I recently gave a talk about how, should we cast our eyes back into the deepest known history, it looks as though the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity has been ever under the two-edged sword of the blessings of the Grailkeepers and the curse of the Time Bandits.
The Grailkeepers preserve the secret, esoteric, occulted knowledge known as the Mysteries, to which man needs access if he is to understand the meaning and purpose of his human life. It is their role to “bring the Heavens down to the Earth”. The Time Bandits, however, hide those Mysteries. Through keeping us in dark that there even is a path to such enlightenment, let alone show us the steps for how we should follow it They are, in effect, stealing our time here, on this Earth, in order to further enrich themselves. But they also mess with our calendars so that we out of kilter down here on Earth with the Heavens above, and thus disempowered.
In ceremonial magical circles, the Grailkeepers and the Time Bandits are said to follow, respectively, the Right Hand Path and the Left Hand Path.
So how to do we tell a Grailkeeper from a Time Bandit? Well, it is about the undercurrents in their creative works, which tell another story that the subconscious recognised, one that complements the superficial one, as is often about the importance of bringing the Heavens down to the Earth, and how to the hidden keys which help us to follow the true way or conversely, send us off in the wrong direction.
Time Bandits are those who fragment our perception of Time by inventing false histories, changing our calendars and ‘freezing’ our zodiacs, so that we are no longer holistically in tune Below with the cycles of the constellations Above.
Grailkeepers use their special knowledge and wisdom to re-align the understanding of the all-important correlation between the Heavens and Earth, and express it in their creative works.
Learning to recognise a Grailkeeper from a Time Bandit is a necessary stage in our spiritual evolution, as is told about in many an ancient tale that features the mythological zodiac hero. One of the crucial steps towards illumination is discrimination, or separation as it is called in alchemy, which occurs when the protagonist reaches Virgo. There, the task is to use advanced perception to sort the wheat from the chaff, the wolves from the wolves in sheeps clothing, the true prophets from the false prophets who profit from our ignorance.
But the identity of some Grailkeepers – those who preserve the Mysteries for the salvation of mankind – may come as a surprise. For instance, P L Travers who wrote the Mary Poppins series of books, buried these secret keys under her superficial stories about characters who, like shamans, went into other dimensions to solve the problems of this one.
The underlying plotlines in both the original 1964 Mary Poppins movie, and the most recent one, Mary Poppins Returns, reveal that Pamela Travers was well versed in the Mysteries of Time and Space, which she had imbibed at the feet of philosopher initiates like George Gurdjieff, and Irish poets George William Russell and W.B. Yeats. She also lived for some time among Native American tribes such as the Navajos, Hopis and Pueblos, where she studied their mythology and folklore. After that, she went to Japan to learn Zen mysticism.
In this way, Travers learned about the universal Mysteries, and then she worked out how to weave these golden threads of wisdom into the underlayers of her simple children’s adventure stories, so that they were only visible to those who had reached the necessary level of discernment or advanced pattern recognition: the more zoomed-out perception of reality that is a natural by-product of crossing and criss-crossing the corpus callosum in shamanic trance.
Step in Time, Mary Poppins!
In any magical work, timing is essential, and so you may want to take the following into account if you are planning on setting your intention by the bells of Big Ben.
The character who holds the key to the Mary Poppins Mysteries is Admiral Boom. He understands about keeping the timing of Earth in harmony with the timing of the planets in the Heaven.
Admiral Boom keeps time by firing his cannon. But his boom is always five minutes before the chimes of Big Ben; just over five minutes early to be precise. This is a metaphor for a hidden truth in our real world. Just over five seconds is the amount of time that the Greenwich Meridian, from which all clocks including Big Ben, take their beat, is out of kilter, compared to real time. There is a difference between the GNSS coordinates and the astronomically-determined coordinates because the red laser beam of the GPS on the Royal Observatory at Greenwich is out by 0.006 miles.
Admiral Boom, in other words, is sounding out real time, according to the stars, although everyone thinks he’s mad, bad or just plain wrong … apart, that is, from the ‘lucky’ Cockney chimney sweeps who sing “Step in time, Mary Poppins!”
In the exciting finale to the latest film, Mary Poppins Returns, the problems of the existing world can only be solved by correcting the hands of the clock of Big Ben by those five minutes – a symbol for the five seconds – so that the bells are in synchronicity with the cannon blasts of Admiral Boom, aka Saturn or Old Father Time, thus bringing the times and tides of man more in step with his destiny which is told in the stars.
I won’t spoil it for you by revealing whether they succeeded or not! But as Emily Blunt’s Mary Poppins comments wryly as the lamplighters struggle with their ladders to reach the clock of Big Ben: “You’d think they’d never done it before!”.
Shaman of Avalon 