Toward Ecosophy

The things that fascinated me most, though, were scraps of teaching that had to do with a system of Druid Revival philosophy and practice I'd seen referenced here and there. There's a system of correspondences that assigns things to seven symbolic Cantrefs, which I'd seen referenced but never described in a classic occult work by David Conway; there's an odd series of hints about Rosicrucian connections -- "the mistletoe on the oak is also the rose on the cross," and the like; there were portions of two lessons of an old mimeographed correspondence course, which I expanded into the Dolmen Arch course, soon to be published in book form; and running through the whole thing, there's a distinctive take on magical energies, which focuses on the interplay between the solar or cosmic current descending from the heavens and the telluric current rising from the earth. 

I'd also encountered that before, in hints and scraps. The late John Michell, who knew an extraordinary amount about occult tradition and wove any number of hints into The View Over Atlantis and his other books, talked learnedly about the two currents here and there, and explored their symbolic numbers. Some years back, my fellow archdruid Gordon Cooper succeeded in tracking down an odd series of essays from the early 19th century, "Letters on Tellurism, Commonly Called Animal Magnetism," which were written by Swiss mesmerist Gioacchino de Prati and talk about the two currents in some detail; and there are also things in Dion Fortune that suggest a knowledge of it -- when we get to the relationship between the Solar Logos and the Planetary Spirit in my monthly commentary on The Cosmic Doctrine, we'll get into that. 

Now I have another few scraps. 

For quite a few years now I've practiced a system of acupressure self-treatment called Do-In -- that's pronounced "dough-inn," and it's the Japanese version of the Chinese term Daoyin. Most of the books I have on it were published in America, and when they get into philosophy at all they mostly talk about the macrobiotic diet. There are a few books by French authors, though -- Jacques de Langre and Jean Rofidal -- that head off in their own direction. Both of them drop plenty of references to the Druids...and both of them talk at some length about the cosmic and telluric currents. 

The connection's not hard to trace. There's been a very large Druid Revival scene in France since the late 19th century at least, and it linked up in various ways with Asian and especially Japanese spiritual traditions when those reached Western Europe -- the macrobiotic teacher George Ohsawa and the controversial Breton nationalist Druid Neven Henaff even co-wrote a book on the health benefits of vitamin C, which was published in 1977. French Druid traditions adopted a version of East Asian yin-yang theory, using the Gaulish words samos and giamos ("summer" and "winter" respectively) for yang and yin. Thus de Langre and Rofidal had plenty of chances to learn a Druidized version of Do-In, and that's apparently what they did. 

So clearly whatever teaching de Prati knew in the 1830s was still known in France in the 1930s, in the US somewhere around that time (the mimeographed pages I got didn't have dates on them but I'm guessing from context), wherever John Michell got his knowledge in the 1950s and 1960s, and in French macrobiotic circles in the 1970s and 1980s. (I've also got a lead on some kind of neo-Templar tradition along the same lines, which identifies the solar and telluric currents with Sophia and Baphomet respectively, but that's a whole 'nother story.) 

Piecing things together, bit by bit...