The Inklings and Homeopathy
Sue Young
.. Home is behind the world ahead
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadow to the edge of night
Until the stars are all alight.
Mist and shadow Cloud and shade
All shall fade All shall fade… [1]‘
The Inklings (1930s-1949) were an influential literary group at University of Oxford 1096 AD who were totally immersed in our Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time. They were intimate experts in antique manuscripts, the Arthurian Mythos[2], Celtic legends, and the Old Norse Skaldic Prose, and they spun and wove an elaborate network of tracery between the unfathomable mentation of our Ancient Minds and our Modern World.
The Inklings were deeply concerned that our modern Rationalist mindset has no place or understanding of the importance of Legends and Myth. The modern fashion for empirical truth, genuine historical and factual foundations for everything and every phenomena was blinding Human Consciousness to the very great detriment of our mental health…. because it totally excludes the Numinous, a very deep need now lost to our Human Soul.
This is now a very modern bewilderment as Gullveig (Finance-the Great Harlot) and Falsity (Fake News) is confabulating our Modern Consciousness and World, and we no longer seem able to triage information correctly. As a result, our descent into Culture Cancel and WOKE is now extremely concerning. Our destruction of our planet’s atmosphere and environment is deathly and devastating[3].
In the Inkling’s hyper/hypolink world everything bleeds into everything else, and everything is an Esoteric link into everything else. In the Mabinogion (compiled in the 12th-13th centuries from earlier oral traditions), they identified and unearthed the Gundestrup Cauldron (?200 BC/300 AD?), a vessel of wisdom and rebirth, which boils down into their essential essence every possible fact, opinion, persons, philosophy, things and thoughts.
Three imbibed drops of its content conveys wisdom and prophecy to inspired poets[4], and Taliesin (6th century AD) was so blessed, to become a renowned bard believed to have sung at the courts of at least three ancient kings. Taliesin was an inspiration for the Inklings. The Matter of Britain (Logres), the Old Norse Sagas and the King Arthur stories were fascinations they all shared.
The Inklings have generated so much academic study, it is difficult to summarise this vast complex body of literature into one small article, but for our purposes, I will attempt the briefest of outlines here. Because of their shared WW1 experiences, the Inklings scoured antient Legends and Myths to their very core to ease the bone deep conviction they had come into contact with something irrevocably evil.
The Old Norse Sagas explain it all… Chaos = Darkness (Evil) = Death = Primal Universe = Satan = Antilife = Age of Ymir (origin of Odin (Intellect – Spirit), Haenir (Soul – Water) and Lodur (Loki – blood – Fire), and all the Aesir (Infant gods) + those who believe they are gods + Age of Giants + Antediluvians + lusts and longings + Jotunheim (one of the Nine Worlds comprised of Primordial Universal forces) + Midgard (before Life arrived) + serpents + atheists – all compete and fall into confusion and war reigns supreme.
The Inklings were very clear they had uncovered a clear need for Spiritual certainty in our modern disordered world. World War 1 left very deep and traumatic impact craters in the Inklings Soul and they plumbed the horrors of these terrors deep into their academic studies and in their discussions with their friends to understand what, where and why this Evil had originated from. And they say men don’t know how to talk about their feelings!?
This emotional exploration is thankfully now on the move again due to the current success of the Peaky Blinders TV series, which follows the exploits of the real first original organised crime gang forged in the direct and terrible aftershock of World War 1.
We all now seem to be living in a world of organised crime gangs and currently, there are about 43 wards raging around our world as the Earth’s climate swings out of control and we face animal and human extinction. The Old Norse Sagas explain it all.
The Inklings investigated the historic grammar and the role of Poetic Myth as it birthed our Western Esoteric Tradition[5] dating from our Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time, which they utilised in their discussions and their fiction.
Meant for our age, the Inklings used Green Language to obscure their message using this complex layering of meaning… (aka the Language of the Birds). Green Language has been used for millennia to guide ‘initiates’ towards important truths…‘… the language of the birds was considered a secret and perfect language and the key to perfect knowledge, sometimes also called the langue verte, or green language... [6]‘
The Inklings were quite aware that our current Consciousness cannot grasp, process or understand the true horrors we are racing towards. However, their books and stories are in the top ten of the most popular books in the World in the Guinness Book of Records, so they have done magnificently!
The Inklings and their colleagues and friends were all profoundly and subtly influenced by these Legends and Myths, whose importance and influence has not yet been fully grasped by our Modern Academic Mind. The Pearls are all there. Little White Pebbles waiting to be gathered up and strung into a Necklace of Illumination.
Its members included:
Owen Barfield (1898-1997), a British solicitor, author, lecturer and philosopher, was an advocate[7] of Homeopathy ‘… Frightened or not, I have got to try some remedy beyond those I have tried already, and the homeopathic one is the only one that suggests itself. A hair of the dog that bites me….[8]’ Barfield’s adopted daughter Lucy Barfield (1935-2003) was a young adult professional dancer when she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and admitted[9] to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (1947-2010) in 1975. Barfield was much influenced by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)[10], who was also a staunch advocate and Lay Practitioner of Homeopathy.
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was an Irish writer, who wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe 1950[11] where he recounted how his hero, a lion called Aslan, cracked the Stone Table and our Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time seeped up to the surface through a million fissures in the bedrock.
This is a Multiverse of Realities[12] as Lewis described in The Magicians Nephew (1955) in his ‘Wood Between the Worlds’, which is in itself a Green Language trope for yet another thing that points to everything else ad infinitum. Lewis was believed to have written Barfield’s daughter Lucy into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 1950 as Lucy Pevensie. Lucy was one of the four children who stayed with Lewis during the bombing raids of World War II. Lewis dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 1952 to Barfield’s son Geoffrey.
Lewis was also certainly a very serious author, who wrote The Hideous Strength (1945) [13], in which his hero Elwin (Elf Friend) Ransom is the ?79th Pendragon to draw a company around him to defend us from NICE (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments 1945) and their demonic hegemony… our current version of NICE is the (National Institute of Clinical Excellence 1999) ‘… every Logres (Arthur’s Britain) fails to receive the Grail and sinks…[14]’
Elwin Ransome is ‘… the last survivor of something older…’ ‘… the last vestiges of Atlantean magic…’ and he speaks the ‘… Old Solar, the language of Eden… the Oyarsa [Saturn] tongue so old it was no longer heard even in Numenor…’
In The Hideous Strength (1945) Ransom pleads for help to defeat NICE (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments 1945) from the planetary intelligences he encounters, but they can’t descend to Earth without a Rainbow Bridge. Merlin (Heimdall) agrees to create this to save his own Soul.
This is a very clever and complex authorship, written in Green Language to retell the Old Norse Legends as described in The Book of Edda Called Voluspa, Wilkinson, 1897, of which more is explained below. This story is also currently being filmed in the extremely popular Marvel Comics (1939) film franchise of 14 films (2011-2022), up to and including Dr. Strange (2016-2022) and his Multiverse, and Thor Orinson, the legendary Norse God of Thunder (8 films 2011-2022).
John Ronald Reuel Tolkein (1892-1973) an English academic wrote the Lord of the Rings Trilogy Tolkein 1949, one of the most famous stories ever written. Tolkein’s maternal grandfather John Suffield (1802-1891)[15] was a very successful British lace dealer, hosier, glover and carpet warehouseman, who was on the Management Committee[16] of the Birmingham Homeopathic Hospital (1845-1949). Mabel Suffield Tolkien (1870-1904) (the daughter of John Suffield) and her husband Arthur Ruel Tolkein (1894-1976) were the parents of J R R Tolkein.
The Old Norse Saga in the form of The Book of Edda Called Voluspa, Wilkinson, 1897[17] explains the prophecies of Vala (the Seeress) as she records the maturation of Valfather (all peoples) from an Original Golden Age (the First Dispensation), through Ragnarok (Armageddon) to the dawning of a New Golden Age (the 2nd Dispensation). James John Garth Wilkinson (1812-1899) ‘The Father of 19th century Homeopathy’ was very influential and his works were widely read in his time. In The Book of Edda Called Voluspa, Wilkinson, 1897, Garth Wilkinson used the Doctrine of Correspondences Swedenborg 1740-1741 by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish Mystic, to translate this famous Norse text, two years before he died, after forty three years of research and having to learn another three languages to translate it!
Tolkein reportedly[18] read The Elder or Poetic Edda: commonly known as Saemund’s Edda, Bray 1908[19] by Olive Bray (?-?), with a preface written by William Gershom Collingwood (1854-1932), a famous artist and a close friend of John Ruskin (1819-1900), who was a lifelong friend[20] of Garth Wilkinson.
Collingwood visited Iceland in 1897 and work began to translate the Kormaks Saga (13th century) into English, in collaboration with Jon Steffanson (?-?), which was not published until 1899 under the title A Pilgrimage to the Saga-steads of Iceland Collingswood 1899[21].
Both Olive Bray and Collingwood made the Norse Sagas extremely popular and bought them to the mind of the academic intelligentsia at this time, but Garth Wilkinson had pipped them all to the point in 1897 and it is most probable his earlier edition was known to Tolkein.
The Book of Edda Called Voluspa, Wilkinson, 1897 expounds our Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time and proves itself to be the fruitful source of Tolkien’s Silmarillion and his Lord of the Rings Trilogy and so much else. The list of the characters named in The Book of Edda Called Voluspa, Wilkinson, 1897 provides a list of contentious elements of Darkness (Evil) and Light (Good), including the characters Dravpnir (Ringdropper – the First Dwarf) and his colleagues Dvalinn (Spiritual Patience), Durinn (Drunkenness (Lusts and Longings), Falsity (Fake News), Gandalf, Gimli (a City built upon the ruins of Asgard – the original home of Yggdrasil (Humanity)), Gullveig (Finance-the Great Harlot), Lofar (Praise), Mirkwood (Myrkvior – Dark Wood), Odin (Intellect – Spirit), the Pride of Jotunheim (one of the Nine Worlds comprised of Primordial Universal Forces) and Elohim (Divine Ideas), Vanir (Faerie from Erion), Warg (Vargr, wolf) – all surrounded by ‘Serpent lures’.
The Book of Edda Called Voluspa, Wilkinson, 1897 is highly suggestive that Asgard is also Tolkien’s Numenor and the Greek Atlantis? In the Lord of the Rings 1949, Tolkien named his hero Gandalf the Grey, who magnificently becomes Gandalf the White. Nothing is ever as it seems. The dualism of Human Consciousness, light and shadow, flickers always just behind our eyes, with the Susurration of the Universe.
Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945)[22] was an English writer and literary critic. As a young man, Stansby Williams was also a member of the Salvator Mundi Temple of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross 1915, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Westcott 1887, where he could have met many Homeopaths and their advocates including Edward William Berridge (1844-1920)[23], Gerard Anaclet Vincent Encausse (1865-1916)[24], Robert Masters Theobald (1829-1914)[25], Charles Lloyd Tuckey (1855-1925)[26] and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)[27]. It has been suggested that Lewis was also a member[28] of the Salvator Mundi Temple of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross 1915, and it is a certainty that many of the Inklings were cognizant of these Esoteric Occult groups.
Stansby Williams had also been a student of archaeologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) at University College London 1826, whose father William Petrie (1821-1908) was an ‘… enthusiastic homeopath…’ and his children were brought up with it[29]. It has been oft suggested[30] [31] that Flinders Petrie was also close to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Westcott 1887, and both were well known to Florence Beatrice Farr Emery (1860-1917), an English actress, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Westcott 1887, a member of the British Theosophical Society Blavatsky 1878, and a confidante within Garth’s milieu. Flinders Petrie was a close friend of Garth Wilkinson and his family. Flinders Petrie lived just around the corner from Garth Wilkinson at 5 Cannon Place NW3.
On 25th August 1893, Garth Wilkinson wrote to his Glasgow publisher to thank him for his Secret of the Nile Thomson 1893, and to inform him it ‘… will be made good use of… [as Garth Wilkinson’s daughter Florence Blakiston Wilkinson Atwood Mathews (1842-1908) friend Flinders Petrie] proposes to spend next winter in London, determine to enter seriously on heiroglyphic lore… [32]’
Stansby Williams ‘… conflated 1000 years of European history down into the span of [King] Arthur’s lifetime…[33]’ to illustrate Taliesin’s wisdom. He thus used Logres as a hyperlink to an underworld which ‘… contains entire symbolic universes…’ wherein a heraldic tree ‘… loaded with yellow fruits and silver leaves…[and] around its base… was coiled a small dragon covered with scales of red gold…’
Stansby Williams was a Pendragon who set up the Order of the Co Inherence Stansby Williams 1930s. As we are ultimately all one, we can live as members of one another. This ‘mutual dwelling’ enables us to voluntarily carry burdens for each other, living, dead, or unborn[34], whether they be of emotional, medical or spiritual nature, by Substitution or Exchange.
The Inklings and Homeopathy © Sue Young Spring 2022
[1] Pippins song The Edge of Night, from Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King.
[2] Williams, Taliesin Through Logres and the Region of the Summer Stars, (Williams, 1954). ; Higgins, Williams, Taliesin Through Logres and the Region of the Summer Stars, (Apocraphyle Books, 2016).
[3] Lent, Integrating Ancient Wisdom & Modern Science to Create a Meaningful Life, (Profile Books Ltd, 2021).
[4] Anon, Mabinogion, (12th-13th century).
[5] James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, (1890-1915). ; Robert Graves, The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, (1948).
[6] Wikipedia Language of the birds
[7] Barfield, A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield, (Wesleyan University Press, 1999). Page 176. ;
[8] Barfield, This Ever Diverse Pair, (Gollancz, 1950). Page 20.
Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays, (1977, Barfield Press, 2006). Page 223.
[9] David L Kimbrough, Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky, (Mercer University Press, 2002). Page 150 Ftn 24). ; Wheaton College, Marion Wade Centre, Seven Vol. 20, (Wheaton College, 2008). Page 5.
[10] sueyounghistories.com ; Rudolf Steiner, Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine: Lectures, March 21-April 9, 1920, Dornach, Switzerland, (SteinerBooks, 1999). Multiple Pages)
[11] Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, (1950 Geoffrey Bles, Harper Collins Publishers 1997).
[12] Sorina Higgins, Inklings and King Arthur, (Apocraphyle Press, 2017).
[13] Lewis, The Hideous Strength, (Bodley Head, 1945).
[14] Sorina Higgins, Inklings and King Arthur, (Apocraphyle Press, 2017).
[15] sueyounghistories.com
[16] Anon, The Homeopathic medical directory of Great Britain and Ireland, (1868). Page 98.
[17] James John Garth Wilkinson, The Book Of Edda Called Voluspa: A Study In Its Scriptural And Spiritual Correspondences (1897, 2010) based on a transcription by Saemundar Edda Hins Frodha (?1055-1133), translated and published by Theodor Mobius (?-?) in Leipsig in 1860. Mobius, Edda saemundar hins fród?a, (Hinrichs, 1860).
[18] Bray, Dart Thornton, The Poetic Edda – a Book That Inspired Tolkien with Original Illustrations, (Quillpen Pty Limited, 2018).
[19] Olive Bray, The Elder or Poetic Edda: commonly known as Saemund’s Edda: Illustrated by W.G. Collingwood, (1908).
[20] Anon, The British Spiritual Telegraph, being a weekly record of spiritual phenomena, Volume 1, (Keighley, Morell, 1857). Page 14 (quoted in this volume from a letter published in the New York Tribune).
[21] Mike and Kate Lea, W.G. Collingwood’s Letters from Iceland, (RG Collingwood Society, 2013).
[22] Lindop, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, (Oxford University Press, 2015). Multiple pages. ; Tyldesley, Egypt: How A Lost Civilisation Was Rediscovered, (Random House, 2010). Page 139.
[23] sueyounghistories.com ; Hahnemann House Trust biographies
[24] R. Swinburne Clymer, Book of the Rosicrucae 1947, Part 2, (Kessinger Publishing, 2003). Page 87
[25] sueyounghistories.com ; Smith, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body, (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2002). Page 43. ; Swedenborg Archives K125 [45] letter dated 31.7.1894 from Garth Wilkinson to Robert Masters Theobald. ; Swedenborg Archive Address Book of James John Garth Wilkinson dated 1895. ; Swedenborg Archive Address Book of James John Garth Wilkinson ‘Where is it’ dated 1.10.1892.
[26] sueyounghistories.com. ; Strouse, Alice James, (Harvill, 1980). Page 308. ; James, Edel, The diary of Alice James, (Penguin Books, 1982). Page 222). ; Am J Psychiatry 1982 139: 1079).
[27] sueyounghistories.com
[28] Florence Sarah Conway Williams , To Michal from Serge: Letters from Charles Williams to His Wife, Florence, 1939-1945, (Kent State University Press, 2002).
[29] Joyce Tyldesley, Egypt: How A Lost Civilisation Was Rediscovered, (Random House, 31 Oct 2010). Page 139.
[30] Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822-1922, (OUP Oxford, 2013). Page 263.
[31] Smith, The books of the beast: essays on Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers, Francis Barrett and others, (Crucible, 1987). Page 102.
[32] Swedenborg Archive K125 [15] Letter 25.8.1893 Garth to John Thomson.
[33] Higgins, Inklings and Arthur, (Apocraphyle Press, 2017).
[34] https://theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/intro/
