The Seymour Papers

Colonel Charles Richard Foster Seymour (1880-1943) was one of the most important esotericists of the twentieth century. He is almost unknown today. I am making available on this site a series of his writings from the 1930s. They are a very useful resource, but they are not easy to obtain. They were first published to a general audience in the 1980s in a book aptly entitled The Forgotten Mage, but they have not been accessible online until now.

Who was Colonel Seymour?

Seymour came from a privileged family background. His father was a member of the Irish Protestant landowning class, and his mother was English. He was nicknamed ‘Kim’, or sometimes ‘Griffin’ or ‘Griff’. His career was in the British army and intelligence service. While he was posted to India, he had an experience of spiritual awakening.

Seymour is said to have been a sad man. He and his wife Zoe lost a child, and Zoe later separated from him. He was not necessarily likeable and did not suffer fools gladly. But he inspired great devotion in those who became close to him.

Seymour’s experience of esoteric movements came through Freemasonry and Dion Fortune’s group, the Fraternity of the Inner Light. He was a close collaborator of Fortune, and he duly turns up in fictionalised form in her novels.

What Seymour believed

Summarising Seymour’s ideas is not especially easy because he did not lay them out systematically, nor were they necessarily consistent. Seymour was not a theologian but a teacher: he was trying, for the benefit of his students, to put advanced and elusive ideas into words. A summary cannot do justice to his writings: there is no substitute for reading them.

What we can say is that Seymour stood squarely in the Western esoteric tradition. His principal theoretical influences, which he refers to repeatedly, are Neoplatonism and the Kabbalah. He did not contribute much in the way of new theoretical insights: his virtue was not as an original thinker but as a teacher.

Seymour should be read with some caution. He repeatedly makes what are, to the academic scholar, inaccurate and speculative statements about ancient history and religion. It may be felt that this criticism is pedantic: looking to the historical content of his writings rather than concentrating on their more valuable spiritual content. Less easy to explain away are statements made by Seymour which by present-day standards must be considered as bigoted or racist.

Below, I try to summarise Seymour’s key ideas.

Cosmology

An ultimate divine power exists, consisting of “a neutral unpersonalized sea of cosmic force”. Under the influence of the German scholar Rudolf Otto, Seymour sometimes refers to this ultimate power with the Latin term Numen. The divine life of the Numen bursts out and manifests itself in the visible universe, and the visible universe exists within the Numen. The material world is the body of God.

Humankind is a child of the Numen. The human mind and soul correspond to or form part of the divine mind and soul. A human being can achieve union with the Numen in this life, although “for the most part in flashes only”. (Elsewhere, Seymour says that the human mind can reach as far as the soul of the universe, not quite to the Numen.)

Every human being is their own priest and their own saviour: Seymour tells his readers that they should “trust no religion or sect that maintains any form of dogma”. Religion is a system for obtaining personal spiritual experience – and anyone can do this if they are willing to pay the cost.

Who are the gods?

In order to engage with the power of the Numen and attain to union with it, most people must go through personalised gods and goddesses; this is “a psychological trick”.

Gods and goddesses are personifications of types of divine force:

For example, Venus is the personification of the divine activity that is called attraction; Mars is that of repulsion, the divine destructive force; and Jupiter is a constructive mode of action….

Seymour also says:

The form which the Aphrodite Force takes in Greece is not the same as that which her counterpart Isis takes in Egypt; nor is the latter the same as that of Isis of Nubia. These varying forms, for their initiates, act as a link between the subjective Aphrodite of the microcosms [i.e. individual human beings] and the objective Aphrodite of the macrocosm. The forces within and without man do not vary. Only the images that link them vary….

For the trained initiate these forms are not the Goddess any more than the tap which you turn on with your hand is the hot water that fills your bath. The Christian uses the image of Jesus to touch the Cosmic Christ Force, the ancient Egyptian used the image of Osiris to bring him into touch with that same great spiritual being.

The ancient mysteries

Seymour saw ancient mystery cults as being more or less close to modern esoteric movements. He referred to them repeatedly.

He thought that the ancient mysteries used meditation to get into contact with the divine:

Those who entered the Mysteries were, and still are, given a long and very careful training in the art of ‘tuning in’. To speak in terms of the wireless, you were taught which wavelength to use, which stations you might expect to pick up, and even the kind of programme you should be able to hear… or see, for they had a spiritual television of a sort.

He also noted that the mystery cults used ritual. He had an interesting observation to make on this subject:

If a certain note is repeatedly struck on a piano then it will tend to set in vibration the strings of other pianos nearby which are tuned to the same pitch. In a Mystery ritual a certain spiritual note was struck, a note tuned to the vibrations of the spiritual essence which was the god of that cult. Those partaking in the ritual, if they had been trained to pick up this note and tune their consciousness to it, could pick up and receive the spiritual vibrations of the deity of that cult.

For Seymour, the mysteries had two stages (or three – he was not consistent on this). The Lesser Mysteries were focussed on the individual and the awakening of the god within. He claims at different points that they culminated in the uniting of the god within with the lower self; or in the uniting of the god within with the god without (of which the god within is part). As for the Greater Mysteries, these were cosmic in scope. They involved the regeneration of the soul and its return to the divine:

The lighting of the lamp and the invocation of the divine no-self into the innermost sanctuary of the divine self, which is the initiated you, is the second great purgation. It involves the realization of one’s potential divinity.

Lessons for the reader

Seymour was not writing self-help works. He took the view that most people who wished to enter into the mysteries needed a competent teacher from an esoteric order; and the teacher would appear when the person was ready. His writings seem to have been intended for people who were already involved as students with the Fraternity of the Inner Light. Yet he also recognised that an individual who has not yet met their teacher can make progress in the meantime with preliminary preparations.

For Seymour, the road to spiritual initiation is a road deep into one’s own consciousness. There are “vast unknown territories that lie within the soul of mankind”. Initiation is about opening the gates to these territories and admitting the influence of the god within.

He was realistic about the demands of the spiritual path. It involved hard and lengthy work. Spiritual exercises could lead to “things unpleasant as well as pleasant” – “terrible” things, even. The student might experience failure. But even constant failures could become “milestones on the road to success”.

It should be said that Seymour’s ethos was not harsh or severe. He was against asceticism, although he did suggest that it is “best… not to eat, drink or sleep too much if you want to get results from meditation”.

How to make spiritual progress

What does one have to do in order to advance along the spiritual path? Ritual is part of it, but only part. Initiation is “assisted by ritual”, and ritual acts on the unconscious mind. But initiation is not the “result of a ritual”.

Seymour recommends daily spiritual exercises. The object of these is “the conscious opening up of latent powers within the soul”. His recommended exercises seem to have consisted essentially of meditation, which he considered necessary to spiritual progress. Meditation is “the link between the outer world of matter and the inner world of spirit”. It brings about a change in consciousness and entails conscious contact with the divine realm (as opposed to the usual subconscious contact).

How is meditation accomplished? It requires concentration. As to how to practice concentration, “[t]he easiest way to teach oneself to concentrate is to do one thing at a time, and to think about it carefully while it is being done.” Seymour also writes that concentration requires interest. “Interest is the starting handle of the mind’s apparatus.” The student should “learn to arouse interest at will”. Lack of interest may result from a poor imagination; and imagination is “the royal faculty of the human mind”.

One who is skilled in meditation will eventually arrive at the final stage, which Seymour terms “contemplation”. He defines this as “the art of identifying oneself with the object or subject being meditated upon”.

Symbols

For Seymour, the use of symbols is important in spiritual development. The power of the subconscious mind is mobilised by images rather than words. A symbol “acts as a creative spiritual source of life”, although it does not necessarily have inherent power. He says at one point that it is “the attitude of worship, adoration and devotion for the Great Mother that really links the microcosmic imagery to the macrocosmic reality.”

Pregnant symbolism is found in Seymour’s writings. He gives us passages like this:

Let us think back to the Lord Tehuti, the Lord of the Moon Cave, whom the Chaldeans called Zinn, the Lord of the Moon Wisdom. He is also the Lord of the Inner Human Wisdom; he is Merlin in his sea cave by the still waters of the summer sea that flow and ebb over the lost lands of Lyonesse. The blue cloak of this Watcher can still be seen on the hidden shores of the mind. The silver badge of his Shakti, whom men call Morgan Le Fay is the full moon low in the south east, throwing a long bar of silver light across the waves to the feet of the silent Watcher at the entrance to the Moon Cave. A figure seated on a sacred stool, it is motionless, and behind it with hands placed upon its shoulders stand two female figures robed in white and silver, one crowned with the crescent and the other with a silver star.

Merlin draws all his power through these two priestesses; he loses his rule and his power when he allows the silver priestess to usurp his divine authority, and thus Merlin fell. If we go back into Egyptian mythology we find the same warning in the tale of Isis and Ra. For the silver-footed Isis, by her craft, obtained the secret name of the great sun-god, and by so doing became possessed of his power and so his master. Beware the mastery of the silver priestess; rule your own subconscious mind.

He says, shortly afterwards:

You are not meant to understand these pictures. If you do understand them, then the writer has failed in his purpose. They are meant to be incubated in the depths of your subconscious mind. Some day, perhaps under the stress of great love, hate or adoration, the inner fountains of your subliminal life will open up. The images that you have worked with for so long will spring into life full blown, for better or worse in your conscious life. Will you, as the lord of the Moon Wisdom, as the initiated Tehuti, use them, or will they use you? Knowledge is a two-edged sword.

The goal

In Seymour’s thought, the ultimate goal of the initiate is the state that can be described, using Buddhist or Kabbalistic terminology, as Nirvana or the “Thrice Greatest Darkness”. He further uses the terms “Ineffable Light” and “no-thing-ness” in this connection. He has little to say about this state and regards it as indescribable. He writes at one stage:

The secrets of the Mysteries are not concerned with facts, symbols, dogmas or teachings. They cannot be betrayed because they concern a mode of consciousness.

—–

The papers

1. The Meaning of Initiation

2. Magic in the Ancient Mystery Religions

Part 1. Magic, Myth, Mystery

Part 2. Religion

Part 3. The Lore of Persephone

Part 4. The Inhabitants of the Realm of Persephone

Part 5. The Bridal Song

Part 6. Les Ténèbres de l’Ignorance

3. The Esoteric Aspect of Religion

Part 1. The Grey Dawn of Religion