I’m supposed to be doing some emergency coding this weekend – hence the unusually high level of blogging activity 😉 St Nectan’s Glen has been a popular subject on the psychicQuesting.com website over the years. It contains one of the most recent comments in the forums and the only set of photos in the photo gallery (click here to see the forum thread). I think a large part of this has to do with the impact of Yuri’s drawing.

On another track, I’ve been reading the Magdalene Line books by Kathleen McGowan (finished "The Expected One", half-way through "The Book of Love"). The books take as their starting point the very well-trodden, and perhaps now over-familiar, territory of "The Holy Blood/Holy Grail" & "Da Vinci Code" with Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus and mother of his children. However, she does take this is a new direction and the style is very different to anything else I’ve read. Interspersed with the novel "proper" are excerpts from Mary Magdalene’s own Gospel. In addition the relationships between the characters are carefully detailed so that by the end of the first book, the author has painted a vibrant and engaging picture of the earliest days of the Christian church and the people who drive it forward. Whether you believe this to be historically accurate (and, as mentioned, Kathleen* does introduce some very original twists into the familiar material) is an entirely different question but it doesn’t detract from the strength of the novel.

The structure of the novel is a standard split-time sequence. A modern investigator, using a combination of historical research and visionary experience, unravels the ancient threads while the information she learns about the time of the Christians is played as cut-scene sequences shot from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. The "ancient" sequences thus have something of the style of Geraldine Cummings’ books – only infinitely more readable! Where it gets very interesting for me is that at the end of the book, in the Afterword, Kathleen writes that the lead character who has been on this voyage of discovery is actually a novelistic version of herself. So suddenly we are to understand (and there are no clues that this admission is itself a fictional, post-modern flourish although I guess this is always a possibility) that Kathleen McGowan has, "in true life" (as my kids say when they want to make it clear that they are moving out of the world of make-believe), been on a quest to uncover the path of Mary Magdalene and the earliest proto-Christians – a quest on which she has experienced psychic flashes, full-on visions and uncovered genuine historical artefacts. All of which exactly describes Psychic Questing.

As I was reading the books, I kept experiencing a nagging sense of deja vu. Finally I realised that I was subconsciously comparing the books to Louise Langley’s book "The Sacred Quest". "The Sacred Quest" is also written in the third person although the protagonist is acknowledged to be Louise herself. It too features the theme of an unbroken bond of sacred love that transcends time. It highlights the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It details the upheaval in the life of its (female) protagonist and shows her moving out of what has been her normal day-to-day existence and into a more authentic, spiritual way of life. Both have strong connections to Ireland.

I’m not sure how pleased either author would be about their books being compared and I do it only to show that it feels like something more is at work here. If, as artists, they are tuned to the vibrations of coming events should we expect that such experiences will become much more prevalent? And what impact will this have on society? I am personally deeply suspicious of the whole 2012 thing (which seems to be a natural continuation of the older new-age "Age of Aquarius" meme). We all face our personal apocalypses and we tend to project our fears about this onto the outside world. On the other hand, there are some very weird things happening (and this investigation is obviously the meta-theme of my blog). Scientists have reached down to touch the bottom of reality, trying to get hold of the smallest "chunk" of solid matter. But like a cartoon character suspended in mid-air above a canyon, when they reach out around them, the solid base they thought was there has completely disappeared. Far from our world being built up from tiny bricks, the foundation appears to nothing more substantial than clouds of probability. If science can suggest that consciousness plays a part in creating the physical world around us then, it is important to pay attention to emerging global patterns of consciousness.

But I digress…I guess I’m wondering whether Louise and Kathleen form the vanguard of something that we will soon be commonly observing (and even experiencing for ourselves).

One last point. Joseph of Arimathea and his role as tin trader and his visits to Britain also play a part in Kathleen’s books. This legend, as popularised in the hymn version of William Blake’s poem "And Did Those Feet in Ancient times…" has just been picked up by Louise in a post on her blog. And the connection for her was made at…St Nectan’s Glen. It seems that there is some special energy there that may warrant further investigation…

[* As I go on to refer to Louise Langley as "Louise", it seemed to jar and be slightly hostile if I was referring side-by-side to Kathleen McGowan as "McGowan". I hope Ms McGowan will forgive me the over-familiar use of her first name.]