Royal Academy Schools, 1-2 October 2010

Researching a series of unexplained incidents at this historic building, artist Blue Firth uncovered a first-hand account of apparent poltergeist activity in the artists’ studios.

While patrolling the 18th century corridors one night in 2008, Red Collar guard Nathan Phillips experienced something that prevented him from finishing his shift: “When I got back to where the skeletons are kept, the doors all slammed shut — like boom, boom, boom one after another. I tried to make out what it could be and checked all the doors again. I got to the same point in the same sequence and the bangs happened all over again. I didn’t finish my patrol that night.”

To make sense of what happened to Nathan, Blue has collaborated with parapsychologist Dr David Luke and writer Mark Pilkington. As preparatory research they undertook investigative training sessions with the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP).

Bringing together their knowledge and experience of the paranormal and arts fields, the trio have devised an event that merges Blue’s art practice with David and Mark’s expertise in making sense of the unexplained. The end result is a unique participatory experiment in which the audience are both observers and the observed, the haunters and the haunted.

Participants will be asked to complete psychological and physiological assessments before and after entering the site of the haunting, which will be monitored for any unusual occurrences. The vigil will take place under carefully controlled conditions and in total darkness.

Combining authentic investigative procedures with subtle performative aspects, Vigil examines and subverts the roles of audience expectation, spectatorship and belief.

Spaces for both nights are extremely limited so we advise reserving your position soon.

Visit the Royal Academy web site to buy tickets.

Dreamflesh Journal contributor Stephen Grasso is now blogging under the banner ‘Clean living in difficult circumstances‘. Stephen sums it up thusly:

It will predominantly feature writing about Voodoo, magic, music, obscure records, psychogeography, and whatever else I get up to and feel like writing about.

It’s essentially a way for me to get regular new material out while I work on finishing my book, so I don’t feel quite so much like one of those guys who secretly makes a throne for the Archangel Metatron out of lightbulbs and toilet rolls in his garage, that nobody else ever gets to see or hear about.

The book in question is, needless to say, much anticipated. For now, the blog serves up Stephen’s refreshingly relevant occultism, subversive antics in the City, and obscure Voodoo vinyl, with rum & cigars aplenty.

In the wake of his splendid Black Sheep album, inspired by the Clash’s 1986 busking tour, Julian Cope’s undertaking a brief, bold tour around England this week. Starting at 10am tomorrow, Monday 27th October, at the ancient law hill Swanborough Tump in the Vale of Pewsey, it sweeps through a fascinating array of landmarks in the history of British protest, ending at the C.G. Jung statue in Liverpool at the end of Wednesday.

There’s a list of days and locations; times for each performance are being left rough, ready and open. Pull a sickie and catch one.

I met Jennifer Dumpert during a trip to California in 2005. In a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco she outlined a dream practice she developed during a rough time in New York, a process of mapping dream content onto your local geography in order to foster bonds between the dream and waking worlds.

This sounded fantastic for the first Dreamflesh Journal, but unfortunately she didn’t find time to develop a piece on the subject (though Volume One did include her fascinating examination of how the sense of self-identity in dreams can seep into waking life).

Well, she’s just launched her Urban Dreamscape site which documents her experiments in mapping her dreams onto the streets near her San Francisco home. Two books she mentions as key inspirations will immediately clue in anyone who’s read them: The Art of Memory by Francis Yates and The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. The former seems most directly relevant, because instead of literally documenting dreams of local places, she takes the creative step of transposing dreams onto walls, windows, lampposts, shops and other features that aren’t associated with the dream content in any linear way. Situationist dérive tactics are the engine for latching dreams onto places, cumulatively layering dreamtime onto everyday geography in a way that seems to cannily draw on hunter-gatherer myth-making, Renaissance magic and modern art activism.

She’s also attempted to express own internal, imaginal palimpsest of dream-place minglings in digital form with a clickable map of her stomping grounds which fires off little impressionistic Flash and QuickTime experiments in depicting these mergings and juxtapositions of psyche and urban environments. These multimedia fragments are intriguing, playful indicators, pointing at the true riches that Jennifer also hints at: interactive, regional collaborations on the generation of local dreamscapes, crafted and intuited in the flesh, on the street…

It’s Independence Day today. I thought I might feel like checking out the local parade here in Palo Alto, but actually my lack of connection to the whole thing, together with everyone else’s immersion, creates the ideal sense of dislocation in which to take stock and reflect. The thumping parades have died down, so I guess everyone’s tucking into the barbecues now. Where shall I begin?

San Francisco

A wonderful city. The air is clean, fresh and bright, and the feeling permeates. Well, it seemed to permeate pretty much everything except my skin. The expression “hitting a funk” bubbled up at the time as the best description of my state. Some combination of the mounting length of time without real personal space, and the contrast between some ugly feelings this brought up and the prettiness around me… all conspired to conjure a less than ideal introduction to the city.

There were good things, of course. I caught Erik Davis doing a reading from his new book on Led Zeppelin in a bookshop on Haight Street, which was a blast. Erik and his wonderful partner Jennifer Dumpert graciously let me crash at their splendid place for a few nights, and the bits of their social whirl that I hooked up with were great. Had some great chats with Erik’s fiery, freaky friend Wef, and met a bunch of great DJ/artist friends of Erik’s. Sadly, my dancing feet weren’t around for the night these guys put on. By then, Erik’s sage recommendations from his arcane, extends-to-every-room library had possessed me, a channel to cope with the dark clouds gathering over my head.

James Hillman is an author who’s been looming over my horizon for a while now, and his Dream and the Underworld immediately started hitting home, crystallizing some of the vaporous thoughts and feelings I’ve been having relating to this Dreamflesh journal I’m planning. Even more potent was Michael Ortiz Hill‘s Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage. Published in 1994, the year I started a zine about dreams, the year before I started a journal concerned with apocalyptic themes, it’s one of those books that you can’t believe you haven’t discovered sooner – and yet in a way, you’re glad you didn’t. In short, it comes at just the right time. Michael’s sophisticated yet heartfelt analysis of themes and patterns in people’s dreams of nuclear and ecological holocaust resonated deeply with my own perspectives, feelings, and yes, dreams. What’s more, the brief biographical details in the introduction – mentioning his period of homelessness and his work with the dying as a registered nurse – underlined his “effort to understand the path of compassion during a tumultuous age” with something more than mere credibility. When he talked of sneaking in to lectures by Norman O. Brown while he was homeless, to listen to this oft-neglected curiosity of classical scholarship colliding with the millennial fervour of the 1960′s, the connections deepened (Brown was a key influence on my thinking during the 90′s, and I had as yet failed to come across anyone else standing up to claim him as a key source). So I tracked Michael’s email down, and got in touch. I’d left the last week of my stay here open for “what may come”, and it seemed like Michael fit the bill. Over the next week I gradually planned my trip to visit him in the Santa Monica mountains.

Before leaving San Francisco, my funk came to a head, and Erik’s prize cactus bore the brunt. In one of those accidents that immediately feels like psychic steam forcing its way out any which way it can, I knocked over a Tjuringa board that in turn toppled the cactus that was well over a foot high. It’s now considerably shorter. Sorry, Erik.

Garberville

So I was in kind of a state on the Amtrak bus north up to Garberville in Humboldt County. Initially, my fragility wasn’t helped in the slightest when, just as the landscape started to kick in with beauty and majesty, a few of the other passengers lobbied to get a video showing. The gaudy teen-flick vibe of Orange County‘s opening half-hour sent me reeling into a profoundly stressed space between America’s good (outside drifting by) and bad (inside being loud at me). But, the film turned out to be kind of interesting and pretty funny in a goofy-but-intelligent way. Jack Black has a very-much-in-his-element turn as a drugged-out loser, and there’s some great supporting roles filled by Lily Tomlin, John Lithgow, Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis (doing a great scene as a Stanford dean getting spiked).

As we hit real redwoods-and-windy-rivers country, I was thrilled and privileged by my first site of the Eel River: an osprey plunging straight into the waters and emerging swiftly with a fish in its claws. I was in love with birds of prey as a kid, and this is one of the archetypal scenes of such a love. My jaw dropped. When the first really fucking big redwood trunks slid by, a tear threatened to drop from my eye. There are no words for such impassive, undeniable presence.

I was in Garberville at the invite of a friend of a friend, Scott, who met Merrick while he was at the protest against the extension of the Manchester Airport runway. Scott lives in an Airstream trailer (while he builds his cabin) on some land way up in the hills near Garberville, and works with the Trees Foundation, a charity helping grassroots groups to preserve the ecological integrity of the Pacific Northwest. The week I arrived he was working with some other people preparing to do a fund-raising Thai noodles stall at a festival that weekend. Unfortunately the festival itself clashed with the dream conference I’d come to attend in Berkeley, but it was gratifying fun to muck in a help paint signs and such like for the stall.

Scott was – like pretty much everyone who’s extended their hospitality to me over here – a gracious and generous host, and we put up a groovy tent (actually more of a grandiose mosquito net) for me to get some up-close-with-nature time during my stay. Connecting with Scott that first night was great. Feeling more and more ecological ideas weave themselves forcefully into my thinking for Dreamflesh journal, I found myself hitting the classic writer’s guilt about not doing enough practical, hands-on work. If the environment’s so screwed, shouldn’t I be learning permaculture and agitating instead of waxing philosophical? Naturally I’m never much of an either/or person, but I do manifest an imbalance… But then here was Scott, someone devoting so much energy to pragmatic activism, and yet, at least that night when I arrived, he felt starved of perspectives, ideas, inspiration. So between Scott’s responses to my loquacious musings, and my lending a hand to Scott’s stall construction efforts, we seemed to find exactly the kind of fruitful meeting and exchange we both needed. Cool.

Sadly I was stricken with flu and allergies the next day (and for over a week from there, in total). One of Scott’s first, fatal remarks to me were, “Oh, I’ve got a bit of a cough, but don’t worry, it’s not catching.” But despite the hacking and sniffling, I couldn’t not appreciate the humbling redwoods in the Humboldt State Park, on a daytrip with with Scott’s girlfriend Joan, and her friend Matt from New York.

The strange little town of Garberville, I soon learned, is renowned for its dope-growing. Oddly, I missed out on sampling some while I was there. But knowing this, the hemp shop and the fantastic organic bagels and smoothie shop fell right into place, as did the wiry Latino guy called J-Bird who approached me about ten minutes after I arrived asking if I wanted to smoke some pot with him. I also remembered a great little film called Homegrown about dope-growing in northern California, and realised where the region depicted there hooked up to the place I was now in.

On my last night there, I checked out the tiny cinema to see Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s an essential film for our times. Seeing it in California – especially such an environmentally-conscious area of the state – added some force to it, given those infamous recordings of Enron traders as they create California’s rolling blackouts for blatant, ugly profit. And yet more Dreamflesh concepts resolved themselves into sharper focus; the Enron saga seems to be as crucial as 9/11 for understanding what’s going on in our world now, and it seems to me there is more than a little uncanny cosmic resonance in the fact that CEO Jeff Skilling resigned a week before the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Berkeley and the Dream Conference

The tail-end of my flu kind of smothered my engagement in the Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Berkeley, but it was definitely worth my while. I loved Berkeley itself. Being the old stomping ground of Philip K. Dick and Terence McKenna, among others, it had strong associations for me, and it didn’t disappoint. As pretty in its way as the hipper parts of San Francisco, but lower-lying and less assuming, seemingly more at ease with its run-down aspects, it exuded a relaxed kookiness evident in its wildly diverse religious communities. Curiously, the evident Indian and Pakistani community – I grabbed some very passable samosas on University Avenue – made me feel quite at home, having spent most of my adult life surrounded by transplants of these cultures in Leeds and London. Yet more warm hospitality came in the form of Antero and Sylvi Alli, whose place was the picture of esoteric Berkeley homeliness.

The conference opening didn’t bode well. A woman had been invited to initiate proceedings with a song. She explained very sincerely that she had done “a lot of research” on the internet about dreams, songs, and the current world situation, but when she started her backing tape and some terribly standard pseudo-soul session music issued forth, I braced myself. She launched into some sub-’Ebony and Ivory’ lyrics about dreaming of a better world, and asked us to clap along and sign the word “dream” in the chorus. My ice is often reluctant to break with these things, but break it will, given enough seduction through humour, intelligence, or just plain charisma. Sadly none of these showed themselves, and I half-heartedly suppressed my smile as I wrote, “… this is California. I have arrived.”

It was good to see some of the “big names” in consciousness research – Charles Tart and Stan Krippner being the most prominent – but as is usually the case with conferences, it’s the impassioned people with less of a standing that make the most impact, that and the social connections. Texan Bitsy Broughton‘s talk on manifesting connections with dream animals, entwined with working with ancestors and a vision of dream animals’ relevance to our ecological crisis, set a chorus of bells ringing for me, as did the brilliant Jeremy Taylor‘s lucid, gutsy approach to dreamwork and social justice. The panel on dreams and spiritual practice could – given the tone set by the opening song – have been pretty uninspiring, but Anne Hill and Rose May Dance (both from the Bay Area witchcraft group Reclaiming) gave us some righteous, open-minded, grounded perspective from their work with dreams in group rituals and solo retreats, and Jungian psychologist Meridith Sabini managed to bind her own thoughts with Jung’s and conjure a palpable sense of spiritual common ground in the room.

I met a couple of great people: Brian Mills MacGregor, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed artist from Savannah, Georgia, and Clare Johnson, a fellow Limey who researches lucid dreaming and creativity. We drank to our common achievement of having managed to avoid regular working hours for most of our lives.

On the Sunday night, there was the Dream Telepathy contest. Someone concentrated on one of three previously unseen images that had been especially posted in, and if people felt their dream that night connected with any of them, they put their dream in an envelope next to that image. The closest match wins. Clare had actually won the year before. Stories abound of people in previous years having gained lucidity in their dream to go searching for the image being transmitted; I hadn’t been dreaming much at all on my travels, so I didn’t hold out much hope of hitting any connection.

Well, before the contest, of course, we had to establish some form of personal connection with the “sender”, so we all lined up to give her a hug, which was great fun, reminding me of those Indian gurus who go around do gigs at arenas where everyone lines up for their hug-dispensed prana. I did a little affirmation to dream before crashing, and dozed off in a red wine haze. I was pretty shocked to wake up the next morning with the vivid memory of becoming lucid in my dream and going, “Oh yeah, there’s this contest on. Where’s that woman who’s sending the image?” I ran around looking for her, finding one woman, deciding it was the wrong one, then moving on a trying to find another, and so on. Well, all this feminine contact seemed to veer off in a direction that derailed my lucid awareness of the situation (dreams aren’t much different from waking life in many respects), and before long I was introduced to an especially beautiful young woman naked from the waist down. Things became, how shall I put it… predictably personal. Suffice it to say, I had zero success with the telepathy thing.

Mulholland Drive

By now I had booked myself a flight to Burbank and a hire car for me at the airport. The plan was to visit Michael Ortiz Hill in the Topanga hills west of Los Angeles, then take it easy driving back up to the Bay Area along the Pacific coast.

Hitting Burbank was interestingly crazy. I’d driven a bit up in Garberville and was pretty used to driving on the wrong side of the road, but the LA freeways are something else. I decided, given my intense love for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and as a huge stretch of that mythic road took me to the region I was heading for, I just had to go that way instead of saving a bit of time of the madcap, choked freeway. So, brushing past the Hollywood Hills, down through Coldwater Canyon, really digesting Lynch’s comment about the optimistic quality of the light and quickly absorbing what I could of the intense cultural emanations of this area for me (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction and Fishbone – all locals – were my three favourite bands as a teen), I joined Mulholland and headed west. Actually I missed the turning first time, giving me a little taste of things to come. You see, Mulholland Drive is impossibly twisty. I knew Lynch built on this quality in his labyrinthine, tricksy narrative structure in the film, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the in-the-flesh insight I was about to get into that story. There was one bit where you had to kind of join another road and rejoin Mulholland, but as far as I felt able, I kept heading west.

Then I saw some traffic lights approaching. The junction looked familiar, but I didn’t recognise it. Suddenly it hit me. I was at the very junction where I had initially joined the road, only now heading out of it in the other direction. Such a spatial flip really hits you on a gut level. I could comprehend making a wrong turning – but doubling back on yourself, maybe two miles along then two miles back again, and only clocking it right at the end? The moebius strip quality of Mulholland Drive‘s plot seemed to now be etched into my brainstem. I gasped and reeled (and cursed), and meekly headed for the freeway.

Topanga Canyon

Michael’s place is tucked away right at the end of a tiny road in the Santa Monica mountains near Topanga, a fantastic area ripe with the bohemian overflow from Hollywood, where the semi-arid hills ooze displaced Chumash myth and entrenched hippy dreams. Michael has been initiated into a Bantu tradition of healing by his mapatya (spiritual twin), Augustine Kandemwa, and, together with his humbling (for him and for anyone who reads of them) experiences as a registered nurse at UCLA Medical Centre, he comes across as someone engaged with compassion and spirit to the utmost degree. A Liberian guy, whose peacemaking efforts Michael is involved with, dropped by soon after I arrived. Michael told me of this guy’s brother, who was tortured to death during the civil war, and how this event forced him to a place where he knew he could take the path of vengeance or peace. It’s a realm of moral choice I have zero experience of; but it’s so heartening to meet people who have been there and braved such impossible forks in their paths.

I did a brief interview with Michael, then he read my tarot cards and performed a little ritual for me to get healing dreams when I slept up on the hill behind his house that night. Offering tobacco to a Buddha that Michael had once buried under the site of the first nuclear bomb explosion in New Mexico as part of an intensive ritual for peace, I gingerly smoked some too. (I swore to never smoke tobacco under any circumstances again about 6 years ago, but refraining here didn’t seem right. Any connection with the indigenous traditions of the Americas pretty much involves this highly sacred plant.) Michael sung his prayers in Bantu and Spanish (he’s half Mexican), and deposited me under a tree on the hill.

No dreams as such really came that night, but, as I was braced for something “real-seeming” (my strong dreams sleeping out are usually of things that seem to be there, very real), a certain event became my “dream”. I’d asked Michael for a blanket in case the night got chilly, but later he’d decided to bring up a duvet just in case. He said I was snoring when I came. My experience was a half-conscious fright as something brushed against my body and a light flashed above me. I lay motionless, terrified of looking around to see what had touched me. I was actually warm enough at that point, and before I got the courage to investigate, the warmth of the duvet soon had me sweating profusely. Of course I felt pretty silly when I realised a very mundane duvet had been benevolently placed on me. I could pull off some of my shiny sleeping bag and huddle up with the duvet’s softness. Michael took this as hugely symbolic, a feeling he saw confirmed in his I Ching reading for me over breakfast. My coin throws brought up the K’un (The Receptive) hexagram, with the middle line of the lower trigram changing it to Shih (The Army). I don’t know my I Ching, but Michael was pretty struck by how positive it all looked. The chili and cheese omlette tasted better and better as we discussed the reading.

[Final installment soon...]

I just popped back up to the cycle shop to see about the fitting of my D-lock (the bike’s got a funny frame), and to try not to come across like a floppy-armed pansy as I asked the burly proprietor covered in tattoos if he could adjust the seat to be a bit higher. (Really, you can’t get much purchase on those crummy little multi-socket bike spanners. And I’m a bit weak from my cold, alright?)

Well, the glorious weather was such that I couldn’t resist going for a little spin, and I ended up on a pleasant trundle along the shady side of the River Lea. There were swans that looked so unfeasibly big they seemed to be a lost prehistoric species… silly numbers of little fish in the shallows, doing synchronised leaps to break the surface in mini-shoals… and loads of other cyclists, with whom I now feel an inexplicably sudden, well-formed camaraderie with.

One thing that crossed my mind, after writing yesterday about how different forms of transport alter your sense of travel, was how drastically my perception of the local roads is changed by being on a bike. I’d never noticed the cycle lanes on Forest Road before, and I walk up and down it many times a week. I’d also never really digested, absorbed into my sense of the area, the positioning and extents of the various little hills and inclines. Walking you have a general sense of the large-scale undulations, but the subtler ones seem to pass you by. I guess it’s that bit where you have to change down a gear and pedal a little bit harder that sinks this knowledge of the landscape into your body.

So, even though cycling is in one sense a bit more "alienated" than walking, you see things you’d otherwise miss. It’s the same with cars of course—you’re just shifting speed and scale. Different forms of transport are like microscopes or telescopes to the psychogeographer. From the anthropocentric primitivism of "earth mysteries"—where walking is the assumed default mode—to the alienated intensities of the roadscapes documented by J.G. Ballard, and beyond into jet-powered continent- and planet-hopping, you see what your ride lets you see.

We have inherited from the Western philosophical tradition a theory of faculty psychology, in which we have a "faculty" of reason that is separate from and independent of what we do with our bodies. In particular, reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement. In the Western tradition, this autonomous capacity of reason is regarded as what make us essentially human, distinguishing us from all other animals. [...]

The evidence from cognitive science shows that classical faculty psychology is wrong. There is no such fully autonomous faculty of reason separate from and independent of bodily capacities such as perception and movement.

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh

by Barry Patterson

Introduction

We are living in a society in which most of us are thoroughly insulated from the rawness of the elements, & our idea of nature is a walk on a path through the agricultural countryside or a TV documentary. Our lives revolve around values which are far removed from those of our origins, & although we don’t dominate nature, we try to, & when that doesn’t work we try to sanitise it or retreat from it.

The problem of our loss of integration with the environment isn’t just a physical one about pollution, or an ecological one about our present lifestyle not being sustainable, it is also at the heart of the spiritual crisis which our culture has created for itself. More & more people are alienated, stressed out & suffering from subtle dis-ease resulting from the way we live, & are realising, at the heart of this sense of wrongness that they feel, a drive towards magic or alternative spiritualities. A number of movements have arisen in the past two decades, including the diverse community of modern pagans, some of whom try to address these issues in an holistic way; discovering that there is healing & transformation in contact with nature in all its depth & sometimes danger.

I have long held the view that one particular dynamic which has incredible potential for a return to a greater sense of wholeness is contact between people & special places with which they form relationships of mutual benefit. In one sense, animistically, it is about mediation between the human & non-human worlds; in a mystical sense it is about the recognition that the boundaries which divide up our lives can fall away, & we can experience the fundamental ground of being, the source & unity of all.

Here I am going to look at the potential of what might be called "Sacred Geology", the idea that different kinds of rocks & rock formations can alter our state of consciousness & are worthy of consideration by those of us who turn to the natural world for inspiration, guidance & healing.

Science, Art & Magic

I don’t think of myself as a scientist, nowadays, despite my background & training. I still value the insights & knowledge which come from my scientific education & I have always been a keen amateur naturalist & geologist, but I am no longer a participant in any activity which could be called science. On one hand I accept, generally, the current models of the history of the earth & theevolution of life, but I place some of my own idiosyncratic interpretations upon them too; what is history after all?

The reason for this explanation is to clarify that in this article I am using geological nomenclature & some modern scientific ideas, but I am giving them other, non-scientific meanings or significance as well. I am not pretending that what is presented here is in itself scientific, nor would I rejoice to hear it described as quasi- or pseudo-science. I really don’t accept the model that says that you can do controlled experiments in magic. It is possible that in some future time science might provide some kind of workable hypothesis of how different kinds of rocks & minerals or landforms might alter human consciousness in a measurable, consistent way, but I am not interested in attempting to make such an explanation, rather in describing what my own & others’ investigations have suggested, in a way which will hopefully encourage others to make their own.

Finally I make no bones of the fact that I consider magic, divination, ritual, trance work or whatever as arts (not sciences) & that, in the long run, I consider science to be an art as well. This view may not be acceptable to many, but I offer it here, with no apology for a lack of explanatory philosophising, so that the reader will be able to understand how I have approached mysubject matter.

What makes a sacred site?

If you ask most people to name a sacred site they will probably choose somewhere which is famous for religious or mythical reasons such as Stonehenge, Tara or Durham Cathedral, & there is a lot of current interest in ancient or sacred places, not only among modern pagans but much of the population for a variety of reasons.

I was recently reading a book in which the famous American psychology writer Scott Peck (of The Road Less Travelled) was visiting megalithic sites in the UK. It was interesting to read the associations which he made with them but also to see familiar places through another’s eyes. He very soon began to address the question of why some places feel "holy" & others simply don’t. Obviously just because a site is ancient doesn’t make it feel sacred, & in the end we are going to attend to our own personal impressions more than anything anyone else has to say about the matter. On the other hand there are those who go on about "The Stones" but who light fires against them or daub them with graffiti or leave litter & inappropriate offerings. After removing litter from countless sites one can only imagine that such people aren’t really interested in what’s there at all, only in what it means to them in their own narrow little world view.

It’s a truism, I suppose, to say that a place is powerful or sacred because we feel it to be so ourselves, but much of what concerns me here is totally subjective. Often you get back what you put in, so if you approach a site with awe, reverence, or respect you are more likely to feel some kind of positive response. There is an argument that everywhere is sacred & it is purely a matter of our mind set, but that being said we still find ourselves for the most part in the relative world where some places affect us more than others. "Everywhere being sacred" is, if you like, another state of consciousness (although one well worth aspiring to). One of the reasons for these different effects is, in my opinion, the "local geology", by which I mean the local rock types & the shapes & forms that we find them in. On a recent trip to Ireland I often found myself as awestruck when I encountered natural rock formations as I did at some of that country’s truly marvellous megalithic sites, if not more so.

Of course the whole ecology of a place will contribute to its atmosphere & its effects upon our mood or perceptions. This includes plant & animal life, time of day & year, weather, human history, use & abuse, folklore & so on; ideally I like to approach the subject in a holistic way & have written about that elsewhere; but underneath all of these is the ground from which they sprang, the living bedrock of the Land.

Finding Your Place

I am a great believer in the almost clichéd (a cliché is in the mind of the beholder!) saying "Think Global, Act Local", & feel most strongly that instead of racing around the country visiting important places (so that we may feel important?) we should find, get to know, work with & look after our own local places of power. They may be sites of scientific or archaeological interest, places with interesting folklore attached to them or just anonymous spots where we feel something special & to which we find ourselves returning. If you think about it we all have such places or have had them at some time in our lives, & it isn’t hard to get in touch with that again. Reading books on local history & natural history & studying local maps is a good way to get started if you find yourself on new turf, as is getting out & exploring, whether in a planned way or just by aimlessly wandering to see where the Genius Loci, the spirit of the locality, might lead you.

If reading this article turns you on to considering geological factors in finding or working with local spots then you may decide to purchase a geological map. If you do, I hope that the following advice will be of assistance. Geological maps show different types & ages of rock as different colours superimposed on a monotone map of the area. It is useful to have a standard O.S. map to hand as well to make comparisons to locate sites of interest. Geology is a complex science & the maps are covered with a lot of technical terms. Some of them are briefly clarified elsewhere in this article but if you’re going so far as to get a map then get an introductory book on geology with a glossary in it (you’ll probably find one in the local library), & a local guide book too, which describes what the map illustrates. When you are choosing your map you will discover that they are expensive, & this means that scale of map(s) you choose will be dependent upon your budget. It’s cheaper to buy one which covers a larger area but shows less detail. There are also two kinds of maps, solid & flow. The former show the solid bedrock underlying the area covered by the map while the latter also show the deposits which exist on top of that such as those of rivers or glaciers. You need to choose which to use; I prefer solid maps.

If you are looking for potential power places to visit try finding:

1. Places where there are lots of geological faults, (shown on the map as black lines) major fault lines or where faults meet. Rock faults are lines where a the rocks have split & slid along against one another. Studies have noticed a strong correlation between the concentration of faults in an area & the occurrence of stone circles, as well as reports of UFO’s (unidentified, right?), hauntings & other "strange" phenomena.
2. Localized igneous intrusions (see explanation below). These are usually shown as red, pink or purple blobs.
3. Places where a lot of different layers (different colours) are found close together in a single locality.
4. Any obvious small sized islands or blobs of anything which contrast with the surrounding land.
5. Interesting physical features such as caves, gorges, dykes, escarpments, etc.

Minerals, Stones & Rock

The rocks of the earth’s crust are made up from various chemical ingredients with their own clear identities. They are called minerals & most rocks are a mixture of them. Ultimately most minerals are in crystalline form but the crystals in many rocks are microscopically small in size. Larger crystals occur for a variety of reasons (see below). When I say rocks I mean types of rock. By stones I mean pieces of rock which have broken free from the bedrock. Bedrock, where it outcrops on the surface or can be accessed in quarries, caves or mines, or on the coast, is sometimes referred to as living rock because it is still in direct connection with the deeper layers or other structures beneath it.

A Zen Teacher said: "A stone has the life of a stone", & there are parallels between stones & more animated objects such as people and other creatures. They are born when they separate from the body of their mother, whether bedrock or a larger stone. They exist as individuals for a period of time during which they may spawn smaller stones & eventually they wear away. They are broken up or eroded to the degree that their life has come to an end. Just as a mystic might say that we are continually dying & being reborn, so our stone, in its natural environment, is being constantly eroded by wind, water, ice & other stones. This is one explanation of why we feel an affinity with stones, & because their life span is often so much longer than ours (depending upon their hardness), hold them in reverence, like ancient trees or elders of the clan.

I’m an animist. If you asked me do I believe that stones have an indwelling spirit, I’d say yes, but if you said do they have some kind of conscious awareness then I would say there’s no nervous system, so not like ours. One doesn’t have to believe that there’s a person living in that rock or stone in order to treat it with respect or enter into communion with it. You could say that rocks are non-human entities of an age & size beyond our imagining, which sounds a bit Lovecraftian, but how we approach them is surely a matter for the private conscience of the individual.

Types of Rock

There are unseen dynamisms within the earth. Huge currents & movements of the liquid & semi-liquid materials beneath the crust lead to what we now recognise as continental drift, a migration which takes millennia. On the surface there are other faster & more easily identifiable geological processes at work. We can all witness the three great processes which have shaped the land: erosion, transportation & deposition. The agents of ice, sunshine, wind & water have been playing with the basic materials of the earth’s surface since before organic life emerged in the soup.

Some of the oldest & deepest rocks, although they do emerge onto the surface in many ways, are those which are formed when molten material such as magma, under the surface, or lava, emerging, have cooled down & solidified. They are usually hard rocks composed of complex patterns of interlocking mineral crystals of varying sizes & types. Basalts, which form structures under the surface such as sills & dykes, maybe later revealed by erosion, tend to be composed of very small crystals. Granites, on the other hand , often have such large crystals that individuals can be seen clearly with the naked eye. Such rocks as these, born when the heat of down below cools, are called igneous rocks.

Such rocks, no matter how hard, cannot resist the forces of erosion & are broken, split, smashed & bashed into smaller bits, which are carried elsewhere by water or ice or wind. They become pebbles, gravel & sand & eventually even fine powders such as clay & silt. These materials accumulate on beaches & lake & sea beds, on river bottoms, floodplains & in deserts, & after millions of years of build-up the lower layers, now deep underground, are heated & compressed to form layers of rock. These are known as sedimentary rocks & they tell the story of what conditions were like in a particular place at the time when they were dumped there. They are the kinds of rocks such as sandstone or shale, which often contain fossils. Some sedimentary rocks are more organic in origin than anything else, such as chalk, limestone or coal.

Everything is constantly changing & rocks under the surface may be exposed to extreme conditions of temperature & pressure, causing them to change their appearance & composition. Both igneous & sedimentary rocks can be transformed, limestone into marble, or granite into gneiss (that wonderful stuff which they used to build Callanish!), & when this happens the new rocks are known as metamorphic rocks in recognition of their change.

With respect to the subtle influences & significance of these rock types, the following ideas are suggested as starting points for further investigation. They are based primarily on my own experiences & therefore are very subjective. Nevertheless I feel that they have a place here & will give at least an idea of how geological considerations can influence the feeling of a site or one’s work with the Genius Loci.

Igneous rocks, called plutonic rocks when structures from the deep places appear on the surface, can generate powerful energies with some degree of possible modulation & focusing available to the human operator. I imagine those tightly packed matrices of interlocking crystals as being like huge storage batteries & microprocessors. The former can release sudden bursts of energy & the latter are waiting for programs to run. The unwary can find themselves face to face with the animated contents of their own deep psyche in ill-prepared workings where igneous materials come to the surface. They may also meet that which inhabits such materials! This is very useful if one is considering evocative or magical operations, but one must be wary that one is clear about one’s intention & familiar with one’s own stuff. To be suddenly confronted by an animation from the plutonic region can be disconcerting to say the least!

Metamorphic rocks tend to affect our body awareness, & can be very useful in healing or trance work of various kinds. The keyword is transformation. They can be just as intense as igneous rocks, but the effect is much more likely to build up over a period of time before it knocks your socks off. This gives you more time to monitor & control the situation. Metamorphic rocks are usually the source of what are popularly known as "crystals", i.e. large individual crystal forms which most people buy in shops & were probably strip mined in Brazil or some other developing country by exploited peasant workers. With the help of a good book on minerals we can go looking for our own (but read comments on conservation, later). It also means that specific spots in a metamorphic region may have strong concentrations of particular materials, & that we must choose our spot with care. One spot may be right on top of a big vein of lead pyrites with a strong grounding influence, while another may be near to a big lump of quartz which could give you a jolt.

Sedimentary rocks are the ages in an aeon-old book that tells the story of this place. Each layer is a landscape, quite possibly inhabited, with its own vegetation, climate & landforms, some familiar, some less so. The deeper you go, the further back in time you travel. Usually there are pages missing from the book. These are called non-conformities, when layers have been eroded away before the next were deposited. This means that the journey down may jump back millions of years in an instant.

What I love are sandstone surfaces which once were the strand & still bear the ripples of wave action hundreds of millions of years later. Huge mountains were eroded & their remains washed down in rivers & dumped as sand in estuaries & the sea. When, as rock on the beach, they are revealed by the action of today’s waves, you can see identical forms side by side, ancient & modern. I have a bit of a thing about steamy carboniferous forests full of giant amphibians too!

Limestone is a significant material worthy of much study. It is often full of fossils, is permeable & soluble to water & is responsible for some of our most dramatic & mysterious places. It forms cavern systems & steep sided ravines, like the lushly wooded denes of County Durham, & where the bedrock is laid bare the incredible forms of limestone pavement like the Burren, a possibly man-made desert in Western Ireland. Limestone was lain down in ancient seas which once covered much of this land & consists mainly of the excreted remains of tiny planktonic animals, shat by slightly larger ones. Chalk is of similar origins & is responsible for the famous downland landscapes of southern England. It is also the matrix in which we find flint, that mysterious, brittle, sharp edged stuff so important to us for most of our history.

Shapes in the Land

It would be misleading of me to try to categorise the forms that may be found in the landscape in the way I have rocks & stones. These forms are of course dependent upon the materials of which they are made & also upon events which have taken place there over the aeons. That little hill may be a baby mountain in its youth or it may be the scarred stump of some ancient Everest or Vesuvius. I have mentioned trying to look at places holistically & for me this means trying to see the big picture, the whole thing, to try to feel the identity, the meaning of the place. To enter into a relationship with the spirit of place is a noble but long term project. We must always be on our guard to recognise our own projections, fears or fantasies of wish fulfilment.

A very good way of studying the esoteric side to land forms is to study the folklore & mythology of different kinds of places. Some commentators speculate about such sources being the remains of, clues to, or codes of lost knowledge, & this may be so, but I enjoy taking the stories as I find them; they have much to tell us about the character of an area & a lot of insight into the challenge of contact between human & non-human beings.

One theme which stands out is that inaccessible places are often seen as the abode some kind of otherworldly being or race. Inaccessible often means hazardous, so people go there but don’t always come back. There may be injunctions against going there among local people. Should we respect them? It can be just as powerful (or even more so) to do one’s ritual just below, or in sight of the holy mountain or mound rather than on the top. On the other hand sometimes we need the danger & challenge of taboo-breaking to test our knowledge of ourselves against the world or society. It must also be said that in my experience, if you are going to work on the hill, then you should work on the top where the energies are usually both stronger & more coherent. A certain power place known to me has been known to reduce people to gibbering wrecks, but it is interesting to note that they are usually people who decided to do their thing in the woods on the flanks of the hill rather than at an obviously central location on the top. It can still be powerful & challenging there but there is a clarity about it which is simpler & more direct. Put in other terms, you get to play about with the lesser, more dodgy spirits around the sides, whereas on the top you’re dealing with The Boss.

Areas with lots of faulting seem to have a lot going on. They can be very active in terms of what most people would think of as "strange" phenomena such as hauntings, & they often show striking seasonal & lunar cycles which can be fairly easy to tune into. It must also be said that such places attract "strange" people too & they aren’t all necessarily people you’d want to meet on a dark moonless night down the pub never mind the old quarry!

Sills & dykes are sheets & ridges of intruded igneous rock which can stretch for hundreds of miles under the surface. Where they come up as outcrops can be particularly striking & powerful places. Imagine some millennia-old leviathan breaking the surface of the sea for a moment! Working on such an outcrop one senses the other places where the same great body touches the sky. One senses the powerful presence of the landscape as a whole in such situations. These great beings are truly Titans. We can touch them, & if we do so with awareness, they might respond to us!

Practical work

1. Collecting

Geological conservation is a serious problem. There’s a big fuss if ancient woodland or wetland is destroyed or damaged but you don’t hear of many scandals about sites of geological significance being trashed. Everyone complains about the idiots who chip bits off the Rollright Stones, but if they’re at the seaside for their holidays they don’t think twice about hacking away at something interesting. Certain famous & not so famous localities have been ruined by keen collectors of fossils & minerals chipping away at them for specimens to keep in boxes & cases & on shelves, so please don’t contribute to this problem. If you must, try collecting stones rather than removing any living rock. Beware picking stuff up willy-nilly as well; in a house full of different stones its sometimes hard to tell which ones are really significant.

It is useful to maintain what I think of as a gift protocol with respect to natural history specimens or "power objects" of any kind. One approach which I use is: it has to be on the surface, in my path, & looking like it was put there for me to find. Then I ask it if it wants to come with me. Whether or not you’re an animist this is a useful exercise because it gives you time to take a breath & find out how you really feel about the situation, & you never know it might reply! Some stones I’ve picked up have given me an instant headache or sense of discomfort, in which case I replace them carefully with my blessing.

If you do receive some kind of gift from a place you visited then spend some time meditating with it, find out the best way of keeping or treating it. Does it need to be cleaned in any way? If so stick it in a jar of salt for a while or wash it in a fast flowing stream (with the stream’s permission of course!). Be warned though, you can destroy whatever made it special in the first place if your preparation is too strong! Intuition is needed.

Sometimes if something grabs my attention I don’t just collect it, I put it somewhere where someone else will notice it, either to admire it or take it themselves. Sometimes one can do little spontaneous pieces of art, as long as they’re not intrusive. Give them a blessing to heal whoever looks at them or something. It’s not a major operation to do so, just wish it, whether out loud—always preferable in such acts—or inwardly. Don’t leave powerful personal stuff lying around for others to pick up though! If you do an outdoor working always close down, ground the energies thoroughly, & sit still until you feel in a good state to continue your journey.

2. Tuning in

By tuning into the rocks & stones in a particular setting you can also start to make connections with the landscape generally. I like to study maps & guide books a bit so I have some idea of what is going on, but it’s a matter of taste.

Approach a site or stone outcrop with respect. Delay getting hands on as long as you can; use your other senses first. Take time to make a connection with the whole situation, not just some object in front of you. Touch with your hands. Keep them still. Push. Stroke or rub the rock. Lean against it. Breath with the rock. Place your cheek or forehead against it, but don’t rush. Get your shoes & socks off! Bare feet are a great way of making contact with the power of rocks & stones. Now try practising whatever meditation you are familiar with. Make sure that it is appropriate though. By this I do not mean that it must have a direct cultural or historical link with the place, although that can be helpful, but that whatever you are doing is sensitive to what is already there; in harmony with the energies that you find. If you must make offerings, which is a very good thing to do, try to be unobtrusive. One person’s offerings are another person’s litter, & the bits of food & flowers which you so carefully arranged might just be a horrible mess after the wind, rain & local beasties have finished with them. Try picking up all the litter which you find there, that’s a kind of offering. Not all offerings are material!

3. Trance Workings

Most everyday states of consciousness are trances of one kind or another. In order to be successful in trance work I suggest:

1. Daily meditation practice at home in a safe, preferably designated place.
2. Practising moment to moment awareness of what kind of trance you’re in now.
3. Finding a good teacher who won’t play games with your head &/or wallet.
4. Practising all techniques indoors in your safe space first before you do them outdoors if that is at all possible.
5. Always keeping your bum or another stable body part on terra firma while you’re working & not doing trance in potentially dangerous places (see later).
6. Having a clear intent & raison d’être for the working. State it out loud when you start & do so again as & when it is helpful. Learn it off by heart & make sure that you are clear enough to fully understand & really mean what you are saying.
7. Debriefing yourself. Be honest. If you feel comfortable commit to do it again if you can. If not don’t try it!

That being said, & assuming that you’re familiar with some kind of meditation or trance work, here are some ideas:

1. Going down from where you sit or lie, through the layers, back in time, explore, see what you can find, make sure to come back up!
2. Going into some kind of structure like a hill, mountain or cave, try to find its centre. You may not succeed first time even if you thought you did; debrief properly afterwards, was it really that profound?
3. Lying on the ground, once in your trance imagine that you stand up & open your eyes. Then:
   1. Explore your surroundings. You may want to spend time building up a visualisation, but I recommend that if you are successfully tranced just take it as it comes, assuming that you have clearly stated your intent.
   2. Imagine that light or lights appear in the ground or rock around you. Note what it is like & investigate it/them.
   3. Call to the Guardian/s of the place & request a meeting. State your intent clearly. Remember, a statement of intent is not enough, you have to understand the significance of what you are saying & really mean it.
4. Try to enter into conversation or communion with a stone or rock formation, whether worded or just empathic.
5. Expand you awareness to take in more & more of the landscape. Rap with it if you can.
6. Use or follow the water present in the place to sense more about what’s going on there on a more subtle level.
7. Dreaming. Spend the night there, sleep & keep a dream record as the night progresses. Build a simple ritual around it. Make sure that you are properly prepared for the physical conditions which you might find there.

N.B. Remember to ground any energies carefully when you are finished.

These are just a few suggestions to give you ideas, take them as far as you like or think up your own. It is probably a good idea to build some kind of simple ritual around them so that you have a set of boundaries & can orientate & protect yourself if necessary. What happens & how you deal with it are up to you. I advise that you never cease to question yourself about whatever you think may be happening & urge anyone prepared to try such practises not to abandon common sense & psychic hygiene along the way.

Danger!

The kinds of places which I am writing about are seriously hazardous. Don’t be complacent in the mountains, in quarries, on rocks or crags of any kind, & on the seashore be sure that you know what the tide is doing. Negligence of these matters kills many people every year. Please observe the country code & basic rules of personal safety at all times if you are intent on practising out of doors.

There are other dangers too. If you are unfamiliar with altered states be warned! Certain kinds of places, whether they be fault lines, bare basalt hill tops, caves or whatever can have effects as strong as certain proscribed chemicals under the right circumstances. Make sure that you feel confident & healthy enough for any challenges which you might face. I don’t think that I am recommending dangerous practices but please give this careful consideration. Extreme situations are quite rare & in my experience there’s always a point at which you can opt out. If you feel any doubt or discomfort then do so. Debrief yourself & talk to a friend, co-worker or advisor about whether or how you should proceed.

I mentioned H.P. Lovecraft earlier. Well where did you think he got a lot of his ideas from? The natural world, I say. He seems to be horrified by the vastness of time & space & the diversity of natural forms, a horror which strikes a chord because everyone, at some point, has at least been awestruck by these things. Geology & geological time feature strongly in his work & although I think that his mythology is spurious in many ways, some of the experiences which befall his protagonists are not beyond the realms of possibility in this work. The huge tentacled horror which has slept beneath my house for millennia may well be a fossilised cephalopod from the Palaeozoic Era & meeting her face to face is quite a trip!

Our own fear is one of the most dangerous things which we may encounter & it is important to acknowledge this & do some work on it. The "dark side" hinted at by macho occultists is not really about the "dark glamour" (sexy succubi in leather gear?), but the stuff which we really don’t want to know about ourselves & our world, so much so that we have sealed it in an impregnable vault deep down somewhere. Contact with the primal energies which may be released by magical workings at certain geological structures can open that vault. Are you ready for that kind of experience? It can be overwhelming.

Something to remember should you find yourself in an extreme situation is don’t make any sudden moves. This includes suddenly stopping whatever you were doing at the time. I remember well a situation in which something unseen but gigantic brushed against me while I was drumming & for some reason filled me with horror. I focused on the drumming itself & the energy of my horror entered it & was released with a rush of excitement & euphoria. If I had stopped, which I nearly did, no doubt the horror would have settled, lasted & maybe even got worse. One very useful technique for dealing with extreme emotional states involves entering rather than struggling with or trying to rationalise the feeling, & instead of mentally going over & over it, trying to recognise it as a sensation within the body & focus on that. To manage this however one would have to be experienced in some kind of basic meditation practice.

Fear can unhinge the mind but it can also cause physical danger too. Make sure that you are fully aware of a safe exit from the place in which you are working. Panic & you could do yourself or someone else some damage.

In the City

In the city any large stone or rocky outcrop is a potential pace of power because even if it has been shaped in some way or placed there by men it still represents contact with a world far more ancient & deep than the increasingly symbolic, virtual image that urban people inhabit. Even a railway cutting or an artistically placed boulder in the park can put you in contact with the magical power of the earth. For this reason geological features of note near population centres are often very popular places with a lot of stories attached to them. Be careful that you handle the human energies or disturbed natural energies that you may find in such places with care & don’t leave a big charge behind you when you’re done. The vast majority of the population are just as sensitive to these things as you are, they just don’t know it or don’t want to know.

In the same chalk, as they say, such places may need some kind of healing or cleansing work to be done for their own good as well as that of their human visitors. If you embark upon such work make sure that you can handle what you might find. Be prepared to look at the place as holistically as you can. If you don’t feel up to the task right away just monitor the situation. I once did this with a very disturbed spot near my home & found that after a year or two the intensity of whatever it was that repelled me died down & I could gain safe access & do my work without worrying about picking up anything nasty. That said, try not to be too judgmental. If that’s the place on the common where the kids hang out its probably been the place where the kids hang out for years. Maybe its their place, not yours. Maybe you should be cautious before you rush in to try to heal something which was there anyway & they were attracted by in the first place. There are a number of places near where I live that fall into this category. (One is called "The Devil’s Playground"!) Don’t forget, the earth has seen far worse than this in her long life, it’s the human beings that are really fucked up!

Another way of connecting with urban rocks is to study the building stone which may be found in your town, but I will leave that for others to look into.

Conclusion

Geological factors are of great significance in the study of earth magic, geomancy & sacred ecology, yet they have largely been ignored. Practitioners of outdoor meditation or ritual & those trying to enter into communion with the life of the land or the spirit of place can find a wealth of material for exploration & practice in this field. It is my hope that this short essay may stimulate more people to think of these things. I pray that in going out into the field that they will show sensitivity to what they find there, & that the Dragons of Albion will be kind to them.

Reading list

• The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abrams – Vintage 1997
• Toward a Transpersonal Ecology – Warwick Fox – Shambhala 1990
• Discovering Landscape in England & Wales – Andrew Goudie – Chapman & Hall 1992
• Sacred World – Jeremy Hayward – Rider 1996
• Pseudonomicon – Phil Hine – 2nd Ed, Dagon Productions 1997
• British Geological Survey Maps & Guides – HMSO (Or contact the B.G.S. Shop & Office in the Natural History Museum, see below)
• New Penguin Dictionary of Geology – Phil Kearey – Penguin 1996 (N.B. not recommended for total beginners!)
• At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft (currently available in many anthologies)
• Ages of Gaia – James Lovelock – Oxford University Press 1995
• Highland Landforms – Robert Price – Aberdeen University Press 1991
• The Black Goddess & the Sixth Sense – Peter Redgrove – Paladin 1989
• Rebirth of Nature – Rupert Sheldrake – Century Hutchinson 1993

N.B. There are loads of good guide books to rocks minerals & fossils & the following are just selections. Dorling Kindersley do good ones but I don’t have the details.

• Collins Photo Guide to Rocks, Minerals & Gemstones – Walter Schumann – HarperCollins 1996
• British Palaeozoic, Mesozoic & Cenozoic Fossils (3 vols, my edition is ancient!) – The Natural History Museum Bookshop, Cromwell Road, London,SW7 5BD

(None of these authors or institutions would necessarily endorse the views that I have expressed here & some would no doubt not wish to be associated with them!)

• Event date: 12th October 2002
• Venue: Conway Hall, London

Megalithomania! was the result of a collaboration between 3rd Stone magazine and Strange Attractor. Its obvious aim was to expose the ever-increasing convergences between the two polar extremes of academic archaeology and psychedelic counterculture, something brought to the fore quite publicly with the success of Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian. Following Cope’s timely broadening of the convergence, Megalithomania! sought to deepen it, gathering diverse representatives of new approaches to past and place into a full day and night of talks, stalls, exhibitions, films and musical performances.

Nearly nocturnal through obsessive web-building, I knew I wasn’t going to make it down for the 10.30am start. Then again, neither did the opening speaker, John Michell, whose book gave this event its title, so I was in good company… I also missed a good deal after I arrived, for various reasons, omitting the exhibition room and half of the musical acts in the evening. However, the spirit of the day was thankfully bereft of the trainspotterishness often associated with the ‘earth mysteries’ scene, so it mattered not.

I initially wandered round the main hall checking out the "Don’t mind me, I’m only 5000 years old" series of photographs of stones and ancient monuments that have somehow survived encroaching urban development. Put together by RiotGibbon (who’ll be familiar to any regulars at the Head Heritage forums), it was a great selection of sites, demonstrating concrete examples of the theme—the clash between ancient and modern—that underpinned the event. It inspired both repulsion at the narrow vision of environmental planning, and wonder at how doggedly persistent these monuments can be.

The first speaker I caught, Leslie Ellen Jones, talked with verve about the depiction of megaliths in films, noting how they often function as code for "the beginning" or "the primal time". She rightly spoke of how truly bad films are often the most interesting when investigating cultural perception of specific motifs, and her commentary on the atrociously acted biker horror flick Psychomania was amply supported by the clip from the film that followed. This compilation of film and TV snippets felt like a great ice-breaker for me, coming as it did at the start of my day. The 70′s BBC camp of Children of the Stones and Dr Who went down just as well as the familiarity of the classic "Stonehenge" scene from Spinal Tap.

The Reverend Alan Walker followed, showing a good deal of courage and a bit of cheek in modelling his talk on the structure of the traditional Christian sermon. Weaving around the intersections between stones, London and Christianity, Walker’s talk became more and more fascinating as he revealed some of the more curious aspects of Judaic and Christian psychogeography in the capital. His gratuitous inclusion of a slide of a sculpture of a black cat climbing off a wall was partly just playful, but also another bit of conscious cheek. "I thought you all might like to see a black cat," he said, implying "That’s what you pagans like, isn’t it?" in an endearingly patronising tone you can usually only get away with talking to intimates. A friend said she thought he got away lightly (in terms of heckling), such a brazen Christian in such a pagan gathering, but he was a fascinating speaker who deserved the warm reception, and added greatly to the day’s diversity.

Drawing on 5 years of research into contemporary attitudes to sacred sites, the University of Southampton’s Robert Wallis outlined the ongoing tensions between "preservationist" bodies such as English Heritage, and the participatory urges so strong in the various subcultures drawn to ancient sites. Suffering from technical gremlins denying us the planned visual presentation, the talk perhaps lacked a bit of colour, but I guess any attempt to highlight the real issues involved—which are inevitably weighed down by the bureaucracy of negotiations between many different interest groups—would be hard put to rival the glamour of today’s other, much more psychologically engaging topics. Importantly, the issues were addressed, and Wallis deftly illustrated the historical isolation of today’s overly precious attitudes to sacred monuments by pointing out the relatively debauched revelries that were a common occurrence in churches and cathedrals in medieval times.

It’s curious that I’ve managed to comment on both the modern disregard for sacred sites (seen in some of the barely-surviving monuments in RiotGibbons’ photo exhibition) and today’s "overly precious" attitudes. It does seem to be the case, that sites are either crudely neglected or fastidiously frozen as "land exhibits". This speaks volumes about our culture’s fractured psychology, which novelist Iain Sinclair managed to sketch so vividly in his series of extracts from his London Orbital. His project, of walking the M25′s route encircling London to delve into its psychological and possibly spiritual significance, found him eulogising the act of walking as a form of positive escapism—a fugue—that left the "salaried liars" of "the new politics" behind, and rediscovered the present moment.

Sinclair touched on the erasure of memory in politics today, which suddenly struck me with a realisation that seemed hugely relevant to the day’s events. This clash, or melding, of ancient and modern, the palaeophilic and the neophilic, that brought us all together for the day, is a contradiction to be reckoned with. How does indignity at hoary old monuments being neglected or destroyed find common ground with a disregard for ‘tradition’ and ‘conservatism’? For a moment, listening to Sinclair’s experiences, I saw it: mainstream "tradition" is psychotically selective. That which bolsters and perpetuates the status quo’s power is remembered and guarded with rigid defensiveness. That which empowers the individual, the dispossessed and the "damaged dreamers"—as Sinclair referred to the people who were shoved out to London’s peripheral asylums in times past, to the boundaries now defined by the M25—is forgotten. Recent or distant past, it doesn’t matter—"tradition" is not history, it is the history we choose to recall, in order to freeze-dry the present; a process which, of course, sucks the life from the real present, immediate experience of life.

I saw Paul Devereux a couple of weeks ago at the New Human Be-In event, and he seemed to flourish much more in that relaxed environment than in his headline slot today, bearing the pressure of all the day’s delays. He delivered a good talk, nevertheless, honing in on the origins of sacred monuments in revered natural landscapes. Naturally-occurring simulacra figured largely, as did the first human embellishments to natural formations—the cross-over between nature and artifice. Especially engaging was the scenario he sketched of North American shamen weaving a visionary web as they flew along the invisible threads they believe connect mountain peaks together.

Showing us a slide of the Mayan pyramid at Chichen Itza, he explained how the pyramid form was—obviously—modelled on mountains, but also how the primal mountain of myth was seen to emerge from the undifferentiated oceans, evoking the mysterious rise of consciousness from the wash of pre-conscious impulses and formless psychic currents. When he informed us that the Mayan word for "plaza" meant "sheet of water", to highlight the connotations of the stone plazas out of which the pyramids rise, my mind rushed back to Iain Sinclair’s evocation of the M25 as a river, relating incidents of swans actually trying to land on the tarmac when it first opened in 1986. Back to Devereux, I found him showing images of those wonderful carvings of boats on Scandinavian sheets of rock, and Australian petroglyph figures emerging from small crevices in boulders, showing the shamanic perception of the rock surface as a membrane between this world and… another. From here the day, for me, succeeded in becoming more than the sum of its parts.

After an evening pub-break, the right-brain nightside of the proceedings was kicked off by veteran head Brian Barritt introducing Flinton Chalk’s short film Psychedelic Archaeology. With some preliminary scene-setting done—the film’s subject is the equinox sunrise entering Cairn T at Loughcrew in Ireland—the film zoomed in on the stone inside the tomb whose entoptic carvings were being touched by the sun’s golden rays. These carvings, abstract geometric shapes such as concentric circles and spirals, are now acknowledged by all but the most fusty of academic archaeologists to probably be the result of visionary trance states in which such forms—encoded into the human optic nerve, and signalling to the individual a dramatic shift in consciousness—are perceived. This film’s soundtrack—by the BarritTones—featured deep drones hitting the 111 Hz mark that is the resonant frequency of the Cairn T chamber. In short, it attempted to rekindle the shift in consciousness that was believed to fuel the tomb/temple’s original life. Brief but effective, the film left a lot of people hungry for more, in both the negative sense of being disappointed by its brevity, and the positive sense of wanting to get on the first ferry to Ireland.

I missed Wigwam and Gorodisch in a whirl of mingling, but caught Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s uncompromising performance. Drew Mulholland emitted stark, spiralling walls of electro-noise to accompany his film showing curious modern stone constructions in parts of the Scottish landscape. The film’s success at capturing the oddly intriguing juxtapositions of bland concrete architecture would have made J.G. Ballard proud, but I have to admit the soundtrack left me cold. It wasn’t quite resonant enough for its repetition to become engaging.

Coil, on the other hand, did what they do, delivering a truly strange performance specially tailored for the night. Awash with projections of green ripples throughout, what began in plinky electronic dripping noises slowly evolved into a rumbling, disconcerting, openly confrontational comment on the event. After some bemusing antics with an unrecognisable stuffed object—bearing all the hallmarks of the backdrop to a David Lynch scene—Jhon Balance began intoning, both on tape and into the microphone: "They are not there. They are here. I am not here… They are not there…" (The event was billed as "a celebration of our awesome monuments and the people who built them"—my emphasis.) Heaving a monitor speaker around, Balance grew more threatening until he seemed to snap and jumped into the audience screaming, "Why are you here? Why are you here?", holding the microphone out. The line between theatre and genuine aggression was thin, but clearly revealed as the music wound up, the applause and appreciative screams thundered, and Balance waved his thanks, head held high as the curtains drew together. A friend remarked that gigs—not just Coil—were commonly much more confrontational in the early 80′s. I imagine this is true, so I’m glad people like Coil are still mustering the energy to even try to walk that border between performance and personal confrontation, as an alogical extension of their uniquely potent, abrasive and ambiguous musical creations.

In all, a grand day for megaliths, psychedelic culture and eclecticism. As both the tweedy ley-hunter figure and the tie-died hippy fall into obscurity or irrelevance, it’s intriguing and exciting to see what new forms and styles we can create to funnel this potent urge for the land and expanded consciousness through. Megalithomania! was a step in the right direction.

Avebury tree – photo by Gyrus

by Mogg Morgan

"Divided for Love’s Sake—for the Chance of Union"

I was first introduced to the connection between eroticism and the sacred landscape many years ago during the course of a short but intense relationship with a well-known visionary artist, who, for the sake of this article, I will call Dakini Devi. My first attempt to record some of these experiences formed the basis of the chapter ‘The Erotic Landscape’ that appeared in my book Sexual Magick. This chapter discussed the way in which certain magical trance states help the magician develop a connection between their inner world and the physical landscape that surrounds them. Through sexuality the magician develops a special gaze in which he or she is able to see places of power in the landscape.

As my senses became more tuned in and I could see the remains of sacred landscapes and even create new ones—I remember Dakini saying to me one day that I was beginning to develop the gaze. It’s almost as if you begin to see the sensual flesh of the land—as for example at the ‘manger’ below Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. The technique in itself is stupidly simple: merely go to a sacred site, stay there for a while, get to know it, mellow out there, sleep there, etc. etc. This way the landscape becomes embedded in your brain; it begins to live there. At peak moments, such as during lovemaking, the landscape may choose to come to life, either in your head, your partner’s head, or sometimes both at once.

Together we went to the ancient stone-age ritual complex at Avebury in Wiltshire. Dakini, who knew almost everything there was to know about this place, initiated me into its mysteries. It is a place that has been close to my heart ever since. Dakini taught me how to connect with the nameless divine beings of the site; these forces would later erupt into our consciousness, as we made love within the sacred space of our temple room. Intuitively it seemed that the Avebury ritual site had an erotic component, and this seemed yet another example of the mindset found also in Tantrism and in even in the more earthy, shamanic byways of Egyptian magick. These ideas took root, and as I moved towards the task of creating my own magical system or synthesis, these experiences formed part of the process. This system I call Tankhem—which traces the tantrik doctrines of the Hindu intellectual tradition back to their Egyptian origins and forms a bridge to the nameless or primeval beings of the predynastic and neolithic times.

I’m often asked, why this obsession with ancient philosophy? I suppose the attraction of ancient thought is that by some strange twist of fate, ancient ideas often become modern ones. As we as a species develop and grow, we are able again to understand how our ancestors thought. This is a fairly familiar idea in academic philosophy, as the following example might help to illustrate. The pagan philosopher Plato continues to dominate the modern mind. Plato developed the techniques of Greek drama into a powerful way of exteriorising ideas through the use of dialogue. He wrote dialogues in which import-ant mystical themes were played out. However, some of these dialogues have only really been fully understood within the last one hundred years, when our own minds have begun to move in a similar direction. There are long passages in Plato dealing with the nature of the body and what makes it sick or healthy, which have been largely ignored until in recent years we, as a culture, have begun looking for alternatives to the modern clinical model. Our understanding of the ancient mind is something that can only come about when our own minds begin to tread the same pathways, to speak the same dialogues.

Egyptian magick attracted me because it is so old yet so subtle. Since the closure of all pagan temples by the Christian despot Theodosius, its secrets became really secret—even the language of the writing was forgotten, and its magical landscapes and temples buried beneath the surface of the desert. As the lights on the sanctuary were extinguished, the doctrine of the magi survived outside of the Christian sphere of influence in practices such as Tantrism. Even the driest academic book acknowledges this fact, and I give several examples of this in my own book. Tantrism is one of the most liberating of ancient ideas. If ancient thought were all like tantrism then we would have to say that the ancients definitely knew something that we moderns do not, and that they knew things that we desperately need to re-learn. Primarily, the sacred and mystical nature of our own bodies and the wonderful capacity of the sexual act to change the structures of our brain as it did for our ancient ancestors—the first tantriks.

When it comes to understanding the magick of ‘preliterate’ times before the coming of the dynasties, the task seems hopeless; the gods of places such as Avebury seem destined to remain forever veiled. Some might say that we can never really know how the ancient magicians thought or did things—but I do not share this pessimism. Magick and ritual has its own archaeology; if there is space in a stone circle or temple to move around and dance, it may well be that it was used in such a way by our ancestors. The site ‘teaches’ us how it can or could be used; we try out these techniques and learn even more about the site. Eventually we are perhaps acting as the ancient masters did, and there is a saying, if you repeat the actions of the master, then you become the master. Perhaps as we use the ancient techniques of the magi, we can become them, and they will begin to speak to us over the long intervening silence.

Correspondence between body and temple in an architectural floor plan of a Hindu temple

Over the last few years I began researching further into the nature of the temple. A magical temple can, in itself, be viewed as an idealised sacred landscape. Temples are also stylised representation of the human body (see Sexual Magick). I feel that the idea of the temple is so familiar that we are in danger of overlooking its mystery, the creation of sacred space. In the texts that have survived from ancient Egypt, it is possible to perceive the archaeology of gnosis—the texts contain many layers of meaning—nothing seems to be wasted. In other words, you have to mentally move around and use the temple using visioning techniques, in order to really learn what the landscape is trying to teach you. Even though these insights, for what they are worth, are inspired by my magical work with the Tankhem system, I know that some might find it easier to accept if they had some independent corroboration. Intuitively I felt that the position of a sacred text in the temple, whether it be in the outer court or in the inner sanctuary, would somehow be relevant to its meaning. And I discovered that a similar theory had indeed been advanced by the German archaeologist Siegfried Schott in the 1950s.

The earliest temples and sacred landscapes have hardly survived. The Pyramid Texts, so called because they were carved on the walls of the pyramids of the 5th and 6th dynasty Kings (c. 2500 BCE) record spells such as "The bricks are removed for thee from the great tomb".1 This text is carved on a stone building but talks of brick—the scribe is quoting from an even older text, when sacred architecture was made of brick. It is quoting from ‘books’ even older than the time of the Pyramids! The earlier sacred buildings were of brick and before that they were of natural organic materials such as wood and reed, with perhaps the occasional use of megalithic stones, as the following article in a recent edition of Nature indicates:

Megaliths and Neolithic astronomy in southern Egypt

The Sahara west of the Nile in southern Egypt was hyperarid and unoccupied during most of the Late Pleistocene epoch. About 11,000 years ago the summer monsoons of central Africa moved into Egypt, and temporary lakes or playas were formed. The Nabta Playa depression, which is one of the largest in southern Egypt, is a kidney-shaped basin of roughly 10km by 7km in area. The authors report the discovery of megalithic alignments and stone circles next to locations of Middle and Late Neolithic communities at Nabta, which suggest the early development of a complex society. The southward shift of the monsoons in the Late Neolithic age rendered the area once again hyperarid and uninhabitable some 4,800 radiocarbon years before the present (years BP). This well-determined date establishes that the ceremonial complex of Nabta, which has alignments to cardinal and solstitial directions, was a very early megalithic expression of ideology and astronomy. Five megalithic alignments within the playa deposits radiate outwards from megalithic structures, which may have been funerary structures. The organization of the megaliths suggests a symbolic geometry that integrated death, water, and the Sun. An exodus from the Nubian Desert at 4,800 years BP may have stimulated social differentiation and cultural complexity in predynastic Upper Egypt.

J.M. Malville, F. Wendorf, A.A. Mazar & R. Schild, ‘Megaliths and Neolithic astronomy in southern Egypt’ (Letters to Nature) in Nature 392, 488 (1998)

Other texts describe these very first sacred landscapes, describing buildings that, even for the ancient Egyptian, were a fading and distant memory. They did not even know the names of the gods that roamed during those days of yore, but referred to them cryptically in books such as the ‘Book of the Primeval Old Ones’ as the nameless gods.

The non-magician tends to focus overly on the surface exterior form of ceremony and ritual, for the non-initiate has very little understanding of the inner states implied by these techniques. I like to interpret them using a psychological model.

‘The Book of the Primeval Old Ones’ (a pukka book, not a Grantian creation) tells us that in the primeval times the surface of the planet was covered with water. Below the surface of the water lay the remains of one or perhaps more than one previous creations. The divine entities were without form but not without power. The ancient sages or shamans call out to these beings, using words of power that they had but recently learned. There are said to be seven sages or shamans, and this is a motif that seems to crop up all over the place. I have found references to them in Egyptian, Hindu and even Chinese mythology, where they are connected with the constellation the Plough or Great Bear. Apart from an astrological significance, they seem to me to be real personality types, perhaps members of the tribe whose trance awareness is slightly more advanced than the others, and are thus able to say, "That is a special place, we should build a temple here."

At the word of the seven shamans, the power quickened and the first cosmic island rose from the waters. On this island, those shamans or seers built the first sacred temple. Perhaps it was these visionaries whose consciousness first emerged randomly from the past. (Interestingly, it was another visionary, Imhotep, who was later to be credited with the creation of the first temple hewn from stone, and subsequently deified for his efforts.)

These are very suggestive images—I feel they have something to do with the moment in which our early
predator mentality emerged from its instinctual fog and became self-aware. The divine forces take on form where previously they had none—they are still nameless but now they are represented in two of the most ancient hieroglyphs: the hand and the yoni or phallus (see Lascaux). These ‘hieroglyphs’ are very ancient indeed, perhaps even the oldest representations of the divine. These same pictograms can be seen in the cave paintings of the palaeolithic—for example at Pech Merle, Lot, France (c. 24,000 BCE), where the scribe has left the imprint of his or her own hand on the sacred ‘pictographic’ text.

Palaeolithic cave paintings from Pech Merle, France.

The cave paintings are revealed, not as pictures in the sense of art history, but as sacred texts—whose true meaning is only now emerging. My editor reminds me that magick is full of dream and trance meditations using the human hand as a focus (see Jan Fries’ Seidways, Mandrake of Oxford, 1997, for an interesting exploration of some of these wyrd byways of magick).

What do these two pictograms mean—the hand and the phallus? Psychologically I feel they are pointing to the catalyst that enabled our consciousness to mutate and become self-aware. Is it not obvious that what most distinguishes us from other beasts of creation is our sexuality—what other animal has a sexuality quite like ours? We look at other animals and try to recognise a rudimentary sexuality, e.g. love-play in dolphins and non-reproductive homosexuality in various other animals. Perhaps some animals are closer to our end of the sexual spectrum than others, but I still feel that strictly speaking, animals reproduce, they do not have sex.

The ancient Egyptians seem to be telling us that it was in the sexual act itself that the ancients first found the way to become human. It was sexuality that generated the power necessary to raise the primal mound from the waters, where it had subsided after some primeval battle. Why should this have been a once and for all time process? Could not the same catalyst work over and over again? Two principles become divided from each other in order to become self-aware and then experience the real transforming joy of union.

The two gods—hand and genitals—are later assimilated into the predynastic cult of the phallic god Min2 and his ‘cousin’ Amon-Ra—whose rites in dynastic times included some form of sexual magick—in which the phallus of the god was stimulated and a magical, transformative elixir sprang forth. The mythology of dynastic times fully explores all the mysteries of sacred sexuality, starting with masturbation. A mythology that gives such a central role to an act of masturbation is a very mysterious one. Perhaps they knew something we do not or have forgotten. They seem to be saying that masturbation is good for the body, good for the land and good for the whole topocosm. It is also one of the first mysteries of life, when we first reach out and touch ourselves.

On the face of it touching ourselves seems unnecessary, for we are already touching ‘inside’. Somehow the system, by some accident of physiology, finds this one of the first magical arts—perhaps this is why the later religions sought to suppress and demonise the process? We most of us have residual conditioning concerning masturbation—but the ancients knew, as we now know, that masturbation is a natural part of the healthy functioning of mind, body, spirit—the works.

Paradoxically, the way you learn and practice masturbation affects your ability to really experience sacred sex with another person. Look at how many of the current problems of dysfunctional sex stem from ineffective masturbation. For example, for men the problem can be an addiction to furtive and rapid relief, whilst for women it is an ignorance due to lack of exploration and experimentation with self-love.

Beginning with masturbation, or self-love, and embracing the whole range of joyous sexuality, the magician can reprogram his or her whole biosystem so that it becomes fully in tune with the erotic landscape. It is said that we contain the whole of our evolution in our genes—that when a human develops from embryo to adult, they go through all the phases of millions of years of evolution, from fish to reptile to mammal. If this be true for the physical, may it not also be true for consciousness itself? Gyrus says that this reprogramming involves retracing the development of consciousness, union to division to union etc., and back again, and I agree with that. For men and women, the first step might be work on developing your orgasm, so that it become a total body experience that literally ‘fucks your brains out’, a useful condition to be in when exploring some of the better trance states.

I am particularly fond of Margot Anand’s book Art of Sexual Magick,3 were she gives graded exercises for exploring your orgasmic response. This can be done alone or with a trusted partner. Even if your sexual partner is present, the ideal is still to explore your individual sexual response first, the partner helping to stimulate and explore the secret workings of your body at your
pleasure.

The idea is to enter your ritual space without any particular goal in mind, just enjoy the full bodily sensations as he or she caresses and strokes your body. Being pleasured by your partner in this way is, in many ways, more intimate that actual intercourse. Don’t worry about coming, just become very pacific and let the sensations stream around your body. Your partner will naturally vary the rhythm, making the approach to climax slower and more erratic.

If you feel yourself approaching the point of ‘no return’, maybe ask your partner to pause, and make any adjustments necessary to prevent ejaculation or climax (for a man, pressing on the prostate or muladhara chakra can often help this). As the urge for ejaculation or release subsides, you may feel the warm sexual glow spreading throughout your whole pelvic region, opening out other energy centres sometimes called chakras. When you’re ready your partner begins again, exploring all your erogenous zones, or places of power, until you reach another peak.

The first time you try this exercise, you might be happier coming off now, but if you are more experienced, you might want to go for another and another pre-orgasmic peak. A strange thing happens: you become like an erotic landscape, a sea of sensation. Try to regard the time you have spent in this ‘build up’ to ejaculation as part of the orgasm. Viewed this way, perhaps you can see that an orgasm, for both men and women, is actually a lot more intense than those few moments of ejaculation or climax.

Perhaps you are happy to just stop when you’ve had enough, although you might find that when you do come in the conventional sense, the orgasm is ultra-physical and polymorphous. In other words, it forms a field all over your body. There are at least two distinct sexual trance states here, one ‘pre-orgasmic’ the other ‘post-orgasmic’. Both can be moments in which ancestral memories, dreams, meditations and archaic god forms can break through into your sensitized body. That is sexual magick.

Locked away in our brains are the first moments during which we emerged as humans from the cosmic waters, becoming self-aware and preserving that moment in the form of sacred landscapes—temples, reed enclosures and circles. Perhaps you will remember that first moment when, as an ancient hunter-gatherer, you made love or stimulated your partner, and something in the way you thought about the world around you changed utterly. Maybe you were that naked man in a cave at Lascaux, staring at the bison and rhinoceros—and as you look down you see your erection. Later you paint your experience on the walls of the cave.

The Tankhem magical system works like this—combining a primeval sexuality with a re-membering of the first temple—that we can live again as our ancestors did—in other words—we can turn our brains back on. One hint as to the accomplishment of this task lies in the understanding and reclaiming of our sexuality and the connections it has always had to the external and erotic landscape.

Further research

• Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving by Betty Dodson (Crown Trade Paperbacks, NY 1996).
• Readers interested in male pleasuring are referred to More Joy: An Advanced Guide to Solo Sex by Dr. Harold Litten (Factor Press, 1996), ISBN 0962653187, and Joseph Kramer’s Erotic Massage instructional videos. Also, The Multi Orgasmic Man by Mantak Chia & Douglas Abrams Avara (HarperCollins, 2002).

Innocence is invaluable. It is like being barefoot in a forest, every detail makes its presence felt. So, when, I was young and fit enough to think that walking twenty miles every day for a week was what holidays were all about, I took myself off to Wiltshire. My pocket guide to archaeological sites had photos of hill forts and details of a few barrows and wasn’t there suppose to be a ley running up from a hill fort through Salisbury cathedral to Old Sarum?

Such holidays were solitary events where my only companions were a brace of cameras and a large supply of film. The rhythm of a few days’ walking soon cleansed the mind of complicated thoughts. The pace of the human gait allows a closeness with the particulars of every place that is blurred on a bicycle and unimaginable when driving. Internal streams of thought can be followed along their courses until they merge with the Big Ideas of Life that occupy wide rivers or even entire oceans.

‘Walking Zen’ I knew it as then, for at the time my tutors were books about eastern religions. My local ‘born-again’ librarian clearly considered my appetite for Hindu Goddesses and the like to be very peculiar. It would be many years before I was to discover that there were even a few others in Britain who felt that feminine deities were still alive, and later still to find that practising pagans almost abounded, if one knew where to look!

About half way into my week’s walking in Wiltshire, having already ‘done’ Salisbury and Stonehenge, I found a farmhouse doing B&B. The next morning was Wednesday (Woden’s Day), and it seemed appropriate to walk Wansdyke (Woden’s Dyke), which is the remains of a long earthwork running over a ridge of downs. The horizon seemed so far away as to have all of southern England spread around; the solitude was nearly total, the weather was hot and almost sultry, and the sense of self slipped away to be replaced by a one-ness with the land.

So it was the day after this rapturous experience that I made my first encounter with a place that has called me back on many occasions since. The enormous grey sarsen stones along the avenue and within the vast space enclosed by the gargantuan ditches have a presence unlike at any other stone circle. At Avebury, for this is where I am describing, each stone had its own personality, and to photograph them was like taking a portrait of a human face—from different angles the character changed but was always distinct.

Perhaps because of the spaciousness of this monument, other visitors rarely disturb your thoughts. They seem almost other-worldly, like ghosts that can be seen but not felt. The sheep and cows which graze there have a greater presence, but they too seem transient. In several photographs that I took people dissolve away in the light, and sheep blur at the edges. To say that this is ’caused by’ effects of focus and flare, or from slow shutter speeds, is to miss the reality of these images.

From the circle it is an easy walk along the side of a stream to reach the most enigmatic of all prehistoric sites, Silbury Hill. The writings of Michael Dames (The Silbury Treasure, 1976, and The Avebury Cycle, 1977) had been like throwing a handful of pebbles into a lake; in this case the ripples resonated with all my feelings for the Earth as Mother. Although I was unable to connect the reality of the monument with the complex ideas which I associated with it, the scale of the construction and perfection of its shape were surprising.

On the crest of the next hill is the chambered long barrow at West Kennett. Irresponsibly restored, with a glass-block roof, it has still succeeded in retaining its sense of sacredness. Like a human figure laid down there are five recesses corresponding to the head, arms and legs. That this is intended to be recognised as a Goddess, the Great Mother, is left in no doubt—the entrance is between the legs, and to enter that tomb/womb for the first time aroused the same intensity of emotion as, say, the moment of conquest of a lover. But this was no sensual emotion, but a primeval resonance with both Her life-giving and dark aspects.

The mixed enchantments that this cluster of sites aroused in me led me to read avidly about them and to visit the many other sites in the area. On subsequent trips I waited patiently for dusk and dawn, sleeping rough through the short summer nights. But the innocence was gone. I now knew too much, my head was full of knowledge, and it left no space for words of wisdom to speak across the millennia. My preoccupations became more concerned with ‘getting a good photo’ and whether the light was right.

There is a moral here. My interest in earth mysteries is such that I helped create and edit a magazine devoted to the subject (Mercian Mysteries); my understanding of the goddess and other aspects of neo-
paganism has developed so that I feel able to discuss my ideas openly. However, I recall when someone wrote to me wanting to come along on a Mercian Mysteries field-trip as she was "only just scratching the surface as far as knowledge of earth mysteries etc. goes". She felt in some way inferior because of her ignorance, but my reaction was entirely opposite, and my heart went out to her as this is an experience I can no longer regain.

Too often we know too much; far better to allow places to tell their own tale and wrap you with their wisdom.