The Helios Journal

A new book from the Helios School. On the ending we have all accepted without noticing, what the oldest Grail texts say the quest was actually for, and what a company of us did about it across a decade of workings at Tintagel and in West Wales. Every telling of Arthur ends the same way. The court divides. The knights kill one another at Camlann. The king is carried off across the water, wounded and not dead, and the land he held is left without him. The Grail is achieved by three knights and then withdrawn from the world altogether, and the fellowship that went looking for it is broken by the going. Not one wound is healed. Not one relationship is mended. We have been retelling that ending for a thousand years, and we have grown so used to it that we no longer notice it is an ending at all. We treat it as the shape of the story rather than as something that happened to the story. The ending nobody chose Ask anyone in the world who knows nothing else about these islands, and they w...

The Egyptian year opened in the heat of midsummer, on a day nobody decreed. A note on the star that governed the river, the calendar that wandered for three thousand years, and the five days that belonged to no year at all. Our own year begins in the dead of winter, on a date chosen for reasons most of us could not now recover, in the darkest and least promising week of the calendar. We mark it with fireworks and resolutions, and by the second week of February most of the resolutions have quietly gone. Egypt began its year in the heat of high summer, and it began it for a reason you could walk outside and see. The star that governed the river For about seventy days each year, the brightest star in the sky is simply not there. Sirius, which the Egyptians called Sopdet and the later Greeks called Sothis, and which the tradition identifies with Isis, passes behind the glare of the sun and vanishes from the heavens altogether. Then, on one particular morning in high summer, it returns: ris...

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Egyptian material, when the textbook account of ancient Egypt quietly stops being enough. You have read about the gods and their stories. You have looked at the photographs of the temples, the long avenues of columns, the painted ceilings. You know the names. And yet something in you suspects that all of this was built to do something, and that the doing has been left out of the description. That suspicion is correct. The temple was never a building alone. It was a working model of the created world, raised in stone so that the pattern of the cosmos could be entered and taken p art in rather than merely admired. The rites performed within it were not pageantry. They were the means by which the world was kept upright and renewed. And the gods who were served there were not characters in old tales. They were, and are, living powers with a nature, a courtesy and a cost. Voices of the Nile is an attempt to set this down honest...

An honest account of the year just past — the original programme it all grew from, the Arcana courses drawn out of it, the four new doorways, and the part that artificial intelligence played in the work. For a while, Helios was quieter than it should have been. The teaching was sound and the lineage intact, but the school as a thing you could actually walk into — a clear set of doors, a path whose shape you could see — had drifted out of focus. This past year, a small group of us set out to rebuild it properly. What follows is an account of how we did that, because we would rather you heard it from us than guessed at it. What we started with We did not begin from nothing. At the heart of Helios is the original First Degree — a three-year intensive programme I wrote between 2009 and 2012, built entirely on the Qabalah, NLP and the Tarot. It ran for years, and the people who came through it gave us something you cannot buy: honest feedback, cohort after cohort, on what truly landed and w...

Most people first meet Ma'at as a picture. A set of golden scales in a torchlit hall of the dead; on one pan a human heart, on the other a single white feather. The heart is weighed. If it is light as the feather, the soul passes on. If it is heavy with wrongdoing, a waiting creature devours it. It is one of the most striking images to come down to us from ancient Egypt. But to treat Ma'at as a scene from the afterlife is to miss almost everything that mattered about her. To the Egyptians, Ma'at was not first a goddess, and not first a courtroom at the end of life. She was the principle by which the whole world, and every life within it, was rightly ordered. And she was something you practised, daily, while you were very much alive. More than a goddess The word ma'at is hard to translate, because we have broken into separate pieces what the Egyptians held as one. It means truth. It also means justice, order, balance, harmony, and rightness. To the Egyptian mind, what is...