Opening the imagination - expressing the heart

Publication release next Spring by Ignotus Press but you can sneak a preview to the intro now...

"OK so I'm an old sod, an old bastard, a thousand different kinds of shit if you like, but I am a human being who loved the esoteric Tradition I tried to  serve... Perhaps I didn't do very well with what I'd got but I did my best..."         

letter to Alan Richardson, 19th Sept. 1989

William G. Gray was a real magician, a kind of primeval spirit who worked his magic as an extension of the Life Force, not as a sop to ego. No-one who met him had any doubt that he was in touch with supra-human sources of wisdom, or that from his home in a dowdy back- street of Cheltenham he was bringing through energies from other dimensions that would one day influence us all. He reeked of psychism like he often reeked of incense, could give you the uncomfortable feeling that he could see right through you and beyond, and had been to places in spirit that we could scarcely imagine. He had powers of low-key prophecy which he often demonstrated, which were often accurate, and he turned some of the convoluted magical systems that had endured for centuries inside-out and upside-down, thus making it simpler for the rest of us to work with Light. Many of the books on magic and the kabbalah which appear today owe a huge if unrecognised debt to his pioneering writing. If nothing else, he was a true original in everything he did. In some ways he was larger than life, and many people were fearful of him. In other ways he had exasperating and unapologetic human quirks which could make him seem very small, depending on where you stood -or sometimes rather appealing if you didn't get blasted by his ire.

Anyone who ever met Bill Gray must laugh at the books churned out by the self-styled witches, magicians and urban shamans who, a generation later, imagine they are High Priests, mighty adepts, or 21st Century brujos. What empty figures they are in comparison, clutching their amulet-filled power pouches or dream-catchers, communing with their power animals while riding their dainty silver broomsticks through crystal-singing candy-floss Otherworlds where everything is eternally positive and ineffably, irritatingly, nice -and always with at least one eye on achieving a few sound-bites on local tv.

As Bill might have said when asked if they raised any real power: "Raise power? That lot couldn't raise so much as a good fart between them!"

Yet if there is anything evolutionary about the current urge to revitalise the present by looking at the patterns of the past, and the increasing notions that there are harmonic energies within the Earth and ourselves that can be worked with -whether through green eco- movements, the Celtic Revival or the Wiccan arts -then it is due in no small degree to the work that was done by an old bastard who lived near the bus station in a faded town in Gloucestershire.

At least Bill Gray could raise power. Power that could make your eyes water and your fillings ache, and seep out into the world to change it. That's what real magicians do.  

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Last modified: November 09, 2003