Alan Richardson

In Alan's words:

I wrote my first book, on the Kabbalah, when I was a teenager. It’s still going, 40 years on. I can’t stand the thing. But listen, I was a weird child. Just ask me Mam. When others were jotting down train numbers, learning to smoke, or starting to show a bewildering interest in the curves and cavities of the opposite sex, I was collecting details about chakras, auras, astral projection, earth-bound spirits, yoga asanas, clairvoyance, exorcisms, past lives and all of those lurid topics which became lumped under the dreadful word 'occult'. In a completely solitary way that I would never recommend to my own supremely well-balanced kids, I became deeply, practically involved in all of these things. As I got older (and we're talking mid-teens here) I realised that not many people could cope with this, and those who could seemed even weirder than me, so I kept my distance, and kept my mouth shut, and tried to live a normal life on the surface, doing all the usual things involving sex, drugs and - well, not rock 'n roll exactly, but some really lively songs by Simon and Garfunkel. God was I bored.

So I started writing to people whose books had impressed me, and secretly getting their replies before the Mam found out and destroyed them. I wrote to: Lobsang Rampa, Gareth Knight, William G. Gray, Francis King, W.E. Butler, Israel Regardie, Christine Hartley, Doreen Valiente, Pat Crowther, Kenneth Grant and a veritable host of others. These are biggies you understand. Some of them were adepts within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Some of them more or less created the modern Wiccan movement. And even when I found out that Lobsang Rampa, the wonderworking lama from Chakpori Monastery in Thibet was really Cyril Hoskins from Thames Ditton in Surrey, I didn't lose my psycho-motor functions for more than a few days. I've still got their letters. And one way or another they triggered off all sorts of things in my psyche. I've never been a great Magician - although sometimes I pretend I am - but I've had some astonishing adventures in Magick, on all levels, thanks to them and others like them.