31108893 messenger stanley the cathar connection

THE CATHAR CONNECTION Stanley Messenger

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The Cathar

Connection

A Journey through Conjunction * Reflection * Resolution

Stanley Messenger 1980-1981

Published online in 2002 by The Glastonbury Archive

Glastonbury, England http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/GlastonburyArchive/

Publisher: Palden Jenkins [email protected]

© Stanley Messenger, 1981 and 2002. This work may be printed out in single copies for personal use and study, in a spirit of fair play. Reproduction in

any form in larger quantities or for financial gain is not permitted except with permission from the publisher.

Book transcribed by Sarah Soden


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Contents: Chapter 1 The Edge of the World Chapter 2 Esther Chapter 3 Raymond Chapter 4 Fraser Chapter 5 Clothilde Chapter 6 Diary of the Journey Chapter 7 Clothilde Chapter 8 Requiescant Chapter 9 Fraser

The people: Alan Fraser, psychiatrist Raymond Felcourt, works in accountancy when not wandering about Europe Esther Corstorphine, trainee in probation service Helène Fauré, ex-student, was at college with Esther Clothilde Perrier, psychiatric consultant in Toulouse

FOREWORD This is a work of fiction. Nowadays this word is often itself a convenient fiction to conceal fact; fact which has been loosened up and adapted by imagination to convey truths which would be unassimilable in any other form. The reader is then free to do what he likes with the truths. However, it saves disappointment if one is warned not to look for physical confirmations that don’t exist. Everything I remember about what Antonin Gadal told me in the fifties is in the book. But there has been a great deal of research since then, and things may now be seen differently. For example, I am told an exit in the Sos valley connecting with the Grotte de Lombrives has been found. But a direct link as high up the valley as Olbier would be very unlikely geologically, perhaps impossible. This doesn’t alter what may be factual on a spiritual level, and I hope the book will stimulate research on these levels also. Perhaps the real nature of fiction lies in its suggestion that things which in reality happen on many levels can be condensed, and so be experienced with a synthetic immediacy without waiting for slower transcendence; just as fairy-tales in fact, which were born out of love and are based on faith, may also be prophetic of hope.

--- oOo --- Take Death Enough to achieve, already now, The distance from this incarnation Already attained from the others; Not so much that you fall out of love with the earth And all of earth’s precious darlings From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’ begun by Esther on the journey


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CHAPTER ONE THE EDGE OF THE WORLD High above the bracken and azalea-covered flank of the mountain, a pair of buzzards slowly circled. The slopes were touched now by a fitful golden glow as the sun prepared to set prematurely behind massed banks of cloud. The little Pyrenean village of Olbier, almost the last inhabited settlement at the top of the Sos valley, was already in shadow. A faint clanking was audible far down the valley below the path, as a few stray goats stumbled hurriedly in the wake of their fellows to join the flock on its way home. The threat of approaching storm was almost tangible behind them. Small gusts and flurries of wind stirred the tall grasses by the path. The leisurely circling of the giant birds seemed almost immune to the disturbance at ground level, as if a deep slow breathing of maternal nature was preparing to guard itself, to batten down the hatches against whatever onslaught was being prepared by the elemental masters of the heights. A rattle of stones from the path below might have been a last goat still astray. But it came again, and this time sounded nearer. Only human footsteps crunched with that particular rhythm. But in this wilderness and at this time of the late summer afternoon there was no destination on this path nearer than the ‘Refuge Fr. De Grail’ a thousand feet or more above. For a few moments the sound of faltering steps was silent. A faint cry came through the gathering mist. Then the footsteps started again. As if to signal the imminent threat from the elements, one of the birds now wheeled away down the valley, and was soon lost to view among the misty outriders of drizzle-bearing cloud creeping like an advancing tide along the valley floor below. The other bird continued in a desultory way to describe a few diminishing spirals, and then it too drifted slowly valleywards. Successive waves of mist projected one after another in faintly discernible thickenings, almost like hands and fingers caressing the ground, enveloping the bushes, concealing and then quickly revealing again the features of the valley floor, so that the whole landscape to the north came into movement with no stable points of reference. The last feature to lose its sharp outlines was man-made, or at least animal-made; the zigzag path descending to the tarred road up which the last of the goats had now disappeared. This path led up and over a col, it’s higher reaches invisible at this point, but destined to climb for many miles into and over the pass to the east of Pic Montcalm, and ultimately into Spain. In this direction the light was still vivid, and the mountain ridge was in sharp focus. But below it, and in all the valleys visible to the south, the cloud was now mounting like a sea of cotton foam. Sound too was blanketed by it, except nearby, where the wind was becoming increasingly gusty. A wavering shadow appeared in the swirling cloud on the path and slowly thickened and darkened. No-one, animal or human, was there to observe when the girl stumbled at last to a halt by the little upland meadow above which the great birds had so recently watched for the movement of small rodents foraging in the grass. Without searching further for shelter the girl made for a clump of hazel bushes and threw herself down. Gathering round her the heavy peasant shawl of undyed wool, beaded with fine drops of condensation, and now with actual rain, which could be heard in gusty flurries in the hazel branches above her head. Something about the way she settled exactly into the most comfortable depression in the stony ground would have told an observer that this was not the first time she had made a nest for herself under these particular bushes. Indeed she now turned on her side and began to scrabble about under the moss and pebbles as if in search of something. A sob of hysteria was quickly followed by a sigh of relief. She turned back onto her elbows, drew herself further under the bushes, and began to examine the object in her hand. Dark wisps of damp hair fell across her deep brown, almost black, large-pupilled eyes. As


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she pushed her hair aside with the back of a delicate, well cared-for hand, one would have been struck suddenly by the first of many incongruities. The hair, the peasant shawl, the rough sandals, the muttered Langue d’Oc phrases with which she began to croon endearments to the object in her hands, were all very much “de la region”. But the cared-for skin, the movements, a certain lightness in her gestures, all bespoke something very different. The stone she held was a piece of Pyrenean limestone about the size of a sparrow, and very much like it in shape. Clearly someone had been at work on this stone with a carving implement of some kind, because it was fashioned roughly into the shape of a dove, the tail feathers outspread, the head tucked beneath the wings. These were gathered about the body like the girl’s own shawl. Indeed, it was very much an abandoned nestling she now began to resemble, drawing the garment even closer round her as the increasingly rough weather burst into her inadequate shelter with a furious downpour of rain. Clasping the stone dove to her breast, she began to pour forth an answering torrent of words, which did almost seem for a moment to drive back the elements by the sheer violence of the emotion that racked her tiny frame. The full import of these words would not have penetrated the understanding of any twentieth-century listener. But any Cathar, any persecuted heretical refugee in these mountain fastnesses, cowering among the rocks and caves in a last retreat from the Inquisition, would have responded with a wave of protective love as the sacred words erupted with elemental force from this latter-day Cathar throat. Evoking as they did so an immediate response of sympathetic resonance from the very mountains themselves. As if to confirm this response the heaviest downpour now appeared to have passed over. Although all trace of gold had now gone from the sky, and visibility through the mountain drizzle was restricted to a dozen yards or so, there was still plenty of light. The girl pulled herself out of her nest and shook off the worst of the rain. Her movements, as she fumbled in her handbag and pulled out a roll of bread wrapped in a tissue, were pure 20th century. It was as if something deep in her bodily reserves came to her rescue as pure survival, though everything in her soul-consciousness belonged to the mountains, belonged to a tradition of worship indigenous to the region over centuries. And as she sat again in the grass under the once more lightening sky nibbling the bread, she was picking at the form of the stone dove to emphasise some feature in its imagery. She longed for it to speak to her more vividly of her own soul in its church-rejecting elemental hunger for the divine, through and beyond the natural world. Yet the implement with which she did so was a cheap nail-file which one could find anywhere in a supermarket in Toulouse, or further out there in the strident twentieth-century world, which her bemused and hallucinated consciousness had for the time being entirely rejected and forgotten. Suddenly, she looked up and began to listen. She got to her feet. “Ramón?” Her light cry fell into the blanketing mist like a pebble into moss. It would hardly have been audible a hundred feet away. She gathered her things and began to stumble and climb up the slope, as if making for a perfectly well known objective; but she was quickly out of breath and had to stop. The pair of fallow deer, whose movements had aroused her, stood in petrified astonishment as she came into view, and at once darted up the slope, leaping wraith-like into the mist. A few stones were dislodged, then all was silent once more. This brooding silence suddenly came down on her with such a weight that she fell to her knees with a burst of sobbing. “Il ne vient pas. Il ne vient pas.” She cried, then began one more with added urgency to climb the steepening slope towards an overhang of cliff and tumbled rocks now only a few yards above her. Unhesitatingly she made her way between two of the largest of these. She stopped short as she always did at this point, almost physically pushed back by the immense blackness of the cavern these rocks concealed. Nothing would have induced her to take a step further down the trodden path, which led into the cave without Ramón himself in front of her. She couldn’t believe he would actually have made the crucial descent without her, knowing how essential it was to have her at the top of the pitch while he climbed down. “Ramón!. Ramón!” she cried. This time the echo of her light voice rang and re-rang across the vaulted roof, joining the “clack-chuck” of the jackdaws which flew out in protest, circling and muttering to each other as they redeployed themselves among the shelving recesses above her.


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“Ramón!” She knew he wasn’t there. She had known ever since late night when she lost touch with him after crossing that terrible river in the dark, that none of this was really happening. Something else much worse was happening instead, worse and yet so much better, something deep within the mountains in the darkness something she should never have left. She should be in the mountain darkness with the others, sharing the peace, sharing the horror, holding hands with all the others in the dark, drifting away across the frontier that led to the light, the Eternal Light promised by the holy ‘consolamentum’. The assurance of release from the darkness, from the crippling stone and the drowning water, the stone in men’s Inquisitorial hearts, the drowning tide of their relentless questioning. A thin, pale, infinitely tenuous thread which linked her with Ramón and their purpose up here together suddenly snapped at this moment and flung away across the mountains like a tiny whiplash of light, cutting through the rain-clouds and out into the sunlight over the flat plains beyond. It came snapping home at last like the cut end of a broken piece of elastic straight into the solar plexus of a dark sweating young man struggling with a heavy rucksack up the platform of the main station at Toulouse. The vast diesel engines of the Paris train were already pounding out their tune of power, in preparation for a journey beyond the imagination of ghostly Cathars. Or indeed, of buzzards or deer, or any of the more tenuous elemental creatures still drifting in the faint cloud-land visible to the young man as he turned with a puzzled frown towards the southern horizon. “Come on, Raymond, we’ll miss it,” said the tall girl behind him. Her green-grey eyes puckered in the bright August sunlight, concealing the anxious concern with which for the past fortnight she had increasingly watched him. He continued to stand, staring uncomprehendingly into the distance, rucksack forgotten at his feet. Elbows jabbed at him. Shouting voices insisted. Rushing feet milled past and around them. “Raymond!” He looked into her eyes. “The ladder” he said. “What?” “I’ve forgotten to…” The guard’s whistle blew with shrill urgency. “Come on!” the girl shouted. He heaved the rucksack up into the opening and stumbled in after it, hauling her up behind him. Only moments later the giant train pulled slowly out of the station. Other threads snapped in all directions. Scraps of paper drifted down the platform in the wake of the parting train. Esther collapsed onto her rucksack in the corridor. Raymond stood, hands thrust into his pockets, nose pressed against the window, staring into the setting sun. The train gathered speed. In the far distance the cloud-capped mountains came into view to his left at an unbelievable height above the plain. As he pressed his face against the glass, gripping the handrail till his knuckles were sharply white against his sunburned hands, a moan of pure anguish forced itself between his lips. Stumbling across Esther’s feet and the baggage, he tried to open the window of the train door, wrestling with the catch, and even trying to get the door open. White-faced, Esther struggled after him shouting. Finally, she slapped him sharply across the mouth. He turned eyes empty and expressionless. He wiped his hand across his forehead, collapsed to the floor, and began to weep quietly. She returned to the rucksacks, found a comb, and started to run it through her shoulder length straight red hair, watching him meanwhile with a kind of grim solicitude. While he was weeping, which he had been doing from time to time for the last week, she felt more relaxed. At least this emotional outlet was better than the fixed expression of despair, and even worse than that, the look of utter bewilderment, which sometimes greeted her casual references to incidents during the holiday with Helène and herself in the mountains. She was deeply worried about what had happened to Helène. The day before yesterday, when Raymond had turned up at their lodgings in Ussat, she had expected Helène to be with him. He, on the other hand, seemed devastated not to find her at the pension. Yesterday he was still looking for her. He went up to the doctor’s house, where she and Helène had first met him at a study-group, but Dr Perrier had seen no sign of her. When he came


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back he was once more in the abstracted and apparently hallucinated condition which had been an increasingly disturbing factor in the last two weeks. Now, however, there was in addition a frightening feeling of urgency about him. It was apparently essential that he get back to England without losing any more time. From the little conversation she had had with this quite new, but very fascinating acquaintance in the last fortnight, she knew he had no job to return to. Moreover it had been her own intention to stay at least another month. The whole thing in fact was becoming something she didn’t want to deal with. She had far less responsibility for this young man now quietly weeping to himself in an empty train corridor than she had for Helène, who although she was in no sense a close friend, had at least been at college with her. Only the fact that Helène was a local girl with her family in Toulouse had prevented her ditching Raymond altogether when he laid siege to her at Ussat and more or less insisted on her accompanying him back to England to help him explain matters, as he put it, “to the English Templar Brotherhood”. This was, as far as she was concerned, pure gobbledygook. Something, which she now saw was quite half-baked, about the fact that she was some sort of social worker, that the young man was English, and that he was clearly on the edge of a breakdown, if not actually over the edge, had made her agree to go with him. But she now saw she had been utterly crazy to become so deeply involved on such short acquaintance. And why, for God’s sake, had she not at least gone to Dr Perrier first? At least she was a doctor, but of course she, Esther, had only met her that one time, and she was French, and, oh hell, it was none of her, Esther’s, business anyway. The fact was she was thoroughly out of her depth. What she should have done…… Her thoughts went back to Helène. If she really had a responsibility, it would have been to stay in Ussat till Helène turned up, or at the very least to have found out, perhaps through Dr Perrier, where Helène’s parents lived in Toulouse and see if she had gone back there. With all her maunderings and hysteria about the Cathars, she was in some ways just as much ‘at risk’ as this weepy, but, she confessed it, very attractive young man in the corner. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, something new and frighteningly adult was born. As clearly and sharply defined as when a butterfly, with that sharp little popping crack it emits at the moment of emergence from its chrysalis, immediately extracts its two antennae, which wave enquiringly and expectantly about in their first contact with the air. And when its little spiral tongue pulls itself free and starts to curl and uncurl, exploring entirely new dimensions of time and space, becoming for the first time on earth, a recognisable Being of the Light. Something vertical and razor-sharp emerged from the young woman’s angry and somewhat beleaguered Scottish soul, and muttered something that her Gaelic ancestors would have recognised as authentic. Indeed, it was closely akin to their own headlong clannish determination to establish a responsible and committed ego-quality on the earth’s surface. But being a woman first and foremost, and having a woman’s fellow-feeling for those of her sex who only late in life, or never, arrive at such a clarity of self-determination, she now found herself emitting a strong wave of protective warmth back through the cooling August evening into those distant mountains, and towards the gentle creature whom she now felt she had feebly and selfishly abandoned there. It arrived far too late to reach the consciousness of the dark girl, which had by that time sunk very deeply into the mountains, and had for the time being lost its identity in a more diffuse mode of being, from which it would emerge, if at all, in recognisable and individual form only after a long period of transformation and healing, which lay beyond her own power to control, or even to affect. So do our powers of sacrifice and faith again and again offer to our fellow-beings opportunities for wholly undetermined, unpredictable occasions of selfless love. What Esther’s powerful gesture, wrested from her newly born spiritual being, did achieve, however, was to link itself with a purely physical emanation or essence, born of their time together in the mountains, and even perhaps with a linkage begun in much earlier periods of history. It was enough, at any rate, to attract the attention of a quite instinctive, even glandular process in the life-forces of the distraught girl now lying on the ground in a cave-mouth high up in the Grail valley of Montréal-de-Sos, where she was rapidly succumbing to the effects of exposure, and arouse in those processes a germinal motivation towards survival.


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Infinitely slowly, the girl began to move towards the gap in the rocks, and to crawl painfully on hands and knees back down the slope towards the path. It was providential, and perhaps also part of Esther’s intervention, that the owner of the goats had miscounted his flock, and was making a last search higher up towards the refuge. When he saw the movements of Helène’s dun-coloured shawl among the bracken high up the slope to his right he thought that one of his animals had perhaps missed its footing and broken a leg. It was less than two hours before she was lying, warm and asleep, wrapped in rugs before the blazing hearth of a shepherd’s cot in Olbier. But it was another full day before the doctor came from Tarascon, summoned when the shepherd’s wife realised the girl was not going to be able to move for some while. And it was several more days before the doctor himself appreciated that he was dealing with something a little different from straightforward shock and exposure.

--- oOo --- Take the Divided Self Enough to choose which one is you on each level Not so much that the other, or others, pursue you Raging with despair and hunger To every encounter with the spirit From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’


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CHAPTER TWO ESTHER Long before the train reached Paris in the early light of the following morning Esther had managed to secure for the two of them, a reasonably empty compartment where they had both achieved a few hours of fitful sleep. It was not until she was thoroughly awake, and had twice unsuccessfully attempted to rouse Raymond into a similar condition, that she began to realise that her troubles were now only beginning. With a sickening feeling she realised that her startling ‘rebirth’, as she now began to feel it to have been, the previous evening, had happened only just in time. She became aware that she had on her hands someone not far removed from helpless infancy. He lay in the corner of the compartment with his eyes wide open and clear, and said nothing. The only time his eyes moved was when she moved. When, as sometimes happened, she moved out of his field of vision, to go into the corridor to intercept the coffee attendant or go to the toilet, his chin fell on his chest and he relapsed into a sort of stupor. As soon as she returned his eyes were on her again, and there they stayed. Once or twice during the holiday she had the feeling that he was not seeing her as a 20th century girl at all, but a something much more formidable, which he appeared to associate with the Cathar obsessions he shared with Helène. It was this more formidable self she felt he was looking at now as he stared at her, and upon which she realised he had made himself totally dependent. Although it made her distinctly uncomfortable, and to some extent brought back the feelings of inadequacy and avoidance more characteristic of what she now thought of as her ‘previous’ self. She couldn’t help speculating whether it might not have played some part in the very arousing of these new feelings of freedom and independence. The immediate problem was whether she was going to be able to get him across Paris to the Gare St Lazare and the Dover train without summoning help. She began to experiment, first of all by giving up all efforts to get him to behave as an adult. Fortunately, the two other people in the compartment had showed no interest in their affairs. By consciously controlling her anxiety in case they noticed anything unusual she managed to start talking to him quietly and confidently as nurse to patient or child. When the coffee came she handed him his cup. “Here’s your coffee, look.” No response. Just the patient dependent look into her eyes. “Drink it up.” She realised she was going to have to feed him. She managed to get herself between him and the elderly French woman in the opposite corner and fed him the coffee, sip by sip. He drank it all without difficulty. She didn’t know much about amnesia, but she began to suppose that this was what she was dealing with. Later she got him out along the corridor and into the toilet, where all seemed to be well. At least he wasn’t wet. When they got to Paris she miraculously found a porter, and by using the words “mon frère” and “un peu simple” she managed with his help to get Raymond’s rucksack onto his back. Leading him by the hand she found a taxi and got him into it. At the Gare St Lazare there was half an hour to wait for the train. Her main fear while she collected food at the Café-bar was that he would wander off while she wasn’t looking. But it was all right. By talking to him as one would to a child she got him to sit docilely by the rucksacks. As in the train, as soon as she was out of his field of vision his chin dropped onto his chest and he appeared to lose contact with the world altogether. She bit her fingernails in the café queue, but he was quite all right when she got back. For some miles before Calais she had nightmares about getting through the customs. She needn’t have worried. She put on a sort of bossy elder sister act and simply raising her eyebrows and making movements with her head was quite enough to indicate the ‘un peu simple’ bit. She opened his rucksack along with hers when requested. Rien à déclarer. Child’s play.


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Then Dover. She had to make up her mind what to do. Now the professionals would really have to take over. As soon as they were past the customs, she found a policeman and asked if there was any sort of medical officer on duty. When the doctor came, it was a woman. “It’s my travelling companion. We were part of a group in the south of France. He wasn’t very well when we were down there, and I felt I ought to help him to get back. I think it must be amnesia.” She said as little as possible about the hallucinations, and nothing at all about her own involvement or Helène’s, which at this stage she was doing her best to put out of her mind altogether. Later when she had had time to think it might be different. She waited till the ambulance came. As he submissively climbed into it he didn’t even look round. She managed somehow to get herself to London and back to her lodgings. She collapsed onto her bed and cried herself to sleep. Late in the afternoon she woke and began to prepare herself a meal out of tins. It was more than an hour later that she suddenly realised with absolute horror that she hadn’t even asked what hospital they were taking him to. It was weeks before the reaction reversed itself and she started to take up her old contacts and to make serious efforts to make sense of what had happened. She had aroused more fundamental responses in the laws of human destiny than she had any idea of.

*** Raymond came to himself the following morning and emerged into a state of considerable clarity. He remembered the journey as a kind of peaceful dream overshadowed by the watchful kindly presence of a middle aged man who kept murmuring in his ear that he mustn’t worry any more about someone whose name he couldn’t now remember, and whose pain seemed to be inside him. Linked somehow to his belly, which ached and burned unaccountably. He clasped his hands across it and tried to steady the ache by breathing more deeply. When he did that the memory of the kindly man faded and was replaced by someone quite different, but as if born out of the fading memory a girl of about twenty-two or three, striking without being particularly pretty, with long straight red hair and a firm chin. Her greenish-brown clear eyes seemed to have been looking into his for a very long time. A wave of self-pity overcame him and he began to sob. He needed her. He must find her. He looked round the room where he was lying, which made no sense to him whatever. It looked like a hospital room. There was a vase of flowers on the windowsill. And those were his things. There was his rucksack by the door. Suddenly, he remembered a long journey by ambulance, and arriving at a hospital. He had to get out and try to remember what he was supposed to be doing. An appalling fear started to rise from somewhere deep in his body. He began to shake, and it was all he could do to stop himself from crying out. This must be a mental hospital. His old fear of madness was getting a grip on him. He all but panicked. At all costs they mustn’t get hold of him again. Last time it nearly came to ECT and heavy drug treatment. Then he wouldn’t be able to… Slowly the other memories emerged from some depth or other linked with last night’s dreams. What was the place he had to get to? Ashridge, that was it. Somewhere northwest of London, they said. Who was it said that? But this he couldn’t remember. It would come back to him later. The important thing now was to keep calm and hang on to Ashridge. He got out of bed and crept to the door. He could hear nothing. He tried the door. Unlocked. He peered out. A long empty corridor with doors on both sides. Rapidly he got dressed. Everything seemed to be in his pockets, including wallet; even his passport. They hadn’t started to check on him yet then. He must get away before a doctor or nurse came. Time? 5.30 am. He was about to lift the rucksack onto his back when he heard footsteps approaching. He quickly put it back by the door. He leapt into bed and pulled the things over him. The footsteps stopped outside his door and paused. Quietly the door opened. He breathed deeply. Then the door softly closed again and the footsteps retreated. With beating heart he got out of bed, heaved the rucksack onto his back, gently opened the door, and after a quick glance both ways, made off in the opposite direction to the retreating footsteps. He reached a right-angled bend without mishap. A


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bewildering array of directional signs faced him on the wall. One said ‘Exit to Front Lodge’. He passed a window. Thank heavens he was on the ground floor. He could not afford to meet anyone. It was far too early for a fully-dressed stranger to escape comment. He made himself walk slowly and quietly. The corridor seemed endless. He could see an open space a long way ahead. He jerked to a halt as someone who looked like a porter crossed the space and disappeared. He began to hurry in case the man came straight back. As he approached the hallway he tiptoed to where he could get a view into the glass-partitioned office. All was silent and the office was empty. There was a ‘gents’ on his left. That’s where the porter was! He made a bolt for the open front door and through it, turning at once behind the doorjamb out of view of the hallway. It was a fine sunny morning and the sun was already hot. He began to feel safe. The drive was curved and sloping and went through a shrubbery. Suddenly he heard a vehicle change gear and approach rapidly. He darted into the bushes. An ambulance passed within inches of him. Then he was away and out into the road. The shock of realising he was actually free again shot him straight back into his alternative memory stream. He leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. He must somehow get hold of a horse and encircle London. It would be fatal to declare his mission until he got within a few miles of Ashridge itself. Some peasants there would certainly know of the Cathar foundation. He would have to watch in the markets for the ciphered greeting signs. But when he got there, how would he recognise the Templar master? He would have to be accepted into the brotherhood first and give them the opportunity to recognise him. Blurting out his anxieties straight away would only rouse suspicion. If it weren’t all so desperately urgent! He opened his eyes and looked down. The short trousers and hiking-boots gave him a shock of total meaninglessness which cut off his memories, as when one is wakened suddenly out of a dream. He began to walk rather aimlessly along the main road. There was plenty of traffic. He saw a bus stop and walked up to it, trying to make sense of the route numbers. He must be somewhere in southeast London. He remembered that there were four or five pound notes in his wallet, but the rest of the currency was French. He would have to find a Bureau de Change, perhaps at one of the railway termini. The buses might not start this early. He had no idea which direction was towards London. A man was coming towards him along the pavement. Raymond asked him about buses. “You’re on the wrong side of the road.” “Do the buses start as early as this?” “Should be one along soon.” He crossed over. The stop was a few yards back. He began to be anxious that a search for him would be starting. He considered hitchhiking. Then he realised he was in no condition to give an account of himself to anyone who got curious. It seemed an age before a bus came. At last he saw the familiar red monster trundling towards him, but it was only a local one. He was about to turn away when he saw a Green Line coach rushing up behind the bus. He panicked. No Green Line stop. There it was twenty yards up the road. He rushed back and just managed to signal it to a halt. Five minutes later he had recovered his breath and was considering his luck. If the nurse had not decided to let him sleep… If the porter had not chosen that moment to go to the loo… However, here he was. The abyss in his solar plexus started to open up, but he firmly controlled it. Time enough for all that when he got to London. The coach would arrive at Victoria. The one word that he had in his mind was Ashridge. How to find out where that was? He asked the conductor. “Ashridge? There’s an Ashridge Park near Berkhamsted.” “Is that north-west of London?” “That’s right. In Hertfordshire.” “How do I get there?” “Well, there’s another Green Line goes to Aylesbury which takes you not too far away. If I were you I’d get off at Two Waters and get a bus into Hemel.” “Hemel?” “Yeah. Hemel Hempstead. There’s bound to be a local bus from there.” “Thanks, you’ve been very helpful.”


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“Pleasure.” He dozed off for a bit. He awoke shouting, out of a tremendous dream in which the whole Cathar brotherhood was crossing a giant bridge, which spanned the heavens. Behind them the smoking ruins of countless stakes and gibbets flamed and reeked, the fading cries of the tortured martyrs rang in his ears, the dying prayers of his beloved companions in the black recesses of the caves rose within him into the golden radiance above. But it was what lay ahead that called up the joyous shout in his soul. The waiting concourse of future souls longing for the message of hope brought to them by the marching thousands from the past. “We are you! We are one another! The earth is renewed for us again and again from one life to the next. The horror and the loss are all transmuted and raised as seeds for a new hope. Change! Change! Transmute lead into Gold!” As Raymond woke he thought he was shouting aloud, but only a mutter escaped his lips as the bus came to a halt behind a row of others on the long bridge over the railway lines. He tried to gather himself together, but found he could remember nothing. Then the conductor shook him. “There’s your coach, look. 318 to Aylesbury.” He got his rucksack down and stumbled to the door. “Get off at Two Waters.” Somehow he got himself into the other bus. He hoped he still had enough money. He found that the fare still left him with a pound and odd pence to spare. As he settled into the rhythm of the new vehicle he tried to doze off again. There had been something of tremendous importance, which made sense of his whole experience if only he could get back to it. All the way to his destination he was struggling to force his tired and overstrained mind into a straitjacket which was still too small to hold it. As before there came a point when the division passed some threshold of coherence and fell into its component parts. By the time the conductor shook him awake at Two Waters he was past being able to bring himself into any sort of purposeful behaviour. He was still standing at the roadside two hours later with his rucksack beside him. Fortunately, a police-car had spotted him on two previous trips, and the sergeant began to wonder why he didn’t appear to be attempting to signal cars. On the third occasion he stopped and got out. When he was met by the patient trusting look Esther had become accustomed to on the French train he decided to take the distraught young man up to out-patients at the West Herts Hospital. He would have been considerably surprised had he known that it was Ramón who gazed back at him, and that the latter had seen the unmistakable signs in his greeting of a knowledge of Cathar lay-brotherhood. All the unknowing sergeant had done was to make a sketchy salute to his cap, but it was enough to bridge the gap of centuries. Ramón knew his Templar master couldn’t be far away. He put himself gratefully into the copper’s hands and was soon once more in hospital. The clinic in the Kent suburbs, which was the only one in the county which happened to have an empty psychiatric bed, never did find out what happened to him.

-- oOo --- Take Initiation Enough to realise in solemnity That the slow trundling move across the first frontier Came and is past. That the peaks on the mountain pass look the same And are subtly different. Not so much that you forget you chose to come to earth And those you loved for whom you made the choice. From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’


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CHAPTER THREE RAYMOND Soon after Raymond’s arrival in Hertfordshire a dossier of papers began to collect in the file of the psychiatrist to whom he found his way during the first two or three days of his hospitalisation. Some of these were written by Raymond himself, others by the psychiatrist. In due course much of this material came into the hands of a group of people working together in the Pyrenées, studying the Cathars, their life and times, and their relevance to the transformation of life in contemporary society. In making up this account of the events that led to the formation of this group it has not been found necessary to alter any of this material which gives a clearer picture of the development of the relationships of the people involved than could have been achieved by piecemeal quotations incorporated into narrative form as by a third party. The dossier begins with a document on a single page transcribed from tape. It formed part of the first interview between Raymond and the doctor after the former came round from his initial period of sedation. Raymond has always set great store by this short excerpt, regarding it as the first step in his emergence from his double stream of memories, and from the amnesia by which he attempted to resolve and rationalise his crisis of identity. This is followed by a longer passage, consisting partly of further pieces written in response to the doctor’s request for material he could use during treatment, and partly of continuity passages written later when a number of people were trying to incorporate the material into a continuous narrative. From the dossier:- Behind all the subsequent conversations, and overshadowing all the later involvements and adventures I can still sometimes recapture the echo of a quieter, steadier voice. The voice more of a doctor than a friend… You say you’ve been on this journey. You should sit down and write out your experiences. I can’t remember what they are; only the fact that they are important. Perhaps you should start to write in any case. Perhaps that is what is needed to bring them back. It is just this I fear. The experiences were unbearable? All experiences are unbearable until they are rationalised. Most people would rather be bored than have unrationalised experiences. But I meant something rather different. Yes? Well, simply that to remember experiences usually seems to diminish their importance. It is as if only the husks of what was experienced are accessible to memory. The point would be to have the experiences again, and this seems to me to be something essentially different, even quite opposite, to remembering them. I was making a different point. I meant to suggest that in writing down what you could remember you would be directing attention to what you experienced in such a way that others could read between the lines. At the cost of my own sense of their importance, which alone gives meaning to my life? Anyone who hangs on to spiritual capital by deliberately withholding the communication of it loses it inevitably, and deserves to. It seems quite possible that the only way to re-experience your journey is through the reflection of it in the involvement with others which your recollection creates. Throw the bread upon the waters and see what comes back. It is rather a question of throwing the husks and seeing if bread comes back. That one does in any case, Ancient Mariner fashion, merely by being back from the journey and clutching a sleeve or two.

***


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This conversation, and others like it, took place all that year, some of them in the clinic, others more diluted and less pretentious-sounding after I came out. The shrewd reader will have observed what a difference it makes once the suggestion has been implanted that only an inner journey is meant. You then begin at once to discount anything further that is said, or at least to qualify it with some preconceived idea about what is real and what is not. This is so even if no mention is made of clinics. There would still be a headlong rush in most of us towards some personal standard of ‘reality’ - ‘normality’. Trying to overcome my increasing cautiousness in selecting people to talk to, I tend to judge people nowadays by how hysterical this rush for normality becomes under pressure. You would think that doctors in clinics would be proof against this sort of pressure. Some are, but most are not, least of all those whose ‘position’ vis-à-vis the patient is most impregnable. The only reason that such doctors don’t bolt for cover at the first suggestion that there maybe some doubt about the exact boundary between inner and outer experience, or between reality and hallucination, is that they never came out of cover in the first place. I shall have to ask you to exercise a little patience, and allow me to blow off steam about the clinic. I realise how defensive it is and how often this sort of thing has been said before. I also realise that nobody with rigid preconceptions could honestly have spoken to me as Fraser, my doctor, did, in his suggestions, which I wrote down at the beginning. Exactly similar suggestions can of course be made dishonestly, and frequently are, for purely therapeutic reasons, by persons whose notions of reality are completely rigid. And whose intention it is to restore one, by surgical interference if necessary, to a condition in which the channels by which such experiences enter are permanently cut off. However, I am putting it on record that Fraser was to the best of my belief honest, and open to the possibility that there were objective grounds for thinking about what I told him, and taking it at its face value, by which I simply mean without preconceptions. I don’t really mean that anything perceptual can be taken at face value, least of all one’s own or other peoples’ open-mindedness. The unconscious preconceptions are the worst. My intuition told me that Fraser was honest. I had to leave it at that.

*** So now I have thoroughly established the impression that this was an inner journey, a psychedelic journey as we say nowadays. I suggested this simply by the way I introduced it, and by mentioning the clinic. So it is time to throw a spanner in the works and assure you it was nothing of the sort. I was away on a definite journey, mainly in the Pyrenées, for the best part of six months. The episode in the clinic was after I got back, and lasted only a short time, a couple of weeks, though I was under the doctor at home for some time after that. During this time and later I had several further conversations with Fraser. More than anyone else he helped me to re-establish a degree of inner equilibrium, and without demanding heaven as his price. The others were not interested in heaven. Earth at its most mediocre was their mark, ponces one and all, selling the boredom and emptiness of so-called normal experience as if she were your smiling mother, instead of the raddled old tart she is. Not just selling either, forcing their putrid wares on you with the threat of the leucotomy scalpel, or of the blasting of heaven from your soul with electric shocks, on the grounds that heaven is really hell because the way to it is through suffering. As if you were to tell Christ he needn’t be crucified after all, he can have a tranquilliser instead. Then there is the final blasphemy of claiming that the birth of consciousness at a new level, the next step in human evolution, is not worth the price. As if you were to say that metamorphosis is a disease, and butterflies sick, degenerate caterpillars. That there is something evil about birth because it is painful, and some people have miscarriages. When I had written this much I went one day in late October to Dr. Fraser’s London consulting room in order to get his comments on it before going on. He asked if I thought I had been mentally ill. I said I was sure I had. “Do you think an attempt should be made to cure mental illness”? He asked. I said I thought the medical profession had blurred the distinction between medicine and surgery. It used to be realised


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that surgery should always be a last ditch affair, a retreat before a hopeless situation, blowing up your supply lines and burning villages. On the other hand there were healing substances, herbs and the like, introduced into the living and still hopeful situation, witnesses, new factors introduced into the ecological argument going on within the diseased body. Healing in this sense was hardly separable from nourishment, or at the very least from maintenance, preventive medicine, since in any case the body starts to die the moment it is born. The perpetually dying organism takes its place in the whole economy of nature, where nourishing and healing substances are marshalled in ever changing patterns in accordance with the fluctuating events of health and disease. But all this is now hopelessly perverted. Instead of a gentle ecological balancing game of influences and humours, a kind of husbandry of the blood stream and the metabolism and the impulses, where even diseases have their value as indicators of the state of the human being in the purposeful and meaningful struggle of his life, and where even death is only one beat in the rhythm of immortality… instead of exercising this urbane and wise supervision the doctors have declared war on disease and death as if these were somehow avoidable instead of being an inbuilt part of the whole life process. Having no intuitions about rhythm, they take sides with one swing of the pendulum and declare anathema on the other. You are only allowed to live, you mustn’t die, not even in a small way, and if necessary they half kill you to make sure. Soon you will be allowed to wake, but not to sleep, quite unnecessary. You can breathe in, but not out. The clock may go tick, but it may not go tock. They have lost the understanding that inside the physical-chemical structure there is a human being with a meaningful destiny, and the possibility of a directional and purposeful history between pain and pleasure, light and dark, which alone orient him, make life comprehensible to him. For them there is no patient. There is only the system, and they have opted to keep it going at all costs. Instead of the meaningful commerce between light and darkness which gives birth to the colour and individual quality of each human existence, they have erected an iron curtain, a Berlin Wall, slap across the middle of human nature. Behind this they sit, sniping at disease and death with an every increasing armoury of chemical weapons. They have quite overthrown the old concept of healing substances, which restore the balance of a rhythmic process whose meaningful survival depends on the interweaving of destructive as well as of creative elements. Now there is no essential difference between medicine and surgery. It is no longer peacetime, with medicine the peacekeeper, surgery the ultimate sanction of a lawful administration. The human body is under martial law, with every function conscripted on one side of the barrier, every drug dedicated to the destruction of some dissenting cell or function, victory for life over death the absolute and inviolable aim, the promised land a spurious physical immortality, consciousness the perpetual glare of a naked bulb in an interrogation cell. Do not be deceived by painlessness, by vivisection under ether. These only mask the essential violence of the tranquillising drug, the essentially surgical, irreversible character of chemical medication. Hardly anyone appreciates that in-patients discharged from mental hospitals after leucotomy, shock, or suppressive medication, whole areas of essential humanity have been irretrievable written off. What is called cure is achieved at the cost of a permanent suspension of meaningful experience. I don’t suppose I said half this, it is what I wrote down afterwards. But whatever it was I got off my chest, Fraser sat watching me with his characteristic half smile. I was used to letting off verbal fireworks at him in hospital, and he played up to me as audience. He grinned broadly, and said something like “Quite like old times”. Then he said I hadn’t answered his question, and added that perhaps he should rephrase it. After a bit he said:- “Do you think an attempt should be made to cure illness in general, and mental illness in particular? At this point we decided to put the conversation on tape, so what follows is more or less unedited. “The trouble is,” I said, “most of the serious thinking about mental illness has taken place since the medical profession lost touch with the nature and purpose if illness. Most people need a certain amount of illness. It is a disservice to people to deprive them of illnesses that may be their only way to achieve advances of other kinds. Many advances in human experience can only be made indirectly by deprivation, or opposition of one kind and another. It is only when illness becomes excessive that people need help in finding their own right balance between sickness and health. All this applies to mental illness too. I am quite sure a lot of mental illness should be left alone, though the people


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suffering from it should not. Endless attempts should be made to communicate with them. But the first thing would have to be an entirely new start, not in the diagnosis of mental illness, but in interpreting the diagnosis.” “You leave out of account that many people we see are beyond the point when it is any good to them or to society to leave their illness alone. We are not free agents.” “No, by then you are not. But the situation should never be allowed to get that far. By the time the experiences that lead to mental illness have begun to affect the body it is already too late to do anything but treat the body, and this puts a stop to the experiences. Doctors will never stop working to make the body incapable of having such experiences until they start realising that they are valid human experiences. Some of them are a lot more than that. They are an aspect of evolutionary metamorphosis of human consciousness, of which the irreversible psychoses have hitherto been the inevitable casualties. We people who are potential or actual mental patients need to put continual pressure on the medical profession from now on to find ways of making the physical apparatus which is the vehicle of psychic events strong enough to bear an ever increasing load of new kinds of psychic experience.” “I’m not sure that this is the function of doctors,” said Fraser, “Doctors are simply repairmen. You are asking us to send the model back to the manufacturers for re-styling. I suppose that’s an extension of the branch we call prosthetics. Psychic prosthetics, do you want?” “I don’t think we do, no.” I said, “I think we need you to look in the past history of your art for your lost intuitive sense of the nature of health. Somewhere there, there must be a clue to enable you to bring that intuition of health up to date, in line with the necessary thinking of today and the evolutionary needs of today. We have to grow new organs of perception, not manufacture them as artefacts.” We sat in silence for a while. Then I started up again. “I mean I know I have laid into your profession as if this war you have declared on the abnormal is a matter of sheer perversity and bloody-minded lack of insight. Most doctors have been caught unawares by the proliferation of new psychic phenomena and try to deal with them with totally inadequate concepts. But there must surely be an increasing number of doctors who are realising that the corporate health, particularly mental health, of humanity has in a certain sense broken down, to quite a new extent in the last half century?” “I think most of us are aware of it,” said Fraser, “Looked at biologically, man has become a runaway weakened stock like his own domestic animals, thinned out through over breeding like battery hens and Australian rabbits. Humanity’s plant-animal forces are too thinly spread. I wonder if we won’t soon be getting a human version of foot-and-mouth or myxomatosis, to concentrate the stock. We need to re-sink our biological roots in a more compact area of life.” Fraser got up and filled his pipe, which he always did when something began to work in him. Usually he just sat and smiled faintly. Most of the time when I was with him in hospital he hardly spoke. At first I used to think he was half-asleep. He was at the window now, looking down the long avenue of plane trees from the fourth floor of the apartment house where he had his consulting room. From my chair by the fire I could see a column of smoke rising above the multi-coloured autumn trees. Somebody was burning leaves in one of the gardens in West Heath Road, backing onto Hampstead Heath. The sharp smell caught my throat, and I was pulled suddenly back across the months to another autumn before all these things had happened. The momentary panic was more on account of the huge gulf these events had created between the self I now was and most of what I had been before, than of anything in the events themselves. I sat there sweating it out with the whole experience yawning beneath me. I was clutching the arms of the chair as if this would hold me back from the plunge. But I soon found I could breathe easily again and could think quite calmly of the castle and the inn, and the moment at the ford when the water started to rise. Then the slow onset of confusion about sleeping and waking, and the confused identities of the people I was involved with, especially of the girl on the train on the journey coming back. I could almost have taken Fraser at his word and launched into a full account, had he not at that moment turned from the window to speak. And at that moment it was not Fraser at all but… well, it was Fraser, but it was also someone quite different whose identity escaped me, as did all the rest of it.


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He choked off what he was about to say and came rather quickly across the room, but I waved him off and got up. “I’m all right,” I said, “Another bit of my amnesia sorting itself out. Well, not exactly that, if anything more confused than ever, but all the same something is resolving itself. In fact I think I’m beginning to get an idea of what we ought to do.” He moved back to his place by the fire, pipe forgotten, and sat down. He looked trapped and disconcerted in a way that I had never seen in him. “I think you are going to involve me in an impossible choice,” he said. “You know, you are one of the lucky ones. You’ve come through this experience without serious harm. You are neither insane, nor are you back in life as a psychic cripple, with your inner life more or less confined to the satisfaction of minor appetites. This is what many of our post-operative and ECT patients become.” “Did I have ECT?” “No. I’m glad to say you didn’t. But you must realise that I can no more stop this war you have been talking about than stop humanity’s search for a meaningful existence. The avalanche of mental illness continues, and even if every doctor was prepared to look deeper, or had time to look deeper into the causes of it, we would still have the mounting task of somehow protecting the public. No, don’t shout at me! I know you’re going to say it’s time we stopped protecting the bloody public and let them experience, the hard way if necessary, that they are personally involved in the problem. It is their world that produces the conditions for madness. It is they who go mad in it. It is up to them etc. etc. But for every one who is open hearted and ready to learn and take on relationships with people who cannot always stay sane, there are ten who are callous and indifferent out of self protection and the desire for a quiet life. To put it a bit more charitably, there are ten who are quite unequipped, whose mature characteristics as healers and teachers, which we all potentially are, if only as parents, have simply not developed far enough to take on such a thing with another adult person whether sibling or wife or husband, or elderly parent. The long-term education of people in compassion and personal responsibility for each other simply doesn’t keep pace with the mounting pressure of demand for it. To be quite brutal, if you go off your rocker again, who’s going to look after you? You are unmarried, your parents are too old to take you on, and wouldn’t anyway.” “I’m not going off my rocker again, as you put it. You yourself have ensured that, by opening up, for yourself as well as for me, quite new vistas in the doctor-patient relationship.” “I’m not as sure about the long term outcome of that as you seem to be,” said Fraser, “Obviously the most frightening potential casualty in this whole thing is the doctor himself as healer. The more treatments science makes available to him, the more he has to hide behind when faced with his ignorance of the real nature of the human being who confronts him as a patient. In the end he is no different from the husband who wants his mad wife carted off to the loony bin. He knows no more about how to help her face her problems than the husband. He can’t even form an adequate concept of what, for her, that problem is. At least ECT stops her carving up the furniture, even if he has to send her home permanently incapable of rising above the vegetable level in her relationships. As for the husband, he has a straight choice between a loony and a moron. At least the latter doesn’t leave him too scared and shattered to do his job and earn the family’s bread and butter.” “You’re almost talking as if the struggle between psychotherapy and physical treatment is implicitly over,” I objected, “as if the drug boys had had the last word.” “We don’t really know what mental illness is,” said Fraser. “We don’t really know whether a particular patient is going to deteriorate or have a remission, except statistically. Once the process starts we can stop it going totally beyond control with our physical treatments, but only at the cost of a burnt-out shell of a human being whom there is no means of re-equipping with the basic facilities for normal life. Anything we can call creatively human has retreated so far into the background as to be quite inaccessible to ordinary communication. It is because of this that it is so easy to concede to the hard-headed behaviourists what you call the last word. They believe the human being to be a machine, which, especially when it breaks down, you can either treat as a machine as far as you understand how it works, or abandon. For them there is no alternative.” “But for you there is an alternative,” I insisted. “You embody it in your whole attitude.” “That may be so,” said Fraser, “in fact it is so. But if psychotherapy and particularly psychoanalysis as practised hitherto, were really the only answer to them, they would inevitably capture the whole field before long. And my attitude as you call it is not in itself more than a jumping- off point for a new


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approach. Many, many doctors have such an attitude. But so long as they cannot fully conceptualise such an attitude and forge it into a therapeutic instrument which demonstrates by its clinical successes the reality of the spiritual nature of the human being upon which it rests, then they, I in fact, am tilting at windmills. In the last resort we will be treated by the rest of the profession as mere talkers, fit only to treat the minor neuroses.” I knew by now it was no use holding off any longer, even if it meant losing him as a doctor. I was convinced I didn’t need him any longer in that capacity. But I also knew that unless he could achieve a change of relationship with me, I would be unable to help him to take his own next step. “One thing, however, you can quite certainly know,” I said. “You may not be able to prove it, but you can experience it quite directly when as a result of your insisting on keeping faith with the essential humanity of a patient, and that’s what you are doing now with me, you put him in a position to call your bluff. You have to be able to take the further step of putting yourself as much into his hands as he has put himself in yours. You’ve probably anticipated what I’m going to suggest,” I went on, “I wouldn’t do so if I weren’t convinced that you are already involved in the matter at a deeper level. I want you to come back with me to the Pyrenées. There are people there I want you to meet. I think it very possible, even likely, that this is part of your answer to the problem of convincing yourself and possibly other people that the breakthrough for non-physical psychotherapy will transcend mere talk. Certainly you will be able to take your own experience of me as a patient to a further point. Possibly you will find a new and more satisfactory meaning for the term ex-patient.” This made him laugh, but before he could object I went on. “But that is only part of it. Until now you have only seen my journey as the vehicle for some hallucinatory symptoms of a condition in me you wish to cure. You suspect it maybe more than that. I want you to risk putting this to the test. Now I know mental patients are always out to persuade their doctors to do this. Part of the doctor’s task is to find grounds for an objective position in reality from which to resist the process. Most of them fail to do so without crass materialism, which is supported by most of the science of the day, which by and large they are happy to go along with. Even if like you they are not happy with it, it can become a relatively firm point from which to confront the patient. But you are in a different position. You are already half convinced that what I went through had an objective content, that it only slipped over into hallucination to the extent that my organism failed to contain it adequately. This very openness on your part enabled me to come through it, think it through, make it bearable to myself in the context of ordinary life. Now we need the other half of the story; for you to put yourself in a position to judge for yourself what part or the content of my experience can be objective for you. Implied in this is the question of how far you can confront the abyss faced by any of your patients without losing the ground on which you stand as doctor.” “How far I can confront the abyss, full-stop,” said Fraser. “There is only one abyss. Potentially it faces us all. Most mental illness consists in facing it unprepared.” He laughed. “You know I can visualise the exact expression on the faces of my colleagues if they were standing here waiting to see how I would answer you. Being conned by the plausibility of a patient’s hallucinations is the main occupational hazard of psychologists.” “I know. I’ve just been reading William Sargent’s story about a false pregnancy.” “Yes there are dozens of such stories. One can see their point. The depressing thing is that for a large number of those who are most conspicuously successful in avoiding such an involvement the question of the actual content of the hallucination is never raised at all. For them the content is quite immaterial. It is the fact that the hallucination occurs and is a diagnostic pointer to a physical condition which is physically curable which alone interests them.” “We come to the crucial question, don’t we,” I said. “How would you yourself answer the question, what is an hallucination? I’m beginning to emerge from mine gradually during the last six weeks. But I want to see whether you would account for them in the same way as I do.” Fraser looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know if you can understand why that sort of question worries me as much as it does,” he said. “For one thing you’re not a Scot, and being a Scotsman has a good deal to do with it. You credit me


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with a degree of liberality and openness, which you haven’t found in other doctors, and that flatters me on the one hand. But it also disconcerts me, because professional soundness, and a conscientious discipline in thinking mean a great deal to me. They are the ground of a great deal of my self-respect. I value them in my colleagues, and I have grave doubts whether a single one of those I owe most to in my work could continue to treat me as one of themselves if I said openly what I am more and more forced to conclude about these problems in private. No doubt you think I’m making a lot of fuss about this, but it’s unfortunately true that a majority of people who allow themselves to speculate about entirely new ways of looking at reality do so at the expense of all honesty and accuracy of thinking. It needs a much more trained mind to avoid useless fantasy in this sort of field than if you stick to well worn paths. But having said all that…” He looked up at me and grinned rather sheepishly. “Yes, I could say having said all that,” I broke in, “having paid your tribute to your orthodox self, you’re now prepared to let your back hair down. Don’t think I fail to appreciate what a struggle this is for you. On the other hand, colleagues notwithstanding, you can hardly believe that the entire fruits of having acquired a professionally trained mind will fall uselessly away the minute you open it to unfamiliar facts. If my intentions towards you, unknown to myself, are no more than a more subtle variant of the esoteric confidence trick, you above all are in the best position to frustrate them. In any case the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you were a soft touch in the sense we have been talking about, you and I would now both be wallowing in the hallucinatory world which overtook me six months ago.” “Are you sure we are not doing just that?” “Yes, absolutely sure. All the more so because I am more and more convinced that I know how hallucinations arise. They represent a breakdown of the brain’s efforts to form comprehensible pictures of new kinds of perfectly valid reality attempting to break through into consciousness. Moreover they maintain to a great extent, as some dreams do, a kind of parallelism with the realities they have replaced. In other words, the right sort of attempt to analyse hallucinations by their actual content would not be wasted. It is a matter of learning to do this for the patient at the same time as dealing with the purely physical breakdown which the drug therapists attempt. But I’m jumping the gun a bit. I want to know first what was in your mind before you started on your harangue about the value of orthodoxy.” “You know, I don’t know why I put up with you at all,” said Fraser. “I don’t needle you about being a poor bloody loony.” “You don’t have to,” I said. “Thanks to you I’m perfectly sane for the time being. But how far are you with me? What do you think hallucinations are?” He looked at me with a quite new directness. I found myself relaxing deeply, and opening to a new confidence that we were going to arrive together at a deeper understanding. “The question is unanswerable,” he began. “We have to start with a much more fundamental question, one which is begged by every attempt, on the part of psychologists or anyone else, to take their stand on a general notion of normality as ground for curing hallucinations. Hardly anyone faced with this goes in practice beyond the crudest form of naïve realism. Physicists can talk till they’re black in the face about the illusory character of the sense-perceptible world. No amount of theoretical belief that tables and chairs consist of nothing but the balance of fields of force and whirling electrons will stop ordinary people, including psychologists, falling straight back on the most blatantly pragmatic common sense.” “Gratefully collapsing into chairs that don’t exist.” “Yes, precisely. Upon arses that don’t exist either. But you know, when eastern religions talk about Maya, the great illusion presented to the consciousness of man by the world of the senses, they have something very different in mind from our typical Western double-think. In theory, we say, we “know” that there are no tables and chairs, only empty space filled with battling forces. But in practice, faced with any sort of departure in somebody else’s mind from the usual appearance of reality, we behave as if Maya was a sort of shameful secret not to be spoken of in front of the patient. It seems to me that once we stop erecting an artificial barrier between hallucinations on the one hand and ordinary experience on the other, we can take the first step towards accepting the hallucinated patient as a special instance of something we are all perfectly familiar with in our own ordinary experience.” “In other words we are all mad.”


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“No, we are quite categorically not all mad. We are sane, and there is something else which is madness. But this something else is not different in kind; it is only different in degree. There is no invisible barrier across which someone steps, and hey presto they are mad. There is no justification whatever for the savage primitive fear-reaction which pushes the lunatic through the porthole of our sympathies into the outer space of a non-human world. There is simply a point at which the condition from which people are suffering takes an acute turn; the system breaks down under it; intervention becomes necessary.” “But difference in degree of what? What is the condition? You’re saying that the condition we are normally in only has to be modified a bit, and there we are, starkers. What condition, for heaven’s sake?” “Well I don’t think we’ve named it. I don’t think we’ve given it a clinical identity. But personally I’m quite sure it has a clinical identity. It’s a universal morbid mental condition, so much the common lot of mankind that we don’t recognise it as an illness, rather like yaws in an African village. The only thing is it is considerably more severe than yaws. As time goes on it breaks down into a terminal condition more readily, and I think the conclusions as to why this should be are inescapable.” “You are saying that we are all mentally ill, but not mad.” “Well, this is of course also partly a matter of defining your terms, but yes, I stand by that. To be quite precise I am certain that the situation we refer to loosely as the average mental condition of our day, and with very little idea that it has come to be like this over a period, probably over several centuries and maybe much longer than that, is a progressive degeneration from something considerably more robust, more viable, even if less conscious and more dreamlike as Owen Barfield describes in “Saving the Appearances”. I’m quite sure that this average mental condition has been for a very long time now a slow, debilitating, morbid condition of mind, upon which reality impinges in a very largely illusory way, so that our range of observations has become completely one-sided. Mind you, there are gains from this one-sidedness, astonishing gains in terms of one-pointedness of sense perception, and the thoughts and deeds such accurate perception makes possible. The whole of scientific technology is built upon these gains. But this must not conceal from us that the whole character of so-called normal twentieth-century sense perception and sense-bound intellect is obsessional, in the strictest clinical sense. If the nature of reality were static, non-directional in time, if no underlying processes of evolution were at work, this would escape notice. But events show that this is far from being the case. As a biological adaptation to reality the mentality of twentieth century materialism is a blind alley, a false cast off the main stream of evolution. Meanwhile real changes take place in realms only accessible at an unconscious or only partly conscious level, and these changes have begun to call the bluff of this obsessional materialistic consciousness. At first it was only a trickle, but it is rapidly approaching the dimensions of an avalanche as more and more people experience unprecedented realities, for which sense-bound intellectual consciousness provides them with no clue, either in imagery or in semantics, no language either of pictorial or of abstract comprehension and expression. Reality blasts open our cramped, debilitated mental framework and reduces our nexus of images and thoughts to chaos. With our thoughts clear out of control all secure sense of meaningfulness is lost, and an abyss opens beneath us into which our waning sense of personal identity threatens to fall in complete disarray.” “You put it pretty strongly,” I said, sweating somewhat. “It strikes very near home. Perhaps you are risking a glance at how much of this sort of thing I’m now ready to take. As you realise, all this is very familiar ground to me. I think I’m always a good deal nearer the brink of slipping over from the chronic into the acute phase of what you describe than probably most people are. You know, this being near the brink has a curious effect which is almost the reverse of what most people think it is. Of course I was a very neurotic child, whatever that is supposed to mean, and you know how people are always telling nervy kids they’ve got too much imagination. One almost comes to believe it at times. But in fact the reverse is the case. The fact is that the starkness of reality, both in its glorious and its terrifying aspects, is so imminent, exalting and inescapable, that one daren’t tell oneself stories about it for fear of missing something. All this guff about so-called normal common-sense people being unimaginative is so patently ridiculous I can’t imagine how it comes to be so universally believed. Dull they may be, but that is the dullness to reality, impenetrability to the impact of the real world.” “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” says Eliot.


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“But unimaginative? The whole point, which I’ve realised from childhood on, is that their whole existence is almost entirely imaginary. One can only understand them at all if one has sufficient dramatic sense to recognise, not just that they tell themselves stories the whole time to make up for their complete insulation from reality, but to recognise with each person what particular story is being told to him or herself. Don’t you remember that when you were young? There were the ones who told themselves the football story, the pop-star story, the lost princess story, the rastafarian story, the working class solidarity story, the latest car story. Then as they grew up the career story, the money story, the patriotic story, the religious story. The list of course is endless, but the point is the immense fertility of imagination expended on making total immunity to reality bearable. The thing about reality is that it is stark. It may be glorious or not, but it leaves no room for the imagination in the usual sense. But to realise this as a young person is very isolating. One’s reactions are not very standard, and it is no wonder that one is nervous, and tends to be called neurotic. Then, of course, one becomes neurotic and far too interested in oneself and one’s own world and its concerns. But of course there is another aspect, because naturally it is not that the neurotic is entirely lacking in imagination. It is just that he can’t find the story that corresponds to reality. Once having got used to the astonishment that most people are so entirely deceived about what is supposed to be happening in life, and that they appeared to have got hold of a script for a play that I wasn’t in at all. The question of what the real story was, became the all absorbing one. There must, I thought, be certain key stories. I became obsessed with the thought of lost legends, because all those I did read were in one way or another unsatisfying, provokingly crude and stilted, while at the same time hinting at a strength, a superhuman scale, which the words were simply inadequate to contain. One had a feeling all the time that there was an enormous amount missing from the script, hardly anything left really.” “Are you saying simply that modern society lacks a contemporary myth?” “I think that is probably a very good way to put it, provided we realise that we’re long past the time when one story will serve. I think that what we have succeeded in doing is to cut off from ourselves almost completely the essential mythological process at the same time as we have insulated ourselves from reality, the reality for which genuine myth is the imaginative counterpart. And just as we’ve replaced reality by the endless stories people tell themselves about life, so we’ve replaced the real story, the real mythological process, by what we call literature. Just think of the enormous amount of writing there is today. Billions upon billions of words flood out across human consciousness day in day out in hundreds of languages. There’s so much literature that people have lost all bump-of-locality in the literary cosmos, no sense of any one thing having any more depth or significance or contemporary validity than another. As a result the most fundamental human expressions and relationships are neutralised in peoples’ minds as fiction, as part of a literary cult, a matter of taste or personal preference. Christianity is an excellent example. I personally believe that the Christ mystery is the apotheosis of the whole mythological process for mankind. It might even be possible to dispense with all other mythology if that were to be fully grasped; although that is a contradiction, because the full expression of the Christ story would have to contain all other myths to express its range. What, however, do we experience in practice in our society? Christianity is so diluted by now by humanists and plagiarisers of all sorts, for whom it is now no more than a rather special, and particularly beloved, literary conceit, a mighty pretty take which enshrines by analogy all their own much more modern and practical moral and even moralistic notions, that it has been entirely insulated from those for whom it might well become something much more important. Are you beginning to see why it is of such vital importance to me to convey to you the paramount significance this mythological quest has for me? Reality blasts materialism into meaninglessness, so people make up stories. Then literature demeans the story process till it is all subjective fancy. Then I go through the nightmare of the last months and find I have lost touch with the clue to reality all that was beginning to give me.” We sat in silence for a while. “The trouble is,” I went on, “that what I used to tell you a month or two ago is still true to a great extent, in some ways more so than ever. I really do not exactly remember what it was I experienced; and whenever I start to remember, it all seems much less significant. Just now, for instance, I thought I


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recognised you standing in the window as someone I expected to meet as part of the situation in France. Then when you turned round this was momentarily confirmed. But I lost it as once in your present identity, and then became much less sure. The time sequence became confused, and I am now more inclined to think that already in France I had some idea of meeting someone in England and bringing him back.” He was sitting very still now and I realised that he was expecting me to come out with a more significant revelation. This had the effect of making me more unsure than ever. “I wish I could convey to you the feeling quality of my realisation that the waxing and waning of what we call ‘significance’ in events, usually such an elusive thing, a subtle matter of moods and atmospheres, which will not be forced, and is killed by accurate definition or exact recollection, that this ebb and flow of what we recognise as meaningful can begin to reveal itself as the approach or withdrawal of a living being.” “You mean that the feeling of significance is itself an organ of sensibility for some other sentient being? You mean another person? After death, for instance?” “No nothing so definable. I know we normally think of this in connection with people or even animals or plants. We can also begin to get a feeling for it in any sort of dramatic incantation, the calling up of spirits, the poet evoking his muse, the performance of music building up a transcendent presence of the actual being of music. But this being I am talking about is subtler. Does it make any sense to you if I describe it as a living being composed of events? It reveals itself through an increased sensitivity to rhythms and sequences, an exaggerated proneness to coincidence, to small telepathic communications, to minor prophecies, to impulsive decisions tied up with heightened expectancy, to increased willingness to see significance over and above the obvious connections. Now I know that all this is also the common coin of every kind of self-delusion, of the kind that leads to hallucinations and actual damage to the instruments of perception and thinking. But it is entirely a different matter if the living being I am speaking of is not only gradually and subtly perceived, but at the same time one finds it bringing with it a growing concept of itself. One finds oneself strongly thinking the reality of these events, identifying them as having really happened with far more force than if in the ordinary sense one remembered them”. “Suppose one thinks the wrong concept?” “Well that’s just it. Now do you know what a hallucination is?” He looked awestruck. “Well, I suppose I do. It is when one is overwhelmed by a perception, and then defeated by the effort to form an adequate concept of it. As when a mighty conscious entity is perceived as a flying saucer?” “Yes, or as a large impressive human being with wings, which is just as irrelevant.” “Yes but look here” said Fraser. My heart sank. I knew the sort of way the discussion was now likely to develop, and how far it would take us from the immediacy of the experience I was trying to convey to him. But he was launched on an intellectual analysis. “Answer this one,” he said. “How in effect does one distinguish between perceiving significance in events and reading significance into them? Between willed thinking and wishful thinking?” I stared at him. “Another equally pertinent question,” persisted Fraser. “Are you talking about arranging events, or selecting significant events from a random sequence, or reading the meaning in an unselected random sequence of events?” “Yes”. “What do you mean, ‘Yes’?” “Yes. All of them. Look, Dr Fraser, all those questions are extremely interesting and worth while. They are even essential as means of cross-checking and avoiding self-deception. But they have nothing whatever to do with the basic issue of how one personally copes with the impact of a growing perceptual field. Faced with that one matures, one acquires a certain intuitive taste for the real, what one could describe as a healthy sense of truth. And if there is time and opportunity one exercises analytic mental disciplines as we have been doing. But for the sanity of the process they are at best marginal. At worst they only add to one’s confusion. What is far more to the point is sharing them with you and letting you use them as raw material for developing your understanding, which I can then share. If we can go on working together in that way, I would find it invaluable.”


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He was staring at me rather ruefully as if I had deprived him of an opportunity to come further in his own understanding. The truth was that I had become increasingly restless during the last half-hour. The being composed of events was exerting an increasing pressure, and I felt it was time to make a move. He looked at his watch and exclaimed. “Lord, is it really that time? I’m afraid we’ll have to break it up. I’ve got a patient. She’s probably waiting already.” I felt an unaccountable pressure and anxiety in the solar plexus region. I got up and began to try and thank him for his support. “We got a long way today,” I said, “I’m very grateful, and I really would like to go on meeting if we may.” “By all means” he said, anxious now to get rid of me, “Give me a ring.” I pulled on my coat as he opened the door, and we stepped out into the waiting room. A slight figure, long red hair swinging, rose from a chair and walked towards us, then stopped as she looked from Fraser to me. It was the girl herself, the incredible girl of the train journey who brought me home.

--- oOo --- You were ready to die at the turn of the year. You brought the three together at the holy rendezvous, Where on earth the Virgin holds the Corn-dolly, Promising that the triple seed will be fertile: Where in heaven the scales gently swing The giant pendulum, sensing to a hair’s breadth The poise of spirit-awareness in the soul. From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’


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CHAPTER FOUR FRASER I had seriously intended to keep an accurate and detailed medical report on the young man whose writings appear in the foregoing paragraphs of this book from the moment when I agreed after a struggle to return with him to the scene of his earlier adventures. This attempt was foredoomed, as it deserved to be. There would not normally have been any reason to continue it once he had been discharged from hospital, except in the form of the brief progress notes I usually make on the occasions when a former patient visits me for a check up. Raymond’s subsequent visits were not really of this nature. They were more or less social, or exploratory into our common interests, and I hadn’t been recording them. No, I had to face up to the fact that the intention to start them again was partly in self-justification. I still had a bad conscience about the thing. On a number of occasions I came near to abandoning the record, but I was glad later I hadn’t. I was able to write now with less constraint, and the expensive black loose-leaf binder challenged me every evening to record or reflect on the affair as it evolved. Anyone who has had much to do with neurotic personalities is familiar with the extraordinary power a certain neurotic type has to fascinate the rest of humanity. A paediatrician, one of my early mentors, pointed out to his pupils that one should try to observe quite objectively the astonishing capacity of the neurotic to waste other peoples’ time. As for wasting their own time, in the strictest sense they have no time of their own to waste. For the extreme introvert the outer world, which is the stable reference point for most of humanity in our largely extroverted society, has reality only as an extension of his own concerns. His home, his family, his party, his country, exist, for him to a degree incomprehensible to his fellows. But since other peoples’ affairs are relatively shadowy to him he feels no concern for any of the punctualities and co-ordinations that matter to them. As for his own, there is endless time for those. If for any reason you are of interest to him, therefore, watch out, for he will engage you in a fascinating involvement for indefinite periods; fascinating to him, that is. If it also happens to fascinate you, you are lost. You too can become an extension of his world, in your own experience as well as his. There are of course endless variations on the neurotic theme. Try turning all the he’s in the above paragraph to she’s for example. Read T S Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’. I had been speculating on this theme at about the time Raymond’s case first came to my attention. I was particularly interested in the way Rudolf Steiner, with the use he makes of the three soul faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing, and the notion of personalities being ‘loosely or heavily incarnated’, is able to extend the perhaps only very generally useful categories of introversion and extraversion proposed by C G Jung into a more usable diagnostic tool. If it is true that we see patients at times who may be actually ‘out of their body’ in respect of their thinking for example, while operating normally, or perhaps too deeply physically in their other, less conscious soul functions, we have a point of reference of great usefulness in observing their behaviour. It was against this background of thoughts, therefore, that I found myself considering the young man Raymond Felcourt when I confronted him one August evening at the hospital in Hertfordshire where I was a consultant at the time. It was my custom to rely on the registrar’s opinion that a new case had features which would be of a special interest to me. I was thus able to see the patient without prior discussion, and without reading the background notes. On this occasion I was sitting at the desk making up some notes on a previous case, when someone came in unannounced. He drew in his breath sharply as I looked up. There was an instant of mutual recognition, followed by mutual embarrassment as we failed to identify its cause. He stood there with


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his bright dark eyes focussed in painful concentration and doubt upon me, and began to pour out a long incoherent ramble of apology and explanation and pleading which was pitiful to listen to. Only very gradually did the theme begin to register. He had escaped from the Inquisition, no less, and it was essential that he draw together certain people He had come on his own, local conditions making it impractical to secure authorisation from his superiors, the Cathar brotherhood in Lombrives. The end was very near, but a seed must be sown, certain people must be concealed and certain training continued. It was essential I join him and accompany him at once before someone he called the Knight arrived. All this was clear, but inextricably mingled with much else about trains and hitch-hiking, and long periods of silence with his eyes closed and lips moving, apparently in prayer. Sometimes he would stare at me in complete perplexity and say things like, “They said you were the doctor?” and “Who are you?” Once he said, “How do you manage to conceal your identity here?” The nurse came bustling in, upbraiding him for not waiting for her, but I brushed aside her apologies, asking her to lead us to a guestroom. She played along with me. He seemed to be contented to accept our hospitality and agreed to stay with us for a few days while we sorted out his problem. But the sense of urgency soon returned. He became violent, and was put under heavy sedation for forty-eight hours. I was able to photograph him and study his features at leisure. He had a long narrow face and pointed chin, with deep grooves at the side of his mouth, though he appeared to be only in his late twenties. His hair was black, fine, springy and straight, lying close to his skull like the hair of an old-fashioned Chinese doll. He reminded me of a Shakespearean Prince, lying in state after a battle. During this time I studied his notes, compiled by the registrar with the tearful help of the elderly parents, who had been summoned to identify him three days earlier. No previous history of mental disorder, quiet, studious lad, frugal habits, working class background, secondary school, Oxford scholarship, took law, third-class degree, abandoned it for accountancy, series of jobs where he did well but left unaccountably and went off on protracted tours of the continent, Greece, Italy, Egypt, and now this latest one to the Pyrenées. Usually returned to his parents’ home and settled down apparently contented, to a new accountancy job. Few friends, no girls that his parents knew of. I was not able to see him again for a day or two after he came round. I found him morose and uncommunicative at first. The nurse said he had wept uncontrollably at intervals and had said very little. During the following week he talked a great deal, but it was mainly self-derogatory stuff about himself as a misfit, a fish out of water, born out of his time. He seemed to have no recollection of our pre-sedation meetings, and I did not refer to it when he showed later signs of talking about his journey. His quick spontaneous recovery was a personal relief to me. He appeared to have forgotten our original meeting. I certainly had not. It had unsettled me more than any case in my memory. I felt involved and committed beyond the call of professional obligation. His account of the way in which our relationship developed is more restrained than I could have expected from his early manner. I have to admit, though, that he is kinder to me and to himself than I would have been. He makes us both more perceptive and more tolerant of each other than we were. If I were as suggestible as he makes me appear I would hardly be where I am as a doctor. If he had been as eloquent and restrained in his arguments as he became in that last recorded conversation, I would not be writing of him as a neurotic. In short, I am more of the conventional psychologist than he makes me out to be, and the subsequent growth of my respect and regard for him was slow. At this late stage, respect and regard have become tinged with a certain awe. He has taught me to ask, not only of him, but of others I have met through him, who is this man after all? What hind of beings are these with whom we have become involved? Indeed, what kind of beings are he and I, to have become involved with them? Even to venture into much more speculative and often fruitless questions about the nature of man himself. I am painfully conscious that I am not the right kind of person to embark on the sort of tale it is now necessary to tell. There is too much of the ponderous professional Scotsman about me, out of key with the limpid, liberal mood of the day. It is an old trick of fiction writers to use characters like myself as a foil for volatile, liberal, speculative minds. We ourselves or caricatures of us, creak our way painfully through Victorian fiction, the eternal Dr. Watsons of life, our mouths hanging open as we applaud the cut and thrust of the brilliant and heroic intellects around us, penetrating the unknown. In real life the contrasts of personality are less sharply drawn. The sheer ineffectualness and irrelevance that dogs the


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most lively of human activities in real life never seems to worry the characters of fiction. In real life it happens all the time. Much of the journey Raymond imposed on me following the events he has described was quite irrelevant and dull. If this has the effect of heightening the dramatic effect of the events, which broke through into this dullness from time to time, it is due to no literary artifice that it does so. High adventure and spiritual striving are extremely elusive. Unless they are consciously recreated by an active inner life almost from moment to moment, they rapidly deteriorate into boredom or farce. I am not saying there are not folk to whom meaningful things happen all the time. But even these people seem to invoke adventure by a deliberately cultivated mood of expectancy. It is certainly not just a matter of luck.

*** After the encounter in my waiting room with Esther (that’s Esther Corstorphine, my young cousin), the three of us took to meeting several times a week in my Highgate flat. Raymond was now in lodgings in Fulham, and it was accepted by his parents that he was more or less under my eye. In fact he was twenty-eight, but it was convenient to accept the fiction that I was acting for them in this, rather than oblige them to regard him still as a mental patient. This fortuitous meeting with Esther, who was studying for probation work, and who was also understood by her Edinburgh parents to be in good hands with me, their psychologist cousin Alan, had been a considerable shock to Raymond. He was torn between a desperate conviction that we had all three been involved together in previous lives, and an even more disturbing suspicion that I had somehow managed to rig the meeting. It took some time to persuade him that my use of the word coincidence did not imply a cynical disregard for the deeper levels of cause and effect in human involvement. Raymond was now looking for another job, but his heart was not in it. I paid something more than lip service to persuading him to put down some roots as a balance for his restless search for higher meanings and tasks. But I suppose I realised that he would not be satisfied till he had played out the drama in which he was involved. Moreover, my own common sense and detachment was far from immune to his efforts to involve me. For him the appearance of Esther on the scene after a gap of several weeks, during which he had gradually managed to sort out which elements belonged to his adventure, and which had simply accrued to it during the period of hallucination, threw everything once more into confusion. It was made no easier by the fact that Esther was clearly very much in love with him. She had also been badly frightened when the budding relationship had apparently ended for good at Dover with her companion being carted away in an ambulance. Her story was that she had been to stay for a proposed three months with a former college friend in Toulouse. They were to hitchhike back at the end of September, when Esther would resume her probation studies, and friend Helene would start an au pair exchange for a year. Helene ‘knew all about’ the Albigensian Cathars, and she wanted to take Esther to see the Grotte de Lombrives, and the ‘spoulgas’ and ‘gleisas’, the fortified caves and shrines where traditionally the Cathar initiations took place. They took the train to Foix, then walked up the Ariège valley with tents and packs on their backs. Helène talked most of the way. The mountain walls grew higher and higher and the Ariège thundered in its defile. They camped by the river at Tarascon, and while they walked by the stream after dark Helène told Esther in long rambling snatches how the water and the stone had been the bearers of a strange kind of consciousness right through from ancient Mithraic times; and then how in 1279, by a series of geological changes, the rock formation had weakened, and a great lake high up the valley had suddenly emptied itself and thundered down the defile, carrying other minor lakes with it, including underground ones. The whole network of caverns inside the mountains, which were later to be the theatre where the last tragic eighty years of the Cathar drama were played out, was suddenly revealed and made accessible to habitation. This was the scenario against whose fascinating and terrifying backdrop the three young people had found themselves caught up in a series of incidents and experiences, which had for a time blurred the sharp outline, which normally separates reality from


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fantasy. What had happened to Helène was for the time being obscure and worrying. Letters written by Esther to Toulouse had received no reply, and in one case had been returned. I used to brood in much confusion over our long evenings in my Highgate apartment, going over and over again the events and imaginations which filled their minds, now made doubly confusing by the fact that there was no consistent agreement between them as to how much time they had actually spent together in the Pyrenées. There were times when I seriously thought that the first actual physical meeting between them had been on the train journey home. But there was so much shared memory between them about incidents in the mountains, so circumstantial as to preclude either collusion or telepathy, or some sort of ‘physical’ regression into Cathar Times, which in any case my whole rational nature rebelled against taking seriously. I was obliged to accept that at least for a time, even if perhaps rather intermittently, they had been physically together. About Helène I was much less sure. I swung helplessly between the view that Esther had simply constructed her to account for her own experiences, and the equally untenable opposite position that Helène was a powerful and unscrupulous hypnotist, who had somehow included them both in her own fantasy world, and subsequently ditched them in the mountains to find their own way back. Neither vessel held water. The first view meant that Esther was hallucinating, for which there was no clear evidence; and the second was easily proved or disproved by a check on their times at college together and later. I felt there was nothing to do at this stage except to help in the process of clarifying matters between Esther and Raymond. In representing Esther to Raymond in the first place as a patient whom I was waiting to see I had in all innocence compounded his confusion. This took some time to resolve. In fact she was far from being in need of psychological help, though her parents took the opposite view, which explains how I had allowed myself to be landed with her in a somewhat false relationship. There had been no particular difficulty in resolving this, since she was a very ‘together’ and challenging young person, given to entangling me in wide-ranging discussions about reincarnation and psychism generally, and altogether bent on establishing me in her mind as representing an old-fashioned, if loveable, fuddy-duddy view of life. I happily played along with this, occasionally hitting back, I think to good effect, since she evidently thought it worth while coming back for more. Altogether we enjoyed each other’s company. However, on her return from France, six weeks earlier than expected, and without Helène, things had clearly changed. Not expecting her till the end of the month I hadn’t phoned. When I did she was evasive, and it was another fortnight before, clearly very worried, she phoned for an appointment on the very evening Raymond had arranged to show me his bits of writing in the afternoon. The meeting in the waiting room was one of those often referred to in the jargon of the day as ‘one of those moments’. Dramatic and fictional convention usually takes the opportunity of leaving such occasions to the reader’s imagination. The cinema can sometimes rise to near genius in visual imagery in its attempt to relieve the descriptive word of a torturing burden. But only the higher classical art forms in poetry, opera or symphony are usually adequate to relieve or ‘earth’ the heart forces aroused at such times of an otherwise intolerable load of energy. It is the martyrdom of the psychologist that no such let-out is permitted him. For him it is a question of ‘conceptualise or bust’. Nine times out of ten this means bathos. But the attempt must be made. I think the first thing one becomes aware of is that everybody’s thought processes have accelerated to an intolerable intensity. A timeless stillness fills the space as one stands there. It then quickly becomes a question of whose fuses will blow first, and since this possibility threatens the others, everyone either heads instinctively for cover and ‘sauve qui peut’ or a transcendent level of mutual support is achieved with great rapidity, which manifests in a unique opportunity for intense love or hate. At the same time there is a tremendous testing of genuineness and maturity all round and it becomes apparent that this opportunity for spiritual growth cannot possibly be seized by one at the expense of another without grave moral danger. Exploitation of such a moment can easily slip over into a real black magic. Nevertheless in the process of shriving or stripping of pretence that everyone goes through at such moments, there is also a polarisation. On the one hand those whose presence of mind survives the moment pretty well intact seem to take the lead in moving the group on to the next resolution in the


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relationship. Others, however, either through proneness to panic or because they feel they have more to lose, take longer to pull themselves together. So a sort of pecking order develops in moral initiative. Interestingly, it is not by any means always the one with least to lose in terms of hang-ups and general psychic rubbish who recovers first. Such people may well be more cautious and reluctant to commit themselves emotionally to the moment. The sheer cathartic impact, purging and annealing the feelings, sometimes places an unlikely candidate in the position of being the first to focalise an attitude to which the others can respond as a starting point for communication. On this occasion it was Raymond who proved himself most resilient and who was able not only to move forward in a loving way himself, but also to include all three of us in a pattern of warmth through which a current of healing and relief could flow. This was clearly the right thing for Esther. She was never very self-absorbed, and felt as she later confessed much the stronger partner in the relationship. But she felt powerless even to make contact with him while his amnesia, as she supposed, persisted. Now at last she was able to release her anxiety in tears. So for a few minutes it was tears all round, while Raymond convinced himself she was real, and confessed that this doubt was the main block in daring to remember much else. Meanwhile Esther waxed eloquent about her insights into different levels of reality, and how she was managing to gain some facility in moving from one stratum to another while still keeping her feet sufficiently on the ground to attend her classes and cook her meals. It was only I, touched as I was by her confidence and hold over the situation, who was unable to quell a considerable anxiety that my patient was about to revert in full force to his hallucinating state. Esther’s view of life would then doubtless provide that most satisfying of all confirmations, a rationalised and convincing reflection from outside the hallucination, which I as doctor was most concerned to disperse. While they cuddled and crooned I went through what I suppose was the most gruelling crisis I had yet faced in my medical life, in which all my professional training was locked in a life and death struggle with intuitions which grew moment by moment more powerful. Yet I knew at the same time that my scepticism was a priceless scalpel edge, without whose support and power the insidious encroachment of absolute illusion into these intuitions would be an incurable cancer. I began to see another dimension in all this which in the end more than anything else swayed me into going along with them, and giving a degree of provisional credence to their headlong commitment to the objectivity of what for me were still highly speculative levels of reality. This was the growing realisation that it is only the demarcation of insanity that is quantitative and analytic. The intuitions that lead us on a beeline to our commitment to the depths of sanity in a patient are always qualitative and synthetic, and it is this commitment which characterises the mature physician. Everything else is mere mechanical tinkering, notwithstanding my less than courageous claim to Raymond that doctors are no more than repairmen. So they are, but even repairmen are useless without an increasingly sure-footed concept of what constitutes a whole human being. My commitment as physician in the end resonated with their commitment to the objectivity of their trans-physical world. Once this bridgehead was gained by all three of us, their confidence in my sceptical contribution allowed the latter to take its proper place in the welter of memories, stories, and events which now, evening by evening for several more months, poured into the listening space of my study and onto tape, till we achieved a synthetic goal, a determination to carry through a full investigation and research, into what had actually happened to them physically, and now particularly to Helène. But not only that. We were resolved to plunge existentially into the true nature of those other events, to recapture which we were now engaged evening after evening in a gruelling battle of memory, an assault on amnesia, confusion, fear, and semantics, which rocked the consciousness of all of us to its foundations. We were long past the point of fighting for anyone’s sanity. The very concepts of sanity and insanity were dissolved in our all-absorbing struggle to achieve mastery in a territory where freedom of movement between levels of reality, in which words and ideas had different meanings according to what level we were on, became a battle for the life and death of meaning itself.


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In no way was it possible to arrive at a consistent story upon which we could all agree and write down in the form of a diary of events. The whole process was a tantalising jigsaw of inner and outer experiences, in which certain sequences began to stand out in startling clarity, while others remained obstinately obscure and timeless, having more of the character of dreams than outer events. Passages in Raymond’s account which gave the most promise of making the sort of sense we would need when, or if, we managed ultimately to return to the scene of action, would infuriatingly reappear in Esther’s story, but in a different time sequence. Other themes, which appeared at first to be purely sequential, would irritatingly peter out, but similar sequences would appear to be superimposed on them, and on one another, in such a way as to draw attention to a single momentary event with blinding intensity, so that what appeared at first to be purposive and directional turned out to be mainly interesting for its intense momentary significance. This all had the effect of giving one an inkling that the rôles of time and space were somehow being interchanged. Blindingly intense events revealed as described above were traced to spatial configurations on the map, but their spatial sequence, often startlingly geometrical, would indicate an order out of key with the actual time sequence of the events, but in a much truer cause-and-effect sequence, as if once more cause-and-effect was more apparent through space than through time. Thus later events would sometimes seem to be causing earlier ones but not always; this would depend on the spatial configuration. A sense for this would again and again nudge one’s attention towards certain spots on the map where the intensity of present experience was always enhanced, as if time and space were complementary energies, tending always in the direction of transcendence, even eternity. As far as Raymond’s hallucinations were concerned I needn’t have worried. For the time being he seemed content to leave certain memories untapped. Esther was trusted to hold these on his account like a sort of psychic banker, while I was relied upon in turn to keep an eye on Esther conceptually, to see in fact that her ability to understand her memories kept pace with her ability to recall them. How far either of us were fitted to fill these rôles was a question we agreed to keep in abeyance. Raymond’s trust was itself a powerful energy, which released in Esther and myself a strong urge towards grasping the situation. For the time being a stable relationship developed between the three of us. Soon after Christmas, Raymond found himself another accountancy job, Esther went back to her lectures, and I went on seeing patients. They found a large bed-sitter not too far from my flat and moved in together. I decided a letter to Esther’s parents was called for, saying how well she was getting on, and that she had moved to Highgate. There was no point in adding to her difficulties by a fruitless attempt to get them to accept her life-style. But I used the letter to reassure them as her doctor that she was in very little need of psychological care, and that I was happily standing in for them as an older relative. She would soon be through her training and starting work. Privately I couldn’t quite see her yet being ready to visit them, but we were unlikely to get to France before the summer, and I thought perhaps she might be willing to go before then. I foresaw my “Cousin Alan” role wearing a bit thin as her new confidence grew. The fact was that there had been astonishing changes in Esther over the last few months. From being a cheerfully and amusingly aggressive and imaginative twenty-four-year old, with a penchant for cynical views about the bureaucracy and careerism in the social field she was adopting, she was developing a responsible sobriety at a rate that caused me some unease. Though still deeply interested in delinquency as a social problem, as well as the more personal side of it in the young people she was meeting through her probation placements, there was no doubt that the experience in France was in its own way just as much of an abyss in her consciousness as it was in Raymond’s. The great difference was that whereas for him it had caused a near psychotic rift in his sense of identity, there was in Esther no question of a psychic split. She was struggling with considerable grasp and a kind of righteous anger to make sense of a set of memories that violated all her logical preconception and common sense. She hadn’t the slightest intention of abandoning these memories in a facile ‘It must have been my imagination’ sort of cop-out. She not only loved Raymond, she felt she was in the fortunate position of having somehow avoided the worst depths of the experience which threatened his sense of reality, and that this gave her a unique stance from which to help him drag himself out of his amnesia and make sense of what had happened to him. For my part I felt that this new sober responsible Esther could have done with a bit of salting with the frivolous lass of a few months ago. But my attempts to introduce a bit of dry facetiousness into the


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situation fell rather flat. Esther still saw us as fighting for Raymond’s sanity. I really now had no such fears. I agreed with her that his amnesia would gradually lighten, but I had in some ways more faith in his resilience than in hers. “Let him come through it in his own way and in his own time,” I said to her one day. “You’re not going to sort out the realities of this saga on purely logical grounds. For that very reason your own titanic struggles to describe with increasing accuracy what in your experience “really happened,” are of enormous importance, for yourself as well as for him. The only danger I see is that the nearer this existential picture you draw for yourself comes to completion, the more difficult you will find it to transcend.” “Why should it need transcending if it is complete?” said Esther. “Because it only can be complete at one level of reality,” I said. “When you reach the point where there are irreducible facts that can in no way be assimilated into your complete picture, you either have to capitulate to sheer irrationality, or transcend to a level where a higher logic can be found which is capable of assimilating them. You then become aware of your self objectively as a thinking being with a cognitive instrument which is capable of growth. Prior to that you just think the thoughts, unaware of yourself as thinking them.” “You make it all too complicated,” said Esther. “Somewhere or other there is a rational explanation of everything that happened. I intend to find it. Raymond’s return to normality makes it necessary that I do”. “Yes, you’re absolutely right, there is a rational explanation, but it won’t be found by attempting to cram the facts into a logical pattern too tight and rigid for them. Ultimately there is such a thing as simplicity. But we don’t get to it by ignoring complexities or overriding them. We have to resolve them, and that means respecting their extremely complex nature. Bulldozing one’s way through to a simplistic world by means of a frustrated obstinate will solves only the problems for whose solution you are prepared to sacrifice the rest, what one might call the soldier’s way. The new problems you create join the original unassimilable facts, which are still there grinning at you.” Her eyes filled with tears. “You’re hardly being helpful are you? With one breath you insist that I must ferret away at the facts, so-called, till my picture of them is as clear as I can get it. With the next you are saying that when I have reached my own absolute limit along those lines I’ve still got only half the story. I can’t win, can I?” “On the contrary, it is only at that apparent dead-end that the first chance of “winning,” as you call it, is presented. The dead-end turns out to be a hitherto invisible starting point for an imaginative leap that starts you on a whole new cycle of understanding. You think we’ve already reached a kind of dead-end now. There have been moments when the struggle for exact recall has come near to defeating us both. I assure you from many past struggles that we haven’t reached the end of the tunnel yet. Each time we have to start again at the beginning.” “I’ve lost faith in the process,” said Esther. “What’s the use of going over and over the same ground?” “Because it never is the same ground. The next time round, each time we ourselves have changed. It is only the same journey in a quite superficial sense. You know, this is rather extraordinary. Think back to that astonishing morning when we all met in my waiting room. Then it was you who rose to the realisation that something was happening on more than one level, and still managing to keep your feet on the ground. I was the one then who thought we might lose Raymond back into his Cathar world. But Raymond is much tougher than we thought. You had an intuitive faith in him then, and that was what brought him through, as much as, and even more than anything I could do as a doctor. I learned a lot from you that day. Now the position is a bit reversed. You’re beginning to experience some of the nightmares I go through when my trained professional mind is at odds with my intuition. I on the other hand am releasing a lot of intuitive perception I didn’t know I had, and a lot of that is rubbing off on me from you and Raymond.” Her tears now really let go, and she had a good old cry in my arms. When we had comforted each other a bit the atmosphere had lightened considerably. “Come on,” I said, “Let’s have another go at it. I tell you what, this time I’ll try to tell the story. It’ll be good for my imagination. When I get the pictures wrong you correct them and that way perhaps the whole thing will come to life in a new way. You know, each time we’ve come to it I’ve felt that there


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was a particular moment when in a certain way the whole adventure took flight. A certain airiness entered the conversation. A light turned on somewhere. Up till then it might have been any two friends on a conventional hitchhiking tour. But at that moment there was a sort of shiver. You know the moment I’m talking about?” “Yes. I know exactly. Helène and I were sitting at that café table. The sun was getting low in the sky. There were long shadows of poplars across the valley floor, and then a bit of a chilly wind sprang up.” “Then, as you got up to pay the bill, those two peasants at the table in the other café across the street got up as well and began to walk side by side up the dusty track towards the mountains. For some reason you both had the impulse to follow them. If I remember the light was dead behind you and fell on their backs as they walked away. They were in rough farming clothes, and you had this flowing orange and gold impression of their rather clumping gait, the steady rhythm of feet used to following ox-carts up steep tracks to heavy work in the dry stony soil.” “Yes, and then the light changed. The sun went behind the peak and at the same moment they stepped into the dappled shadow of a row of poplars. One of them stopped to light a pipe. I saw the glow on his rugged face as the match-light caught it. And at exactly that moment the other man drew himself more upright and turned. And this was the moment when exact observation was threatened with imprecision, where fantasy got its chance to blur the cut lines. I had the strongest possible impression that he became immensely tall and somehow blue… a pale long face beneath a dark blue casquette cap, and the long blue cloak below. Then Helène started muttering in an agitated manner in French, a prayer or invocation of some sort, and I turned to see what was the matter. She looked white-faced into mine, and we both turned to confirm the strange impression. But they had moved on”. “It is important to recall your exact feelings at that point. They can be a clue to what happened next.” “Well this is where I always lose confidence. You lose the present moment, analysis takes over, you start to chatter to your companion, or if you’re by yourself the restless inner dialogue puts up a wall between you and your exact experience. You may even start to fantasise, actually to lie to yourself about what happened, because of the hunger for significance, because you are so miserable about the usual meaninglessness of life.” “Esther, what actually happened next?” “Helène and I clung to each other, looking into each other’s eyes. My heart was beating like a sledgehammer. Her eyes shone through the strands of dark wispy hair, with an expression… of intense longing, an incredible hunger. She started clawing at me, dragging me forward along the path, saying something like “Il faut les suivre. Il faut les suivre. C’est un ‘parfait’.” Helène was so agitated that I became suddenly cold and in control. “Listen, Helène,” I said, “Nothing is gained by rushing at it. They were walking quite slowly. Come along, we’ll simply follow the track. We may catch them up.” “But you don’t understand. They will be in danger, walking in the open like that. We have to warn them.” “Warn them of what? Helène,” I said sharply, “I know what you’re doing. You’re simply allowing the drama of these Cathar stories to take you over. There’s no Inquisition now. Whatever we both saw, and I saw it too you know, whatever it means, it doesn’t mean physical danger. We even have to allow for sheer fantasy, a trick of the light, the sort of thing that often happens at this time of day. Come along, it’s cold. It’s time we found a campsite. There they are, look. We’re walking faster than they are.” The energy of walking restored her confidence, and she forgot to feel rejected by my scepticism. As we caught them up they turned aside up the hill between two cottages. The vines in the patch in front of the row were glowing crimson, purple and gold. A half filled basket of grapes stood in the path. The sun, lower still, had momentarily re-emerged lower down the valley. “Bonne vendange,” I called out. . The two men turned. The older one looked from me to Helène, and a benign expression came into his eyes. “Merci, Mademoiselle. C’est une bonne année.” He came forward and lifted a great bunch of grapes from the basket. As he handed it to Helène he looked deep into her eyes. She whispered something. Then occurred the only thing which can be called a sort of evidence. He raised his right


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hand and placed two fingers momentarily on her forehead. Then the two men turned and went into the house. Helène was left standing with her eyes shut. I took the grapes from her loose fingers and put my arm in hers, and we went slowly up the path. She didn’t refer to the episode again, and I didn’t ask her.” “No blue robes and biretta, of course,” I interjected. “No of course not. A dear old peasant wine-grower blessing a young girl.” We sat in silence for a little while. “But of course, something else as well,” Esther then said, “Helène’s mood changed altogether. She stopped chatting and reminiscing out of books and began to look purposive. I was to understand from that point that we were on a pilgrimage.” “As we shall be again in the summer,” I put in. “Isn’t it remarkable” I continued after a minute of two, “how important the world of light becomes as we begin to be aware of other dimensions of reality? It is not only that particular light conditions at certain times of day favour a kind of loosening of perception, though that is very important…” “Yes,” said Esther, “and particularly colours. It is as if colours come into movement. They start to give scope for a whole new range of images to appear. That is why illusion becomes so much more dangerous; why exact observation becomes more and more important.” “Provided that happens,” I said, “imagination ceases to be mere fantasy, and becomes a real seeing through into another dimension. We have to walk a knife edge between exactitude and openness. So often we are carried by emotion beyond objectivity.” “As Helène and I momentarily were,” she said excitedly, “I caught her emotion, and we shared a sudden vision, which seemed to evoke a memory. But something, a sort of defiant sense of truth, asserted itself in me and overcame the illusory element. I really think this had a powerful transforming effect on the situation, stopped the experience going over into hallucination.” “For Helène as well?” She thought this over. “Well, in the light of what happened subsequently I’m not so sure. She seemed to hug the experience somehow to herself, as if she was saying, “I know what I know,” and stopped sharing it except when her emotions took over again. Then it all came pouring out, and she ceased to be able to see where the outer facts set a limit upon what she was experiencing.” “You see, that is what makes this journey we want to make so fundamentally important.” I said. “It is more than a matter of you and I reaching a common picture of how to help Raymond through to reality without ourselves being drawn into a hallucinated experience of whatever other reality it is that he is struggling with.” “You really think there is another level of reality?” Esther asked. “We have to talk about reincarnation again,” I said, “I know you and I talked in a light-hearted way about it before all this happened. But we were really only playing at it. You were attracted to the idea, and you used it as a kind of goad to tease me with. But since then the whole question of whether reincarnation is really a fact has been creeping up on us, simply through our having to make sense of what happened to you all down there. And when life actually forces you to look at the possibility of reincarnation, to start taking the idea of it more seriously, more personally, as genuinely accounting for some of the things you experience, it becomes very heady stuff indeed. You’re no longer playing at it. It comes home to roost, as they say. For the first time it becomes a real danger that you might be caught up in something you can no longer quite control.” “I sometimes think that it is that very loss of control people like Raymond find so attractive,” she said, “And which makes them so attractive too,” she added, “Half the reason I love him so much…” She couldn’t quite go on. “Without that romantic glamorous element in the whole adventure of relating to previous lives we probably shouldn’t have the impulse to explore the realm at all.” I said. “Yet intuition tells me that it has to be explored, even if it turns out that the underlying truth behind it is not quite the obvious one.” Esther had recovered a bit and had gone to the window of the first floor flat, which faced down Highgate Hill. “I never shared with you what Raymond was saying that day we all met for the first time, “ I went on, “I wouldn’t be talking to you at all about it if that conversation hadn’t somehow tipped the scale to such good effect that I now find myself seriously planning to come with you to France in the summer. And yet...”


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She came back and sat down. “And yet,” I continued, “the very thing that so impressed me is that same thing which Raymond can’t quite face and which still holds so much of his mind in amnesia. It is as if he hangs onto it and rejects it at the same time. At one point he said with deep earnestness that he had made contact with a living being, which he described as ‘composed of events’.” She leaned forward and gripped my arms. “But that is exactly how it was,” she forced out. “That is exactly what was so horrifying. Day after day this mounting sense of a tide of events, first in Helène’s experience, then in Raymond’s, and then gradually in spite of all my efforts to some extent in mine too, which had a life of its own in defiance of the sobering solidity of the actual mountains and roads and valleys and inns in which we spent those weeks. But Alan, what is this being which he experiences, and which he has this horrifying capacity to project into the space around him, so that one is obliged to live in it with him?”. “Well, you two were so obliged, but I think that depends on at least part of your nature and Helène’s deeply wanting to do so for reasons connected with your own needs and previous involvement with him. As for what that being is, I think I am beginning to have a concept of that. I think it is no more and no less than his own being as it was in a life in Cathar times.” “But if we too were involved in this, and perhaps even you were, why are we not directly affected in the same way?” “For the very reason, Esther, that emerged in what he said the very first time I met him, the day you actually came back from France.” I said “There was something he still had to do; something so powerful that it has made it impossible for him to let that life go.” “But if we do live more than once, we really do let it go,” said Esther, “we die.” “And there you have it,” I said, “I think that’s what happened when he came to England, apparently to fetch me, some time at the beginning of the fourteenth century. He simply died.” “But in a way that impulse must have gone on. He never was able to let it go. It’s with him still, but buried,” said Esther. I found myself gazing inwardly at the tragic, still profile of several months ago relaxed under sedation, the deep lines of suffering beginning to smooth out, the hopeless struggle against the odds of that Cathar life already beginning to be laid to rest. “When he was no longer able to control the hallucinations we had to put him under sedation,” I said, “and we took some photographs.” I went to a drawer and took out a folder. She took it from my hand and began to look rapidly through the file. Her face became strained and tragic, and then very tender. “He doesn’t look like that now,” she said. “His hair is browner and curlier. But this is the man I met in France.” We stared together at the thin pinched nose, the tight black polished skullcap of hair. “He’s like a mediaeval king,” she whispered, “he died.” “Then what is that being?” she went on, “that living being of events he experiences, after all, and makes us experience with him?” “I believe it is simply himself, the unresolved, untransformed entity of his own Cathar life struggling to complete its task, and unable to relate properly to this life until it has done so. Transformation is the key. I think most people achieve this transformation without ever remembering their past lives.” “Then is memory of past lives a sort of illness?” “I think there is a more interesting and important question. It may well be that at least one important aspect of mental illness is unresolved problems from past lives. What function memory of past lives has may well go deeper. And there may be other ways to relate to them than straight memory.” Esther went back to the window. “Here he comes up the hill,” she said, “put the photographs away. You haven’t shown them to him have you?” “You don’t think he should see them?” “Certainly not. It could be an awful shock.” “Yes, I agree. But I think at some point he will be ready to see them.” “Only if he comes to the realisation that he never completed his mission, and actually accepts it; in his own way and in his own good time, as you said earlier. This realisation of ours is going to make it much harder to be open with him.”


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At that moment we heard him coming up the stairs. Esther went to the front door of the flat and let him in. As she came through the door and met my glance I was at once aware that something had happened. Then Raymond came in and stopped in front of me. It was like looking into an entirely different kind of space, as if a porthole had cleared in a spaceship, and there for the first time was the naked world of the stars, into whose infinite depths the vision plummeted and threatened to wrest the perceiving consciousness clear out of its own being. I felt a sickening wrench at my solar plexus and was obliged to grip my stomach with both hands, and struggle with steady breathing to hold myself together. As I did so I felt the almost uncontrollable capacity of perception rise up through my chest and throat, and centre somewhere between my eyes, so that I was able to overcome the violence of his impact on me, and transform it into a process of growth and understanding. A wave of tenderness for him overspread my heart and throat, but instead of embracing him I tried to retain a last glimpse of the ‘being composed of events’ which had just threatened to take possession of my consciousness. I felt myself endowed with a solemn and immensely humbling responsibility from deep within my own being to stand before him as a kind of container, or electrical capacitor, through which the otherwise destructive power of his unresolved memories, anxieties, and desperate dedicated will could be earthed, transformed, and brought into perspective with his present life and relationships and begin to work on these constructively and creatively. I had an inward vision of myself as a kind of Prospero, reaping the reward of patient professional work, by being at last allowed to extend my magician’s wand from the region of understanding to touch the surface of the earth, so that down it in a series of tremendous flashes the warring powers of the elements could drain away into the earth, and there become healed, absorbed, and transformed into powers of growth, metamorphosis and creation. As we stood there I had the sense of Raymond’s tremendous neurotic power dissipating and spreading through the room, sharing itself between the three of us, in such a way that we could at last look at it and resolve it in an arena of common understanding. He moved across to the settee and sat down taking off his gloves and scarf and leaning back with his eyes closed. “I am not him, and he is not me,” he said, “He never fulfilled his task, and I have never been able to accept the fact that I should not be able simply to continue where he left off. He got to England all right, he was on the point of meeting the Templar Master as arranged, but he died before he could tell his story.” Esther went over and kneeled by the settee. “You look so different, Ray,” she murmured, “I like you much better as Raymond than as the other one. You know, don’t you, that the only reason we came rushing back to England was to re-enact his death, and set in train once for all a process which would lead to your ceasing to identify with him.” “Well, I don’t identify with him any more,” said Raymond. “I think now with any luck I shall begin to appreciate him. You know what it is, Alan? It’s the glamour, isn’t it? Why did they have to make reincarnation so appallingly glamorous? What is glamour? Why is the whole idea of life in the middle ages so tremendously exciting and seductive? What’s so special about the Middle Ages or Egypt for that matter, or even Atlantis? It was terrifying and totally desperate at times, yet the whole idea of it absolutely fascinates me.” “It fascinates me too.” I said. “It seems quite illogical, doesn’t it? The gleam comes into peoples’ eyes and their breath comes faster. It’s like real live TV! Yet we know perfectly well, and you actually remember, that a lot of it was utterly unbearable and bestial. Certainly it was full of adventure and romance and beauty, but then so is life now if one looks for it. There is always something to engage the will and sense of purpose if that is what we want. And equally we can be bored anywhere. I’ve no doubt you were just as bored as a Cathar as you often are now. And life can be absolutely miraculous now if we look for that.” “What is glamour, Alan? asked Esther. “Is there any meaning to such a question?” “Trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth put it.” I replied, “I think glamour is what happens when we start confusing the unresolved, undigested past with the glory of the world of spirit which clings to it. What should happen in the world of spirit is that everything unfinished in the last life should be released and let go, so that it can be transformed into a seed for a new and entirely different personality, able to work out the old problems in a new way, make an entirely fresh start. But if we come through into the new life carrying these old motivations unchanged and undigested, like a chip on the shoulder, they bear with


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them this dramatic charismatic aura, with its tremendous power to fascinate and involve others. And that is what neurosis is.” “So really,” said Esther “we shall never arrive at a healthy view of reincarnation until we manage to get the glamour out of it. But doesn’t that mean that all unsought memory of past incarnations is sick?” “I think it depends how it arises. Certainly if it forces its way through for negative reasons, like unwillingness to accept death and failure, inability to accept that the old life must be released and allowed to transmute, then it is neurotic and sick. If one the other hand…” “Yes,” interrupted Raymond firmly, “but that is where speculation can start becoming very destructive if one simply follows the logical conclusion. To the extent that we came through into life with our past lives resolved, and transformed into the will to follow a new destiny, we are reborn with a certain innocence. We can, as it were, live our lives straight, and grow slowly towards consciousness of the purpose of life in a strong way, the sort of way that builds a firm basis also for society and for children. But the neurotic, charismatic personality also has a role if he can come through to self-realisation, and manages to avoid the trap set by psychiatric medicine, which is the Inquisition in its twentieth century form. If on the other hand he is lucky enough to encounter someone like Alan, as has happened to me over the past months he may be given the chance to attempt consciously what others achieve in a more natural, healthy, and at first unconscious way. In fact, if the neurotic does come through he may find himself involved in tasks which are at the growing tip of human evolution, posing the kind of questions which only future generations can answer.” Raymond pulled our hands together into a bunch. “We no longer have to go back to France to complete the impossible task which that poor brave little nephew of the Comte de Foix imposed on himself. I’ve managed to achieve a certain distance now from some of the worst of his memories. He was indescribably horrified and sickened as most of his friends were tortured and burned and raped. But much of that has retreated into the background now, more of a sadness then a horror. And somewhere in the background with it is the incomplete mission, which I now have to discover how to complete in a quite different way. But first I have to understand it. It is you two whose hope and encouragement have made it possible for me to come this far. I hope and pray that now we can take this further step together. It is a far more important thing we have to do now. Even if Ramón had brought his Templar back to Tarascon, he would have found scarcely anyone left to help escape from the Inquisition. I doubt if the Knight whom you and I, Alan, were supposed to meet in the Ariège valley ever got through.” “No,” Raymond went on, “There is something real to do there which those who have chosen to come back into modern times in the very same valleys where it all happened cannot quite do alone. Only those who have struggled together through hallucination into clarity, whether as victims or healers of illusion, can breast that particular rise, and act as catalysts for a new incarnation of spiritual life there.” “Do you mean Cartharism itself is to be reborn?” I asked “No, most emphatically not. Catharism reached its end, just as individual Cathars reached theirs at the stake, or walled up by the Inquisition in their ‘gleisas’ and ‘spoulgas’. No, but Catharism itself may in large part have been transformed in the other world into something broader and deeper than the rather narrow cult of good and evil it had begun to degenerate into. Some of those who have been drawn into the reincarnation whirlpool in the Ariège valley are just as confused and lost as I was. We have to find them and help them onto quite a new path into their spiritual mountains.” “One of them is Helène,” said Esther - “I believe we shall find her,” said Raymond.

--- oOo --- Now wait out the winter! Presently in spring the planets will return As if they had forgotten something, The young one radiant, but faintly angry, The old one with the tired smile of those To whom everything has happened before. From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’


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CHAPTER FIVE CLOTHILDE When I settled in this area over twenty years ago to practice medicine I had little thought that I might find myself at the focus of what is sometimes regarded by its critics as a religious fad, or worse, an anticlerical perversity. In fact that is so far from being the significance of the revival of the mediaeval heresy known locally in this area as the Albigeois that we who have lived with its teachings for a long time scarcely recognise the description. On the other hand, the fact that such a misconception could arise is easily understood. Why after all should such a group of modern people apparently sane in other ways appear to ally themselves with a body of doctrine which was long ago discredited by the Church, and which has, moreover, little to offer to those whose view of the nature of reality is opposed to Christian orthodoxy? We may be sympathetic to its teachings, but these are not as important to us as the Cathari themselves. The Albigeois were the French manifestation of a widespread heresy represented in different forms, and with some doctrinal variation in several parts of Europe. The Vaudois or Waldenses on the Swiss border, the Patarini in the Apennines, the Bogomils in Bulgaria, were all variants of a common religious stream, linked with Manichaeism and Gnosticism in the East, and with Sufi teachings coming up with the Moors through Spain. Known collectively as the Cathari, they represented in Christian form that universal current, present in all religions, which lays greater emphasis on the spiritual evolution and training of the candidate towards some form of insight and enlightenment. It is this which contrasts them with the other more numerous stream, that of orthodoxy, which links salvation and redemption with a system of beliefs. The latter stream dubs other streams as infidel with implacable hostility, and then even further divides sect from sect within one religious stream. Each adherent to the orthodox stream is taught to see himself as having a unique and privileged access to the divine, provided he pledges sectarian allegiance to ‘the true path’. By contrast, the stream of illuminates, although it bridges the gaps among religions and sects, is just as selective through its path of inward evolution. It tends to classify aspirants vertically on a ladder of development, instead of horizontally in a spectrum of sects. In the end the one-pointed path of development and initiation often draws to itself a set of one-sided philosophical attitudes as rigid in their way as the orthodoxies which they attempt to transcend. This is what happened to the Cathari, who came to embody an extreme form of philosophical dualism, quite alien to their profoundly wise and timeless system of training, which was based on the ancient clairvoyance of Greek, Mithraic, Egyptian, Persian, and even more deeply time-embedded mystery schools going back to Atlantis and earlier. It was this dualism, teaching that only the spiritual world was created by divine beneficent powers, and that everything earthly was the creation of the Devil, which brought down on these heresies the implacable hostility of the Church, leading in the end to their virtually total suppression and destruction by the Inquisition. Even more shocking to orthodoxy was their contention that, though the Cosmic Christ was unquestionably divine, he cannot possibly have gone through incarnation and death as Jesus. The cross was therefore for them a symbol having a completely different significance. At the most it represented the impact of spirit upon matter, the crossing point of good and evil upon which it was the destiny of man to be martyred, till such time as he was relieved by death from the evil world. The outward and visible sign of this was the ‘consolamentum’, their only sacrament, normally reserved for the moment when death, especially by martyrdom, was imminent, and giving the seal of divine blessing to this wonderful release from the Devil-created world. It was claimed also, and with demonstrable truth, that in many cases the consolamentum relieved the martyr of the worse excesses of physical suffering, enabling the release of consciousness to take place far more easily and blessedly. If the candidate for initiation progressed far enough he could become eligible to receive the consolamentum much earlier in his life as an earnest of a more committed dedication to the world of spirit. He was then known as a ‘parfait’ or perfected one, as opposed to a ‘croyant’ or believer. It was


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only the ‘parfait’ who was expected to renounce the ways of the flesh, to become celibate and practice an ascetic way of life. Otherwise the lives of the ‘croyants’ were in every way normal, and high spiritual value was set on the life of relationships. This condensed account of the average attitudes of the Cathari is intended to clarify what most of them believed and how it affected their behaviour and lifestyle. I say most of them, because there were numbers of them who held mitigated less extreme views, especially on the subject of redemption from sin by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. These ‘mitigés’ in some areas made it much more difficult for the Inquisitors to tie down the accused to actual proof of heresy. As happened later also with the Templars, confessions were increasingly extorted by torture, and not only to de facto heretical beliefs, but also to abominations and malpractices for which circumstantial evidence was virtually non-existent. It should be clear from this account that for many of those who in modern times take a profound interest in the Cathari, it is not so much the doctrinal aspects of Catharism which are of interest, for these were for the most part confused if not demonstrably perverse, but the mysterious link with a system of training and a path of mystical illumination. Of equally great interest is the survival in Catharism of the teaching of reincarnation and karma, suppressed in orthodoxy by the early Church, but inseparable from a doctrine which sees life as a multistage path of illumination, in which the release from matter is a protracted process, necessitating repeated return to earthly conditions which provide opportunities to solve new problems or old ones in a new way. Had I encountered a descriptive article about the Albigeois on these lines when I was young, the only part that would have intrigued me would have been the cryptic reference to a path of illumination linked with the doctrine of reincarnation. The rest of the story would have associated itself with the horror I always felt as a child for the accounts of religious persecution in the history books, and the fact that always as a child I was on the side of the heretics and martyrs who were burned. In a childish way I was sure that the wicked practices of which they were accused, linked with witchcraft, Satanism, and the worship of idols, were either pure invention, or misunderstandings of secret knowledge which had a quite other significance, attached to the deeper meaning and purpose of life, which I wanted to know about. The very word Catholic was for me a source of fear and distaste, something to do with masses of superstitious ignorant people, huddled together in petty-minded self-comforting beliefs, slavishly following greedy self-indulgent priests, and terrified of the least originality, progress or individual distinction. Not only did this heaving morass of indistinguishable mediocrity seem to me to be quite incurious about any deeper dimension to life, but it was obviously prone to turn with a horrifying sadistic savagery on anyone with an inquiring mind and destroy them, shrieking with agony in the name of gentle loving Jesus, his virgin Mother, and the holy Saints. And as a child in that part of my existence which was isolated and self-absorbed, I shrieked and cowered inwardly with the heretics. Establishment of any kind was for me embodied evil, gross and mediocre. As can be seen I was prone like most children to believe the side of the story which was presented to me. I learned of other aspects later on. But all that is a far cry from identifying myself as an adult with what the protagonists of heretical religious beliefs appeared actually to have taught. It had a lot to say about what kind of a child I was, and it seemed as I got older also to raise questions to which knowledge of reincarnation might well suggest some sort of an answer. But as far as doctrine was concerned I felt no more sympathy with Manichaean dualism than with the Catholic Church. If anything my sympathies were more with the Pauline view, a discovery of the higher self through the invocation of an inner identity with the ‘I’ of Christ. The first hint I had that my irrational feeling of identification with the Cathari might have a more objective basis was much later, when I became deeply involved with the esoteric teachings of the Austrian initiate sage Rudolf Steiner. This is not the place to do more than indicate with a light touch the central place his system occupies in the underlying dynamic of spiritual evolution in our day. From the most ancient times there has been a fundamental problem for the divine creative beings, within whose own evolution mankind has come into existence as the latest flowering, the tenth hierarchy. It is this. The divine aim is that there should be at last be, as crowning glory of the hierarchies, a being who could embody at one and the same time both freedom and love. How is there


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to be achieved and preserved in Man this possibility, without at the same time losing for him, perhaps forever, his connection with the reality which preceded him, the ‘conformity of thought to thing?’ If Man unavoidably knew the divine, he could never be free of it, and so freely seek it. If he was free of it, he would never be bound to love it. To this paradox, only the Christed ego, the marriage of the free ego with the very principle of freedom and egoity itself, provides at the same time a conceptual answer, and its fulfilment in a living evolving process of embodiment and experience. Only the Christ in Man is God, and at the same time, free of God, and free to love God. On the path embodied in the school of spiritual science inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner, there slowly grows over the years in the student, an indissoluble link between the incompatible truths in this paradox of paradoxes. The long vista of mankind’s gradual loss of all clairvoyance, all spontaneous unquestioned knowledge of his divine origins, is bonded first with a sure-footed muscular grasp of freedom as a philosophical reality. Then on the other swing of the pendulum there builds up a panoramic view of the world temple of love, the earth embodiment of the Cosmic Christ, where each soul may be both performer of the Christ Mystery, and his destiny the arena in which that performance is enacted. It was necessary to give this condensed, almost telegraphic word-picture of how on Rudolf Steiner’s path of knowledge freedom and love as the meaning of mankind meet in his picture of the Cosmic Christ, because it gradually became apparent to me that it was over their partial failure to discover the resolution of this paradox that the Cathars had finally lost themselves in the blind alley of dualism. Imagine then, the impact it had on me, wrestling with these concepts as a young person, when I discovered that Rudolf Steiner, speaking of the way in which souls embodied in the different streams of evolving Christianity would reincarnate in our time, drew attention to the fact that many souls connecting themselves with the movement for Spiritual Science associated with his own teachings, were in fact former Cathari. If this is so, then it seems clear to me that this Cathar stream in Spiritual Science has a double task. Firstly, to act as a spearhead, through the metamorphosis of its own suffering and suppression, for the knowledge of reincarnation in our time. Secondly, by participating in the contemporary stream of Cosmic Christianity, to embody in its own being the resolution of the dualistic paradox which took it down into darkness in the fourteenth century. The immediate effect on me as a young person meeting Steiner’s Spiritual Science, and at the same time feeling an intuitive identification with the Albigeois of the Pyrenean valleys, was to send me off on a romantic pilgrimage to discover for myself the mysterious places where all these things had happened. As a medical student at Montpellier these places were easily accessible to me. I was able to spend a lot of holiday time, and even weekends, with a pack on my back, endlessly walking and dreaming my way through the magical landscape of the Langue d’Oc. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends as besotted as I was, re-enacting with our guide-books and our inflamed imaginations the journeys of the troubadours, the clowns and their initiated mentors, as they spread the secret, heretical Gnostic word of love and illumination. Although most of this heady joyous adolescent stuff was in the nature of a preparation of the heart for more mature perceptions, it did lead directly to an experience which has remained with me all my life. This became a turning point for my commitment to much else besides the recollection and transcendence of Catharism, and I recount it here because I feel it will resonate with the experiences of others, and perhaps provide a clue to the understanding of many accounts quite different from this, but linked with it through the common channel of typically Cathar insights. During one memorable summer in the early fifties a friend and I rode the wave of our common enthusiasm into the Pyrenées with a more determined intention to penetrate the heart of the mystery. The beacon which drew us was the single word Montségur, which for me had only the magic of the name itself, and the knowledge that it had been the scene of the most famous of the massacres of the Albigeois in 1244. A more detailed account of its place in this story is given elsewhere. We only had the vaguest idea of the place of Montségur on the map. It seemed to shine in our imagination like an inner light, so that we felt it was only necessary to travel in its general direction in order to find it. Montségur would do the rest. It was thrilling to discover later on that this was quite a common experience among similar moths to this particular candle. It had led to its being commonly known


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among latter-day adherents to the cult as ‘la phare du Catharisme’. However, for us at first, the lighthouse shone with a somewhat fitful gleam. We came to bless this elusive quality as time went on as the chief factor in the heightening of consciousness, which proved to be crucial as preparation for the actual experience. Much of the journey was by the time-honoured young person’s method of ‘auto-stop’. Hitchhiking is one of the few ways available in our time to recapture some of the essential features of mediaeval pilgrimage. It is far too easy nowadays to plan a journey. Hitchhiking reintroduces, even if in a somewhat artificial way, the element of happenstance into travelling. It teases out and loosens up the warp and weft of chance events so that meaningful incidents have a greater chance of dropping into the pattern of the tapestry. Expectancy is heightened and at an early stage there is far greater sensitivity to the rhythmic element in time and space. For example, circumstances precludes one from usually travelling in a direct line towards the objective. We made it a rule never to refuse a lift which aimed within forty-five degrees on either side of the supposed line of approach. The vagueness of the latter ensured that we saw a lot of country, encountered a lot of people, both on and off the road and had a lot of unplanned conversations. Within this mosaic we began to discern the first features of a pattern of space-time relationships which would only culminate at Montségur itself. Particularly on going to sleep and on waking, in the states of extreme fatigue and early freshness induced by the arduousness of the journey, there began to emerge a pattern of rhythms which became more vivid and distinct as the days wore on, and the possibility of culmination drew nearer. None of these rhythms was more fundamental than any other. They were like overlapping and superimposed waves of widely different amplitude and wavelength, advancing and receding with our moods and the circumstances of the day. As you plod along in the hot sunshine between lifts, the light and shade of endless ranks of dappled plane trees falls upon your unprotected head. Heat and relief from heat have their own rhythm, as if a sun- born lion was panting above you with its own slow breath. Within this pattern is your own breathing and heart beat, and the plodding of your laboured steps on the metalled road, punctuated and relieved by the windy rush and roar of passing cars and lorries. Deeper and longer waves suggest themselves as the day rolls on, the rhythm of morning and afternoon light, of day and night of heat and cold, the longer tide as summer heat points towards autumn ripeness. More inwardly the rhythm of dream and wakefulness, of restfulness and exertion, fatigue and freshness, underpin and confirm the outer pulses. One begins to lose all sense of self in a new identity with a world wholly composed of interlocking rhythms. As consciousness ascends into this world it evokes fantasies of the rhythm of memory and oblivion, of comprehension and ignorance, of identity and equilibrium, and from the latter even faint intimations of a rhythm of relationship with the far past, of presence on the earth and off it, and of its needs in former incarnations. All this becomes increasingly one-pointed and agonising as it homes in on the crucial rhythm of pilgrimage itself Is the goal reached or is it not? Does Mecca lie far away, or is it present in one’s own heart at home? One day we reached a kind of limit to our endurance. It was as if consciousness popped out above the heaving oceans of rhythm into a colder clearer air. In a kind of desperate gamble, we submitted the enterprise to the toss of a coin. If it was heads we would hitch one more lift and go wherever it took us. If tails, we would return to base, accepting that Montségur was not for us. The coin spun in the air, reflecting all the other rhythms in dappled sunlight. Heads. The lorry came trundling along and stopped. We climbed up on a spare wheel and over the tailboard. It was full of Algerian workers with their shovels and wineskins. As they shared their wine with us we chattered of Montségur and our journey. They laughed at our clumsy efforts, spurting wine over our faces and clothes. “Si, si, Montségur. Ancient chateau”, they said. We dozed. Soon we woke and spoke of Montségur again. “Oui, oui, Montségur.” Every time we said Montségur, they said Montségur. It slowly dawned on us that they were going to Montségur. They were going to repair it. Of course, the picks and shovels. We laughed and wept and rolled about. And laughed again, and I think prayed, and sang. There was a lot of wine. So we arrived.


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It is not necessarily better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Climax is a special talent. Perhaps the art of lovemaking is to have an equivocal and wholly accepting relationship to orgasm as a grace. If not, then not. If so... We were not disappointed. Suddenly and with a divine inevitability the rhythms coalesced. All the up-beats, irrespective of wavelength, resonated together. The illusion that time is extended along a spatial and linear wave-pattern was dispelled. All time became present time. We were not only climbing up the Chateau de Montségur. The climbing of Montségur was eternally present. We knew too that the clue to the eternal awareness of all other present moments was being revealed to us, whatever use we made of such a revelation in future vision, or in past recollection. It turned out to be the start of a lifetime of learning. It took me some years to find my way to the area and make it my home. I was not ready for it until I had been through several more life chapters, medical and otherwise; including a short but wonderful marriage, before the opportunity of a practice in the Ariège valley came my way. I had thought that I would have to seek out others who felt as I did about the area and its history. But they came to me. Over the years, not only as patients, but through contacts with visitors and people of the region, interested in Catharism from many different points of view, a lifetime’s work has opened up for me. It is far from over yet, and I sometimes feel that the best of it is yet to come.

***


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In the section that follows I have condensed an account of the area written after my friend and I returned from our first pilgrimage. I hope this will provide a historical perspective for those who wish to make some of these journeys themselves.

CATHARISM AND THE GRAIL IN THE PYRENÉES In the ninth century the post-Manichaean movement of Gnostic heretics was already well established in Eastern Europe. Spreading from centres in Bulgaria eastward into Russia, northward into Eastern Germany, and south and west into Italy and France, came wave after wave of devotees. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries they settled in great numbers in two principal regions of France. Near Lyons and on the Swiss border they were known as the Waldenses, ‘Les Vaudois’. But far more numerous were the Albigenses, whose name came from Albi, a town in the Tarn region, north east of Toulouse. Toulouse became for a time their great centre. Later on when persecution became more serious they migrated southward. Foix, Carcassonne, Béziers, Narbonne, and many other places between Toulouse and the Spanish border became centres of a widespread civil and religious culture, which was not finally annihilated by the Inquisition until 1328. Why was it to this particular region of Europe that these heretics came? We find that where many relics of French Catharism are still to be seen they are chiefly concentrated in the ancient province of Sabarthez. If we glance very briefly at the political history of Sabarthez we unfold an astonishing story of fanatical independence, which, in the age when the formation of the great European nations was in full swing, is almost inexplicable, unless a motive of extreme importance for remaining free underlay it. Sabarthez began by resisting successfully the invasions under Julius Caesar and Augustus. Later when the whole of the region between it and the sea was united as the province of Narbonnais, Sabarthez again remained free. About 613 AD we find France united under Clothaire II. About 770, a descendent of the latter, Wandrille, had four sons. In 845 an edict was issued under Charles la Chauve that Sabarthez should be governed by Wandrille and his descendants in perpetuity as an independent province. Not only do we find this succession faithfully maintained well over the first millennium, but descendants of Wandrille and their connections have a hold in many neighbouring provinces and in the noble families. One branch, for example, of Wandrille’s family gives rise to the Comtes de Foix. At the time of the Albigensian crusade it is this family among others which is prominent in organising resistance against the Crusaders. Finally between 1200 and 1330 the whole region is conquered and united under France. But even then so strong is the spirit of independence that the hardier spirits retreat up the valley into the Pyrenées and over them, and there became the mainspring of a further resistance against absorption by both France and Spain. The little republic of Andorra remains independent to this day, largely as a result of these forces. What had they to defend? If we look at a map of Sabarthez we see as we face the Eastern Pyrenées a long Y-shaped valley, whose stem and eastern arm are formed by the river Ariège between Foix and Ax-les-Thermes, and whose western extension is the valley of the Sos, leading up to the Spanish frontier at Pic Montcalm, the giant of the Eastern Pyrenées. At Ax-les-Thermes we can turn and climb for an equal distance due south, reaching the source of the Ariège at the Col de Puymorens which separates us from Andorra. Half way up the stem of the Y a third valley comes in from the east. It bears a little stream from the hills of the Plantaurel, which separate the Pyrenées from the plains round Carcassonne. These three valleys formed the old province of Sabarthez, and they form the stage upon which the last tragic century and a half of Albigensian history are unfolded.


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The crusaders approached Sabarthez from Carcassonne in the northeast, and climbing the Plantaurel, struck the eastern valley at Lavelanet. They climbed beyond it into the first real foothills of the Pyrenées, and there above them, towering over the surrounding countryside at a height of over 3000 ft, were the massive ramparts of the Château de Montségur. The mount of safety, whose conquest in 1244 marked the end of the military phase of the Crusade, and has always been regarded historically as the death-blow of the movement. How much survived it and for how long we shall see later. All we can say here of the bitter struggles which preceded the tragic capitulation of Montségur will give only the faintest inkling of the richness and importance, historically and spiritually, of the culture whose destruction ended there. The Crusade destroyed not merely a minor heresy of the Catholic Church, but the germ of a whole civilisation. For the revival of early Christianity which these men had achieved built up in the course of two and a half centuries a human culture which was not only the richest in Europe, but could almost be called a kind of premature renaissance, so far had this Langue d’Oc civilisation gone in terms of human intercourse, religious tolerance, and in the limited sphere of music and poetry, also in art. This was the seat of the troubadours and the ‘Courts d’Amour’. Only a superficial judgement sees in these nothing but the depravity and license that afterwards overcame them. There is little doubt that the mainspring of the Troubadour culture was a Cathar one, and that many of the epics they sang in the courts of the Langue d’Oc nobility were genuine mythos, thinly disguised esoteric doctrine in the form of romances. It would be a great mistake to regard this civilisation as French in the sense of the France of the north that afterwards overcame it. On the contrary it represented by 1200 a serious obstacle to French unity, and more than the germ of a different nation altogether. This fact was the real driving force behind the Crusade. We may doubt whether Pope Innocent III at any time really intended the ghastly massacres which were perpetrated in his name, although we may suppose that he experienced to the full the necessity for keeping esoteric activity under the kind of control that the Church was in a position to exercise. He was determined to persuade the Cathar initiates to join the Church, if necessary by force. But no doubt he would have preferred that through the impulse of St. Dominic, who was a local man from Fanjeaux, something of the purity of life style of the Cathar brotherhood could have entered the Church by way of the Dominican order. In the end, however, Dominic became as ruthless an Inquisitor as any. A great tragedy for the Church underlies the failure of Dominic’s mission, and the perversion of the Crusade into the cynical and barbaric conquest it became. The entire populations of Carcassonne and Béziers, Catholic and Cathar, were massacred. There remains to us the famous dictum of the Grand Prieur Armand Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, one of the chief local instigators of the Crusade, and later a Grand Inquisitor, on the occasion of the massacre of Beziérs: “Kill them all; God will recognise which are His”. This attitude was characteristic, and there is no doubt that far more Catholics than heretics were slaughtered. The northern French were incapable of appreciating the extent to which Catholicism and Catharism were intermingled in Langue d’Oc. Not only were the doctrinal differences too slight to be appreciated by citizens of such a heart-centred culture, but a degree of actual religious toleration had been attained which was centuries ahead of its time. Further south in Spain it had even reached the point where Catholics, Cathars and Moorish Muslims met and exchanged wisdom, borrowed much of each others ritual and architecture, and where the Muezzin was even happy to call the faithful Christians to prayer. From the official viewpoint, faced with Cathar abbots in Catholic monasteries, ‘Tuez les tous’, was the only answer. To Montségur retreated the great ones of the movement. Protected by the universal sympathy, though rarely the actual membership of the local nobility of Foix and other centres, they concentrated their forces, and remained for several years the beacon of esoteric Christianity in the barren land. Siege was at last laid to them in 1244, and after six months they capitulated. Two hundred parfaits, croyants and sympathisers were burned alive on a vast pyre at the foot of the rock. The Abbot Amiel Aicard, his friend Hugo, and two others were permitted to escape. They took with them a certain treasure. The manner of what was written about this leads us to ask whether a spiritual treasure is meant.


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If we think about the fire on that tragic night in March 1244, and the castle looking out across miles of Pyrenean foothills towards the lost lands of Langue d’Oc, and if we add to these thoughts the fact that it lies in the destinies of many people, French and otherwise, in our time to approach these Cathar mysteries through an experience of Montségur, we are led with Antonin Gadal, one of the instigators of a modern Cathar movement in the Ariège valley, to call Montségur, ‘La Phare du Catharisme’, the lighthouse for an approach to Catharism. If we follow the route Amiel Aicard took as he escaped from Montségur we have to climb to a height of over 6,000 ft and drop down in a south-westerly direction from the Pic St Barthélémy into a high mountain valley running parallel to the Ariège, and known as the route des Corniches. We follow this for a mile or two north-west, and then leave it on a westerly track over the Montagne de Lougat, which is still known as the ‘Route des Cathares’. From here we drop down a further 1,500ft into the bed of the Ariège valley near the village of Ussat-les-Bains. It is here that we find, in the words of Antonin Gadal, the harbour for which Montségur is the lighthouse. It is difficult to find words to describe the melancholy tenderness with which this quiet little valley is enfolded by the great green and grey limestone giants that surround it. Above and below Ussat the valley narrows a little and expands near the village owing to the entrance of the small lateral valley of Ornolac. This results in a three sided expansion of the valley across whose flat grassy floor rushes the Ariège in its stony bed through a mass of flowers in spring, and a green carpet in summer. Tradition has it that a lake filled this expansion till 1279, when geological changes caused the water to escape from this and from another lake higher up. Similar escapes of water from underground lakes deep in the fathomless caves of these hills in recent times lend weight to the tradition. To these caves, and in particular to the immense grotte de Lombrives, came Amiel Aicard and his followers, and there the treasure they brought with them was preserved until 1328. The Inquisition found them at last, and after a battle in the mouth of the cave in which the Catholic forces were routed, the last 500 of the Cathari were sealed up alive, where their bodies remained till Henri Quatre, then still Duc de Navarre, unsealed the cave, and had the bones removed to an unknown cemetery. His signature, and those of his companions, is still clearly legible on the wall, half a mile inside the mountains. What brought Amiel Aicard to Lombrives? Well, if you climb up the side of the mountains on each side of the valley at this point, you will find a whole circle of caves of varying depth and extent, and at different heights above the river. There are a dozen or more, some no more than shelters, some with connecting galleries many kilometres in extent. Lombrives has been explored to a depth of three miles, and is suspected to re-emerge high up in the valley of the Sos mentioned above. In at least half a dozen of the caves the walls are interlaced with countless drawings and signs, some readily identifiable, others to be interpreted only with expert knowledge of Cathar and Templar symbolism. A seemingly innocent area of wall reveals after an hour or two’s study sign after sign, scratched chiselled or roughly drawn in manganese, rust or ochre, many superimposed and in every degree of legibility. Many of the caves are fortified, and in some cases the ramparts are excellently preserved. Now some of the symbols have been identified by modern investigators of Catharism as being far older than Christianity. They have arrived at the wonderful conclusion that this circle of caves was the centre for an ancient Mithraic initiation and was already a holy place when first the Grail mystery, and later the Cathari sought it out and perpetuated it as a mighty initiation centre right into the times of which we are speaking. These investigators speak of a circle of seven cave churches ‘gleisas’, each of which was a temple of initiation into one of the seven stages, first of Mithraic, and later of Cathar mysteries. They lead one finally to a tiny double chambered cell, still known locally as Bethlehem, approached step by step through a succession of fortifications. In one place these enclose a tiny meadow of transcendent sweetness and peace. Beyond a gateway is a place where ritual bread was baked and distributed. Finally there is a second gate, through which only the Grand Initié himself was permitted to pass. Here the candidate received the seventh initiation, standing with arms and legs outstretched in a great chiselled pentagon high up in the wall, and reached by seven steps, which his Mithraic forebears had left. The side of the pentagon was so cut at his left side as to facilitate his experience of the wound of Christ, through which passed at the Crucifixion the element which renewed


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the earth, and through which must pass for the time being at his initiation, the candidate’s own astral body. Opposite him the wall is itself a huge pentagon, and at one side of it is seen the indistinct form of a dove in flight. He gazes too upon a sacred silver vessel in a recess in the wall, upon which is also embossed a dove. This vessel was recently unearthed from its hiding place in the floor of the cave, and its dove has become the symbol of the modern movement. When the candidate emerged, he was called ‘parfait’, and he and his companion, initiated on the same day, and bound to him by lifelong vows, went forth as vagrant mendicants, and taught as troubadours and monks until the Inquisition caught them. The Grotte de Lombrives is the most holy of all Cathar shrines. It leaves an indelible impression of sanctity and tragedy, and a mighty question unanswered. Beyond the narrow bottleneck which Henry of Navarre unsealed, which is already a quarter of a mile from the surface, there opens out a tremendous cavern of the proportions of a Gothic Cathedral. Here, for a further eighty years after Montségur, the persecuted remnant of the movement gathered day by day from their refuges in the heart of the limestone, and heard the sermons and exhortations of the ageing Amiel Aicard and his successors. The echoes still convey something of the tremendous force the words of the initiate must have conveyed, charged mantrically with the wisdom of Manichaean tradition, fed by intimate contact with the Knights Templar, the guardians of the Grail, and reflected, echoed and magnified by the laminated, reverberant walls of these endless limestone grottoes. Beyond the cathedral one climbs almost to the level of its roof, passing the inscribed names and symbols of many noble Rosicrucian pilgrims of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and at a depth of nearly a mile inside the mountain one reaches the shores of a quiet lake. On these shores, and along the peaceful corridor that approaches them, the last five hundred of the Albigenses lay down to die. In the middle of the cave is a stalagmite, of the height of a man and somewhat larger. One steps up it, and in the top is a pool of clear water. No font can have been made more perfectly by nature, or used at so perfect a last sacrament. Looking back at its dazzling whiteness in the delicate modern lighting, and touching the switch which leaves it to the long black vigil it has kept for six hundred years, one feels that the world of light into which slipped those five hundred souls from a blackness which could no longer receive their spiritual knowledge, is almost tangible beyond the dark. Not least in the questioning mood of Lombrives is the mystery of what lay beyond the lake. The world of the Pyrenées is a world of stone. There is a legend that Pyrène herself, who gave them her name, was turned to stone, and that the gleaming white stalactites above her tomb are the frozen tears of Hercules, her lover. Stone was the daily companion, friend and enemy, protector and frustrator of the Cathar. Stone resisted his incarnation and walled him out of it, stone protected his gleisas and spoulgas, the fortified churches in which he worshipped. He lived in stone castles, and with stone defended them. And in the sacramental transformation of the fallen earth, that Cathartic purification of and release from dead matter, which gave him his name, and is the secret of his doctrine, it is to stone again that he turns for the symbol and substance of his meditations. As one leaves the cold night of Lombrives and re-emerges into the dazzling southern sunlight, we find the stones upon which he meditated everywhere. For three, nearly four hundred years, these valleys were inhabited and worked by men and women who were our forerunners in the conviction that the dead matter of the earth is redeemable by the Christ, and that Sun-substance arises phoenix-like and aflame out of stone which Christ-filled thought and will have transformed by love and art. The symbol of the Cathar croyant was the dove, and of the parfait the pentagon. There is hardly a pebble at the side of the track that some Cathar has not redeemed by art or meditation. Many and many he has carved into the form of doves, however crudely, ---- doves flying into the bosom of the spirit; doves alighting into incarnation; doves with head under wing in the sleep and darkness of profoundest contemplation; the soul in all stages of spiritual experience. Those he has not carved as doves he has seen as doves, as we still can; stones formed by nature into shapes which, with a scratch here and a piece chipped off there, remind him sufficiently of his theme. Occasionally a pentagon of startling accuracy shocks our scepticism out of the thought that the eye sees in any curious shape what it wishes to see. Behind all these relics and evidence of the teeming life of Catharism during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and yet still superimposed on the far older Mithraic life, comes hint after hint of the profoundest connection of all these matters with an important chapter in the history of the Holy Grail.


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What was the treasure of Montésgur? What if anything was carried beyond the water through the further five or more miles of Lombrives to an unconfirmed exit high up in Vicdessos? An answer, and a further question is to be found at the top of the Vicdessos valley itself. Near the village of Vicdessos, on a great rock by the present hamlet of Olbier, and set like a picture in the mighty frame of Pic Montcalm, there stood until Richelieu pulled it down, one of the biggest castles in France, Le Château de Montréalp de Sos. If you walk from one corner of the wall to its diagonal opposite, and these two corners are all that remains above ground you must walk all of 220 yards. Below the battlements in the rock, however, is a tiny grotto which Richelieu could not, or at least did not destroy. On the wall of this cave is a picture, now almost washed away, of the Sun descending and crowned with thorns, and a broad-bladed sword, and a cross, and a lance from whose point drip five drops of blood, each one guarded by a white cross. All this is faintly executed in black and white and blue-grey and orange-red, and the picture guarded on its outer side by a column of orange-red crosses. The local tradition that this was the Grail Castle reaches as far as an indirect reference on the ordnance map, which marks a ‘Rge.Fr. de Grail’ only a kilometre away. Modern investigators of Catharism refer to the fact that the Templars were servants and guardians of the Grail as a karmic compensation for errors in previous lives. They say that it was to Cathar initiates that the Templars looked for spiritual leadership, that they were frequently initiated by Cathar leaders. They say that some of the initiations in the Parsifal story were Cathar initiations. They suggest that the now empty lake in the Ariège valley was the lake referred to by Wolfram von Eschenbach as Brumbane. They point to a remarkable hollowed out rock near the shores of this lake as the Hut of Trevrezent, and they show the cave where Parsifal must have slept because there was no room for two in Trevrezent’s hut. (This was on Parsifal’s second visit to the castle, mentioned by Wolfram von Eschenbach. (Chrétien’s account is incomplete) Galahad, they say was initiated at ‘Bethlehem’. These hints, shared with us by Antonin Gadal, take their place with many other accounts, historical, legendary, perceived clairvoyantly in ‘far memory’. A picture grows up over the years, and we can look at it, and set it beside whatever else we can discover of the Grail Mystery. In due course it will begin to speak.

---oOo--- Stay calm, for soon, satisfied, They will travel relentlessly on To the definitive meeting where all is ratified In high summer From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’


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CHAPTER SIX DIARY OF THE JOURNEY They finally set out on the last day of July. It was a very different grouping of people from that which had gradually coalesced out of three very dissimilar pairs almost a year earlier. The doctor with his patient, the unlikely friendship flowering into love, the middle-aged cousin with his young protégé - life had fused them by now into colleagues on a footing of equality. Knowledge of each other’s weaknesses and strengths had by now forged a strong bond of mutual respect, so that they were consistently at ease with one another. That this bond would now be put to a further test none of them doubted. But the nature of this was for the time being hidden beneath a growing expectancy and excitement as they drove onto the ferry late on the Monday evening. The clear sky was soon alive with stars. The young couple strolled about the deck, their sense of mission soaring almost visibly about them. It wasn’t long before they were deeply asleep in the cabin below. Fraser took longer to relax. The responsibility lay more heavily on his shoulders, and whereas in former years deep resources of psychological experience would have come readily to his aid, he now found himself in midstream of an inner revolution. The farther shore was in sight, but not yet accessible. It required a quite new step of faith to put himself as much into the hands of these young people as they had put themselves into his. He was uneasily aware that his whole future depended on a successful outcome to the experiment upon which they were embarked. For several hours he mused over the events of recent months, first on deck, and then later retreating from the mist and cold to the bar below. From time to time he made note in the same loose-leaf notebook with which he began Raymond’s case-notes. He planned to suggest that they now all used it as a diary for the journey. Soon he too was overcome by sleep. By the time they all awoke the sun was high in the sky. By the evening they were in Spain, had driven well past San Sebastian, and were bedded down in the Dormobile in the rolling Basque hills. Fraser wrote up the log for the first day’s journey.

*** The Car-ferry docked at Santander about half-past-three in the afternoon, Tuesday. As we drove through the town and onto the Bilbao road Raymond and Esther were larking about like a couple of kids. We were all in proper holiday mood, and this had overtones of sweetness, a gentle simplicity and sacredness, which was a far more definitive answer to the ponderous overshadowing of unresolved tragedies than any more solemn approach to the mountains would have been. The fact was of course that at one level the victory was already won. We had come to terms conceptually with the nature and origin of hallucination, and this was common ground between us. What was still to be done - the resolution of connections and events in the outer world - was inseparable from processes of inner transformation, which in any case go on all the time, heightened almost beyond recognition as they may still be by such threshold-crossing crises as we had all recently been through. This inner transformation in turn has an exact counterpart in the transformation on a more cosmic level. The latter kind of change one can describe as a laying aside of one form of incarnation, ie. the death of a particular personality, its metamorphosis in the spiritual world, consisting of the extractor of a sort of ultimate essence or seed, and then its re-embodiment through rebirth in an entirely different personality. What we had seen in Raymond could be regarded as this process taking place in a ‘sick’ form, involving mental illness. But it could equally be regarded as a priceless opportunity for a metamorphosis which had only partly or incompletely occurred for him before birth, to be worked through in association with others, on a conscious earthly plane. Only in this way, it could be said, is a


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gap left through which spiritual facts and processes incomprehensible in terms of earthly cause and effect, can break through into the realm of the comprehensible, the graspable. Out of this, motivations, plans of action, can again arise which are able to resolve what would otherwise remain at the level of breakdown, deterioration, and often of physical tragedy, disease, and premature death. The mood which arises out of such understanding is one of deep relaxation, a profound loss of tension in the struggle to make sense of bizarre events. The breaking through of light into the shared mood can only properly be called an experience of divine grace. Something quite new began to break into the succession of events, a sort of happenstance or synchronicity that we all felt as a direct consequence of the spontaneous openness to light or enlightenment which we were sharing. ESTHER Wednesday, mid-morning. When I had read through this first entry which Alan made in the diary about three times, I not only began to understand it, I really began to think that the old dear had got something which it isn’t all that easy to understand except through these masses of verbiage. I tried to put it in my own words and didn’t get very far. In other words, I thought, we feel happy and blessed and simple because we understand things a little better, which gives us strength to carry on and face what could well be quite an ordeal. We’ve changed, and this will probably change the things which happen, and with any luck will also turn out to make sense in terms of reincarnation. Unfortunately, Ray had to get ill over it, but maybe this was a blessing in that we were forced to struggle hard to understand things more deeply. That may well open up new possibilities that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, such as helpful coincidences. All this makes us less tense, hence more open to enlightenment. I don’t know if that makes it any easier for you little chicks. I know it still feels quite complicated to me. But one the whole I think we would miss something if we didn’t have to wrestle with Alan’s efforts to put very difficult experiences into words. All the same, when we decided to keep this diary of events we thought we must find a way of stopping the old coot pontificating away, describing in advance everything that was going to happen before it happened. Circumstances favoured this, because we have a very long journey ahead of us, so we are taking turns at driving, and Alan is the best driver. So this gives Raymond and me plenty of chance to put in our bits of the writing. Raymond is a rotten driver, positively hair-raising on twisty mountain roads as we discovered very soon yesterday as we worked our way over the Spanish frontier and into the French Basses Pyrenées. So Alan is doing most of the hairy mountain roads, and I’ve been driving on the steady mountain parts, narrow straight second-class roads with a lot of stopping on verges to let things pass. Also I’m the natural history one of the three, and mainly control the picnic things, so I could pick good places to stop, sun traps with plenty of Alpine flowers and butterflies. We had decided to do it the long way round, partly to see a bit of the Spanish Biscay coast, and some of the Basque country. I for instance was keen to watch them play pelote, which is like a particularly dangerous game of blown-up squash rackets using lacrosse sticks. We had a chance to watch for a few minutes near Cambo. But it was also so that we could approach the Pyrenean giants by way of the gentler terrain of the Basses Pyrenées. Anyone who sees only one bit of the Pyrenées gets a very one-sided picture, my father used to tell me. It was his holidays there before World War Two that first fired my imagination to go there. He saw the Pyrenées as a sort of microcosm of the whole spiritual history of Europe, almost every valley and its ‘gave’ or mountain torrent and its dominating high peak in the background, embodying a distinct ‘mansion’ in the kingdom of whatever god overshadowed and protected the whole range, and each itself overshadowed by its own giant presiding hierarchy, whose home was in the high peak, a deva certainly, but at times some being even higher and more formidable. Even the names of the peaks, he said, embodied something of the mood that dominated the valley and its history.


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My father first began to think about this on his first visit which was to Lourdes in 1938. At his magical spot the life forces are so delicate and open that a sensitive child who had lived there since babyhood suddenly came into contact with the highest of all earth beings, the Divine Isis-Sophia herself. The only earth being profound enough to become the mother of a child who could himself become the vehicle for the earth embodiment of the Sun God, the Son of God himself. So simple and pure was the child Bernadette that her experience opened the way for thousands of people whose conceptual and feeling life was of the crudest and most banal form of Christianity, to open their hearts there to a particularly pure form of blessing, which not infrequently spilled over into psychic and even gross physical healing. My father wondered how it was that this sacred place had remained under the domination of that part of Christianity which had become most formalised, gripped by the most rigid dogmatism. The very place in the mountains where the forces of the heart seemed to pour through with overwhelming simplicity, reaching the hearts of millions of unsophisticated people, was at the same time controlled and cloaked by forces which could ensure that a price of almost total incomprehension, misunderstanding and formal obscurantism, was exacted from them. Never in this life could most of them hope to understand what had really happened to them. As my father continued up the Gave de Pau to the foot of the Brêche de Roland with its colossal 1500 foot cliff, and the long climb up over Childe Roland’s famous path from Spain, he realised that this pass did not after all itself mark the highest and most dominating command and protection of the sacred valley of the Virgin. Behind it, hidden on the Spanish side, was a peak 1500 feet higher still. When he saw the name on the map, Mont Perdu, Monte Perdido, the Lost Mountain, his whole soul reverberated with the tragedy of Lourdes. For the time being, he realised, the heart centre of this whole range is darkened and obscured by that which can only he healed when the Christ Being comes again, and releases Christendom from its dogmatic thrall, reveals its lost origin, and links it once more with the Cosmos. Later on he found himself a few miles further east, and faced with a very different experience. This was at St. Bertrand de Comminges, familiar to him from the first story in one of his favourite horror books of adolescence, M R James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. This is the village where the very stones of the church excoriate with Gothic Horror. Bogles creep and leer from every corner, every gargoyle, every handhold of each pew seems intent on extruding and dispersing evil from the sacred substances of the tortured earth. A crocodile skin hangs on the wall to symbolise the death of a Dragon. Legend ascribes to the village the distinction of being one of the principal concentration camps of the Roman Empire. Even Annas and Caiaphas were sent there. Later Bertrand was sent by the Pope as a man holy enough to expunge the evil. But something of the horror remains, as Montague James realised. It was when my father saw that this section of the range was ruled by a mountain called Maladetta, Pic Maudit, the Accursed, that he began to wonder whether the whole range was not perhaps a conversation between very mighty beings, keeping in balance a microcosm of forces, whose ultimate resolution would speak with mighty power a giant Word, a formidable mantric syllable out of history into the resurrecting Temple of Christendom in some future century. The whole experience reached a kind of apotheosis for him when he came into the Cathar country, towards which, on this second day, we were slowly winding our way through increasingly impressive terrain. For at the top of the southern valley of the Y-shaped kingdom of ancient Sabarthez, (where in the heart of the mountains the last of the Albigensian Cathari were starved to death in darkness), at the head of the valley of the Sos, behind the castle of Montrealp de Sos, destroyed by Richelieu, and bearing the legend that it had been the Pyrenean version of the Castle of the Grail, my father read on the map - Pic Montcalm, the Mountain of Peace. Father felt there was a threefold structure, a kind of devic architecture, giving a clue to the Temple lay-out of the whole range. Calm to the east at Pic Montcalm, the calm of death which awaits resurrection; a smouldering curse surviving in the middle east at Pic Maudit, and a mighty being at the centre at Mont Perdu, whose meaning was still largely lost and forgotten. The pattern was clearly incomplete, a


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jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. There were tantalising clues, but he never had a chance to follow them up. My journey with Helène and Raymond, terrifying as it was, and if anything adding to the mystery rather than resolving anything, yet had the effect of involving me in the stories my father had told me as a sort of reassuring background. My determination to arrive at a rationale for Raymond’s experiences largely stemmed from the sense of ultimate meaning the very stones and streams conveyed to me, singing as they did all the time to me the songs my father’s stories faintly sang.

*** Raymond now takes over the log-book from mid afternoon on Wednesday.

*** This diary is becoming something of an inner pilgrimage, making visible an otherwise invisible companion, a fourth member who drives along with us, pointing out the features of the landscape, raying into the conversations a lateral commentary which is developing a personality of its own. For some reason or another Esther had never got round to telling me about this experience of her father’s before the war. When I read it, it started to open up a quite new dimension of my own experiences. It gave me a fulcrum with which to attain a still more distant and objective slant on the saga of Ramón de Foix, the little Spanish by-blow of the Comte de Foix’s younger brother, from whose toils I have now almost completely emerged. It was not that I had in any way identified with the three streams professor Corstorphine had become aware of in his youth. But what did emerge into my consciousness was the hitherto unnoticed fact that Ramón lived completely within the protection and blessing of the mountains themselves. For him the mountains were God. It was this more than the ‘parfaits’, more than the songs and legends, more that the ever haunting, ever present background melodies and lilting rhythms of the troubadours, more even than the ‘consolamentum’ itself, the holy consolamentum with its promise of a gateway through the impenetrable stone, through the shrieks of the torture, through the horrifying, overwhelming, yet releasing brightness and agony of the fire, into the Light that lay beyond the all-encompassing blackness of the freezing caves. For Ramón the totally awe-inspiring presence of the mountains themselves was what counted; but not just the separate mountains, it was the very being of the Pyrenées itself, so tremendous, filling the whole sky. Yet in the same breath and breadth of vision the mountain was a gentle young girl. infinitely tender, Pyrène herself, the eternal white maiden of the heart of the mountains, patiently waiting by the shores of the lake in the depths of the cavern of Lombrives where the last Cathars died, waiting for the liberation when her lover, the giant Hercules, releaser and dissolver of the bonds of relentless stone, should come for her in the last days. How many hours had Ramon sat in Lombrives by the precious font, the stalagmite grail with its cupful of holy water, Pyrène’s tears falling drop by drop from the roof above, never diminished, always there as a draught of hope for the pilgrim. So too would it soon be for the last five hundred for whom Ramon had felt so overpoweringly responsible. But he had failed to bring back the rescuer from England, the Templar who knew the way through the mountains into the top of the Sos valley, and over the pathways into Spain. They had died of hunger and cold and darkness. But not of thirst; the tears of Pyrène had been the draught of the consolamentum to the very end. Ramòn died in despair, not even noticing that Pyrène’s love was still enclosing him, that she was releasing his beloved companions at the very moment when he was craving audience with his dying breath at Ashridge with the Templar Master who would be able to return and show them the path to safety. It became my task as Raymond to come to this realisation and to lay Ramón’s ghost to sleep. There ought to be a special word to describe the transcendent tenderness and adoration that the successive embodiers of an eternal human spirit can come to feel for one another. I have been


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privileged to overcome the obsessive identification I experienced with a previous embodiment of my own higher being. It has been replaced by a feeling which must until recent times have been rare in human experience, a degree of sheer fellow-feeling quite unequalled by any love for a fellow human being I have met in any other way. It is neither Eros, nor philia nor even agape. Nor is it in any trivial sense self love. Yet it is a teacher for all these four. It must be something like the tenderness the creator feels for his creatures. It is the love the higher self feels for all the lower selves to which he gives a home. It is not I, Raymond, who loves Ramón. But there is slowly, from moment to moment, being born in me One, who loves Raymond and Ramón together, and begins to have a faint inkling how many others in our ‘family’ there are to love. And it is this family, this we, who begin to sense what that love must be like which truly loves our neighbour as ourself. What a self it is which loves that neighbour! And what a neighbour that is! ESTHER Wednesday evening I am writing at the side of a most wonderful little stream that encloses a flat grassy lawn, cropped, I suppose by rabbits and deer and mountain goats. Smooth and flat, incredibly green, and at this time of day and for the last two hours comfortably warm after a day of gruelling sunshine. Another stream separates from ours, a little higher up, so that the little lawn lies in the fork of a Y. Earlier there were butterflies in profusion. I saw a swallowtail, and several of its cousin podalirius, some black-veined whites, and in the distance what I am sure was an Apollo, and of course many blues and the smaller fritillaries. But now only an occasional skipper flits by to roost on the tall pendant grasses, where the blues and fritillaries are already hanging in dozens like grey and gold droplet leaves. Soon we shall roost too in the Dormobile standing in the lay-by just out of sight up the slope behind us. We are quiet and at peace now, but an hour ago we were in the middle of a disturbing emotional experience with which we have to come to terms. It is Wednesday evening. We must be somewhere near Lannes on the road between Tardets and Oloron. It is N618 on the map if you want to look it up. I’m not at all sure I shall be able to find it again; places look different if you have seen them with an altered consciousness. It is probably misleading to call it a disturbing emotional experience, without calling it also an altered state of consciousness. Perhaps the only thing disturbing about it is the aftermath of having managed, more or less successfully to remain in balance and in touch with each other, in a state of inner acceleration and heightening which came on for all three of us quite unexpectedly. It was after I did my butterfly walk-about and we had brought the picnic things out from the caravan. I was just about to lay the things out for the meal when I happened to catch sight of the other two at the edge of the green space and each about a hundred yards away from me, quite a distance. I then noticed that we appeared to form an exact equilateral triangle. It was then that the experience took off, as it were. For me that is - the others may have experienced it differently. What happened for me was that this triangle began to ‘buzz’ in my head, I felt a pressure there. It appeared as if the three points at which we stood became geometrically linked by straight lines, which I felt, but didn’t see, as light going to a common centre. The others clearly felt something too, since they both turned to face me as I got to my feet. It then appeared as if the common centre began to rise into the air vertically till it reached a point where, with the three of us, an invisible but powerfully felt tetrahedron was formed. We were all looking up to this point as if expecting to see something there. But all that happened was that the tetrahedron itself, outlined with invisible light, began now to glow with warmth which felt inexpressibly gentle and tender. I almost giggled at the thought that I was being loved by a tetrahedron, but was quickly sobered by the consideration that if I were a bit less thick I might be experiencing it somewhat differently.


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We then had the common impulses to walk towards one another, I think under the impression that this would somehow concentrate the tetrahedron, and bring the apex near enough to ‘see properly’, whatever that might turn out to mean. Anyway, this is what happened. I shut my eyes, or blinked, and opened them again, and found that the figure was in a short of way visible, and was somehow moving in colour as it got smaller, from invisible through yellow and apricot and peach towards a sort of rose-pink colour. I noticed the buzzing in my head had stopped, after going through a kind of intensification, and something like a rising musical note, which went beyond the audible range. Then, quite unexpectedly we all stopped, as if we weren’t allowed to cross a line. But really it was because the rose tetrahedron ‘said so’, not be being in a frightening sense formidable, but simply because the tenderness now really did become past bearing, and this was formidable. I know that tears began to spill over my eyelids, but I felt I had to control them or I would miss something important that was being, or would be said. But after that, on one level anyway, nothing more happened. One moment we were looking at something at the same time in front of us and within us. The next moment we were looking at each other. But we were not the same. We were taller, or steadier and more solid, or more present, or perhaps none of these. Anyway, different, and dearer. We fell into each other’s arms. We walked back to the food. At some point during the meal Alan handed me the diary, and said, “You’d better write it; better do it now while its fresh.” “I can’t possibly”, I said. “You’re probably the only one who can”, said Alan. “Then it won’t be written”, said I. However, I wrote it. The others haven’t read it yet. They probably won’t tonight. FRASER Thursday Time to ‘pontificate’ again apparently. Thinking about that word I realise of course that it means building bridges. The verbal bridges I build are, I should have thought, almost entirely to make things clearer to me, and are not particularly, perhaps not at all, audience-conscious. Raymond realises this better then most. He’s quite right that for a lot of the time when I’m with patients I say very little. But I have to do an awful lot of verbalising to get things clear to myself, and this gets one classed as an intellectual if one tries it out on people. I really would like to get to the point of being somehow able to transcend verbalisation. What happened yesterday went some way towards that for me. But both Raymond and I agreed after reading Esther’s account that we wouldn’t try to describe it ourselves. We also agreed that it was nothing like what she said; reading it nevertheless added a new dimension which was extremely important to us on its own account. It also had the effect of bringing him and me closer together, but I don’t quite know why this was. Just listen to me saying that! One of the casualties on this trip is my capacity as a theoretical psychologist. I’m beginning to feel positively imbecile. Raymond thinks this is no bad thing. I seem to remember him saying earlier that the doctor as therapist might turn out to be the first casualty of deepened insight. I wonder if he’s right. Apart from this there seems to be a general relaxation of any tensions that my still have persisted between us. And I think I shall stick my neck out to the extent of speculating that there may well be some kind of fourth presence along with us as we continue towards Lourdes. But I utterly decline to try and fit this idea into any previous frameworks I may have erected during this account or previously. I feel a bit elderly and defensive today, and might well relapse into an Eliotesque self-pity. As to ‘daring to eat a peach’, we seem to be offered them at every other restaurant meal. I’m getting sick of the things. It’s too early for ripe figs, which I adore. But there are plenty of apricots, and little sweet plums called mirabelles which I consume in quantity. I don’t know what I’m waffling on about. I’d better stop.


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*** They insisted on reading this during my next spell of driving. They rolled about the caravan floor with wild shrieks of mirth, alarming passers-by. Esther kept kissing my neck and ruffling my hair. We practically stampeded a flock of black goats near Betharram and thought we’d better stop altogether. In the end we calmed down and in fact cooled down by doing the marvellous underground trip in a boat through the caverns there. By the time we got into Lourdes it was almost dark, but we were in time for the impressive outdoor recessional, walking along with a thousand others in the dark, holding our candles and singing “Ave, ave, ave Maria”. All my anti-Catholicism dissolved away and I calmly entered the emotional stream without thought or criticism. Afterwards I thought that consciousness had to breathe. There is room in it for everything provided it is balanced and rhythmical. “So there is in Mother Church”, Catholics are inclined to say. “In theory, yes”, I usually answer, “But if it were true in practice you would extend it, where it needs extending, to include what you describe as hearsay”. “We do”, they say, “heretics exclude themselves, precisely by not being balanced and rhythmical”. And so the exclusiveness remains, side by side with Catholic comprehensiveness. Being a heretic is a decision, a basic stance, which fits me as I fit it. Even if I seem to understand a bit less every day it feels often like the darkness before the dawn. I shall go to bed. ESTHER Friday, about noon. There is something special about traversing these mountains parallel to their main direction as a mountain chain. The obvious thing is that you go up to an enormous height on a zigzag road and reach a shoulder called a col, then do the same down the other side. On a col you feel protection and privilege at the same time. You have the magnificent views of both peak and plain, and colossal winds may sweep across parallel to the peaks. But you are protected by mountains, often on both sides, and shelter slightly down on one side or the other is quickly reached. A less obvious aspect is that every col is a frontier between two valleys. Sometimes two ‘gaves’ are visible, or at least their course will be, from nearly the same spot. Your consciousness can link two worlds: can be the arena for the dialogue of two devas. The butterfly world is quite aware of this. Clear demarcations between two species or sub-species are frequently identified near a col. Nowhere is it more apparent that butterflies and their counterparts the flowering plants are the giving and receiving end of a language of communication between devic or elemental beings of a middle or ambassadorial level. Moving back and forth over such frontiers, as father did once in a space of only a few hundred yards in the Austrian mountains, where three closely-related mountain Erebia butterflies confronted one another across such a col, can bring one near to participation in a multi-facetted symposium in which one suspects all of nature is taking part. How different is the experience when one approaches the range at right angles. Coming to Lourdes by road or train out of the flat lands of ‘civilisation’, one comes unconsciously under the influence of that particular river and its attendant towns and villages. The car is parked, the train vacated, the hotel porter handles the luggage, the landlady produces a timetable of masses and pilgrimages and guided tours. Massive Irish women smoking cigars sip holy water out of thermos-flask tops on the steps of churches. Medals and rosaries and plastic icons spill out of trays in hundreds of thousands from rows of blue and gold and silver market stalls and boutiques. Wading, swimming one’s way through the smoke and jangle of this, there is the Basilica, and below it the Grotto. Hideous lime-encrusted crutches and coins and personal effects of all kinds lie and lean in the water. Hospital chairs and wheeled stretchers trundle by. But the peace and the faith and the reverence are palpable. Through the cloying, garish, sickly miasma glows the fitful light of holiness, the valid reality, the timeless hope, sparkling with undiminishable power. For those who suspect that there is a further cosmic background to all this, there is the road up through Argelès Gazost to Gèdre and Gavarnie, and behind them the Brêche and the high peaks. On the way the Catholics seek the strangely incongruous statue of Our Lady of the Rocks, outpost of the spirit of


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Lourdes in the middle of an ancient avalanche of tumbled stone. Perhaps for them it is not the statue, but the forbidding precipices and rock-falls that are incongruous, incursions of unredeemed matter into the reality of God’s Church. However, they resolve this, most of the pilgrim’s turn here and return to Lourdes and shelter and home. Mont Perdu looms in the background unseen and unsuspected. For the church there would not be much doubt which side of this confrontation is that of the lost, perhaps eternally. Perhaps a similarly constructed, but utterly different story could be told about a party of ghost-ridden occultists, amateurs and dilettantes of the black art fringes, and with pentacles and herbs and all the knick-knacks of witchery, mincing up the Garonne valley to St. Bertrand in the footsteps of M R James, to try their hand at reviving the antiquated eidola of dust-covered horrors and turning their powers towards the fulfilment of hell knows what trivial and highly personal satisfactions. Like ruling the world or some such irrelevance! I don’t think I’ll bother. The point is made. Monte Maladetta makes its own comment. One comes to realise, however, through this exercise how utterly insulated from each other these stories are; and how this has something to do with the geometry, the approach to reality itself at right-angles, unaware of the lateral dimension. It was precisely this lesson that seemed to me to have come home to roost in the contrast between the journey we are on now, and the one Helène and I undertook last year. These two journeys cross one another at right angles, and not only in the geometrical sense. The direct approach last year landed us in an earthbound involvement. We became imprisoned in a situation where what should have been transmuted into spirit remained caught down into the physical dimensions of rock and water and darkness and fear. Now we are homing into the world with a kind of lateral thinking. We are catching ourselves on the hop, submitting our own being to a shock assault out of a clear sky. The Cathar cross which you find everywhere in churchyards in the Langue d’Oc region has four equal arms. It represents, not the crucifixion of the Lord, but the impact of spirit upon matter, the stark right-angled welding of God upon the being of incarnated Man, in the person of Jesus Christ. The discontinuity, the sheer lateral thinking of the Christ Event, what Rudolf Steiner calls the Mystery of Golgotha, is missed by those who think religions are all the same, and one grows naturally and continuously out of another. Of course, this is true too, but it only constitutes the soil. Out of this soil unique plants grow. This Cosmic Christian plant is a very particular Rose. I don’t know quite who is writing this. It certainly isn’t Esther Corstorphine any more. Perhaps it is you, tetrahedron. No, it is I, who am also Esther, tetrahedron says. If I’m going to tell you everything I shall have to find a better name for you. I suppose it had better be ‘Rose’ a flower I have always had a love-hate relationship with. But equally I could call you ‘Cross’ in view of the thoughts that have been coming through in the last few minutes. Yes, I am quite aware of the associations you are putting into my mind. So ‘Rose Cross’ it is. I accept that this is who you may well be. I happily go along with the idea. It makes me feel very much at peace with you. RAYMOND Friday evening, at a Pension in Foix. While Esther sat beside me and wrote and gazed into the distance, and Alan dozed on his bunk in the back, I did the long hundred-mile trip along main roads through Tarbes, St. Gaudens and St. Girons towards Foix. For the time being we lost the mountains and became ordinary tourists covering the mileage. I know I am not all that safe as a driver, a bit erratic and inclined to lose my temper with other drivers’ rudeness and aggression. Today, however, I felt an unaccustomed calm. So much so that I began to realise how much I have changed in the last year and a half. For a moment then I felt a touch of that sickening lurch over the abyss again. It is to do with the real effort of will it takes to say the word ‘I’ and be sure what I mean by it. Although I have lost the double identity feeling and am quite secure in this present Raymond personality, I still know that remembering Ramon has changed me. His fire and zeal is foreign to my quiet, rather self-effacing nature, and though I have managed to lay all that to rest


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in his English grave, a lot rubbed off on me while I was still trying to keep him alive. We come to resemble what we love. Altogether the notion of reincarnation is not one to play about with lightly. It takes one quickly into a realm where the price of safety is truly eternal vigilance. It takes more courage to sleep when it can no longer be taken entirely for granted what one will wake to. I expect you have read the Castañeda books. If not, I shall tell you that one is called Journey to Ixtlan. The title is taken from the experience of the character whose birthplace Ixtlan was. But he opted, or was chosen, to go through an initiatory experience as a shaman or magician. This involves among other things the emergence of a second self. One of the discoveries he made was that there is no way, once one has left the safe harbour of a simple identity, to find one’s way, as we say, ‘home’. The point of the title was, there is no journey to Ixtlan. Loss of simple identity is, among other things, a loss of innocence. One faces the long struggle, through the desert of experience, to a longed for, but by no means certain harbour, which Blake called Imagination, which in a sense is a restoration of innocence in a transcended form. I think what is happening to us all on this journey is the miraculous discovery that, although there is no turning back on the path which loses Ixtlan, it is not necessarily a path that has to be followed alone. The grace of companionship on the way, although one relies on it at one’s peril, is not necessarily withheld. And beyond companionship, indeed inseparable from it at any level which gives relationships their real meaning, there lies the emergence of some form of invisible companionship. The precise form of this is describable in so many soul-languages that it would be superfluous to point far beyond the immediate one we three are experiencing. We could cal it the merging of our still inviolable separateness in a common fourth being, who sits beside us and guards us from these new perils. I listen to him now, speaking through me, and it is still I who am speaking. “The dangers to which you have woken” he says “were there before you woke. It is not my role that has changed, but your participation in it. You are beings who till not thought you were sailing along the road of life in the same way as you fly in your dreams. Now you wake and look down, and see for the first time you are on a bicycle that you have been steering unconsciously. My presence made this possible. I am still here, but now you are intermittently aware of me. The bicycle was there all along. You steered it alright while you were asleep, so go on steering it now. There’s no need suddenly to get wheel-wobble and crash just because you’re awake. If you need to, go back to sleep. Things will go on as before. The difference is, now you have woken you will wake again. There is no way for me to make it so that you never woke in the first place. There is now way back to Ixtlan. But all is well. I am here. Sweet dreams!” “What price eternal vigilance, then?” “You missed the point. There has always been eternal vigilance. There still is. You have just become aware of it.” “Whose vigilance is it?” “Why of course, our own. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you with a cup of tea!” FRASER Saturday I have thought so long about it all that now I’m here I don’t know what to do with it. There is such a thing as being too articulate. I feel as if I’ve verbalised it all away into fragments. In a sense there is nothing left and I have a feeling of nakedness. I don’t think it is simply pretensions I am stripped bare of, though since Wednesday I find myself increasingly wondering whether I can possibly go back to my work. Maybe it really is just pretensions. I find it a shocking, really quite impossible thought that the whole of my posture as a psychologist is simply a frontage for an abject bankruptcy of inner resources. In fact I know quite deeply that this is not true. On the other hand, something or other has been stripping my self-image down to some very bare bones ever since the experience in the mountains on Wednesday afternoon. I don’t think any of us will ever be quite the same again. AI as an older man probably had more to lose, and I am not making a particularly good job of patching up the fragments of my personality and presenting a front to the other two.


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Although Raymond and I agreed to restrain any attempt to describe our experiences then and there, we have not been able to ignore the inevitable developments that have followed them. For me it has been as if a seed was planted right inside my consciousness, which has now begun to germinate and pursue an independent life of its own. Something tells me that if I can allow this to go on happening, and make sense of it, it will provide me with all the ‘front’ I need. Having come to this thought I find I am able to follow it by realising that Esther and Raymond have each in their own quite different ways been changed since Wednesday just as fundamentally as I have. I must stop encouraging in myself the feeling that I am simply being dragged along in the slipstream of an experience that they understand much better than I do, and moreover that they can communicate it to each other in a special way which leaves me blundering along behind. I find myself confessing that for years now I have had an increasing feeling of inferiority to clients. They live in a real world, I have thought, to which I have access only in the vicarious sense of listening to them. It is just because I feel myself on the outside of life looking in, like an astronaut crawling about on the surface, repairing a space ship, that I have been such an effective instrument in reflecting people’s lives back to them as a counsellor. I have seen it as my function to polish and re-polish a mirror-like surface of myself for people, so that by merely listening to their self-revelations I have enabled them to see themselves in a new light. The healing which has so often come about in peoples’ lives through this has been a healing reached by their own efforts to perceive this self-image in me, for which I have acted simply as a catalyst. Moreover the love and gratitude they have often expressed after the resolution of their problems I have seen simply as an extension and growth of their self-love to the point where it transcends the trivial and solipsistic and becomes a genuine reverence for their real being, upon which they could build in a new way. What has happened, among other things, since Wednesday is that I have almost convinced myself that my professional life is little more than an elaborate cop-out. My bluff has been called, and I have been wallowing in the feeling that I am an under fraud. I’m glad Raymond stated to write yesterday about the Castañeda books. The teacher Don Juan in those books is more scathing about the tendency in seekers to indulge in feelings of their own inadequacy and nonentity than about any other shortcoming. I shall now stop indulging, and attempt a hard, clear existential look at the actual processes which come about through my healing work, and try to see these objectively, as if it were someone else who had brought them about. This should not be too difficult, because I can feel almost from moment to moment as if the real weight of my sense of self is increasingly resting on a newborn squalling infant inside me who has only been in existence since Wednesday afternoon. This pinkish or rose-coloured child has no views one way or another about solipsism or self-pity, of which he has no experience. We, he and I, look out on the world with unalloyed wonder and expectancy. We have no preconceptions whatever about what is going to happen next, and so have no doubts at all about our combined, in fact, unified, ability to meet whatever comes. As for Raymond and Esther’s contention that we have been joined by a fourth member of the party, they are quite clearly correct. We are it! ESTHER Sunday If anybody has been thinking since Wednesday that we would arrive here like three Grail Knights in shining armour and ride in triumph up the Ariée to sort everybody out, rescue Helène, and ride home in technicolour silhouette into the setting sun, the events of the last twenty-four hours should have laid any such notion to rest. We found a very nice pension in Foix with a motherly landlady who clearly wants us to stay the week. Yesterday morning about seven Raymond and I strolled out into the town leaving Alan asleep and leaned over the parapet of the bridge watching the river. Raymond was still in the serene state that has been with him all the time since Friday. The dialogue between him and the picture he holds of the life as Ramòn grows almost from minute to minute.


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The sweet mystery of my participation in this lifts me at times into a state of such bliss I can hardly bear it in my ordinary life of feeling. It spills over into helpless tears, which our lovemaking only partly assuages. But ever and again we find ourselves turning at the same moment to ‘Rose Cross’, breathing out into an identification with him, and breathing in again to find ourselves. In these moments I find myself thanking Arthur Guirdham for that wonderful expression, ‘We are one another”, which he used as title for one of the books he wrote out of this Cathar experience. I really think that the acceleration of inward growth, and the sense of impending events that we all feel, and don’t particularly feel like talking about, has itself written ‘finis’ in the diary. I certainly don’t feel I can entirely share any more everything that is happening in words, especially with Alan. And this is not in any way because we feel a distance from him; on the contrary we are incredibly close. But of course he is quite right. The rebirth in him has plummeted to quite different depth in him from that in either Raymond or me. In a very unmistakable way Alan has become our child. One could regard this as the price he has to pay for the years long build up of sophistication in his conceptual life. But in another way he is also years ahead of us, on the threshold of a simplicity which, at least in this life, it may take Ray and I much longer to reach. I suppose the main problem is how to afford Alan the real protection he needs without at the same time indulging his indulgence, which is a long established ploy to deal with his vulnerability, and won’t be dismissed in short order by his determination to be existential about his work. We also have to help him not to throw all that down the drain as his confidence in rebirth begins to flex its muscles. Incidentally, before I forget to write it down, a phrase came to me early this morning which I need to incorporate in a poem. It was to do with achieving, through inner death and resurrection, the same degree of distance, ‘dis-identification’ (to invent a word for it,) from one’s present incarnation that one implicitly has from any previous incarnation. This is what Raymond is going through in his experience with Rose Cross. The mere understanding of previous lives of yours that other people tell you about already takes you one step along this road. In fact I think it can be better to…. What do I mean, ‘better’? Of course it’s not better, one has no control over how the relationship to far-memory evolves… What I mean is that it might be easier to come to terms with a sympathetic grasp of a previous incarnation if one were told about it by a former companion who remembered it, than to be plunged neck and crop into a hallucinated identification as Raymond was. All the same, life itself actually brought him to the ‘mental illness’ bit, and he did actually battle through, and so surged ahead to a priceless vantage point, not for himself perhaps, but for others. O my dear Lord, it is always of course for others. We are one another. And that of course was what he was doing inadvertently all the time last year. Every time I had to battle with him and Helène in France and later with him and Alan in England, to keep my own feet on the ground. I came further and further into the actual grasping of the nature of reincarnation, what the real relationship between this self and previous selves really is, just how it is mediated by a so-called higher being common to all, so that one comes step by step nearer to the point when that higher being is able to burst through, hatching like a butterfly from the pressure to which one’s lower self is being submitted. Death and resurrection. The lower self dies, as all previous lower selves have died, possibly through such a breakthrough, but in the end physically. Only then might one catch a glimpse of a perspective embracing one’s whole self, and all its successive personalities.

---oOo--- Be patient, for you will be met. From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’


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CHAPTER SEVEN CLOTHILDE SUNDAY They should be here soon. I ought to know by now that however clearly the inner pictures foreshadow coming events, the one thing one can never be certain about is timing. The habit of thinking about the supersensible counterparts of physical events as if they operated on the same time scale dies hard. It is so easy to forget that the earthly reckoning of time is basically spatial, whereas even the closest ethereal time exists only on a rhythmic wave, and is therefore in one sense always present. Its actual immediacy can therefore alter according to the intensity with which the participants are experiencing it. If their consciousness and will is intensifying, the time scale shortens, meaning they will be here more quickly. I believe that this has been happening. How I have retained my faith in the outcome of all this in the last year I really don’t know. Accepting that Raymond had gone back to England with his mind still in hopeless confusion was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. Yet I knew that only he could tease out the strands of reality from the illusion in which he was involved, and to do this he had if at all possible to meet the main characters implicated in his unresolved situation, and come to terms with them. Failing this he would have the same thing to do all over again in another life, in a different form, and perhaps in circumstances even less propitious. There are other dimensions, and I don’t really know how aware of them he is. Although I do know that in the gaps of his madness he sometimes realised last year that more rested on his ability to solve his own identity problem than just the question of his own sanity. Later, when he reverted almost entirely to a hopeless dedication to working out a fourteenth century problem instead of the one that faced him this time, he ceased to see what a powerful effect he was having on the people here, who depend on me. I’ve found it impossible to separate these events from the planetary processes that have been going on all year. I suppose I half feared that in some way he really would not survive the ordeal, and that the real danger point was at Christmas time. As this may turn out to be part of the documentation of a chapter in the history of these valleys at rather a crucial stage, I feel it is important to say something about these planetary alignments. It is the first time for nearly 200 years that Jupiter and Saturn have come into conjunction, and then gone into a retrograde stage in the same part of the sky together. As they travel at different speeds Jupiter therefore overtook Saturn twice more before finally leaving the slower planet behind, so the conjunction took place three times in a seven-month period. The connection between these events and what Raymond was going through will be apparent later. It was quite clear last summer that Raymond was going into a situation which would threaten his mental stability unless he faced the most obvious corollary which confronts anyone who starts to remember a past incarnation before he is adequately prepared for such an experience. This corollary is that at the end of the incarnation you die. Freudians talk about birth-traumas, but we are not yet accustomed in the consulting room to giving a clinical identity to the increasing number of death-traumas affecting people now that recollection of their past lives is on the increase. Clearly hardly anyone comes to the end of a life with all problems solved; loose ends snipped off and bows neatly tied. When people do manage this there is something a bit inhuman about it. One can feel that there is not much left there to love or to hope for. Raymond, however, was perhaps rather an extreme case of the opposite situation. When he came to me for a casual check up in April last year at my practice in Tarascon, I saw very quickly that his karma had brought him to the valleys to sort out an old problem. More and more people have been doing this in the last twenty or thirty years; a lot of them involved in modern esoteric movements.


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Rudolf Steiner in particular was on record as saying that many former Cathars would find their way in this century into his so-called ‘anthroposophical’ movement. Raymond had no connection with this movement. In a way it would have been easier for him if he had. The sheer bewilderment of finding himself week by week in situations where he had strong memories and fears which he knew perfectly well tied up in no way with his actual life, threw him quickly into total confusion. The fear that he was going mad was worse than the experiences themselves. It has been my problem and responsibility to remember my involvement in those times with considerable clarity and accuracy. I knew I had never met Raymond before, but I knew with equal certainty that his arrival on my doorstep now was somehow closely linked with our respective orientations in Cathar times. To have explored this dimension with him there and then, would have been to throw him into even worse confusion. I had to be content to allow him to pour out his experiences, hallucinatory and otherwise, and simply myself to act as a channel, a waste pipe, for the mounting energies. Helping as best I could to ground him in his present situation, and concealing any past links that I began to remember with his story. The theme again and again in his mounting obsession was death. As his memories of the life in the caverns round Ussat-les-Bains grew sharper he was clearly participating day by day in the creeping paralysis of fear that dogged the footsteps of the heretics. It was eighty-four years since the outer life of the movement as an open culture and civilisation had been crushed and exterminated forever at Montségur. ‘Croyants’ remembered Montségur, the awful siege and starvation, the loss of friends, the burnings, the screams of the dying, as a nightmare of childhood tales told by their parents. This was the terrible bridge which separated them from the happy romantic lives among the troubadours, the poets, the Moorish savants, the wandering ‘parfaits’, who filled the memories of their parents and grandparents. Their own memories were of homelessness and privation, the constant threat of exposure by the secret spies of the Inquisition, the fear of strangers, the village life suddenly interrupted by fearful warnings in the night, the escapes to the caves, the weeks of sleeping in the dark and the cold. Then in later years Raymond remembered the caves becoming a permanent home. Remembered his own development in the movement, the joy of seeing older friends passing stage after stage up the initiatory path, the privilege of himself being allowed to enter, first one, and then a second sanctuary in the mountains. The reverential awe with which he received certain secret information, the ecstasy as this information began to act as a key to open windows in his inner life of soul. Then the gratitude and sure-footedness as he realised how fully in control the path was, how nothing was ever allowed to be released to the aspiring ‘croyant’ too soon, but that when it was revealed it answered all those questions which burned most deeply at that very time. But for him and his friends all these experiences felt like a race against time. He knew as they all did that it was literally a matter of time before the evidence of their existence, the sheer numbers of Cathars concealed in the mountains, would be fully apparent to the Inquisition. They would inevitably be traced to their actual lair and ruthlessly exterminated. Death loomed over the entire society, just as now death loomed over the consciousness of Raymond in the twentieth century. This was why as his temporary physician, seeing through my astrological knowledge the first phase of the triple conjunction moving inexorably towards the moment when after Christmas the life and death forces first opposed one another, I began to see this event cosmically as one of Death and Resurrection. Raymond’s own chart linked him inseparably to this aspect. He would either have to face the fact of his death in Cathar times consciously in this life, or he would run the grave risk of permanent madness or actual premature death before he had come to terms with the necessity for transformation. I knew that I had certainly been deeply involved with this process in the fourteenth century, and had clear memories of gathering together survivors from the Ariège and elsewhere during the 1330s and 1340s, and founding secret cells in various parts of Europe and even England, chiefly through the Knights Hospitallers. But I could not yet see how it was that destiny had brought me now to France once again to meet the successive waves of young people, who were going through at Montségur and here in the caves a kind of catalytic awakening of memory for the fact of reincarnation. For it is often much more the fact of reincarnation and the opening up of a path for understanding it, and removing


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the many illusions that surround it, that people take away from here, rather than actual soul memories. Antonin Gadal in the forties and fifties was so right in describing Montségur as ‘le Phare du Catharisme’. It was truly a guiding beacon for hundreds, a lighthouse illuminating their arrival at crucial stages in their understanding. Now Christmas is the most likely time of year to go into the darkness of earthly death with the realisation that new life, a Christ Child, is miraculously born out of it. Yet I feel intuitively that Raymond did not die at Christmas time last year. At Easter time or thereabouts, however, there is a new possibility of crisis. A few weeks before Easter the two planets had met again in their retrograde state. Just as I identified the first phase with Death and Resurrection, I saw this second conjunction as a Crisis of Identity. I think it is most likely that about this time Raymond would have been first able to sort out in his mind which of his experiences belonged to which century. I see him coming through as Raymond to a more detailed relationship with his Cathar counterpart, greeting him as a brother rather than confusing him with his present identity. This crisis too has its own characteristic perils. It is all very well coming psychologically to the point where one is able to contain at some level of consciousness the acceptance of a multiple identity. What is much more equivocal is whether there is any realm in which this containment can survive the pressures of ordinary life. This would be my actual definition of schizophrenia, that our civilisation is becoming littered with the casualties of this process, people who fail to cross this second threshold. Here again, Easter is the ideal season in which to weather this storm. At Easter Jesus dies, releasing the Christ; but Christ goes through this death, and resurrects into the earth again. A third identity, the resurrected Christ, comes into existence as a transcended stage of the embodied Christ. The conquest of schizophrenia is conditional upon the birth of a transcendent entity into consciousness, but one that does not lose its hold upon the earth. Lo, I am with you always. If this stage can be achieved, it remains accessible as a permanent resource of consciousness. It will be clear that this pattern has in it the seeds of its own next phase, and that this is partly my reason for expecting that Raymond will appear, with or without companions, not so very long after the third conjunction of the planets on July 24th. If death and resurrection was the theme on Dec 31st, and schizophrenia, the meeting with the double, on March 4th, then it will be necessary to embody this third phase, when the planets are once more moving forward on their usual trajectory, in a concept which emerges logically from the other two. I see it as having something to do with initiation, with the ratification of the two stages of rebirth and crisis of identity in a definitive commitment, the crossing of a threshold, or bridge of consciousness, something involving a higher stage of will. This threefold development has a dynamic with a clear line through self and otherness. The self dies and resurrects; the meeting with the double is both self and other; but in initiation what is met is that other. The self comes to meet one out of the otherness of events. One experiences for the first time I AM THAT. One has the direct experience that the events coming to meet one in life are just as much direct embodiments of the self as is the soul, experienced inwardly, who comes to meet them. All of this lies in the womb of time for us who are involved with these happenings. Not least for the girls, who I haven’t mentioned yet. One day when he was more than usually identified with his Cathar self, Raymond came to my cottage in Ussat in a high state of excitement. It must have been about August 20th. For some years now there has been a regular meeting at this house, which I have led, and which has been a serious, but not particularly esoteric, study of the civilisation of early Langue d’Oc, the surviving works of the troubadours, the minnesingers, and so on. It arose in the first place out of the pioneering work of Roché, Gadal and others who had their own magazine which is still published. When he first appeared in the area Raymond used to come to these meetings, in fact I encouraged him to do so when he first came to my surgery. I felt inclined to keep an eye on him in a more social setting, especially when I began to realise that his concern with the Albigeois story was becoming a bit obsessional.


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On this occasion I really began to have the feeling for the first time that his identification with the Cathar time was slipping over into hallucination. He started to talk about ‘the girls’ in a way that made it clear that he was confusing the group of his young contemporaries in the Cathar times with the two young ladies I still have to write about. He began to speak very excitedly about a journey to England he now had to make which would be vitally important now that Inquisition pressure seemed to be working up to a final confrontation. He couldn’t tell me any more details, as the less people knew about it this end the less they would be able to reveal under torture if they were captured by the Inquisition. This was why he had to take the girls with him. The trouble was he couldn’t find the dark one. Did I know where she was? I now became a bit alarmed, as in this life at least they had certainly been together up until the last time he visited me, which was the previous week. But he was in no condition to be quizzed about the present day girl and her friend. I asked him to be sure and let me know if he found her; didn’t the other girl know where she was? He looked at me very suspiciously, and I was aware I had made a gaffe. “Which other girl?” he asked. “What do you know about another girl?” “Why, the Scottish girl, Esther, the one with straight red hair.” “I don’t know any Scottish girls”, he said darkly, “I shouldn’t be talking to you at all”. This was the last time I saw him. To explain now about the two girls. The previous year another holiday visitor, a girl from Toulouse called Helène Fauré, had come to the meetings on a few occasions, and last year she turned up again bringing a Scottish girl of whom I got an immediate good impression. Heléne herself was not particularly helpful at the meetings, somewhat hysterical, and critical of what she called the rather dry academic tone of the studies. But on other occasions she has visited me privately, and then she had been more perceptive, and I had told her a great deal about the Cathar history and background, and given her things to read. When she brought her Scottish friend Esther to meet me I thought this would be followed up. But this didn’t happen; the reason for which became clear. It was because when they came to the group they met Raymond. It was obvious during the evening that there was a strong spark of attraction between all three of them. But as far as the meeting was concerned we didn’t see them again. This was somewhat of a relief, as they would certainly have dominated the proceedings, and in a direction which most of the others were not yet ready to go. Raymond, however, also continued to visit me privately and it was clear that the trio were spending a great deal of time together. As the summer went on Raymond’s visits became more infrequent, and I became more concerned. Then as I have described, communication ceased. One day towards the end of August I went in to the clinic in Toulouse where I do a monthly psychiatric rota. A colleague called across to me in the common-room: “Hey, Perrier, aren’t you interested in the Albigeois?” “Yes, why?” “Case sheet here might interest you.” Of course it was Helène. She’d been in about a week, found wandering in the mountains somewhere up the Sos valley, wet and distraught, completely out of herself. Before sedation nobody had been able to make any sense of the situation, indeed it could simply have been shock. But under drugs there was a persistent Cathar content to her ramblings, and when I told the registrar I knew her he was prepared to see if I could get any sense out of her. However, it was clear that she didn’t recognise me at all. I sat with her for some time before her ramblings became any more coherent. Then gradually and with growing horror I began to realise where she imagined herself to be. If you have never been by yourself in the heart of a mountain cavern without lighting, it is almost impossible to convey qualitatively how much blacker than black, quieter than quiet, how penetratingly cold the experience is. I once tried it out artificially by asking a guide to switch off the lighting for me for a few minutes while the party started back from the innermost point by the lake in Lombrives. He


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played along with me, but it can’t have been more than about three minutes. I have never quite forgotten that distant sound of retreating footsteps. Helène started to radiate across to me, as much in her silences as in what she whispered, what this was like after hours and days, past the point when there was any way of gauging the passage of time. It was not only horror, it was ecstasy, and bliss, fear and misery, increasing despair and increasing peace. And then gradually there came the slow dawning through delirium and hallucination the approach of an indescribable light and joy as death came nearer. But for me the listener, the greater her light and joy, the more sober my assessment of her psychiatric condition. I was able to arrange with the hospital authorities to take her retrospectively onto my register of patients and visit her parents in that capacity. To my surprise it was over two months since they had heard from her. I imagined her as living at home, but apparently she had moved into lodgings in the town over a year earlier. Life, particularly with her father, had become increasingly difficult, and her mother was not even allowed to visit her. Helène visited her mother when her father was at work, and she and her mother got on reasonably well. But affection was increasingly eroded by mutual irritation, and her visits became less frequent. When her student’s grant ended without her getting a degree in England she told her mother she wanted to try and settle in England, which she preferred, and planned to start on the usual ‘au pair’ basis. And now this trouble. The hospital authorities had no particular plans for treatment. I went on visiting, but there was no improvement. The authorities were prepared to discharge her to her parents’ care, so it became a matter of me persuading the parents to have her out on my say-so. I knew what I was taking on, and that I was saddling myself with her in a less than professional way. Or perhaps more than professional, I thought. The Faurés were compliant, or at least Mm. Fauré appeared to trust me, so I took Helène in the car back to Ussat. Tuesday They’ve arrived. Thursday Raymond had the grace to phone me before actually turning up at the front door. “Dr Perrier?” “Hallo, Raymond.” Silence. My heart began to thump a bit. “Raymond?” “Yes, still here. You sounded as if you expected it to be me.” “Yes, I did. I’ve been expecting you for a week.” Then in case this might sound over dramatic, I said: “Nothing particularly clairvoyant about it. More a matter of calculation. All the same I’m mightily relieved to hear your voice. Are you alone?. “No.” “The Scottish girl? Esther, was it?” “Yes her. And someone else.” My heart beat faster still. I chipped in before he could elaborate. “Where are you?” “How are you?” “Just the three of us. Two men. Esther and I live together.” Poor Helène, I thought. “All right, you’d better come along straight away. Your friend can sleep at Mme Brault’s next door. There’s room for you two here. Have you eaten?” “Yes, we’re fine. We’re in a Dormobile van. We’ve just finished lunch. See you in. say an hour.” My thoughts were going round like a whirlpool. There was only one person he was likely to have brought, but would he have brought that person unless he were still hallucinated? He had sounded very much together. I began to entertain a fantastic hope. Memory of past incarnations, even if one has attained considerable clarity, never returns all of a piece. It is like any other form of amnesia in that it returns in patches, sometimes just a haunting word or sentence, a familiar smell, sometimes whole sequences, of weeks, months, or even years at a time, whole panoramas which you wonder how you could ever have forgotten. One of the things which one would not perhaps immediately think of is that when the secret knowledge one has in past lives really was held by solemn oath as a secret, even under a kind of hypnotism, it becomes ten times harder to recall it from one incarnation to another. Listening to whole patches of Raymond’s memories last year, I became aware that he, that is Ramón and a group of other young Cathars, had been involved in a conspiracy to encompass the escape of a large number, perhaps the whole five hundred, survivors by a


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secret route over the mountains into Spain. This series of patchy incoherent memories had started to arouse in me an extraordinary tension which felt remarkably like amnesia. I slowly became convinced that I held a key to this conspiracy which I didn’t know I possessed. However, the pressure of this amnesiac tension found a let-out by arousing a series of other half-memories that I was sure had a bearing on the matter. It was something Antonin Gadal had once told me in my youth, that he was convinced there was a cave route, right through the mountains beyond the underground lake, and that it emerged high up in the Sos valley, not so very far from the Chateau de Montreal-de Sos itself. Was this the way the young conspirators had planned to lead the party? What made them think they could find this route through miles and miles of mountain caverns? Was this the secret knowledge I myself possessed? But I was convinced that I had never possessed any such knowledge. Nothing of my memories of that time, with all its Templar and Hospitaller connections in other parts of Europe, would have given me that kind of detailed psychological skill. The only kind of knowledge that could be relevant would be in the realm of cipher, code words, the locking away of secrets themselves, secrets of any kind. Then as now I had psychological skills appropriate to the times. Had the youngsters hit on some secret, which I had played a part in concealing? In that case, why had Ramón gone to England? Then, suddenly I remembered. After the horrors of the Templar destruction in 1307 and 1308, the few of us Templars who remained were widely scattered. Many were concealed among the Knights Hospitallers, but among the Cathars there were still Albigeois and Patarene groups about, and Bogomils relatively untouched further east. So a good many of us, especially those who had long been link men between the lazy vulnerable establishments that Philippe le Bel had largely massacred, simply went underground into well established secret lines of communication, and continued our spiritual work in this way, helping to encourage and train the groups that still remained to learn the technique of work in cells that could survive anonymously within an orthodox framework. I now remembered a certain Templar Master in England. It was part of my task to service Hospitaller and other respectable groups where Templars were concealed with certain hypnotic skills, planting mental blocks which could only be released by code-words known only to myself and others of my psychological craft order. The only person I knew of whom Ramon might be able to contact was a man I had visited there ten years earlier. We were never informed of the actual content of the secret knowledge it was our task to put under hypnotic lock and key. Was this the man who knew the way through the caves? The sudden extermination of the remaining Ariège Cathar groups had taken me by surprise in the middle of a secret mission. It was my precise function in regard to this that I was still struggling unsuccessfully to recall. If my wild guess or intuition was right, and Raymond’s destiny had in fact led him through his illness to the very man he had so desperately needed when he was Ramón, then I was about to confront someone with whom I was supposed to complete a secret mission, but 652 years too late! Moreover, it was a man I had only met once even then, and he had been simply one of a series of very many clients or patients, with whom my only connection had been though a code word, chosen for that mission and never used again. I am not so blasé about far memory as to be immune to the excitement of the occasional breakthrough of almost incredible unlikelihood when the synchronous mechanics of karma and reincarnation miraculously reveal themselves. I could now only wait with a dry mouth for their appearance on my doorstep. I busied myself bustling around making beds and preparing a snack meal, and then going in to Marie Brault next door to borrow her spare room, and making up the bed in there. The afternoon wore on. I had known it would be more than an hour.


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But the waiting was over at last, and suddenly there was Raymond with his arms round me. This had never been our relationship before, but the relief of tension, and his obvious clarity of mind and new maturity had brought us both a step further. Esther hugged me to. Then I was confronting across the room a tall middle-aged and strikingly handsome Scotsman, with grey hair in a quiffe and clear, bright blue eyes. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, and the world momentarily stopped for us. Then he stepped across the room and gripped my hands in both his. “You came to see me at Ashridge”, he said. “You were the one I was supposed to meet if anything ever went wrong and my knowledge was needed. But you never sent for me.” Raymond was looking from one to the other of us in absolute astonishment. “You were the Knight, Dr Perrier”, he burst out, “All the time it was you, the one thing last year that never occurred to me. And Alan, what’s come over you? I thought you never remembered anything of past lives.” “I don’t” said Alan. “At least I thought I didn’t. But this is an absolutely clear picture, like a still shot from a film. That is all it is, it has no context, just an isolated scene with no before and after.” Raymond was practically gibbering, and Esther was sitting in the corner of the room quietly weeping. “But Dr Perrier”, persisted Raymond, “why didn’t you tell me last year?” “Just think back, my dear boy. You were desperately confused and ill. Anything I could have said, and indeed some of the things I did say, would simply have driven you further into confusion and paranoia. Another thing, which you will find harder to believe, is that actually I hadn’t made the connection either. I knew I had something to do with your conspiracy, but I couldn’t remember what. You’re missing the obvious. We never met, and the secret knowledge, which I had, successfully eluded the barrier of successive incarnations. In fact..” I looked across at the handsome Scot and laughed. “I think it’s time someone introduced us”, I said. He looked at me with such tenderness I knew it was going to be all right. “Otherwise I shall never remember the code-word. I’m not sure I shall anyway.” “Dr Fraser, meet Dr Perrier”, laughed Raymond, moving across to Esther. He knelt beside her and enfolded her in his arms. “Darling, it’s going to be all right”, he said. “Yes, I believe it is, sweetheart”, she replied. “But do you mean to say you’ve forgotten Helène altogether?” “You know, for the time being I really had forgotten her.” “Yes darling you’ve been forgetting her for six hundred and fifty years. The trouble is, though; she’s never forgotten you. Now here you are forgetting her entirely the second time round.” Esther got up. “Dr Perrier, I’ve been waiting to ask you this ever since we came. It was here Raymond met Helène and me. She talked so much about you, and you were the one here who knew her. Yet when we were writing to Toulouse to try and find out where she was, it somehow never occurred to us to follow it up this end. Partly it was Raymond’s illness. We were fighting for his sanity for months. But partly it was that I too was caught up in what was almost a hallucination. I wasn’t entirely sure how much of the experience was real. Have you any idea what happened to her?” “Fortunately I have”, I replied. “She’s upstairs in bed and asleep.” The wave of relief across the room was palpable. Suddenly everybody was talking at once. There was a crescendo of voices and laughter, and I quickly shut the door in case Helène woke. Marie Brault chose that moment to enter massively through the kitchen calling, “Mon dieu, quel bruit! De quoi s’agit il? Vous allez réveiller les morts, sans parler de la demoiselle qui dort á l’étage du dessus. Allez Clothilde, présente moi la personne qui séjourne avec moi.” She was introduced all round. She has no English and only Raymond speaks more than a very little French. Thank God for that little, thought I, stealing a glance at my Scotsman. Then I realised that Esther was still watching me, as she had continued to do ever since her question. Amid the psychic swirling and colour of the mingling auras in the room she stood like a vertical pillar of radiance and strength. I suddenly felt very sorry for her. She’s the strong one of this lot, I thought ruefully. Raymond, and also my dear Alan, I thought, have clearly got an awful long way to go. But just look at this lass. I remembered my disappointment when she didn’t return last year. Perhaps now, I thought. This is someone I could work with. She came across to me as the others struggled with the language. “She’s ill, isn’t she?” she said. “I mean really ill?” I nodded helplessly. “Is there any hope?” Esther went on. “Is she going to get better?” “I don’t think we can talk now”, I said. “I want to talk to you


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first. We’ll get Dr Fraser settled, then when Raymond’s asleep come down here for a nightcap. We’ll drink coffee and talk.” I tried to grip her hand reassuringly, but she only sighed. Then her eyes twinkled. “He’s nice, isn’t he, my old Cousin Alan?” My grip on her hand changed to a little slap, and I felt myself colouring. We looked at each other, and then spontaneously we were both cuddling, and tears spilled over. “I said to Raymond I thought it would all work out”, she said. “But I think I’m going to lose him.” “We don’t really lose anybody”, I replied. “Mais nous verrons. Nous verrons. À plus tard.” Things sorted themselves out. They took their snacks to their rooms, and I collapsed in front of the hearth, where I keep a log fire going even in summer. This high up it gets chilly at night. After such a day and such a turmoil of emotions I didn’t really feel much like talking, but I felt Esther needed to get a few things off her chest. Perhaps we both realised that it was we who would have to carry the situation and steer it through if possible to a creative outcome. Esther came down fairly soon in her night things. “Here, I’ll get you a dressing gown”, I said. “Pour yourself some coffee, if you can take it at this time of night.” We settled down, with Esther on the hearth rug at my feet. “Did Raymond get off to sleep?” “No, but I told him I wasn’t sleepy and was going down for a drink. He didn’t want one. I think he’ll be asleep very soon. I wondered”, she said after a pause, “whether he would perhaps creep into Helène’s room” “Do you think he might?” “I don’t really think so. The relationship scares him, he hasn’t come to terms with it. I don’t think he ever loved her, you see, even as Ramón. But he was her hero, and he felt responsible for her.” “How much do you remember about the last two or three days before you left?” I asked. “Well, I remember it all now,” said Esther. “We’ve worked on it for so long. But it is still a sickening, almost unbearable nightmare. At first, when Helene and I arrived in the area, I managed to keep the strands of modern and mediaeval sequences very separate. I had ways of overcoming illusion in myself, which at first increased my control considerably. But I realised each time that this was only at the cost of losing Helene. I sounded more and more to myself like a prissy schoolmarm. She started concealing things from me. In order to stay in touch with her I was obliged more and more to pretend that I was taking her account of what was happening at face value. But this started to call my bluff, and there were several occasions when I quite lost control of reality, and was convinced we were in quite another world.” “Can you describe such an occasion?” Esther looked at me. Then her gaze blurred. She stared once more into the flames and began to look at her memories. “The crucial incident took place only a few days before Helène brought me to your meeting”, she said. “We had been walking and hitch-hiking up the valley a few miles at a time for more than a week. During these days I had sensed the balance of Helène’s consciousness slipping more and more out of control. The previous night we had failed to find lodgings, and had slept in the tiny tent right by the river. Helène had insisted on a most awkward site under a rocky overhang concealed from the road, in case, as she said, a posse of Inquisition priests and their retinue of hangers-on, who were known to be in the area, passed by on one of their night patrols. ‘Since various sporadic attacks on these Inquisitors had taken place in recent months,’ she told me, ‘there was what amounted to a curfew in operation the whole length of the valley’. “The following morning we were only a few miles below here. Coming so near now to the crucial area Helène’s tension was unbearable. She started and stopped at the least noise. In a desultory way I was still trying to stabilise things, as I could only feel that whatever life we were in, nothing was served by losing our cool at the least incident. “In order to avoid the main highway, (Inquisitors again), Helène and I had crossed the river lower down and were on a parallel track a bit up the slope on the other side, with a forbidding overhang of scree above us to the right, which soon opened out into a small steep side valley down which a torrent rushed from a waterfall above. We stood on the stone bridge crossing this torrent, and Helène looked up the slopes on the far side where the next mountain led round into the main Ariège valley once more. I felt a deep unease which affected me physically. A kind of humming filled my head and ears, and I looked round for reassurance. I couldn’t see our rucksacks and tent, couldn’t remember where we had put them down. “Helène gave a sharp cry, and I followed her gaze up the mountainside. A figure came into view, leaping and bounding with incredible sure-footedness down the slope between the rocks, over clumps of azalea, joining the path, leaving it again, at a speed


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more like a chamois than a man, growing in size with extraordinary rapidity till he came to a sudden halt only a few yards above us. “He was dressed all in black with a short cloak, held at the shoulder with the Cathar buckle, cross and fleur-de-lys in silver. He stood there quivering, shimmering almost, as if he were composed of pure energy instead of flesh and blood. He seemed to be part of the mountain. He got his breath, then: ‘C’est toi, Roxane. J’ai besoin de toi.’ He seemed to notice me for the first time. He pulled himself upright, and then gave me some sort of salutation, which aroused a tantalising half memory, and which I found myself returning. They quickly lapsed into a rapid crossfire in the Occitane dialect that threw me strongly back into presence of mind. By the time I had reached the point of preparing to intervene, however, the conversation was over and the figure was rapidly disappearing up the slope and into the rocks. “Helène was now beside herself with anxiety and haste. She impatiently brushed aside my questions, but with a certain deference which linked in my mind with the young man’s greeting. Almost apologetically she hastened me along, and in a couple of hours we were here in this village. She seemed to know where to go for lodgings, and we settled in. After the meal she disappeared, saying she had to meet the young man Ramón, and receive some instructions.” Esther paused and seemed not to know how to continue. “Did you recognise him in Raymond when you came to the meeting?” I asked. “Well, I didn’t at first. Then I caught him looking at me in a puzzled sort of way. I suddenly made the mental connection, and found I could no longer think at all. It was like being stuck in a limbo between consequence and expectation. I just sat and stared at him. “Immediately after the meeting he got hold of us both, and we went round to our lodgings. On the way round Raymond was questioning me in a way that seemed as if he were thinking that I belonged to the Cathar brotherhood in some senior capacity. He wanted to know how I had met up with Helène, whom he continued to refer to as Roxane. My answers, which simply referred back to our holiday trip, made no sense to him at all. But later on he seemed to start seeing me as a girl and for a time talked quite sensibly about his own life in the twentieth century. He had been here several months, he referred to you, Dr Perrier, and to your meetings, and even started to tell me bits of Cathar history and about the caves and so on. But the more he did this the more tense and nervous Helène became, and finally she burst into the conversation in French, hysterically anxious about urgent affairs they had to settle. Raymond rubbed his eyes and complained of a headache, and they seemed to forget me altogether for a time. Then he started shooting me puzzled, even suspicious, glances as before.” “You never had any sort of memory which could link with the personality he seemed to be attributing to you?” I asked. “Nothing at all, except an occasional haunted feeling, as if I ought to remember and couldn’t.” I had been leaning back on the settee, and Esther was against my knees, still staring into the fire. Suddenly she turned and gripped my wrists. “And do you know” she said emphatically, “why I don’t remember it? I’ll tell you. It’s because it doesn’t exist any more. Here it is. Here!” She let go of me and knocked herself on the chest and head. “This is what we’ve all come through to understanding in this last year. It is we who are the fortunate ones, the ones who don’t remember, because we can reach firm ground on which to stand, so that we can appreciate and grasp what transformation is about. Then we can ourselves freely plunge back into the past, and draw forward, re-collect into the present the essence of what we have been, and stand on it as ground of our own being. Those like Raymond and Helene whose past lives batter away at their memories, and force actions upon them which they have not themselves initiated in this life, are helpless victims of their own metamorphosing identity.” “Yes, Esther. But at the same time”, I put in quietly, “unless there were such people, we solid sane people would have no reason to suspect there was anything else accessible to us but this life. We need each other. More than that, we are one another. We exist just as much in the people who come to meet us as we do in the events that come to meet us. So often the people like us, you and I ,Esther, whose relation to the past starts off by being simply a slow growth of intuitive understanding, we are the very ones who the hysterical, neurotic, clairvoyant, charismatic, wonderful people like Raymond


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and Helène, home in on with faultless instinct to sort them out. What we don’t always remember is that we need them just as much as they need us.” “Yes” I went on after a bit, “and one of the things we need them for is to give us the clues whereby we can acquire for ourselves in freedom the memory of the past which was forced on them by their destiny.” “Is that how it went for you?” she asked. “Yes”, I replied. “I’ll tell you about all that one day.” We sat and gazed at the fire for some time. Then Esther shifted uncomfortably. “Of course I love him dearly”, she said, “But you know I don’t really need him. He’s much more Helène’s than he is mine.” “Yes, but does he know that? He’s so close to Helene he doesn’t notice her. He loves you because you’re so different.” “Yes” she said, “and it is those differences which will end by driving him away. I’m too critical of the very things in him Helène adores.” “It’s not so simple”, I said. “It’s Ramón that Helène adores, not Raymond.” “You mean it’s Ramón that Roxane adores. What happens when Helène comes to terms with Roxane just as Raymond has with Ramón?” I looked at her quietly. “It’s not by any means certain we’ll get that far”, I said. “She’s shown not the slightest sign so far of having any other experience than the dreamy bliss of having died in Lombrives.” “Well Raymond will just have to sit with her day in, day out, till she does”, said Esther. “Will you be able to let him? Without coming to hate her?” “You can’t hate her. She’s gentle and faithful and courageous. And a bit silly! If he brings her through he’ll come to love her.” “Well I think you’re probably right, though I don’t know whether I could make the sacrifice.” “I don’t think I’ve much alternative. Once he allows himself to realise the state she’s in, and that he is himself a good deal to blame for it, he won’t be able to cope with his guilt. And then he’ll blame me, quite rightly. I’ll lose him anyway.” “As I said before, you won’t lose him. You’ll gain him on another level. Well, you know you’ve got all my backing. She’s my patient, and that would be my prescription too. But I needed your support.” “You think he’ll be able to do it?” “He might. And I doubt if anyone else could.” We said a very warm goodnight and went to bed. I felt a deep happiness, such as I hadn’t experienced for many a long day, not really since my husband died. I felt as if restored to my true family. The tremulous hope I experienced when I realised they were really coming began to stir like a young plant. Endless possibilities for an entirely new beginning in the spiritual work began to dawn in my heart. My meditation before sleep soared into a tremendous flame of gratitude and resolve. My last thoughts were of Alan. I was trembling on the edge of wonder like a young girl.

---oOo--- You will be told in unmistakable terms Where the choices lie. From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’


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CHAPTER 8 REQUIESCANT No sudden impact of such a group of people, reeling and ecstatic as these four at once were with the sudden release of energies long held in tension, can last long without those energies needing an outlet extending beyond simple personal involvement. For Raymond it was quickly apparent that Helene would engage most of his time and thoughts. It was partly to assuage Esther’s inevitable pain that Clothilde engaged her quickly upon a course of studies and tasks which occupied her fully until she had to return to her next probation placement in England. Among the tasks was that of visiting, (and incidentally practising her French on), a number of enquirers who had shown an interest in Clothilde’s historical study group, but whom she was too busy with her practice to spend much time with. Part of the object was to find out if any of these enquirers showed a potential interest in the more esoteric aspects of the work. Clothilde felt that the meeting of the five of them, including Helène, raised the question whether it was not intended by beings beyond the threshold that a considerable expansion of teaching was now demanded by the times, for which the events culminating in their own discovery of each other were intended as an unmistakable signal. Esther made no startling discoveries straight away, but her reports back to Clothilde in the evenings took them both deep into the realm of Cathar beliefs, and the problems they raised. Stimulated by Clothilde’s far memories, Esther’s keenly analytic mind, ably backed by Alan’s insights, provoked Clothilde into many revelations she herself had forgotten. Some of the most interesting of these related to information, much of it second hand, which she had picked up during her Templar work, about some of the personalities of later Cathar times, who necessarily kept themselves deeply hidden, but who had become legends in their time along the equally secret trails and haunts of missioning Templars. It was during one of these exciting speculative evenings that Esther suddenly came out with the idea that they should try to bring some of these legendary personalities to life in the form of drama. “After all”, she said, “the real way to bring the Cathars alive for people today, to show the vital part they played in sowing the seeds of our own romanticism, and at the same time how their beliefs and philosophy have to be transformed in our time into further capacities for understanding and growth, is not so much to lecture about them as to embody them in living form.” “Don’t we do that already in our own persons by slowly penetrating into those times in far memory?” asked Alan. “Yes, but I think we need to do more. Mere memory is still to some extent a retrograde step. We are the fulfilment of the prophecy which their problems embodied. Can we not give that fact far greater force for other people by expressing dramatically the full prophetic challenge the Cathars felt then? Would not this be one way to help others recall their own involvement, to bring their own forgotten intentions into consciousness?” “It would be extraordinary to perform the part of one’s own previous incarnation on the stage”, said Clothilde. “Probably more therapeutic to play each other’s!” said Alan. “We’re none of us playwrights”, said Esther. “How do you know?” asked Alan, “Some of the stuff you wrote in the diary was highly dramatic. Why don’t you have a go?” “I think Clothilde and I might do it together”, said Esther. “I could record your reminiscences, Clothilde, and build on some of those.” Several scenes for plays arose in this way, and could well form the basis for a future archive. One especially, however, seems to belong to the present account. It later played a special part in their teaching work, but it is placed here for the role it plays in closing that particular chapter in their lives, laying finally to rest also their regret and longing to relive and resolve old tragedies. After that they became much more fully engaged in the present life, and far memory, while not fading, was increasingly embodied in a transformed way in their involvement with other people and new tasks.

* * * This scene was originally conceived as part of a radio play. They made a tape of it, and used it in audio-visual scenes, using photographs and paintings of Montségur and the caves, and of other


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mountain and lakeland scenery in the area, some of it high up in the Pyrenées. The sound effect of echoes and dripping water was essential to the atmosphere, and they were able through the kindness of the owners to record it in Lombrives itself. The young Dominican brother, Philippe, and his Cathar friend Bernard are seated on a rock in the middle of the vast cathedral cave of the Grotte de Lombrives. The scene opens with the ringing echoes of their loud laughter, reverberating in the huge space of the cavern, and the microphone slowly homes in on them as Philippe starts to speak. PHILIPPE My dear Bernard, you’re incorrigible. (Laughter again. Then, in the silence which follows, Bernard speaks quietly.) BERNARD And so we come again, now as so often before, to the same point in the same discussion, the same interminable discussion...threading our way with what seems endless patience and care past pitfall after pitfall in the vast edifice of doctrine which men have built up, for our protection and our training, and reaching, as always so it seems to me, a point at which the intelligence confesses itself utterly at a loss, and hands over the task of final judgement to the weary untutored heart. And upon that heart’s judgement rests the dreadful burden of our deeds. PHILIPPE And there it is, at that very point, my dear tortured friend, that Holy Mother Church holds out her two hands and offers... BERNARD Stop, Philippe. PHILIPPE ...and offers... BERNARD Stop, I say. I beg you to be silent. PHILIPPE Upon this rock will I build my.... BERNARD (cries out) SILENCE! (Tremendous echoes resound). Forgive me! My rude bellowing shatters the very silence I would defend. Hear the echoes lose themselves among the endless pillars and curtains of stone which surround us on every side, mile after mile. There! Now the silence I invoke rules again, and the rock may speak. Forgive me my friend. There are things hidden from us here, things that I am compelled to defend. Heaven knows they need no defence from me. But I cannot help myself. Tell me, how far did you walk to reach me here? PHILIPPE Three leagues in the saddle, and a mile on foot to the cave mouth. BERNARD And how far within the mountain? PHILIPPE I don’t know. Why do you ask? A long way. BERNARD Over half a mile. Over half a mile of solid limestone between us and the sun, Philippe, and another half mile of it over our heads. To that depth has your Holy Mother Church driven us. “Upon this rock!” Has the rock of Peter entered into your souls then? Are we to be crushed finally like toads between rock and rock, ground like flour between the Pope and the Pyrenées? PHILIPPE It is too late to speak like this, Bernard. You are not usually so bitter. What is to become of our friendship? The crusade is over a century old. Do I have to remind you that we are living in the land of tolerance, the only land in Europe where men of the most widely divergent opinions can live side by side within the Church in mutual regard, the civilisation of the Langue d’Oc....? BERNARD The civilisation of the Langue d’ Oc? We are the civilisation of the Langue d’Oc, we five hundred pale prisoners, invalids, hermits, children, herded in this sunless tomb! The civilisation of the Langue d’Oc is as dead as mutton, and you know it. Our very language, the language of the Troubadours, is as dead as Ancient Greek. Our Courts of Love, the flower of European culture, they


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are museum pieces, the gossip of tourists and archaeologists. Our whole culture, Troubadours and Cathars, croyants and parfaits, relegated to the history book, the story book almost. You have utterly destroyed them. PHILIPPE The Inquisition has utterly destroyed them. They act with the utmost wickedness in the name of the Church, and the Church acts with what wisdom she may through them. She is hardly in a position to do otherwise. Like any artist she uses the material she has. There is no room for a whole world of vermin in a building as large and as old as the Catholic Church, Bernard. But no amount of cockroaches can pull down a mansion, and they keep the cellars clear of rubbish. Yes, rubbish! In the broad view one has to admit that the Church’s scavengers detract very little from the value of the Church as a whole. It is certainly so that most of her time is spent advancing the purposes of Christ by balancing out the crimes of Christians. If you insist on living in the cellars of course, the very dungeons of Christendom, you naturally come up against them. But if I may say so, that’s your own look out. There’s plenty of room upstairs. BERNARD No. There’s no room for us ‘upstairs’ as you call it. Oh I know what you want. You think all we have to do is to walk out into the sunshine and give ourselves up. We allow a few dozen more souls to be sacrificed in the fire; what would they amount to among the hundreds of martyrs already burned? And then, how would you put it?.. March forward in line with a truly progressive Christianity into the modern fourteenth-century world., is that it? We are an anachronism, aren’t we, a bunch of outmoded radicals chanting slogans that the world is thankful to have forgotten. What is more pathetic that the revolutionary of yesterday whose reforms are either established commonplaces, or else have been relegated to the back shelf? No, your kindness is worse than your cruelty. The Catholic juggernaut has grown so big it no longer knows what it is crushing. You, invoking the tolerance of Langue d’Oc! You don’t know what the Langue d’Oc was. You haven’t the faintest idea, you don’t know what there still is, living in these caves. You’ve come here since you were a boy and you still don’t know. There are five hundred of us, Philippe. The sole coherent remnant of a whole civilisation, and we hold here in the palm of our hand the secret and the guiding force that built that whole world. A world that would have conquered Europe with the Love of Christ, a world that would have wooed and melted the whole stony heart of the Rome-ridden, Norman-ridden, yes and Pope-ridden western world with the sweet lover’s kiss of Christ the Troubadour, the little story-teller from the sun, who whispers in the ears of drunken warriors and priests the sweet romantic tale of catharsis, of a new earth and a burning fire which lifts the very rocks of these crushing Pyrenées right into the floor of the heavenly kingdom. “Upon this rock will I build my Church!” Let these timeless caverns ring with this redeeming word! Let the indwelling spirit of every crystal pillar answer you back word for word the message you try to bring them from the stony earthbound hearts of Peter’s churchmen. Here, here in the earth herself, in these very stones, is the TRUE church of Christ, strut as you may in your crimson vestments, dispense as you may your man-contrived absolutions, wrangle and scribble as you may towards that highly distilled theology, that Summa Theologica you all hope to write. Listen, Philippe, here, in this very cave.. (As Bernard draws near to Philippe and prepares to whisper more secretly in his ear, a faint sound caused him to turn. The ‘grand initié’ himself, Father Amiel, son of the original Amiel Aicard, and himself now of a great age, has silently drawn near, and now quietly speaks.) FATHER AMIEL Bernard! BERNARD Father! I didn’t know you were here. I thought........ FATHER AMIEL Yes, my son? BERNARD I thought this was your day in the lower cave. The others all went down early. The children have no studies. This was to have been the preparation day for the Autumn festival.


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FATHER AMIEL All is as it should be. The fires are lit; everyone is carrying out their tasks as usual. BERNARD Why should they not, Father? Is something wrong? (The question hangs in the air.) FATHER AMIEL Philippe, you are loyal to your childhood friend, and welcome as always. But this is the first time you have honoured us at a festival time. Your own rites surely have first claim to you. Have you a particular reason for coming today? PHILIPPE Father Amiel, I am deeply disturbed. I came to speak to Bernard about it, but as usual we have spent the time trying to resolve our differences in discussion. FATHER AMIEL It seems to me more and more that the clarity we seek lies not in discussion but in another region altogether. BERNARD Yet something impels us to search for answers at that level also. FATHER AMIEL A level which can only have been designed by God for sharpening our questioning faculty and making it more painful. Answers are given through events, but only if questions are painful enough. I heard part of your conversation. Not intentionally of course. You seem to have roused our dear Bernard more then usual, Philippe. Something is making you more than usually anxious for our welfare here. PHILIPPE Oh Father Amiel! Father Amiel! FATHER AMIEL They have found us at last. PHILIPPE I don’t know, Father. I simply don’t know. I am told nothing, of course, although as far as I know my visits here are not suspected. But somebody must know something. The first thing that aroused my fears was the appointment of a new Grand Inquisitor at Toulouse. Antoine de Lafitte was old and due in any case for retirement, but the man they appointed was none other than the notorious Lecocq, who served as a young man under Amaury de Citeaux himself. BERNARD But this is old news...a general tightening up of the Inquisition everywhere. We know all this. But what now, Philippe, for Heaven’s sake, why didn’t you tell us at once? PHILIPPE But it is no more than a rumour... BERNARD But, Philippe.... PHILIPPE They are transferring the tribunal from Foix to Tarascon. (Horrified pause) BERNARD At our very gates! They must know we are here! Oh Father Amiel, the children, the whole community, we can’t...... FATHER AMIEL They probably don’t know where we are. BERNARD But Tarascon, Father, it’s barely three miles away. FATHER AMIEL They probably don’t know where we are. BERNARD Then why...?


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FATHER AMIEL They have known we were here in a general way for a very long time. Oh, the Inquisition probably, no, but the Church itself, more specifically the authority in Rome, most certainly, yes. For a very long time indeed. In fact it is not an exaggeration to say that they have always known we were here. BERNARD You mean ever since... Montségur? That must be over eighty years, Father. Is this true? I can’t believe it! The Inquisition would have scoured every valley in the Pyrenées for us by now, a hundred times over. FATHER AMIEL When I say ‘we’, Bernard, I don’t simply mean we, the Albigeois. We have only been here eighty years. But there have been worshippers in these caves since long before the Catholic Church invented the word ‘heretic’; since long before there was a Catholic Church. This has always been a gateway to the world of the spirit. His Holiness the Pope knows that as well as we do, and the popes before him knew it. We are no more than the last inheritors of an ancient key, a key to the spiritual world, which someone on earth must always have. That key the Church needs, and is always in danger of losing. That key we hold for them, but only so long as we remain free to use it. BERNARD Father, I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The whole aim of the Inquisition is to destroy our kind of knowledge. They claim it is all untrue and devilish, and that only through the sacraments of their Bishops can the people reach Christ in safety. How can the Church covet that which it destroys with the utmost savagery? FATHER AMIEL The Inquisition is not the Church, Bernard. PHILIPPE Father, much as I love and respect you, I cannot stand here and let you say these things. It has always been understood between us that I came here pledged to respect your sincerity, and to discuss my beliefs unrestrainedly with you in expectation of a similar tolerance. I am a Languedocien as well as a Catholic, and I grieve equally with you for our lost liberties and our dying culture. But I cannot allow you to say that the Church is divided, the Pope one thing and the Inquisition another. Whatever the Inquisition does, however terrible it seems, and however wicked the men themselves, what they do they do with the Pope behind them. However bitter the necessities they are carried out with this assurance. If this were not so, how could Christian men dare to shoulder the burden of such terrible destruction as is necessary for the purification of Christ’s Church? FATHER AMIEL Yet I repeat, the Inquisition is not the Church, Philippe. The Inquisition does not know we are here, and the Church does. If the Inquisition knew we were here, it would have destroyed us, and that the Pope has striven till now with the utmost fidelity to avoid, loving us and needing us as he does. For that reason his predecessor gave into the hands of Dominic, his faithful and saintly servant, the task of leading us poor straying sheep into the fold, before ever the terrible crusade was thought of. Dominic failed in his mission, and we failed him. PHILIPPE How can you stand there and say so? Father, I am torn by all this. At least I have believed till now that the very intensity of your deep wisdom and knowledge of the secrets of nature and of the Earth had somehow blinded you to the love the Church has for all who profess as you do the love of Christ. And I felt that the hardships and agonies of soul and body you have all suffered through the Inquisition had still further closed you to all we wish to bring you, above all to the tremendous promise for the future which the Church holds. All this I have felt deeply bound to forgive, believing in and feeling the need as I do for mutual tolerance, and remembering my happy childhood among you all. How then can I now bear to stand and hear you confess that you have known these things all along and care nothing for them? That you have felt the great love of Christ’s Church calling and protecting you, and have rejected it? You have called down upon yourself the chastisement of Christ’s inevitable laws. How can I protect you from them? FATHER AMIEL You cannot, my son. I do not tell you these things now for the first time as if by chance. We have come to a division of the ways. You have brought us news. This bears its bitter fruit for you, sooner than you could have expected. You are called upon to make a decision, which till now


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has been left in a happy suspense all your life. The whole growth of your understanding has taken place as if between two warring armies pledged to mutual destruction, but in a part of the field where they were as yet unready for the fray. Not many have so long a reprieve from fatal decision and action, or so good a chance to prepare for it. I am sorry to see you go, but I do not think we will often meet again. The Lord be with you my son. PHILIPPE Heaven forgive me, Father, have you too developed in spite of yourself that self-destroying madness I have seen and pitied in so many of your peasant converts, who throw themselves into the flames in an ecstasy of thoughtless desire for martyrdom at all costs? How many more disillusionments am I to suffer today? I thought you, Father, at least were free from the taint of the minority mind. Yet here you are apparently determined that your defeat is already at hand. I can think of no other possible explanation for your heartless dismissal. If the Holy Church is my mother, I may say in truth that this place has fathered me, and speak no disloyalty. Well, Father, is the lad to be sent out to fend for himself. FATHER AMIEL You are free, Philippe, my dear son. PHILIPPE Free, yes. Father Amiel, I am afraid for you. They will not spare you, Father, you are too responsible. But, Bernard, persuade him. Father, I beg you to come with us. I would use every argument I possess to convince him. I am convinced, Father much as I love you. The Church is for the future. The Church will lead every man to freedom, to the free choice of Christ. With all your wisdom, your teaching only blinds men back to inevitable actions and inevitable laws. You see so much of the spiritual world that its vastness chains you. We choose blindness for the sake of freedom, and for the development of the priceless gifts of faith and grace. See how obsessed you are now with a sense of inevitable doom. You have infected me with it. That is why I ran here today. Oh, Father! (Philippe runs into Father Amiel’s arms) FATHER AMIEL How blessed we are, dear Philippe, to have your selfless love. And how blessed you are, with all your youthful insight, and its promise of future wisdom. Go now. Return tomorrow, if you can. Perhaps you will be able to bring us more news. You will have to be very careful who sees you come and go. Bernard and I will talk. Bernard too is faced with a decision. Go now. (Father Amiel gives a blessing. Philippe goes) FATHER AMIEL This is the end, Bernard. BERNARD Father, what can I say? Is there nothing we can do? FATHER AMIEL There is a great deal we can do for each other, very little we can do now for the world. But what of yourself, Bernard? BERNARD What do you mean, Father? FATHER AMIEL Do you not know why I interrupted your conversation with Philippe? BERNARD I had forgotten in the stress of this terrible news. Why are you here Father? Why not down in the lower cave? Can it be you knew already what he had to tell? FATHER AMIEL It has always been inevitable, my dear son. We older ones are always and continually on the look out for it. The seeds of the inevitable extinction of our movement were nurtured in the finest flowering of Langue d’Oc. The very success of our teaching, the very hunger of the people for it, the very richness of the life in Langue d’Oc which sprang into riotous being on the heels of our mission, these things have always spelt no less than our final doom. (BERNARD (puts in) But why, Father?)


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FATHER AMIEL Because the world is not ready for the sheer wealth of spiritual life. The world is not ready for romance. The world swoons at the lover’s kiss, it gets drunk, it goes mad. Man is a baby, he hasn’t the stomach yet for freedom and responsibility and ecstasy all in one. He has to lose ecstasy for the sake of the other two. Christianity must become prosaic, so that man may become responsible and free. Then the secrets may be told again. Then some future Catharism will arise to serve wine instead of milk. You see my dear Bernard, one of the vows that is put upon the highest Initiates of our order is that they must never betray the nature of their faith. Yet leakage is constantly occurring. How can I express this without hurting you? You love the high and courtly culture of the Troubadours with all the passion which is its supreme achievement and crown. Yet I have to say to you that this lost glory was our supreme failure and our tragedy; That I, and with me the great Initiates and leaders of our movement, now and in the past, suffer and bleed with His Holiness the Pope and with all the wise men of the Church, for this very tragedy. I desire the unity of Christendom, O Lord Christ, how I desire and long for it. And I believe, Heaven protect my words, that if the leakage of what is secret can only be ended by the utter destruction of all our forms and movements and teachings, and even our very hold on the earth, then it is right that the Pope should countenance this utter destruction. Oh Bernard, you know these things. The Silence you invoked a little while ago, and laid upon Philippe, that is the realm in which our Truth must now perforce have its life. In the silence of these impenetrable rocks we have by God’s grace imprinted the forms of ecstasy. Here let our passion be enshrined, suspended, frozen, till man is strong enough to handle the key. If the Church knows that we have so transformed the impenetrable rock by our secret and Christ-filled powers, that our very bones will speak as loudly to posterity as if we addressed them in words; IF THE CHURCH KNOWS THAT, Bernard, she can release her Inquisitorial hounds from their leash with a quiet mind. And we can welcome them. BERNARD The key, Father, the key of which I spoke to Philippe. FATHER AMIEL Yes, the key, whose nature Philippe is not ready to hear of, and which you so nearly betrayed to him. BERNARD That is why you interrupted us. FATHER AMIEL No, for you would not have given him a true picture of it. I interrupted you because the false picture you would have given him would have reached the Inquisitors, and so the Pope; and if the Pope has a false picture of what is here he will never forgive himself for destroying us. Only if he is sure we have kept our greatest secrets from the Inquisition can he release them upon us with a good conscience. BERNARD But you are implying that Philippe will betray us to the Inquisitors? FATHER AMIEL Never intentionally. And now not at all. It is not his task. BERNARD How can it be anybody’s task? (Another question hangs in the air) FATHER AMIEL Bernard, I must speak to the people. BERNARD They are all below, Father. They will wonder what has kept you here so long. (Father Amiel walks towards the lower entrance. We hear his steps receding. Then the steps come to a halt. We hear him speak further away) FATHER AMIEL Bernard, my son, you asked me if I knew before Philippe came if anything was about to happen, which led me to wonder whether the end might not be near. It has to do with that key of which we have spoken. Think about it. I told you that a decision faced you. Think about the key.


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(His footsteps recede into the silence) BERNARD (whispers) I shall never see the sunshine again. I shall never see you again, darling girl. I don’t want to die in this dark cold place. (Silence) BERNARD (clearly in his full voice) Lord Christ, I was going to tell them. Father Amiel knew. I am ready now. I am ready to see the key. (Silence) BERNARD (whispers again) The key is a Vessel. I can see the Light. The rocks are all made of Light. I’m allowed to hold the Vessel. I’m allowed to carry it right through the mountain. (The whisper now comes from further away) I’m allowed to carry it right through the mountain. (Scene ends)

---oOo--- Have confidence. You will know the place. From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’ Note: Esther completed the poem while she was working with Clothilde during the first year at Ussat. It is reprinted in full at the end.


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CHAPTER NINE FRASER Looking back now after a lapse of two years on the events recorded in these pages I am surprised how little I have had to edit in what I wrote at the time. Bits of hindsight have been added here and there for the sake of continuity, but I haven’t cheated much. Other peoples’ contributions I have left alone, which, as you will appreciate, was sometimes quite hard. I went through a period of considerable disorientation for a good many months. It was particularly hard returning to England, which I had to do almost immediately, simply to clear up existing case work. Without Clothilde.... ‘Without Clothilde’ was the prologue to a good many remarks made by all of us in those first months. Even now we all find ourselves awestruck by her stature again and again as new dimensions of the joint work reveal themselves. She insists that for her the sense of wonder at the release of new possibilities is as great, (or greater) for her as for the rest of us. The whole point is that it is a joint enterprise. What is being done is being done by a group. This is the characteristic feature of this kind of spiritual work in our age, that it can no longer be carried by individuals. The very spiritual beings beyond the Threshold who initiate it have themselves participated in the transformations in that world over the last three or four years, and they too can no longer work in the same way through isolated individuals. The dimensions of individual human consciousness are no longer adequate in range or scale for them to bring through in the old way what has now to be brought to humanity. At the same time the first stages of what was made possible by the impact we had on one another bore heavily down at first on Clothilde’s broad shoulders and will certainly continue to do so for some time to come. Her physical and professional situation remained the strongest and most stable element, economically as well, as we strove against considerable odds to carve out a form in which we could work together. For the young people guest status covered things for the time being. Later on there would be employment problems to be faced, but we would cross that bridge when we came to it. At least with the EEC there would be no visa difficulties. Meanwhile there was the question of whether Esther should complete her training. One thing that was quite hard to adjust to, was the extraordinary maturity of soul Esther more and more revealed. In some ways she had changed more rapidly than any of us. Reading through my old notes I remembered worrying at the beginning that she might be growing inwardly too fast, and wishing she could still be her old frivolous self. While she and Raymond were young lovers this lighter side reasserted itself. But after she met Clothilde, and particularly as Raymond carried more and more responsibility for Helène, she went through a very hard time. What saved her was the sheer power of imagination that was born out of her partnership with Clothilde. For partnership it was, very much the junior partner though she remained. She had clearly found in Clothilde the teacher along the spiritual way that she now needed. This quickly emerged in the most wonderful way in their creative work together in poetry and drama. But on another level she was still very young and headstrong. I think she would not have returned to England at all had Clothilde not put great stress on it. She was very insistent indeed about this, saying firmly that Esther had not yet learned to work. She needed to complete her degree, and do at least her remaining statutory placements in the probation service, before, so Clothilde felt, she could carry her part in building up the ambitious project we began to develop. Another important factor was the situation of Raymond and Helène. This touching relationship was such a delicate plant that we felt for everybody’s sake it needed the most peaceful possible environment to nourish and protect it till we could see whether Helène would be able to emerge into the sunlight and play a balanced rôle in our circle. To our great joy about Michaelmas time she was pregnant. The house was already a happy place to be in, and now became even more so. To complete the pattern it seemed right that Clothilde and I should time our wedding for Whitsunday. (In the event


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we had a joint wedding, a lovely day, with Esther a double bridesmaid). So instead of Esther having to face day by day the development of more and more intimacy and mutual dependence between Raymond and Helène she spent most of her time in England. But she was still able to arrange her placements so that in University vacations she was here for a few weeks at a time. As for Raymond, he now grew almost as fast as Esther did. Nothing of course could alter their deep involvement with each other. The love between them would always flow deep and strong. The danger before had been that she was the stronger character, and that he had been the dependent one. In his new relationship he was the strong one, and his strength grew greater as his devoted care for Helène began to bear fruit. As time went on he related to Esther on more and more equal terms, knowing that his maturity did not depend on her. It spoke volumes for the two of them that Helène never had the opportunity to be jealous. Her dependence on Raymond at first had been absolute, and her trust in him never faltered. About this side of things Raymond never spoke, but how much it had cost him was clear from his obvious stature. As for Helène she would never be other than a slender little personality, but she was never a trivial one. Her essential goodness of soul ensured that she never experienced her relationship with the more formidable personalities round her as a demeaning one. Her growth within Raymond’s care and love gave her considerable power over him, but as far as I could see she never exploited it, and as her pregnancy developed her air of fulfilment was a joy to watch. I have left my own story to the last. I don’t find it easy to talk about it. Altogether I am not quite the pompous windbag that I used to be. I experience in theory that each of us has been reborn, but I feel that in me this rebirth has been more fundamental. Without the others’, and particularly Clothilde’s, support, the early disorientation I spoke of might well have ended in breakdown. But I never felt it as that. It was much more like post-operative convalescence. I really did become a kind of baby. I had to learn again so many of the simplest things from scratch. For Clothilde it was much the same. We fell in love like two teenagers. I had never been married, and in every way, including sexually, I was helpless as a kitten. She had been married before, but it never seemed to her that this had taught her anything she needed to make sense of me. Being so utterly in awe of her on a spiritual level I thought I would never manage to be otherwise than infantile with her in a more intimate context. But this hasn’t proved to be so. On the contrary she seems to need as much reassurance in this realm as I do on other levels; and of course this has been very good for my confidence. Also, thank goodness, we get on extremely well together professionally. I can’t practice in France of course but on the inner healing planes it amounts to a professional partnership between us. This has already begun to open up entirely new possibilities for me as far as vocational life is concerned. I had no qualms about severing my professional links in England with as much dispatch as was decent. For both of us the exploration of field after field of study in areas of psychic healing and other aspects of so-called ‘fringe’ therapies is opening up a virtually new career for me. For Raymond this has fully vindicated what he intuitively felt would emerge from our earliest meetings. But all these developments are in a way only the fringe of the matter. There is something further that gives meaning to all our lives in a much more fundamental way. One thing in me that hasn’t changed, I’m afraid, is my old theme of ‘conceptualise or bust’. But perhaps that too has gone through a process of transformation and transcendence. So I must try to describe something which is perhaps in its essence indescribable, just as I did three years ago when I first tried to make sense of what happened to us then. I think the place to begin is the cipher. The instinct for this approach to the realm of the mysterious is strong in our time, but of course largely trivialised in jigsaws, crosswords, anagrams and acrostics, the who-dun-it of fifty years ago, the spy story, the mysteries of consciousness in so-called outer space. There developed in ancient times a bridge between logical processes, (increasingly embodied in the neuron, that infinitely complicated switching system in our physical brain, of which we now see the


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technical outcome in the silicon chip), and something else essentially different in kind. The brain-born, silicon chip approach to meaning is essentially an either-or, yes or no, black or white, it-is-or-it-isn’t approach to meaning. But here is a way of knowing entirely different from that, which preceded it in time, and which ancient mankind relied on, put his weight on, just as we put our weight on logical reason. What happens now for most people, (I might say for people who don’t always feel the need to conceptualise everything), is that they firmly insist that they base their view of life on logical reason, but in all important matters they fall back on something quite illogical which they refuse to make conscious. They call it commonsense. There is nothing logical about commonsense, but it turns a key. It links different patches of logic and reason together. It stops people losing faith in logic. It prevents logic itself bringing them too close to its own implications, to the realisation that different areas of logic don’t really hang together in a logical universe as we tell ourselves they do. People need commonsense. Commonsense is a cipher. I hope you see where we’re heading, and I’m sorry we have to go the long way round to it. In fact I shall have to ask you to take on trust, at least provisionally, something I can’t prove, but can only demonstrate, out of wide reading and study, and the consequent emergence of a kind of dim memory. It is this. Nowadays we have the sense of climbing out of our binary brain-bound thinking greatly helped by cipher, into something more unitary and intuitive. In ancient times, and I am talking about prehistory, way back to Atlantis and beyond, they experienced the opposite. For them it was a question of falling into the brain, not climbing out of it. They had the sense of losing their universal grasp of reality and of getting trapped in yes or no, either-or, which was safe and firm, but somehow not quite true. And as they fell in this way they had the presence of mind to implant in their recording systems reminders, guide marks, NAMES, in a word, ciphers, in the hope that later, when they had become entirely logical, the names would remind them what the logic stood for. They were like dogs lifting their legs against lampposts. Unitary memories were fading, so they had to rely on names. A lamppost for a dog is a cipher. But times changed. Cipher originally emerged as an aspect of the approach to lost knowledge, something to help mankind to keep hold of mysteries. But later on they were used for the opposite purpose, to conceal. The Aztecs used them to block memory, to guard secret knowledge. This was done for good as well as for bad reasons, to guard knowledge from perversion and misuse by the ignorant, and also to pervert and misuse it for personal power and gain. There is no need to pursue the history of cipher in any more detail. The memory blocks of Aztec slaves reappear in our time as the keys to huge memory banks in binary computers. These keys have just the same kind of allegorical and arbitrary names as the code words used throughout history to release areas of secret knowledge to aspirants for initiation into the mysteries. Out of this same feeling for the bridge between the logical and the illogical, meteorologists pay tribute to the arbitrary will-element in hurricanes by giving them the names of wayward young girls. Hurricane Jenny is a cipher. She bloweth where she listeth. So we come to Clothilde and me. Our meeting in the middle ages was for the implantation of a cipher, and it has retained the same cipher character now that we have met again. There was a Templar master in England who in his youth had gone adventuring among the Cathars in the Pyrenées. He was twenty-one when the waters broke and rushed down the Ariège drowning cattle and sweeping away villages. My memories of this time, stirred in the faintest possible degree by the work Clothilde and I have done in the last two years, have scarcely penetrated beyond surmise and deduction. But I think this young man must have gone off with a Templar mission on a tour of castles, estates and administrative establishments in Eastern Europe. He was probably attached to a Templar knight as part of his retinue, a personal servant or something of the kind. I think it was there he heard of the Pyrenean events somewhere along the grapevine operating through the monk and troubadour wanderers they met along the way. Fascinated by the Grail and treasure rumours, he must have abandoned the Templars and joined one of these wandering groups on its way back to Albigeois territory. He may even have had instructions to do a bit of investigation on behalf of his master. The opening up of so many underground caverns after 1279 posed a quite new challenge and hope for the beleaguered ‘croyants’. Speleology became the great new sport for the adventurous young.


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Speculation as to whether there really was a way right through the Pyrenées to Spain was rife. What had happened thirty-five years ago after Montségur? What was the Montségur treasure? Where was it? Senior ‘parfaits’ kept their own counsel on these things, but a superhuman mystery undoubtedly overshadowed the spirituality of life in the caverns during these years. Apart from this ‘everybody knew’ that three or four people climbed down the cliffs on ropes in 1244, on the very night before the terrible capitulation of the castle, when hundreds of believers, men and women, parfaits and croyants and servants, aristocrats and knights, had been burned alive on a huge funeral pyre below the castle. The little band of refugees carried with them some unspecified ‘trésor’, but nobody really knows to this day what it was. Misconceptions of the nature of the Holy Grail have led to the belief that this was what it was, that a physical object embodying this mystery found its way into the caves and later to Spain. Others more mundane thought it was simply priceless treasure in gold and precious stones. Others speak of a secret gospel, perhaps a document hidden in a sacred cross, containing knowledge of the Christ mystery handed down in this way, or perhaps simply by word of mouth and heart from Manichaean to Gnostic to Cathar down the centuries, or enshrined in a priceless ‘heretical’ scripture. Nobody knows, and very few knew then. But the young enthusiasts of the 1280s and 1290s believed in the secret route. It has become my belief that some of them found it. But after the Templar massacres of 1308 and later this information became very hot knowledge indeed. Senior people clamped down on further uncontrolled exploration. People who might have known were tracked down, and their memories blocked and codified. And in the end as we know the object was defeated and the knowledge was never used. Unless of course there were further wheels within wheels. One day about a year after the events recorded at the time of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, Clothilde and Raymond and I were talking late at night in the cottage. We had been very meticulous about not questioning him in any way about the development of his work with Helène. As a result a deep trust had grown between the three of us, and we had explored many areas of spiritual life and knowledge together as a group under Clothilde’s gentle and wise guidance. Sometimes in vacation time Esther had joined us, and then a new dimension of extraordinary power emerged, linked with Clothilde, and yet having a rapier quality of freshness and fragrance all its own. We could feel at those times that it was as if a mysterious rose blossomed in the room. On this occasion there was no Esther, but her presence was there in a subliminal way. Perhaps it was this dimension which prompted me to say quietly to Raymond, “Ray, what was Helène doing that night, right up the valley, almost as far as Montreal-de-Sos?” There was a long pause. I thought for a moment I might have ‘blown it’ as the young say, and put a block into our communication which would be difficult to loosen. But Clothilde took my hand, and after a deep sigh Raymond turned to me and smiled. He had gone rather pale. “Yes, it is time I brought some of that down into words”, he said, “I am tremendously grateful that none of you have allowed your deep concern, and even, let’s face it, natural curiosity, to tempt you to ask me about this before. I needed a long time to get it all straight in my mind.” He paused. “Had you found the way through the mountains?” I prompted. “No, but what we believed we had found was the way out at the top end.” He poured us and himself more coffee and settled back in the armchair as if he needed firmer support and warmth from it. He shivered. “I still find it quite hard to make myself go over those three or four days clearly and objectively”, he said. “All one’s efforts to make a logical sequence out of it are defeated by the time reversals and space-time exchanges between incarnations which you and I used to discuss two years ago. Some understanding of it on a heart level has been one of the painful fruits of my time with Helène over the past year. Struggling to bear her pain as she climbed inch by inch out of the darkness back into the light and warmth of this wonderful time has been more of a teacher for me than any of the mental effort to grasp what happened that has accompanied it.”


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As if to ratify and seal the feeling of us all having reached a safe harbour after long months of storms at sea, and the fear of shipwreck, we momentarily heard the thin wail of the tiny baby as Helène opened and closed a door upstairs. “I have to accept” Raymond added, “that during those days I projected out of my time-warped return into Cathar times a series of pseudo-events which in this life appeared in a reversed time sequence. The striving to open up the cave route in which I involved Helène all took place in that dimension before she and I met in this house, but it was in fact set in train by this meeting. Those events actually never occurred. They were a projection of my refusal after I died in 1328 to accept the failure of my mission. Lacking the clue which the cipher would have afforded I battled on after death. Roxane had by then already died with the others in Lombrives. But we both went on struggling to open up the cave route. We chose an appalling night when the river was in flood, and nearly got washed away at the ford. But we got through to Vicdessos across the mountains. I needed her help with ropes and tackle to negotiate a last traverse deep in the caves high up. I was convinced that after that the way would be clear to guide the five hundred survivors out into daylight.” “What happened?” “The continuity of consciousness broke. I found Esther again in the valley and we went back to England. I lost the thread of memory, which only reappeared intermittently. Meanwhile I also forgot where Helène was. I think I came here one day to look for her. So I very nearly managed to kill Helène on a fruitless ploy, the greater part of which didn’t physically happen. It was some sort of projection. I also gravely threatened things for Esther.” “I still don’t quite know who Esther was at that time. She was obviously looking after Roxane in some way. Possibly she was one of the seniors who were trying to ensure that the secret knowledge remained so till the right time. What is quite clear is that she is one of those for whom far memory has to be a fully conscious attainment which would be distorted by premature revelation, such as my own obsessional involvement threatened her with.” Clothilde got up and closed the curtains. We all felt cold. She stoked up the fire. Then she came back and shifted the coffee table into the centre of the space. She lit the candle standing on it and doused the oil-lamp. “Sit in a proper triangle”, she said. “You too, Esther she added, making it acceptable by a light laugh, as she often did when anything might have threatened credibility for us acolytes. “Esther, you can be at the apex of the tetrahedron.” She made us join hands. The invisible Esther felt like a warmth above our heads. “Now”, Clothilde said, “I’m going to try to bring through what actually happened. The Rose Cross encloses all these events. Within this context we may begin to see a little more of the spiritual geometry.” “First of all, Raymond, please get out of your mind any lingering feeling you may have that there is any long term difference between success and failure. Your failure in 1328 became your success in 1980. You didn’t bring the Templar agents together then. Instead you brought me and Alan together now. By the same token your success in 1328 was paid for by a failure in 1980, which, by the way, you are not simply dying of as you might well have done. Instead you have turned it into a quite spectacular success, unforeseen in the karmic pattern of the past, creating karma for a whole new cycle of time. This relationship with Helène has hung in the balance for six and a half centuries. Now it moves forward into something quite new for a higher power to use.” “You said my success in 1328. What success?” Clothilde looked at him with such a gaze of power that we felt the rosy tetrahedron sparkle in a kind of golden shower. “Your opening up of the route.” “I didn’t open it up.” “Oh yes you did.” “When?” “In 1328. Ramón and Roxane placed their rope ladder as they intended.” “But she was dead. I came to England.” “You reset the stage last year. You projected it back. You changed the past. Please don’t ask me to describe it in terms of mechanical cause and effect. I don’t know how it ‘works’. It doesn’t work in the ordinary way we use the term. In fact there may never have been a rope ladder. There may have been a fortuitous rock fall. Anyway something happened in 1328 which created an exit that wasn’t there before.” “But the five hundred never got through.” “No. But someone did and the treasure did. The mystery of what happened in the Sierras to the Grail in the succeeding centuries is another story, and it is not a story I know. Maybe one day we shall all know it.” For a few minutes there was nothing but the glow, the peace and the warmth and a faint smell of roses. Then the candlelight returned, the circle broke, the feeling of Esther faded, and we were sitting back in our chairs.


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After a long time Clothilde spoke again. “There is still a further dimension, Raymond, in what you have achieved. Until now Alan and I, or our Templar prototypes, have been linked together by a forgotten cipher. Had we known, the need for the switch to that fourteenth-century memory bank was implicitly over. By simply working out your own destiny and by rising beyond it in a certain way, ‘beyond the call of duty’, as one might say, you made the implicit solution of this particular riddle explicit. Somewhere a long time ago you enabled the link, the karmic enciphered knot, between me and Alan to loosen and transform itself into a new range of possibilities. We can now freely associate, and you, and also Esther along with us, forming a grouping of great power which may be able to play a part in transforming the very nature of the Cathar-Templar destiny here in the Pyrenées. It has the possibility of spreading out into the rest of the Western esoteric stream, as something quite new, and far nearer to the mainstream of spiritual evolution in our time. There had been a considerable deterioration in these impulses by the fourteenth century. Catharism in particular had become too narrow a vessel to contain what humanity needed to experience next. It had to disappear for a time into the dark. The narrow dualistic doctrine of dark and light, good heaven and evil earth, needed to be buried in darkness for a time, so that a third element, a rose of rebirth, could be born in the space between them. That is why, in the centuries after Henri Quatre, the Huguenot king, had opened up Lombrives, found the skeletons of the last five hundred Albigeois in the darkness, and had them removed and buried -, the cave became a place of pilgrimage for the Rosicrucian Brotherhood.” “So what you did, Raymond, and what we all did after July 1981, when the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction went into its third, initiatory, transformation, was to set the stage for a restoration of what has to happen through the Rose Cross impulse.” “Deep in the mountains, as Esther told us, there has been all along an elemental spirit of divine radiance and beauty, waiting for millennia to be released from the bondage of intractable stone; not least from the intractable stone in men’s hearts, which will not allow that anything new can come to birth through spiritual evolution. For her too there can now be a new chapter of hope. Pyrène can now begin to stir from her cavern, and peer forth in the pale spring sunlight, bringing with her the hopes of all the victims over the centuries, victims of the inquisitorial harshness of Experience itself, embodying the Innocence which we, if we work rightly, can husband and nourish towards what Blake hoped for as Imagination.” Heléne timed her entrance perfectly, pushing the door open with her baby-arm, and peering a little short-sightedly through her usual wisps of dark hair, big brown eyes blinking and shinning in the candlelight. “Il ne dort pas”, she whispered. We all had to laugh, even Raymond. “Come on, little goddess”, he said, “you shall be Pyrène for tonight, and this is the little infant Hercules, born to you as son instead of lover. He shall be the first of a new generation of Albigeois.” I looked across to Clothilde and saw Raymond’s light-hearted prophecy transform in her eyes into a great vista of future space and time. She moved into my arms and then we were all sitting again by the fire, playing with the baby. I thought about Raymond’s wish in the past to help me find a new meaning for the term ex-patient, and then had the thought that, in fulfilling that, the doctor had disappeared as well. They were linked together in a relationship that transcended both. In fact we were all a family. I put my arm round his shoulder, and as I did so there was a sudden rattle at the front door, and a flurry of wind and rain burst out of the darkness. A windswept figure in a blue cloak over sandy tweeds, red hair flying, stood in the doorway. “I’m through my exams”, said Esther.


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RECIPE FOR A THREEFOLD CONJUNCTION Take Death Enough to achieve, already now, The distance from this incarnation Already attained from the others. Not so much that you fall out of love with the Earth And all of Earth’s precious darlings. Take the Divided Self Enough to choose which one is you on each level. Not so much that the other, or others, pursue you Raging with despair and hunger To every encounter with the Spirit. Take Initiation Enough to realise in solemnity That the slow trundling move across the first frontier Came and is past. That the peaks on the mountain pass look the same And are subtly different. Not so much that you forget you chose to come to Earth And those you love for whom you made the choice. You were ready to die at the turn of the year. You brought the three together at the holy rendezvous, Where on Earth the Virgin holds the Corn-dolly, Promising that the triple seed will be fertile: Where in heaven the Scales gently swing The giant pendulum, sensing to a hair’s breadth The poise of spirit-awareness in the soul. Now, wait out the winter! Presently in spring the planets will return As if they had forgotten something, The young one radiant, but faintly angry, The old one with the tired smile of those To whom everything has happened before. Stay calm, for soon, satisfied, They will travel relentlessly on To the definitive meeting where all is ratified In high summer. Be patient, for you will be met. You will be told in unmistakable terms Where the choices lie. Have confidence. You will know the place.

THE END

31108893 messenger stanley the cathar connection

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