Don't Vote Tribal in 2015 - One Last Chance for England

England is probably the most class-ridden country in the world. It is like a mental illness or a soul illness that is the main cause for the cancer at the heart of our politics. Unless at least 20% of the electorate wake up and caste off their class prejudices before 2015, I think England is over. Finished. If you are a dyed-in-the-wool Tory - do not vote Conservative now: your party has betrayed all of its better values. If you are a tribal Labour voter because your grandfather was Old Labour - do not vote Labour now. Do not believe a word of the propaganda you read in the newspapers or online. Almost all of it is spin and lies, designed to appeal to your emotional prejudices for financial reasons, to keep politicians in their jobs. PLEASE wake up to this because after 2015 there won't be another chance. Above all do not vote Labour because you have heard there are unnecessary spending cuts and you like angry slogans like 'Tories are scum' or 'lower than vermin' - unless you transcend this mindset, we are finished. Because ALL major parties represent the moneyed Middle Classes fighting viciously amongst themselves, and ALL are committed to capitalism and Statism that is killing our planet. Yes there are some vicious and unnecessary spending cuts - but welfarist fantasies are no solution.

200 years ago, politics was simple. It was a battle between the Tories - the party of the aristocrats, the old social order, the Monarchy and tradition - and the Whigs, the party of the wealthy aspirational middle classes, often more powerful than the decaying aristocrats, who believed in 'progress'. It was a balance of two groups of people who between them had most of the money and power in Britain. The new industrial working classes did not yet have the vote or any political power; the Trade Unions were in their infancy.

At the end of the 19th Century, the Labour Party came into existence very largely informed by Nonconformist Christianity. Keir Hardie the first Labour MP was a Methodist minister. Labour in the UK has always been emotional and nursed a noble sense of solidarity with the downtrodden, alongside an ignoble tribal hatred of the moneyed classes. Which of course many of their grandchildren then became. The Whigs developed into Liberal Party which should have been the great unifying party with its values of individualism and moderation. Instead it gradually faded to nothing as the Labour Party grew and gradually became Middle Class and because Tories and Labour alike were and are obsessed with money and control and the Liberal party abdicated its duty to speak of freedom.

After the Second World War, there was a temporary cross-party consensus: the Welfare State was a good thing; the NHS was a good thing. Council Housing and a massive programme of home building were good things. Trade Unions grew powerful and notoriously took pleasure in screwing over the bosses, even to the detriment of the workers they represented. All this began to change in the 1970s when the combined effect of the Vietnam War, the rise of Eastern and Middle Eastern economies and the natural limits of the post World War 2 consensus meant 'growth' - that problematic entity - went into reverse. The dream was over. Margaret Thatcher won a historic victory in 1979 which she utterly squandered. Destructive economic neoliberalism instead of conservatism; funny money banking instead of industry; populist war instead of Great Britain. Her destruction of the post War consensus was enthusiastically continued by Tony Blair. As Thatcher destroyed all that was good about the Tory party, so did Blair destroy the Labour party.

And in voting terms he was right. How and why, you may ask? It's simple. There are three things that distinguish Left from the Right wing parties, globally. How do you like Government - Centralist and focused on power, or decentralised? How do you manage your economy - individualistically based on competition, or socially based on the quest for equality? What social values do you prefer - conservative or radical?

The first question identifies you on a continuum from Statist to Anarchist. The second, from capitalism to socialism. We will come to the third.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Labour Party favoured what might be called Left Libertarian views - as do I myself, with reservations. Closer to anarchism than Statism and closer to financial equality than yuppiedom. But after the New Labour revolution, all 3 British parties were virtually identical - they had accepted capitalism and Statist power. How then could Blair distinguish his brand?

Well, chances are many of us have all met students that have a poster of Bob Marley on their walls; that took a gap year to explore India; that are 'spiritual but not religious'; that think racist and sexist are the worst sins in history and thus useful words to use against each other in playgrounds and then in their journalism. They like safely revolutionary music; pictures of striking looking 'ethnics' without seeing their own racism in this; they think poor neighbourhoods are 'vibrant' and 'diverse' places to visit and score some dope, maybe even visit a squat! (Before squatting was made illegal). They may have had a Working Glass grandparent who was a union member, or their mothers may have been involved in feminism. They are among the most powerful people in Britain but they regard themselves as morally superior to 'the rich' because they disapprove of foxhunting. They are Blair's tribe. And they respond to the third distinguisher of politics - IDENTITY which is so easily commodified and sold.

Racism is real and despicable; so is sexism. However without an analysis of economics and the power relations that sustain inequality, trendy politics is worse than useless. It is easy to preach 'anti-racism' when you live in an all-white Upper Middle class part of London, safely insulated from the demeaning stuggle to work and live faced by working class people of many ethnicities. Now the problem about these communities is they are not quite as 'cool' as the trendoids might wish. They often make racist remarks themselves; do not like uncontrolled immigration even though their parents may have been immigrants; are more religious than the essentially atheist 'spiritual' types who govern them; may have traditional gender relations that may be called sexist. They are not progressives, because they have a culture they think is worth conserving. They don't regulate their lives by 'nannie'. They live the consequences of the social experiment that Right and Left wing centrist governments foist on all of us. 'Speaking nicely' and good behaviour; a duly reverential, cap doffing attitude to the Welfare State and the charities are not top of their priorities.

But 'Cool Britannia' won. While the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, while the people of England, the Mother of Parliaments become more and more disenfranchised, where austerity is the new normal, the political classes continue to chatter. In fact many charities were delighted when Labour lost in 2010 because, with vast hypocrisy, they could start blaming cuts on the evil Tories - virtually the same cuts Labour said they would make, and substantially necessitated by the idiotic ideological fanaticism of Gordon Brown whose destructive work is being continued by the equally ideological insanity of George Osborne. They kept utterly silent when their friends and paymasters were spreading global capitalism at top speed and killing Iraqis and Afghanis.

It is time to stop policing people's thoughts and language, to drop the slogans and self-righteousness and to actually give the disadvantaged money and power. Everyone. No one is better of worse for the colour of their skins or what lies between their legs. Time to come into the present. David Cameron thinks we are in St Mary Mead in 1910; the Big Society jumblesale is raising funds on the village green. Meanwhile the worthy charity types are living in 1947 where Mr Beveridge is going to give milk and free medicine to us all. We must never even suggest the NHS isn't functioning perfectly as it is and there will be plenty of jobs for British workers...and err, for our Commonwealth immigrant neighbours, won't there?

Modern finance and multinational business is destroying our politics and our country - but we can't criticise unlimited economic migration, because that's racism isn't it? Even when it is what leads to a factory employing 5000 workers to be closed and operations relocated across the world. Even when it means that businesses have no incentive to pay workers even a minimum wage, let alone a living wage.

The only political party voicing any actual grassroots socialist policies that might help people is the Green party. If you don't think you need real socialism rather than Labour Middle Class tax the rich to keep people on the dole, you may like to consider where your children or younger siblings can afford to live and whether there will be any jobs for them. If you don't like the Greens, you have options: join the Labour Party and force it to return to Old Labour genuine socialism without comfy slogans and convenient hate - though you will have an uphill struggle. I see no hope at all for the Tories or Lib Dems.

You may not like the Greens but I strongly suggest that short of a massive wave of civil unrest which will probably be co-opted by the same old organised Leftist, you might wish to spoil your ballot paper or form a federation of protest parties. Do something creative. Realise how politics works. This is not a game.

The non-English must find it hard to understand English society and politics. But then so do the English. We are a people who have never liked thinking clearly about ourselves. Science: yes. Religion: sometimes. But we are basically a people of instinct, of (sometimes benign) prejudice, of drowsy adherence to slogans and mob mentalities. Now we have three major political parties in the UK. All of them represent sectors of the Middle Classes fighting with each other.

I look forward to Scottish independence. Then the English will lose their inferiority/superiority complex, establish actual relationships with Scotland, Ireland and Wales and regain their soul.

"There is no future in England's dreaming" as Johnny Rotten sang. In the Name of Christ and in the power of Arthur, Albion Awake. We have done it before and we can do it again.

Love, Sex and the New Aeon

Well I'm back again after a harrowing few days reading the appalling Bloodline of the Holy Grail by the late Laurence Gardner. The full review will appear in a future blog, but to restore my soul I'm talking about something much more interesting. Because even if you're currently jaded about love and bored of sex, it's fair to say we all love having opinions about them!

Ok, let's get started by pondering a basic difference between women and men. No this isn't 'Men are from Mars' and yes we have more in common than not, but let's talk straight. It comes more naturally to women to connect emotional feelings with sex; it often comes more naturally to men to separate them. Neither is wrong, yet we spend inordinate time in a battle of these two principles. Men know deep in their bones - and other bits - that there is nothing better than just...sex. The sheer physical rush of high energy. What Eastern teachings call prana or chi in its very yang phase. Potent, animal and clean. If they are honest, men often find that 'feelings' lessen their sex drive; dwelling on kindness, gentleness, consideration may be very attractive to a female partner but - ironically - lessens the libido. Women know deep down the other side of this. Yet often there's no easy synthesis; what works for one doesn't work for the other.

Yes, men can be 'trained out of'  their instincts, and who can blame women for thinking they have a duty to 'train' and 'civilise' the hairy brutes they share a world with! But, ladies - don't be surprised if something vital has gone from your man - and your sex life - if you succeed. I have known too many women that tamed and broke in a man, only to find they were bored! On the other hand, men soon discover that if they take the time to develop emotional honesty, it can only be good for their sex life...in part. To be right, you don't need to make the other person wrong. Both sexes - try not suppressing your partner. Yes, it's uncomfortable.

One of the funniest manifestations of the different wiring of the sexes is the well known fact that a supposedly unattractive man who gets on stage with a musical instrument and some confidence; or does anything unusually well; or attains power, suddenly becomes a fully fledged sex symbol. Yet when I see a beautiful woman lecturing about philosophy, the last thing I start thinking about is sex - I want to talk poststructuralism and Neo-Kantian philosophy with her!

It is one of the hilarious ironies - one of Mother Nature's little jokes - that the gender's sexual biases pull in opposite directions. There is a deep secret here: enter into it.

Well if you're still with me, you may be thinking - he's generalising massively! And shouldn't we just acknowledge the ladies got it right, as elsewhere? But Philalethes has a secret to share: it is really important for the long term happiness of a relationship, for sex and friendship, that the male perspective gets a look in. Why? I shall tell you...

If you get stuck in a rut, if you wait to make any change until your 'emotions' feel just right, you will be waiting a long time. You'll be locked in the stale pattern of your self-repeating psychodramas. Sometimes you just need to do it. Unspoken emotions can close down a couple's sex life. We have to get beyond this pseudo-Christian and basically Victorian idea that only when people are feeling 'loving' should they couple. Yes uncaring sex can be impersonal or at worst brutal. But unsentimental, vital sex can blow away a lot of those niggly little emotions. Go on - try it without trying to control it. And of course, joking aside, this isn't just true of sex but of the human social personality - which is why people use sex to break out of their rigid personalities. Those who cannot balance their instincts with their personalities are bound to have affairs or be serial monogamists...

There are many reasons why gender politics and sex are thorny issues in today's world. But I'd like to share the metaphysical basis. As many are becoming aware, the earlier phases of society were Matriarchal or at least thought of the Goddess as at least as important as the God. This was a biased view and characterisic of times when humans were closer to the animal state, lived more vitally in their bodies and in tune with nature. Ironically stereotypical male sexuality preserves more of the Matriarchal state than the stereotypical female equivalent. Then came the Patriarchal ages that emphasised reason and abstraction. These were also biased and created an artificial separation from the nature humans were moving away from. In this more mental age, stereotypical female sexuality is more culturally appropriate - hence the deeply ironic fact that Christianity is in many was the most effeminate and female friendly religion in recorded history, despite its misogynistic tendencies.

Crowleyites might say, after the ages of Isis and Osiris (Patriarchy and Matriarchy, approximately) must come the age of Horus. Yes, but really this should be bi-sexual. It is very obvious that women have been quicker on the uptake in grasping this, partly perhaps because women often understand bisexuality better than men who are generally frightened by it. Yet this will be scuppered if we try to return to a Matriarchy. All New Age cliches that say women=good, intuitive, sensitive, spiritual and man=bad, rational, insensitive, material are wrong and pernicious. Sugar and spice vs slugs and snails - nonsense and all ultimately deriving from the girly loser Jesus that Sunday schools taught us, a travesty of the Word made Flesh.

EMOTIONS AND SPIRITUALITY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. For Millennia, women express emotion and men express outward energy (prana) more, one expression of which is intellectuality. Neither reason nor emotions are Spirit. Spirit is bisexual.

Until men and women balance their yang and yin within themselves and then with their partners and wider society, the Spirit cannot function in reality.

Our way is the way of fire.

Book Review – Myths of the Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green

Revisiting one's favourite childhood books can be nerve-wracking. Like other 8 year olds, I was fed on a diet of so-called children's books many of which would be classified as 'fantasy'. The fact that children like myths is sometimes used to support the view that myth, or fantasy, is childish. Of course the truth is that the mythic mind is natural and it takes considerable indoctrination to alienate a human being's mind from its natural state through a process sometimes called 'education'. I loved myth and science fiction, and the Tarot cards and astrological books I received around the same age fitted well with my reading; as did my Bible.

Besides obvious items like The Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis' works – which I never liked so much (now I understand why, but that's for another blog) my favourites were a series of re-tellings of global mythology by Roger Lancelyn Green. I knew nothing about him until recently discovering that he was one of the Inklings and knew C. S. Lewis well. Green also wrote The Tale of Troy, Tales of the Greek Heroes, Tales of Ancient Egypt and King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. I cannot imagine a better introduction to comparative religion and mythology than these works. Told in simple and gripping narrative style that holds the attention on the story, Green skillfully brings out the quality of the different myths. It is like an introduction to the folk-souls of the world. Just imagine what fun education could be if this was combined with food of the world, music of the world and so on!

It was quite an exciting discovery for an 8 year old that meditating (or day-dreaming as I then thought of it) on myths with a magical content can induce 'esoteric' experiences. Perhaps Christian fundamentalists are right that there is a subversive occult agenda behind fantasy literature – after all, many children's writers were either directly involved in the magical traditions like E.E. Nesbit, or highly sympathetic, or attuned to the mythopoeic element in religion and folk culture, like the Inklings. And of course one of the Inklings was Owen Barfield, a profound student of Rudolf Steiner's philosophy and C. S. Lewis' closest intellectual friend.

But to return to Myths of the Norsemen. What a captivating world! We are continents away from the sultry warmth, the dark earthiness of Egyptian myth, the playfulness and humanism of Greece. These are older mysteries, akin to the Celtic / Brythonic yet distinct. Perhaps due to the over influence of Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions on our culture, the Norse / Saxon myths which should be the closest to the British, are the most remote. We have been taught to sneer with politically-correct disdain at the term Anglo-Saxon; and yet, the Norse myths, preserved in works like the Eddas and the Volsung Saga and deriving from the Skalds (Bards) are full of magic and life.

The Tree of Yggdrasil; the city of Asgard in its very top; the Aesir and the Vanir; one-eyed Odin with his broad-brimmed hat and blue cloak; the ice giants; beautiful Baldur killed with the mistletoe and laid out with his wife in the longboat; the destructive Fenris Wolf and the Midgard Serpent which encircles the world; Thor and his mighty hammer Miolnir; Andvari's cursed ring and Sigurd's tragic destiny; the Halls of Valhalla where warriors who die in battle feast and drink mead; treacherous Loki; and the final battle of Ragnarok. Anyone with a drop of the blood of the North aches with recognition at these images, as if they were part of our minds all along and have never been forgotten.

Scholars now understand how a group of tribes from the Caucasus region, horse lords with deities of the sky, lightning, wind and other primal forces, migrated passing down into India, across Europe and even to Ireland. They called themselves Aryan – nobles – and the peoples of Europe and India are largely descended from them. They left their name not just in India but in Iran, and Eire (Ireland). Their languages remain surprisingly similar – for example the names of the numbers 1 to 10 are virtually identical in all these languages and in particular German and Sanskrit retain some deep verbal similarities.

The emerging sciences of ethnology and comparative linguistics in the 19^th Century abused the dawning insights to create racist ideologies in some cases. The Aryan rather than Christian heritage common to the Indians and Germanic peoples, increasingly clear through the scholarship of Max Muller and the occult traditions collected by Madame Blatavsky, were distorted to become influences on the hate-filled ideology of Nazism. But it has yet to be appreciated that the suppression of the indigenous cultures of our lands by the religions of the East and the intellectuality of Greece and Rome – above all by books and languages of other lands – was a blow from which we are still recovering.

The Western Mysteries have done wonderful work in integrating Celtic / British themes with Magical Qabalah. Surely the Norse myths must one day attain their due role.

If they do, the key figure will surely be seen as J.R.R. Tolkein, who combined a deep knowledge of the Nordic Sagas with a true Christian spirit. His co-worker Roger Lancelyn Green will be remembered alongside him. Everyone should buy this little book to begin the quest. Now I am off to look for a good edition of the Eddas.

Cyril Scott - Great, Forgotten English Composer and Theosophist

Very few English people know of the "founder of British modern music" Cyril Scott (1879-1970). I suspect this is partly because the English have a deep inferiority complex about their abilities as 'high artists'. We are always prone to assume that a great painter is more likely to be Italian or French, a great composer to be German. When Europeans mock English art, we are often quick to join in with a touch of self-flagellation!

Scott was a virtuoso pianist and composer. Like many serious artists he wrote 'pot-boilers'. One of these is nonetheless an immortal work. Lotus Land (1905) was immensely popular in its time. A dreamy, somewhat Oriental piece for solo piano, it has the effect - like Satie - of putting the performer in a trance while playing it. The famous violinist Fritz Kreisler arranged it for violin and piano - a wonderful original recording of Kreisler playing Lotus Land may be heard here, if you can wait for 30 seconds of advertisement. It is an easy, delightful piece to play on piano especially if you have big hands.

Few have any idea how the great musical inspirations of that time pervade our music. Here is one example. Listen to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme - Resolution (live footage of the master himself) and you will hear the same mode, chords, even the same key as Lotus Land. This is not coincidental. The advanced harmony of French Impressionist music like Debussy, Ravel and Satie entered modern Jazz to pervade the 1950s and 1960s work of Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Coltrane etc. And so did the deep spiritual influences within this music. 

Scott was very much a part of the turn of the century ferment of music, art and spirituality. Like many artists of his time, Cyril Scott was a Theosophist. And this is probably why the English establishment could not relate to him as to a national treasure like Ralph Vaughan Williams or an obviously 'important' composer in historical terms like Benjamin Britten. (RVW was a great composer, but he exemplified an 'Englishness' that tends to make him inaccessible to mainstream European sentiment. Britten, a prodigious genius, will be the subject of a later blog). 

Alongside his prolific musical career, Scott wrote books on occultism, nutritional theory and other subjects; he was also a poet. Some idea of his range can be gained from this website. Scott is best known for his trilogy of works beginning with The Initiate, written in 1920. I have just reread The Initiate and it is without doubt one of the best of all Theosophical books. The first half is a series of impressions of an advanced English yogi with deep knowledge of Yog Vidya, referred to under the pseudonym of Justin Moreward Haig. JMH operates as a kind of benevolent trickster in English high society, cajoling people into discovering the happiness that comes from acknowledging unity, identification with the soul within, and abandoning vanity and selfishness, which then leads naturally on to spiritual practice. Fascinatingly, one of his main targets was sexual jealousy and the rigid English fear of expressing love, at least in England circa 1910. The second half is a magical parable or fairytale called The Circuitous Journey. 

JMH comes across as a philosopher-sage, a very English Boddhisattva. To this day, rather like Castaneda's Don Juan, speculation rages as to whether there was any such person as JMH. But the proof of the pudding is that his personality rings true. This book, and its two successors The Initiate In the New World, and The Initiate In The Dark Cycle, were written when the Theosophical Society seemed to be going through a crisis. Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater had announced that the young Indian boy Krishnamurti was the mouthpiece of the World Teacher. The Theosophists conflated this concept with the coming of the Maitreya and in a way with the reappearance of Christ, as so often using the name Christ word with a sneakily tweaked Theosophical meaning. Up to 250,000 people joined the Order of the Star of the East before Krishnamurti himself declared he was not who all these people thought he was and disbanded the order in 1929. 

Great western occultists like Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune ultimately left the Theosophical Society because of this unfortunate direction. To this day the New Age influenced by pop-Theosophy churns out all kinds of rubbish in the holy names of Christ and Maitreya. Yet there were those within Theosophy who tried to keep the Society to its original course. Scott and his circle were among the best.

The fate of the Theosophical Society and its relation to the substantially failed New Age movement is another story. Yet to return to the criminal neglect of Cyril Scott: it must be said, the English are barbarians. Lacking the brilliant intellectual culture of the Scots, the incomparable verbal dexterity and arch playfulness of the Irish, and the mysticism of those who self-identify as Celts, our culture is a mystery. The English can either be visionaries or total materialists; we are not thinkers, but we are inspired inventors. Without the Bible, poetry and some sense of connection to the stories of our land, we perish. I wish it were not so, but there it is. 

The English must return to William Blake and the 'mad' religious poets; to Shakespeare and then to the Romantics; and above all to its folk tradition. It must rediscover its Arthurian and Christian Mystic roots and thus, taking its place in Christendom, go forth to meet the East in fraternity. There is a finite time this can be accomplished. Albion, awake!