SHADOWPLAY: the Story Behind the Novel

My first book ‘The Wise Virgin’, was published in 1979. It described how we are triggered into the awareness of our spiritual nature and become conscious of the higher self. Michael Polyani described it as ‘implicit’ rather than ‘tacit’ knowledge’. I called it the feminine principle.

If I thought the journey to spirit was emotionally painful, the visceral experiences of the descent into matter took me into some very difficult spaces.

In the 1980s I was living in Geneva, and went regularly from there to France, to take part in the two-week Seminars held by Ruth White in Le Plan du Castellet. These were held on the beautiful estate of Lorna St Aubyn. Ruth and her guide Gildas covered everything on the psychological/spiritual development spectrum, and I went there once or twice a year from l984-1989.

During that time I met the most incredible people who became life-long friends, and it was a wonderful time of my life. But alongside that was the recognition that I was experiencing ‘the descent’, and encountering a lot of darkness.

In l987 I moved from Geneva to Le Castellet, near Le Plan. There was so much psychic energy in France, which people easily opened up to, in workshops particularly. Over the years and in various settings, I witnessed the harm that psychic power could do and the knots that people could tie themselves in. Learning to discriminate what is and isn’t ‘spiritual’ is part of the journey, and we were all keen to improve our psychic gifts. But it was also obvious how easy it was to be drawn into the unconscious psychic and sexual energy of seemingly well-meaning people.

Jung talked about ‘the shadow’; the repository of taboos, fears and compulsions that lay buried in the unconscious, waiting to burst to the surface as negative emotions or drives.

There was no point in being ‘light and bright and spiritual’, without exploring the depths of our suppressed negative emotions and desires. If we didn’t our insights would likely be skewed. It was important to clear the unconscious and use these gifts as ‘cleanly’ as possible.

I believed in ‘spirit of place’, and felt that being here in Provence was significant to this part of the journey. As well as the Cistercians, I was interested in the Cathars, the twelfth century heretic sect persecuted at Mont Segur for their beliefs in Gnosis and Dualism. The Cathars were centred in the Languedoc – on ‘the other side of the Rhone’ to us.

I read ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’, on the ‘treasure’ of Rennes le Chateau, and their astonishing conclusion that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene. This meant there was a continuing line of the blue blood of Christ. I had no idea if this was physical fact, but something inside me knew it was ‘spiritual truth’.

Mary Magdalene was the Patron Saint of Provence. It was to her that people came to be healed, and over the centuries there were many instances of miracle cures depicted in the tiny Magdalene church of Le Beausset Vieux not far from Le Castellet.

She was also secretly worshipped by the Order of the Knights Templar, indicated by their use of her symbol, the skull.

One day we visited Les Saintes Maries de la Mer at the mouth of the Rhone in the Camargue. It is believed that the three Marys: Salome, Jacobe and Magdalene, came here at the time of Christ with their black servant Sara. They celebrate the event twice a year by carrying the relics from the Church in procession into the sea. It draws gypsies from all round the world who look on Black Sara as their saint.

The symbol on the church and gates at Les Saintes Maries is the anchored heart, part of the Camargue Cross. And on this particular occasion I was sitting in the church, looking towards a statue of the Magdalene, when I had ‘one of those experiences’: a profound physical and energetic sense of spiralling down and down and down, and being anchored into the deepest level of matter.

The clues to the symbolic meaning of the Magdalene were piling one upon the other. The feminine descent in essence was the anchoring of the heart in matter. In 1984 we made an excursion to the cavern in the mountains of St Baume where Mary Magdalene was reputed to have lived for the last thirty years of her life. A forty-minute walk takes you winding up through timeless, primal, druidic woods, and ends at a grotto, which opens out into a cavernous mountain church.

We sat in a pew taking in the atmosphere, lit a candle at the back of the cave and walked down to another chapel below and listened to someone playing the flute. I don’t know how to describe it, but in a microsecond, in another of those experiences, I ‘knew’, through direct knowledge, the energy of the Magdalene through my whole body.

Mary Magdalene represented ‘whore’ energy. Not in the way the Catholic Church imagined, to be repressed for all time, but in the sense of the ‘Holy Whore’: the profound letting go of ‘all that is’, a total supplication, through the sacral chakra, to the acceptance of death and annihilation within matter.

It is in this abandonment to ‘death and nothingness’ and to Him, the Christ – which in some way he is empowering her to do – she ‘seeds’ the Christ, through the Third Eye. Although it is wholly simultaneous, it is She – the dark feminine – who somehow instigates it within that simultaneity. This circulation of polarised energy is the principle of integration that constitutes the goal of human existence. It is the symbolic integration of the principle of spirit and matter, masculine and feminine: the essence of what it is to be human.

But the difficulty – and horror – of this ‘spiritual truth’ is that, at its most degraded, it answers why there is so much rape and incest in the world. At the most raw, material edges: the imperative and drive of matter to be spiritualised, when left un-integrated, could be expressed like that.

I took my last seminar with Ruth in December 1989. It was on Alchemy: the psychological/spiritual changing of lead into gold. It was a fitting completion and in 1990 I decided to write to the book: part two of the journey to the feminine principle. It was the sequel to The Wise Virgin, but felt so bizarre, it was impossible to write it as ‘fact’. I would write the book as a metaphor in novel form. I began wading amongst the symbols I would use, and how the Greek Gods could be depicted in the story.

I didn’t want to set my book in France, despite the fact that everything I had experienced stemmed from there. Landscape would be the prime player in the story, and a dark book needed black earth. The only place I could think of with black volcanic sand was Santorini.

I went to Santorini in April 1990, and found accommodation in Oia at the end of the island, overlooking the Caldera. Lauda’s was a family run hotel, set on sloping white terraces, with rooms that tunnelled into the cliffs. My purpose was simply to write down a location for my story and I spent the days walking up and down recording everything I saw. In the evening I would sit on the terrace with a glass of wine, look across the sea and imagine a life for my story.

I spent a year at home in France writing the novel.

(In March 2013 – I saw a programme on television that suggested Santorini was the original Atlantis. Although I don’t think I ever saw my novel as depicting that story, as I meditated on images to help the story, I did see action under water amongst Greek caves and rocks. I saw underworld laboratories that corresponded with the myth of the final days of Atlantis, where there was experimentation on others, physically, mentally and emotionally. And these themes had turned up in the novel.)

It crossed my mind it was going to be a dark book, which worried me, and the writing was not without its own terrors. At one point I had created a character that was psychically very powerful and I just stopped writing. Fortunately a friend, a healer, turned up, and as we talked we got to the nub of the fear which freed me to go on with the novel.

On the day before I was due to leave France for the UK, I was reflecting on the ending of the novel. Out of the blue I experienced a huge ‘surrender’ inside me – that ultimate sense of ‘feminine surrender’. And the plot ending suddenly turned round completely.

I had written a novel about the descent into matter; the dark shadow of humanity that needed to be made conscious, to be redeemed and integrated in order for us to emerge as fully spiritualised beings here on earth.

For many years the novel was tucked in a drawer, but recently when I lived in Normandy, I visited the Scriptorial in Avranches, where the original manuscripts from Mont St Michel are kept. The information on the history of Mont St Michel suggested that St Michael, the all-powerful master of natural forces, had taken over from the Greek Gods. This made me think again about my novel, which I had linked to those old Gods.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge and the process is no longer as visceral and challenging as it was then. In fact I have mostly forgotten the process. And despite the uncertain picture we still see around us, and the obvious presence of so much power, greed and fear, I do know that since I wrote the novel there is much more light on the horizon. Energies have evolved and times have changed and are continuing to change. Matter, the subject of the book, has been lifted out of the darkness by the ‘return of the spirit of St Michael’, witnessed by the lighting up in the consciousness and understanding of so many people.

I’d really like it now if Shadowplay could come out of the shadows.