GLASTONBURY, England – The fourth Gareth Knight Conference took place on Saturday, 15th March, at the Assembly Rooms in Glastonbury. This was organised by Knight’s daughter, Rebsie Fairholm, among others of the Gareth Knight group.
Gareth Knight was the pseudonym of Basil Wilby, born in Colchester in 1930. In 1953, he joined the Society of the Inner Light, the organisation formed around the work of Dion Fortune, and in later years edited the magazine New Dimensions and started his own publishing company, Helios Books. He worked with many of the key figures of British esotericism in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, initiating a course on the Kabbalah with Walter Ernest Butler and having a fractious friendship (in common with most people) with occultist William Gray, whose books he published. Knight also published many works of his own, including A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, White Magic, and The Experience of the Inner Worlds with Christian priest Anthony Duncan.
The first talk at this year’s conference was given by Wendy Berg, focusing around the topic of the Externalisation of the Hierarchy, the latter word being a term used to describe the groups of astral plane beings which are believed by some occultists to guide the affairs of those on Earth. Some commentators are not keen on the term ‘hierarchy’, due to its implications of a top-down order, but opinions vary. It comes from the title of a book by the same name by Alice Bailey. The Inner Plane Adepts are supposed to meet every hundred years since 1425, and according to Bailey, their final meeting is supposed to be this year. The term ‘externalisation’ does not necessarily mean that the Adepts will materialise on the physical plane: Knight’s own view seems to have been considerably more subtle, and Wendy Berg suggested that this ‘externalisation’ may refer to a ‘regeneration’ of how archetypes such as the characters of the Arthurian mythos are envisaged.
This was followed by a talk by Rebsie Fairholm on magical rituals and how rituals are structured within the Gareth Knight group. She spent some time on the subject of magical protection and why we do this (inadvertently inviting entities into a ritual can become a problem, for example). Most rituals work best when they are concise and to the point.
Glastonbury’s High Street [Photo Credit: David Gearing CC BY-SA 2.0
After lunch, Paul Maiteny gave a talk on Esoteric Ecology, and the day ended with a visualisation led by Rebsie.
In addition to the conference itself, participants were given a reduction in ticket price to the preview that evening of a production of William Sharp’s play The Immortal Hour, also in the Assembly Rooms. This was written via Sharp’s pseudonym – some would say, channelled persona – Fiona McLeod. Sharp himself was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and his work can be viewed as part of the Celtic Twilight artistic movement of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Boughton adapted the opera of the same name from his libretto of The Immortal Hour, taken from Sharp’s play, in which the faery Etain flees from the faery realm into the mortal world and falls in love with a king. However, she is lured back to faery by the dark spirit Dalua, leaving her broken-hearted monarch to die alone. The play is based on the Irish legend of the Tochmarc Etaine, the ‘Wooing of Etaine,’ which is more substantial in scope than the play and a lot weirder (Etaine is turned into a fly for a thousand years, which doesn’t feature in Sharp’s version!)
This play was first produced in Glastonbury on 26 August 1914. Composer Rutland Boughton staged it as part of the first Glastonbury Festival – now known, over a hundred years later, as one of the world’s biggest pop and rock festivals, but initially conceived as an English version of Bayreuth. It was subsequently staged in London, where it enjoyed a run of over 200 performances, and was staged in New York in 1926.
On a personal note, my mother, now 97, was taken to see a performance of this play before the war, having fallen in love with the music as a teenager: this was played regularly on the Light Programme. In conversation shortly before the preview with esoteric writer RJ Stewart, who has been involved in this production (and who played the psaltery in this performance), he told me that he’d had a similar relationship with the music on Radio Scotland in the 50s: this was a very successful, widely distributed opera.
This initial incarnation of the Glastonbury Festival was supported by theatrical and musical luminaries of the day, such as George Bernard Shaw and Edward Elgar, but Boughton was obliged to step down after joining the Communist Party and supporting the General Strike of 1926.
The latest performance was directed by American composer Greg Dinunzi and differs from both play and opera in that its musical score has been revised: it is a piece of chamber music featuring guitar, cello, viola, bass clarinet, with Armenian Duduk and psaltery. It is a haunting, dreamlike piece of work that was well-received both at the preview and at the main performance on the night of Sunday, 16th March—the cast, all of whom gave strong performances, hail from America, Berlin, and Ireland.
At the preview, a photograph was taken of the cast, which will be placed next to a photo of the original cast of 1914: both will hang in the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms.
You can check out a short video of the background behind the performance here:
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