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Between the formation of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in Scotland on the 4th August 1846 and the present day, a total of thirteen eminent Scottish freemasons have led the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in Scotland, the first of these Sovereign Grand Commanders was Dr Charles Morison of Greenfield …
Continue reading "Ozymandias! The Rite of Misraïm in Scotland."
An ancient Gaelic tale found in the unpublished notebooks of Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912)
Very proud to announce the long-awaited publication of my new book - 'THE GREEN BOOK OF THE ÉLUS COËN (The COMPLETE Manuscrit d’Alger 1772): A TREASURY OF COËN TEXTS IN TWO VOLUMES. This book is an English translation of an obscure and previously unpublished French eighteenth-century masonic manuscript (1770) known as Le Manuscript d’Alger or, …
Continue reading "New Book Published: The Green Book of the Élus Coën: A Treasury of Coën Texts"
ANNOUNCEMENT: Very pleased at receiving word of my selection to join the Global Learning Partnership network in 2020. I will be spending a month in Rwanda and Uganda this summer. In partnership with Redearth Education Uganda and Inspire Educate and Empower Rwanda (IEE), I will be training local educators through professional learning reflecting local context.
With three distinct gold globes, the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque dominates the Marrakesh horizon. Legend tells that one day during the month of Ramadan, the wife of Youcoub El Mansour (c. 1160- 1199) ate three small grapes. In penance, she melted down all her jewellery and moulded them into these three great gold spheres. …
Rabbi Yitzchak Luria ben Shlomo Ashkenazi (1534-1572), also known as the ‘Ari’ or ‘Lion of Safed’, was taught by the influential Rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570). Known for instigating a new school of Kabbalistic thinking in Palestine known as Lurianic Kabbalah, Luria himself writes very little, and his work becomes known through its reference …
Continue reading "Exile in Kabbalah: A Visit to The Old Tzfat Cemetery"
During the summer of 1914, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916) was stabbed in the stomach by a 33-year-old peasant woman named Chionya Guseva, outside his home in Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River in the Tobolsk guberniya (now Tyumen Oblast), Siberia. A former prostitute, Guseva purportedly screamed 'I have killed the Antichrist!'. Rasputin, near dead, was chased …
Continue reading "In Rasputin’s hand: Images of the Mad Monk"
The text below was published in the broadsheet 'Journal des débats' on November 6, 1803. "M. de Saint-Martin, who had founded in Germany a religious sect known as the Martinists, has just died at Aunay, near Paris, at the home of Senator Lenoir-Laroche. He had acquired some celebrity for his bizarre opinions, his attachment to …
At the start of the New Year, I had the pleasure of attending a traditional fire ritual known as 'The Burning of the Clavie'. The burning is an ancient Scottish custom still observed in the village of Burghead, a fishing village on the Moray Firth. The clavie is a collection of casks split in two, …
The ‘Othering’ phenomena is something that is clearly reproduced, reinforced, and experienced by people all around the world, regardless of their race, language, gender, class, nationality, or religion. In classrooms made up of truly diverse groups of children, what are the challenges faced by RE teachers and how do they tackle the ‘Othering’ impulse? With …
Continue reading "Teaching RE to Refugees: Hot-pants and Headscarves – The Dialectics of Identity."
