The first Gareth Knight Conference has taken place over the weekend of 26th March at the Assembly Rooms in Glastonbury. Organised by Knight’s daughter Rebsie Fairholm, among others, the single-day event was to celebrate Knight’s substantial body of work. Regrettably, Knight himself died three weeks before the event on the 1st March at the age of 91, but if he is observing from the astral, he will be aware of the success of this conference (intended as the inaugural day of an annual event) and of the light that it shed on his influential writings.
Flier for the Gareth Knight conference [Gareth Knight Group]
Most occultists will be aware of Knight’s work and now of his legacy. Gareth Knight (the pseudonym of Basil Wilby, who worked at the Longman Group, a publishing company for many years) was 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 knew 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.
He 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. His work with the Society of the Inner Light, and then that of his own group, with its regular meetings at Hawkwood College, are central to any understanding of the esoteric at this time. Many readers will regard Knight’s work as formative to their own understanding of magic, the Kabbala, and other aspects of the esoteric journey.
The conference began with Rebsie’s own recollections of her father, not just as an esoteric practitioner (she has been a member of the Gareth Knight Group since 1995), but as a parent (he kept a parrot and was ‘especially soppy’ about dogs): a moving account, especially as she had just lost her father. She also recalled her mother Roma, an equal partner to Knight and as committed to spiritual exploration.
The next talk was by Wendy Berg, a member of the Gareth Knight Group since the 1990s, who led the group between 1999 and 2013. She gave a detailed lecture on the Rose Cross and the Goddess, exploring the symbolism behind the Rosicrucian Cross, and the links between the Rosicrucian tradition and others, including those who work with Egyptian magic, and Tibetan Buddhism. She also explored the ‘six rules’ for Rosicrucian groups: an emphasis on ‘healing the sick,’ and the importance of training one’s successor. Primarily, she emphasised Knight’s work on the feminine divine.
Following a break, Rebsie once more took the stage for a discussion of Anglo Saxon Magic – a rather neglected strand in Paganism these days. She highlighted the importance of the ancestors in the Anglo Saxon world, and some differences between this and the Norse tradition, including an exploration of the runes and Anglo Saxon herbalism.
Julie Petrie, who is a member of the Gareth Knight Group and a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, as well as being a student of myth, then gave a talk on Remembering Arwen Undómiel, which had as its starting point an encounter with an elven being.
In the afternoon, other members of the Gareth Knight Group delivered talks, including Derek Thompson, a freelance writer and novelist, on the links between creative writing and magic, and Margaret Beardsley, a professional scientist and engineer. Her talk took as its starting point Gareth Knight’s observations that both science and magic suffered from the rift that had grown between them, then explored the factors that led to the division of science and magic, the paths that each took, and the signs that those paths are, at last, converging once more.
Condolences on Knight’s death, as well as responses to the Conference, can be found on the Facebook page below, and show how respected Gareth Knight has been over the last decades in British esotericism (and beyond), and how many people’s lives and practices his work influenced and inspired.
Glastonbury Abbey ruins – Image credit: Gerd Eichmann – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100750867
One member of the community, on hearing of Knight’s death, said that his first response took the form of a recollection of a conversation they’d had about Coleridge, and offered this text as a tribute to his legacy:
“The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.”
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