1. ‘Heptonstall Old Church’ and ‘Football At Slack’ were published in The Times Literary Supplement in June, 1977.

2. Bedient, C. ‘New Confessions’, The Sewanee Review, 56, Winter 1980, p.474.

3. Langley, E. The Times Literary Supplement, 18 Jan. 1980.

4. Grigson, G. ‘Ragged Letters?’, The Listener, 26 July 1979.

5. Ross, A. The London Magazine, Aug/Sept. 1979.

6. Brownjohn, A. Encounter, August 1979, p.47–8.

7. Jennings, E. ‘Landscape Poetry’, The Times, 26 July 1979.

8. Murphy, R. ‘Last Exit to Nature’, New York Review of Books, 10 June 1982.

9. Vaughan, T. Magica Adamica and Anthrosophia Theomagica 1655, Republished in Rudrum, A.(Ed.),The Works of Thomas Vaughan, Clarendon 1984.

10. Kathleen Raine made a detailed analysis of the influence of these works on Blake’s writing in Blake and Tradition , Princeton University Press, 1968.

11. Thomas Taylor translates Porphyry’s words as ‘the confused mixture of generation’ but the phrase ‘witch’s brew’ is attributed to Porphyry by the doxographer Stobacus and is quoted in Lamberton’s translation (Porphyry 16).

12. The imprisonment of cosmic energy (Light) in material bodies (Matter) is still a fundamental concept in our scientific explanations of the world: it is, for example, basic to our description of photosynthesis.

13. “the Three Mothers … are Aire, Water, and Fire; a still Water … a hissing Fire, and Aire the middle Spirit … The Heavens were made of the Fire, the Earth was made of the Water … and the Ayre proceeded from the middle Spirit” (Vaughan, line 1457–67.