Greg Moffitt has posted the third part of our discussion about the life and work of Colin Wilson, based on my book Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, on his popular Legalize Freedom site. Like myself, Greg is a dedicated Wilson reader, something that comes through in his comments and questions. Wilson’s antipathy to the ‘socially conscious’ - read left wing - sensibilities of many of his early contemporaries starts us off, which seems apt for our own time, when practically everything has taken on an unfortunate political character. Personal growth and development versus political ideologies and utopias: that seems a significant contrast today, and much of what Wilson had to say is applicable to our own situation. And if you’ll allow me the plug, I touch on some of this in Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, which will be coming out this summer.

In other news, I’ve been asked by the Swedenborg Society to contribute to a series of short works, exploring the many areas of the eighteenth century Swedish savant’s work. I’ll be writing a long essay on the notion of ‘correspondences’, which is central to Swedenborg’s vision of a earthly, physical realm informed by links to the higher spheres. I’ve talked about this in other books - Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas and A Dark Muse (aka: The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse) - and of course the idea of correspondences is a central theme in the western esoteric tradition. I will place Swedenborg within this tradition and look at how his ideas influenced people like the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who took them and, with some borrowing from Edgar Allan Poe and the the German fantasist E.T.A. Hoffmann, invented Symbolism.