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Your insight into Bill Gray (The Old Sod: The Odd Life & Inner Work
of William G Gray) makes for fascinating reading but where did you get the
source material?
Some years ago Bill gave me the manuscript of his
autobiography and basically told me to get it published. The trouble is, the
work was so malicious in parts, so niggly and downright nasty that no publisher
would have touched it without major revision, because they would have been sued
for libel. Besides which I thought the people he targeted just didn't deserve
his spleen. And worse than that, it made Bill look small - which he never was.
Yet there were large chunks of superb prose, wonderful insight and sheer beauty,
so I felt that if we (Marcus Claridge and I) could take out the good bits and
leave the dross, it might allow people to see the best of Bill Gray, and see
beyond the faults. He had a huge if often indirect impact on the magickal scene,
and I wanted people to realise this.
Nevertheless, without giving away any secrets, there is a great deal of
personal insight here, which shows that you have very fond memories of Bill
Gray. Which is the most potent memory?
I started writing to Bill when I was still a teenager. Because my Mam
hated anything to do with this strange 'other' side of me, I had to sneak down
and get his letters (along with others from W.E. Butler, Lobsang Rampa, Israel
Regardie etc etc) and devour them on my way to school. I've got a mass of
superbly written letters from Bill going back 25 years which evoked within me at
the time a sense of real magick, real excitement and possibility. In literary
terms he wrote better letters than books, and in a sense I saw the best of
William G. Gray through this medium. Mind you the reality was rather potent too.
There was an atmosphere about him which told you immediately that he knew what
he was talking about, and that he was a real magician. Even so
I was rather afraid of him, and it was his wife Bobbie that I truly warmed to,
and who in her own way triggered off more in me at what you might call 'Native
British' levels than Bill himself. I think that he might have had High Hopes for
me in the early days, but then he effectively banished me from his house when he
felt that I was just a fucked-up time-waster. Fucked-up certainly, but
time-waster? - oh no. When I re-appeared in his life some 12 years later,
grown-up and stable, a Dad of Dads, he seemed to realise that I had a different
sort of destiny, and different things to offer. I was no longer afraid of him,
and actually rather loved him - despite his racism.
You have an impressive collection of titles under your belt including
several collaborations, which is your personal favourite, and why?
Oh... I'm not truly happy with any of them, to
be honest. I keep them all hidden away in a cupboard, and never re-read them.
Probably 'Priestess - the Life and Magic of Dion Fortune' is my favourite,
because DNF had such a huge impact on my life. I wrote that book on a
shoe-string budget ( a £200 advance), with extremely demanding outer
circumstances, and really didn't have any choice in the matter. It's been
superseded by others since, who had access to the records and files that I was
denied, but it was certainly an extraordinary time for me: the sense of
overshadowing , and the awesome synchronicities, and all the inner and
outer knock-on effects, were something that I won't forget. In some ways she's
still in my psyche now, in ways that Bill has never been. To me the magic of
WGG is austere, cold and often as heartless as his inner contacts; but the
magick of DNF is many-layered, luminous and enchanting: rather like comparing
the light of neon to that which you get through stained glass.
You worked with Billie Walker-John on The Inner Guide to Egypt and
The Setian (both published by ignotus press), and this must have been
an exciting time. Sadly Billie died in 2000 but what are your happiest
memories of her?
I spoke to Billie often on the phone and
corresponded voluminously (this was in the days before e-mail, remember). I only
met her in the flesh a few times but we both knew that we were, in some sense,
siblings. Siblings who had been brought together again by the spirit of Setne
Kham-uas. She was kind, good-hearted, hugely modest - and she was always there
for me. At one level, an intellectual level, she acted as a kind of shakti, and
- at that level - we brought through the sort of energies that Seymour and
Hartley had done several decades before. I had always had this sort of
hermit-compulsion about me, which she respected, but she seemed to know what I
was thinking from afar, and gave me the information that I craved - even if I
wasn't consciously aware of it at the time. It was important to me that
she was there, and when she died I felt her loss keenly. I still do. She was a
great soul, and those of us who loved her called her
Meri-Khem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote An Introduction to the Mystical
Qabalah when you were just 16 and it's never been out of print since then?
How do you feel about the book now, with the benefit of hindsight?
I was 17 actually, although it didn't get
accepted until I was 20. It embarasses the hell out of me, although the various
new editions have enabled me to give it a more adult tone. I'm not a kabbalist
any more. Y'see when I was in my mid-teens I discovered the kabbalah and masturbation at around the same time,
and - as teenagers do - worked at both right passionately . So I was a bit of a
wanker when I wrote this book, and it clearly shows in the original. However it
sells and sells, whereas my grown-up books all have a spell of invisibility over
them.
Although I
still thought of myself as a kabbalist in my early 30s, it had started to annoy
me. The Tree of Life explained everything - absolutely everything - and really
was/is the 'mighty all-embracing glyph of the universe and the soul of man' as
Ernie Butler termed it somewhere, and it just got up my nose. Actually, looking
back, it was Bobbie Gray who sort of nudged me onto the Herne contact, probably
about 1987, and I decided to take a spontaneous, non-intellectual, non-academic
approach to magick which meant in effect ripping the 'otz chaim' out of my aura
and starting afresh at earth-root level amid the green, green grass and
grey stones of old Wiltshire. I even stopped reading books on magick, and gave
away most of the ones I had to good homes. I'm not sure if it's brought me any
benefit or not, but...there ye go.
A new incarnation of the book will be due
out by Thoth Publications under the title 'The Magickal Kabbalah', hopefully
sometime this year. Mind you, that's what he said last year, so don't hold your
breath. It'll go in the cupboard with the others. There's a life to be lived
folks - rip them Trees out!
What are you working on at the moment, and are we likely to see any more
magical books from you in the not too distant future?
Well, I work away at novels and scripts, but
can't find a home for any of them, although I've had brilliant rejections and
near-misses, and publishers going bust at the last moment, and directors and
producers changing their minds. Still, I enjoy it, so I'll keep plugging away. I
also started 'The Google Tantra' - a quirky account of how I tried to become the
first Ashington Lad to raise the kundalini and not go insane, using only info
cleaned from the Google search engine. But again it's had dozen of rejections
and not the slightest glimmer of interest. Anyone out there wanna see
it?
Oh - and I tried to persuade Aossic to let me do his biography but a mighty silence has been the only response. Pity, coz I'd do him a good one, and even try to keep my own huge ego out of it...
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