Genesis
It all began with an unwanted Tarot card reading on a muggy summer afternoon in 1977. At the time I was living in a barricaded mass squat in Brixton, South London, awaiting summary eviction by a more than willing local Constabulary. The whole neighbourhood was due for clearance to make way for an “open space”. If previous encounters with the forces of awe and boredom were anything to go by, in the process I’d probably be charged with assault and given a good kicking, and not necessarily in that order; and the next offence would more than likely see me sent down for a term of imprisonment. But what the hell, I’d only be replacing one secure environment for another. So much for the occupational hazard of living by one’s principles. The difference, as I then rationalised, being that in this prison freedom resided within rather than outside its walls. The gestalt of the irony hadn’t gone unnoticed. My friends and I were confronting more than just the perverse housing policies of a corrupted local authority; we were re-inventing our entire universe. We wanted our liberty and we wanted it now. Within eighteen months there had been a change of regime at the Town Hall and we had fought the law and won. But that afternoon only one universe changed, when I saw that which lives forever.
Kay the gay transvestite from Glasgow had decided to pay my fellow anarchists and me the unexpected compliment of a visit. ‘We needed to have our fortunes told’. As he clambered in through the first floor window the recently dropped acid suddenly took-off and I knew with absolute certainty I was now, for the first time in my life, ready for destiny.
The artist Paul Klee once remarked: “I’m seeking a distant point at the origin of creation; where I sense a single formula for man, animal, plant, fire, water, air, and all the forces surrounding us.” The search for truth is as much about a reassessment of the known as it is about a discovery of the new. All beginnings are predicated by a return. As the Taoists put it: ‘In the confluence of nothingness, presence stirs’.
Kay laid out the cards in a pattern he referred to as the Holy Cabbalah or ‘Word of God’. Ten cards placed upside down – facing the reader – in the positions of the ten sephiroths of the Tree of Life, and ten placed right way up – facing the querent – to represent the Tree of Knowledge. Within these two spirals lay all the secrets of my life.
In an instant I recognised the symbol laid out before me, I saw the joke and laughed my socks off. It was clearly a visual mnemonic for a double helix; it was none other than a flattened and stretched-out strand of D.N.A. – Francis Crick’s “secret of life”. It was so patently obvious that I at first failed to appreciate the enormous synchronicity in meaning. The Genetic Code and God’s Plan, creation in the image of God born through replication: you get the drift I trust. As the Book of Revelations describes it, the face of God was now in my forehead. “ a pure river of water of life … and on either side … was there the tree of life.” The Tree or ‘Word of God’ was none other than D.N.A. as it would have appeared to the minds of the ancients.
Over the ensuing weeks I explored libraries and bookshops in the expectation that I would find the co-incidence confirmed by others more knowledgeable in these matters than myself. I searched in vain. I tried explaining it to friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers and found to my consternation that I was touching a raw nerve in the ground assumptions of almost everyone I approached. It disturbed people. I disturbed people. People were disturbed. They disturbed me. So I gave up trying.
Over the years the full import of that discovery was to weigh heavy on my mind. With the knowledge had come the nagging, insistent burden of responsibility. Whatever else I might choose to do with my life, I knew I had stumbled upon something that required me to accept the duty of communicating my madness to the world at large. Then one summer evening twenty years after the reading, I was walking home through Brighton when I couldn’t help but notice that a new bookshop was still open, This is unusual for the U.K. as indicated by the fact that most other shops in town, bookshops or not, had long since closed for the night. So on impulse I stepped in and took a look around. As I aimlessly meandered amongst the shelves I came across two books sitting side by side that set my spine tingling. One concerned “DNA and the I Ching – unlocking the code of the universe”, whose synopsis read: “evidence of a Master Plan in which God is the all-encompassing pattern present in all life”. The other, “The Tao and the Tree of Life” with the following recommendation: “This unique text reveals for the first time the fascinating parallels between the Hebrew and Western Traditions of Kabbalah and Taoist Internal Alchemy”. The authors of these two books being Katya Walter and Eric Steven Yudelove respectively. Of course neither author made reference to a third connection, DNA linked through sacred geometry to The Holy Kabbalah, but between them the proposition – by way of ancient Chinese philosophy – had all but been spoken.