Wilfred Glyn Davies (1929-2007) was a student and teacher of Kabbalah, astrology, meditation, and the Western magical tradition. After coming into contact with a hidden tradition while serving in the RAF, Glyn began working with Kabbalistic and other groups in London in the 1950s. In the late 1960s he began to start groups around the country which led to the formation of the organisation Saros in the late 1970s. Throughout his life he worked to reformulate and refresh the tradition he received.
Beginnings
Glyn first came across Kabbalah during his time in the RAF (1947-57). He would say that he saw a diagram of the Tree of Life pinned up on a fellow RAF member’s locker or above his bunk bed, and asked what it was. This person was either the man who became Glyn’s teacher, or someone who put him in contact with that teacher, who Glyn called ‘John Smith’. It seems likely that this happened in 1949 when Glyn was stationed at RAF Patrington near Hull in East Yorkshire.
Early Groups
In the late 1950s, Glyn became involved with the London Kabbalah groups started by Alan Bain. The groups often met in Cafés, and Glyn appears briefly in a staged scene in a short film about Soho Cafes made in 1959, called Coffee Bar [1]. In the frame shown, Glyn is on the right discussing Astrology with Ernest Page (centre) and Tony Potter (on the left).
Glyn was also involved with the SES (the School of Economic Science), and the Study Society, which at that time were working in the tradition of P D Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. In the early 1960s when these organisations helped the Maharishi to bring Transcendental Meditation to the West, Glyn was a steward at the Maharishi’s first congress at the Albert Hall.
Within SES Glyn met others interested in Astrology and Kabbalah. He met Warren Kenton (Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi), later founder of the ‘Toledano Tradition School of the Soul’, and became his instructor in Kabbalah. As Warren writes in his autobiography, The Path of a Kabbalist:
“One of the people who left the school with me was the friend who instructed our small study group in the art of astrology. His training had been based upon the Occult, Magic, the Tarot and Kabbalah. This was a composite approach, dating back to the Renaissance. As such it was not a unified system but did open the door to the Higher Knowledge through symbolism. Having mastered astrology, he proposed to instruct those who were interested in a private study group on Kabbalah.”
The Path of a Kabbalist, p. 113
Circum
In 1966, Glyn left London for a while and took up residence in a ruined cottage in the Mendip Hills. There he wrote Circum, a novel depicting aspects of esoteric life in the 1950s, and structured around the Tarot trumps. The book wasn’t published until after his death. [2]
London
Returning to London, Glyn began giving talks on Kabbalah and running groups. With help from friends he began to start Kabbalah groups in London, Cambridge, Manchester, Leeds and Oxford. He married the artist Gila Zur who worked with him on a number of projects.
Galgal
In the early 1970s Glyn and some fellow Kabbalists developed the Galgal fortune telling game. This was based on the arrangement and interpretation of Hebrew letters on the paths of the Tree of Life. It has since been republished in a revised edition as the Tree of Life Oracle. [3].
A related scheme of Cabalistic Astrology was presented around this time in a pair of articles in ARC Magazine by someone (most likely Glyn) writing under the pseudonym ‘Querent’.
Phoenician Letters
Around this time Glyn began writing The Phoenician Letters, a formulation of ancient Babylonian wisdom revealing the mysteries of the different Gods and the Phoenician script. The preface describes it as “A series of ten letters from one having responsibility in the Sar-Ma’an Brotherhood to the Prince of the Land of the Four Directions, at the Royal School of Ugarit, being an aspirant to the brotherhood”. The book was published in 1979 [4], with artwork by Gila Zur.
Sepher Yetzirah and Sepher Bahir
Later in the 1970s Glyn and Gila worked together to produce a new translation of two ancient Kabbalistic texts, the Book of Formation (Sepher Yetzirah) and the Book of Enlightenment (Sepher Bahir). Glyn discovered possible geometric models for the texts, which he describes in the introductions. The translations are available here.
Saros
One of Glyn’s long term aims was to reformulate Kabbalah, trying to get back to the fundamental principles and present the teaching in a way that addressed those principles. In the late 1970s, this effort took the form of the Saros Foundation for the Perpetuation of Knowledge. Glyn worked with friends and with members of the Kabbalah groups around the country to set up the Saros Association, and in 1979 a centre was opened in Buxton in Derbyshire. The centre was open for six years, and the Saros Association continued to operate for another 16 years with Glyn’s guidance if not direct involvement. See here for more detail.
Later Work
Individual work continued amongst the network of former Saros members, and Glyn continued to work with them on reformulation.
Through Saros International, Glyn encouraged the development of a correspondence course, and ran a series of seminars called Worm, Dragon, Angel relating to different levels of the soul.
Glyn also developed another direction, based on the Basque language and beautiful and enigmatic diagrams. Sareoso, meaning ‘web of wholeness’ sets out ‘an accessible formulation of the peasant mystery tradition.’ The Basque language is unrelated to the other languages of Europe, and is believed to be one of the few surviving pre-Indo-European languages.
Notes
[1] The film was part of the Look at Life series produced by the Rank organisation. It is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B92MnoPVtGs and this part appears around 5min 50sec into the film. The film details are on Imbd at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2207525/combined
[2] Circum was published in 2009 by Firebird Publications.
[3] Cherry Gilchrist, The Tree of Life Oracle, Eddison Sadd (2002), to be republished May 2020 as Kabbalah: The Tree of Life Oracle (Eddison Books)
[4] Wilfred Davies and G. Zur, The Phoenician Letters, Mowat Publishing, 1979.
Historical Sketches in Esoteric Britain 