p1. There is a moment. After my preparations, the note-taking, the buying and borrowing, the itinerary-writing, the spreading out and piling up of things to take – so that the flat was no longer a place to live but a resource at the service of going away, my first trip to Greece alone since 1971 – books, notebooks, clothes piled all around; after the weighing and winnowing, the packing, so that everything is folded and nested into the rucksack that stands in the middle of the carpet, an island, my world, with a space, the sea, around it, and beyond it the continent, everything else. There is a moment, as I bend to lift the rucksack, head down and giddy, and I foresee the space it will leave, that I am flooded with nostalgia. For somewhere I’ve never been, a life I’ve never known, homesick for a life I might have had. Head down, I wait. If I wait, he will come. He will open the door, walk in, life-filled, my son, his face light up, say, ‘Hi!’, and I will be saved. Head down, I wait. The doorbell rings. I bend a little further, grasp a shoulder strap and swing the rucksack up onto my back, leaving the empty space, settle it on my shoulders. I open the door to the taxi driver and I step across the threshold, out of the realm of Hestia, of hearth and security, into the realm of Hermes, of paths, journeys, and chance.

Last night, talking to Celia after tai chi, about how I’ll miss being here for the dismantling of the Town Hall, here to greet the pilgrims (my son among them, unrecognised?) coming to take part in its stone-by-stone reduction, here, as the weight is lifted off, for the slowly-appearing revelation of Gold Hill …  As I talked on she grew impatient, at last interrupted, ‘Richard! It began on May Day, it will be completed at Midsummer. You more than anyone know this. And you will be back for the consummation. You have your role. This is like stage fright – it’s life fright. Just go!’ Adding, more gently, ‘you’re always looking for something. Maybe you’ll only find it when you stop looking? Have a good journey,’ embraced me and headed, sixties’ chick, then free spirit, lover of many, now purposefully celibate, a believer, to the Women’s House.

I waited. For what? ‘One life is all. Do. But do.’ Jacks’ words. My eyes pricked. ‘I give you the end of the golden string.’ Then it had begun: through the door, in. Now the door, out. About to go through. That then, this now. This. Now. I looked up at the tower behind me, its stones illuminated by the evening sun, its light winking in perpetual communication with the tower on Glastonbury Tor, their mathematical inter-weavings dedicated to the unfolding of the Shaftesbury Prophecy, the Eagle’s flight from Glastonbury to Shaftesbury, and then on, Abaris’ arrow, to Delphi, where I, the Hyperborean bearing gifts for Apollo, am going.

Apricot light, blue sky, swallows are brushstrokes on porcelain, hoovering up insects hatched in the first warmth that hover mazily in the blithe air. Air that is soft and caressing. But inside the softness a biological surging, an energy thrusting to self-realisation, the tumbling bird calls drive on as urgent mating signals, the scents, soft honeysuckle, sweet hawthorn, sharp cut grass, arouse.

I slipped off my sandals and stepped onto cooling grass, feeling the warmed earth beneath; as I walked, connecting and disconnecting, I felt the pulse, fast and faint and unstoppable, the forward motion. Above me the dome of the sky changing each moment. Around me the swirl of the busy, driving, driven world. And I, walking in slow, tai chi measure, across the expanse of emerald grass, under the sweet-smelling lindens, to the edge of the churchyard, where the wall had been, the wall that had surrounded the Abbey, that we have removed, I stepped down into the Abbey grounds.

The Abbey, the first for women only, long gone, the stones sold.
‘Only when the clear sky again looks through broken roofs and down onto grass and red poppies on broken walls will I turn my heart again to the abodes of this God.’ (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, pt 2, 4, ‘On the Priests’.)
“Temples are no longer known … Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.” (Rilke, 7th Duino Elegy). As we had. 

Always a sense of singing here, as if the voices of the Abbey still hover above its absence, above the remnant low grey cruciform wall, enclosed now within the white chalk outline of the Eagle.

At the Abbey’s west end, at the eagle’s sacrum, is the ever-bubbling font.

At the crux, where nave and transept cross and the lofty, bell-pealing tower (‘tree of smoke …’) once stood, the eagle’s heart, is the Cretan labyrinth that Simon walked at Matala. Before the beginning. At its centre I saw Dexter, very still, Dexter who as a boy ten years ago had set all this in motion, preparing now to descend through the crypt, into the tunnels of the Akashic Records, seeking guidance.

Beyond the labyrinth, on the site of the altar, is the low stone circle roofed with geodesic dome that records another thread in the weave of New Shaftesbury’s prehistory. Inside it is our omphalos, the heaped white ash that preserves the perpetual Promethean spark of our tribal fire. How much has already happened here! How much more will. I felt the fullness at being part of it, and the ache at being about to leave it. On.

I tasted the sweet water of the bubbling font, and walking through where the enclosing wall of the Abbey had been, I stepped down onto Park Walk, and walked quickly across to the edge, hands grasping the rail as of a ship.

For it ends so abruptly, falls away so steeply that on stormy nights I am at the rail of a great ship, and all invisibly before me is turbulent ocean and there are fragments of torn messages carried on the wind, into my face, and past me. And on still, frosty mornings, when the mist fills the Vale with a sunlit white sea, the tops of knolls and hills are archipelagos of almost meaning, hieroglyphs, images of constellations; and under the mist sea a realm of knights and pilgrims, and I hear the jingle of harness and the murmur of uplifted prayer.

Last night the whole wide panorama was illuminated by the sun setting behind me. Green and gold Downs rising up to and containing the mysteries of Cranborne Chase. My gaze moving slowly across: White Sheet Hill, that brought me here, Spread Eagle Hill that kept me here, and beyond them the landforms and earth mysteries of Wessex, and the chalk streams sliding and chattering to the sea. The coastal path west, and then the intricate landscape of small hedged fields, woodland and green lanes, the vale of small dairies. Round to the Wessex Ridgeway, that path from the sea to Shaftesbury, completing the circuit of the annual migration path of the First People. Remembered and remade in small by the circuit of the  Byzant ceremony. Rediscovered and reanimated in 1989 by Dexter on this Green Rock, transformer and transmitter, this headland that is both set in the ancient landscape and butts out into futurity.

On the steep slope below me is the newly-planted vineyard, leaves vividly green. In its midst is the amphitheatre we have shaped out of the hillside, our Theatre of Dionysos. Last year, ‘Zarathustra’, this year ‘The Green Rock’, the first public revealing of the old mysteries and the new mythology. What a stir it caused!

Beyond the houses of St James, the small patch of allotments has extended to a broad swathe of vegetable gardens and small-scale animal husbandry that now rings the town. Many were still at work there, their companionable voices coming up to me. Activity, too, in the workshops that have been built among the gardens, whose work and products sustain the town. The Abbey fishponds, freshly dug out and restocked, were pools of blue, turning pink.

So much is here, so much is going on, on-going. And so much of me is here. The spell of this place. And yet. Always looking for something. And not ready to stop looking. And anyway my duty, to the community, to what we are doing here, is my mission to Delphi. I turned abruptly from it, swallowing it down, to take with me.

I walked slowly along Park Walk towards the town, my footsteps soft on the sand, on my left the Abbey, the tree of smoke, and the angel with four faces, to my right the fall to the perfect curve of the amphitheatre and beyond, the Downs. I walked among newly-planted trees and on new grass, between strollers and meditators, acrobats and magicians. Magda was singing. She waved me across, still singing, to sing with her. Hands together I declined, regretfully, next time, perhaps … bowed, walked on.

Through the narrow passage beside Simon and Amanda’s pentagonal house. They discovered it on their first visit in 1989, alerted by the watchers, who had noted the old man’s death and Dexter’s discovery. They had come here wondering, yet again, whether this, at last, was it, the place where the Prophecy could unfold. The pentagon house that was complemented by the pentagram of roads at the other end of the High Street, each waiting to be allowed to energise the other. Forms, patterns, symbols, here all along. Felt but not seen. Not hidden, but unseen. Needing to be unforgotten and thereby revealed, and activated within the Prophecy.

I emerged from the narrow passage into the Commons, which has been the crucible of the process, the arena of transformation. This will be the forum, plaza, agora, piazza (the name will come), with the Byzant fountain at its centre.

On the right ‘The Emerald Tablet’. Above the door: ‘That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below. To make the wonder of the one thing.’ It began on one floor as Simon and Amanda’s bookshop, and developed, year by year, level by level, downwards and upwards, seven levels, to rock-hewn basement connecting to the tunnels, to rooftop glass dome connecting to the stars, the centre of the planning and the engineering of the town’s transformation. 

To the left, what had been the coaching inn, centre of power of the London property developers who had bought the town in 1821 for its two seats in parliament. As landed gentry, disturbed by Swing Riots and the Tolpuddle Six, they suppressed the ancient Byzant ceremony that annually reconnected water below and air above, through earth and fire, enacting in its circuit the First People’s annual migration that encoded in its form the town’s deep memory and meaning, and joined town folk and country folk. And to flatter the local small men who would be councillors, they built an elaborate Town Hall at the centre of the town’s market square. On the place of the market cross, the maypole, the standing stone, where the spiralling energies of white tiger and green dragon had danced and energised town and country. Pinning them down, stopping the energy flow.

The coaching inn is now ‘The Byzant Sanctuary and Prophecy Archive’. And the Town Hall? At last I turned to face it.

The top stones of the clock tower were already gone, the clock stopped, its time replaced by that of the deep-time clock. Each day greensand blocks are removed, lifting weight off the centre, easing the pinned energies. They come from far and wide to take part in the dismantling. It is our Berlin Wall. Each day the view changes. Each day more of Gold Hill is revealed. In tarot the broken tower is the shattering of illusions, the destruction of false forms, the opportunity to rebuild anew from the ground. Ours will be an unbuilding: and then the remodelling of the space in a new geometry, with at its centre the ever-flowing fountain.

Turning back towards the Commons, I thought again of all that might happen while I am away, all that I would miss. And then, as the sky turned a final vivid red, and the light drained from the Commons, I experienced again that presence. Of something large and inevitable, dark and inscrutable, moving towards me at its own slow, inexorable pace, that I must go towards, with which I must, out there, engage.

CHAPTER 2. LEAVING NAXOS, 1971
I stood at the rail of the gently-swaying ferry, watching cargo being loaded, holidaymakers, mostly young, mostly chattering, coming aboard. I wondered if any had been there last night, whether I’d leaped with that young man, danced next to that girl …? I looked up at the darkening island, thought of Jacks’ flat in the town, wondered where she and Hanse were. I remembered seeing Jacks at the quayside that night, her gesture that had drawn me from the boat, induced me to abandon my journey, to step across onto the island. I had done my job, enabled her to be where she had chosen to be. And now I was resuming my journey. I wondered if the Athens’ boys from Ios were in the saloon below, even Johanna …. My place was on deck, alone.

The ferry moved at walking pace as figures walked along the isthmus to the Palatia to catch the sunset, where lovers were taking photographs of each other, haloed by the setting sun in the frame of Ariadne’s doorway, ignorant of the events there.

As darkness came I wrapped myself for a night under the stars, once more on my wandering island, Asterie, as Naxos faded behind me, was gone.
I slept, a night of dreams, waking briefly, as if for a gulp of this world, before plunging eagerly back down.

I was on Ios, in Dr George’s gallery of Cycladic figures, a place of slowed time and the exact present, each figure small, precise, radiant, calm. Each stylised and abstract, and yet individual. I found myself drawn to one, strangely familiar, captivating, the essence of one I might love, that seemed to quiver at the edge of revealing on its blank oval the face of the one true love. Held by the possibility of that slowly coming, I waited. Then I heard a noise behind. The figures, now large, were advancing towards me. I stepped back, but found myself surrounded. They began to circle around me, slowly at first, against resistance, as if starting into motion a flywheel, then easier, evenly, as if charging a battery, their accumulating energy crackling in me like a Leyden jar, energising, clarifying, and I was a swan on a lake, wings flapping, feet beating across the surface, their cranked energy, my beating wings about to lift me free of the glue of the water, into the freedom of the air, a figure in front of me I was reaching for, almost there, a face almost seen; and then Lilith’s voice, ‘You may attain knowledge of pure being, not easily, but a task you put your whole self to, passionately, wholeheartedly, an act of love approaching madness, divine madness, the soul sprouting wings, the beautiful signposting the way,’ the face clearing, almost there, about to be, my feet left the water, I felt space all around, isolation, looked down at emptiness, fell.

I woke by the tomb on Ios, ‘Here the earth covers the sacred head of divine Homer, glorifier of hero-men’, a wind sweeping across the wind-blown island, a voice faint from inside the tomb, ‘not twenty, but thirty years’, then blown away across the rocks, my desolation, I lay against the tomb and slept.

I was gazing down at the black surface of Lilith’s dark mirror, into it, at my reflection, I have never really looked, I am ignorant of myself, I must know myself – but how can self learn to know self? ‘A soul to know itself must look into soul,’ another soul; the feather sweeps across, the image settles to a face, not mine, changing, now giving me knowledge of myself, now revelation, now we are looking in mutual admiration, Lilith’s voice, ‘don’t be drawn into reflection, which lies within the glass; allow your attention to rest lightly on the surface, let the images come to you and depart as they will: by being at the surface you are deep inside.’ The feather sweeps across. I let go.

I enter a city, crowded, narrow streets. Here a quiet domesticity that nourishes in the midst of injustice; there warped relationships that warp on. Here a voice raised that, silenced now, will reemerge later; there a precious presence erased and lost forever. Here a group fighting privilege, at great cost they remove the thinnest layer from it; there a band attacking the keep, they disappear into it, it grows stronger.  I round a corner into a square, in the middle is the Palatia doorway, with bodies hanged like crows, Odysseos’ unfaithful female servants, Ariadne, Phaedra, Melanie … and Jacks. I descend the steps under them, slippery with blood, follow the underground labyrinth, emerge on Delos, climb spirally Mount Cynthos and stand on the boss of the shield that is the Cyclades. The throb of an engine and the shield begins to rotate, I fall, slip down, centrifugal force slides me out across the circling islands, off the edge, onto the deck of the ferry.

Throb of an engine through the metal deck, I woke with a start, alarmed, scrambled up, stood holding the rail. It was light, that milky light of dawn before the sun rises. We were passing beneath Cape Sounion, the temple of Poseidon above, its columns strings of a harp still vibrating … Why alarmed? Because in waking from my dream I was also waking from the trance that had held me since the event on Naxos. What was I doing, leaving? Why had I left? Surely everything of point was there? I hurried to the stern, its churning wake back towards Kea, the last of the Cyclades. I watched the island fade and then disappear into a dense bank of fog lying on the sea. Had the old man watched out for me, watched the boat pass, stood with a message for me, perhaps a woman, even a son, by his side? What had I missed, asleep?

But I was awake now. Why had I gone along with the instructions on Naxos? The bus time, the ferry ticket, why had I not questioned? Had it been a test? Should I have said no? I hadn’t caught the golden ball, no. But that had been a test for Jacks, not for me. I had, I now remembered, been about to ask Strawson how I might dismantle the fixed, given dream-world, to reveal to me the god-filled nature, when Hanse had interrupted. Then, too inattentive to myself (how curious, so self-conscious, but so little self conscious) I’d been carried away by his charismatic, romantic-rebel rhetoric. And I had failed to ask Strawson the question, my question. While my calf-love for Jacks had me focussing on her, watching her go, instead of keeping my attention on Strawson. Where had he gone?

After all that had happened, all the clues and signs, I had at that crucial moment not asked the question that would have continued the process. I had been carried away. I stared over the stern, wanting to dive in and swim back to Naxos. But I was staring at an empty sea.

I stood at the rail, facing ahead now, impatient as the ferry chugged its slow way across the wide expanse of water dotted with grey warships and black oil tankers. As the day opened and warmed, as passengers stirred to life, I drummed at the rail, impatient to arrive so I could take the first ferry back.

But, where to? To Ios – would Dr George choose to recognise me? To Naxos – would Paul even be there? The moment had passed. I had left the Cyclades. All that was behind me. I had to go on.

But, where to? As the ferry hooted and shouldered its way through the rubbish-filled oily water of the boat-packed harbour, as the passengers reverted from smiling holiday vacancy to shouting aggression, crushed impatiently at the gangplank off the boat, as the speeding, hooting cars and wire-strung chaos and hard angularity of the city overwhelmed my senses, I shrank in upon myself, realising that, raw, I could not cope with this. Resume. Resume the journey I had originally planned. I hurried into the crush of the early morning metro, among unshaven chins and hard looks and hands groping for my wallet, across Athens to the scruffy station, and onto the narrow-gauge railway to the Peloponnese.