Empire - Terra Umbra - Empire of Shadows

Knightsbridge - summer 1999
There is a healing session in progress the day I visit the lodge. Psychics in white lab smocks
attempt to draw negative energy out of a row of troubled elderly patients seated on cushions in
front of the altar. There is no cross in this church. Instead the watery British sunlight falls on a
massive plaster eagle resembling the luftwaffe symbol and the high priest and priestess wear
turquoise gowns with tiny silver pentagrams around their necks, the same regalia that the Polaires
wore before the war. The fact that they scrub down with holy water before and after the
ceremony only adds to the oddly clinical impression.
The unisex lab smocks and those vivid blue robes bring the works of David Cronenberg to
mind, as much as they recall the witch cults of Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Inferno. Certainly it
looks as if Cronenberg’s resident production designer Carol Spier might have been responsible
for the décor. I am just an observer here, seated towards the back of the assembly with my friend
Andre who has come along to act as a reliable witness to my increasingly paranoid claims. We are
the only ones in the congregation to be wearing black.
The high priestess turns out to be a formidable lady named Jenny Dent. She is the grand
daughter of a famous platform medium from the early days of the SAGB, one Grace Cooke, a
dour, Welsh woman who in the summer of 1934 was photographed having a picnic with the
Polaires at the site of an obscure archaeological excavation in the ruins of the château of Lordat.
At the time Grace claimed to have been channeling the ascended masters in the form of dead
Cathars who contacted her in a series of waking dreams, ultimately directing her to found the
White Eagle Lodge, a movement joined at the hip to the French Polaires and quite possibly to the
Thule Geselschaft. By 1998 the White eagles have a strong presence at the Glastonbury festival
where they do a good deal of recruiting as well as at the Rainbow festival in Scotland.