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The John Michell Reader (Coming Soon!)

Forteans come and Forteans go, after they spent their entire lives trying to unravel the truth behind challenging mysteries. But with any luck their thoughts and wisdom can be preserved, benefitting future generations of consensus dissenters.

Such is the case of John Michell (1933-2009), a true counter-cultural iconoclast of the 1960’s, who left behind a great deal of books and essays focusing on a wide range of ‘heretical topics’: From sacred geometry, earth mysteries, geomancy, gematria, archaeoastronomy, metrology, euphonics, simulacra, sacred sites, faeries, flying saucers and even the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Because the sign of a true Fortean is an eclectic curiosity, and always adopting a ‘holistic’ vision of the world’s mysteries.

Our friends of Inner Traditions will soon release a compendium of Michell’s works, curated by Joscelyn Godwin, who aside from his Fortean interests is also a composer and musicologist. Here’s an excerpt from his introduction to The John Michell Reader:

It is not too much to say that John Michell was a prophet. Prophets do not foretell the future, so much as warn what may come to pass if events continue on their present course. Nowadays this is so blindingly obvious that we hardly need prophets to tell it to us. But there is a rarer prophetic gift, which is the seeing of forms in what Plato called “The World of Ideas” —not the imaginary ideas of men and women, but the divine or daemonic ideas after which the material world is formed. Exekiel saw the Chariot of the Most High; John the Divine saw the New Jerusalem; Mohammed in his night-journey passed through the planetary spheres and met the other prophets of his lineage. Such visions may be warnigs too, but they also inspire confidence in the meaning and goodness of the cosmos; they enable us to imagine Paradise here and now, and to adjust our lives in harmony with it.

Since the publication of the New Jerusalem canon in 1971, a prophetic vision of the latter kind was the foundation of all of John Michell’s writing, and his efforts were bent on bringing about its new descent as a source of joy, sanity, and sacred order in the world. These little essays were like the foam thrown off by the great wave of creative energy set in motion by this discovery, which Michell characterised, in all humility, as a revelation.

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