Author’s note 2024: I joined the Community in 1975 and in due course became Peter Caddy’s secretary, running the office and later accompanying Peter on many of his national and international tours.

While I did not ultimately assist in the writing of Peter’s autobiography, In Perfect Timing (that job was taken on by Jeremy Slocombe), in 1987/88 I contributed the following piece as introduction to the book project. Though it was never used, it provides some insights and observations into Peter’s character, the growth and development of the Community, and on my own Findhorn Story.

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The vast billiard table, shrouded in dust sheets, loomed like the preserved cadaver of an extinct dinosaur in the middle of a very large, very damp and bitterly cold room. Waiting for removal, it resembled a museum piece in this dawning of a ‘new age’, a singular reminder of the ‘old’, abandoned on our pilgrimage to the fabled Findhorn Community in North East Scotland.

Bundled up in over-sized men’s work clothes with clumsy gloves for protection against harsh chemicals and bits of glass, another Canadian and myself were scraping away multiple layers of paint, revealing the original beauty of the room’s natural wood panelling. This former billiards room, where skill and luck had met in the gentleman’s tradition of gaming, was, perfectly paradoxically, to become the heart of the building, the sanctuary. Our labour of love was the means by which such miracles of the ‘new’ were made.

The members of the community were deeply immersed in a complex renovation strategy for Cluny Hill Hotel, a four star showpiece in the 1950’s due to the inspired management of Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean, the founders of the Findhorn Community. Cluny’s dramatic decline had permitted the Foundation to purchase it, thus fulfilling Eileen’s guidance that they would one day return. Following its renovation and a successful season of contractually-bound commercial bus tours, Cluny would drop its disguise as an ageing spa and reveal itself as a ‘spiritual centre’ and ‘college’ for the accommodation of the Community’s many visitors. It was to play a central and grounding role in Eileen’s wider vision of a ‘city of light’ and Peter’s rock-like faith in ‘God’s plan.’

The Foundation was engaged on its most expansive phase. In a few years it would grow from a small group living in caravans on mainly leased land to a community of hundreds, manifesting properties worth many thousands, with a network of links round the world and an educational programme dedicated to planetary harmony.

Peter walked in, sizing up the situation. We glanced across each other. Several years later I would peer into the burnt shell of this very room, caused by a fire that would threaten the entire building but was, by grace, prevented. I would recall that other time when we’d had to burn and scrape and peel the room down to its essence, purifying and making it a sacred space.

Having relinquished the focalisation of the office and flown home to Canada for Christmas, I’d just returned to join the Cluny crew. Peter identified me with the office. In his one-pointed vision, certain people had certain skills, sent to do certain jobs, manifesting in perfect timing. My preferred – though secondary – job had been with the construction crew on the Hall. Peter knew nothing of my background as a Canadian university lecturer, my left-wing socialist feminist politics, my sixties-bred leadership. I’d barely spoken with the Caddys. I’d been too busy running the office after only three weeks of joining the community, transforming it into a miniature cell of happy efficiency, exploring an intense new intimate relationship and generally absorbing the wonder, beauty and utter frustration of community life. Peter had already begun his frequent travels away. The core group and focalization were already well developed. The era of autocracy had ended.

Every day, I set to work arranging for people to visit and answering the many letters that poured in, asking about the community, its founders, our beliefs; I wrote about guidance, being directed into spiritual service. Yet, apart from a short chapter in William Irwin Thompson’s Passages About Earth – suited to my intellectual background – I hadn’t read any Findhorn-related materials. Finally, I tackled Paul Hawken’s The Magic of Findhorn. I recall disliking its promotional American journalistic approach. Now, re-reading it, I find it brilliant! Findhorn helped me moult off a few layers of academia.

What led me to Findhorn and keeps me connected is an unswerving awareness of its importance. It was, in effect, a spiritual posting. One of the few background similarities Peter and I share is the military (I was in the Canadian Air Force and Naval Reserve), with its emphasis on obedience.

In 1974, during time off from my doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia, I played, in a glorious garden on Salt Spring Island. Idyllic, sweet nights of love under a starry sky peeking through a Sioux teepee; bright days spent cultivating gigantic vegetables, holding over the dreams of the sixties. One day, my lover spoke of Findhorn, another garden. In meditation, it became clear I was to go there. Later, a Toronto cousin and her husband, both psychologists, impressed by Findhorn’s growing reputation in the field of the paranormal (from The Secret Life of Plants), re-confirmed my intent to visit the community during a planned tour of Scotland with my mother. The place certainly emanated a magnetic renaissance quality. The vision of mystic gardeners in the land of my Scots ancestors augured strange and alluring delights. And there was that insistent inner prompting: “Go!”

For several years I had been receiving daily instruction from an inner presence I knew as ‘the Christ.’ My major lesson was to see this energy of love and light in others and thereby transform my life and the world around me. I could easily identify with Eileen’s visionary mode. What was lacking was sharing my spiritual life on a daily basis with peers. I had asked for spiritual community. I was about to receive a lifetime supply of it.

I’d been prevented from obtaining much information about Findhorn because, like so many others, I simply needed to experience it. I was drawn by the fruits of the founders’faith: the living community, the reality of God’s Will at work. For years to come, one of Peter’s favourite expressions – “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” – took on the overtones of a very English, almost comic, mantra resounding through the garden paths.

Neither the Findhorn Community nor its founders are politically radical in any conventional sense. Yet Findhorn, with its interweaving network of family, friends and centres has already proved itself a very significant socio-spiritual experiment, part of the ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘green’ revolutions. For me, as for many others, the single most important political current of this century is the women’s movement, in all its various forms. Where Findhorn and the women’s movement meet is a ‘turning point’. Thus far, the relationship between the two has been unclear, fraught with misunderstanding. Yet they have a lot in common. Both envision a new humanity. Both seek practical changes in the way we live and work. Both emphasize people and eschew sexism. Both stress the importance of ecological balance and co-operating with the forces of nature. Esoterically speaking, they meet in the Great God Pan, once known as the Horned God – in service to the Great Goddess, the Cosmic Mother, disguised as the Virgin Mary and ‘slipped’ into official Christianity by force of an older, more earthwise tradition. Her son, the Christ, principle and persona, is both the same and yet different from the age-old son of the Great Mother: the same because he is born of the ‘virgin’ (independent, pure) consciousness of sacred female mater/matter and different because he marks the change of a time and the recognition of a Father with a different face than that of the tyrannical Jehovah: a Father whose way is love.

Christianity has, unfortunately, not borne out the promised potential of this loving Father. In the early history of the founding of the Findhorn Community, Pan played an important role through the person of the scientist and mystic ROC (R. Ogilvie Crombie). Jesus the Christ and Pan are envisioned as brothers. There are similarities to the mythic friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the former a warrior Christ-like figure, dedicated to a new order, and the latter, a son of the old way, the Mother’s way; Enkidu’s death leaves Gilgamesh mournful and incomplete. Union between the best of both old and new is a mirroring myth for all times. This union failed, lacking the balancing grace of the feminine. Enkidu resembles Pan (predating the Greek god) and is in effect, the cross-cultural ‘Green Man’. Pan’s negative metamorphosis into the Christian figure of the devil and the displacement of his real mythic nature parallels the philosphical development of dualism and the domination of mind and false rationality over body/instinct intuitive life, culminating in centuries of war against planet and person and a nuclear arsenal beyond rational understanding. At Findhorn, Pan’s visible role declined as the Community ‘matured’ in the seventies into a garden that grew people. The actual garden suffered.

There is still much work to be done apart from the re-integration of the Horned God/Pan back into the Findhorn matrix. When I first recognized I had a role to play in a further unfolding, I felt uncomfortable. Yet I recalled the many occasions when I had been aware of this very time when I would be called upon to help tell the story in a special way. My malaise stemmed partly from the irritable realization that, after all, I hadn’t managed to finish with the phenomenon of Findhorn.

During my years at Findhorn working with Peter I was integrating and transforming my ‘father’s daughter’ aspect. For years I had strived to come to grips with the difficult role played by my own father, whom I had both loved and deprecated. I had replaced him with any number of other patriarchal images: serving in the military (he’d been a Naval officer); marrying a sailor and dealing successfully, (unlike my mother) with ‘his’ problem with alcohol (my father was alcoholic); working in the university system with men at the helm; becoming a dedicated Christian with Christ and a Father God at the Head of the Church. On the other hand, I had also lived in his image as safely as I could, leaving my young daughter twice to travel the globe, having adventures, feeling unfettered. Meantime,I had considered myself a feminist! Working ‘him’ out of my system only seemed to lead me into deeper waters.

Cover, In Perfect TimingI would note how people reacted negatively to Peter’s position of authority and his power whilst I viewed my own relationship with Peter and Eileen as simply part of ‘the plan’. The age-old challenge of the father’s daughter is to gain his love and respect and ruthlessly get what she wants from the deal. And before Athena was a father’s daughter she was a mother’s daughter. By the time I’d left Findhorn I had healed the wounded daughter I was. And experienced my womanhood, sisterhood and motherhood more fully. This project [the autobiography] with Peter appeared ‘regressive’ until I perceived that having made the journey with Peter, it was our story. How best to tell it but with the man himself!? This is as much a story about woman as teacher, guide, mother and goddess as about Peter the man of rock-like faith. Peter and I have contracted to tell the story in this special way, a sharing from each of us – because that is how we have always worked together – in the office, on the lecture platform, in the workshop circle or tramping through the Rockies together.

The story of Findhorn is a modern myth and those of us who have played within its gentle magic recognize themselves, sooner or later, in relation to ancient personas. Peter and Eileen have played out the ancient archetypes of Father and Mother, birthing into life the other characters.

Eileen has certainly walked in the footsteps of the Great Mother: mother of eight children and a loving, caring granny to several grandchildren, she has mothered the entire community for over twenty-five years. Her talents as a gifted sensitive, writer and myth maker have been justly revealed. She has suffered in this role, feeling relegated to supportive rather than active roles, often feeling rejected, unappreciated and unheard. All this she continues to resolve.

And Peter? Made in the image? If the Mother has suffered oppression and rejection, the great patriarch’s press is tainted by centuries of rape, pillage, violence, tyranny and war. ‘Redemption’ is a charged epithet. Nonetheless, nothing less is required for the necessary transformation; it must accompany the present re-emergence of the Goddess and re-education concerning the female and the feminine. Redemption of not only the Father but the Son too, and the human male made in their image. And the Daughter (was she really ever included in the Son?!), after centuries of eclipse, is rising to tell the tale, wounded, wise and with some thanks to sisters like Mary Daly, merrily awakening.

There is an understandable temptation to over simply, democratically, credit the thousands of Findhorn’s members and visitors for the Community’s success. Yet the phenomenon of Findhorn owes a good amount to the guiding force in Peter. He cannot help but emerge as a patriarchal figure, a modern Moses leading ‘New Age’-minded people out of the wasteland of the city culture to the garden. As much as we seek redemption we fear it – and its acknowledgement. Peter’s role in the building of Findhorn is a story of redemption and transformation. Like the billiards room cum Cluny sanctuary and the rubbish tip that formed the ground for the Findhorn garden. But what of the builder, the body and soul of ‘mankind’? Is he destined to become an extinct species? Or will he, with ‘womankind’, find a path through the maze? Peter’s life ‘down amongst the women’ and the plants offers some instructive guidelines.

My malaise about being involved in this project also stemmed from realising that the Findhorn story has been told many times: The Findhorn Garden, Faces of Findhorn, Paul Hawken’s The Magic of Findhorn, Dorothy Maclean’s To Hear the Angels Sing and her Divina books, The Spirit of Findhorn and the several books of Eileen’s guidance and recently her autobiography Flight into Freedom. There are films. Countless lecture and workshop tours. The market appears flooded. People continue to visit that vanguard of the new age in happy droves, braving the winds of change! Surely we risk boring even the converted with yet another book, even though it tells much more than the tale of Findhorn.

And yet we still have barely moved the mass that is ‘mere materialism’. There’s a lot of work to do to heal the worldwide wounds caused by dualistic systems. What we are engaged in is ever new. The golden age is most likely what could be rather than what once was. There is still a lot of storytelling to do round the tribal fires.

There have been plans afoot to do a film of Peter’s very active life. But first, he must tell his story. From a very different perspective than Eileen. Peter does not perceive himself as a writer, though ever since I’ve known him, like Eileen, he has regularly written informative and engaging letters. He says he’s not a ‘sensitive’ though he’ll admit to having heard a ‘voice’- the time in Jerusalem, for instance, when he knew Eileen was to be his partner. He claims he is a man of action, working on hunches and intuitive flashes. Throughout the years, to the chagrin of certain friends and colleagues, he’s insisted on accepting the channelings of various ‘sensitives’ as confirmation of what he intuitively knows. A recurring challenge in his life is the tendency of people to try to prove him wrong, gainsay his good points and convince him to take different routes, all to no avail. Findhorn was founded on his rock-like faith, against great odds, that God was speaking through Eileen, the ‘Devas’ through Dorothy, Pan through ROC and the Christ through David Spangler, and Peter’s own inner knowing. His whole life’s work is founded on faith – faith in the validity and efficacy of living a life for and of ‘God’.

An avid student of the ancient wisdoms, Peter is a man of mind, welded to spiritual will and purpose, his intellect servant to that higher will, his character consciously tempered through the years by love, begun under the training with his second wife and teacher, Sheena Govan.

When Peter and I connected that day in Cluny, an umbrella of energies enfolded us. They included a cloak and a key. A role to play and a magic password.

Soon after I was asked by his secretary to replace her. It was the beginning of a long and close friendship based on mutual respect and receptivity. Peter has often shared how he and I, so different, have worked so well together. This project is performed under the guiding force of the Universal Wisdom of Sophia. It addresses the nature of faith and tells a true tale about how the super-natural extra-ordinary magic of learning to listen to divine intuition makes life work, about putting hands into the soil, planting seeds and growing in the garden.

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Featured image: Left to Right: Eileen Caddy, Leona Graham (Aroha), Peter Caddy, Mary Inglis photo by Findhorn Foundation