Introducing Elizabeth Ancrum Mackenzie
(aka, Barbara Gardiner to some)
At the same time, as a friend and as a social scientist, I feel the necessity of placing her and her work into some context:
One) Western Civilization is undergoing a dying and becoming - a metamorphosis. This Civilzation is the core of the macro Stage-setting of the world, against which all the dramas of our personal biographies take place. Everyone's. All this is taking place at the transition from the Second to the Third Millennium, which spiritual common sense would suggest has to be a very significant time for all of humanity. Three of the ways Rudolf Steiner characterized this are: 1) this time is the end of the Kala Yuga; 2) it is beginning during the time when Archangel Michael reigns again as the Time Spirit - providing the overall tone of the Zeitgiest; and, 3) at this moment in the evolution of consciousness everyone is crossing the threshold from the material world to the spiritual world in one fashion or another.
Two) Christ has returned, or as Steiner prophecized, in his role as the John the Baptist figure of the Second Coming (the voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism), beginning around 1933 (which coincides with the burning of the Reichstag in Germany by the National Socialists), human beings would begin to experience Christ in the ethereal realm - not in the physical, but in the ethereal - the realm into which human thinking can come awake out of its own forces of will.
Three) That who we might call the Dark God Ahriman is to incarnate in the flesh, much the same way Lucifer incarnated in the flesh around 3101 BC, and Christ two thousand years ago. One of the greatest powers in the whole of the Cosmos is to take on a human body and live as one of us for a time. This too happens on the cusp of the change to the Third Millennium. As well we need to realize that this remarkable spiritual Being is not evil, at least in the sense that we human beings think of as evil. He comes to be a Teacher of Mankind, and if we sleep through this activity we will not gain from it what we ought to gain, with the result that Ahriman's given imbalances will turn the next civilization into something we would rather not experience at all.
Part of these vast changes involves the Return as well of the Divine Feminine to a more prominant role in Civilization. In my writing I have characterized this as the end of a period of male enforced dominion over, to a period of female encouraged communion with. Our social life will manifest these underlying principles all the better were we to become conscious of them. Hierarchical social forms will give way to circle-like social forms, of which the Occupy Wall Street movement in practice was an excellent example. It is not so much that the female human being will dominate, but rather that the male will let go his need to be strictly male, and the female will find less need to coerce the male into more peacable social behaviors.
This same process will take place in the realm of Christian Esoterics. What Rudolf Steiner began with the original Anthroposophical Society, by including such figures as Ita Wegman, Marie Steiner and Elizabeth Vreede, will continue. Christian Esoterics is a community process - we work together to manifest it, and our sexual orientation is of little import except as a remnant hanging on from the prior ages of male dominion over. In my own experience this has led me to accepting as my best guides in life the women of my biography. This is not to say there was no influence from the men, but the healthiest social impulses came from the women who helped me learn to see the character flaws I carried as a male, and how to let go these cultural artifacts without sacrificing my essential self.
All of this then is to set the context for placing before the reader ,of this introduction and the works below, a leading female Christian Esotericist and Anthroposophist, able to do what Steiner called spiritual research, and what I would characterize is about learning to experience spiritual communion and then report on those experiences and that knowledge in a form which integrates itself with the underlying impulses of the best of natural science. These underlying impulses of natural science belong to this time because the reality of human consciousness is that logical rigor, and strict adherence to emperisism, must be joined to deep religiosity and artistic sensibility. This spiritual Science is then the Way of Knowledge for our time and on into the future for many many centuries. Barbara Gardiner, aka Elizabeth MacKensie, has this to give to us in exactly the way we need.
Just as the First Appearence of Christ resulted in Gospels - good news - so the return of Christ in the Ethereal leads to the seeing from different places on the mountain top of knowledge, all manner of perceptions which are necessary for our time. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science did not cease its productive activity when Steiner crossed over. That work just become the province of others, to carry on as best they could during these times of great and grave trials.
I was baptised in St John’s Tide, June 21st 1956 on the Island of Lismore in Scotland,- Lios Mor in Scottish Gaelic means the Great Garden. The island contains the ruin of the 13thc cathedral church of the Inner Isles of the Hebrides on which a protestant church was built in the 19th c. This is a very small Island and was an important monastic Physic Garden. It was settled in the 6thc by an Irish monk, Moluag, and his Apostolic 12. Its history is linked with that of the Island of Iona, I Columcille,
. “ I” in Gaelic,- pronounced ee as in Ich in German-means simply Island but also art and science.
I was 3 years old when I was baptised and my first memories are of the sea journey to Lismore and of the interior of this cathedral Church.
My father was an agnostic factory floor worker in Rolls Royce from generations of coalminers; my mother’s cousin called us for baptism. I did not see the inside of a church again in my childhood. On my mother’s side we came out of the slums of industrial Glasgow.
My father’s generation still looked to Russia and communism as the great hope for working class humanity. How little they knew. My father died 2 days before my 14th birthday at the age of 42.
When it came time, at 16, to choose what to study at University I asked myself what was the highest faculty I possessed. Clearly thinking. Therefore the highest subject I could study was the one which dealt with thinking. Was there such a subject? I looked in the books of subjects, indeed there was and it was called Philosophy. Well then I would go and study Philosophy. My Biology teacher thought me mad.
I was seeking the muscularity of thinking, the gymnastic of thought, the sheer joy of thinking with Socrates, of exercising in an organic way the faculty that to me was my highest. Instead I found at my very young University a rattling dancing skeleton of intellectualism, dry as dust and dead as a dodo but dancing nevertheless. Here was no graceful gymnastic, no development of muscle on the bare bones of the thinking faculty, here was the skeleton, the intellect, left skeletal and forced into clattering gyrations of simply increased cleverness. Was it perhaps Psychology then that offered the path to understanding this thinking faculty? No, I could pass this exam without ever attending a lecture but merely by opening a book an hour beforehand.
I left and went wandering, what I sought was not in the young University whose Philosophy department had not yet produced a graduate.
Destiny brought me eventually to a lecture in Amherst University, USA, by Richard Alpert, Leary’s co-experimenter or Ram Dass as he had by then become.
Here
was a man who did
not walk onto the stage but was carried like a goose on a platter by
devotees and placed on a table. He quite openly stated that his “I”
was “not at home”... but a voice was coming forth. This voice
seemed to come from a great distance and gave the impression of a
very powerful being, however if Ram Dass was not at home then I
wanted to know who was. It did not take long into the ‘wisdom’
teaching of this being who was not Ram Dass, nor Alpert, by his own
admission, for my soul to respond with an overwhelming, profound and
total rejection. From this ‘wisdom’ there was nothing for me to
learn, however the phenomenon itself...a ‘fount of wisdom’
that was not wisdom but a series of banalities delivered in a slow
basso profundo, a being of inordinate arrogance who could proclaim
its presence in another being who had abrogated his ego, a room full
of devotees who did not seem to see anything amiss and my own
immediate reaction of dismissal of this being’s power to come
anywhere near my thinking. I rose to go, my companion was horrified,
we were in the front row. I had learned all I needed to learn, to
remain would mean falling asleep out of boredom and I seemed already
to know the danger in that.
....
So I came to Anthroposophy and devoured the library as one starving. I found there was a society, I joined. I found I was sometimes the only member under middle age attending. At an early stage I asked the members in a meeting.
“Do you not see all the souls floundering and drowning in the water? Can you not see beyond your lifeboat? Why are you concerned whether the lifeboat is coloured blue or red when the sea is filled with drowning souls?”
I must have said too much.
I joined a Philopsophy of Freedom study group. Here was muscle!!! Here was a gymnastic of thought that built muscle and with such economy!!! Such discipline!!! One could feel the strain, feel the logic, feel the purity of the logic that had no extraneous extravagances of the intellect, feel the intellect straining to free itself from such discipline. For all its apparent philosophical simplicity, and by this I mean freedom from philosophic artifice, here was a work devoted to thinking and the love of thinking, not intellectualising, nor philosophising into the blue. This was Philosophy for the lovers of thinking.
The first and unexpected result was that I beheld the ‘place’, the logical place where the Foundation Stone Meditation was a living reality; the reality of the Foundation Stone’s eternal being grew out of the logic of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity before my very ‘eyes’ (eyes of the spirit) as surely as a plant grows out of its soil. Such are they related, you cannot have one without the other.
I worked with the exercises and some meditations. The last experience I want to describe concerns this. I come from a hereditary stream of weakened physical hearts and early deaths. My grandfather was the first to step out of coal mining to be cannon fodder in 1st WW.
Soon after I began the esoteric work I lay down one day and fell not asleep but awake. I woke up in my diamond body and arose from the bed. I walked through the rooms and looked out the windows, all was as in normal sense perception except that everything was composed of condensed light, had lost its density and weight although these were present in a spiritualised form in accordance with Goethe’s Theory of Light so that one could recognise that this was not another world but the same world as sense perception simply minus the weight and density of heavy matter in its earthly manifestation. The body in which I was perceiving was condensed light, the room, the teapot, the window, the trees beyond were condensed light. The ‘coal’ body, the heavy body, had become the ‘diamond’ body. The carbon body of man. Light condenses to carbon, to materiality, Christ enters the carbon body of man, in time it will become the living diamond body. The warmth of Saturn, the beginnings of the carbon body of man. How to get back to my coal body was then the problem..the words of the teacher came, I must remember that body and try to feel physical hunger. So I did and woke up again within it.
You will find then listed below, the works she seeks to share, in the order she has chosen - that is links to individual pages containing the writings described. In addtiion we have published on lulu.com both a general collection of all her works, as well as a special edition of Shepherd's Fire (which is also included in that collection).
Books, Essays and Poems of Elizabeth Ancrum Mackenzie
Escrivatura
(new word she just coined..means writings)
The Shepherds' Fire
(rtf version - missing some art)
The
Shepherds' Fire (pdf version - has all the art)
The
Pre-Requisites for Spiritual Scientific Research in The School of
Spiritual Science
Some Thoughts Arising on the Constitution Events: 2004
How to See Christ
in the Etheric - Living the Veils, An Active
Imagination; and the
Alchemical
RoseCross
In Memoriam 30 March
1925: Inconsolatimus
Poems (and stuff)
The Cattle Market at Perth
The Price is Nicht Richt
My Dog has gone to
Sirius
Little Big Man
Cogito
The Poets High Canyons of 9/11
Vigil
The Black Panther of Logierait
Hand
Hold
on the Buchaille
Trois
Rivieres
This Fucking Poem