Gareth Knight

With a foreword by Iain Sinclair. London is an ancient city, whose foundation dates back literally thousands of years into the legendary prehistory of these islands. Not surprisingly it has accumulated a large number of stories, both historic and mythical, during this period, many of which, though faithfully recorded at the time, have lain almost forgotten in dusty libraries throughout the city. The Secret Lore of London is a guide to the legends, including a discussion of their importance as part of the oral tradition of Britain, combining Prehistoric, Celtic, Arthurian, Roman, Saxon and Norman levels - each of which has contributed to the many-layered life of the city. The first part contains a unique selection of essays (some printed here for the first time) by experts in their fields, each of whom possesses a unique interest in the legends of these islands, and who have written widely on associated themes. The second part of the book will consist of a Gazetteer of the sites mentioned which are still in existence, together with various other sites of associated interest, compiled by the Editor, the contributors, and members of the London Earth Mysteries Group. This part will be fully updated and extended to include many more sites. The result is a wide ranging and wholly fascinating book, with wide sales application possible. A series of appendixes will include William Stukley's extraordinary document The Brill, which relates to the ancient prehistoric sites around the area of present day St. Pancras, and excerpts from some of the best known 19th and early 20th century works on Legendary London by Lewis Spence and Harold BayleyContributors to the book are: Nigel PennickJohn MatthewsCaroline WiseCaitlín MatthewsCarol Clancy R.J. StewartBernard Nesfield-CooksonGareth KnightRobert StephensonGeraldine BeskinChesca PotterWilliam StukeleyLewis SpenceHarold BayleyAlan V. InsoleRoss Nichols

5 Essays: Verändertes Licht auf das Medium und die Botschaft / Fantasie, Glaube und Wirklichkeit / Gibt es einen Sensitiven im Haus? / Die beiden Seiten der Tür, eine Kurzbiographie von Margaret Lumley Brown / Lehren über die Aura

5 Essays: Die Brunnen der Vision / Sternenmagie / Awen - die Kraft im magischen Kessel / Mit Engeln sprechen / Der Hüter der Schwelle

4 Essays: Historische Bilder der Magie / Sir Walter Ralegh und die Prinzessin Pocahontas / Mehr Licht auf die Seite des Westens / Der Meister der Medizin

The essays in this book are collected from a variety of sources, including articles in the Inner Light Journal. Topics include the role of psychism within the occult tradition, working with the Elemental Tides, the medieval grail texts of Chrétien de Troyes, pathworking the Qabalistic Tree of Life and the magical symbolism of the rose.

Margaret Lumley Brown was a leading member of Dion Fortune's Society of the Inner Light, taking over many of Dion Fortune's functions after the latter's death in 1946. She raised the arts of seership to an entirely new level and has been hailed with some justification as the finest medium and psychic of the twentieth century. Although she generally sought anonymity in her lifetime her work was the source of much of the inner teachings of the Society from 1946 to 1961 and provided much of the material for Gareth Knight's The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend and A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism. Gathered here is a four part record of the life and work of this remarkable woman. Part One presents the main biographical details largely as revealed by herself in an early work Both Sides of the Door an account of the frightening way in which her natural psychism developed as a consequence of experimenting with an ouija board in a haunted house. Part Two consists of articles written by her on such subjects as Dreams, Elementals, the Faery Kingdom, Healing and Atlantis, most of them commissioned for the legendary but short lived magazine New Dimensions. Part Th ree provides examples of her mediumship as Archpythoness of her occult fraternity with trance addresses on topics as diverse as Elemental Contacts, Angels and Archangels, Greek and Egyptian gods, and the Holy Grail. Part Four is devoted to the occult side of poetry, with some examples of her own work which was widely published in her day. Gareth Knight was a colleague and friend of Margaret Lumley Brown in their days in the Society of the Inner Light together, to whom in later years she vouchsafed her literary remains, some esoteric memorabilia, and the privilege of being her literary executor

In what appears on the surface to be a children's story, Gareth Knight, using Tarot imagery, conducts a guided visualisation through the Tree of Life from the homely Cottage of Heart's Desire to the Heart of the Rainbow ... and back again. Richard and Rebecca meet the Joker of their granny's pack of cards, and guided by his dog, embark on an adventure through the Inner Worlds in search of their True Names. To those attuned to its deeper symbolism, the story forms an imaginative journey along the serpentine path of the Tree of Life, conducted via the Tarot archetypes, which when read with openness and imagination may serve as a powerful key to intuitive understanding of the Western Mystery Tradition. Gareth Knight is one of the world's leading authorities on modern esoteric studies and the Western Mystery Tradition, with a career as an author, publisher and lecturer which spans more than 50 years.

Potent medieval faery lore and hidden goddess traditions for the 21st century. Gareth Knight explores and reveals the hidden mystery of the Faery Melusine, a major figure in medieval French lore and legend. Through vivid interpretation of original source texts, Gareth Knight shows that the Melusine story is a powerful initiatory legend emerging from the deeply transformative Faery Tradition of ancient Europe. Furthermore he demonstrates how such legends manifest as history: the innate sacromagical power of Melusine affected key places and events in the development of the medieval world and from there reached far into the shaping of the modern world through the conflicts for Jerusalem and the Middle East. Gareth Knight is the author of many books on magic, occultism, and esoteric tradition. His work is known world-wide and has been influential in the development of the contemporary magical revival.

A series of essays covering a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience, whose underlying theme is to show how our daily lives can be made a training ground for adepthood. It explains the different kinds of meditation and how to find the right esoteric teachers. Essays on the Tree of Life explain the evolution of modern esoteric Qabalah and how it has evolved from an image of God to a map of the created universe. A careful elucidation of the philosophy of Coleridge, and its relevance for today, is followed by a chapter on bridging the gap between psychology and occultism, with examples from the life of Dion Fortune and the 'ghost' of her Sea Priestess. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on Western Esoteric Traditions, this book is full of wisdom and insights that will help readers apply spiritual, magical and Qabalistic principles to their everyday life.

Dion Fortune encoded much practical magical lore within her novels, leaving it up to the reader to work out how to make use of it. Behind the novels were two major rituals, the Rite of Isis and the Rite of Pan, which Dion Fortune occasionally performed in public in the 1930s as part of her drive to open up occultism beyond the closed walls of esoteric fraternities. Now for the first time, these important magical workings have been released from her society's archive in their complete and original form. Edited and explained by Gareth Knight, this book contains the full text of the original Rite of Isis and Rite of Pan which formed the basis for Dion Fortune's Moon Magic, The Goat-Foot God, and The Sea Priestess. Further archive material elucidates the practical magical principles found in The Winged Bull. The book is supplemented by several articles written by Dion Fortune in the 1930s which shed further light on the practical content of her novels, including the essay Ceremonial Magic Unveiled, a review of the work of Israel Regardie in which she gives her views on the controversies within the Golden Dawn and frankly describes her own falling out with Moina MacGregor Mathers.

"By the time we met, he was a newly ordained curate and I was scratching a living in the esoteric world, had written a book on the Qabalah and ran an occult magazine. We were thus inhabitants of two worlds that were never supposed to meet - at least by popular convention - or if they did, to be diametrically opposed to each other." The catalyst for such a meeting of the minds was the provocative poetry of Anthony Duncan, hitherto little known to the world but privately praised by Kathleen Raine. Following on from the "Lord of the Dance" chapter in his recent autobiography, I Called it Magic, and various entries in his book of collected letters, Yours Very Truly, Gareth Knight muses on the esoteric resonances resulting from his unlikely friendship with the Reverend Anthony Duncan. Their intellectual sharing of ideas led to Duncan's The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic and Knight's Experience of the Inner Worlds, which have become companion texts of esoteric Christianity often read and taught together. The pair had planned to co-author a book before Duncan's untimely passing in 2003 so Christ & Qabalah comes as a fulfilment of a long-held promise. The book will delight admirers of both authors with its intertextual interplay as well as a fresh exploration of the differences and similarities between a cleric and an occultist. Knight has described the book as an "organic process, almost an initiation, that has left me with a somewhat expanded consciousness." Readers are invited to share in the various machinations that sparked this dynamic relationship - one that keeps on giving.

The knights of King Arthur's Round Table - Erec, Lancelot, Yvain, Perceval and Gawain - first appeared in the works of Chretien de Troyes, who cast into Old French stories told by Welsh and Breton story tellers which had their origin in Celtic myth and legend. Chretien wrote at a time when faery lore was still taken seriously - some leading families even claimed descent from faery ancestors! So we do well to look again at these early stories, for they were written not so much in terms of mystical quests or examples of military chivalry but records of initiation into Otherworld dynamics. Gareth Knight, an acknowledged expert on spiritual and magical traditions and a student of medieval French, goes to the well spring of Arthurian tradition to unveil these original principles. What is more, he shows how they can be regenerated today. "Opening the faery gates" can have its reward not only in terms of personal satisfaction and spiritual growth but as part of a much needed realignment of our spiritual responsibilities as human beings on planet Earth.

Considerable interest in faery tradition has grown up in recent years and not least in the story of Melusine of Lusignan, the subject of a prose romance by Jean d'Arras at the end of the 14th century, swiftly followed by one in verse by Couldrette. This book provides a collection of material from various sources to give an all round picture of the remarkable faery, her town, her church, her immediate family, and the great Lusignan dynasty she founded. An established authority on Melusine, Gareth Knight collects together all the best source material, which he translates from the French, and presents his own researches into the Lusignan family of the 12th century, whose dynasty included kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, examining the possibility of a familiar spirit guiding the family in its destiny.

The knowledge and use of magical images was once a closely guarded secret of initiates and adepts in the Mystery Schools. Gareth Knight gives easy-to-follow classifications of the various kinds of magical image, along with instructions for their use as agents of self realisation and spiritual service. Indispensible for beginners and advanced practitioners alike, this book presents the theory and techniques of creative visualisation and meditation. These practical teachings range from the circulation of force within the aura for the purpose of balancing the personality to the development of a full magical system of pathworking, enabling deep contact with inner sources of wisdom. Now in its third edition, a new section is included on the magical images of the Tarot, plus an extensive chapter on Qabalistic pathworking in the Western Mystery Tradition.

In this book Gareth Knight takes the most famous and most haunting of all British legends and places it in its rightful position as the core of the Western Mystery Tradition, which draws its inspiration from Greek, Irish and even Atlantean myth. The central Arthurian themes and characters are brought to life with clear and thorough explanations, while the carefully woven pattern that has developed around the Arthuriad is carefully unravelled and its full esoteric significance revealed. This fascinating study, which builds on the work of Dion Fortune and Margaret Lumley Brown, takes the reader beyond the world of Malory and unfolds an inner landscape as real as the isles in which it was created.

Here is unfolded the fascinating history and development of the Tarot, from its fifteenth-century beginnings as a conjunct to playing cards, to the massive explosion of its popularity as a system of occult symbolism. Gareth Knight presents his analysis of the basic archetypal principle behind each card and gives practical examples of magical work with the Tarot images in pathworkings and rituals. Several different approaches are adopted which can be used to develop familiarity and skill with the Tarot system. Originally published in 1986 as The Treasure House of Images, and later re-issued in the USA as Tarot & Magic, this new, expanded edition includes six extra chapters, pulling together many of the new insights garnered over the 25 years since it was first published.

The Breton lai is a narrative poem, usually accompanied by music, that appeared in France about the middle of the 12th century, carried by travelling musicians and storytellers called jongleurs. What is important about them is that they contain a great deal of faery and supernatural lore deriving from Celtic myth, legend and folktale. This collection of twelve tales focuses on faery lore in the lai tradition. Nine are taken from anonymous medieval jongleur sources; the other three are from the more courtly tales collected by Marie de France in the late 12th century. Gareth Knight, a scholar of medieval French as well as an established author on esoteric faery lore, provides a vivid and lively translation of each lai along with a commentary which takes a perspective both historic and esoteric.

Few figures from myth and legend have impressed the imagination like that of Merlin, Archmage of the land of Logres, whose shadowy, compelling presence plays a key part in the tales of Arthurian legend and the Quest of the Holy Grail. In this lively collection of essays, Gareth Knight traces the historical importance and esoteric influence of Merlin and the Grail tradition from its mythological beginnings right down to modern times. Topics covered include Dion Fortune's grail work at Glastonbury, the Merlin archetype, the "Elizabethan Merlin" John Dee, the blue stones of Preseli (which were used to build Stonehenge), and the connection between Merlin and Tolkien's figure of Gandalf. This new edition of the book is expanded and has three additional articles, including an esoteric analysis of the legend of Sir Gareth which has never been published before.

The long-awaited magical autobiography of Gareth Knight covers a long career in pursuit of the Mysteries, from the adventures of New Dimensions magazine to the calling of King Arthur, from the rituals of Sherwood Forest to the Somme, from the wrath of fellow ritual magicians to the shining allure of Faery.