FOREWORD TO THE SACRED TEXT

The Sacred Text stands alone. It is unlike any other set of consciously created pictographs and subtly eludes both precise classification and identifiable historical parallel, even though one sees or thinks one sees elements of many disparate systems within it.

How it will resonate in the subconscious mind of the neo-pagan I cannot say, for I can approach it only from the psycho-spiritual standpoint of the Christian esotericist. Even so, I suspect that there will be a sense of familiarity coupled with a distinct unease, for this is not a facile product of the wandering, rational mind, but an ur-text that has welled up from the deep levels of the most ancient part of the human brain. Such parallels as it has are not historic but literary: it brings to mind the nameless symbols of the nightmare beings created by H.P. Lovecraft, and, perhaps more appropriately, the pictographs that are now the outward and visible sign of the pre-Celtic proto-humans of Arthur Machen's fantastic tales.

Their apparent familiarity may indicate that they stem from neural patterns inherent in human consciousness: patterns that have descended from a time long before the advent of civilisation. That such patterns survive is unquestioned. They can be seen in Pictish symbols; in certain Etruscan art forms; and in the symbolic decorations of the manuscripts of the Revelations of the Twelfth Century mystic, Hildegarde of Bingen that are now thought to represent the regular visual effects of the migraines from which she suffered. In her case the migraines seem to have stimulated a physiological process that led to the appearance of patterns that were lying dormant in obscure neural pathways.

Nor was Hildegarde alone. Symbolic patterns of a similar kind can be seen in the pictographs of new religions, most obviously in the imagery of the Wiccan religion, designed and established by Gerald Gardner. But by virtue of his earlier association with Aleister Crowley, Gardner drew from a reservoir of unstructured imagery that derived not from the disciplined and traditional magic of the Western Mystery Tradition with its emphasis on divine Otherness, but from a primitive, anarchic strain within the savage self.

Thus the pictogrpahs of The Sacred Text should be approached with care. They represent the untrammelled energy of primitive man. We may have overlain our savagery with civilisation but beneath the veneer the raw energy survives, given material expression in symbols with a strange, emotive power. Where they will lead those who take them up and systematically manipulate them, I do not know, and what they will do to such practitioners I cannot say. They are entering uncharted waters.

R.A. Gilbert
Bristol, England

October 1998