Tim Wyatt – England
The author and some cats ... somewhere in Greece
There’s a shadow war and covert fightback unfolding against soul-corroding modernism and mass technophilia. It may soon erupt into a full-scale conflict.
It’s been happening for a while as a growing minority of people intuitively recoil from a machine-driven, digitised world and all the dangers and addictions this imposes on its eight billion plus inhabitants.
All across the planet there’s an instinctive imperative to stop degrading and raping Gaia, this living, breathing Earth Mother who sustains and hosts all life on this tiny spinning rock. There appears to be a blossoming and deep-seated urge to reject dehumanising concrete and glass cityscapes and reconnect with the natural world. And there’s also a deep suspicion if not growing certainty that materialism we’ve been conditioned to worship is a futile, fatal and failed worldview.
Perhaps this is why – in the West at least – ancient Earth-based religions such as Wicca, paganism and shamanism are making a comeback as the fastest growing spiritual traditions.
In my own country, England, Christianity continues to corrode into increasing irrelevance fuelled by serial sex scandals and failed descents into crude political correctness. It no longer satisfies spiritual hunger of the masses – if indeed it ever did. A different situation prevails elsewhere.
(The core Christian message may remain sublime but it’s clear that a great many people are looking for something to supersede a creed cooked up in the desert twenty centuries ago.)
More and more people are seeking direct contact with whatever they consider divine – not through some robed intermediary who claims privileged access to deity.
Absolutely central to these emerging trends are those hidden kingdoms of nature which – unknown to most – create and sustain all life on this planet.
Although these fall into two entirely separate classes and evolutionary streams there’s intimate connection and co-operation between them.
The angelic realms constitute a superhuman kingdom of entities, part of an entirely separate evolutionary strand from the human. Sometimes known as devas (‘shining ones’ in Sanskrit) these vast hierarchies operate mainly on the mental level but may rarely manifest on lower planes such as the astral or etheric. These are the planners and architects.
Central to Christianity and other religions, angels remain astonishingly prominent in modern thought. Recent polling by Pew Research found that 68 per cent of Americans – Christians, atheists, agnostics and members of other religions – believe in the existence of angels.
Angels work in close co-operation with less evolved entities – nature spirits or elementals. Known in every culture and tradition throughout history – except now – nature spirits originate from the three etheric kingdoms below that of the mineral. They have permanent astral bodies but can appear etherically. They take numerous forms and have thousands of different names across the world. In Hinduism alone there are 330,000 million of them. These elementals are the workers and builders.
Industrialisation and urbanisation over the past two centuries have largely severed our connection with fairies, gnomes, sylphs and salamanders. A select few with enhanced perception can still witness their activities. And yet to most people they are nothing more than the quaint remnants of folklore and fairy tales.
Angels may remain in vogue because they were a central beneficial feature of Christian teachings whereas nature spirits were largely branded as diabolical entities and agents of Satan by the Church authorities from the medieval period onwards.
Throughout the twentieth century the Theosophical Society spawned a series of gifted individuals able to observe both elementals and angels in the natural world. Their insights are fascinating.
The Dutch-American psychic Dora van Gelder Kunz (1904-1999), grew up on the island of Java in Indonesia and communed with what she called ethereal beings from an early age. This continued after she moved to America and employed her psychic abilities as a healer. (Dora was a Dutch citizen when she married Fritz Kunz in Chicago in 1927, but later became a naturalized American
Dora at a young age
She became president of the Theosophical Society in America in 1977 and two years later published her seminal book The Real World Of Fairies describing her life-long detailed interactions with nature spirits in many different locations.
The English theosophist, writer and lecturer Edward L. Gardner (1869-1969) also studied the fairy realms. He was one of the investigators of controversial photographs of fairies taken by two girls in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley in 1917. The prominent author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also visited the site and wrote about it in leading periodicals.
Decades later the girls – then old women – admitted that the pictures had been faked using cutouts from a girl’s magazine although they insisted that they’d only been trying to illustrate what they’d actually seen in the fields near their home.
(This writer spent much of his childhood in the same village in the 1960s but never had the privilege of communing with the fairy folk. But it did spark a life-long interest in the hidden realms.)
Geoffrey Hodson
Geoffrey Hodson (1886-1983) also investigated the Cottingley phenomenon and claimed to have seen the same fairy figures as the girls. Hodson wasn’t only one of the most prolific and influential theosophical writers of the twentieth century producing more than fifty books, he was also a world traveller and highly-respected lecturer whose work spanned decades.
Crucially, he was also a talented clairvoyant. Much of his work involved observing angels or devas as well as nature spirits and elementals.
Hodson first encountered both of these commonwealths as a young man in the countryside near where he grew up in Lancashire, England. His first contact with theosophy – something he describes as ‘a life-changing event’ – took place in 1912 when he heard Annie Besant, the then president of the International Theosophical Society, speaking in Manchester. He immediately joined the organisation. This led to a lifetime devoted to Theosophy. But the key focus of his activities was studying the activities and functions of angels and elementals.
Throughout his long life – he lived to the age of 97 – he was regularly in contact with and assisted by non-physical beings such as the Masters Morya, Koothoomi, Serapis Bey, Rackoczy and others. They all assisted his work in understanding these hidden legions.
However, there were two other pivotal figures who provided huge assistance in this work – Master Polidorus Isurenus and an archangel called Bethelda. Through regular contact they all proved pivotal in teaching him about the nature and activities of these kingdoms.
From the 1920s onwards Hodson wrote a succession of books outlining his observations of devas and elementals describing their appearance, behaviour and purpose. The most important of his observations from many different countries are encapsulated in his book The Kingdom of the Gods. These focus not only on his early activities in England from 1921 to 1929 but subsequent investigations across the world. However, this book wasn’t finally published until 1952. In many ways it can be regarded as an overall compendium encapsulating his many decades of work.
In many ways The Kingdom of the Gods is a ground-breaking work. Its coverage of the angelic and elemental worlds is panoramic, spanning vast hierarchies from mighty solar archangels and planetary spirits to sylphs, salamanders and the minutest flower spirits. Arguably the most comprehensive catalogue of these invisible empires ever produced, Hodson provides detailed descriptions of the numerous different classes of being he encountered, offering incredible insights into their appearance and working methods.
In 1937 while travelling by boat from India to South Africa Hodson met the talented artist and illustrator Ethelwynne M. Quail who was familiar with and deeply impressed by his books on angels. She offered to produce illustrations of these hidden entities.
Later she and her parents invited Hodson to stay with them for six weeks at their home in Cape Town. Here they embarked on a project for her to produce dozens of images of the nature spirits and angels from his detailed descriptions. Sometimes Quail painted the pictures as Hodson was directly observing these beings.
Among the extensive repertoire were Salamanders, fire elementals built of tongues of flame with constantly changing shapes and between two and three feet tall; Tree Spirits; Mountain Gods; Angels of Music; Rose Angels representing love and wisdom; Healing Angels; and a Kundalini deva responsible for transmitting the three vital forces of life – kundalini, fohat and prana.
Hodson realised that two-dimensional images however beautiful could never do justice to these lofty and impressive beings, some of which displayed auras stretching half a mile over mountainsides and landscapes.
Fascinating insights into how The Kingdom of the Gods was written and inspired can be found in Hodson’s occult diary Sanctuary of the Light compiled from his papers by his second wife Sandra after his death and published in 1986. This provides deep insights not only into his clairvoyant abilities but into his wider occult career.
Sanctuary of the Light reveals how Hodson experienced a major breakthrough in August 1925 when by chance he and his first wife Jane were holidaying at a cottage in the picturesque Gloucestershire village of Sheepscombe. Interestingly, the Hodsons were meant to travel to Torquay but accommodation there had suddenly become unavailable and they were offered a cottage in the Cotswolds instead.
(Intriguingly – and possibly synchronistically – a few days after beginning research into Hodson’s fairy-hunting activities I was perusing a bookstall when I came across a copy of Be Ye Perfect – signed by him and dated Sheepscombe 1928. Clearly it had become a repeat holiday destination for the Hodsons.)
One day during their 1926 stay the Hodsons were lying on a hillside near a beech forest with him observing the activities of what he described as ‘an especially beautiful’ tree fairy. Then there was a dramatic intervention.
Hodson recalled: ‘Quite suddenly, and entirely unsought, I had a tremendous expansion of consciousness. It seemed that the whole heavens opened and became filled with light, and I was caught up into a height which I had never hitherto attained.’ He became aware of the presence of a great angelic being whom he described as being ‘supernally beautiful’.
Hodson commented: ‘He was majestic, godlike, impassive, and utterly impersonal. Eventually, He communicated to me that He might be known by the name of Bethelda.’ In Hebrew this means ‘The Angel of the House of God’. Bethelda remained in communication with Hodson for the rest of his life.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Hodson published a series of mainly short books including Faeries at Work and at Play and The Brotherhood of Angels and of Men. From the 1940s he began incorporating and elaborating this huge body of material into a new super-compilation, The Kingdom of the Gods.
September 1944 saw a major breakthrough in this project. This marked his first contact with another elevated being, the Master Polidorus Isurenus who informed Hodson: ‘You are asked to undertake a special work.’ (Hodson was subsequently given various specific but undisclosed tasks.)
In December the same year Polidorus Isurenus told him that he’d first embarked on the occult path eight thousand years earlier in Ancient Egypt where he’d taken both male and female incarnations. Further incarnations had followed in Greece and in Palestine where he’d met Jesus Christ preaching to a crowd.
Hodson was informed that he’d first met Polidorus Isurenus, who’d been his teacher, during a first century Jewish incarnation. This had been his last so-called ‘temple’ life and subsequent incarnations had been more prosaic.
Later Hodson was told that he’d appeared among the Gnostics of Alexandria where he’d been an obscure writer and philosopher.
Interestingly, Hodson was also informed that his next three incarnations were ‘less occult than temporal’. He’d appeared in India as a doctor of Ayurvedic medicine in the tenth century. This was followed by a worldly life in Rome. His most recent incarnation had been as a landed gentleman in seventeenth century Tudor England where he’d died in middle age. He was told this life had paid off major karmic debts.
During one of their regular communications Polidorus Isurenus informed him that he was the Masters’ ‘most direct agent to the public’.
On another occasion Hodson learned that his introduction to the world of fairies as a young man was ‘not so much to awaken concepts of a personal angel attached to or working with oneself, as to lead to belief in and study of the existence of the Devic Hierarchy and its functions.’
In one diary entry dated the 12th August 1946 – Hodson’s sixtieth birthday – he describes how on that day Polidorus Isurenus was dictating specific portions of The Kingdom of the Gods.
Despite the life-long influence of the Archangel Bethelda, especially on this book, he’s mentioned briefly on only five instances in his occult diary, some long after the book was completed.
Bethelda’s overall message was that informing humans about the existence of the angelic hosts throughout the ages along with their functions and places in cosmic, universal, planetary, and human nature had a specific purpose. This was to free the human mind from the ‘personalisation of Deity and Divine Powers and Presences’ and offer far more universal concepts.
In September 1972, twenty years after the publication of The Kingdom of the Gods, Bethelda told Hodson: ‘Angel guardianship, angel healing, and angel inspiration of the intellect will ever be fully available to you and each one of those for whom, by you, it may be and is sought.’
Perhaps Bethelda’s most interesting – and indeed specific – observations concern The World Mother, a very sacred celestial personage described as ‘a universally present and active principle’. Hodson had witnessed this mighty feminine presence overshadowing women about to give birth. He’d witnessed this during clairvoyant observations of the various stages of a woman’s pregnancy in the 1920s and which is detailed in his book The Miracle Of Birth.
Bethelda said that throughout the ages adept teachers had repeatedly introduced the concept and worship of a Feminine Aspect of Deity.
And he added: ‘One purpose for this teaching is to inspire devotion leading to the adoption of the concept of a perfect Divine Woman…This principle pervades all creation from the mineral of the dense world to the formless aspects of Solar Systems, Universes, and Cosmoi. This journey in consciousness is part of the evolutionary procedure and will naturally take place in the course of human evolution.’
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The Kingdom of the Gods has gone through numerous editions over the past seventy years and remains in print. It can be regarded as a roadmap for the future.
Tim Wyatt’s books are available HERE