A very strange sequence of events has happened to me over the last three days. Yes, I know that we look for meaningful patterns in the myriad random events that occur, forgetting the meaningless ones and seizing on the meaningful ones. But this is very strange…<\/p>\n
On Friday I went to drop off some graphic samples to a company that is making us exhibition cabinets. They are based in High Wycombe and the AA website told me to come off the M40 at Junction 3. I did this but it brought me all the way through the eastern suburbs of Wycombe and out the other side so I decided to not go back through the town and try and hit Junction 4 of the M40 by continuing westward. In the event I never did find Junction 4 but ended up rejoining the motorway at Junction 5. However, my new route took me through “Old Wycombe” and I noticed intriguing signs to the “Hellfire Caves”. I clocked this away and decided to look it up on the internet when I got home.<\/p>\n
On Saturday I went to Midhurst to talk to a man about a carpet. On the way back to the car Lisa dropped into a butcher’s shop. I stayed outside with the children. As I loitered in the butcher’s carpark a man came from the nearby wine shop and loaded a case of wine into the boot of his car. I was shocked to see that the name of the wine was “Thelema Mountain” as I associated “Thelema” with Aleister Crowley and I wouldn’t have thought that to your average quaffer this was a great draw. Anyway, when I got home I searched for this on the internet and found the vineyard in question as well as the whole background to their name.<\/a> Interesting that Crowley wasn’t the person who invented Thelema nor the famous dictum “Do what thou wilt…” but had lifted it from a sixteenth century Catholic priest called Francois Rabelais. <\/p>\n Yesterday (Monday) I was doing a major tidy of the study at home. I came across an old “magazine on CD” that I had purchased a couple of years ago called Duat Magazine.<\/a> This was such a success that the first edition ws the only edition (although another is threatened “soon”). I wondered if there was any material on there that I could use on my website and scanned through the contents. Whilst looking through the magazine I found an article that I had never seen before (you’ll have to trust me on this) by a lady called Robin Crookshank Hilton. A quick search on the colourful Robin showed that she was now the UK Editor-in-chief of Phenomenon Magazine (which briefly owned The Daily Grail, but that’s a whole other trail…). Her most recent article, entitled “From Hellfire to Hieros Gamos”<\/a> is all about the Hellfire Caves and associated “gentleman’s club” created by Sir Francis Dashwood who took inspiration from Francios Rabelais and who in turn inspired Aleister Crowley.<\/p>\n How spooky, you have to ask, is that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In which our hero once again feels that there is more going on than meets the eye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-questing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonjnugent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}