Summer Term 2025 Evening Lectures
Thursday 8th May
‘Sagging End and Chapter’s Close’: David Jones in the Zone
JOHN MATTHEWS
In the Chair Professor Grevel Lindop
David Jones was neither comfortable nor at home in the modern world. To him, the period of history through which he lived, particularly the two world wars and the period between them, was a time of darkness and destruction, characterized by loss of religious faith, a failure to recognize the importance of symbol and sign, and an increasing neglect of the sacramental in Modern Art.
It was indeed a Wasteland, like that whose outlines he delineated in so much of his writings. It was this that he described, in the opening passage of the Anathemata, as ‘the sagging end and chapter’s close’ – the end of history, particularly as it is defined in the writings of Oswald Spengler, whose work was familiar and important to David throughout this period in his life. In this talk, John Matthews will explore how the time though which David Jones lived impacted his work both as artist and writer.
JOHN MATTHEWS is an independent scholar and author living in Oxford. He published his first book in 1980 and has since gone on to publish over a hundred titles on Myth, Folklore, and ancient traditions. A frequent speaker at the Temenos Academy since its inception, he has made a lifetime study of every aspect of the Arthurian legends, from its origins to modern retellings. His Great Book of King Arthur (2023) and Realms of the Round Table (2025) are recognised as presenting a major new dimension to the history of Arthurian literature.
Venue & Admission
St George the Martyr, Holborn, 44 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AH
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Thursday 22nd May 2025
Yeats, Kathleen Raine and the Learning of the Imagination
PROFESSOR GREVEL LINDOP
In the Chair Julia Cleave
Today, we often think of imagination as something individual and insubstantial – a personal process giving rise to notions from ‘subjective’ sources. But traditionally, imagination is something very different: it is a faculty of vision and comprehension rising from deep springs, and one that deserves nurture and training.
Yeats spoke of a ‘singing school’ where the human soul could contemplate ‘monuments of its own magnificence’. He found his own ‘school’ in Indian thought, Theosophy, the Kabbalah, and especially in the art and poetry of William Blake, as well as in Irish legend and tradition. Kathleen Raine in turn, in her studies of Blake and Yeats and her later contact with India, took up this ‘golden string’ enabling her to enrich individual poetic imagination by contact with a universal tradition. This lecture will explore some of these pathways and suggest how ‘the learning of the imagination’ may be valuable in today’s world.
GREVEL LINDOP was Professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies at Manchester University. He is the author of six collections of poems and has written biographies of Thomas De Quincey and of Charles Williams (the Arthurian poet and Oxford ‘Inkling’). He is currently writing W.B. Yeats: The Mystical Life, for publication by Oxford University Press. He has taught Buddhist meditation in the Samatha tradition for more than forty years and currently chairs the Temenos Academic Board.
His website is at www.grevel.co.uk
Venue & Admission
St George the Martyr, Holborn, 44 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AH
Doors Open 6.40pm, Lecture Begins 7pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Wednesday 18th June 2025
Twelve-fold Harmony: Symbol and Place
CHRISTINE RHONE
In the Chair Tom Bree
In the light of the mythical and divine imagination, numbers are embodiments of qualities or principles rather than simply material indications of quantity or magnitude. From this perspective, the number twelve acts as a universal connector and harmoniser. It is a whole set considered as a balanced process, a cycle of becoming and transformation.
In his book The Laws, Plato describes the ideal city of Magnesia as divided into twelve parts, an expression of harmony that reflects the cycle of the constellations. This twelve-part territorial tradition was widespread in the ancient world. Today, we still count hours, minutes and circular distances using the Babylonian system based on sixty, a multiple of twelve. The archetypal mandala of twelve can also be considered a tool of anamnesis, of ‘not forgetting’ the One and the Oneness of Being.
In this talk, Chrisine Rhone will show how the number twelve is a symbol of that traditional philosophy by which it is possible to see how every element in nature, and every tribe and individual, has a legitimate place within a divine and potentially paradisial Creation.
CHRISTINE RHONE is a regular contributor to the Temenos Academy Review and has organised several Temenos Academy study days on the work of author and geometer John Michell (1933-2009), a Fellow of Temenos, the next one upcoming in 2026. She is the co-author with him of Twelve-Tribe Nations and the Science of Enchanting the Landscape. She is the French-English translator of Sacred Geography of the Ancient Greeks by Jean Richer; Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism by Antoine Faivre; and Saint Francis of Assisi by Jacques Le Goff. She has a special interest in sacred sites and geometry, pilgrimage, and Goddess Spirituality.
Venue & Admission
The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, 19-22 Charlotte Road, London, EC2A 3SG
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Wednesday 9th July 2025
The Image Bears Witness to Your State: Gifts for our world from the Sufi tradition
Sir Nicholas Pearson
In the chair Ian Skelly
This lecture will explore the origin, nature and significance of the image in light of the wisdom of some of the great visionary teachers of Islam. Drawing upon the insights of the Sufi mystic ‘Ibn Arabi and the Persian physician Avicenna, as well as their later interpretation by Henry Corbin, Nicholas Pearson will relate how the understanding of the image offered by these thinkers has profoundly affected his approach to ‘the learning of the imagination’ as a working psychotherapist.
After charting the degradation of the image and the imagination in the West, this talk will explore how we might find a path out of our current secular malaise. It will argue that a recovery of a spiritual orientation can be found through a true understanding of the nature of Soul and the images that circle around that reality.
Citing examples from his own practice in working with autoimmune dis-ease, this lecture will show how the direct experience of the image, and the powers it contains, can be found through careful attention to the body and mind.
NICHOLAS PEARSON was born in India in 1943 and spent his first half-century in the Army, in politics and in international business. This period ended for him abruptly in a catastrophic car crash which ushered in a total re-orientation of his life. Eventually training as a counsellor aged 60, he has explored the nature and creative power of working with the imagination. He is a Fellow of the Academy, having served as its chairman for twelve years, and runs a busy psychotherapeutic practice from Kensington where he lives with his wife.
Venue & Admission
The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Wednesday 23rd July 2025
Shakespeare and the Language of Nature
DR JOSEPH MILNE
In the chair Kamil Sawicki
This talk will argue that Shakespeare’s plays move us because they are rooted in a primordial sense of a great cosmic order. This sense of a cosmic order is a distinguishing feature of human intelligence which first apprehends all things as a whole. This apprehension of the whole may be traced back to the most ancient creation myths which present the created world as a living being, peopled with heavenly and earthy powers, and imbued with meanings and signs of eternal mysteries. While portraying such a cosmic vision, these ancient myths also narrate an unfolding drama, so that the universe is above all revealed and known through story. The human story is itself an integral part of this cosmic story, providing a key to true drama, most powerfully exemplified in the plays of Shakespeare. The poet’s vision reverts back to this primordial way of seeing which gives birth to myth. Nature herself speaks through the poet.
JOSEPH MILNE is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Kent where he taught on the MA course in Mysticism and Religious Experience until his retirement in 2013. His interests range among Hinduism, Platonism, Patristics, classical natural law, medieval mysticism and theology. He is Editor of Land & Liberty, the journal of the Henry George Foundation and the author of the Temenos Academy Papers The Ground of Being: Foundations of Christian Mysticism (2004), Metaphysics and the Cosmic Order (2008), The Mystical Cosmos (2013), and The Lost Vision of Nature (2018). His forthcoming book is Natural Law and the Just Society. He is a Trustee of the Eckhart Society and a Fellow of the Temenos Academy.
Venue & Admission
Rudolf Steiner House, 35 Park Road, London, NW1 6XT
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
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[Image: Part of a larger Batik painting, The Holy City, by Thetis Blacker]
