Today I want to draw your attention to a wonderful blog-post series Gareth Knight has been constantly and quietly releasing since late in 2015.

In a world that is awash with repetitive, unconnected snippets of information, hearing the voice of people who hold the actual genuine knowledge and giving them the time to tell a full story has become a rarity. Especially on this particular topic - and then completely for free on top of it!

Gareth Knight 2013, © SkylightPress — Gareth Knight 2013, © SkylightPress

Mr.Knight is offering fascinating detail and insights in exploring the historic nuances of the French occult scene of the early 1900s. As he points out in his first post, this scene remains notoriously under explored and little understood in both the Anglo-Saxon as well as the German speaking worlds.

Many of my own posts and writings have a similar aim: to bridge the abyss of knowledge and understanding amongst our European strands of occult lore. However, I can only work on that bridge from one end and for one language (German). Now here is someone with significantly more experience and language capabilities doing the same for the French language and occult scene.

Just imagine the power of knowledge unfolding if we had similar projects underway for our Polish, Italian, Nordic, Russian, etc. occult heritages? The so called 'West' is a much larger and lesser known canvas than most of like to believe. Mr.Knight is offering a fresh and colourful perspectives on many connections most of us might have missed in the past.

Here are some of his own words in introducing his series:

"In the course of those trips (to France before the year 2000, ed. Acher) and getting to know a number of French occultists I began to realise what a huge gap there was between the English and the French when it came to the development, aims and attitude toward the esoteric. The English Channel might just as well have been a Cosmic Abyss.

I thought not a lot more of this at the time although I was conscious, on one or two occasions when invited to sit in on some practical workings with the French, that something was happening on an inner level of which I ought to take notice – although at the time I could not think what it might be. One just had to ‘bear it in mind’ for possible future use.

It seems as if the time for this possible further use is upon me. (...) The hour has now struck. Or as one of my French friends said in relation to the Tarot card of the Magician, that they call Le Bateleur – it is Le Bat á l’Heure! Or in good old plain English: “Get on with it!”

The trouble is that, being a highly Aries kind of person, I am not good at being patient about things. If I am going to do something I need to have done it yesterday – not tomorrow! (...) After a deal of pushing and shoving between the planes a compromise has come to me that I can live with, which is to deal with it all in a piecemeal episodic manner. As a series of separate articles or chapters that feature in each case a particularly important character or issue on the French occult scene during its heyday at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries."