Explore the burial chambers of Bryn Celli Ddu and Barclodiad y Gawres and learn the secrets of the initiation rites of the ancient Celts. Sit in the gloom of these places of pilgrimage and hear the words of Taliesin and Merlin echo down through time to describe the journey into the Celtic underworld of Annwn…
Such are the words of invitation to one of Mike Harris’s lectures, where the willing listener will be ushered into a world of magical and historical associations, connecting them spatially and temporally to both resonant secrets of their past and new possibilities for their future. Mike Harris is an integral part of the Western Mystery Tradition, a phenomenon that augers around the intellectual and practical legacies of the likes of Dion Fortune, Frederick Bligh Bond, William Sharp, and Gareth Knight. As both student and teacher he has been instrumental in the development of many successful offshoots of the great 19th Century Golden Dawn traditions, including the Society of the Inner Light, the Company of Hawkwood, the Rose and Unicorn Group, the Gareth Knight Group, and most recently, the Company of Avalon.
His most well known contribution to date is the work that centres around the Celtic Mystery Traditions of Wales, a place with which he is deeply intimate having lived in its enchanted mountains for over thirty years. A poet himself, he is attuned to the bardic traditions of Taliesin, the mythical poethos of the writers of the Mabinogion, and the mnemonic texts of the pre-Augustine Brythons. Harris’s work is well researched, neatly collated, and presented in an inspiring style that will appeal to historians, mythographers, anthropologists, comparative religionists, as well as those especially enamoured by the spiritual realms and their secret progeny. In a field where so many authors pander to cliché, fantasy, parody and populism, Harris gives us his world of the Keltoi, full of scholarly substance and panache. His great gift is being able to transcribe written words from old parchments to an animated chorale of living landscapes in a way that allows for the physical internalization that the bards intended. He is a spiritual cartographer of sorts, lifting dead language from the page and retracing its magical glyphs and sigils across the rugged vistas of the Mabinogi.
Such manifestations can be in found in the all new edition of Awen, The Quest of the Celtic Mysteries soon to be reissued by Skylight Press, as well as his other numerous books and articles. He is also the co-author of Polarity Magic, The Secret History of Western Religion with fellow Skylight author, Wendy Berg. One can spend many a nosweithiau llawen (merry evening) reading his work.
*The above quote comes from An Invitation By Mike Harris to Live the Myth (Excerpt from Winter Newsletter of The Healing Theatre Connection)
Through the Skylight 