Tracks in Space

[ecosophia]

One of the interesting concepts you'll find in the writings of occultist Dion Fortune is the concept that every action leaves a "track in space" that tends to pull other actions along its own course. Usually that doesn't accomplish much, but when an action is repeated over and over again, the "track in space" becomes very deeply rutted and begins to exert an appreciable influence on any action moving in more or less the same notional direction.

(Yes, this is another way of talking about the concept of morphogenetic fields that Rupert Sheldrake introduced in his book A New Science of Life. The parallels are exact enough that I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that Sheldrake had studied Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine -- though it may instead just have been a matter of her concepts forming a track in space that he followed...) 

At any rate, the concept we're discussing has highly practical applications in occultism, and I've recently had the pleasant experience of encountering one of them. 

Longtime readers of mine know that several years back, as a result of one of those absurd series of chance discoveries you couldn't get away with in a novel. I finally located a 19th-century Welsh book that gave the symbolic meanings of the Coelbren of the Bards, the quasi-runic magical alphabet created by eccentric Welsh genius Iolo Morganwg for his revival of Welsh Bardic and Druid traditions. Of course I turned that discovery into a book, The Coelbren Alphabet -- that's what writers do, you know ;-) -- but in the process I made myself a set of Coelbren sticks and spent a while casting divinations with them, to make sure I understood the Coelbren oracle and could explain it to readers. My experience with the Coelbren at that time was that it made a decent divination system, fairly clear and accurate, but not really exceptional -- for example, I got about the same level of clarity and accuracy from it that I got from Ogham divinations. (Admittedly I've done a lot of Ogham and get good results with it.) 

Fast forward three years. Earlier this month, I finished up a cycle of work with my forthcoming Sacred Geometry Oracle and the spiritual practices connected with it, and returned to the Coelbren and the system of Druidical magic I introduced in The Celtic Golden Dawn. (I've got some serious projects in process for that system -- more on this later.) That involved using the Coelbren again for daily divinations -- and I ended up blinking in surprise, because every morning's divination was crisp, instantly readable, accurate, and relevant, more so than just about any oracle I've worked with. Mileages vary, of course, but that's been my experience. 

Obviously this didn't happen because I'd been doing lots of practice with it. Instead, I think it's a matter of tracks in space. During the time I spent doing Coelbren divinations earlier, the Coelbren was practically forgotten, and as far as I can tell nobody anywhere was using the old meanings John Williams ab Ithel put in the rare book of his that I found. Since then, my book has come out, and it's had modest but decent sales -- so there have been some thousands of people casting and interpreting Coelbren readings, laying down tracks in space. Chalk one up for Dion Fortune and Rupert Sheldrake, and for morphogenetic fields...