Camembert, conferences and cave art: my Palaeolithic week in the Dordogne

Archaeologists across the world are familiar with the exquisite images of mammoth, bison, horses, and other large fauna that adorn the cave walls of southern France. Produced by mobile hunter-gatherer communities who lived in the region during the Upper Palaeolithic, in the midst of Europe's Ice Age, they remain an ongoing testament to the aesthetic abilities of our distant antecessors. The reasons for the production of such works remain enigmatic, although it is widely believed that many of them were produced for purposes that we today would call religious or spiritual, which largely explains my own fascination with the subject.

The paintings at Lascaux II, photograph taken by Prof Saxx.

Last week I had the privilege of visiting many of these sites, including a number that are normally closed to the public, as part of a study group from the UCL Institute of Archaeology, London. The trip was kindly organised by Dr. Didier Bouakhaze-Khan, Honourary Senior Lecturer at the UCL IoA, who has himself undertaken extensive research into the rock art of Botswana and the Horn of Africa. Accompanying the two of us were two further master's degree students from the Institute, Kate Sinha and Ginger Drage, along with Dr. Maria Guagnin, an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh and specialist in Saharan rock art. Also present was Dr. Stephen Shennan, Director of the UCL IoA, and sculptor Peter Robinson, editor of the Bradshaw Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation devoted to the preservation and appreciation of rock art across the world. Together we stayed at a wonderfully rustic gite with its origins dating back to the Late Mediaeval, located on the edge of Les Eyzies de Tayac in Dordogne, and set forth each day to explore the region's rich prehistoric past.

The CNP Museum

The study tour was organised in conjunction with the Centre National de Prehistoire (CNP), a research institution run by the French Ministry of Communication and Culture. They have a fantastic state-of-the-art museum devoted to the Palaeolithic built into the cliffs at Les Eyzies de Tayac, which is a must-see for anyone interested in the deep past. Its collection of lithics is particularly extensive, and it houses a number of renowned artefacts, such as the Lascaux oil lamp and the famed bison carving found at La Madeleine. The CNP is under the leadership of director Jean-Michel Geneste, a giant in the world of rock art studies whose physical appearance strongly reminds me of Einstein; an apt comparison considering his formidable intellect. He and his wife were kind enough to welcome us into their beautiful home on our final evening in Dordogne, for a sumptuous homemade meal prepared from fresh local ingredients. I must take this opportunity to once again extend my thanks to both of them and also to the CNP's Catherine Cretin, who helped to make this trip such a memorable experience through their hard work and hospitality.

Dordogne itself is a beautiful part of the world, dominated by lush green forests interspersed with pretty rural villages. Many wooded mountains and cliff tops tower above the meandering valleys, and it is in these that the naturally-created grottes can be found. Throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, homo sapiens sapiens - human beings who were fundamentally the same as us, biologically-speaking - entered some of these caves, crawling into their deepest, darkest recesses, where, under the flickering illumination of lamp light, they proceeded to engrave or paint animal imagery onto the cave walls, sometimes leaving painted dots or hand prints in their place.

The entrance to Font de Gomme.

On our first day, we visited several of these archaeological sites which are normally off-limits to the public -- Domme, Pigeonnier, and Roc de Vezac. The next morning saw us up bright and early to visit the Abri du Poisson, a rock shelter famed for its fantastic petroglyphic salmon, before we visited another rock shelter, Cap Blanc, known for its large carved horse reliefs. That day we also entered Combarelles, a long, thin, and twisting cave with a large number of finely-scratched engravings, and then my personal favourite, Font de Gomme, with its selection of beautifully painted bison images. On Wednesday we joined the tourist hoards to visit Lascaux II, an exact replica of the breath-taking cave at Lascaux, the "Cistene Chapel of Prehistory." From there we were given the VIP treatment to enter the control room of the conservationists whose job it is to maintain the life control machine that the original Lascaux relies on - the impressive paintings are sadly far too fragile to be visited anymore. Making it through the rain, we then visited Rouffignac, another fantastic cave where we were taken around on a little train by the owner, Dr. Frédéric Plassard. After showing us illustrations of woolly rhino and mammoths, he ended his tour by showing us the decorated ceiling deep in the bowels of the cave, where I was truly bowled over by the sheer power and majesty of the images. On Saturday we ventured further afield into Lot to see the caves at Pech Merle and Cougnac, both of which are run very much for the benefit of tourists. The natural geology of these two caves, dominated by stalagmites and stalactites, was mind-blowing, and it wasn't hard to see why Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers treated these as very special places in the landscape.

Ibex and mammoth on the ceiling of Rouffignac.
Image from post card.

Thursday and Friday saw us getting away from the caves as we attended the CNP's Fourth Rock Art Meetings, a conference devoted to the theme of "Thinking Contexts in Rock Art: Methods, Experiences, Prospects." I found it surprising that here in France, rock art specialists were still debating whether an understanding of archaeological contexts was important for rock art studies - a position some even shockingly rejected ! It was a stark reminder that while there are areas where French archaeology is clearly ahead of the game, when it comes to theoretical issues, Francophone archaeology lags quite far behind that of the Anglophone world. I really hope that future collaboration between the two academic spheres will serve to be of great benefit to both. I presented my own paper at the conference, "Can we talk of a distinctive Cornish tradition of rock art ?", which was a tentative examination of several issues that I hope to be able to explore in further depth at some point. I was pleased to see that a number of those attending seemed to take an interest in the Neolithic and Bronze Age petroglyphs of Britain, an area that is finally beginning to see the academic attention that it deserves. Three of my comrades also presented papers, all of which were on the rock arts of Africa, while Peter Robinson took the opportunity to present the good work of the Bradshaw Foundation to a wider audience.

Overall, it was a fantastic week that I won't be forgetting any time soon, and while my personal research interests focus on areas that are more recent than the Upper Palaeolithic, my appetite for the cave art of this period has definitely been whetted. My thanks go out to everyone who made it such a memorable experience, and especially to Didier, whose hard work in organising everything really paid off !

An Interview with Dr. Christine Hoff Kraemer

After two month's absence, we're back here at Albion Calling with the latest in our ongoing series of interviews with academics operating in the study of ritual, cult and magic. Today we talk with Dr. Christine Hoff Kraemer of Cherry Hill Seminary, an American Pagan theologian/thealogian and religious studies scholar who gained her doctoral dissertation from Boston University in 2008. Having a research interest in the interplay between religion, minority sexualities and popular culture, namely cinema and comic books, she has seen her work published in a series of peer-reviewed outlets, and is resposible for both a recently-released monograph, Seeking the Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies, as well as the anthology Graven Images: Religion in Comics and Graphic Novels, co-edited with A. David Lewis. We discuss Alan Moore, the pitfalls of academia, and the growth of contemporary Pagan theology.

EDW: Hello Christine, and welcome to Albion Calling. The first question that I'd like to ask you today is how you got involved with the academic field of Religious Studies, and what attracted you to enter the realm of academia in the first place? Was it always a burning ambition of yours or was it one of those things that just seemed to have a will of its own? 

I was in love with the academy when I was in college. I published my first peer-reviewed article shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, and then I took a year and a half off school. I spent my entire “break” desperate to get back into school as soon as possible; I was working for a church and often ended up in the minister’s office devouring books of theology. I considered seminary, but in the end I found an interdisciplinary program in Religion and Literature that would allow me to continue the literary and media criticism I’d studied as an undergrad. I had a vision of myself becoming a professor, teaching, having a family, and being able to serve as a leader in my religious community. 

To be honest, I think much of the encouragement I got from teachers and clergy about becoming a professor came from their experiences of the academy twenty to thirty years before. I was about halfway through my PhD when I fully understood that, not only was the academic job market a disaster, but many of my professors were living unhappy, overcommitted, highly stressed lives. I’d thought I was signing up for a stable career of teaching and reading great literature, with enough flexibility to also pursue my own research and still have a spiritual and social life. It became clear to me that a professorship was no longer a job, but an all-consuming lifestyle that didn’t necessarily leave time for family, friends, or religious community. 

I am thankful that my primary advisor, an ordained Episcopal priest, understood that there was more to life than the academy and encouraged me to find work that I loved. As a result, although I maintain a relationship with academia through publishing, presenting at conferences, and teaching at an alternative academic institution (Cherry Hill Seminary, an online contemporary Pagan seminary), I haven’t felt tied to my identity as an academic. Today, I work as a nonprofit consultant and as Managing Editor of the Pagan Channel at Patheos.com. Patheos has a great model for interfaith public religious education, and I’m thrilled to be part of it. 

Many of the readers here have probably seen the flood of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere announcing the end of tenure and decrying the way graduate students and new PhDs are emerging unprepared to make a living. Happily, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) has been responsive to these concerns; last fall, I was able to get funding to bring Dr. Amy Hale to Boston, where she presented on alternative academic careers in the humanities and social sciences. Amy is a Celticist who has made a career of online teaching and consulting while also continuing to do research. The workshop was so well-received that we were invited to repeat it at the national AAR conference. The need for this kind of re-envisioning of the academic life is enormous. 

Rather than mourning the end of tenure, I’m more interested in looking ahead toward alternative models of higher education. I think that online and hybrid learning environments (partially online, partially in person) are going to be essential to the academy of the twenty-first century, as will instructors that have real-world experience in their fields. I don’t think there’s any way we can return to an academy based on tenured professorships, but I do think that universities could recognize the special expertise of adjunct instructors who are working in their fields outside the academy and compensate them appropriately. 

EDW: After working on it at Boston University, in 2008 you completed your doctorate in Religious and Theological Studies with a thesis titled “The Erotic Fringe: Sexual Minorities and Religion in Contemporary American Literature and Film”, in which you examined how religious minorities had treated the erotic as sacred to counteract the sexually repressive atmosphere propagated by the Christian Right. Is it available online, because it sounds like an enjoyable read, particularly as one of your four case studies is one of my favourite films, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch ? Could you tell us more about this particular project of yours, and how you came to choose such an interesting research question? You've since published papers on sexual minorities and religion in The Pomegranate and the Religion Compass; is it an area of research that you'd like to get back to in the future? 

Thanks so much for the interest in my dissertation! Some of the chapters have been published or are forthcoming as articles; “Contemporary Paganism, Utopian Reading Communities, and Sacred Nonmonogamy: The Religious Impact of Heinlein's and Starhawk’s Fiction” appeared in The Pomegranate in 2011, for instance. I’m also happy to send the entire dissertation to anyone who contacts me. 

The dissertation project emerged organically out of projects I’d pursued during graduate school. As a literary and media critic, I saw my task as spotlighting and giving context to popular works with important social, religious, or political messages, especially those that hadn’t yet received much scholarly attention (Angels in America was the only one of the works I treated that had significant existing criticism). Sexual minorities, gender identity, the erotic as a theological concept, and hybrid media forms were all recurring issues in the works I found myself writing about. It was in looking for the threads of connection between them that I discovered my research question. 

I haven’t really stopped writing about religion and sexual minorities since, although in my recent work, I’ve been approaching the subject through the discipline of theology rather than through religious studies. I’ve just turned in a book manuscript entitled Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective: Divided for Love’s Sake to my editor at Routledge—quite the labor of love! I’m grateful to Routledge for taking it on, because Eros and Touch is a risky book, not least because it’s interdisciplinary and so doesn’t fit neatly into existing marketing categories. 

In many ways, Eros and Touch came out of my dissertation project and its aftermath. I was reading a great deal of Christian and post-Christian queer theology, as well as writings from sexual minority advocates (LGBT writers, but also BDSM practitioners, polyamorists, and others) [EDW: "LGBT" refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered" people, "BDSM" to those involved in "bondage and sado-masochism"]. The two groups had a great deal of theological overlap, but as far as I could tell, relatively little awareness of each other’s existence. There were a few exceptions, though, notably Marcella Althaus-Reid, a queer Christian liberation theologian who argues that because of their marginalized status, sexual minorities have special insight into social power structures around sexuality and the erotic. (The idea that marginalized groups have a critical role to play in social reform is a key idea in liberation theology.) I admired the focus of queer Christian writers on social justice issues, but most didn’t go as far as the Pagan community tends to in affirming pleasure as a holy birthright. I wanted to add a Pagan voice to the theological conversation, and I wanted to talk openly about the sexual minority groups that many queer Christian theologians didn’t seem willing to discuss, perhaps because they are so controversial. 

The final piece of the puzzle came when I pursued training as a massage therapist and was exposed to both spiritual and clinical writing about bodywork. The personal and social impact of touch deprivation came fully into focus for me. In America and the UK, people are socialized to touch others very little, to the extent where touch between students and between teachers and students is nearly forbidden in many public schools. Yet we have clinical studies showing that touch deprivation causes developmental problems, degrades mental and physical health, and encourages violent behavior. 

Eros and Touch brings together writings from contemporary Pagan leaders, progressive Christian and Goddess theologians, advocates for the queer and BDSM communities, and therapeutic bodyworkers to present the erotic as a divinely transformative force for social change. I define “the erotic” as intimate, fully embodied, pleasurable contact that can include the sexual, but which also includes many nonsexual forms of contract. My purpose is to propose a system of social and personal ethics, grounded in Pagan liturgy and myth but hopefully accessible to other progressive religious people, that emphasizes the importance of consensual, pleasurable touch for human spiritual and physical health. 

Although I’ve written essays and one previous book where I identify myself as a Pagan and a practitioner of religious witchcraft, Eros and Touch is by far the most personal piece I’ve written. In my work as a religious studies scholar and literary critic, I’ve always written in a relatively objective voice and assumed an audience with no particular set of religious commitments. This book is written specifically for a theologically progressive interfaith audience with interests in Pagan studies, body theology, or LGBT/sexual minority issues. I will be praying that it finds its intended audience! 

EDW: Your first published book was an edited volume co-produced with A. David Lewis, Graven Images: Religion in Comics and Graphic Novels (Continuum, 2010), itself based on an earlier conference that the two of you had run. Could you tell us the story of how this conference, and ensuing book, came about, and has your interest in comic books/graphic novels been something you've brought from your personal life into academia? As a lifelong fan of the medium, I've always felt that there is still something of a stigma attached to it in the Anglo-American world, a sense that comics can never be “real literature”; did you face any sort of hostility or opposition to your conference as a result of this attitude? 

I discovered comics through a college roommate, who directed me to some of the most sophisticated comics works then available and gave me free access to his extensive collection. I mentioned before that one of my missions in the academy is to bring scholarly attention to works and subject matter that haven’t been extensively studied, so I was a comics fan for about five minutes before I started doing writing and research on them! 

Dave Lewis is a comics writer as well as a scholar. We met and become friends through the Religion and Literature program at BU, and he was the one to come up with the idea of doing a religion and comics conference. Since I already had significant experience organizing events and had comics as an ongoing research interest, I was happy to join the project. The weekend had good attendance and attracted undergraduates and some members of the public as well as academics; we were especially happy to be able to feature a keynote address and a panel featuring comics creators, in addition to the scholarly papers. Afterward, it seemed natural to develop the conference proceedings into a book. Two publishers were interested immediately, and we ended up signing with Continuum. 

I think I started doing comics scholarship right at a tipping point—after two decades of articles in the New York Times Magazine and other publications extolling how comics are a real, sophisticated art form now, academics seem to have gotten the memo. There’s quite a bit of comics scholarship available today, and I think the field is developing nicely [EDW: see such peer-reviewed outlets as the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, European Comic Art and ImageText]. It’s probably where film studies was in the middle of the twentieth century. 

EDW: Your own paper in the aforementioned volume, titled “The Magic Circus of the Mind: Alan Moore's Promethea and the Transformation of Consciousness through Comics” -- co-written with J. Lawton Winslade -- discussed one of the comic book master's lesser known tomes, but one which explored his own personal esoteric beliefs through the medium of the Qabalah. You've also published a paper titled “The Undying Fire: Erotic Love as Divine Grace in Promethea” in last year's edited volume on Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore (McFarland, 2012). I've long been a big fan of Moore's work, and authored an article on “The Occultic World of Alan Moore” for a magazine back in sixth form. Although there are a number of strong contenders, Promethea is probably my favourite part of his extensive oeuvre (and I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to tell him so when I ran into him quite by chance in London's Atlantis Bookshop one afternoon), but I'd love to know how you began to take an interest in the man's works? What is it about Promethea that interests you enough to devote papers to the work? 

Alan Moore, literary genius.

Oh, that’s a good story! I was writing my undergraduate thesis on twentieth-century representations of apocalypse, and I’d already chosen Moore’s Watchmen as one of my pieces (it was one of the first comics that my helpful comics fan roommate gave me to read). I decided that if I was going to write on comics, I ought to have the experience of following a comic series month to month. I headed to my local comics shop and saw the cover of Promethea #4 from across the room—without even getting close enough to see what it was called or who the creator was, knew I had to have it. When I saw it had been written by Moore, I was thrilled; and when it turned out that the main character was a college student writing her senior thesis on comics, it seemed positively meant to be! 

A few years later, I wrote Moore a fan letter, telling him a bit about myself, my religious leanings, and my academic studies. A month passed, and then a mysterious package from the UK arrived, containing a stack of Moore’s ritual theater CDs, an unpublished article on chaos magick, two copies of Promethea Vol. 2 (one signed for me to keep, one to lend out), and a warm and encouraging note. I was floored! 

Alan Moore’s being an extremely sweet man, though, isn’t why I keep writing about his work. Although Moore’s work has getting a fair bit of scholarly attention over the past ten years, I notice that many comics scholars either don’t take his spiritual philosophy seriously (preferring instead to focus on his politics) or simply don’t have the background to understand and interpret it. Religion and theology represent a gap in Moore scholarship that I can easily fill. 

Promethea continues to be one of my favorite works of his, not because it’s the best-written of his works, but because it’s so experimental in both form and content. I think it goes over many readers’ heads, at least initially, so I appreciate opportunities to provide context for it. Additionally, many Pagans and ceremonial magicians have embraced Promethea as a primer for learning about Western esotericism. Religious education has been a major function of the comics form for decades, if not centuries (if one uses a broad definition of “comics”), so it’s fascinating to look at how the form being used in service of a non-mainstream spirituality. 

EDW: Your latest book, Seeking the Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies, has just been published as an eBook by Patheos Press and released to a positive reception online. Could you tell us a little more about this new project of yours; how did it come about and what are your hopes for it? 

Many Pagans are hostile to the idea of theology, either because they understand it as a purely Christian construct that focuses on belief rather than practice, or because they fear that written theologies will cause Paganism to become dogmatic and rigid. Neither of these is the case. 

I wrote the book for two different purposes. First, I wanted to help Pagans develop a theological vocabulary to describe their beliefs and attitudes, while making it clear that Paganism has theologies (not one theology) and that it is normal for an individual’s theology to evolve over the course of her life. I’m hoping that the book will prepare Pagans to read semi-academic and academic theologies and discuss them in their communities. To me, the ability to have sophisticated intellectual frameworks with which to describe our practices is part of the process of becoming a sustainable religious movement—and it also equips Pagans to communicate effectively in interfaith situations. 

The book’s secondary audience is readers who know something about theology but little about Pagans. Most Americans approach religion from the point of view of belief, and while belief isn’t the focus of Paganism, Pagans do have important beliefs about why their practices are effective and worthwhile. Since the first question non-Pagan readers tend to ask people of other religions is, “What do you believe about X?”, the book indulges that impulse while leading them to understand that belief is only one small aspect of most contemporary Pagan traditions. 

The book includes discussion questions and exercises for individuals and groups, so I especially hope that Pagan training groups and interfaith study circles will find it useful. 

EDW: You now teach Theology and Religious History at Cherry Hill Seminary, a Pagan institution that offers Master of Divinities degrees which is, I believe, the first of its kind in the U.S. How did you come to take up this job, and what do you see as your role within it? I get the impression that the Seminary is further evidence for the increased “routinization” and institutionalisation of the American Pagan movement, as discussed in the work of sociologist Helen A. Berger. It would be very interesting to hear your feelings toward this idea. Furthermore, what place do you feel that the Seminary serves in the Pagan community and in American society as a whole? 

I was initially recruited for Cherry Hill by Macha NightMare, who I knew through AAR. After coming on as an instructor and developing two of the core Master’s classes, I served as chair of Theology and Religious History for two years and assisted with the development of the Master’s program. I’m back to teaching core Master’s classes in Theology and Contemporary Global Paganisms now, along with the occasional 4-week community education class. 

I do think the seminary is moving the Pagan community toward institutionalization, and I also believe that institutionalization is an inevitable process. The Pagan community keeps growing, and with it, so does the demand for clergy services—weddings and funerals, counseling, prison ministry, hospital ministry, more. We owe it to ourselves and each other to have well-trained clergy to provide those services to their communities. 

At the same time, I have mixed feelings about the institutionalization process. I believe the Pagan movement needs skilled clergy to thrive, and that we won’t be able to sustain those clergy if we can’t find a way to pay them—and that almost certainly means creating organizations of some kind. I’ve witnessed far too many cases of volunteer burnout to think that we can be survive indefinitely with volunteer leadership. On the other hand, Pagans need to think carefully about how to structure the organizations we create, especially when it comes to power relationships. I don’t want to see the volunteer leaders who built Pagan traditions pushed aside by newly paid, professional clergy; instead, I’d like to see organizations that retain a great deal of power in the hands of volunteers and use collaborative decision-making processes. I’m not against hierarchical organizations, but I’d like to see Pagans creating dynamic hierarchies in which power does not rest permanently with one person or one small group. If Pagans can learn from existing groups that operate without traditional hierarchies—the Society of Friends (Quakers) is just one such group—perhaps we can avoid perpetuating the kinds of rigid religious institutions that many Pagans left their birth religions to escape. 

EDW: It's a question which I have asked my last three interviewees, but I would be very interested to hear your take on it. How do you see the academic field of Pagan Studies progressing over the next fifty years or so, and what role do you believe institutions like Cherry Hill will play in that, particularly in the context of Markus Altena Davidsen's criticism that Pagan Studies is already too heavily dominated by practising Pagans ? 

Well, with regard to Davidsen, I’m not sure his complaint is that the field is dominated by insiders so much as that he objects to a Pagan studies that isn’t primarily scientific and theoretically oriented. Davidsen actually names a number of scholars who are also practitioners as successfully producing the kind of scientific work he admires, although I’m not sure he’s aware of their religious commitments. Regarding his criticism overall, I think he does have a point that much of Pagan studies scholarship has been very descriptive. I think that’s normal for a young field, although if his barb drives scholars to become more critical and analytical in their approach to the material, that’s probably a good thing. 

My research leanings are in theology right now, though, and theology is inherently an insider discourse, as opposed to religious studies, which has a range of participant-observer approaches. I’d like to think that Pagan theology will have a place in the Pagan studies in the future, just as Christian theology has a place within the academy now. I also sympathize with what Nikki Bado said at the last meeting of the AAR: that for scholars of religion, “insider” and “outsider” are slippery categories. If I am a Pagan and I study Christians, am I an outsider because I do not practice their religion? Am I an insider because I was raised in a Christian church, or an insider because like them, I am a theist? To me, the question of how to deal with one’s personal religious commitments when doing religious studies scholarship is a complicated question to which there are no easy answers (indeed, the excellent book Researching Paganisms is largely devoted to debating it). 

At Cherry Hill, we are primarily educating clergy and community leaders, not religious studies scholars. But I think the way Cherry Hill cultivates a distinctively Pagan intellectual culture is valuable and should have a place in Pagan studies, even if we may need to draw stronger distinctions between work intended to be constructive/theological vs. work that is meant to be analytical/scientific. Theology and religious studies are different disciplines, and I myself prefer not to blur them too badly. That being said, I’m thrilled at the constructive scholarship my students at Cherry Hill are doing, the way they’re engaging history and religious studies to bring rigor to their theology and to enrich the liturgy and lore of their traditions. 

In the next fifty years, I’d like to see a strengthening and clarifying of different approaches in Pagan studies—not a casting-aside of what Davidsen calls the “religionist” approach, but far greater clarity about the methods we’re using and why. I personally appreciate the approaches that Davidsen calls “scientific,” I would love to see more scholarship in that vein as well as more development of distinctively Pagan theological discourses. I’m a big fan of Constance Wise’s Hidden Circles in the Web, for example -- it is genuinely a theological work, not an attempt to approach theology through sociology or history, as other works of Pagan studies have. 

Thanks very much, Ethan, for the opportunity to be interviewed. It's been a pleasure.

EDW: And thank you Christine for giving us this wonderful interview! We look forward to the publication of Eros and Touch and hope that it is a resounding success!

An Interview with Dr. Nevill Drury

Today I'm talking with Dr. Nevill Drury, a man who requires no introduction for those acquainted with the contemporary Pagan and esoteric scenes. The author of over sixty books dealing with all manner of subjects, from the artwork of contemporary Indigenous Australian communities to practical Neo-Shamanism, his works have been translated into eighteen languages and counting. Born in England, he has spent most of his life in Australia, receiving his BA from the University of Sydney in 1968, after which he briefly became a high school teacher before moving on to work in government administration, publishing and television, He also turned his hand to writing, resulting in his copious oeuvre. Nevill worked in the Australian book publishing industry from 1976-2000, also obtaining his MA Honours degree in anthropology from Macquarie University in 1980. After briefly returning to high school teaching in 2004 he began researching his PhD on the esoteric beliefs and practices of Rosaleen Norton in 2006 while still based in various country high schools. He received his doctorate from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, in 2008. Since then, he has published prolifically in peer-reviewed, academic journals and anthologies, and produced his own books and edited volumes dealing with the Western Esoteric Traditions. I ask him about the journey he took to get to where he is now, his latest projects, and the perils of publishing. 

EDW: You have the distinction of having been born in Hastings, Southern England, in 1947, which I am sure you are aware was the very same town and year which witnessed the death of Aleister Crowley, the infamous “Great Beast” and founder of Thelema. Aged nine you moved all the way to Australia, where you have lived since, something which I can only imagine must have been a significant transition in your life. Did you feel that the environment of Australia affected your spiritual beliefs in any way, and how did you first come to develop your interest in the esoteric ?

Nevill Drury

ND: I grew up in a family that had a Theosophical orientation. My father had been an officer in the Indian Army during World War Two and was deeply interested in Eastern mysticism and the 'perennial tradition', and my grandmother had several books by Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater – some of which later found their way onto our bookshelves in Australia. These books were part of the spiritual culture of my family, although I myself was never especially drawn to Theosophy per se and found the notions of ‘root races’ and discarnate Mahatmas quite ridiculous. As a family we migrated to Sydney in 1957 when I was nine years old and when I was still a teenager I came across The Dawn of Magic by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. I found this book inspirational, although I realize now that it contains many errors and is, in fact, quite unreliable. Nevertheless it was the first time I had heard of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the mystical fiction of the Welsh novelist Arthur Machen – and that, by itself, offered a pathway into the Western Esoteric Tradition. In 1968, at Sydney University, I met Stephen Skinner and he introduced me to the study of the Kabbalah. After we wrote our first book together – The Search for Abraxas, published in London in 1972 –Stephen moved to Britain and became well known in London esoteric circles – he now lives in Singapore and we have kept in touch over the years. At University we were both attracted to the emergent international counterculture and, I think, were deeply influenced by it. Stephen was much more attracted to Aleister Crowley than I was, however, and I should point out that although I was born in Hastings in 1947 I am definitely not Crowley’s reincarnation – he died in December that year, and I was born in October!

EDW: You are well known for your work in popularising and propagating Neo-Shamanic, or Western Shamanic ideas in such books as The Shaman and the Magician (1982), Elements of Shamanism (1989) and Sacred Encounters (2003) and you have also written a work of mythic fiction – The Shaman’s Quest (2004 / 2012). How did you first get involved in this particular spiritual practice and furthermore, what made you decide to start writing about it for a wider audience? What do you see as the benefits of shamanistic practices for people living in the Western world today, and how do you respond to critics who oppose the “appropriation” of shamanic practices from indigenous communities for Western usage ?

ND: During the 1970s several of my friends pushed me towards the sort of ceremonial magical practices associated with figures like Aleister Crowley, Israel Regardie and Gareth Knight but although I appreciated their appeal, I am not really a ritualist and this approach didn’t work for me. For as long as I can remember I have been attracted to visionary states of awareness and the study of altered states of consciousness, and like many of my friends I had some transformative experiences in the late 1960s and 1970s using psychedelics. In 1980 I completed my Masters (honours) thesis at Macquarie University on shamanic aspects of modern Western magic, focusing especially on such magical techniques as ‘rising in the planes’ using the Kabbalistic Tree Life and the apparent parallel between visionary Western magic and states of trance in classical shamanism. American anthropologist Dr Michael Harner was the external reader for my Masters thesis and he recommended publication – that’s how The Shaman and the Magician came into existence, although I think I have written much better books since. I met Michael for the first time in person in 1980 at a Transpersonal conference in Melbourne and attended a workshop on shamanic drumming. I found his neo-shamanic techniques really effective and I continued this work on a regular basis with a small group of friends, for several years. Basically, we drummed for each other, made use of Michael’s visualizations (described in his book The Way of the Shaman), and wrote down our experiences after each session. I published my diary in a small book called Vision Quest, released by Prism Press in 1984.

Drury's most recent work on shamanism

Living at the time in a large modern city, I viewed the neo-shamanic visionary experience as an adjunct to creativity and psychosomatic healing and I still see it in those terms now. After all, Michael Harner’s approach in neo-shamanism was to present the core experiential concepts of indigenous shamanism to a modern Western audience and there were no illusions or deceptions around that. Personally I think the whole notion of appropriation has been greatly overstated – after all, can’t we learn from the traditions of other cultures? And I understand that members of some indigenous groups – specifically the Sami and Inuit – approached Michael Harner to ask for help in restoring shamanic awareness in their respective cultures after sacred knowledge was lost as a result of Christian missionary activity and European colonization. So these sharing processes can flow in both directions. It seems to me that the scholars who object to Michael Harner’s trans-cultural approach have mostly been post-modern deconstructionists who are obsessed with the supposedly unique characteristics of specific ‘shamanisms’ (a dreadful term, in my opinion) and who have lost the ability to think universally. I have little time for them and find both their academic pedantry and their convoluted writing totally boring and unhelpful. I have to admit that for many years, as you say, I was something of a populariser of shamanic themes but I see nothing wrong in writing for a general audience – you reach more people that way. My introductory overview book The Elements of Shamanism is a case in point. In terms of sales it sold over 30,000 copies and was published in ten languages. It remains one of my most successful books. My more recent fictional work – The Shaman’s Quest – is also aimed at the general reader, and I think it is one of my best books. It describes the experiences of four shamans, from North, East, South and West, who journey towards the mythical ‘centre of the world’ where a transformational healing process takes place.

EDW: Although not directly related to your scholarship or to the esoteric, I can't help but notice that you were an undergraduate at the University of Sydney in 1968, the year of the famous international student protests, something that resonates with my experiences in the 2010 student protests here in Britain. Did you experience any of the "Spirit of '68" over in Sydney at the time ?   

ND: I was at Sydney University in from 1966 through to 1969 and it was a great time to be a university student. It was a period of political protests and wonderful parties. I wasn’t a student radical at the time although I remember several of my friends and I being involved in a large political rally against the visiting USA president, Lyndon B. Johnson and the State premier, Robert Askin, who wanted to go ‘all the way with LBJ’ in the Vietnam War. I was totally opposed to national conscription and regarded Australia’s attempts to prop up the corrupt regime in South Vietnam as totally misplaced. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t called up for military service.

EDW: For the documentary that you produced on The Occult Experience (1985), you met with and filmed some of the world's most significant figures then active in the Western Esoteric scene, including senior English Wiccans Alex Sanders, Janet Farrar and Stewart Farrar, the American Pagan Margot Adler, and Swiss artist H.R. Giger. Looking back on it now, what was this remarkable experience like ?

ND: This was a wonderful experience for me and came on the back of a television series on holistic health that I presented on ABC-TV in the early 1980s. I was approached by Sydney-based documentary-maker Frank Heimans to plan a 90-minute television programme on occult beliefs and practices around the world and Frank managed to raise $350,000 to finance it, which at the time was quite a lot of money. We filmed in Perth, Western Australia, where there were several Wiccan covens and also in the Yanchep caves north of Perth where a group of local enthusiasts carried out rituals based on ancient Egyptian magic – that made for some spectacular visual imagery. We also filmed a group of Sydney-based Christian fundamentalists ‘casting out demons’. However some of the most spectacular sequences took place overseas. We filmed well known American witch Selena Fox and her close associates conducting a ritual in the snow in Wisconsin; a wonderful, spontaneous ceremonial gathering of radical feminist Goddess worshippers in Oakland, California – including interviews with Z. Budapest and Luisah Teish – and a meeting with Dr Michael Aquino and his wife Lilith, key members of the Left-Hand path Temple of Set in San Francisco. We also filmed a shamanic workshop with Michael Harner and conducted an interview with Margot Adler in New York in the ritual space at the back of Herman Slater’s Magickal Childe bookshop. In Europe we visited visionary artist H.R. Giger at home in Zurich amidst his remarkable, hellish paintings. We also filmed an initiatory sequence with Janet and Stewart Farrar at their coven in Drogheda, north of Dublin, and visited the founders of the Fellowship of Isis at their Jacobite castle in Clonegal. Later we conducted an interview with Alex Sanders at home in Bexhill, Sussex and filmed him invoking an Aztec deity – a somewhat surprising variant on Wicca! – where he nearly set his pants alight with the flaming torches he was holding. 

(Note to Ronald Hutton who tried to establish Sanders’ birth-date and writes about it in The Triumph of the Moon: Sanders told me he had frequently lied about his age in the past, understating it by ten years. He was born in 1916, not 1926, and his aged semi-naked body seemed to confirm this fact during filming.) American pagan scholar Chas S. Clifton, who appears not to have realised that the documentary was financed by a commercial television channel that in turn influenced the final film-edit, has described The Occult Experience on his blog-site as ‘thunderingly pretentious and … basically content-free’ but I feel this is both untrue and unfair: after all, many key esoteric figures feature in the film – they speak for themselves and often have very interesting things to say. The documentary won a Bronze Award in the 1985 International Film and Television Festival in New York, so someone must have liked it. Readers of Albion Calling can decide for themselves: it is freely available on my website: www.nevilldrury.com

EDW: You're probably the world's foremost authority on Rosaleen Norton (1917–1979), Australia's homegrown Pagan Witch and infamous occult artist, having first published a biography of her titled Pan's Daughter (1988) before devoting your PhD research to her, resulting in the expanded volume Homage to Pan (2003); a book that I very much enjoyed and would not hesitate to recommend. How did you first begin your investigations into this intriguing character, and what is it about Norton's work that fascinates you personally ? You also have another book out, Dark Spirits (2012), comparing Norton's work with that of London occult artist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), whose work is definitely seeing a resurgence of interest, at least in Britain; what is it about his work that appeals ?

ND: I became interested in Austin Spare and Rosaleen Norton (Roie, as she liked to be known) in the 1970s. Both of them fascinated me because they were extraordinary visionary artists whose imagery was deeply grounded in the Western Esoteric tradition. Roie was always more accessible to me because she lived in Australia. I first met her in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Kings Cross in 1977, while researching my book Inner Visions: Explorations in Magical Consciousness. At the time Roie was living like a recluse in a dark basement flat at the end of a long corridor in an old building in Roslyn Gardens, just down from the centre of Kings Cross in the direction of Rushcutters Bay. She was somewhat frail but still extremely mentally alert, with expressive eyes and a hearty laugh. We talked at that meeting about the god-forms Roie encountered in trance, about her view that Pan was alive in the ‘back-to-Nature’ movement supported by the counterculture, and we also discussed her strong personal bond with animals. Roie told me that she believed most animals had much more integrity than human beings and she also felt that cats, especially, could operate both in the world of normal waking consciousness and in the inner psychic world at the same time. Roie was very much an adventurer – a free spirit – and she liked to fly through the worlds opened to her by her imagination. Her art, of course, reflected this.

Drury's most thorough biography of Norton.

Like Rosaleen Norton, Austin Spare was also an outsider who was substantially misunderstood by the public at large. My first contact with Spare’s visionary art came about in 1970, while I was working as a secondary school teacher in rural New South Wales. In the somewhat isolated country town of West Wyalong, 300 miles west of Sydney, I happened upon the first edition of a new part-work magazine titled Man, Myth and Magic and was immediately struck by its dramatic cover – which featured a painting of a supernatural entity by Austin Spare. Keen to find out more about this unfamiliar visionary artist I decided to research his background. At this stage there was no substantial information on him of any kind, with the exception of a very brief introductory essay by Kenneth and Steffi Grant, published in 1961 as one of the Carfax Monographs.

In 1971, having abandoned my brief career as a school-teacher to live instead in London, I obtained a reader’s ticket to the British Museum and was able to read Spare’s self-published books first-hand. As a young man Spare had won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art but his brilliant skills as a figurative artist would soon be overshadowed by his eccentric exploration of visionary trance states, sorcery and sigil magic. His major self-published works – Earth Inferno (1905), A Book of Satyrs (1907) and The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): the Psychology of Ecstasy (1909-1913) – were clearly not the work of a conventional artist and it was understandable, while also very regrettable, that his creative genius had not been acknowledged in any of the major British art histories. 

Drury's Dark Spirits (2012).

Excited by the scope of Spare’s vision, I decided to seek out London publishers who might be interested in his art and ideas, and I eventually found my way to the office of occult publisher Neville Spearman Armstrong in Whitfield Street, not far from the Museum. Armstrong’s publishing company, Neville Spearman, was associated at the time with well-known occult writers like Francis King, Trevor Ravenscroft and Erika Cheetham and included publications on modern Western magic, the prophecies of Nostradamus, paranormal research and alchemy. I wasn’t really surprised that Neville Armstrong quickly warmed to the idea of a book describing the magical imagery of Austin Spare but it was equally clear that such a book would also have to be much broader in scope. I returned to Australia and after co-opting Stephen Skinner as my co-author we decided together to produce a book that would explore some of the major themes in the Western esoteric tradition and the philosophies and cosmologies underpinning them. The resulting volume, The Search for Abraxas (1972), included a substantial overview essay on Austin Spare and presented a concise profile of an artist-magician who was largely unknown among devotees of modern Western magic at that time. I think Spare is a major figure in the 20th century Western magical revival and one of its most original thinkers. He has also been acknowledged as a key influence on contemporary Chaos magick.

EDW: Although for years you have probably been better known for your work on practical esotericism and also for your books on magic and shamanism designed for a popular audience, in recent years you have brought out a number of tomes through academic publishing houses that are aimed at a more scholarly readership. What lay behind this decision to give up your job teaching high school kids about English and History, study for a PhD, and embrace the world of academia again ?

ND: Some time around 2006, when I was still teaching in rural New South Wales, I found out that Pan’s Daughter was a featured text in a Pagan Studies course that Dr Marguerite Johnson was teaching at the University of Newcastle. It occurred to me that maybe I could use my existing research on Rosaleen Norton and work it up into a PhD dissertation at Newcastle with Marguerite as my supervisor. That’s how it turned out. The university allowed me to work on my own, away from the campus – I was teaching in the rural town of Leeton at the time – and I completed the PhD in a little less than two years. I think the benefit of the extra study was that it helped me tighten my writing style and document references more specifically than I had in most of my general books. As a result, I think my most recent publications are among my best.

EDW: You are also known as an important figure in the wider popularisation of artwork produced in Australia, particularly that made by people from indigenous Australian communities. It's not an area that I know much about, although I have attended lectures and public talks on the archaeological study of Australian rock art, which I would assume often carries with it a cultural connection to the contemporary paintings. How did you first become involved in this fascinating area, and have you been involved in wider academic and/or esoteric engagement with the continent's Native peoples ?

ND: For most of my professional life I worked in the Australian book industry – initially as an editor for the local Australian branches of the American publishing houses Harper & Row and Doubleday. In 1981, together with book publisher Geoffrey King and graphic designer Judy Hungerford, I co-founded a publishing company dedicated specifically to Australian contemporary art. At the time Bay Books, an imprint owned by Rupert Murdoch, was the only major competition. However, Bay Books covered only the major artists – figures like Ian Fairweather, Brett Whiteley and Sid Nolan – and there was vast scope to publish the works of significant mid-career artists across the country. This is what we did – initially as limited editions and from 1985 onwards as standard hardcover publications. It soon became obvious, given that we were marketing our publications to schools as well as art collectors, that we should also publish significant Aboriginal artists. We released the first scholarly monograph on an Aboriginal artist – Dr Vivien Johnson’s Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri – in 1994, and followed it with publications on Michael Jagamara Nelson, Emily Kngwarreye and Gordon Bennett as well as books on the Aboriginal art of the Utopia and Balgo communities and a reference book on artists of the Western Desert. I visited the artists at Balgo in remote Western Australia, and Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs, and found this a very enriching experience. I would have liked to publish a major work on Rover Thomas – one of the true greats in Aboriginal art – but was unable to get this project off the ground.

EDW: One of your most recent works is Pathways in Modern Western Magic, an edited volume published by Concrescent Press, one of a number of new esoteric publishers to have appeared on the block in recent years. Last year I interviewed one of the contributors to the anthology, Dr. Dave Evans, while it also includes contributions from such notables as James R. Lewis, Nikki Bado, Thomas Karlsson, Lynne Hume, Robert J. Wallis, Amy Hale and Jenny Blain on topics as disparate as the Dragon Rouge, technoshamanism and emic approaches to fieldwork among magical communities. You of course also provide two essays in the volume, on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Thelemic sex magic respectively. I'd be interested in knowing how this particular project came together, and what role you see for volumes like this – filled with peer-reviewed contributions by academics but not produced through a conventional academic publisher – in the fields of Pagan and Esoteric Studies ? Do you see it as a part of the wider academic dissatisfaction with traditional avenues of publication ?

ND: In 2009 I signed a contract with the Dutch scholarly publisher Brill for a multi-authored volume titled A Handbook of Modern Western Magic and the well-known Swedish academic Henrik Bogdan was brought in as co-editor. In addition to the authors you have just mentioned we were also hoping to attract chapters from scholars like Gregory Tillett (writing on ‘Modern Western magic and Theosophy’), Susan Johnston Graf (‘Yeats, creativity and magic’), Thomas Hakl (‘The Fraternitas Saturni’), Jesper Petersen (‘Contemporary Satanic spirituality’), Kennet Granholm (‘Ophidian magick in the Scandinavian Dragon Rouge’), Carole M. Cusack ‘The Discordians’ ) and Stephen Skinner (‘Magical evocation and Goetia’). Henrik also committed to writing a chapter titled ‘Ritual initiations and spiritual transformation in modern esotericism’. You can imagine my surprise – and, frankly, anger – when the editorial board rejected the majority of chapters in the submitted anthology. Evidently several of the chapters were insufficiently post-modern and ‘etic’, lacked a critical analytical edge, or were simply ‘unsuitable’ (too ‘emic’). Several of the authors whose work was rejected had published in the past with university presses and a few even with Brill itself. Following a suggestion from Dr Amy Hale that a new American imprint, Concrescent Press, might be interested in publishing the anthology I wrote to all of the contributors and explained the situation. Some authors whom I have listed above wrote back and said that their university contracts precluded them from publishing with little-known publishers but many were willing to go ahead and publish with the small independent Californian publishing house. (Interestingly, the publisher at Concrescent is Sam Webster, who is currently studying under Ronald Hutton at the University of Bristol – so there is an Anglo-American connection.)

At Concrescent Press the manuscripts were peer-reviewed by a selection of American academics and a new anthology assembled. I felt that the revised selection was still reasonably coherent but there were a couple of obvious gaps so I requested a chapter on the Dragon Rouge from the Order’s founder, Thomas Karlsson, a chapter on cybermagic from Libuše Martínková, a Czech researcher whom I contacted via the Internet, and an ‘insider’ account of the Temple of Set from former High Priest, Don Webb. Concrescent Press published Pathways in Modern Western Magic in September 2012 and naturally I hope it goes well for them. I am sure this new press will attract a range of academic submissions in the future. The focus of Concrescent Press is on esoteric studies and the Western magical traditions.

EDW: In your introductory piece to Pathways in Modern Western Magic, you emphasise the importance of emic, or “insider” perspectives in the study of contemporary esotericism, and I'd be interested to hear if you had any thoughts on the recent attack on the over-reliance on emic approaches within Pagan Studies made by Danish Religious Studies scholar Markus Altena Davidsen in his 2012 paper published in the Method and Theory in the Study of Religion journal ? His critique primarily hinged on another edited volume that you had contributed to, the hefty Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (Brill, 2008), and this whole debate looks set to become a bit of a theoretical battleground in ensuing years.

ND: I have just read Markus Davidsen’s critique of ‘pagan scholarship’ – with all his references to the alleged shortcomings associated with so-called ‘insider perspectives’ – and I have to say I find his approach totally misguided. After all, where do authentic religious and magical experiences actually originate? The answer can be found by exploring the psyches, or ‘consciousness’ of the practitioners and devotees themselves. If we move beyond the analysis of belief systems to the actual essence of religion and magic we often find ourselves entering a domain characterised by profoundly transformative spiritual experiences. These are experiences associated with altered states of consciousness, not intellectual conceptual frameworks imposed by theoreticians at a distance. So is it not indeed fortunate that there are several notable practitioner-academics who are able to apply their scholarly knowledge in defining, describing and referencing these experiences? Isn’t that what ‘religious studies’ is fundamentally about? Davidsen’s insistence that religious studies as an academic discipline has to be defined by imposed theoretical frameworks and scientific perspectives seems to me to miss the point entirely. Here is a scholar who sounds like he is more in love with the footnote than the main narrative. 

By way of contrast, as I made clear in my Introduction to Pathways in Modern Western Magic, I am all in favour of emically-oriented scholarly discourse and I think it is deeply insulting to describe it as ‘ignorant’. It comes as no surprise that many of the etically oriented publications that Davidsen is obviously in awe of so frequently come across as jargon-bound, ponderously analytical, and sterile. So often these publications are for scholars writing simply for their colleagues and, in my opinion, they are ultimately of little lasting value. As for my own chapter in the Brill Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, I have to no desire whatever to follow Davidsen’s advice and engage in ‘minimal reinterpretation’ in order to make it ‘commensurable with the critical-naturalist paradigm’ – as a historian (my PhD is in Humanities) 1 have simply presented the material as accurately and lucidly as I can, and I am sure many other writers contributing to the anthology would feel the same way.

EDW: Also of note are two other recent publications of yours. The first, Stealing Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic (2011) has been brought out by the prestigious Oxford University Press, and offers a scholarly overview and introduction to this particular area that I'm sure will prove to be of great utility to students and established scholars in coming years. The second is a volume you have co-authored with Dr Lynne Hume titled The Varieties of Magical Experience which has just been published in the United States by Praeger. Aside from these, are there any more academic projects on the horizon that we should be keeping our eyes out for ?

ND: I have no plans right now for any new publications on the scale of these two books. Stealing Fire from Heaven was my attempt at a concise historical overview of the modern magical revival, commencing effectively with the hugely influential late-19th century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and continuing through to present times. In the case of The Varieties of Magical Experience, I thought it would be a good idea to produce a book that in a sense was a counterpart to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience although I didn’t feel I could do this all by myself. So I invited Professor Lynne Hume from the University of Queensland to be my co-author. Lynne is an anthropologist and has also studied paganism in some detail, so she wrote the chapters on indigenous magic, sensory awareness and Wicca and I wrote the others. We have never met in person but we managed to work well together on this project. I have to concede that this book is strongly emic and inevitably some scholars won’t like it for that reason. However two of the academics who provided endorsements for the book jacket (both of them scholars I have never met personally) have described it as a ‘classic’ – so that’s a good start.

EDW: And lastly, because of the many divergent views that arise, I like to ask all of my interviewees where they see the academic fields of Pagan and Esoteric Studies going in the next fifty years or so ? Do you share the concerns of another Australian Pagan Studies scholar whom I have interviewed, Caroline Tully, that there is a serious problem arising between academics involved in these fields and anti-intellectual elements within the wider esoteric community ?

ND: I don’t regard the division you mention – between scholars and anti-intellectual practitioners – as the main problem, although I acknowledge that it is somewhat problematical. I think the biggest issue we face is that some scholars will become increasingly fascinated by cross-referencing each other’s jargon – ‘occulture’ is one term that comes to mind – while forgetting that magic and religion are ultimately experiential in nature and should be treated as such.

EDW: Thank you for taking the time out to undertake this interview Nevill, and I wish you all the best in future!