The Archive of Stanley Messenger

The Butterfly Man

Biographical Notes by Mike Jones and others

Stanley Messenger is an utterly unique and unforgettable person and his surname describes an important part of his nature perfectly. He has been a messenger from early childhood: a seeker after truth and an extraordinary thinker. He has shared his insights freely (in conversations, talks and writings) and carried them among uncountable milieux, groups of people, individuals and communities during the many occupations he has pursued. He has been an actor, teacher, writer, lecturer, businessman, social worker, craftsman and not least husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, companion and friend; and this does not exhaust the list.

Like his good friend, Sir George Trevelyan, he based his thinking, fundamentally Christ-centred in the deepest and broadest sense, on the concepts derived from Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy (Wisdom of the Human Being). Stanley preferred to call himself an 'anthroposopher' rather than an anthroposophist, as he was suspicious of all 'isms', which he felt ran the danger of limiting and confining one within doctrinal structures and styles of being.

He has been totally unafraid, however, to go into more unusual fields and bring his strong thinking powers and above all his own inner experience to bear, in order to penetrate the matter at hand. Thus the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence and communication with and from it, and the phenomenon of crop circle formations all became significant for him, but always with the focus of seeking to understand what the meaning was for our human understanding and the development of our awareness, within the context of these challenging times.

Another abiding interest has been the question of sexuality and how this may be understood on all its many levels and in all its complexity. Stanley has described himself as 'exaggeratedly sensually sensitive', a trait he perhaps shares with one of his favourite authors, John Cowper Powys. Stanley recalls feeling overwhelmed the first time he was confronted by a woman (complete with make up) at a school dancing lesson. His sense of being overwhelmed completely got in the way of his being able to learn the dance.

He has been passionately committed to searching for the spiritual in all aspects of life and holds deeply to the view that solutions to the problems facing humanity on all levels can only be found when the spiritual dimension is included.

Stanley has spent decades studying butterflies, seeing them as very special representatives of the elemental kingdom. This passion was sparked as a child on holiday in the Mendips and has continued through his life. The Gatekeeper butterfly has played a particularly significant role in his life and perhaps best symbolises Stanley's role in the world as well. The Gatekeeper butterfly literally only flourishes at the boundaries of different kinds of landscape. If you go from agricultural land across a hedge and onto open moor, the Gatekeeper flourishes around the actual points where the two landscapes meet.

Stanley has always occupied threshold space, like the Gatekeeper butterfly. However, his role has not only been of exploring thresholds, but also to encourage others to cross thresholds. This is perhaps the quality for which he is most appreciated and celebrated. He has a very intimate way of communicating with every individual he meets. Time and again, in collecting together material for this appreciation, people have commented on how Stanley has changed their lives and brought about deep insights. In fact, many people can recall one sentence that has had a profound impact upon them. Like a butterfly, he alights upon individuals' souls and connects to the nectar.

Stanley was born on February 9th 1917 to a middle class family living in Hendon. His father was a qualified doctor, who practised as a dentist, wishing to pass his practice over to either of his two sons. It was clear, however, that Stanley did not fit into the conventional world. He was not fond of his mother, disliked living in London and was even unhappier when sent to boarding school at St Lawrence College, Ramsgate, where he was bullied. His only respite was to be in nature, to which he was introduced at the age of eight or so, when sent to his grandparents' house in Winscombe on the edge of the Mendips for the Easter holidays.

It was in Winscombe that he met his Aunt Maggie, the unmarried rebel of the family, who introduced him to nature and the study of butterflies, birds and flowers. Stanley explored the Mendips both with his aunt and on his own and these childhood experiences became the foundation of his spiritual development. His sister, Margaret (Topsy), recalls that Stanley used to take her out into the countryside from her boarding school at weekends: "It always seemed to be sunny and the air filled with the scent of wild flowers and fresh mown hay!" Stanley's brother Guy became a botanist and Stanley recalls that they "giggled a lot together".

After school, Stanley studied medicine, but dropped out a month or two before taking qualifying exams, aware that he was only pursuing medical studies to satisfy his parents. Within a week of dropping out, he got a professional job in the theatre and remained in repertory work from 1938 to 1946. He married Katharine in 1941; his daughter, Jenifer, was born in 1942 and son, Michael, in 1944. His marriage broke up in 1946 at about the same time as leaving the theatre.

It was during his acting years that Stanley first came across the work of Rudolf Steiner. Stanley recalls:

I was sitting in a pub within 300 yards or less of Piccadilly Circus when a man came in. I was in a very sort of sleazy grouping of Hampstead people. It was very largely a very degenerate kind of gay community that I'd got myself linked to - I wasn't gay but I was pretty and I was pursued.

So somebody came into the pub where we were and asked if I had ever heard of Rudolf Steiner and I said I hadn't and he gave me a book. It wasn't by Steiner, it was by a pupil, but I read the whole book through over night and I joined the Rudolf Steiner library at Park Road, London and for five years I read and I read and I read. I found where I wanted to be, really, through that.

I became a member of the Society at a time when it was completely divided into two groups; one group following the more English, western experience of Steiner and the other the more Theosophical more orientalist sort of connections with it. Theosophy and Anthroposophy were linked, but the Theosophists wouldn't have anything special to do with the Christian tradition, but Steiner and his followers did.

Most people in the movement were very independent as far as their relation to esoterics was concerned and followed their own paths and reading. It was far more individualistic and less theosophical in its approach all together. I must have read hundreds of lectures of Steiner's.

I suppose I became quite an authority on that and I was quite a good talker. I didn't really feel I could write. I have written stuff, but mainly I've talked. And during all those early years, as soon as I had grasped what was really going on, I used to lecture and lecture and lecture to whatever groups I found.

Stanley began Steiner teacher training in Hampstead and taught at Steiner schools in Forest Row and Stourbridge. He married his second wife, Patty, another Steiner teacher, in 1954 and his second son, John, was born in 1960. Somewhere about this time his involvement with social work began.

Tyna Redpath met Stanley in 1973, when she was working for a charity called SHAPE which helped the homeless, of which Stanley was a trustee. Stanley worked for the Housing Department of Birmingham City Council and was renowned for taking on the most difficult and challenging homelessness cases. Stanley's job was to rehouse them and he would spend days with each client in order to gain their trust and meet their needs.

Stanley was a grandfatherly figure to Tyna and supported her both in her work and her personal life. He also spoke about Rudolf Steiner and took her to Forest Row. Tyna was hungry for something spiritual, but had no idea what that might be. Stanley would say enigmatically, "You are a chrysalis". When asked what he meant, he would reply: "Because you might turn into a butterfly".

In the late 1970s he gathered together a small group, whom he called the 'Butterfly Group', to study butterflies and what they could teach us about ourselves and also about the elemental world that is at work behind all natural phenomena. Around this time Stanley met someone with the gift of vision into the subtle realms, whom he recognised as a necessary member of the group. This was Peter Dawkins.

Through Peter's insights into 'Landscape Temples' and his fine ability to teach people how to be aware on other levels in order to work with the landscape, the original group became the Gatekeeper Trust, named after the small Hedge Brown or Gatekeeper butterfly. The emphasis was on researching, honouring and re-awakening the temple alignments in the landscape of Britain, and later of Europe and the world. Pilgrimages to these temples of sacred landscape became the focus of the trust. Sites in Britain included Glastonbury and other places on the St Michael leyline, Rhandhirmwyn near Llandovery, St Davids and the Prescelli Mountains and Iona.

Sir George Trevelyan became the inspiring and very active figurehead of the Trust, whilst Stanley has been described as the yeast, drawing people in to the project.

Patty died in 1977 and Stanley came to live in Glastonbury in the early 1980s in a flat provided by Helene Koppejan for the use of the Gatekeeper Trust. Glastonbury was seen as a teaching temple: an obvious landscape temple for people to perceive with Bride's Mound as the root, St Benedict's Church the sacral, the Abbey as the solar plexus, Chalice Hill the heart and the Tor the crown. Not long after moving to Glastonbury, some differences of interpretation led to Stanley withdrawing from the 'Gatekeeper Trust', but without animosity.

The Arthurian and Grail legends and the 'Matter of Britain' were an important background to the Trust's work, but they are also fundamental to Stanley's worldview, and hence his deep connection with Glastonbury and his love for it. Over the years he has come to be recognised in the town as one of the much loved and respected elders, indeed as a kind of Merlin figure. He has identified with this figure and also at times with that of the wounded Fisher King from the Parsifal story, powerful archetypes and teachers for our inner growth that they are.

The early 80s marked the beginning of an extended, extremely mobile period, with moves to different parts of the south-west, and trips to Europe and eventually the USA. Stanley regularly gave talks during this period, to members of various spiritual/educational foundations. The interests and subjects he pursued were too many to track and would probably read like some kind of ephemeral shopping list. Special mention should be given to his exploration of Cathar mythology and time spent in the Languedoc around Rennes le Chateau.

Stanley began living with Gudrun Pelham in 1989, with whom he now lives in Glastonbury. They were involved for a number of years with an esoteric group organised by Louis Böhtlingk, living with Gudrun in North East Scotland for four and a half years from the mid 1990's before returning to Glastonbury.

Stanley's contribution to the Glastonbury Crop Circle Symposium and the body of thought around crop circles has been significant. He was present at the Symposium from the start (1991), and became its resident philosopher and grandfather. His discourses were always very interesting and uplifting, though it might be open to question how much everyone understood or remembered them - they embodied such a unique viewpoint, difficult to replicate.

Stanley's sense of the cosmological whole - archons and elohim - and his highly spiritual approach to small, 'real' things - butterflies and crop circles - gave a sense of space, and his observations ventilated the hallways of the mind and stretched things around. In the crop circle movement, bugged as it has been by doubt, hoaxing and the need to prove things, Stanley has been consistently metaphysical, as if intentionally keeping that wing of the field fascinatingly open, while it has at times been under assault.

A classic little profundity was Stanley's observation that crop circle irradiated wheat was harvested, homoeopathically potentised by a process of dilution with other wheat and, amongst other things, funnelled into McVitie's biscuits and distributed through supermarkets worldwide! So millions were imbibing potentised crop circle wheat! He was one of the people concerned with the 'Circlemakers' as highly intelligent beings with a message, an agenda and even a sense of humour, and this was just one example of his interesting, circuitous thinking.

Attendees at the Symposium, coming from many places and countries, all loved him, and his talks on the Sunday, the third and final day of the annual conference, were always packed full. And then, in 2004, Stanley stopped in mid-speech and clearly indicated he had nothing more to say. He had said all he had to say. That was that.

An amount of his thinking and wisdom has, with his and others' help, been digitalised and made into Stanley's online archive. This includes articles and writings on an array of subjects, with two larger works, 'The Cathar Connection' and 'The Intraterrestrials', and even some musical material. www.isleofavalon.co.uk/messenger.html

Above all, Stanley should be celebrated as a wonderful soul communicator. Always engaging, with a twinkle in the eye and infectious giggle, sharing his observations with everyone of whatever age. An agent of synchronicity, talking to individuals at the right time with the appropriate information to provoke further inquiry.

This appreciation has been written because Stanley has been an initiator for many hundreds of people on the spiritual quest. He has not been an author of books, a self publicist or a collector of followers. He has, however, been a unique presence amongst us for many decades, interacting on a human level at the threshold, activating, inspiring and enthusing. A good soul.

Stanley's own comment on this brief biography was: "It's always a temptation to write about the things one likes about oneself and to leave out the things one's ashamed of, hasn't thought through or doesn't even understand".

The Archive of Stanley Messenger

© Stanley Messenger. You may print out any of these works in single copies for personal use and study, in a spirit of fair play.
Reproduction on websites or in print, except in the case of quotations, require permission from the publisher.