Callanish Peter Whitehead In 1996, Peter Whitehead suffered a major heart attack. At the time, he was involved with The Falconer (1997), a film project made with Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. A key sequence in the film was shot at the ancient stone circle at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. In this previously unpublished essay, Whitehead reflects upon the work he did on the film and attempts to triangulate his heart problems, an unexplained incident at Callanish, and a number of ideas from his novel The Risen. The novel The Risen (1994) starts with three experiments that, by an unforeseen or predicted "coincidence," occur at the identical moment in time, but in three apparently different places and contexts. Three experiments, three places, and three people exploring a different technical means by which a hidden truth might be revealed: three pyramids—two pyrimidine crystals, one seen and one eaten, and Cheops' pyramid at Giza. So what is the implication for our comprehension of "coincidence" in this context? By the end of the novel, it seems probable that the three events are a single event seen from three separate points of view or modes of access. This "single" event is a breakthrough in plane, from linear horizontal narrative time into the flux of multiplicity, or so-called vertical time. Jung calls this "verticality" synchronicity, while David Bohm suggests it is the one true and only disposition of time/space, an involute of phenomenon coexisting across interlocking webs of holographic time/space.1 The breakthrough in plane, as deciphered in the novel, is an advance: a dislocation into the vertical dimensions of simultaneity, transcending the illusory single narrative dimension we are supposed to inhabit, that of the horizontal; that which is a mere horizon rather than the entire cosmos. A [End Page 865] breakthrough that is a new, higher insight; a motion through into the continuum beyond, which we can normally only imagine. But once you believe in such a probability, you activate the ability to see it at work. It explains otherwise unforeseen, bizarrely connected events that are dismissed somewhat carelessly as mere "coincidence." But such "coincidences" (Bohm's implicate order) are proof of the presence of these further fields of being, meaning, and influence, which we only perceive, experience, sense, or receive telepathically at brief moments of syncope ... flashes of absence from the prison house of reason, with which modern man, blinded by science, creates his so-called normal reality.2 Robert Temple describes such a field in eloquent detail as the "Anubis field" in the introduction to the newly revised publication of his masterpiece The Sirius Mystery (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976). His account is a very precise portrayal of the meaning and mechanisms of the "R-Field," as elaborated in The Risen.3 Thirteen (or fourteen) years after writing The Risen, I suffered a major heart attack at dawn, 5:34 a.m., on August 3, 1996. By "coincidence," this was the precise moment of the helical rising of Sirius above the Giza plain, the point at which, according to the Ancient Egyptians, was the symbolic timing of the sacred birth of Horus the Falcon. The ritualistic aspect of this "event," at the heart of each of the three experiments, is the essential occult motif flowing through the entire novel. What are the odds of having a heart attack at such a symbolically immaculate instant of time—symbolic of not only an entire multilayered vertical novel, but an entire life lived, years spent copulating with and breeding falcons, giving birth to them on the physical plane? Some time after I had recovered from an emergency bypass operation, reflecting on the "coincidences" involved, I came to the conclusion that The Risen had always been a premonition of the heart attack, as an initiatory death-in-life event; its timing inevitably (according to the rules of the R-Field) coinciding with the moment of symbolic birth of Horus the Falcon. I was lucky to survive this death-in-life experience. It was Freud who announced to his dumbfounded colleagues, on regaining consciousness after famously fainting in a hotel in Munich in 1912 during an important conference (after...
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Jan 1, 2016
Archana Barua 
Open Access