The name appears in several earlier novels by MacGregor including, There and Back Again, Camberwick, and throughout his Arthurian Cycle where Oberion is a father-figure to Merlin. The name has no known antecedents in Scottish folklore but appears in several medieval accounts, including a number of French chanson de geste, or ‘song of heroic deeds’ where the name is variously given as Oberon, Oberyon, Huon or Auberon. In the handful of medieval English texts where Oberion appears he is merely a familiar spirit summoned by an incantation to do a person’s will, whereas the chanson de gest honours him as Le Roi de Féerie, or ‘King of the Faeries.’ It is the latter role he takes in This Iron Race.
A king of the faeries appears under various names in the folklore and legends of Wales, Germany and Scandinavia, but is absent from that of Scotland. In Wales he is Gwyn ap Nudd, king of the Tylwyth Teg or ‘fair folk’. ‘Ap’ is a patronymic indicating Gwyn is the son of Nudd and Nudd may be cognate with the Irish god Nuada, or perhaps both Nuada and Nudd derive from Nodens, the horned god of the pre-Roman inhabitants of the Britannic Isles.
Mythologists have proposed that the deities and beliefs of an invaded and subjugated people are invariably subsumed into or supplanted by those of the invader. The Romans and Romano-British, for example, were willing to accommodate Brythonic deities, such as Sabrina of the River Severn, into their temples, whereas the Anglo-Saxons imposed their Germanic deities onto Anglia and pushed the old Brythonic gods aside. Thus, a deity once worshipped by humans might find himself demoted to king of Faerieland. The Christianisation of the Britannic Isles eventually displaced all the old gods and, with no pantheon in a monotheistic faith to accommodate them, all were condemned to haunt the hills, woods and byways alongside the faerie folk.
In Germanic mythology the king of the faeries is Alberich, ruler (rihhi in Old High German) of the Elben, or elves, with the elven folk being cognate with the faeries, or Beann Sidhe of Scottish legend and folklore. Alberich is often portrayed as a malignant dwarf, in which guise he is guardian of the Nibelungs’ treasure in the Nibelungenlied, or ‘Song of the Nibelungs’, the epic medieval poem later made famous by Wagner’s opera. Whether Alberich ruler of the elves and Alberich the treasure hoarder have been conflated, or whether Alberich’s character has been blackened and diminished by later Christian writers is uncertain.
In Norse mythology Alberich is cognate with the god Freyr, whose name is more accurately given as Yngvi-Freyr; Freyr being an honorific title rather than a given name. Uncommonly, although ruler of the Álfar or elves, Yngvi-Freyr was not elf-born, but son of the sea god, Njörðr (Njord). All the realms in Norse mythology are under the rule of the gods, or Vanir, and Njord shows this by giving Ingvi-Freyr dominion of Álfheimr (elf-home) as a teething present. Unlike the dwarvish Alberich, Yngvi-Freyr is a handsome warrior who had numerous lovers, including his twin sister, Freyja. He is associated with fair weather and virility, and sometimes depicted with an erect phallus.
Njord and the Celtic Nodens are associated with the sea and fishing and it is suggested that both are embodied in the Fisher King, the wounded ruler of a waste land who appears in Arthurian Myth (see “Maimed Heroes”) The Fisher King’s wound is a euphemism for castration – the wasting of his realm being a direct consequence – and there may be an echo of this in Yngvi-Freyr who gave up his magic sword in exchange for marriage to the beautiful Gerthr and as a result was fated to perish at Ragnarok, the End of the Gods.
In Scottish legend and folklore, and to a lesser extent in Eireland (Scotland and Eireland share much of their Gaelic heritage) no single name appears in the role of king of the faeries. This may reflect the powerful and divisive clan systems which dominated both countries until the medieval period and prevented either from uniting under one individual. To put it another way, Scots and Eirish culture no more acknowledged an individual having dominion over the faeries than they acknowledged an individual having dominion over Scotland or Eireland.
MacGregor describes Oberion as having horns like a stag and a similar antlered god appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron discovered in Denmark in 1891. The figure is believed to be the Celtic god Cernunnos and one can hear in the name a distant echo of the Irish gods already mentioned. Other horned gods under various names and guises are found worldwide. Many are styled after bulls—the Minotaur may be regarded as a fallen god—or sometimes goats and often the entire head takes the animal form. It should be noted there is no clear distinction between faith and mythology, other than the latter is more studied than practised and vice versa.
In Christian iconography the Antichrist is often depicted with horns, and this has led to an unfortunate conflation between Satanists and those who revere the old horned gods. Your editor has himself engaged in heated discussion with fellow Christians on this exact point, especially at midsummer eve when Avebury becomes a magnet for Wicca folk. It may well be that early-Christian missionaries deliberately conflated the old gods with the enemy of Christ in their efforts to convert our pagan ancestors, but Herne, Oberion and Cernunnos, along with the other members of the pre-Christian pantheons, are not at all like Satan in nature. He, alas, is a quite distinct entity.
The type was small and hard to read. He did not bother beyond the first few words if he did not think it useful. There were a great many forms of wandering spirits, and it was curious such a thin book should have so much to say on them.
This Iron Race, book one
Dr Claude Crabtree, writing in 1930, suggested this apparently casual remark alludes to the common belief that books of magick, as opposed to books about magick, were panaceas, literally ‘all things to all men’ and could, in effect, answer any query given to them regardless of its obscurity. From the description of the book Bheathain reads it seems unlikely it is anything other than a simple guide to common magickal practice and phenomena—genuine books of magick being rare and expensive—therefore, accepting the remark is without obvious narrative context, we concur with Dr Crabtree it probably refers to a text outside the narrative.
MacGregor wrote considerably more on the nature of books of magick in his last major work; The History of Scottish Magick (published posthumously in France in 1899 as L’Histoire de Écossais Magie) and this brief extract may be of interest:
Ordinary books suffer from a requirement to contain in one volume all that reasonably falls within the remit of their title. Thus, even books of seemingly modest scope weigh heavily in the hand and by their length obfuscate and conceal the seed within an immensity of chaff; notwithstanding the uninteresting chaff will contain one or many seeds suiting the enquiry or enquirer of a different time or place. Books of magick, necessarily containing magick need not suffer from this but may reveal to the reader exactly what he sought (whether he knew it or not) without the pain of always carrying and periodically winnowing the chaff. That books of magick go to such pains to please the reader may be the reason they become curmudgeonly when treated in a careless or unappreciative manner.
This Iron Race, book one
How such books might materially function is another matter entirely. The best explanation argues they are palimpsests with multiple layers of writing any one of which may be superimposed to suit the needs of the moment. Hendryk van Zelden, a man whom, despite our disagreements, we allow is an excellent communicator, has said in an interview that books of magick are akin to the hyperweb in containing a vast amount of immediately accessible knowledge whose exact whereabouts and provenance are almost unknowable.
Soul-death, or, to use its modern name, malignant anima psychosis (MAP) is a reaction to stress or stimuli where an individual’s soul or anima turns upon them, much as cancerous cells turn upon the healthy tissue surrounding them. Unless treated—formerly with charms and incantations, now more frequently by hypnosis and parapsychology—MAP is invariably fatal, sometimes through suicide but usually from complications resulting from victims failing to take care of their physical health or, in common parlance, losing the will to live.
MacGregor’s journals for the months after Madeleine’s death reveal a man contemplating suicide and the concerned letters from his friends—all available in the MacGregor Archive, box xix 1858–59 King James University, Edenborough—show that he was scarcely eating or sleeping at this time and appeared unshaven in his few public appearances. In a letter to Charles Palliser, dated October 7th, 1860, MacGregor credits his housekeeper, Edith Cave, and assistant Jock Strange, writing:
Truly, it is they I must thank for saving me from a monstrous creature that would have chilled the very blood beating in my heart and taken everything of life from the air I breathed for its own fell nourishment and yet was such a part of me, equal to my own limbs, that I think it must always have dwelt benignly within and only assumed its evil form when I was at my weakest.
That, according to the paraphysicist Professor Hans Frum of my alma mater, Israel College, Oxford, is as accurate a description of the symptoms of MAP as one will find in any medical text book.
MacGregor left no exact account of his battle with MAP and was inclined in conversation to ascribe his recovery wholly to the intervention of friends and his meeting Helena Northwood, but his journal at this time makes several references to a “journey,” albeit without clues to the nature of the journey. Whether this journey was through what Jung would later term, the subconscious, or was a metaphysical journey into an otherworld, is unexplained. Certainly, history is full of accounts of journeys to unearthly paradises or hellish netherworlds and while most are obviously allegorical not all can be easily dismissed.
The same uncertainty appends Sarah’s Pinsker’s journey through the otherworld in chapter twelve of This Iron Race. By turns, whimsical, amusing, menacing, even erotic, her journey has the capriciousness of a dream, and yet has repercussions in the real world. On the one hand, Sarah’s father remarks that she has been missing for three days (during which she must surely have been somewhere) and her eyes have changed from brown to blue, yet her entry into the otherworld through a rack of fur coats, encounter with the bear, fox and squirrel and return via a tapestry are so implausible the text begs us not to take it seriously.
The detail regarded Sarah’s eyes occurs in both the printed edition of 1865 and in MacGregor’s first draft and it was investigated by Dr Claude Crabtree in The Wizard of the North, (King James University Press, 1930). Medical science has moved on a great deal in the past eighty years, and I have confirmed with a visit to my optician that children are commonly born with blue eyes, that is, without pigmentation of the iris, and the eyes will gradually change colour between the ages of one and three. Subsequently, this colour is fixed for the great majority of people, though changes may occur during puberty and pregnancy as a result of hormonal changes in the body. Heterochromia is a rare condition that can cause changes in eye colour but as it was not documented in MacGregor’s time he is unlikely to have been aware of it. In any event there are no known circumstances where eyes change colour within the space of three days.
At this point it is important to remember that this is not an event in the narrative present but Sarah’s recollection of an event some years before. Therefore, MacGregor is not asking us to believe that this happened, only that it is Sarah’s recollection. The true question then becomes whether Sarah’s recollection is trustworthy and, with the proviso that something undoubtedly did happen to her in the magick quarter, I suggest its whimsical presentation intends us not to trust her. Ultimately, however, MacGregor offers an emphatic ambiguity allowing the reader to interpret Sarah’s account as fact or allegory as they see fit.
As anyone who has the misfortune to live in a house built across a faerie road will acknowledge, we do not need to see faeries to know they are among us. Traditionally, such houses have their front and back door opposite each other, and the inhabitants would leave their doors wide open on Midsummer Eve and Halloween when the faeries ride and leave gifts of milk, cream, and butter to appease them. Failure to leave the doors open would lead to violent shaking of the entire house and, in rare cases, demolition as the faeries vented their anger. Plainly, that we cannot see faeries does not make us immune.
This raises an interesting question for folkloric research and experimental paraphysics confirms that certain animals have far higher visual awareness of faerie phenomena than others and many animal species are more aware than the average human. Dogs are frequently seen to bark at nothing, cats will refuse to enter a room, horses will spook for no reason, and some bird species will often fly in frenzied alarm. Most of this behaviour has a physical explanation but some are genuine encounters between animal and the world of faerie.
Quite why horses, cats, dogs, and many species of bird, are visually aware of faeries and man is not remained a great mystery until the last few decades when the answer came, indirectly, from the study of colour vision in primates. All fish, reptiles, amphibians, most species of birds, several species of primate, and humans, have trichromatic vision that distinguishes between shades of red and yellow; however, the great majority of placental mammals (this excludes the marsupials) have dichromatic vision which cannot distinguish between red and yellow. The study concluded that trichromacy was lost in early mammals but later re-evolved among certain primate species. Further study of these primates proved that all were, or had evolved from, frugivores—fruit-eaters—indicating that trichromacy re-evolved to discriminate between ripe and unripe fruit.
These studies were published in the relevant scientific journals but made little impact outside the field of evolutionary biology until Professor Leon Heidenreich of Berlin University’s Paraphysics Laboratory noted a correlation between those animal species with dichromatic vision and those with heightened awareness of faerie, or paraphysical, phenomena. Remarkably, Professor Heidenreich showed that all higher mammals with dichromacy have at least partial awareness of faerie phenomena while those with trichromatic vision have none. He concluded that when our distant primate ancestor gained the ability to identify the ripe fruit from the unripe they lost the ability to detect faerie, or ‘Bright Colours’ as they are known. Professor Heidenreich’s findings led to a rush of new research, some creditable some less so, which eventually proved a correlation between colour blindness and psychic awareness in humans. This is not to say that all with colour blindness can see faerie colours (thank heavens!) merely that there is a greater chance they might do so. Curiously, colour blindness is far more common among males at an estimated one in twelve of the population than in women where only one in two-hundred is affected. I myself suffer from colour blindness and it always made offering my wife advice on her latest dress diplomatically awkward—why she would insist on asking me I shall never know—and perhaps exacerbated our estrangement, along with her affair with Rupert the riding instructor.
Some of the research following Professor Heidenreich’s findings has been intriguing, if far-fetched. The most curious, to my mind, was that of Julius Endicote, a homeopath and animal psychiatrist with no obvious scientific or medical training, who drew a parallel between the evolution of trichromacy in primates and our loss of visual contact with the faeries and our estrangement from God in the Judeo-Christian account of the Fall of Man. In both cases, Endicote argued, the cause was fruit: the ripe fruit desired by the primate and the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge eaten by Adam and Eve. Needless to say, the theories of Julius Endicote do not appear in scientific journals.
I shall have more to say on ‘Bright Colours’ in due course, but for the moment it suffices to say that they do not resemble ordinary colours so much as shades of emotion or moods.
Faeries, like humans, build their roads sensibly: neither too steep nor too winding and when topography demands it faerie roads and those of man take an identical course. Hence, man and faerie often meet on the road, albeit only the wariness of your horse will alert you to their presence for while they are curious about humankind they generally leave us alone. Thus, while Tormod M’Neis intends his remark ‘Have the little folk crossed the road?’ as a joke it is not without substance for they will have crossed the road or walked beside us at one time or other.
The alert reader will have noted that from taking to his bed after the visitation from his soul to his awakening in Màiri Mulcahy’s bed some sixty hours elapse during which Bheathain is either unconscious or delirious. This should not be a surprise.
Acquiring the gift of clearsight, or Grace, is a traumatic process akin, so it is claimed, to the transformation of a humble grub into a damselfly, with the proviso that unlike the metamorphosis of the damselfly, which is organised, and predictable, psychic transformations differ widely. As in the Zygoptera, a period of torpor or quiescence is essential and Dr Diane Fanshawe claims (Psychic Insight Magazine, August 2011), the allusion to the metamorphosis of the larva into the adult insect is closer than one might suppose for acoustic imaging of the brains of people acquiring clearsight reveals the breakdown of neural connections and their reconstruction. Essentially, this is a form of self-inflicted brain injury and can, if interrupted or unfinished, lead to a permanent catatonic state, insanity and even death. As the neuroscientist Charles Sherrington memorably wrote:
…the brain is weaving anew its tapestry of meaning and though each—the before and after—was and shall be perfect upon completion, the execution risks the unravelling of loose threads.
Your editor is no expert, but allowing learning is itself a form of mental rewiring, one imagines Charles Sherrington is stating in his own terms the advice given Bheathain by Màiri Mulcahy:
Deny it, it will destroy you; left untrained it will destroy those you care for.
One can argue—indeed, we should say it has been argued—that Bheathain has hardly been quiescent: indeed, he will continue to resist at every turn. Unlike the damselfly, one who acquires clearsight does not emerge from the chrysalis able to fly on instinct alone. Bheathain’s transformation is incomplete and, like a child learning to walk, he lacks self-control. He has many further boundaries to cross and challenges to meet and MacGregor intends to show us this journey.
I thank Eileen Provender of Belshade College, Oxford for her assistance with the above.
With the obsolescence of the candle as an everyday object, ‘candle-snatcher’ has lately dropped from usage. Essentially, it is a lost spirit, or revenant, suspended between this world and the next, although there are numerous accounts of faerie sprites pretending to be revenants in order to make mischief, such as Peggy Pickwick whose theft of a candle is blamed for the Great Fire of Lunden.
The Catholic Church long maintained that the primary cause of suspension of the human spirit is a failure to baptise children, citing the childlike behaviour of Candlesnatchers as proof; however, this is contradicted by the works of Pliny the Elder and Aristotle which describe similar phenomena long before the advent of Christianity. Today, most authorities agree the cause of spiritual ‘suspension’ remains unknown.
Although uncanny, candlesnatchers are harmless and are usually discouraged with an unkind word or, on the rare occasion they prove persistent, with a show of iron or steel whose magnetic properties are anathema to all forms of magick. The majority are ephemeral, although folklore suggests those with a permanent home near water can survive for many decades, albeit a number of these may be the elemental spirits which habitually frequent watercourses. Despite this partiality for water, candlesnatchers are, like all magickal phenomena, unable to cross running water owing to the etheric field created by the current.
Much of this is necessary to understand the candlesnatcher’s purpose in MacGregor’s narrative. The most obvious is it immediately introduces the supernatural, for, as MacGregor informed us, “The chief concern of this novel is magick.”
The less obvious purpose is to illustrate an aspect of Captain Wolfe’s character. A candlesnatcher is an interstitial phenomenon and trapped in a permanent state of unbelonging, as is Captain Wolfe whose clearsight prevents him being the son his father wished and the heroic officer he wishes to be. In essence, Captain Wolfe’s reaction to the candlesnatcher mirrors the loathing in which he holds himself.
The claim that the soul exists outside the body and manifests (though not exclusively) at the point of death is, of course, at odds with the teachings of the Abrahamic religions. However, belief in an external soul appears to have been widespread in ancient times and there are many references in folklore to a person’s soul being placed in safekeeping external to the body. The same belief in an external soul also appears, albeit in fragments, in the teaching of certain Far-Eastern faiths, but by far the largest body of evidence for an external soul comes from accounts of near-death experiences.
Common to almost all such experiences, a person’s soul appears in animal form to escort the spirit to the afterlife. Or rather, in the case of near-death experiences, to deny them passage because it is not yet their time. Only rarely, usually to herald great change or conflict, does the soul manifest outside of a near-death experience.
Bheathain’s soul appears as a stag. It is a common animal in the Scottish Highlands, but that is not the case with all soul forms and parapsychologists have spent much effort theorising why certain animals occur much more frequently than others and why some are rarely, if ever found.
The more harebrained parapsychologists (the pun cannot be resisted) such as Dr Lennart Östberg of Stockholm University, have argued for an astrological connection, but while many soul forms appear among the constellations, notably the antelope, whale, goat, bear and lion, many do not, and a great number of the constellations are not named after animals at all. Moreover, as detractors of Dr Östberg’s theory point out, astrology is a subjective discipline, and one cannot attempt to lever together two non-rational beliefs in order to create something more than the sum of their parts.
The Slovakian parapsychologist and ardent feminist, Professor Zukana Molnár, is much more reliable. She has drawn on the fossil record to show a correlation between the fauna of the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods and typical soul forms. This, Professor Molnár argues, explains why domesticated animals, such as the dog, never occur as soul forms and why extinct animals, like the mammoth, do. She then proposes that this is evidence of a race memory dating from the earliest development of mankind’s spiritual beliefs (universally assumed to be animist in nature) and connected to the Jungian concepts of Symbolism and Archetypes.
This is far too complex to elaborate further, but it is sufficient for the reader to understand that a northern European is as likely to have the soul form of a mammoth as a weasel, whereas a native Latin-American might have the soul form of a macaw or giant sloth.
Professor Molnár’s The Perception of the Ancients (Príroda, Bratislava, 2009) examines the depiction of human-animal hybrids, such as mermen, centaurs, minotaurs, and sphinxes, in the literature of the ancient world and concludes they are allegories of our dualistic nature, being half human and half beast, rather than descriptions of actual species. The acceptance of the dual nature of humans was, she argues, common to all beliefs until the advent of agriculture when we began to think of ourselves as distinct from all other species and concomitant with this distinction humans could only acknowledge their innate animal desires as sinful.
This, Professor Molnár argues, is the true nature of The Fall described in the Book of Genesis and she claims in Sexual Awakening: Freeing the Beast Within (Príroda, Bratislava, 2014) that the denial of our animal nature is the cause of almost every modern psychosis. The book created a scandal among parapsychologists and when the mainstream media picked up on the story, they portrayed her as a sexual degenerate with the morals of an alley cat.
Your editor, when an undergraduate at Israel College, Oxford, perhaps unwisely at the end of an evening in the Lamb and Flag, had his soul ‘read’ by a female student of whom he was somewhat enamoured and, after much hand waving, she pronounced his soul was a toad. Having babbled something about her confusing the Amphibia and perhaps he might be a frog—alluding to the fairy tale—she pronounced him, which is to say, me, too ugly to be a frog. The humiliations we suffer for love and its pretenders.
Although outside the remit of his task, your editor directs the interested reader to a piece in the winter 2012 issue of The Silver Trowel (Prisma Press, Woking) discussing the differing interpretations by archaeologists and archaeoparapsychologists of the prehistoric cave paintings at Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France and, increasingly, all animal representation in prehistoric art. Do such scenes illustrate, as archaeologists argue, hunting rituals? Or, as proposed by archaeoparapsychologists, the ascension of the human spirit accompanied by the soul? The article in The Silver Trowel makes no definitive answer but provides an overview of the evidence.
In Scottish folklore and that from Wales, Cornwall, Eireland, Mannin, and Basse-Bretagne, accounts of the soul guiding the deceased’s spirit to the afterlife are widespread. In most tales, the soul travels by “green lanes”, or pathways to an afterlife named variously in Celtic lore as the Hesperides, Tir Na Og, Land O’ Leel, or the Summer Country. Often the green lane is described as sunlight reflected on the sea, in others it is a green ray seen at sunset, in yet more it is a shooting star or the aurora borealis.
Speaking as a practising Christian, your editor suggests the precise whereabouts and form taken by our soul is less important than listening to its demands, rather than demanding its tolerance of our indulgences. One only regrets not understanding this many years ago when one might have proved a more constant father to one’s son.
Sigmund Freud, the father of applied psychology, argued in Die Nachtmahrdeutung (Vienna, 1902) that magick in all its variety of manifestations is a projection of the sensate or conscious mind upon the insensate or unconscious environment. Freud’s disciple, and eventual rival, Carl Jung, put the same argument more succinctly in Aion. Beiträge zur Symbolik des Selbst (Walter Verlag, 1951) claiming that,
magick does not exist, unless we make it so.
The proof against Freud’s “Theorie Magie” requires the demonstration of magickal phenomena wholly external to human observation and intervention. That no such demonstration has been proven in over one hundred years of thaumaturgical research is testament to Professor Freud’s theory and ought, or so any reasonable man might suppose, consign the conception of magick as an external metaphysical phenomenon to the same attic room as goblins and cherubim and other obsolete beliefs.
Regrettably, those who argue for the reality of magick as a force external to human consciousness are not reasonable. They argue, in a variant of Heisenberg’s infamous thought experiment, that magick at any given point in time and space both does and does not exist and only manifests as an “observer effect.” Magick, so they claim, is the lock, and trained human thought the key that opens it.
This argument is popularised, both by those who defend the proposal and those who ridicule it, as, magick exists, if you believe in the existence of magick! An anecdote, if you will, to show that we Austrian Germans are not without a sense of humour: in December 1913, two years before the Great War, Vienna’s Volkstheater put on a production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Famously, as Tinker Bell is dying Peter addresses the audience with the question,
Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!
In most theatres I believe the response is immediate applause, but we Viennese are an exceedingly rational people and on the first night the line was met with stony silence until a young moustachioed man in a corporal’s uniform rose in his seat and loudly declared,
Es gibt keine feen in Wien! – There are no fairies in Vienna.
Amusing, ja?
I digress, but I think I make clear the absurdity of arguing that something is so only if you believe it to be so.
Leaving aside the lack of evidence for magick as a force external to conscious thought, a theoretical study of the matter reveals a question that no one can answer and few have even considered, at least from a scientific point of view. It is this: if magick exists outside consciousness but only manifests when observed by a conscious being, then what was its purpose and manner of existence prior to man’s evolution from the insensate, unconscious non-beingness that preceded him? Even if we permit our neighbours on the tree of life a small degree of consciousness, it scarcely takes the development of consciousness beyond some ten million years into the past. If magic is a lock and consciousness the key, then what possible purpose could magick have served during the two and one half billion years when no life more complex than the bacterium existed on earth?
It is at this point in the discussion that those few who have considered the matter depart wholly from science and declare that God is the source of all magick. God, we are supposed to accept, is the lock and we the key, for, so they declare, He brought us into existence in order for Himself to become manifest. Others, wary of association with organised religion, identify a protean life force as the source of all magick and regard evolution—in scientific terms a mindless tinker—as the tool by which this life force executes its ambition; an ambition of which we are a small and uncomprehending part.
These are theological arguments, not scientific, and in scientific terms there is not a shred of experimental evidence for the existence of magick as a force external to human (or animal) consciousness.
By contrast, Freud’s “Theorie Magie” has withstood all theoretical counter-arguments and there is growing experimental evidence, widely available and which need not be cited here, that magick is, as Freud first claimed, a product of the development of consciousness among living organ-isms. Manifesting first in species of birds, or perhaps with their ancestors, the great reptiles, its origins are traceable still in the remarkable migrations and homing instincts of some bird species. Later it appeared in the cetaceans, many of which are also migratory, before reaching new heights in the great apes and its pinnacle, for the moment at least, in hominids and Homo sapiens, which was the first species to understand magick and use it consciously and so may rightly be called the inventor of magick.
Carl Jung, a pioneer in the field of supranaturalism, had special regard for magick as a tool for understanding the precise nature of consciousness and in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Franz Deuticke, 1912) wrote:
If our true consciousness lies hidden beneath the superficiality of thought, like a mountain shrouded by fog, then magick is the cold, clear air we must direct upon it.
This allows me to draw a parallel between Jung and Sir Tamburlaine MacGregor: both argued, if not in the same words, that to be truly ourselves we must believe in the magick within us. This approach guided Jung’s investigation of consciousness and it resides at the centre of MacGregor’s This Iron Race novels. Of course, MacGregor died in 1872 and Jung was not born until 1875 and seems never to have read MacGregor’s work, so it can only be a parallel and not a direct connection.
If we regard Freud and Jung as marking the era when the study of consciousness turned from enlightenment philosophy into science, then Sir Tamburlaine MacGregor wrote in an era when enlightenment philosophy had itself only recently broken from Aristotle’s two millennia grip on rational enquiry and from theocratic obscurantism incapable of observing the world other than through the lens of scripture.
The Danish natural philosopher Carl Davinius, writing in the preface to his On the Mutability of Species by means of Natural Variation (Copenhagen, 1847) summed up the new era thus:
For almost two thousand years, a long-dead Greek philosopher and the Vatican have barred rational progress. They succeeded because progress was itself no more than a plodding dray horse. Then, a mere decade ago, Herr August Borsig of Berlin invented the railroad locomotive* and finally these cadavers of history were crushed beneath its wheels.
From my reading of MacGregor’s work, it appears his description of the human soul and what he popularised as ‘Bright Colours’ are highly influenced by his near contemporary, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770–1831. Copies of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, (Leipzig, 1807) and Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, (Heidelberg, 1817) and several of his other major works, were held in the library of Edenborough’s Speculative Society where MacGregor was a frequent attendee in his youth and member from 1832 to his death in 1872 so there is no reason to doubt, given the similarities between Hegel’s theories and the psychoprosopography in MacGregor’s later novels, that he had read them, if not studied them in depth.
Freud was not a devotee of Hegel; indeed, they are quite different in their approach and Freud never acknowledges Hegel’s work as influential on his own; yet the connection between them is obvious: both sought to apply logic and conceptual rationalism upon that which had hitherto not been subject to any scientific investigation whatsoever. Rather, the inner world of man, dergeist und der soul und das wesen—in German, also, there are particular names—was the province of the theologian for man’s nature was inseparable from the God that had made him in His image. Hegel sought to understand man within the wider world of enlightenment philosophy: Freud sought to understand the nature of man within man himself and created his own identifiers: ego, superego, id, psyche, and persona, for the many parts that make man, and let us add, woman, too.
Should we be surprised if, guided by Hegel’s dictum,
the sleep of reason produces monsters,
Sir Tamburlaine’s dissection of human nature coincides so remarkably with Freudian theory? I think not, for he was not the only nineteenth century artist to discover Freud before Freud, nor even the best known. That distinction is held by the Leipzig-born composer, Wilhelm Richard Wagner, who explored in his “Music Dramas” many of Freud’s theories, including the Oedipal Complex, decades before they were described in psychological terms. Moreover, MacGregor and Freud, along with Wagner and Hegel, were hardly rival inventors, but merely observers of that which had existed, buried in our conscious and unconscious minds, for as long as man has existed, and whose nature both MacGregor and Freud had good cause to examine.
Freud’s observations of psychological phenomena were upon his patients: for MacGregor, the evidence, incomplete as it is, strongly suggests he combined the roles of patient and observer in one. I shall not be drawn into the foolish disagreement between Mr Warbrook and Herr Zelden: there is not so much difference between the processes in certain forms of magick and those in psychological analysis, and from the considerable knowledge of such matters revealed in Sir Tamburlaine’s journals, it is clear he had access both to those who claimed to work magick and those who employed more novel forms of treatment. Which he chose, in my opinion, matters little; its success is proved by his recovery from the psychological morbidity enjoined by his first wife’s death, the happiness of his second marriage, and his restored creativity.
In MacGregor’s, This Iron Race novels there are three forms, or aspects, of human existence directly described: der soul, which manifests as a familiar animal form; der geist, or spirit, which MacGregor terms ‘Bright Colours’ and describes as a halo of auric light invisible to all but a few adepts; and the conscious man living half in memory and half in the present. These we may, without too much difficulty, assign Freudian nomenclature, as follows.
The animal soul approximates to the id: the seat of our primal impulses. In Freudian theory, the id comprises two elements, Erosund Thanatos: the former is the life, or sex urge, while the latter is the death urge which thrives on risk-taking. MacGregor’s animal souls can also take two forms: one is dark, savage, and treacherous; the other light, impulsive and passionate, but essentially benign and even playful.
MacGregor’s ‘Bright Colours’ also manifest in dark and light forms, but these reveal differences in vitality, rather than character. The dark form is weak-willed and apathetic; it pleads rather than commands. The light form is vital, strong-willed, and resolute. We may correlate MacGregor’s ‘Bright Colours’ with Freud’s concept of the ego which seeks to satisfy the primal urges of the id in a sustainable manner to produce long-term benefits, even at short term disadvantage. Unlike id and superego, and unlike the depiction of the soul in MacGregor’s novel, it is self-aware and able to rationalise.
Freud’s ego is guided by the superego: in German, the Über-Ich. It seeks a form of perfection through instinctive, or evolved morality, and the internalisation of socialised morality. The latter is informed through nurture and environment and accessed through conscious and unconscious memory. MacGregor does not give the super-ego a particular form or nature, but we may see it in action as characters reflect on traumatic events in their past, often reliving them as though seeking different understandings, if not outcomes, and these events continue to inform their actions in the present. Regrettably, MacGregor’s concern for his characters’ lives prior to the narrative present has led to some accusing him of ‘losing the plot.’ This I find unreasonable: narrative without proper attention to causation, or motive, is merely an accumulation of events, whereas causation gives significance to apparently trivial circumstances, such as a small boy’s fear of horses.
The whole man, including the natural living processes of the flesh, conscious thought and the unconscious drives of the id and ego combined, is described by Freud as the psyche and in great part MacGregor’s work might be described as the study of the psyche, particularly when placed under the great stress of acquiring clairvoyance, or as MacGregor’s terms it, “Grace.” There is no doubt that while magick is, according to Freud’s long-standing theory, a projection of consciousness upon the unconscious environment, we construct reality from that which we perceive and therefore even though magick has no objective reality, subjectively it is entirely real.
However, it is with some amusement that I note a limitation in my expertise prevents me from further discussion for this novel is as much about persona, that which we present of ourselves to others, as it is about the various components of the psyche. Naturally, in one’s practice one gains experience of the defences the patient places between the world and his or her true nature, but the analytical psychologist’s probing must always be gentle and permissive and never direct, or the patient exercises their freedom to leave the couch. The examination of each of the characters by Bheathain’s curse is analogous to the work of the applied psychologist, even to the point where one or two become aware of the process and break the examination; however, one character in the novel reveals only what he chooses and remains untested: that character is Sir Tamburlaine himself. Even when writing in his private journal, Sir Tamburlaine’s persona never fractures, and I believe that to understand his motives and methods requires the skill of a forensic psychologist and that lies quite outside my knowledge.
Dr Walter Waltz, Vienna Institute of Parapsychology
Notes.
*Davinius appears to refer to the founding of the Borsig-Werke factory in 1837. In fact, August Borsig built his first steam locomotive in 1828 when only twenty-four years old.
†The written description of characters’ psychological nature or attributes.
It is widely believed that the dead surround us always. Most enter their company only at death, but a rare few, while yet living, are temporarily joined to their number by adventure or mischance. Of these few, some are unwitting trespassers, or captives; others demand passage to the afterlife in the hope of retrieving a deceased wife or lover; and others resurrect the dead to consult with them.
Odysseus was among the latter, but having raised Tiresias, the one-time blind prophet of Apollo, with an offering of wine, honey, barley meal, and the blood of a black ram, Odysseus failed to follow Tiresias’s advice. After many misadventures, including: offending the gods, losing his ship and crew; and seven years as the reluctant consort of the nymph, Calypso; he eventually returned home to Ithaca. There, having killing the suitors who had attempted to woo his wife and take his house, Odysseus at last obeyed Tiresias’ instruction and, carrying an oar upon his back, he began walking inland.
This fragment of Homer’s Odyssey inspired one of my favourite poems by Thomas Warbrook whom I had the privilege of knowing in my early years at Israel College, Oxford. Tom was something of a mentor to me and I think Nevil Warbrook will not mind if I quote his father’s poem in full, given its theme is not far from what we will discuss.
The Corn Flail
‘Odysseus?’ My new companion said, And I was glad the name was strange to him. ‘Why do you carry that upon your back?’ ‘This?’ I asked him, shaft in hand As though I had not carried it long, ‘You do not know its purpose?’
‘I know it well enough,’ he said, ‘But you are one-thousand miles from shore.’ ‘Name it then, or have I carried it far enough?’ ‘An oar,’ he said. ‘But you have no need Here in this wilderness, and the sea lies upon your back.’ ‘Tiresias had me carry it,’ I said.
The man looked sideways on me, saying ‘I had heard Tiresias was dead.’ ‘I had heard the same,’ I said. ‘And yet lately I sat with him. At the sign of the Black Ram we drank His health and mine in honey, blood, and wine.’
‘I should be walking on,’ my new companion said. And I, having troubled him, waved him by Saying, ‘I have given up my sword, Both long and short. Am an old man wandering And no threat to you or any other.
‘But tell me, if you must go, How far is the land of corn?’ ‘The land of corn?’ my new companion said. ‘I do not know how many miles But sure it is upon this road.’ He did not walk on
But puzzled, glanced again at me And the oar upon my back. ‘Tiresias had me carry it,’ I said. ‘Until a man sees a corn flail And not an oar upon my back. Only then will Odysseus lie far enough from the sea.’
Thomas Warbrook, from ‘Greek Gifts’ (Brunswick Press, 1958)
The poem is about redemption and how far a man must go before he can be forgiven. Though the text stands on its own merit, anyone familiar with its author recognises an autobiographical element for Tom Warbrook never entirely shook off his association with unsavoury, not to say scandalous society during his student days at Oxford. A fact borne out by his obituaries, which, while universally praising his work, found space to mention his association with the notorious Lester Rookwood and The Helios Club. Our deaths invite the raking of embers we wish had grown cold and leave our friends free to speak of our indiscretions.
The sea is the great barrier between Odysseus and his return to Ithaca and he journeys to its outermost part, identified in The Odyssey as a harbour at the edge of the world, to speak to the shade of Tiresias. Twice, thus far in Sir Tamburlaine’s novel, a journey by water has taken us near the land of the dead. We saw it in the subterranean adventure of Sarah Pinsker and, less obviously, in George Huck’s redemptive return to Clovenstone to release his lost love, Elisabet.
Mud mired his boots till every step hauled up a mountain on his soles. He bent forward, the better to grab handfuls of reed and moss and haul himself higher. In the starlight he saw the broad sweep of Clovenstone, even the stone itself dark under sky, its cleft face darker still. He trusted to his hands to find the way. Hope led him on, hope and love. He would not be swayed now. He found a low mound beneath his fists and dug his hands into the roots, dragging out handfuls of thick brown moss.
—I’m here, Bet. Like I said. Like I promised.
Breath scorched his throat. His insides burned with pain. Yet his flesh was chill, his hands cold. Water ran clear through his fingers, welling from the ground like tears. This, under his hands was the source of the flood; all the water in the dale began here, the origin, the beginning.
This Iron Race, book two, Chapter 14.
Water, in the form of a river or sea, separates the worlds of the living and the dead in a number of beliefs. In Greek myth Charon the ferryman sculls us across the River Styx. In Norse myth the Rainbow Bridge, Bifröst carries over the chasm of the Kerlaugar. In Hindu myth the river is the Vaitarani. In Japanese Buddhist tradition the Sanzu-no-kawa. In the Rigveda, the ancient Indian text, it is the Rasā.
In Celtic myth the souls of Cornishmen sailed across the western approaches to Brittany, while in Welsh and Irish myth the land of the dead lies beyond the setting sun, far out in the Atlantic. And in The Odyssey, as we noted, the Gates of Hades lie at edge of the world, beyond the sea.
In all these examples the afterlife must be travelled to; we do not fall into it, as though through a rabbit hole. It is a sea voyage, a journey into the unknown, whether taken deliberately while alive, or undertaken at our deaths: death must be, as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan tells us, an awfully big adventure.
Having established that the land of the dead, as presented in myth, lies over water, we turn to the dead themselves. When Odysseus calls Tiresias up from the dead, we read:
Then came also the ghost of Theban Tiresias, with his golden sceptre in his hand.
He knew me and said, ‘Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, why, poor man, have you left the light of day and come down to visit the dead in this sad place? Stand back from the trench and withdraw your sword that I may drink of the blood and answer your questions truly.’
So I drew back, and sheathed my sword, whereon when he had drank of the blood he began with his prophecy.’
Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI.
You will note that Tiresias is presented whole. Though still blind, his clearsight identifies Odysseus immediately. He drinks the offered blood and converses with Odysseus without difficulty. There is nothing to indicate, other than the word ‘ghosts’ earlier in the scene, that this is anything other than a dialogue between two mortal men. It would, however, be unwise to read too much from this: Homer’s audience would bring their own assumptions and they are not our assumptions. Tiresias’s ghost appears to be corporeal, but while we know that cannot be, our knowledge is not that of the Ancient Greeks: the past here is truly a foreign country.
To date, the scientific investigation into the nature of the dead has restricted itself to anatomy: the butchery of corpses to understand the processes of the living. Anatomy is of no use to our investigation. The pseudoscience of ghost-hunting almost entirely postdates the writing of This Iron Race, and it too cannot directly serve us, if our aim is to understand the presentation of the dead within that work. Anecdotal evidence for the nature of the dead is ancient, but if we investigate it thoroughly this article will be nearly as large as the work for which it is a preface.
I restrict myself, then, to those relevant works of literature in the library of Sir Tamburlaine MacGregor and Edenborough’s Speculative Society. These I will test against knowledge: literary, pseudoscientific, and anecdotal; acquired since MacGregor’s time. I shall be brief.
Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, (Leipzig, 1807) describes four forms of the dead: corporeal, animated corpse, pure spirit, and vampyric. Hegel allows that these distinctions are not always absolute. For example, although Tiresias appears corporeal, he can only speak once he has drunk the blood of the ram, suggesting he is partly vampyric: that is to say, his presence among the living depends upon another’s life essence—here, a slaughtered ram.
Paraphysicists have now identified a fifth form that survives as pure information within an extant electrical field. In former times they haunted streams and running water, but are now usually found near telecommunications equipment and radio transmitters. Most of us will have heard mysterious voices speaking to us through the static of a badly tuned radio or while waiting for someone to take our telephone call.
The corporeal dead have only the illusion of flesh. It is glamour with the appearance and sometimes the touch of flesh, but their real flesh lies lifeless in the ground, decaying, or is grey ash. Tiresias cannot drink the blood of the ram since he has no mouth or throat or gut, but he can consume the essence of it and gain strength. That is our rationalisation of what Odysseus reports. It is, perhaps, not the only rationalisation, but it serves.
The animated corpse is known by various names, but corp-walker will serve our needs. They are not, and never have been except in second-rate fiction, zombies: the zombie is a wholly separate phenomenon. Corp-walkers show a preference for their own flesh, at least initially; but once their flesh is no longer serviceable, they will occupy the corpses of other humans and even animals. Like the homeless, in extremis they will accept any roof over their head. It is probable that the animating force gains either pleasure or familiarity from the flesh, and also energy released by the processes of decomposition: energy presumably greater than that needed to animate the flesh. Naturally, the more recently dead a corpse is, the more attractive it is to a corp-walker and the monumental gravestones and tombs in our cemeteries were intended to deter them. Poor people, unable to pay for elaborate and heavy funerary monuments employed grave watchers to look over the deceased for the first week or two after death. Graves would also be planted with nails and other ironware to deter corp-walkers.
One book in particular in MacGregor’s library would have furnished him with sufficient material on corp-walkers: The Customs and Antiquities of Alba, by Mrs Elspeth Divine (pub John McConnell, 1804) and the Edenborough Speculative Society also had many pamphlets and lecture notes on talks on the subject dating from the 1820s. Mrs Divine’s work in particular is a thorough compendium of hauntings and post-mortem phenomena in Scotland and Northern Anglia.
Like the corp-walker, the vampyre requires a source of energy, since it is no longer able to generate its own. Unlike the corp-walker, it prefers to take that energy parasitically from the living and was therefore a particular concern. Like the corporeal dead, the vampyre has the illusion of flesh, allowing it to walk among us, but the illusion is unable to resist sunlight and casts no reflection in a mirror. All the dead are, to some extent, parasitical but only the vampyre is injurious to the health of the living. Again, Mrs Divine’s book provides many examples and suggests several remedies including posies of wild garlic and mutilating the corpse of a supposed vampyre.
It is unclear whether the dead existing as pure spirit are wholly a separate form from those mentioned so far, or whether they are the final stage of post-mortem decay. Aristotle and the Roman writer, Pliny the Elder, described similar phenomena in antiquity but very little was known about them prior to 1800 and Mrs Divine’s work only mentions them fleetingly. Commonly known as candlesnatchers because of their attraction to light and warmth, their transient and ephemeral appearances rendered it difficult to study them until the electrical field discoveries of the German physicist, Thomas Johann Seebeck (1770–1831) and the Dane, Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851). Perplexed by apparently random results in their experiments both men eventually concluded that their work was being haunted by candlesnatchers feeding off the electrical currents. Only after sealing their laboratories with lead could they work uninterrupted. Following Ørsted’s findings, the Anglian physicist, Jerusalem Behr (1805–1882) discovered how to capture candlesnatchers in a de-polarised electro-magnetic field, thus inventing the Behr Cage. This is still the basis of modern systems protecting electrical installations from paranormal interference.
MacGregor’s main interest was in the fields of history and literature and his library at Arbinger was not well appointed with the latest scientific works. His arcane pursuits and antipathy towards the railroads and other industrial developments, led many in his lifetime to accuse him of a romantic attachment to the past and ignorance of the benefits of progress. Among them—though uncritically, since his own views were similar—was Dr Claude Crabtree whose The Wizard of the North (King James University Press, 1930) promulgated the image of MacGregor as a man out of sorts with his time: “a medieval makar let loose in the age of iron”, to quote Dr Crabtree.
This image survived until the 1960s and the work of Professor Evelyn Bishop. In A Writer’s Life, (Exeter Books, 1962) Professor Bishop analysed MacGregor’s representation of magick and paranormal phenomena in This Iron Race and concluded it was congruent with the latest scientific research in Anglia and Europe. Knowing MacGregor’s own library did not have the relevant material, Professor Bishop turned to the Edenborough Speculative Society. Unfortunately, their records are incomplete, and we do not know which texts MacGregor consulted, but studying the library’s acquisition list from the society’s founding to the present day Professor Bishop succeeded in correlating several scenes in This Iron Race with specific research papers in the collection. Her work provides compelling evidence that MacGregor was aware of and interested in what science had to say about magick.
Thus far we have only described the revenant dead without examining why they are unable to join the greater number in passing to the afterlife. One cause, the survival of an identical twin, is dealt with in MacGregor’s text and it remains the only cause proven by scientific investigation, thanks to the work of my father, the paraphycisist, Adolph Frum of Berne University, in the early 1970s. The other cause is explored in literature, folklore, and anecdotal testimony: it is redemption, or lack thereof.
Returning to Tom Warbrook’s poem, Odysseus’ strange quest is an act of redemption for blinding Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. That Polyphemus was the Cyclops who imprisoned and attempted to slaughter Odysseus and his men is of no account; one does not anger Poseidon, no matter the justification. Only when Odysseus finally encounters a stranger who mistakes his oar for a corn flail; which is to say one who has no knowledge of the sea, will his offence be redeemed. It is true that at this point in the narrative, Odysseus has years more life ahead but the message that we must make amends for our crimes if we are to rest easy is clear.
Assuming that we die with a clear conscience, what lies ahead remains a mystery. Dead men, as they say, tell no tales, and accounts from those who have supposedly visited the abode of the dead are so varied we cannot gain a clear picture. What is agreed on are two clear strands: an earthly paradise of permanent summer without want or hunger, and a bleak, perhaps subterranean wasteland, but this is not always the Christian choice of a heaven or a hell for in some mythologies all go to paradise and in other accounts all are in the wasteland.
When judgement is passed before entry to the afterlife the good go to paradise and the wicked to the wasteland, or Gehenna, as it is called in Hebrew accounts. Most of the great religions describe some form of winnowing of the dead, with good behaviour rewarded and bad punished, but it is unclear how much of this is based on truth, insofar as we understand these forms of truth, or whether it is founded on the sociological need to encourage moral behaviour among the living. This is particularly the case among the religions associated with the great civilisations and one can argue that the moral imperative became more vital with the dawn of complex urbanised society. For earlier religious beliefs, the ethnographical research suggests that nomadic and hunter-gatherer societies did not distinguish between the wicked and the virtuous. The dead were simply the dead.
Hebraic society retains a vestige of this older belief in the word She’ol, which described an abode of the dead without moral demarcation. Hades of Greek myth also lacks a distinction between the good and the wicked, but is identified with the underworld. In contrast, among Celtic peoples the Cornish Lyonesse, Ys of the Bretons, the Welsh Annwn, and the Eirish Tir na nÓg are all paradisiacal lands of plenty and eternal summer. The Picts, Scotland’s original inhabitants, have left few traces of their beliefs and Scotland’s history of migrations from Scandinavia to the east, Anglia to the south and Eireland to the west leaves modern Scotland with only fragments of her ancient beliefs. There is no name for the afterlife surviving from Scotland’s pre-Christian period.
World-wide, there are of course many names and descriptions of the afterlife: the ancient Egyptian, Kingdom of the Dead; Hel and Niflhel of Norse belief; the Talmudic, Olam Haba; the Islamic Jannah and Jahannam; in Hinduism one resides in naraka or svarga to await reincarnation; the buddhakṣetra or ‘Pure Land’ of Mahāyāna Buddhism; the Summerland of contemporary Wiccan belief; and the 黄泉, or Yomi of Japanese Shinto. Some of these realms are judgemental, others not; their natures may be paradisiacal or Hadean; the dead may remain for eternity, or only while awaiting reincarnation. A rare variant is the “warriors’ hall”, the most famous of which is the Norse Valhalla, which is reserved for a select few.
Although fascinating to the modern parapsychologist, none of these realms of the dead unduly influenced MacGregor who, recognising the paucity of Scotland’s ancient mythos compared to that of Eireland and other Celtic lands, created a native, uniquely Scottish afterlife from the fragments surviving in pre-Christian folklore: he called it The Well of Shadows.
I shall leave discussion of MacGregor’s inspiration for the Well of Shadows to your editor; along with the role it plays in This Iron Race. Mr Warbrook will not thank me for spoiling MacGregor’s tale! Instead, I will compare the Well of Shadows with those forms of the afterlife we have discussed.
Firstly, the Well of Shadows does not reward the good or punish the bad, at least not directly; nor is it wholly paradisiacal or hellish. Indeed, it is not one place but many, perhaps inspired by John 14:2.
In my Father’s house are many mansions,
with each individual having their own unique place in the afterlife. Within the Well of Shadows the dead relive their lives endlessly: perhaps across only one day or as much as several years—the exact limits are never set—but crucially do so without previous memory: each day and each hour of each day always new. How this particular day or period of years is chosen is never explained, but one can infer that it is always fitting to the individual.
By this expedience, MacGregor solves the conundrum of the hellish and paradisiacal afterlives: namely, that that which pleases us eventually jades and all torments become bearable with time. We can also see that although there is no direct judgement, each individual brings judgement upon them.
The soul, as we have seen, is quite separate. It dwells in the Far Country, a celestial plane comparable with the habitat of the soul’s animal form when it not called upon to usher its charge into the afterlife. One soul will have care of many during its existence and claims for reincarnation and past-life experiences may be an echo of those people previously in the soul’s charge. There have even been cases of past-life experiences appearing to come from the far future, which may suggest the individual has a fertile imagination or that the chronology of the Far Country is not parallel to that of our world.
Carl Jung, the Austrian psychologist, never read MacGregor’s work, but there are similarities to the Well of Shadows in his 1916 essay, The Structure of the Unconscious which described a common currency of archetypes found in all humans, which he termed the Collective Unconscious. This was inherited, not acculturated, and was the source of phobias, such as arachnophobia and xenophobia. In addition, it provides the building blocks of narratives, both in the sense of story-telling and our rationalisation of experience.
In an appendix to The Structure of the Unconscious, Jung elaborated on his ideas and described the concept of a Universal Memory. This, apparently inspired by Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity postulating that time was not constant, existed outside of observable time and encompassed the dawn of humanity and humanity’s end. Universal Memory, Jung reasoned, provided a rational basis for the phenomena of past-life recollections and premonitions of the future, as he described here:
…in the single human mind there is no conception of time, other than the limit set by memory itself: this we see in the flickering of thought from our earliest moments to the most recent; therefore, in the Universal Memory time is only limited by the endurance, both into the past and into the future, of humanity itself.
Thus, while we cannot transport ourselves through time, Universal Memory connects us to what has been and what is to come through our shared soul. All who our soul has borne, both in humanity’s past and in its future, are accessible to those willing to explore, just as our memory is accessible to they.
In the Well of Shadows the dead relive their lives endlessly. Through Universal Memory adepts can access the memories of the dead and those not yet born. Our souls, dwelling in the Far Country, are truly the windows to perception.
Vice-chancellor, Iona Fellowship of Grace, Scotland
In recent decades, our urban authorities have begun to remove the soot that has for so long besmirched the elegant stone and brick buildings of our townscapes to reveal once more the pale-greys, yellows and reds that our forefathers saw. This soot was a product of an earlier age, an age of industry when coal burning in the boilers of great engines and the family hearth polluted everything with its sulphurous smoke. With coal came iron, the natural enemy of magick, whose magnetic properties disrupt the delicate energy fields by which those with the sight receive their insights and perceptions. But iron offered a glorious, and above all prosperous, future and the protest of those affected by its insidious power were ignored and derided. They were the enemies of science and social progress, and their powers thought out-dated and no longer relevant.
In truth, this new Age of Iron was but the latest chapter in a sorry saga. From the Holy Roman Empire of the 1600s when many thousands were persecuted and exiled, to the horrors of the anti-shamanic pogroms in Russia when some two hundred thousand practitioners and followers of magick were brutally slain, magick had been in slow, inexorable decline and even near the present day, it continued to be suppressed and as recently as 1977 the practise of magick was illegal in much of the American Republic.
But what has this to do with Tamburlaine MacGregor, you ask. It is this: for many years MacGregor’s interest in magick was thought quaint, the preoccupation of a man out of tune with his times, much like the Romantic Poets who spent their dotage raving against the intrusion of railways into their beloved mountains. Critics argued that MacGregor’s novels, particularly Acts of the Servant and its sequels, were suitable only for children and those obsessed with the quaint and the fantastic.
Yet times change and in the past few decades as we came to understand the damage industry and progress have done to the world and to our true selves, many turned again to MacGregor’s work and new editions of his novels have appeared; all alas still in the expurgated versions forced upon MacGregor by his publishers, but at least being read! At the same time, I have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the practise of magick and for many that interest began through reading Tamburlaine MacGregor.
Some have suggested that the practise of magick owes the Bard of Tweeddale a debt, believing that he is responsible for igniting the interest of a new generation, but I believe this understates MacGregor’s true significance.
Magick is vitally different from brick and stone: it is a living thing and its nature is capricious. It would not have waited for us to rediscover it beneath a layer of grime but slipped into the shadows and vanished altogether from the world of man. It would be as if the cleaners of those old buildings had removed the soot only to find beneath a rotten shell fit only for the wrecker’s ball for Magick, as a living, breathing force, would have faded from our lives as surely as the dodo. Had not Tamburlaine MacGregor kept the spark alive, we would only have memories, written accounts and the relics of magick, but its vitality would have left us. That Acts of the Servant and its sequels cost Tamburlaine MacGregor his health seems indisputable: what other price he may have paid remains the source of much speculation. We should be grateful and hope that, whatever the cost, he thought it worth paying.
