10 - The English on the Moray Riviera

Summary

When Yeshe Losal wanted to publicise Samye Ling's plans to develop Holy Isle as a spiritual retreat and to display various designs for the new centre, he did so with a press conference at the Findhorn Foundation near Forres, on the Moray coast. This was a sensible choice because it connected Samye Ling to an international network of the sort of people who attended spiritual retreats on remote islands. Now one of Europe's oldest New Age centres, Findhorn had its inauspicious origins in the 1962 sacking of three English people from their jobs running the Cluny Hotel in Forres. Peter and Eileen Caddy and their friend Dorothy Maclean moved into the cheapest accommodation they could find: a shabby caravan on a holiday park.

The Caddys and Maclean had a long history of involvement in the English fringe milieu of alternative spirituality, esoteric knowledge, plant spirits and Venusian UFOs. Rosicrucians (or the people of the ‘red cross’) claim access to an ancient body of secret knowledge about the nature of the material and spiritual worlds which supposedly dates from the Middle Ages but which like most of such things is a modern invention. As a young man Peter Caddy joined the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, a group barely larger than its name that met in a pub in Christchurch to study esoteric subjects from lectures, plays and correspondence material prepared by their inspired master George Sullivan. Peter also attended meetings at the Pimlico flat of Sheena Govan, whom he married in 1948.