LETTERS

From John E. Andrews, Shrewsbury:

As a member of the IGR and a Post Office employee can I take issue with you over the outburst in Ancient Mysteries 18. Yes, things do go missing, for any number of reasons, including theft, but if you have been in the Post Office as long as I have you realize that most things go astray because of inadequate addressing or inadequate packing. I do my usual stint in the parcel office and much time is wasted rewrapping parcels and trying to associate items with correct parcels, sometimes it is impossible and the items finish up in Return Letter Branch as ‘unable to associate’.

Under normal circumstances the service goes unnoticed and only when things go wrong do we have to bear the brunt of press persecution that reaches paranoia. We aren’t all rogues as you imply nor are we all saints. Most of us do our damnedest to get the mail through intact and on time and resent the blanket inference that all Post Office employees are thieves, rogues and vagabonds.
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From Jim Kimmis, Colchester

It’s refreshing to have some controversy. I admit to some confusion as to the point made by Mary Caine in her letter, but I’m glad she made it. While it’s clear that the particular straightness of kingship can be interpreted in terms of political power only, this may not be appropriate to the kingship of early Bronze Age cultures within the Indo-European linguistic world. There’s still ground for supposing that the -reg function was in essence magical rather than tyrannical. I concede the point about the relative priority of sovereign power and linear geomancy, but in claiming a connexion between the two I did not mean to imply that the one rested on the other (at least not as effect and cause). If I have laid Ancient Mysteries open to criticism from any new quarters, as Mary Caine charges, I apologize for the damage done. (The etymology by the way seems to be more than ‘reasonably right’ – a nice choice of words – as it was accepted by Oxford’s C.T. Onions.) (Criticism is no worse than usual – Glyn Daniel’s fossilized core of archaeologists thinks we’re lunatic fringe, he said so in the Cambridge Evening News recently! – editor).

Barbara Crump’s note about the proximity of St Michael and St Andrew churches opens up a field which is relatively unexplored and probably fruitful. In Essex at least, there are slightly different associations of saints: St Michael, St Nicholas and All Saints dedications tend to occur together in concentrations, while in other areas St Andrew has St John the Baptist for a neighbour. There’s no obvious Michael/Andrew correlation here, though. I hope to put some distribution maps which show local concentrations of particular saints’ churches in a future issue of the ELM Newsletter, but not until I’ve worked the data over a bit more. Fascinating stuff!

Sunday Times (1.3.81) states that the architect of the towering Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building in Hong Kong employed a soothsayer (sic) to determine the places of such important features as the main entrance. Apparently this is the first skyscraper in the world to take account of feng-shui – make of that what you will.
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From Chris Lovegrove, Bristol:

Suggestive Inquiry: by chance I have a copy of the Attwood/South book reprinted in 1960 by the Julian Press, NY in a revised edition with an introduction by W.L. Wilmhurst (then editor of The Seeker “a quarterly {12} magazine of Christian mysticism”. From the introduction I take the following details:

The Inquiry was published in 1850 (not 1851) by Mary Anne South, (1817–1910). She was a daughter of a Hampshire gentleman called Thomas South, and in later life married a Rev. Alban Thomas Attwood, vicar of Leake near Thirsk in Yorks. About 100 copies had been issued in 1850 when further issue was stopped by Mr South and all remaining copies burnt. The reason, in Mary Atwood’s own words, was that it had been written “during a process of enquiry and is not a mature result there as should have been.” Wilmhurst suggests the two were “seized by a moral panic … Had they after all said too much? They realized suddenly (the Hermetic Art’s) sanctity, its tremendous difficulty and importance …”

The only conspiracy seems to have been between father and daughter, and their reasons high-minded,
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From Clive Harper,

The bock referred to in the editorial of ANCIENT MYSTERIES 18 – A Suggestive Inquiry … etc. does indeed have an interesting history. It was written by Mary Ann Attwood née South, and according to R.A. Gilbert was “First published in 1850 and then rigidly suppressed by the authoress and her father Thomas South, who felt that the world was not ready for the startling revelations on the Mesmeric basis of Alchemy. By the time of her death in 1910, Mrs Attwood had relented and the new edition was begun by Isabelle de Steiger, who passed the task onto Wilmhurst – and so the great secret was at last revealed.”

The edition referred to was published in Belfast in 1920 and contained an introduction by W.L. Wilmhurst and an appendix containing ‘‘the memorabilia of Mary Ann Attwood”. This edition went through several impressions and has recently been reprinted in the USA by the Yogi Publication Society (ISBN 0-911662-64-2). The further development of Mrs Attwood’ s ideas was recorded in a series of essays by W.L. Wilmhurst entitled ‘‘The Later Mysticism of Mrs Attwood” which appeared in The Quest in l919.
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From James Michelson, Manchester:

Your attack on the GPO is completely justified. The Post Office keeps losing my letters, or sending them ‘accidentally’ opened in the mail. According to an MP recently, the Post Office routinely opens people’s mail, not only that belonging to suspected terrorists either. One magazine got a Special Branch mail list accidentally left in their opened-then-re-sealed mail, and others have had important mail ‘lost’. At 14p (Two shillings and tenpence) a letter, it is a disgrace, and in a democratic country we ought to expect our letters to be safe from prying officialdom. As it is, it’s as bad as Russia (maybe worse for all we know – ed.), and I would advise all readers to write to your MP telling him or her of all the mail you have lost (or they have lost, to be more accurate).

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I agree entirely with Mr Michelson’s letter. My mother had her Mother’s Day chocolates ripped off this time – the letter arrived with the end smartly torn off by the Postman. They all but admitted it, giving her an ex-gratia payment of £1 to compensate after complaints. Had it fallen open at the sorting office, then it would have arrived in a plastic bag neatly printed with “Helping to Protect Your Mail” over it. Moral: if you’ve something really important to send, take it there yourself, and hold onto it until you hand it over.
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