Church (not that Anglo-Catholicism was particularly dogmatic anyway…). Finally, in a era when there was just about nothing on Freemasonry available, for at that time it was still virtually a secret society, reading about the fascinating history of the Craft prior to joining, in Pick & Knight’s little book, helped to prepare me for the lifelong journey that Freemasonry has been for the past 38 years.
So that is the true origin of my interest in the odder paths of spiritual life. And they are summed up in three little books I still possess
