The Blaise Conjunction: Selections from the Geomantic Journals, 1983-2004

By Richard Leviton

The councilors had placed a book upon the table, its cover pale blue edged in silver. The title was The Theosophon. They slid it towards me.

Philomena Wilcox, Ph.D., retired professor of music, pianist, passionate devotee of Russian composers like Scriabin and Rachmaninov, thinks she is merely editing a series of prolix journals by the desert recluse Blaise. One day in 2029 she took delivery of 7,000 pages of his arcane diary entries spanning a 20-year period.

His storywhat he thinks and writes aboutis exceedingly odd, mystical, and perplexing. He is anticipating a planetary event to take place in 2033. Soon enough, Philomena discovers she, impossibly, is part of this story, in fact, will be a keystone in this epochal event. Its as if through the journal pages Blaise talks directly to her and pulls her into his world of wisdom-angels, geomantic patterns, and designer planets.

The pages are encoded with activation triggers. Over a three-year period, she starts to remember her true story, her astonishing past. Its a nonstop tutorial in the Mysteries. Taught by the human Blaise and his angelic mentors, also called Blaise, seemingly right now, in the present moment. Except upwards of 35 years or more separate them in the world of linear time. Her familiar world starts to fall apart.

The event is called the Theosophon. Blaise writes about it, but she designed it. Thats startling enough, but Philomena is astonished to remember that she designed it eons ago in another galaxy. The Earth was created as a performance stage for it.

The Theosophon is a multidimensional musical event involving the collective consciousness of humanity, the Earth, and the spiritual world. The overture of the fulfillment of the purpose of the Earth and humanity. Yes, Philomena is an integral part of this unique event, but it will cost her more than she ever thought possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475998184

Richard Leviton

Richard Leviton is the author of 14 books, including many on myths and the global landscape, notably The Galaxy on Earth, The Emerald Modem, Signs on the Earth, and Encyclopedia of Earth Myths. He has been in regular contact with the angelic realm for more than 22 years, and has written about his experiences with them in Looking for Arthur and What's Beyond That Star. He is the director/founder of the Blue Room Consortium, a cosmic mysteries think tank based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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The Blaise Conjunction

Selections from the Geomantic Journals, 1983-2004

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Leviton.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-9817-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9818-4 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 07/12/2013

Contents

Editor’s Preface

The Journals

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1994

1995

1996

1999

2000

2003

2004

About the Author

The Blue Room Consortium

For Judith A. Lewis and Silver Boy

Editor’s Preface

I never intended to publish a book. I was content to teach music, Scriabin’s sonatas and Rachmaninov’s Morceaux de Fantasie, in particular, to selected students. But when nine bulging boxes arrived at my doorstep courtesy of the already retreating deliveryman, nine dented, stained, and somewhat water-logged cardboard cartons containing approximately 7,000 pages of double-spaced typewritten journal entries attributed to Blaise and addressed to my vanished husband, Professor Frederick Atkinson, formerly of Dartmouth College, all that changed. The publication in 2026 of My Pal, Blaise, edited by my husband, generated some interest in the nature of its elusive, enigmatic author. Here suddenly was a great deal more writing by this same Blaise.

It also led to the unexplained disappearance of its editor, my husband. But now seven years after that publication and four years after the delivery of those battered cartons and three years after I started to edit them, I find myself at first reluctantly but, growingly, enthusiastically, offering them, albeit selected and edited and, to put it delicately, pruned somewhat, for publication for readers wishing to know more about this mysterious Blaise. It was a journey, if I may put it somewhat grandly, to read through these 7,000 pages, for I did, in fact, several times. I almost know them by heart by now. For a long while I wished I had never seen them or read them.

Much of what I read I put aside and did not include in these selections; but I read it, and therefore was exposed to it, a strange, uneven, deep, exotic, lyrical, pedantic, passionate atmosphere, all of these qualities and more, an earnestness, a sincerity couched in prolixity, genuinely a quest, as the old, durable word suggests. The author was on a quest, and, judging from My Pal, Blaise, succeeded, or at least concluded the affair. During my immersion in this abundance of journal pages, a chronicle of 21 years of concentrated attention to energy mysteries of the Earth and the enigmas of the spiritual world and its members, I was unaware of its full effect on me. It was like working in a hospital ward; I had indications along the way, but the full scope of that impact was not clear to me until quite recently. Eventually, I was infected.

All that paper, the boxes emptied, the journal folders stacked, labeled, and me plowing through them over these three years, just as the young Blaise did, a scholar manqué or perhaps acting in the true spirit of a scholar, ripping apart books and myths to find the truth, himself immersed (buried, at times) in a cataract of paper and ideas—and angels.

My criterion in selecting which of the thousands of pages to include in this collation was based on which pages seemed to most affect me. I admit the obvious subjectivity, but in my defense I plead the aesthetics of Walter Pater and his counsels to his Oxford students to assess the effect of the art on them, how it made them feel. Outside of academia, this strikes me as eminently practical advice; if art has no appreciable impact on you, why bother with it? It must be alive and transformative. I have followed that principle in my music studies and performance career, only playing music that profoundly moves me, stirs me with its every note—Scriabin is foremost.

I took myself as a representative reader. Prior to this, and before my husband’s seduction and flight under the influence of this material, or of the spirit of the author of material like this, I had never given the Arthurian mythos a thought. Music was my world. King Arthur, Knights of Camalate, the Holy Grail—like everyone I had heard of this but these had gained no traction in my life or on my intellectual interests. As for an energy anatomy for the planet, a prime subject for Blaise, that was foreign, as were all his discussions of Light temples, geomantic nodes, and mystical Albions.

My editing logic is that if I can discern the pages that prodded me, gave me the infernal infection, these might similarly affect most readers and thus warrant inclusion in this book. Whatever in the Blaise material provoked my husband to run off might similarly have an impact on sensitive readers. Running out of one’s house and abandoning one’s career and life, I assure you, will not be held as proof of this effect. Nor do I wish that upon any reader. The antilogic of this editorial criterion is that I also realize the mass of 7,000 pages also affected me in a cumulative sense. Maybe my reason and sobriety were crushed under their sheer weight, but more likely it was a seduction by accrual. A slow-motion steamroller effect, flattening my resistance. Keep sending someone roses and cards and good wishes and benedictions, they gradually come round and fall into your arms, or at least agree to a tentative, experimental date. Anyway, I was seeded. The journalist’s Blaise World started growing in me.

Another way I might put this and perhaps it will sound slightly more objective as an editorial criterion is that I selected journal excerpts that documented or explained the growing confidence and working relationship of the journalist Blaise with the celestial Blaise. How did they come to be so close, such pals, as the author made clear in his desert journals edited by my husband? How much reality was there to this?

I also selected material that explained, in general, non-technical terms, the nature of the human relationship with the subtle or spiritual aspects of our planet, a subject dear to Blaise and the focus of much of his journal writing. How did he come to view it this way, this intimate link through consciousness of humans and Earth? Much of his entries are technical, jargon-laden, and sometimes arcane because of both factors; I have drawn only minimally from entries of this nature, as they would require too much explanation and such explanation lies beyond my experience or knowledge. I did struggle for a time with the fact that he seemed to be pointing to something, to an aspect of reality that I had never seen or even heard described. He saw it every day.

The whole thing was odd, starting with the delivery. The truck driver dropped them off at my door. All the boxes were neatly, or at least legibly, addressed to Professor Frederick Atkinson at this address; the only indication of the sender was Blaise, written in blue magic marker in the upper left-hand corner of each carton. Inside was a mass of typed pages. What was I supposed to make of all this, or do with it?

I confess, during the time of my husband’s assiduous editorship of the original Blaise notebooks, as recovered in Mexico and recounting the last seven months of his life in 2019, I took little interest in the project or its revelations. That was my husband’s world, if that. We talked about it occasionally, but more as if he were reading a gripping travel book. Or a science fiction novel, I often thought, though privately. I was glad my husband had a project that grabbed him; he had been looking for one for a long time.

He did often express doubts, irritations, grievances, perplexities, and disbelief over what he was daily exposed to and what he was struggling to prepare for publication. No, that was not my world, then. I had my music, my tutorials, my seminars, my performances. But in the last three years since my retirement from the Dartmouth College faculty I have had more mental leisure time to reconsider it all. My retirement neatly coincided with the inception of this editing project in 2030.

There is, I must admit, the continuing mystery of my husband’s precipitous disappearance and fate, and more perplexing, the nature and identity of this Blaise whose journals sent my husband out the door and presumably in search of the same. When he disappeared I thought I would now have to investigate this Blaise character to find out what Siren call he might have exerted on my evidently suggestible spouse. When the boxes arrived, that made the investigation inevitable and, curiously, easier.

As strange and, in fact, as impossible as it would have seemed to me three years ago when I began this absurd project, I now understand what gripped him and why. I now know why he ran out the door of his life (and ours), the book proofs on his desk.

I’m the last person to claim competency in detective work or in penetrating mysteries, but even I can ask the troubling question: If this Blaise left the planet, whatever that truly entailed, in January 2020, who sent these nine boxes in 2029? And why of all the people on the Earth did they send the boxes to my husband? If it was Blaise, even though that seems impossible, wouldn’t he have known my husband was gone? Why send boxes to somebody who would not receive them? I wonder sometimes (the thought glides up to me like an insinuation from my intuition) that the addressing of these boxes to Professor Atkinson was a ploy, a suggestion, an invitation, almost, made with Jamesian tact and reserve, to me, for me to open them and look. That they were not addressed to me explicitly left me a way out if I chose to ignore them. The gesture had that same marvelous if you wish quality the journalist Blaise always attributed to his pal (or pals, it seems more accurate to say), the Blaise angels.

As far as I can determine, my husband never met the author of the New Mexico journals; nor had he heard of this man or of anyone connected with him, yet, enigmatically, as readers of My Pal, Blaise may recall, somehow this hermitic, clairvoyant Blaise in 2019 referred (more than that: he claims to have seen him doing this) to my husband examining his notebooks several years in the future. How he managed to see this—I don’t know how it would be possible to have guessed or surmised it—further compounds the mystery of the whole affair. Readers will I hope forgive me when I admit I shoved the cartons into a spare closet and ignored them.

I am not a scholar of comparative mythology as was my husband. My professional interests have lain in the interaction of biography and musical creativity in a select list of late 19th century and early 20th century European composers, principally for piano. A few of them, such as Alexander Scriabin, were possessed of extra-sensitive perception, what one might defensibly call psychic abilities.

My interest was in what ways this contributed to, or, sometimes, confounded, their creative gifts. In a funny way, I suspect Scriabin might have enjoyed all the discussion of angels and other supernatural phenomena that was so routine a part of the daily high desert life of Blaise. Scriabin, as many know, wanted to reform the world through his music, and he nearly did; only his early death stopped that. Readers will agree, I’m sure, that my husband, through his editorial comments and emendations to the Blaise journals, evidenced a strong professional interest and even, as his editing progressed through the manuscript, a considerable degree of intrigue, often coupled with dismay and disbelief. Obviously something in those crazy desert pages got to him, hence his precipitous departure. Up until recently I was still trying to put that together. Now I believe I have. I understand why he had to leave.

My point here is that my editing approach will differ markedly from his, just as my interest and angle of interpretation, shall we call it, to the new round of desert pages have differed noticeably from his. What angle is that? The effect of being exposed to these journal pages on the reader, starting with myself as a prime example. I resisted them at first, stridently and, I thought, easily; gradually I succumbed to them. It’s as if they were calling to me from their exile in the closet.

No, not succumbed to them as if they emanated a baleful influence; I will attest to their wholesomeness flavored with oddness and idiosyncratic brilliance. I suppose it is a more empirical approach, for after all if literature fails to affect you, produce changes, catalyze transformation, provoke thought and penetrative musing, what good is it other than as a moment’s distraction from the cares of the day? So, yes, these pages had effects on me, and with the support of the publisher, I have agreed to include a running journal of my own reactions to the revelations in the journal pages, illustrating in what ways they evoked a turnaround in one reader, initially skeptical. Anyway, the musicality of this approach pleased me; it was a kind of contrapuntal piece.

The whole experience of immersing myself for months in the Blaise journals was unsettling. A colleague observed I seemed like a frenzied one-track searcher probing the contents of a large chest looking for specific clues, discarding or disregarding everything else, as it were tossing irrelevant pages in all directions. At the time I thought my frenzy was an attempt to find an explanation for my husband’s disappearance, to find the catalysts that drove him out the door, as if somehow implicit in the sequence or the right filtering of the thousands of journal pages there lay a formula, a prescription for recreating the conditions that propelled my husband, but after a while, and especially when I was finished, I realized what I found was completely different. In some respects, far worse than I expected, and far better.

My editing and selection style was certainly not orthodox in any academic sense, and in fact it was shamelessly, profligately subjective and personalized, but then this Blaise was not a literary figure whose every word needed enshrinement, as most scholars approach celebrated writers and artists. Rather, I sought the parts of the massive journal that were on fire, even if that fire burned implicitly, without smoke, but which were capable (in fact, I could assure it) of lighting fires in any readers exposed to them.

Ironically, Scriabin and other mystical-musical geniuses like him would be much more at home today. It’s always hard to achieve a qualitative description of one’s own times as we take so much that is normative for granted, but what is normative, I can see clearly, in retrospect, after having spent three years going through these 7,000 pages of journals, has changed a great deal, actually in accordance with what Blaise in My Pal, Blaise, foresaw in that rare glimpse forward he had of the year 2033, the very moment, now, late March, in which I complete and send off these dual sets of journals.

What is that quality? A softening in the rigidities of perception and belief, a broadening of the field of what it is possible to see and comprehend, i.e., the spiritual world and its abiding, penetrative, and often benevolent involvement in human life. The important point, or the indication of actual progress, is that this reconsideration of the role of the spiritual world in human affairs has been put forward free of dogma. Dogmatic interpretations of the spiritual world have always been, to many sensitive people, a weight on the soul, even an oppressive one, and very often a not helpful one. The empirical approach, so often touted by scientists and so little performed, yields a fluidic, even protean, when necessary, description of the elusiveness of reality.

No one will argue that the thousands of journal pages of Blaise are not empirical. They exude direct experience and the experiencer’s attempt to make sense of it all. A large measure of this newly welcomed and validated experience involves the angelic world, certainly a prime focus of the journal writer, and, gradually, a more common one in mainstream society, now that the religious and institutionalized heavy hand of judgement and approbation has been lifted off the subject and people feel free, finally, to discuss what would formerly have been considered a wide range of questionable, epistemologically suspect, personal experiences of not only angels but many diverse aspects of the subtle world, once best kept prudently to oneself.

What can one say about the current round of journal entries? Let’s start with the identity of their author. The best we can say at present is that his name was Blaise. Not legally or in terms of birth certificate or how his parents (spouse? siblings?) or friends might have known him, but presumably how he knew himself, his private nom de plume. Maybe that is a misperception on our part, decades later; perhaps his use of the name Blaise indicated something else. We do know from My Pal, Blaise that it also referred to his enigmatic co-journalist, putatively a spokesman for the Ofanim order.

The journals span the years 1983 to 2004 which we deduce occupied the author from roughly his mid-thirties to mid-fifties; apparently, he stopped keeping a journal after 2004, or else destroyed or lost or hid those pages to be (magically) released at a later date. Or he kept a different set of journals and these (thankfully!) have not been sent to me. He occasionally alludes to a supplementary chronicle called Journal Annex, and the page citations suggest it comprises many thousands of pages. As to its location I have no idea and am glad of it. What might those additional pages lead to? For now, one can only speculate as to his intentions; they seem most recondite to me.

One authorial intention is clear, though it might not have been that of the author but more his Fate, or what people used to whimsically call the Higher Self. It was all preparation for the Blaise Conjunction; that is a term the author used once or twice in My Pal, Blaise, referring to the imminent incarnation in human baby form of his long-term colleagues and pals, the angelic order known as the Ofanim or Wheels. The author interpreted conjunction in that context to mean the alignment of his awareness in a body and theirs outside of a body for a few months in late 2019.

Once that conjunction was achieved (like the rarest of astronomical events—one might imagine a transit of Venus happening only once in the history of the solar system), the author apparently departed the Earth and the angels entered it as babies. One Blaise was leaving, the other arriving; for a short while they conjuncted. I gradually realized, as the editing proceeded, that that conjunction was only the beginning, the early light, of a much larger, broader, astonishing one to come.

It seems unlikely, and the author’s journal does not suggest so, that he was aware of this conjunction as the teleological fulfillment of his 36-year sojourn with Blaise. This realization came to him only in the final months of 2019, that all his efforts, work, thoughts, musings, mystical experiences, and wanderings, had led to this. Astute readers will correct me here and point out it should be 37 years since the journal entries begin in 1983 and go through to the day before the beginning of 2020; yes, they do, and readers would be correct except that in 1983 the author is gradually being overshadowed by the imminence (one is tempted to say immanence) of the Ofanim, but he is not yet aware of this specific agency and senses only the general coming of a dawn of some kind; he has little clarity of this overshadowing in 1983.

Still, for a reader’s edification (and an editor’s, too) it is valuable to follow this gradual dawning of agency, purpose, intention, a life plan long ago drawn up and now executed, a life plan that entailed the alignment, for a time, of human and angel. How often do we get to see this clarity of purpose in the lives around us, even in fiction?

I have drawn the title for this selection of Blaise’s journals from that remark and perception he put forward in the latter part of 2019 in the high desert journals. But as I discovered (I could not possibly have known this at the outset) another conjunction took place, an alignment, initially fraught with resistance, skepticism, and even (I nearly blush to admit it) spiritual hauteur on my part in the early days, and though I did not dash out the door to God-knows where (and I still don’t) following my husband’s example, I at least understand why he did, and why he felt he had to.

I suppose it’s true also that I know this Blaise better than my husband did (unless, in some fantastic, improbable manner, he has actually met the living Blaise) as he was without the benefit of these 7,000 pages of earlier journals and what they reveal. Literary scholars and sensitive readers in general will attest to how much one can learn about a person, get close to them, even be emotionally and mentally intimate with them, through reading their journal pages, usually never intended for anyone.

For readers who want to know more about the selection process, clearly this publication does not include the entirety of the 7,000 pages. That would be a formidable book. Formidably unreadable, I should think. I selected entries based on their relevance to the unfolding geomantic vision of the author and his gradual alignment with Blaise. It’s odd, don’t you think, to put it that way because I am calling him Blaise as well. As with most young people, or younger anyway (he was in his early thirties when the journal starts), concerns with romance, career, income, status, friends, and enemies figure strongly, although not exclusively, but since they were not germane to my two criteria, their effects on me and the geomantic model, I omitted them from the text. They are, in contrast with Blaise’s focus, a bit mundane.

The journals indicate that Blaise’s point of entry into the Ofanim world was through mythology, especially the Arthurian mythos, which he states he traveled to England on many occasions to perform early research on for a book he envisioned. Apparently, he found the Ofanim like a jewel surprisingly embedded within the stories. The epicenter of those studies and for the Celtic recollection of the King Arthur myth was the Somerset market town of Glastonbury, famous, or shall we say, legendary, as the doorway into fabled Avalon and, certainly for many of Blaise’s generation, as a mecca and unquestionably a fascinating enigma.

If Blaise had been a literary figure, such as a novelist or playwright, I probably would have allowed his reputation and accomplishments to sway my selection criteria. How meetings with various people, social outings, dinners, encounters shaped his style. But he wasn’t, and I didn’t. I adhered to the criteria he put forth himself in the desert journals my husband edited: relevance to and elucidation of the Blaise conjunction.

In those writings he is straightforward, almost obsessively, about explaining his relationship with this Blaise, and doesn’t he go on a bit about that Blaise. That was my first impression. This writer doesn’t let up about this Blaise. I can admit that now because I don’t any longer regard his attention on Blaise as an obsession. I understand it. It is refreshing, intriguing, and, in retrospect, completely necessary for his task. It exhibits the assiduity of the committed detective ferreting out clues and following them. I also found, initially to my dismay, that I had an additional role within this odd drama. I allude to some aspects of this revealed role in some of my contrapuntal comments. Had I known this at the outset, those boxes would never have been dragged out of the closet. I would have locked the closet door and discarded the key. I might even have sold the house with the journals still locked in the closet. I didn’t.

I will allude to another characteristic of these journal pages. An imperative, I might call it. They exude a condition of heightened, sharpened reality, of truth, of things as they really are and which escapes the awareness of most of us most of the time. It was like a crisp bell sounding in the distance, and that distance kept getting shortened, the bell coming closer, or one moving closer to that bell. The Blaise pages also have a sense of urgency, not frenetic or hysterical, simply a sense of priority. Blaise decided this was important, to heed this enigmatic but clearly sounding bell. That’s what he did, and his 7,000 pages are a partial record, field-notes, of the results.

Thematically, the author proceeds, seemingly directed by a higher world tutor, through the Arthurian and Grail mythos out into the geomantic landscape. It appears his scholarly interest had been the permutations of Arthurian characters through a host of story retellings and reimaginings and the peripatetry of these character permutations across the ancient British landscape, leaving a wealth of place-names. You can virtually see a door opening in his mind when he encounters the idea of Earth acupuncture and the Glastonbury zodiac; he begins to sense the specificity of landscape location, that a particular locale has a numinous charge and a mythic burden. This leads him to propose that the myths are picture-maps of geomantic function.

No doubt readers will find some aspects of this unusual model both strange and intriguing. I did not understand it for a long time; it makes sense to me now. That is the necessary foundation, Blaise said, for the construction of a model of the Earth’s Light grid and the context for its more exotic components, such as Light temples and wormholes, as readers of My Pal, Blaise will have observed. That’s where it takes place.

I observed but otherwise took little notice of such things at first. Too recondite and unsubstantiated for my taste. Light temples, perhaps: I could see Blaise’s point, the human Blaise, that is, that Light temple is a term that references the spectral locale of myths. Residences, structures, etheric buildings, spiritual castles, palaces, and even cities, in short, structures made of Light, where the unbelievable or perhaps simply incredible (as in hard to credit) events in myth (and fairy tales, for that matter) occur.

On my first reading of that book my attention tended to be drawn more to what a mother or wife might fuss about: How is that man able to survive alone in the high desiccated desert with no friends or books or anything? Why is he so fixated on unraveling the protean nature of an invisible friend? Why doesn’t he just reconcile with the intelligence agencies and get on with it, make some money, figure out some breakthroughs, get some recognition? That was on days when I actually believed any of it; other days, it seemed too fantastic to credit. That, and the fact that its bizarrely embedded Siren call lured my own husband out the door of our home, our marriage, Dartmouth College, his career, and maybe his life. That infernal, obsessive Blaise reached right into my home and yanked my husband out of my life and out of his too.

I studied this Blaise, this hermitic man of 69, like a guest at afternoon tea. As if I was the proprietor of a salon at an English stately country home, like in a Henry James story (Blaise does with drollery liken his writing style, perhaps in his imagination or wishes, to that of Henry James crossed with Henry Miller, long fussy sentences spiced with vulgarity), and it was five o’clock in the afternoon, the weather bleak and deficient, as it almost always is in England, and tea was being served, and this Blaise, a young Blaise of 34, sits down in a plush chair. So who are you, young man, I inquire mentally. What kind of man might you be, interests, passions, biases? What might afternoon tea be like with this Blaise today, a man of 83 arriving not by hansom, victoria, brougham, horseback, car, train, boat, plane, or helicopter, but from one of his fanciful and possibly nonexistent wormholes, desert dust on his sneakers?

Naturally, what drives my interest here, at least partially, is what on Earth was there about this unusual if not weird Blaise that drove my husband out of his own life? Something, or perhaps it was the cumulative composite impact, about his exposure to the desert journals of Blaise from 2019 lit a fire (of madness?) in my husband and propelled him precipitately and without explanation or forwarding address out the door. I needed to find what that was, because perhaps that is how I might retrieve him. That was my thinking as I began this project. It has shifted considerably since then. I occasionally wonder, was that the reason that Blaise organized, posthumously, it appears, to have his journals from before 2019 to be shipped to my husband and thus me, as a way of explaining, answering this vexing and, I will admit, painful question?

Further, it is of some interest to me, and apparently to my publisher, on behalf of likely readers, to understand who this Blaise is (actually both of them), and at least, in reference to the putatively human male Blaise, what moved him to such a destiny. For he was moved, a driven man, like an old Jewish desert Prophet declaiming in the solitary remote sands about some enigmatic, multifariously appearing angelic colleague. What led him to pursue such an arcane life path, one that ended in anonymity, and for most metaphysically conventional minds, that led him literally off the Earth?

I wish to particularly thank my editor, quite courageous and tolerant (I’m tempted to say indulgent, like one would of a doting parent), Edward Burbage, young in age perhaps but wise in experience. He gave me the latitude to pursue the Blaise journals and my reactions to them in whatever manner seemed appropriate to me. In fact he encouraged, even implored me at times, to pull the boxes out of my closet. He suggested the line of editorial approach, the parallel running of two journals, the Blaise material and my reactions to it, what it provoked in me. Readers will like that, he said.

His confidence in the value of the project (he had been Frederick’s editor for My Pal, Blaise) inspired me to produce this unorthodox selection and annotation of what would normally be (and remain) obscure and probably unremarked and certainly unpublished journals because the whole affair had, to him, as he explained in a number of editorial meetings with me, the air of a good detective story. Lots of unanswered questions, mysterious developments, unexplained disappearances, and surely the central abiding mystery of Blaise, and the other Blaise.

—Philomena Wilcox, Ph.D.

Hanover, New Hampshire, March 30, 2033

THE JOURNALS

1983

May 23: Around 5:30 p.m., smoking my pipe, looking out the window over the Berkshires, sitting in my reading chair in the livingroom by the woodstove, I have positive thoughts about the England trip; maybe I’ll get invited to stay longer, have adventures, unexpected ones, finally be back there after 11 years since the first time I visited Tintagel and glimpsed Glastonbury and the Tor from the bus.

June 16: The England trip draws nearer. The other night I had a flash of filling up two journal books on the trip, living in a stone cottage by the sea perhaps, writing a good portion of my King Arthur book, getting artistic direction for future projects. On this cold, rainy, overcast, very quiet day up in the wooded hills, I spent nine hours without a break taking notes from Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon in preparation for my own research. I’ll be away for a long time, but it’s exciting too, to work on this project which I first envisioned at least five years ago and maybe even heard over my shoulders in high school when Debby pursued Malory’s story for that special English tutorial class we were enrolled in, our teacher encouraging her. Arthuriana did not interest me then. I was much too keen on Kafka and O’Neill.

I didn’t have any interest myself at the time, but I was interested she had such a passion for it. Well, now I’ve got it, and she’s probably a lawyer or something and I’m the one heading off to King Arthur Land. I’ll have to summon up the nerve to take this project seriously, commit several years of research to it, with many books to read. If it satisfies my yearnings, that’s the value of it, never mind its commercial success, if it has any, though it often turns out when somebody pursues a vision like this and gets it published it interests a lot of other people too. Joseph Campbell’s departure and the call to adventure is the motto and somebody behind us shouting Follow your bliss!

July 2: On the eve of a great adventure. Nervous, anticipatory, concentrated on a hazy future waiting for me. The sense of being solitary on a trip; no one else is going with me or understands where I’m going, that is, why, in pursuit of what goal. I don’t see any guideposts or role models for this. I’ll have to be my own role model.

//The reader will note some foreshadowing of his destiny in these first short entries. Blaise was apparently packing for a long trip, almost two months, and from journal entries not included here, it is clear he would not be returning to his home, other than to pack up and move to California and reinvent himself professionally. He intuits he might stay longer than planned, have unexpected adventures, get directions for new projects, and commit several years to it. Indeed, 36 years, as it turned out, as this research project occupied him until the end of 2019. I guess it’s rare to correctly or fully intuit the outline of a big change in one’s life; we get parts of it, misinterpret or under-appreciate its scope, think we comprehend it while actually walking blind.//

July 9: Carried my awfully heavy bags while wearing a corduroy jacket on a steaming hot day up Wearyall Hill, arrived sweaty, tired, hungry. I settled into my narrow room with a single bed and writing table and cabinet and two windows that overlook the Somerset Levels and River Brue in the distance. It feels like being a guest in someone’s house. I went into town to a pub, wandered around, into two bookstores, feeling excited about absorbing this town, the legends, the King Arthur material, and I look forward to researching it thoroughly these coming weeks, with intense study, reading, walking, inquiring. I’ve already learned a lot in the nine hours I’ve been in town, like a course preview. Met a few fellow students, saw the campus.

July 10: Sitting in Abbey Park off Bere Road to read in the shade out of the heat. A baby, one year old or less, male, with two teenage sitters watching nearby, staggers up to me, stares intently at me; he walks away, then returns to stare some more. I smile. He must remember me from a previous incarnation. His sitters are confused and embarrassed with his behavior and finally whisk him off, away from me.

//For some curious but unspecific reason this anecdote about a baby sends my attention sideways, seemingly off on a tangent, though I suspect it is germane. A few months ago a mother brought a young boy to me for piano lessons. He was nine. Tall, slim, handsome, healthy looking, with pale brown hair luxuriating in many tight curls. Bright, penetrating blue eyes with the suggestion of turquoise, like lovely jewelry. As soon as I said Hello to the boy, I was somewhere else. It felt like I had melted, dissolved like a sugar cube in warm water. Not spaced out or scattered, but expanded.

Time stretched enormously, perhaps even stopped. It certainly seemed wide. At first it seemed I was in a crystalline sphere, somewhat like a crystal cave; then it seemed too big for that visual definition, more like a circular auditorium. That too fell behind me in terms of how I interpreted where I was in architectural terms. Now it was more like a sports stadium, a vast circular arena capable of seating 50,000, but where I would expect seats and audience instead I saw crystalline facets, all identical, clear, diamond bright, but blazing with a diamond-white fire.

Then this changed, or perhaps it came into sharper focus. The sense of diamond-white facets girt in blazing white fire remained, but within each diamond facet appeared figures, outlined in light or sketched in that same blazing diamond-white fire. Angels. Innumerable angelic figures. I suppose they appeared in both genders, but they were abstractly drawn, mere suggestions. I’d have to say overall it was a generic form. Their presence was accompanied by music. I’m tempted to say piano music, but there’s nothing you can hear on the physical Earth that sounds like that. Can you imagine Chopin, Scriabin, and Rachmaninov all played at once with no auditory conflict, perfectly overlapping and complementing one another, like a harmonic choir, but the sounds expanding to create shapes with volume and depth, and shapes with colors like curtains of aurora borealis fire. It wasn’t so much that I was hearing the music, listening to it, but I was immersed in it, the way you immerse yourself in the ocean, letting the waves roll and swell over you, reveling in wetness.

It felt like I was here a long time. Even more odd, that I had always been here. And that I was returning, or remembering this place, this condition of consciousness. Days passed, unrecorded. I simply remained in this delicious, swelling, musical place. Then I opened my eyes (though I don’t remember ever having closed them) and saw the boy standing in front of me, a little smile on his face, curious, waiting for me. His demeanor suggested he had expected me to speak momentarily, that I was on the verge of it and therefore, bizarrely, to me, hardly any time, maybe none at all, had passed in this physical world side of things, though days had transpired in the sphere.

It was embarrassing, and I hustled the interview on and scheduled his lessons.//

July 11: Up to Wearyall Hill to sit on a bench, thinking it doesn’t matter if this is actually the place where Joseph of Arimathea landed; the legends get conflated, the same with the Holy Grail matter: it is a symbol, an archetype for inner questing. Yet if this is the exact spot, then what impact did his deed leave on the landscape here? Are there residues of his numinous presence and did he perform that staff-planting act here for a specific reason to do with the energies of this site? I feel I’m on a quest, and even the word feels comfortable, not pompous or pretentious. Legitimate questions, unusual ones, intriguing ones, important ones, like this one, are arising in me.

July 12: The King Arthur quest is leading me into unexpected though compatible areas. Writing here at my wooden desk at midnight in the little white-walled room feels like being at a monastery or on the island of Amorgos where I lived for two months eleven years ago and tried to sense the Greekness of Greece. Glastonbury feels like a special place for learning, through books, personal meetings, reflection, using all the senses. Stanley told me about Wellesley Tudor Pole; he seems strangely familiar, yet I can’t remember ever reading about him or anyone telling me of him, this English Christian mystic who founded Chalice Well, worked with angels and esoteric matters, sold tea, found a holy blue bowl, and died in 1968.

He tells about how a Holy Grail type of unearthly object was found, clairvoyantly, by two women at a sheep dip in the back end of town, a place called Bride’s Mound at Beckery. Stanley has held this numinous dish and enourages me to encounter it. He echoes Pole’s pronouncements that it is pivotal in the unfolding spiritual mission of Glastonbury. Stanley says the Parsifal myth with its 12 women may be zodiacal in origin. There are various unexploited power centers in the world where cultures have not yet tapped into them, and he knows of a place in France, near the Pyrenees, where Grail initiations were conducted as they were here at Chalice Well. Pole made a map of some of these initiation sites. Stanley opens a box of wonders and mysteries and astonishes me with things I have not seen or heard of. He pulls them out one after another and waits for my astonishment.

I went to the Rifleman’s Arms for two pints at midday, sat at a stoutish wooden table under an umbrella in the pub’s garden, and read Geoffrey Ashe on King Arthur. He is earnestly trying to find the historical, factual King Arthur. I doubt he will. The longevity of the myth seems to defeat any definitive solutions or identifications. The myth seems larger than individual people who may have once lived in bodies. I went to Chalice Well, took two involuntary naps in the shade on the grass, succumbing to the ambiance of relaxation the place emits, then sat at the top end by the well cover trying to get a sense of the point of it all: whom does the Grail serve? Famous question, I know, and one not usually answered correctly by the Grail Knight. An even more basic question: What is the Holy Grail? What are any of these mysteries?

July 13: I like the sense of people participating in an intellectual quest, or maybe I’m just getting swept up in the undercurrent of this town. I head up Wearyall Hill at sunset and gaze at the Tor—enigmatic, unchanging, adamant, then look at rounded Chalice Hill next to it, trying to get a sense of the shape of the King Arthur story. Suddenly around 10 p.m. I get the feeling it’s time to leave the hill immediately. The light has changed or faded. I have a creepy, strange feeling and run down the hill as if chased until I get to the turnstile, race through it to the house. I have the irrational feeling, following on the negativity I sensed on the hill, that I’ve been made invisible, or dead, from being on the hill at dusk. I lay on my bed, panting… .

Stanley comes over and reads to us from a book by Pole called Writing on the Ground about the discovery of a Grail object, the Glastonbury Vessel, a blue sapphire bowl kept in a drawer at Chalice Well in the Upper Room. After I had concluded the Grail is a symbol for the mind of an inner quest and its historical and actual existence irrelevant, now I learn of an actual object that likely has been around for two thousand years and which Pole said might be the Holy Grail or a tangible aspect of it.

One person was cited as seeing a reflection of 12 seated figures, possibly male, in the side of the bowl; when it was rotated, she saw the men in profile. The Apostles? Thus image, symbol, and tangible object are combined. My stereotyped, jaded image of Christianity is challenged: Christ as a powerful person, even a celestial spirit, who imbued this bowl with power on his last night on Earth. I feel like I’m hearing of a marvel which dwarfs my conception of the point of the King Arthur material. I’ve never particularly expected physical objects or religious artifacts to hold much interest. The four of us discuss all this this until 12:30 a.m. I go to bed amazed and confused.

My mind feels alive in Glastonbury, checking out concepts I haven’t explored since college, and some never, like the Steiner approach and his Akashic Records, an immutable chronicle of everything that’s ever happened in reality. And Tudor Pole: I feel I’ve heard the name but can’t remember when or from whom. This afternoon while walking along the River Brue I saw the Tor as a breast with erect nipple and Chalice Hill next to it as the pregnant belly of a woman. Then I read in Geoffrey Ashe’s book that he had the same insight and the Abbey is at her crotch, Wearyall Hill her thigh. It was just a matter of looking sideways and wondering if anyone ever thought this whole thing looks like a pregnant female body? Apparently, John Cowper Powys felt the same and mentioned it in A Glastonbury Romance.

Still, a cautionary note arises. Consider Tolkien’s Dwarves who delved too deeply in Moria and unearthed the Balrog who drove them from their ancestral home. Don’t dig too deeply here or I might lose my center and sense of balance. I feel like Morgaine trapped in the Land of Fairies where time passes differently than on the rest of the Earth. Or Merlin seduced into a cave which Vivienne then sealed up.

//Well, the young man certainly did dig too deeply, never heeded his own caution. At least that is what the sober, outer-world directed person would conclude if he contrasted these sentences with the later revelations in My Pal, Blaise. Still, I can’t see anyone, really, classifying Blaise’s Blaise, so to speak, his Ofanim, as like a Balrog; they’re more like angels of the ancient world, and probably benevolent ones. One sees the young Blaise on the threshold (or cliff’s edge) of a numinous adventure, like something out of a fairy tale or a patient’s dream analysis put forward by Dr. Jung. Possibly he could have retreated, played it safe, but he seems completely disinclined. He’s like a man who believes he can walk on air, or maybe does not even see the air.//

July 14: Around 11 a.m. I got out the typewriter for some preliminary (premature, too) writing about Glastonbury, just to feel myself out conceptually. Mainly to get a sense of how to shape the material that is accumulating and the new areas where I lack information. It feels like I’m at the Glastonbury Academy, picking up on my college studies of myth, archaic man, psychoanalysis, and literature. The sense of approaching this complex of ideas organically, in steps, not moving too far ahead until I’ve absorbed my present position, understood it, the day’s new lesson.

When I wrote today it was an important step: I’ve distanced myself preliminarily from the environs, stepped back for a moment to reflect. I see that I should stay here longer and get the story down, two weeks at least. I had the pleasant sense around 1:30 p.m., not having left the house all day, that sitting here on a sunny, warm, summer’s day in England (days like this are not routine but quite untypical) it was like being at my parents’ house as a teenager and spending the day reading, no obligations, or like when I made up a college course in the summer by reading 20 books, sitting there each morning under the big elm tree in the backyard, underlining, marking, assessing, seeing how each book built a case, how they linked up.

Later, at a bookstore, I saw a new area to research: Earth acupuncture and Celtic fairy myths. Energy points in the landscape. Fairies as conductors of souls through the surreal psychic landscape of the Celtic lands. These intrigued me. I have never put my attention there, at least knowingly. An alive landscape. That seems a common assumption in Glastonbury. Alive with energy and power and revelation. I should stay here longer and get the story down. Write it large and long. Whatever it requires. Let the environment sink in to me; it’s a daily process that can’t be rushed. I feel this drive to understand Glastonbury and develop a good story. I read about the Glastonbury zodiac while sitting outside the Abbey ruins and waiting for the pub to open for dinner. I’d never heard of this, a star pattern etched on the landscape with massive images of the zodiacal figures. Do we have such things as this in America?

As I wait for my dinner, I reflect on how Glastonbury is the only place I’ve been where it feels comfortable to say to someone, I’m on a quest. I’m looking for the truth of King Arthur. It’s comfortable because so many other people are on quests, fabulous, mysterious, quixotic, incomprehensible, hopeless, heartfelt quests. The Quest lies behind much of the magnetic attraction Glastonbury exerts these days; it’s a grand questing ground full of dozens of sporty Questing Beasts, those Beasts Glatisant, as they were known in Malory’s time and as chimeras no doubt in ours. Most of the Knights came back with only a handful of fewmets, droppings of the Beast, for their efforts; too late they realized they had been following the wrong trail, had been chasing illusions, glamours, beautifully tricked-out distractions yielding only fewmets. The Questing Beast was some medievalist’s idea of a wry commentary on false leads. Follow it all you want, Grail Knights, but all you’ll come back with are little pellets.

Legions have made their way here into central Somerset in this century, and, increasingly, in the last two decades since the mid-1960s, some coming purposefully as pilgrims, some casually following up intriguing references to Glastonbury’s cauldron of myths, and still others stumbling upon the deceptive market town by accident, or at least by serendipity nicely orchestrated by outside subtle agencies. I say deceptive because it looks like an English market town, but it’s really a carnival of the occult.

It shouldn’t be surprising that truckloads of people come here to a town whose planetary importance is ranked by some theorists (or publicists) as on a par with Egypt’s Giza Plateau and the Great Pyramid and Peru’s Machu Picchu. Glastonbury, some claim today, is one of the planet’s seven major power centers, a kind of physical-psychic vortex in which huge transformations are expected to take place in the coming years, changes in people, culture, and planet. It’s the Tor of course that is the epicenter of (or culprit behind) all this speculation. This queerly shaped green hill like a swelling in the landscape or a sculpted pyramid has a thriving, energetic, opinionated, and sometimes bizarre and buzzing honeycomb of human life, desire, attribution, millennialist expectation, and prophetic ardor packed around it.

For many Americans, even myself when I first got here, words like ley lines, geomancy, gematrial architecture, Atlanteanism lack topicality or circulation. In Britain, and particularly in Glastonbury, they are immediate, vital, engaging, real, mysterious, and as topical as the latest cricket Test Match results in other circles. It will take me at least half a year, I estimate, to put together a view of this geomantic Glastonbury, this geomythic, mythopoeic, and baffling-revealing sacred landscape. Still, I already suspect geomancy and its model of landscape energetics and Light temples holds a key explicatory clue to the mysteries of Avalon and of my quest.

Much unraveling awaits me. I know this, as I sit in this free-form, Druidic, Atlantean, Christian Academy of Glastonbury at Avalon. As far as attributions go, Glastonbury is the epitome of pluralism. It’s a packed bulletin board of allusions. I will work every day at peeling the Arthurian onion, stripping away layer after layer of this strange mythical British vegetable grown in the myth-making soil of Avalon and sending roots deep into human consciousness over time. In this daily process of peeling the onion I suspect one morning I will suddenly realize I have been shedding just as many layers from myself, and I will then see what revealed?

July 15: I have the sense of sinking deeper each day into an organic learning process, following my intuition. This town seems to enhance my self-confidence in following my intuition. My mind feels so active, alive, curious, unbiased, receptive, like a dry sponge, yet centered within a context, my research. In the evening I walk into The Lamb for a beer and spot John and Raife at a table and join them. They invite me to their flat above the store to watch a program on the telly, John says in inimitable British style. I’m drawn to John—very working class, a thick, uneducated accent, tall, lanky, but he knows some things that knock me over, his insight and spiritual development seem bright, what he says seems important for me to listen to.

He’s been in town seven weeks and has seen fairies, UFOs, vampires, ghosts, and has astral traveled, mentioning all this casually as if he said I went to the baker’s this morning for a fresh loaf. Just matter of fact. Says he saw a twinkle in my eye telling him He’s real. He says when I walked into The Lamb he knew their evening was changed; they wouldn’t watch any telly but would talk with me. He fascinates me with his experiences and his attitude about them. More, more, I want to broaden my experience of life, he says. I think he actually means it. That gives me a shiver.

It’s absurd, it’s amazing, it’s a privilege, he says. You already know the answers to the questions you’re asking me. I can see it in your eyes, so why ask? It feels amazing, stimulating: I can sense myself being transformed in front of myself, my quest changing shape. Intuition is dangerous, John says, because it can change you. Once you get the habit of following your intuition, it happens more, suddenly or appropriately meeting the right people for the moment. Glastonbury spits out people who aren’t real or positive or who posture or who can’t deal with the pressures of unimpeded self-inquiry. But is it just a pagan amusement park? A psychic Disneyland?

Self-knowledge comes richly tonight; it’s validating to be receptive to it. I tell John about running off Wearyall Hill in a panic the other night. The fairies were assembling at dusk and didn’t want you there, he comments. Absorb is the key word, without bias, but with wonder and balance from a center. I walk home around 1:30 a.m. through empty streets, so full and bustling in the daytime, and up the hill, half afraid of meeting fairies or whatever, but my mind is acutely attentive.

//Fairies chased him off Wearyall Hill? Perhaps. But note Blaise’s or whatever. That suggests he intuits, since he is talking about intuition here, something else, a different agency, unnamed and to him not yet consciously identified, but my guess is this is an early brush of the wings of the Ofanim on young Blaise. If you are not used to being wing-brushed by angels, either in terms of its impact on your body or psyche, it can feel arresting at first, I should think, and one could, quite understandably, draw the wrong and thus erroneous conclusions. Many people who have not entered into a psychic or mystical life-style find the first encounters unsettling, no matter how wholesome the encountering agencies might be, or so I’ve read. This Blaise is so young and fresh and earnest—well, I feel like I’m offering a mother’s view from twice his age even though he’s in territory unknown to me.//

July 16: I set off on foot today for a five-mile walk to a hamlet called Westhay to talk with an iconoclastic scholar and mystic. I felt the Tor’s pull start to wane after a few miles and baser thoughts, less organized, enter my mind at the same time. I hadn’t realized a landscape feature, presumably just an odd-shaped physical hill, could have such a noticeable effect on my awareness and the tone and direction of my thoughts. Is that what they mean by Earth acupuncture and the power of sacred sites to modulate the resting tone of our awareness, provide it parabolic troughs and peaks?

I watched the Sun set over a little bump of a hill in the west, rising on the horizon after miles of flat marshy plains, the Sun like an orange ball descending into this hill, which swallows it up. It felt Atlantean, striking a marvelous, suggestive image. John told me the other day he likes to be on the Tor during a storm to absorb the energy; he finds the Full Moon is a good collecting moment. It feels like my past is slipping away into the truth, my illusions falling off.

I walked home late again through the empty streets after the pub and a talk with John. I was a bit drunk but chanting the Heart Sutra as a protective talisman, I suppose, so as not to see anything unusual or get that bogeyman feeling again. You don’t know where you’ll be in six months, he said. That’s fine with me. Before I came here my life was at a post-Saturn Return dead-end. It badly needed reinventing, redirection, and redeployment. What I had been doing, who I was, had become dull, even moribund. I was open to suggestions. I was okay with being reformatted here.

July 18: Stanley shows up at the bed-and-breakfast around 11 a.m. saying we have an appointment to view the blue sapphire bowl at Chalice Well. He’s eager to show it to me so I can appreciate its hierophantic function for the Glastonbury Mysteries. We go upstairs in the Little St. Michael’s building to a place Pole called the Upper Room in emulation of the place of the Last Supper, also an upper room. But the Upper Room, Stanley explains, is more than an architectural feature, meaning the second floor; think of it as the upper floor in the Mysteries, in consciousness.

It feels like a meditation room, and the Last Supper stage-set is a convincing simulation. Long wooden table, simple bowls, chairs awaiting their occupants. Pole claimed to have remembered the actual event and wrote about it in A Man Seen Afar, Stanley says. The vibration is strong, still, expectant, but Stanley makes a throat sound of disgust. They’ve moved the bowl and put a cheap simulacrum in the drawer in its place. He discusses the propriety of this with the housekeeper, and it borders on an argument. I feel indifferent to whether I see the bowl or not; to know it exists is sufficient to me, and I take a few moments to enjoy the depth and clarity of the room’s vibration.