I was introduced to Earth magic by Sue Vincent and Stuart France of the Silent Eye but if I am totally honest, they really rather reawakened something within me that has always been there. If I look back, what turned into an early career as a Geologist, involved a love of the wilderness – the lonely places of beauty sculpted by forces more powerful that you can imagine. Tramping through moors and dale with my hammer and rucksack studying how Mother Nature had shaped our world was the singular driving force that turned me from an average school student into a natural born Geologist capable of original research. It was a tad miraculous really if I think back.

Totally crap at math at school, my PhD thesis relied in part upon complex multivariate statistics. My shoddy knowledge of biology was turned into expertise in trinomial nomenclature in that same thesis. I named new varieties such as Anthraconauta sp. calveri (Vasey & Bowes) and Anthraconaia sp. eageri (Vasey), for example. Suddenly, my passion for Earth Sciences had me proposing new theories for how faunas reacted to sea level rise and climate in the Carboniferous period. I had published 6 peer-reviewed papers successfully before submitting my PhD thesis and was told by my examiner that this alone was worthy of the degree. Geology was essentially the only subject I was ever good at at school. I found everything easy to learn and assimilate if it had a geological aspect to it and if it hadn’t been for my love of Earth Sciences, I would never have gone to college at all I suspect.

I recall and have written a few times about my experiences on the Isle of Eigg in the inner Hebrides back in 1980. I was doing my 6-week geological field mapping there – alone. I didn’t see anyone for weeks on end and spoke instead to the sheep and the seagulls. I had many mystical experiences on that beautiful island (See my first book – Inner Journeys: Explorations of the Soul). It was the time I started to realise that I had some form of connection for the goddess. A deep affinity.

But, you forget stuff. Liminal stuff especially. This is the age of materialism and it sucks you in deep. Occasional reminders bring you back to the more esoteric and studying with Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki’s SOL certainly had a very major impact on me though I picked up much useful stuff from AMORC, CR&C, Franz Bardon, Rudolf Steiner and others along the way. But it is only in the last couple of years that things seem to have started to come full circle. Now, again, I am happiest in my walking boots, rucksack on my back in the middle of the Czech forest. The hammer? Replaced these days by dowsing rods. This is where Sue and Stuart come in. They provided me with the nudge….. that brought me back full circle.

So now I find myself on a bit of a journey. A journey towards the goddess. It started with a shaman in Brno who left a trail of evidence that I followed. Research into Templars and pagan sites in my own backyard in Moravia followed along with a refound ability to dowse and follow energy lines. This part of the journey is the basis of my book Chasing the Shaman, which I now see as the follow on to Inner Journeys. Inevitably, those pagans were the Slavs and I was drawn towards their myths and pantheon. Discovering the baby Jesus on a major Catholic site here in Czechia is actually Perun, the god of thunder, opened up a whole new world. I decided to explore that world and started a process of invocation of both Perun and his opposite – Veles. Saying that this opened up more material is an understatement and this part of the journey is in Chasing Dragons in Moravia.

The final stage of this initiatory journey, but I suspect just the beginning of my work, is back to where it began. I am invoking the goddess in the form or Morana, goddess of death and winter, and Vesna, goddess of fertility and spring. I am combining my activities with that of working remotely with a slavic shaman and following her moon cycles and taking part in the traditional Slavic Morana ritual in which we build an effigy of Morana to burn and drown on the Spring equinox. I plan to write up some of this as Chasing the Goddess in 2021. However, I have already had a very major taste of the energies of Morana that I wrote about in this article and, I begin to see how my exploration of the goddess is giving me a look at the hero’s journey but from an altogether different perspective.

That these things have such meaning and value is difficult to explain. However, when in the magic, life flows. When in the stream, the Earth glows. Everything becomes part of a pattern. Perhaps the pattern is at first unseen and then it is not understood but in the end there is a glimpse of a one thing so beautiful, so amazing, and so all encompassing that it takes your breathe away. And this. This is the gift of the goddess.