The Hill of Vision

ln "The Hill of Vision," New York, 1919, an illuminating account of automatic writing; is given which should be convincing to any one who thinks that consciousness is the determining factor. The automatist received continuous, intelligible messages while continuously reading a book requiring unbroken attention.

IV Methods of Communication
The Open Vision. A study of psychic phenomena.
BY
HORATIO W. DRESSER, Ph.D.
1920

In this communication the state of the various nations of Europe before the war is analysed and their faults described.

Belgium, it is said, had special need of purgation, and there is a hint of very deep-seated spiritual disease in her body-politic. In France and Italy the religious consciousness had gone astray, the Reality being submerged in the Symbol, so far as the orthodox faith was concerned. They perfected the symbol, whilst forgetting the great cause of the symbol. England is censured for her crass materialism and love of pleasure, but on the spiritual side she is absolved from the apostasy of some other nations. Nevertheless her "sins of the body " must be purged if she is to hold her spiritual freedom and lead others to light and liberty. America, without racial stimulus, is commended in that she has freely, and through a wonderful unanimity of individual conscience, and individual judgment, chosen the better part of her it is said that through the strength thus given, she will persevere to the end, and her counsels shall prevail. Russia is a melancholy contrast. Her racial intuitions, so spiritual in their nature, are held in bond- age to the rule of perverted Intellect and thus she lies between the upper and the nether millstones[The picture ought to be pretty clear. In "milling" or crushing grain, the ancients used a rounded "upper" millstone and pounded the grain, which rested on the lower or "nether" millstone, with it. The image of the grain being caught in between the two stones tended to trigger the imagination of people. Though we might say today, or at least we might have said a generation ago, that one was caught between a "rock and a hard place" ].

THE HILL OF VISION

A Forecast of the Great War and of Social Revolution with the Coming of the New Race

Gathered from Automatic Writings Obtained between 1909 and 19 12, and also, in 191 8, through the hand of John Alleyne, under the supervision of the author
BY
Frederick Bligh Bond
1919

Frederick Bligh Bond (1864 –1945) was an English architect, illustrator, archaeologist, and psychical researcher.

Bligh Bond joined the Freemasons in 1889, the Theosophical Society in 1895, the Society for Psychical Research in 1902, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1909 and the Ghost Club in 1925. As early as 1899 Bligh Bond had expressed his belief that the dimensions of the buildings at Glastonbury Abbey were based on gematria( a system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other), and in 1917 he published, with Thomas Simcox Lea, Gematria, A Preliminary Investigation of The Cabala contained in the Coptic Gnostic Books and of a similar Gematria in the Greek text of the New Testament, which incorporated his own previously published paper, The Geometric Cubit as a Basis of Proportion in the Plans of Mediaeval Buildings.

Bond, a great-grand nephew of Captain William Bligh of Bounty infamy, had developed an interest in psychic matters well before taking on the Glastonbury dig. He had employed psychical methods to guide his excavation of the Glastonbury ruins, using first Captain John Allan Bartlett (‘John Alleyne’) as a medium, and later others. Bond was eventually persuaded to write a book, and The Gate of Remembrance was published in 1918. As he anticipated, it invited contempt from the Church and scorn from fellow professionals. His reputation was further compromised after the publication of The Hill of Vision by Captain John Allan Bartlett (‘John Alleyne’) in 1919. That book rehashed some of the material in his first book, but went on to include automatic writing produced in sittings with several different mediums concerning World War I and other matters not pertaining to Glastonbury Abbey. As a consequence of these revelations his relations with his employers, who strongly disapproved of spiritualism, deteriorated, and he was sacked in 1921.