I met Jo May for the first time in the early 1980s. I was doing some research for a series of television programmes about the paranormal in the West Country, and had heard about the remarkable 'fogou' at Rosemerryn, a few miles beyond Penzance. I rang Jo, who invited me to come and see for myself.

My wife Joy and I arrived about mid-afternoon, and found the place full of people - Jo was running it as a conference centre for the study of human potential.

I found Jo an impressive sort of person - sincere and gentle, and totally lacking in the kind of pretension that I had seen so often among 'gurus' in California. He showed us around the old house and its grounds, and we went down through the fogou - a kind of underground tunnel that curves downward under a bank with carefully built walls of the kind seen in passage graves; not far from the entrance there is a chamber off on the left. …

…We sat in his lounge, and he described how he had bought the house in 1978 - in spite of the fact that its previous four owners had died prematurely. One old countryman had told him that the place was ‘bad.'

Jo, it seemed, had started life as an actor, training with the Bristol Old Vic. In 1971, at the age of 27, he married, and decided to give up acting in favour of psychotherapy and groupwork. After another period at university, where he read psychology and philosophy, he became a Research Fellow in psychology at the University of Surrey. Then, one day, he decided to abandon academic life and the prospect of tenure, and move to Cornwall to grow his own vegetables. His professor tried hard to dissuade him, but admitted that he felt envious.

So, with his wife Angela and two daughters, he moved into Rosemerryn, supported his family by renting out the cottage, and began running a psychotherapy practice. And, as he tells in the present book, he found himself driven by an obsessive enthusiasm for the place - he hurled himself into rebuilding, and into turning the wilderness into a vegetable garden.

In his enthusiasm, he failed to realise that Angela was having to readjust to a new life. So that when things suddenly broke apart, he was shattered. No amount of work on the house could compensate for the loss of his wife and daughters.

He told us how one day, he was sitting in his armchair in the corner of the room, feeling torn apart by misery and confusion, when quite suddenly he found himself up in the air, looking down on his own body. Suddenly, he was seeing himself ‘from outside', as if he was looking at another person, and knew that this misery would pass. When, a few seconds later, he found himself back in his own body, the misery had evaporated, and he felt at peace…

...About two years ago, Jo sent me the typescript of this book. I read it and was enthusiastic. I was also interested to find out how much Jo had learned about the fogou since then…

…So I was not surprised to discover, from his book, that Jo had come to believe that he had learned something of the past history of the fogou, dating back to the Celts who had originally lived on the site.

On first reading, I was a little dubious when, with the second chapter, the book slips into a kind of fiction. It seemed to me that he had an important and interesting story to tell, and that by introducing this fictional element, he was raising an element of doubt in the reader's mind. But when I had finished the book, I could understand why he had decided to write five chapters in the form of fiction. It is the only way of conveying the immediacy of his sense of the past, his feeling that it is as real as the present.

Undoubtedly, Rosemerryn is a place of power, a place where some psychic energy forms a link between this world and some parallel region. I am not sure whether I would have been capable of living at Rosemerryn…  But I believe that, in living there and coming to terms with its forces, Jo has learned a profound truth about the nature of human existence: that if it is to be understood, it has to be lived at a level of energy that causes all our natural laziness to protest.

Fogou is a remarkable book by an extraordinary man.

 

Edited extract from “Fogou—A Journey Into The Underword” by Jo May-(Prussak). Published by Gothic Image. 1996.