Michael Barker - January 14, 2013
Founded in 1946, the Soil Association is at the forefront of a global movement to promote organic farming. According to their Web site, the Association was formed “by a group of far-sighted individuals who were concerned about the health implications of increasingly intensive agricultural systems.” However, as one might expect, nowhere does the Soil Association’s Web site mention their longstanding connections to the occult community. Indeed, one would hardly guess from their promotional spiel that the description of their founders as being “far-sighted” might equally be interpreted as referring to their ability to communicate with the spiritual realm. This mystical element of the Soil Association’s history has consequently been largely overlooked, which is why Erin Gill’s recently published doctoral thesis, Lady Eve Balfour and the British Organic Food and Farming Movement, is so valuable, especially given the study’s focus on the life of Lady Eve Balfour OBE (1898-1990) — an individual who acted as “a principal force in the creation of the Soil Association in 1946, which she [then] led for more than two decades.” By undertaking the first serious evaluation of the spiritual interests of Eve and her colleagues, Gill comes to the intriguing “conclusion that the early Soil Association should be viewed as a religiously-infused or quasi-religious body and that Eve Balfour’s and other Soil Association members’ New Age beliefs influenced and, indeed, dominated the organisation’s management for many years.”
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Michael Barker - January 28, 2013
Lady Eve Balfour’s interest in “muck and mystery” would continue to play “a highly significant and, at times, possibly a dominant role” in her life, and when she wrote the introduction to the New Age book Co-operation Between Workers on Different Planes of Consciousness (Stockwell, 1954), authored by Veronica, “she referred to ‘the life-giving force of all creation — Divine Love’.” As Gill writes: “More than once, Eve distinguished between materialists and non-materialists, asserting that the Soil Association was made of non-materialists and that the number of people who recognised the limitations of a materialist conception of life was growing.” Eve’s personal papers and correspondence likewise attest to the significance of her anti-materialist convictions, and “provide a large amount of documentary evidence indicating that she had a great and wide-ranging interest in unconventional forms of healing, including spiritual and occult methods.”
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