The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [188]
In Europe, Mediterranean Africa, and the Middle East these spiritual disciplines flourished only until the spread of monotheism. We know their remnants as pagan mystery cults, such as those of Eleusis; we see fragments in Hellenized Egyptian religions such as the worship of Isis; we have a handful of texts of the Gnostic mystery schools, some Christianized, others not, that have miraculously survived the organized persecutions and suppressions of the Orthodox, whether Christian or Moslem, or later years. But what we have are, by and large, hardy fragments of roots left from a mangled plant, cut down before its full flowering by the sort of priest who puts his temporal power above the spiritual health of his flock. The one true magical system we do have is the Jewish Kabalah, kept alive by a people of enormous courage in the face of slander and persecution. In those dark years, Judaism was the only major Western religion to realize that different kinds of souls have different needs, that there will always be some who want to know and to experience the truth for themselves and who are willing to leave safe territory behind to do so. Those of us who believe the same owe it and its people a huge debt.
There is no space here to give the convoluted history of the various magicians and alchemists, Christian Kabalists and Rosicrucians, to say nothing of the Sufis on the Moslem side of the equation, who struggled to keep Western magic alive during the last eighteen hundred years or so. (If you’re interested, you can find books by the historian Frances Yates in any good public library.) That they succeeded at all is amazing enough; to point out that a lot of strange weeds took root and grew in the field cleared but never sown with proper seed seems unfair, but not everyone who claimed to be a follower of the true path was one. And of course the lies and slanders continued and still continue: that magic damns you or drives you insane, that witches worship the devil, and, most recently, that magic is nothing but New Age occult-babble on the one hand or illusion and fraud on the other. As readers, you’ll all have to make up your own mind on the truth of these things. It should be clear enough by now where I stand.
As for the structure of the Deverry books, a lot of people have muttered, either to themselves or directly to me, “Why do you use all those damn flashbacks?” Well, there is in this world more than one way of organizing a story—or a body of factual information, for that matter. The “start at the beginning and go through to the end” principle that we’ve all been raised with dates back to the classical Greeks as transmitted by the Romans, and as part of Aristotelian logic it forms the basis of modern science and the scientific world-view (though one that modern physics is beginning to undermine.) In this way of looking at the world, Time’s arrow flies straight and in one direction only. The magical tradition, however, teaches that you don’t necessarily have to move in a straight line to reach your destination.
Classical writers like Diodorus Siculus and Polybius state that the Celts who were their contemporaries believed in reincarnation, among other doctrines that are today part of the magical tradition. Certainly the art of the Gauls, and the later flowering of Celtic art in the early Christian era, are clear enough evidence that here is a people who organized information in a nonclassical, non-Aristotelian manner. Since I’m writing about ancient Celts, after all, I’ve borrowed their way of looking at the world, too, in the loops and spirals of my story line as it laces between and up the various lifetimes of the characters. I promise, on the gods of my people if you like, that