Hello, I’m Annie Dieu-Le-Veut, a shaman and hermeticist writer and teacher of the ancient Mysteries, and I live in the Vale of Avalon in Somerset, England.
I first came to Avalon half a century ago, along the secret Green Road of the Soul, the “Mystic Way that leads through the Hidden Door into a land known only to the eye of vision”, as the 20th century mystic, Dion Fortune, described it.
I entered that portal through the first ever Glastonbury Festival of music at Worthy Farm, which has since become famous all over the world, although it was a much smaller and deeply spiritual gathering back then.
Afterwards, we set up camp on the grass verges of the narrow, leafy Cinnamon Lane that winds around the foot of Glastonbury Tor.
I was lucky enough to meet people there who thought like me, who were digging down into our spiritual roots, into our ancestors’ understanding about the spirits of the land – known locally as the Fae or faeries – and learning about how a relationship with them was crucial to spiritual growth.
I eventually returned to Canterbury in Kent, where the night-illumined cathedral filled my bedroom window in a house I shared with some art students. And I got on with my life, which involved, eventually, becoming a mother, and then a writer.
Through my work as an alternative health journalist for national newspapers, I travelled all around the world in search of ancient medicinal therapies and techniques. This enabled me to learn a vast amount of esoteric lore from a variety of guides, gurus, swamis and shamans who all helped me, over many decades, to develop in my spiritual evolution around the Wheel of Life.
And the more I listened to the stories of different indigenous cultures, preserved in their sacred lore, the more I realised that they were all telling one story, albeit with diverse local flavours.
My shamanic training first began on a Greek island in 1995, when I was initiated into huna kane: Polynesian shamanism. It continued at my guru’s south Indian ashram, three years later, with shamans from Mexico who had been trained by the same nagual that had taught “Carlos Castenada”. Finally, back home, I followed an intensive two-year course in Dorset, England, in which I was trained to become a teacher of shamanism.
And so I can’t exactly pinpoint at which stage of that years-long process my perception of Nature changed, but change it did, irrevocably. I could see Spirit, or the God principle, everywhere. It happened naturally and unexpectedly. In all those years, no-one had told me that the way I perceived the natural world would change so much.
In 2010, I was suddenly and unexpectedly pulled back to Glastonbury – like Dorothy and Toto in a tornado. I still felt like a fairly rookie shaman. Nevertheless, the Fae came into my visioning and asked me to do a shamanic soul retrieval for the land around the town, and I carried it out on the Winter Solstice.
Since then, I’ve realised that so much of what presents itself as “spiritual” completely misses the point. It’s about the land of our ancestors. It’s always been about our land. It’s about being in love with our own land, and I’d had to travel many times around the world to discover that.
When we try to tell the story of our great love for our homeland – whether through words, music, paintings or dance – the land replies by coming into our dreams and visions with the stories of our ancestors whose ashes fertilise the soil beneath us. Those night-time teachers tutor us in what used to be known as the Mystery teachings, which help us in our spiritual development by sparking our growth towards enlightenment and wisdom.
These Mystery teachings were left to us in the hidden layers of ancient myths, music and architecture. I show what, why and where in My Books – and also how that ancient wisdom can help us in our lives today.
Annie Dieu-Le-Veut 