Shades of Time
A completely
revised edition of Richard Elen's 1979 work, Radical Occultism
© 2004 by Richard Elen
"...The
corners and straights of the earth shall be measured to the depth:
and strange shall be the wonders that are creeping in to new worlds.
Time shall be altered, with the difference of day and night..."
-- Told by the spirit Medicina Dei to Dr. John Dee and recorded in his Diary,
26 March 1583
Running
alongside the conventional history of the world we find several other,"magical",
histories, which developed over many centuries. Such histories often formed
the dominant worldview at times in the past.
We can identify pivotal points in the existence of humanity where our whole perception, or model, of reality has altered: at such points, it seems that not only has the course of the future been changed, but the course of the past too, as previous worldviews - or reality-models - became sidelined and sometimes largely forgotten. It seems as if humanity has turned a corner into another street, to see a new vista in front and something else, too, behind. Thus when we look "over our shoulders" into the past today, we see a different past than would have, say, Dr John Dee in the London of the 1570s.
The brilliant American writer John Crowley, heavily influenced by the Gnostics of the second and third centuries, proposes something similar in his extraordinary four-part novel, Ægypt. However, where Crowley proposes that magic only becomes possible at special crossover periods when a wind of change blows through the world - and the world, with its future and its past, becomes other than what it once appeared - Shades of Time suggests that these different 'histories' remain available at all times, and that we can work magic, too, whenever we like, by calling upon models of reality in which the operations we seek to carry out become possible.
It certainly seems that there are crucial times when the dominant world-model, or 'reality', changes dramatically over a short period. But what happens to the former dominant models? Do they really 'softly and silently vanish away', or do they persist? Shades of Time proposes that they do; that they still have power and often crop up unexpectedly in our daily life - from bizarre coincidences to ancient figures of speech still in common use, their meaning today hermetically sealed.
The magical history most familiar to Westerners today includes such diverse subjects as Atlantis, UFOs, mediumistic prophecies and secret magical orders, while in the Renaissance in Europe it included angels, demons, alchemical gold, ancient high-technology civilisations and the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus - "Thrice-Great Hermes". In this completely revised new edition of his 1979 work Radical Occultism, Richard Elen looks at how these histories have grown up and the alternate models of reality they represent. The journey of discovery thus opened up for the reader includes an insight into “magical” systems as varied as the Qabalah and computer programming.
The book goes on to examine how what we can think of as our "consensus" reality, the world we believe we live in, can be changed – or appear to be changed – by the application of a wide range of "magical technologies", and how these techniques can be evaluated and utilized today. At the core of the work, readers will find an appreciation of how we perceive and (can) model reality itself, and our attitude to beliefs. In Elen's view, we can use beliefs as tools, and the important thing about beliefs, therefore: you should use them - they shouldn't use you.
