The Call of the Old Gods: My Occult Journey on the Pagan Path
Autor Christopher McIntoshen Limba Engleză Paperback – 19 iun 2025
• Examines the rise of Paganism in Europe and the U.S. from the late twentieth century
• Explores numerous pagan and esoteric practices, including Stav (a form of Nordic Tai Chi), sacred gardening, breath work, and many seasonal rites, rituals, and ceremonies
• Includes rare personal accounts of the author’s friendships with pagan luminaries and occult scholars
For millions of people, the spiritual journey is focused on a God in heaven. But what if the answers we are seeking lie in the re-enchantment of life? In this illuminating work—part memoir, part meditation—scholar and Pagan practitioner Christopher McIntosh takes readers on the deeply personal quest that led him to paganism, illustrating how forming stronger connections to the world around us awakens the magic that lives within us.
There was a time when McIntosh believed that a spiritual path should fulfill four centers: the soul, the mind, the heart, and the belly. He later discovered, however, that there was a fifth component to this mystical equation: the feet. The land on which we stand and to which we feel a profound relatedness is the key to wholeness and inner peace. These subtle but significant realizations about connection to the land and nature inspired McIntosh and ultimately led to his following of what he calls "the Fivefold Path." He also recounts pivotal meetings with Pagan luminaries and important figures from esoteric scholarship, the arts, and the occult renaissance of the twentieth century, including Colin Wilson, Joscelyn Godwin, Keith Critchlow, and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, as well as offers an evolving portrait of the occult scene of the late twentieth century.
Woven throughout with examples of seasonal rites and rituals, reflections on sacred gardening, and the practice of energetic breath work as well as a deep dive into Stav, a form of Nordic Tai Chi, this book provides valuable insight into the world of paganism as both a field of study and a system of practice.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9798888500934
Pagini: 264
Ilustrații: Includes 8-page color insert and 59 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Colecția Inner Traditions
Pagini: 264
Ilustrații: Includes 8-page color insert and 59 b&w illustrations
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Colecția Inner Traditions
Notă biografică
Christopher McIntosh is a British-born writer and historian specializing in the esoteric traditions of the West. He has a doctorate in history from Oxford University, a degree in German, and a diploma in Russian from the United Nations Language School. The author of many books, including Beyond the North Wind, Occult Russia, and Occult Germany, he lives in Lower Saxony, North Germany.
Extras
CHAPTER ONE
A Hermetic Baptism
My earliest memories, which reach back to the age of three, are of Oxford, where my father taught English at the college of Christ Church. They are memories of an idyll: hushed college quadrangles, sunlit gardens sequestered behind old stone walls, the swish of oars on the Cherwell River, the deer in Magdalen park, my father building a snowman in the garden of our house in Norham Road, my mother dressing my newborn brother, David. In the main quadrangle of Christ Church there is a fountain with a statue of Mercury (or Hermes, to use his Greek name) and goldfish swimming in the water. One day, peering at the goldfish, I lost my balance, fell into the water, and had to be fished out by my father. Later, when I became fascinated by things Hermetic, I came to look back on that event as my Hermetic baptism. On another occasion I fell into the river and could easily have drowned if someone hadn’t pulled me out. I wasn’t afraid, just fascinated by the greenish water surrounding me and the bubbles rising to the sunlit surface. I also remember the sound of bells, the great bell of Christ Church (called Tom) and many other bells, whose tolling seemed to slow rather than hasten the passage of time. The untarnished idyll of Oxford and the England of my early childhood have stayed with me over the years and perhaps explain my later fascination with the never-never lands of fable and fiction— Agartha, Shambhala, Shangri-La, and the Russian Land of the White Waters.
My father’s forebears came from Sutherland in the far north of Scotland. One of them, my great-grandfather, was a ship’s engineer who settled in the north of England, and my father Angus grew up in Cleadon, County Durham. My grandfather and grandmother were of modest means but wonderful, warmhearted people with a strong appreciation for learning. My father, who was educated at state schools, proved to be a brilliant pupil and in due course won a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford. After taking a first in English he went on a scholarship to do graduate work in philology at Harvard University. There he befriended a fellow student called John Bainbridge and fell in love with his sister Barbara. The family had a farm in Connecticut and an apartment on fashionable Gramercy Park in New York City. My mother’s father was a prominent surgeon and, among other things, a pioneer in the treatment of cancer. My parents were married in 1939 at the family home in Connecticut by the famous preacher and author Norman Vincent Peale, and my father took his bride back to England just in time for the start of the Second World War, most of which he spent as part of the decoding team at Bletchley Park, while my mother also did wartime work at nearby Woburn Abbey.
I was born on September 21, 1943, in the village of Pembury, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to which my mother had been evacuated for the delivery, presumably because it was considered safer from bombardment. The date of my birth is significant, because my parents later told me that they had delayed conceiving a child until they could be sure that the Allies would win the war. The event that convinced them must have been the German defeat at Stalingrad in December 1942, exactly nine months before my birth. I have often thought about this fact and wondered if, according to the theory of reincarnation, the soul of some German victim of Stalingrad had become reborn in Pembury, Kent. This might account for the intense love of Germany that I later developed. I should add that not long ago I mentioned these thoughts to a clairvoyant friend of mine, who went into a brief trance and then said that the Stalingrad part was true, but that I was a Russian and not a German soldier. This also made partial sense to me, as I have long had a great love of Russia as well as Germany.
But does reincarnation really happen? If so, I would have to decide between the German and the Russian, as it seems unlikely that two people could reincarnate in one body at the same time. Furthermore, unless one were born again within the same family, one would acquire a whole new set of ancestors with every reincarnation. I found this idea hard to accept. On the other hand, why do certain people from the past, ancestors or not, seem to call out to me? I believe the answer lies in a concept that I would call "ancestors in spirit." These may at the same time be blood ancestors, or they may be completely unrelated. How these ancestries in spirit come about is a great mystery. My former wife Katherine told me that, when she visited Israel, despite her Jewish ancestry she felt no sense of ancestral roots there, whereas on her first trip to India, when she disembarked from the plane and mingled with the bustling crowd in the Delhi airport, she had a feeling of homecoming that almost made her cry. Somehow on the etheric plane a connection had been established between her and the spirit of India. And similarly, perhaps those two soldiers, in the moment of dying at Stalingrad, for some reason reached out in spirit to a newborn child in Kent, England.
As for my own blood ancestors, I have the benefit of two family genealogies, one compiled by my father’s mother, Mary McIntosh, the other commissioned by my maternal grandfather, Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, who was a distinguished surgeon in New York City. The name Seaman was his mother’s maiden name, and the chapter on the Seaman pedigree states that the name "can be traced back to the Old Norse personal name of Sigmundr, meaning ‘holder of victory.’"
The passage goes on:
It was a name common to both the early Scandinavians and Germans and appears in England in the Domesday Survey, made by William the Conqueror in 1086. . . . It is held that the name entered England before the year 1000 and was probably originally borne by Viking settlers.1
When I read this passage and saw the name Sigmundr, it struck a powerful chord in me and gave me the feeling that here was a blood ancestor who was also one in spirit. I sometimes wonder if it was he who gave me the first push on my journey back to the gods of his people.
Through my maternal grandmother I had some colorful American ancestors. Her father, Thomas Heber Wheeler, grew up in Maine and, as a young man, fell in love with a local girl named Ellen, but was told by her father that he would have to establish himself in the world before he could marry her. It was the 1850s and the time of the California gold rush, so he headed west—a difficult journey, first by ship to the Isthmus of Panama, then across the isthmus by mule, then up to San Francisco on another ship. In San Francisco he lodged with a middle-aged woman he had met on the journey, who owned an establishment that masqueraded as a shirt factory but was in fact a brothel. Evidently the proprietress kept the "seamstresses" away from him.
From there he went up into the hills with a fellow gold-seeker and began prospecting. One day his partner was murdered by robbers, who were quickly apprehended and jailed. Fearing that they might be released on some legal technicality, Thomas and a group of friends made an unsuccessful attempt to break into the jail and lynch the murderers. He was knocked unconscious when a prison guard struck him on the back of his head with the butt of a pistol, and he had a bump on the back of his head for the rest of his life. He then went to work in a gold mine. At the end of one shift he volunteered to go back down and bring up a load of gold at the risk of being asphyxiated by poison gas, which had seeped out into the mine shaft. As a reward he was given a bag of gold dust worth four thousand dollars—a considerable fortune in those days—enabling him to go back east and marry his sweetheart, who was just short of her sixteenth birthday at the time. During my own visits to San Francisco I have often thought of him and may even have retraced his footsteps.
But to return to my own life story—in 1948 the Oxford idyll came to an end and we moved to Edinburgh, where my father had been appointed to the Professorship of English Language and General Linguistics. I believe he was the youngest incumbent in the history of the chair. He had a brilliant career ahead of him and was to become a world-renowned expert on Old and Middle English. For me the transition to life in Edinburgh was difficult. The city seemed gray and rather somber after the mellowness of Oxford, and at first I found the Scottish accent harsh and difficult to understand.
A Hermetic Baptism
My earliest memories, which reach back to the age of three, are of Oxford, where my father taught English at the college of Christ Church. They are memories of an idyll: hushed college quadrangles, sunlit gardens sequestered behind old stone walls, the swish of oars on the Cherwell River, the deer in Magdalen park, my father building a snowman in the garden of our house in Norham Road, my mother dressing my newborn brother, David. In the main quadrangle of Christ Church there is a fountain with a statue of Mercury (or Hermes, to use his Greek name) and goldfish swimming in the water. One day, peering at the goldfish, I lost my balance, fell into the water, and had to be fished out by my father. Later, when I became fascinated by things Hermetic, I came to look back on that event as my Hermetic baptism. On another occasion I fell into the river and could easily have drowned if someone hadn’t pulled me out. I wasn’t afraid, just fascinated by the greenish water surrounding me and the bubbles rising to the sunlit surface. I also remember the sound of bells, the great bell of Christ Church (called Tom) and many other bells, whose tolling seemed to slow rather than hasten the passage of time. The untarnished idyll of Oxford and the England of my early childhood have stayed with me over the years and perhaps explain my later fascination with the never-never lands of fable and fiction— Agartha, Shambhala, Shangri-La, and the Russian Land of the White Waters.
My father’s forebears came from Sutherland in the far north of Scotland. One of them, my great-grandfather, was a ship’s engineer who settled in the north of England, and my father Angus grew up in Cleadon, County Durham. My grandfather and grandmother were of modest means but wonderful, warmhearted people with a strong appreciation for learning. My father, who was educated at state schools, proved to be a brilliant pupil and in due course won a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford. After taking a first in English he went on a scholarship to do graduate work in philology at Harvard University. There he befriended a fellow student called John Bainbridge and fell in love with his sister Barbara. The family had a farm in Connecticut and an apartment on fashionable Gramercy Park in New York City. My mother’s father was a prominent surgeon and, among other things, a pioneer in the treatment of cancer. My parents were married in 1939 at the family home in Connecticut by the famous preacher and author Norman Vincent Peale, and my father took his bride back to England just in time for the start of the Second World War, most of which he spent as part of the decoding team at Bletchley Park, while my mother also did wartime work at nearby Woburn Abbey.
I was born on September 21, 1943, in the village of Pembury, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to which my mother had been evacuated for the delivery, presumably because it was considered safer from bombardment. The date of my birth is significant, because my parents later told me that they had delayed conceiving a child until they could be sure that the Allies would win the war. The event that convinced them must have been the German defeat at Stalingrad in December 1942, exactly nine months before my birth. I have often thought about this fact and wondered if, according to the theory of reincarnation, the soul of some German victim of Stalingrad had become reborn in Pembury, Kent. This might account for the intense love of Germany that I later developed. I should add that not long ago I mentioned these thoughts to a clairvoyant friend of mine, who went into a brief trance and then said that the Stalingrad part was true, but that I was a Russian and not a German soldier. This also made partial sense to me, as I have long had a great love of Russia as well as Germany.
But does reincarnation really happen? If so, I would have to decide between the German and the Russian, as it seems unlikely that two people could reincarnate in one body at the same time. Furthermore, unless one were born again within the same family, one would acquire a whole new set of ancestors with every reincarnation. I found this idea hard to accept. On the other hand, why do certain people from the past, ancestors or not, seem to call out to me? I believe the answer lies in a concept that I would call "ancestors in spirit." These may at the same time be blood ancestors, or they may be completely unrelated. How these ancestries in spirit come about is a great mystery. My former wife Katherine told me that, when she visited Israel, despite her Jewish ancestry she felt no sense of ancestral roots there, whereas on her first trip to India, when she disembarked from the plane and mingled with the bustling crowd in the Delhi airport, she had a feeling of homecoming that almost made her cry. Somehow on the etheric plane a connection had been established between her and the spirit of India. And similarly, perhaps those two soldiers, in the moment of dying at Stalingrad, for some reason reached out in spirit to a newborn child in Kent, England.
As for my own blood ancestors, I have the benefit of two family genealogies, one compiled by my father’s mother, Mary McIntosh, the other commissioned by my maternal grandfather, Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, who was a distinguished surgeon in New York City. The name Seaman was his mother’s maiden name, and the chapter on the Seaman pedigree states that the name "can be traced back to the Old Norse personal name of Sigmundr, meaning ‘holder of victory.’"
The passage goes on:
It was a name common to both the early Scandinavians and Germans and appears in England in the Domesday Survey, made by William the Conqueror in 1086. . . . It is held that the name entered England before the year 1000 and was probably originally borne by Viking settlers.1
When I read this passage and saw the name Sigmundr, it struck a powerful chord in me and gave me the feeling that here was a blood ancestor who was also one in spirit. I sometimes wonder if it was he who gave me the first push on my journey back to the gods of his people.
Through my maternal grandmother I had some colorful American ancestors. Her father, Thomas Heber Wheeler, grew up in Maine and, as a young man, fell in love with a local girl named Ellen, but was told by her father that he would have to establish himself in the world before he could marry her. It was the 1850s and the time of the California gold rush, so he headed west—a difficult journey, first by ship to the Isthmus of Panama, then across the isthmus by mule, then up to San Francisco on another ship. In San Francisco he lodged with a middle-aged woman he had met on the journey, who owned an establishment that masqueraded as a shirt factory but was in fact a brothel. Evidently the proprietress kept the "seamstresses" away from him.
From there he went up into the hills with a fellow gold-seeker and began prospecting. One day his partner was murdered by robbers, who were quickly apprehended and jailed. Fearing that they might be released on some legal technicality, Thomas and a group of friends made an unsuccessful attempt to break into the jail and lynch the murderers. He was knocked unconscious when a prison guard struck him on the back of his head with the butt of a pistol, and he had a bump on the back of his head for the rest of his life. He then went to work in a gold mine. At the end of one shift he volunteered to go back down and bring up a load of gold at the risk of being asphyxiated by poison gas, which had seeped out into the mine shaft. As a reward he was given a bag of gold dust worth four thousand dollars—a considerable fortune in those days—enabling him to go back east and marry his sweetheart, who was just short of her sixteenth birthday at the time. During my own visits to San Francisco I have often thought of him and may even have retraced his footsteps.
But to return to my own life story—in 1948 the Oxford idyll came to an end and we moved to Edinburgh, where my father had been appointed to the Professorship of English Language and General Linguistics. I believe he was the youngest incumbent in the history of the chair. He had a brilliant career ahead of him and was to become a world-renowned expert on Old and Middle English. For me the transition to life in Edinburgh was difficult. The city seemed gray and rather somber after the mellowness of Oxford, and at first I found the Scottish accent harsh and difficult to understand.
Cuprins
Preface A Spiral Journey
Prologue A Spiritual Homecoming
1 A Hermetic Baptism
2 Magic and Mystery in Oxford and London
3 Meetings with Remarkable People
4 Restless Years
5 Second Marriage and Oxford Revisited
6 Life in the Big Apple
7 Experiencing Sacred Space
8 Key Encounters
9 The Gods on Forty-Second Street
10 The Fivefold Path
11 Witchcraft in Hamburg
12 Books, Travels, and Crises
13 Aspects of Mercury and Odin
14 In the Footsteps of the Old Ones
15 A Garden of the Mysteries
16 In Search of the Northern Gods
17 Civis Germanicus
18 California Ho!
19 The Gods Give and the Gods Take Away
20 The Rose Cross and the Internet
21 Excursions into Enchantment
22 Celebrating My First Eighty Years
Notes
Index
Prologue A Spiritual Homecoming
1 A Hermetic Baptism
2 Magic and Mystery in Oxford and London
3 Meetings with Remarkable People
4 Restless Years
5 Second Marriage and Oxford Revisited
6 Life in the Big Apple
7 Experiencing Sacred Space
8 Key Encounters
9 The Gods on Forty-Second Street
10 The Fivefold Path
11 Witchcraft in Hamburg
12 Books, Travels, and Crises
13 Aspects of Mercury and Odin
14 In the Footsteps of the Old Ones
15 A Garden of the Mysteries
16 In Search of the Northern Gods
17 Civis Germanicus
18 California Ho!
19 The Gods Give and the Gods Take Away
20 The Rose Cross and the Internet
21 Excursions into Enchantment
22 Celebrating My First Eighty Years
Notes
Index
Recenzii
“The Call of the Old Gods recounts a personal odyssey through decades of spiritual exploration en route to the author finding his home in Norse paganism. Along the way, we are treated to many lively encounters with some of the most important figures in modern esoteric studies and the insights of a passionate soul devoted to living the ancient ways.”
“Throughout his multiple careers in diplomacy, academia, and publishing, Christopher has never lost sight of higher realities. His many books celebrate the companions of this vision: Rosicrucians, astrologers, monarchs and magi, occultists and creators—like himself—of symbolic gardens honoring the old gods of Europe. They now culminate in one of the great spiritual autobiographies and a paragon of the soul’s navigation through the troubled waters of modernity.”
“Part spiritual autobiography, part exploration of ancient and contemporary pagan spirituality, this vivid and intensely personal memoir by one of the most respected esotericists of our time is required reading for anyone interested in today’s lively renewal of polytheistic faiths.”
“Christopher McIntosh is the Forrest Gump of the esoteric world. With Taoist, almost magical abilities, he has been everywhere and met everyone in the 60+ years he has traversed the field of arcane studies. His fascinating autobiography is not only a documentation of his personal path and studies but also a riveting account of how he and a handful of others have transformed and rehabilitated the esoteric field. Endlessly fascinating!”
“Written by a highly respected member of the occult and heathen community, The Call of the Old Gods is an inspiring narrative showing how paganism is not a relic of a bygone era but has a meaningful place in our modern world. It also has a much broader social message, for the encounters, spiritual conflicts, revelations, and practices the author describes are those that all free-spirited seekers of deeper truth must engage with on their own individual paths.”
“The path of Christopher McIntosh’s rich and varied life meandered over and under the threads of Wyrd. His journeys through numerous countries and countless terrains created a tapestry of varied textures and hues, some gentle, some intense. In this deeply personal memoir Christopher connects the dots. He has been truly called by the old gods.”
“Christopher McIntosh’s eighty-year journey on the pagan path offers enthralling insights by a master storyteller. To read this book is to take that journey, to share his magical moments and beautiful rituals, and to experience the profoundly re-enchanting powers of the pagan revival. This book will change the way you see and feel our world. Io Pan!”
“In an age when science now recognizes the widespread role of intelligence and intention in many living species, McIntosh’s gentle, humorous, yet respectful pagan path makes perfect sense. The old gods are renamed and rediscovered, and this very personal and original book is a start to taking a look at those millennia of practical communication with natural spirits.”
“In The Call of the Old Gods, renowned author Christopher McIntosh invites us on a unique journey through the occult of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, featuring many remarkable people and places, as he shares his distinctive path rediscovering the gods and ways of ancient Europe.”
“Throughout his multiple careers in diplomacy, academia, and publishing, Christopher has never lost sight of higher realities. His many books celebrate the companions of this vision: Rosicrucians, astrologers, monarchs and magi, occultists and creators—like himself—of symbolic gardens honoring the old gods of Europe. They now culminate in one of the great spiritual autobiographies and a paragon of the soul’s navigation through the troubled waters of modernity.”
“Part spiritual autobiography, part exploration of ancient and contemporary pagan spirituality, this vivid and intensely personal memoir by one of the most respected esotericists of our time is required reading for anyone interested in today’s lively renewal of polytheistic faiths.”
“Christopher McIntosh is the Forrest Gump of the esoteric world. With Taoist, almost magical abilities, he has been everywhere and met everyone in the 60+ years he has traversed the field of arcane studies. His fascinating autobiography is not only a documentation of his personal path and studies but also a riveting account of how he and a handful of others have transformed and rehabilitated the esoteric field. Endlessly fascinating!”
“Written by a highly respected member of the occult and heathen community, The Call of the Old Gods is an inspiring narrative showing how paganism is not a relic of a bygone era but has a meaningful place in our modern world. It also has a much broader social message, for the encounters, spiritual conflicts, revelations, and practices the author describes are those that all free-spirited seekers of deeper truth must engage with on their own individual paths.”
“The path of Christopher McIntosh’s rich and varied life meandered over and under the threads of Wyrd. His journeys through numerous countries and countless terrains created a tapestry of varied textures and hues, some gentle, some intense. In this deeply personal memoir Christopher connects the dots. He has been truly called by the old gods.”
“Christopher McIntosh’s eighty-year journey on the pagan path offers enthralling insights by a master storyteller. To read this book is to take that journey, to share his magical moments and beautiful rituals, and to experience the profoundly re-enchanting powers of the pagan revival. This book will change the way you see and feel our world. Io Pan!”
“In an age when science now recognizes the widespread role of intelligence and intention in many living species, McIntosh’s gentle, humorous, yet respectful pagan path makes perfect sense. The old gods are renamed and rediscovered, and this very personal and original book is a start to taking a look at those millennia of practical communication with natural spirits.”
“In The Call of the Old Gods, renowned author Christopher McIntosh invites us on a unique journey through the occult of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, featuring many remarkable people and places, as he shares his distinctive path rediscovering the gods and ways of ancient Europe.”
Descriere
Personal revelations on living a magical life