Sad news this morning, with the website of esoteric researcher and author Nevill Drury reporting his passing. I was hooked into Drury’s writing some 15 years ago via his book Don Juan, Mescalito and Modern Magic, and now have a number of his works on the bookshelf behind me. He was also behind the fascinating documentary The Occult Experience (embedded above).
As a writer, Nevill’s driving interest was always associated with the relationship between art, visionary experience and the esoteric traditions. In 1971, during an eight-month visit to England, he worked in a London bookshop and acquired a reader’s ticket to the British Museum. Here he read the visionary texts of the neglected English artist Austin Osman Spare, who was both a trance artist and occultist. Nevill’s first book, The Search for Abraxas, co-authored with a university friend, Stephen Skinner, and published in 1972, delved further into this area. It was described by British author Colin Wilson, who contributed an introduction, as ‘the manifesto of a new generation’. Over a period of some forty years Nevill wrote and co-authored numerous books on shamanism, modern Western magic, contemporary art, ambient music, holistic health, paranormal consciousness research and esoteric thought.
You can browse some of Drury’s prodigious output on esoteric topics on his Amazon page, and can find out more about the man and his works at his website.
Farewell, and thanks, to Nevill Drury (1 October 1947 – 15 October 2013).
