by Anne Scott
I’d like to have this copy of Dion Fortune’s Glastonbury, Avalon of The Heart for in it she argues that Glastonbury is Avalon and that its surroundings, the drowned lands of Lyonesse, may be the lost kingdom of Atlantis. Here are works by Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crawley from the very earliest years of the shop. Round a corner, I stop by a biography of Piotr Ouspensky, and a modern reading of the women’s action reformer Annie Besant who was both a Fabian and President of the Theosophy Society, her writings attracting Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. There is a central interest in the Atlantis Bookshop in Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky the late 19th century Russian mystic whose framed photograph stands above my head. She was the intellectual and spiritual drive of most of the writers here.
In a corner I see an account of Francis Bacon and the 16th Century Rosicrucians with behind it a vivid text on Freemasonry. Some visitors come to this bookshop simply to read titles from another dimension.
Alchemist/Philosophers from the 17th century are assembled together straight and definite in colour, their hazardous propositions barely tamed within the boards. I look for the 13th century magician Roger Bacon and more closely for Queen Elizabeth’s mathematician Dr John Dee who had the largest library in England in his time. He defined his work by allowing no separations between his calculations and his magic. Both were ‘pure verities’ to him, proven truths powerfully to be discovered under the visible world and instrumental in it every day. His beliefs were for him expressed absolutely in the cosmographic harmonies of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. He had seven copies.
T.S. Eliot must surely have bought some of his copies of Gurdjieff here. The shop was already open in 1922 (though not in Museum Street) when he published ‘Waste Land’ and was still in search of ‘ miraculous, the exercises in attention and observations’ in Piotr Ouspensky. The shop came to Museum Street in 1946, just two years after his ‘Four Quartets’ appeared, documenting – like the history of Lost Atlantis itself perhaps – ‘passing moments in a single day and a night of misfortune’.
Leafy plants hanging over shelves are reflected and a little magnified in the mantel-mirror and a great unfamiliar bird flies there too from across the room. What is strange is never far from what is local and inviting. Notices of events are tagged to the wooden shelves and the walls detailing Workshops and Courses, Speakers, a Moot. Rural baskets white-linen lined, carry leaflets, tarot packs, cards and candles. No surface is plain. A carousel turns with cards exotically figured. Behind me on a lit table are book jackets covered with drawn astrolabes, stars and moons. Here is the full and always up-to-date stock of astrology books, the sacred texts, the Mysteries. These are big books – readers are given a chair to make opening them easier: a bound work on Celtic Alba which is Scotland, one on Celtic Shamanism and Celtic Myths, Faeries in the Irish Tradition.
This occult bookshop carries some fiction and general books. I buy a small book about Tarot, and then, looking out at Museum Street, I discover in the window display a small white table bearing a lit lamp. It seems like a potent and delicate last defence against the cold stone and morning.
There is no music playing and yet I’ve felt a rhythm in this big room: it’s in my heart, perhaps, or in the life of the shop. A delivery has arrived and must be signed-for and set aside, but once the door closes, the room stills again to the sea fall-and-rise of itself.
My son’s books are packed – it’s time to go. At the desk I have too many books to carry away and so the beautiful tablets will be posted on. I hear the words of my home’s address spoken out in this room, my earthly location in touch now with the magic here.
I think of where it must be on the maps in Imago Mundi.
If you enjoyed this book from Sandstone Press you might enjoy:
Abraham and his Son: the story of a story by James Goodman
Gathering Carrageen by Monica Connell
The Blind man of Hoy by Red Szell
Daunderlust by Peter Ross
