The foundations of our Community were laid on many levels:

In our collective autobiography we aim to give voice to all those levels. Most of the stories are told through the members of our Community, as this is a powerful way to experience the One Incredible Family. Therefore we consider Our Foundations here through some of the people bringing these elements into the mosaic of our Community.

We start in this Topic with 9 formative people and there may well be sequels to this Topic as there are so many more facets to the founding – initially and ongoing to this day.

Everyone knows of the 3 founders: Eileen Caddy and Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean. During our 60th Birthday Celebrations we learned that there was actually a fourth founder, Lena Lamont. Whilst the autobiographies of Eileen, Peter and Dorothy mention her, her involvement is not widely known.

  • The 5 other formative people we have chosen for this Topic are:
  • Sheena Govan – the spiritual teacher who Dorothy, Peter, Eileen and Lena worked with for many years before they came to the caravan park at Findhorn in 1962.
  • ROC (Robert Ogilvie Crombie) – who brought the connection with Pan, nature spirits and elementals as well as being the guardian of the Community with an occult background.
  • Sir George Trevelyan – a pioneer educationalist, who came to be called the Grandfather of the New Age in Britain in the 1960s
  • Joanie Hartnell-Beavis is part of the Universal Link founded by Liebie Pugh in St Anne’s
  • David Spangler – a spiritual educator of a younger generation, from the USA, with his own access to the subtle worlds.

These formative figures can be considered as different pieces of the mosaic being created in their own contexts and then with paths crossing and connections forming, creating a picture which goes beyond what any one of them could have created by themselves.

Sheena (from Edinburgh) met Dorothy in Canada and brought her to New York to work in the offices of the OSS which developed into MI6 in New York and they worked together in the United States. Dorothy worked later in South America. After the war they both eventually met in London and stayed closely connected through Sheena’s teaching.

In England prior to the Second World War Peter received his spiritual education through Aureolis/Dr Sullivan in the South of England in the Rosecrucian tradition.
Peter and Sheena met and eventually married. Sheena became the teacher of a group of people, which at that point also included Peter and Dorothy.

Peter joined the RAF at the start of the war and got posted to the Middle East where he met Eileen in Iraq and after a time they become a couple. Eileen had her own, at times very difficult path with Sheena.

Lena Lamont

Peter met Lena Lamont in Glasgow where he worked as a Kleeneze salesman. Lena met Sheena and Eileen through Peter.

In 1957 the group surrounding Sheena got unwanted attention from the tabloid media. It was branded as a cult and called ‘The Nameless Ones’ as they couldn’t give a name when pressed by a reporter. This traumatic time led to the isolation of Sheena, whilst Peter, Eileen, Dorothy and Lena worked together at Cluny Hill Hotel, putting the spiritual principles into practice.

Fast-forward to 1962: after the ignominious dismissal of Peter from the hotel management post, the four adults and 6 children lived at the caravan park in Findhorn, not knowing what their future would hold but continuing their spiritual practice in everything. They implemented it in the Findhorn Garden and through meditations on the Network of Light, with Naomi (another formative figure to be introduced in another Topic). In 1965 an outward movement began that brought ROC, Sir George and Joanie into the picture. First with Peter meeting them on his travels around the UK, and soon they started visiting the Caddys in their corner of the caravan park at Findhorn. Following the death of Liebie Pugh Joanie moved to the first cedarwood bungalow and stayed there for the rest of her life. ROC and Sir George are frequent visitors and instrumental in many aspects of the emerging community.

David Spangler was on his own path in the States as a teacher and explorer of subtle and spiritual realms, He heard about Findhorn from Sir Anthony Brooke (whom Peter had met through the Universal Link) on one of his tours to the US. One of David’s students, who was on the Findhorn mailing list sent his booklet The Pathless Path to Dorothy. This made the connection. In 1970 David finally arrived at Findhorn and stayed for three years.

back: Aileen Ross Stewart, David Spangler, Eileen Caddy, Peter Caddy, Dorothy Maclean, Tom Welsh middle: Elfreda Coy, Janet Willoner front: Craig Gibsone, Julia Spangler, François Duquesne, John Willoner During the Abundance conference October 1991

 

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For this Topic we have collected short biographies of each one. As they are written by different authors they give different flavours but overall they

  • Give basic biographical info
  • Describe their involvement with the Findhorn Foundation Community (For five of them we also have added the video clips from the event Celebrating the Founders hosted by Robert Holden during the 60th Birthday Celebrations in November 2022 – Eileen, Peter, Dorothy, Lena, ROC, David)
  • List the relevant excerpts of the Timeline
  • Provide a list of publications (from our Books&More list and anything else the author lists)
  • Offer hyperlinks to their profiles and stories connected to them on the website (tags)

Links to the 9 short biographies: Eileen Caddy, Peter Caddy, Dorothy Maclean, Lena Lamont, Joanie Hartnell-Beavis, ROC, David Spangler, Sheena Govan, Sir George Trevelyan.

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For a more comprehensive picture of these important people, we draw on individual stories by members of One Incredible Family, as well as relevant publications:

We are inviting Community members to continue to share their own recollections of encounters with, experience and learning from these formative people. You can do that via the Comments function at the end of each post or by submitting your own stories which then will be tagged appropriately to link them to the different individuals.

With great delight and deep appreciation we can offer stories written at the time in the past publications listed below. The complete books are accessible as pdf flipbooks in our eLibrary which you can find in Books&More. As we have done for the 50th Birthday Book, we are posting individual chapters as stories as that makes reading them a lot easier. That way they also become searchable and we can link them to other relevant stories through our categories and tags so that they take their rightful place in the mosaic of our collective autobiography.

We thank Terry Gilbey for his support for our recent requests, and acknowledge the Findhorn Foundation for the permission to offer

We thank Alex Walker for his permission to offer The Kingdom Within compiled and edited by Alex Walker in 1994.

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This Topic is brought to you by an inspired collaboration between Keith Armstrong and Cornelia Featherstone – June 2023.

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Topics are a ‘reader’s digest’, a summary of essential Community facets offering a compilation of posts for further information. Click here for a list of Topics we have produced so far.

If you have suggestions for improvements (corrections or additional information), please leave a Comment below. Thank you!