Rodney Collin

Rodney George Collin-Smith (26 April 1909 – 3 May 1956), known as Rodney Collin, was a British writer who was prolific in the area of spiritual development.

His work was heavily influenced by his teacher P. D. Ouspensky and, through him, G. I. Gurdjieff and their system of spiritual development.

His best known work, The Theory of Celestial Influence, is an ambitious attempt to unite astronomy, physics, chemistry, human physiology and world history with his own version of planetary influences.

Collin was born in Brighton and Hove, England, on 26 April 1909.

He was the son of Frederick Collin-Smith, a wine merchant.

Collin attended Ashford School in Kent, where he was a boarder, and then the London School of Economics, where he received his Bachelor of Commerce degree.

Collin worked as a journalist for the Evening Standard and the Sunday Referee on the subject of art and travel.

He met his future wife Janet Buckley in 1930 on a pilgrimage organised by the international Christian movement Toc H.

Collin read Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe for the first time the same year.

In 1935, Collin and Buckley attended several lectures given by Scottish author Maurice Nicoll in London.

After meeting Ouspensky in September 1936, Collin reached an instant euphoria: he had found what he had been looking for in his extensive reading and traveling.

In 1948, he, his wife Janet and several students of Ouspensky, who decided to follow him moved to the Tlalpan suburb of Mexico City.

There they lived for two years.

His book The Theory of Eternal Life was published anonymously in 1949, the same year he wrote the play Hellas (Hellas), which represents the various stages of Greek civilization.

In 1949, Rodney and Janet Collin purchased a plot of land in the mountains outside the city of Mexico City, where in 1951 the foundation was laid for the planetarium "Tetecala", which in Aztec means "Stone House of God."

This building occupied a central place in the work of Rodney and people close to him throughout the following years.

There were theatrical performances of esoteric mysteries, as well as meetings of Rodney Collin's groups.

All this time Collin did not stop working on the book "Theory of Celestial Influence", which was published only in 1953 in Spanish, and in 1954 - in English.

In the spring of 1954, a group of Rodney Collin, under the name of "The Unicorn Actors ", gave twelve public performances of Henrik Ibsen's " Per Gunnet " (Peer Gynt) for the residents of the town of Tlalpan.

Rodney played the role of Button Caster.

In 1954 and 1955 Rodney traveled to Europe and the Middle East, the main purpose of which was to collect material and establish links with the esoteric schools of the past.

During his visit to Rome in 1954 he was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church.

This step Rodney Collin pondered for a long time.

With the help of Catholicism, he wanted to attract more people interested in the esoteric side of Christianity into his work.

The choice in favor of Catholicism was not accidental, since it was the most popular religion in the countries of South America.

As a result of the distribution of books by Ediciones Sol in Latin America, Rodney Collin's groups started to appear in Peru, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, and contacts were established in several other countries of the American continent.

In January 1955, Rodney visited groups in Lima and Buenos Aires, and then went to Cusco and Machu Picchu to study the remains of ancient civilizations.

Fellow Toc H member, Robert de Ropp(The Master Game: Beyond the Drug Experience (1968), Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in Man and Animals (1969 et al. ), was likely a source for their interest in the Work ideas. The influence of Ouspensky is indesputable; his and Collin's approaches seem inseparable.

Within Collin's most relevant contributions, it is the emphasis on the idea of Fourth Way school existing in different times.

He says:

Collin studied the sequence of European civilizations, finding a pattern which would follow a planetary scale where the times are 10 times longer than in the case of human life.

His sequence starts following Toynbee's but soon he changes some aspects, trying to follow his said pattern.

Thus, his list begins with the Greeks (with roots on the Egyptian, which he considers the last one in the previous sequence), then the Romans, the Primitive Christians, the Monastic Christians, the Medieval Christians, the Renaissance and the Synthetic.

He also quotes the influence of an extra-European civilization, the Arabic, upon the Medieval Christian civilization.

Collin established a relation between Fourth Way schools and the origin and development of these civilizations.

He says:

The conceptual foundations for this project are the Law of Three, arguably similar to the triad of Thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the Law of Seven, the idea that the notes of the Western musical scale encode universal stages in essentially all developmental processes.

Collin unites both of these schemata geometrically using the enneagram figure.

Collin's other work includes The Theory of Eternal Life, which uses some of the ideas of The Theory of Celestial Influence as a point of departure to formulate a theory of the cycles and potentials of souls, e.g. reincarnation.

His works The Theory of Conscious Harmony and The Mirror of Light are more spiritual explorations of humanity: faith, acceptance and forgiveness in contrast to the philosophical scope of his earlier works.