EDITORIAL

As regular readers will have noticed, ANCIENT MYSTERIES has reverted to the old JOG A4 format. This is because of production difficulties with the folded format resulting from register problems with our reliable but venerable duplicator. Not folding enables the hard-pressed volunteers who collate AM to produce more copies in a shorter time. Despite financial stringencies, we are still in business, and our circulation has expanded slightly in the last few months. To our regular readers and valued supporters I wish a happy new year, and hope to see many of you at our forthcoming ANCIENT MYSTERIES CONFERENCE (the Fourth Cambridge Geomancy Symposium).

Since the INSTITUTE OF GEOMANTIC RESEARCH was set up in 1975 to combat the ‘thought control’ of orthodox official archaeology and its minions, it has come as little surprise to see the recent renewed attacks upon our enterprise. Even the television series towards the end of last year, purporting to deal with ‘mysteries’ tended to be derogatory and dismissive of mysterious things. Now although we combat such things to the best of our ability, we are not so paranoid as to ascribe such publicity to a conspiracy, more to an unfortunate tendency in certain circles to keep the status quo, with all its job security, kudos, status and power, ticking over nicely.

Not that things have changed much over the centuries. In 1851 a book entitled A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery was produced by the publisher Trelawney Saunders of Charing Cross, London. Attributed to a learned student of Alchemy, the Reverend South, the work was immediately withdrawn from sale, as it ‘revealed too much’. What was this book, relegated as it is to the mysterious realms on a par with the library of Alexandria or the collection of Druidical books at Bangor Iscoed? More to the point, has anyone out there in geomancy land got a copy, or know where one is? What was the conspiracy that relegated the work to boiler fuel? We may never know, but we must realize that there are those on both sides of our work who wish to see such things suppressed. Some are materialist followers of Marxist–Leninist archaeology theorist Gordon Childe, and believe that anything which challenges their view of history is ‘fascist’ or ‘bourgeois’. Then there are those with the esoteric knowledge who don’t want others to publicize it. We are ‘piggy-in-the-middle’ and will continue as before.

As ever, we remain non-political. Politicians are no friends of the truth. In 1933 Nazis burned the works of ‘Jewish intellectuals’, then thirteen years later the Americans, British and Russians consigned Nazi books to the flames. The Viet Cong destroyed a 40,000 volume library in Saigon University, and the Khmer Rouge killed everybody who could read. Emperors, Kings, Caudillos, Fuhrers, Chairmen and Revolutionary Cadres are no friends of truth – it is too dangerous to their narrow creeds of bigotry. So with academic professors who sit imperiously in panelled rooms comfortably living on public money whilst geomantic researchers trudge at their own expense through muddy wastes in hailstorms only to be abused when they publish. God forbid the day when geomantic researchers sit imperiously in baroque panelled rooms and lambaste the younger crank generation in magnificent typefaces.
NIGEL PENNICK

PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY THE INSTITUTE OF GEOMANTIC RESEARCH, Address, BAR HILL, Cambridge Postcode, ENGLAND.