Michael Dawson

I was still in high school the first time I blundered into a metaphysical bookstore. It was the mid 1960s, I was in my mid-teens and grinding through my 7th tedious year at an Orthodox Jewish Grammar School for Boys in North London.

I had taken the "tube" down to the British Museum to do some research for a paper I was writing on the Metaphysical Poets, churchmen of the 17th century who attempted to reconcile their Christian faith with the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment. Someone, perhaps a librarian, must have directed me to Atlantis Books, the oldest (1922) occult bookstore in the city. I remember the creeping awareness that my teachers and rabbis would be less than happy to find me in this place, particularly when my research led me from Donne, Marvell, Herbert and Vaughan to John Dee, Edward Kelley and a growing awareness that the royal court, in those far-off days, was steeped in cabalism, sorcery and magick. I recall spending many hours there reading Manley Hall, Bailey, Blavatsky, Crowley et al, and the state of rapture I felt having discovered this hidden world beyond the strictures of the religion I had been born into.

Suffice it to say, my ongoing struggle with the Aramaic and medieval Hebrew languages and the convoluted reasoning of the Babylonian Talmud, in which I was immersed in those days, came to an ignominious and rapid end, and my focus turned to the healthier and more traditional British male pursuits of beer, cigarettes, pork sausages and scoring chicks.

It was many years and thousands of miles before I became co-owner of and book-buyer for a metaphysical bookstore myself, and I am now happy to report that my former wife, and dear friend, has just opened a second such establishment here on Maui. I will be assisting her in selecting books and music and conducting a semiweekly circle there, called "Gifts of Meditation," in order for me to pass along the 9 practices, detailed in my book, "that have sustained me along the way."