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Tip o the Week #108 - Kilmartin

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:58:55 +0100

Tip o the Week #108 - Kilmartin

Dear [firstname]

What are your five favorite sacred sites in the British Isles? For me, Avebury would be number one followed closely by Glastonbury, but of the remaining three, Kilmartin, just south of Oban on the west coast of Scotland would surely be included in my list of five. I’ve just had the pleasure of spending the past weekend up there, this time with my Geomancy Group, walking the landscape and being involved in some powerful ceremonies. (Aside: Much of the past winter, Scotland has been having lots of rain, snow and gale force winds, while we down south have had a quite dry time of it. As a result, much of England is having a drought significant enough to have a hose pipe ban; however, for the past week here in Glastonbury, we have been having torrential rains. Unfortunately, because the ground is so dry, the rain couldn’t sink in, so we have had massive flooding! So sadly, the hose-pipe ban is still in place. Meanwhile, while the rain and flooding continued in England, up in Kilmartin we were blessed by a weekend of almost totally blue skies and fantastic stars at night.)

People have been in Kilmartin for at least ten thousand years - the most impressive times were from at least three thousand BCE to the middle of this past millennium. The main attraction are a row of at least five chambered cairns that march down the Kilmartin valley. All are externally covered with large well-rounded stones from the size of a croquet ball to the size of soccer/footballs. Several of these cairns had tombs large enough to get into. For me, Nether Largie North was the most impressive. You drop into the chamber from the modern roof, which slides open to allow entry down some steep stairs into a rectangular room with a rather large cist in the centre. (A cist - pronounced “kist” - is a small stone-built coffin-like box usually used to hold cremated bodies.)


Nether Largie North		Nether Largie Chamber

A bit further down the line, the Nether Largie South Cairn is also a jewel. While it is externally a round cairn and has a chamber entered from the North. The chamber makes it feel like a long barrow. There is also a lovely small cist on the back of the same mound.

Nether Largie South
looking South - into the mouth of the chamber.

At the same point in the valley is Temple Wood, a lovely stone ring, whose floor is covered with the same kind of stones that cover the cairns.

Temple Wood
and
The Three Circuit Labyrinth

It was at this stone ring that at dusk on Saturday our group held a magical ceremony on a small three circuit labyrinth made of string. Several new members of the group were blindfolded and one-at-a-time they were brought to the goal of the labyrinth. The object was for them to find their way out. The rest of us stood on the string/walls and holding hands, created a human wall for the blindfolded initiate. As s/he passed by individuals on the wall, they quickly ran around and extended the wall further. Although we had only nine people acting as walls, we never ran out of human walls! (I find this is much harder to verbalize than to actually do, but I trust you get the idea.)

Kilmartin has its share of quite large standing stones arranged in a way that makes it difficult to determine how they might have been used some are covered with cup and ring marks.

Standing Stones at Nether Largie.
Note the cup marks.

Kilmartin has the largest number of cup and ring marks that I have ever seen. Achnabreck is a collection of cup and ring marks to the south of the features I have been talking about so far. It is located at a spot with a beautiful view of the sea.


Achnabreck		View to the sea

I am thankful that our Geo Group took so many opportunities to tune in to the Spiritual during the weekend, after all, that is the reason why these special sites were constructed in the first place. This will be a Beltane to remember!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
sig@geomancy.org
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week # 107 - Faulty Memory/Faulty Wisdom

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:15:48 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 107 - Faulty Memory/Faulty Wisdom

Dear [firstname]

I have long been interested in what I call "Daysigns" - animals, plants, or anything that triggers an association that can enhance the meaning of an issue you are working on. They can be treated exactly like a dream, or Night sign.

Great Great Grey Owl

What word or words do you associate with the image above? Of course, not everyone will come up with the exact same word or words, but the chances are that if you are of European extraction, "Wisdom" or its equivalent might well spring to mind. Athena had an owl who sat on her shoulder and who whispered wisdom in her ear. ("A little bird told me.") As a child in America, my favourite potato chips (Brits read: crisps) was Wise Potato Chips, and their symbol was an owl.

Owl = Wisdom
When I was a kid, the Wise logo was a full owl.
Now it has been reduced to one eye.

But if you are a Native American, an owl means danger! Something bad is coming your way. What you see depends upon where you sit in the circle - Wisdom to some is Danger to others.

And when we come to remembering things from the past, we are continuing to learn just how inacurate our memory is. In an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled When Memory Commits an Injustice: Eyewitness mistakes lead to tragic errors in court, but new methods could help, author Jonah Lehrer tells us about how incredibly faulty our memory is, and how its accuracy decreases with time.

Lehrer writes, "The biggest lie of human memory is that it feels true. Although our recollections seem like literal snapshots of the past, they're actually deeply flawed reconstructions, a set of stories constantly undergoing rewrites."

He then goes on to discuss how faulty memory is in court trials: "Eye witnesses are repeatedly asked to recall what they saw, but their answers are inevitably influenced by the questions being asked. The result is more confidence in increasingly less accurate testimony.

"Such errors often have tragic consequences. According to the Innocence Project, a legal advocacy group, about 75% of false convictions that are later overturned are based on faulty eyewitness testimony."¹ !!!

This becomes a real issue when academic HISstorians write about controversial events and people in the distant past. For example, many readers of these Tips have a particular vision of the Knights Templar that might well include protectors of pilgrims along the way, magical rites, sacred geometry, and escoteric activities like finding spiritual treasure in the tunnels beneath what had been Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. Helen Nicholson, is a Reader in the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University, and author of A Brief History of The Knights Templar ². In the first paragraph of this book she writes, "It has been a convention of European historical writing since classical times that history should be based on written sources, preferably eyewitness sources but, if not, then written as soon after the actual event as possible. … so modern oral myths of the Templars - supposed 'tradition' which was not actually written down until recently - will not be considered as historical evidence."

Remember that Lehrer wrote that, "…about 75% of false convictions that are later overturned are based on faulty eyewitness testimony." Also, as far as the Templars, the designers of the great Gothic Cathedrals were concerned, they didn't write down their esoteric tradition because shorty after their termination in 1307 the Inquisition and the witch trials didn't exactly encourage carriers of this occult knowledge to write things down.

Jacques de Molay was the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and has been a focus of much esotericism since his death. He was burned at the stake in 1314. Five hundred years later, an unknown man jumped on the guillotine just as Louis XVI had been decapitated and cried, "Jacques de Molay, tu es vengé!" (Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!)

Jacques de Molay
(from WIkipedia)

Helen Nicholson didn't mention de Molay anywhere in her book on the Templars.

There's an old but true maxim: HISstory is written by the victors. As a result, in this case, so much gnowledge and wisdom is lost.

Once again, what you see depends upon where you stand.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
Webmaster
Mid-Atlantic Geomancy
SunnyBank Centre
9, Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
Great Britain BA6 8JE
sig@geomancy.org
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk

---------------------------------

Works Cited:

¹When Memory Commits an Injustice in the Wall Street Journal, by Jonah Lehrer (14 April, 2012)

² A Brief History of the Knights Templar by Helen Nicholson. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7624-3848-8.

If you would like to comment on this Tip (or anything else in MAG for that matter), I would invite you to put your thoughts in the Comment Window that is on every page in the MAG website at the bottom of the right-hand menu column.

Tip o' the Week #106 - Wisdom and The Fool

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:39:30 +0100

Tip o' the Week #106 - Wisdom and The Fool

Dear [firstname]

It is with some trepidation that I write about the topic of Wisdom. But recently some things have come together that have emboldened me to be so foolish.

Let's begin with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Wisdom is the next to last Sepheroth (#2) called "Chokmah." (The Sepheroth are the 10 attributes/emanations in Kabbalah through which God created the world and/or manifests.)

Tree of Life
(from A Complete Guide to the Tarot
by Eden Gray.New York: Crown Publishers. 1970.
Library of Congress Card Number: 70-108086.

Wisdom is the last step of the Pilgrim/Seeker on the Spiritual Path before reaching Kether/the Crown/dare I say, "The One."

Wisdom "means HOW TO ACCURATELY 'ACT' IN ONE'S CURRENT SITUATION. This is not a matter of 'information' that one is missing (for apparently the 'facts' are already known), but of HOW TO TAKE ACTION on the known facts. EFFECTIVE PLANNING OF HOW WE WANT OUR LIVES TO BE IN THE FUTURE is the central issue in solving Chokmah-related crises; we must find a way to DECIDE what to do, how to become or what to evolve our lives into. Carefull FUTURE-PLANNING is of the essence here." <http://www.spirit-alembic.com/chokmah.html>

According to Dr. Igor Grossman of the University of Waterloo in Canada, there are five crucial aspects of wise reasoning. (Cited in The Economist - 7 April 2012 p. 80). {I have put my small additions (in italics and brackets/parentheses)}:

1. Willingness to seek opportunities to resolve conflict.

2. Willingness to search for compromise.

3. Recognition of the limits of personal knowledge. (Wisdom didn't start with me!)

4. Awareness that more than one perspective on a problem can exist. (Sacred point of view)

5. Appreciation of the fact that things may get worse before they get better. (Healing crisis)

I have begun to apply these five aspects to difficult issues I encounter. Seeking resolution and compromise is where it begins - not 'My way is the ONLY way!' as said by so many Fundamentalists these days. Then recognising one's limits of personal knowledge reminds me of that quote by one of my teachers, Terry Ross when questioned about something he said or dowsed, "Wisdom didn't start with me." I've written about Seneca Wolf Clan Garandmother Twylah Nitsch's saying, "When sitting in a circle, everyone has their own sacred point of view." We all see the centre (the object of discussion) from a slightly different perspective or point of view depending upon where we sit in the circle. And finally, the reality that things may get worse before they get better. Here in Glastonbury, that's called a Healing Crisis.

IMHO, all these points are wise to remember.

The Role of the Fool

I've long felt an affinity with the Fool particularly in my early school years and also in the Tarot. I have dyslexia, and to cover my spelling and math misteaks, I became the class clown (lots of us dyslexics use this disguise). If you have difficulty in responding to even simple questions from the teacher, if you're already a clown, no one can call you a fool.

But I was also drawn to this archetype when I first got in to things esoteric in the late sixties. The license plate in my hippy wagon/Volkswagon bus was "Aleph." In the Tarot, the Fool's numerical location is Zero, and therefore the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet - Aleph is the Fool. In a sense, because s/he has no numerical location, the Fool represents the Pilgrim/Seeker on the path. Like the player in a board game, S/he can be everywhere.

Recently, I was re-reading Eden Gray's Complete Guide to the Tarot (cited above). Each card is attributed to a path number. The Fool's path is Number 11 - the last path to be trod by the seeker before reaching the One/Kether. When the Fool gets to Wisdom (Chokmah) and s/he then ready to reach The Crown/Kether. And Eden Gray says, "The Fool, in its esoteric meaning, goes along with Kether, as they both represent the Unknown Absolute before it comes into manifestation."

In the Medieval Court, only the Fool could tell the King where it was really at - and get away with it.

May this foolish thing called Wisdom come to all of us on this planet.

We sure could use it.

};-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
sig@geomancy.org
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week # 105 - Saint Dunstan: Good News/Bad News

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:56:06 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 105 - Saint Dunstan: Good News/Bad News

Dear [firstname]


St. Dunstan in the Patrick Chapel of Glastonbury Abbey		St Dunstan and the Devil in St Johns Church, Glastonbury

THE GOOD NEWS

Most historians term the last half of the first millennium after Christ as a Dark Age in Europe. St. Dunstan, is seen as a key figure in England's subsequent recovery of Christianity that had essentially devolved during that period, and thus he is our local Saint. Dunstan was thought of as the most outstanding of the English saints before the invasion of William the Conqueror. He was born in 909 CE just outside of Glastonbury in Baltonsborough.

He went to school in the Glastonbury Abbey, and became its Abbot in 943. One of Dunstan's first steps as Abbot was to reintroduce monastic discipline using the Rule of St. Benedict (± 547). He enlarged the church and other buildings and bolstered the Abbey's reputation as a centre of learning. Students at the school were taught by professed monks and were expected to participate in the daily monastic observances. This preparation provided a good crop of candidates for monasticism. Soon Glastonbury became a spearhead for a widespread monastic revival.

The Irish Connections

Just how much Irish influence there was on the Abbey just before the end of the first millennium CE is much debated; however, Bligh Bond, the Church Architect and Antiquarian who did the dig of the Abbey in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, found the remains of what he called the Dunstan Chapel just to the west of the Mary Chapel:

The Dunstan Chapel
The form of the foundation with the extensions at each corner
(best seen in the left hand corner) mark this as a typically Irish structure.
This shape is found all over Ireland, but only a small handful
of these structures are known in England.

St. Dunstan was known as an excellent metalsmith (he's the saint of goldsmiths and jewelers), but also he was known for his Irish harp playing. Glastonbury's local secondary school, St. Dunstan's, has a harp as its symbol. Our Glastonbury Tercentennial Labyrinth, which honours four famous spiritual people in our town's history. Dunstan is one, and his symbol in this labyrinth is also a harp.


The Glastonbury Tercentennial Labyrinth		The Dunstan Stone marks one of the four 180° turns in this labyrinth

Here is another illustration of St Dunstan playing the harp while the Devil sneaks in through the door:

Dunstan, Harp & Devil
(From Wikipedia)

But more of the Devil later.

Dunstan became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 960 CE. And in that role, continued to strengthen the renewal of the Church and especially the rules of the Benedictine Order. After celebrating the Divine Liturgy on the Feast of Ascension, 988 CE, St. Dunstan preached a sermon in which he foretold that within the next three days he would die, which he did. Dunstan was buried in his cathedral, where his tomb was a popular place of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages. Until Thomas a Becket later eclipsed Dunstan's fame he was the most popular English saint.

Several years ago, I went to Canterbury Cathedral to look for his place of burial within the Cathedral. I asked a number of Docents (guides with blue sashes carrying thick notebooks of information) where that was. None of them seemed to know until I asked a frail older Docent, and he took me to Dunstan's resting place. The large floor stone marking his grave was just to the right of, and touching the High Altar - a reasonable (but sadly forgotten) indication of his importance to the Church.

THE BAD NEWS

It is my feeling that whenever a period of history is termed a "Dark Age," it means that the ruling culture of the HISstorian who later wrote about the "Dark" time was not in charge. While there were some notable exceptions (like the Venerable Bede 672-735CE) the Dark Age of Europe in the last half of the first millennium CE was not controlled by Christians. Most of the people were still pagans and some of the things that they were interested in would be of great interest to people like geomancers and practitioners of what HISstorians now call the "Dark" Arts - once again, an aspect of spirituality that Christians were not in control of. (Not all witches are bad, not all Catholic priests are good.)

So here comes the Devil. As I said above, St. Dunstan, is seen as a key figure in England's subsequent recovery of Christianity that had essentially been on hold during the Dark Age. There are a number of pictures that symbolise St. Dunstan's termination of this Dark Age. He was an excellent silversmith, and we are told that while he was making a chalice, the Devil annoyed him by his personal appearance, and tempted him whereupon St. Dunstan suddenly seized the fiend by the nose with a pair of iron tongs, burning hot, and so held him while he roared and cried till the night was far spent.


Dunstan holds the Devil by the nose with Tongs Illustration from honearchive.org/etexts/edb/day-pages/139-may19.html		Dunstan holds the Devil by the nose with Tongs Glastonbury Abbey

St. Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull'd the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.

Please understand me, I am not anti Christian. Among other deities, I honour Jesus every evening when I go to bed for the many positive things that have come through from his teachings in the last two thousand years. But I also feel that Christians have a lot to answer for since the founding of the Church up to their impact today on modern politics in both America and here in Britain. St. Dunstan's eradication of the Dark Age was just the beginning of the chain of persecution of alternative thinkers that led to the Inquisition and many other atrocious acts of intolerance of groups people like dowsers and geomancers (not to mention followers of Islam and other non-Christian religions).

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Seneca Wolf Clan Mother Grandmother Twylah Nitsch spoke about our Sacred Point of View - When sitting in a circle and looking at an object in the middle (in this case one's path to the One), we all see that path differently; we each have our individual Sacred Point of View. This is the case for me with our local Saint Dunstan. He was both good news and bad news.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
sig@geomancy.org
+44 (0)1458 835 818

p.s. If you haven't checked out my latest iBook, The Earth Mysteries Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques, please go to iTunes and download a copy.

Tip o' the Week # 104 - Dowsing and Quantum

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:26:47 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 104 - Dowsing and Quantum

Dear [firstname]

If you are not familiar with the Double Slit Experiment, please go to YouTube and watch a short animated film on it before you read further. I have been reading about Quantum physics for over thirty years. The first to catch my eye was Werner Heisenberg and his finding that there is no such thing as an observer being separate from the observed. This Double Split experiment can help you see how this is possible.


Werner Heisenberg		Double Slit Experiment and the mechanical eye/observer

The build-up of an interference pattern as individual particles pass through two side-by-side slits in a screen is one of the most famous examples of how an entity such as an electron can behave both as a particle and as a wave. Aside from making the point that sometimes matter and wave can switch back and forth, the main point I want to make here is that simply by observing the an electron shooting toward the two slits makes it act differently. The observer becomes one with the observed. One of the basic cornerstones of Newtonian physics is that the observer must remain totally objective. But this double split experiment showed that this is not possible.

There is no such thing as a totally objective observer. And the observer not only can, but does affect the observed. Of course, one of the basic caveats in dowsing is not to be attached to the outcome, because if you are, your dowsing will support your unconscious need for a specific answer, "Does my Aunt have cancer?" ("Dear God, make it 'No'!") You will get a "No," for sure. Your unconscious wants to give you the answer it thinks you want to hear. This is why in my eight steps to good dowsing, after tuning in and asking the question, I say repeatedly, "I wonder what the answer is going to be! I wonder what the answer is going to be! I wonder what the answer is going to be!" As long as I am saying that, I can't be saying, "Dear God, make it 'No'!"

So we can create our dowsing answer.

Here is where Tony Talmage comes in. Last weekend, I was at the BSD Earth Energies Group Spring Meeting just outside of Cheltenham. Tony, who is Chairman of the Guernsey Society of Dowsers, spoke on "Dowsing and the Quantum Connection." He spoke of quantum entanglement. According to Wikipedia, "When a measurement is made and it causes one member of such a pair to take on a definite value (e.g., clockwise spin), the other member of this entangled pair will at any subsequent time be found to have taken the appropriately correlated value (e.g., counterclockwise spin). Thus, there is a correlation between the results of measurements performed on entangled pairs, and this correlation is observed even though the entangled pair may have been separated by arbitrarily large distances."

This is what happens with map dowsing and perhaps what happens when dowsers work at a distance - there is no distance. Tony writes, "The hair, the spot of blood, gemstone, oil, water or other witness, (and, I'd add permission) is used by the dowser to connect to its parent. This weird world of quantum offers a scientific explanation for the weird world of the geomancer."

Talmage then goes deeper to suggest that the dowser can actually create reality. He feels that our human consciousness gives form to the symptoms we are told about, and so we bring in to manifestation the negativities described. I believe this is behind what I call "Sig's Hypothesis Number One - Even if they were trained by the same teacher, the chances are very good that when dowsing for intangible targets (like the Earth Energies in a sacred space or in a 'sick house'), no two dowsers will find exactly the same thing." We each find what our particular paradigm causes us to find. We each have our own individual sacred point of view, and therefore create our own reality.

Throughout his talk, Tony spoke of how difficult it was to understand how quantum works, and used something Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman once said, "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't!"

But I feel that I got a better vision last weekend of the possible connection between Quantum and dowsing. I believe that this will be an important part of what the American Society of Dowsers meant when they chose their motto, Indago Felix! - The Fruitful Search! Look for more discussion about this within the BSD in the coming year.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
sig@geomancy.org
+44 (0)1458 835 818

p.s. If you haven't checked out my latest iBook, The Earth Mysteries Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques, please go to iTunes and download a copy.

Tip o’ the Week # 103 - Update

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:14:26 +0100

Tip o’ the Week # 103 - Update

Dear [firstname]

Instead of the usual Tip on some aspect of Geomancy, this one is about new information concerning what I am up to. I am now in Holland where my wife Karin and I have a flat in Enkhuizen, a lovely old town at the western end of the Markerwaarddijk that crosses what used to be called the Zuiderzee.

Enkhuisen is on the western end of the Markerwaarddijk (in red)
The dijk/dike is 32 kilometers/19.9 miles long  Illustration is from <downwindofamsterdam.com

I’ve been working on my <Events> page for 2012. If you live near any of them, it would be great to see you!

I had the sad job recently of taking over twenty names off of my mailing list because the emails bounced. If you enjoy getting these Tips, and your email is going to change, please let me know what your new one is so you won’t miss anything. sig@geomancy.org ; )

I am pleased to tell you that my Earth Mysteries Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques is now available now available on the iTunes store and you can find it here for $4.99. The following is from the Introduction to the Revised Edition section of Earth Mysteries Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques:

When I began the American Society of Dowsers (ASD)/New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA) Earth Mysteries Project almost thirty years ago, having just finished my Masters Program in the study of Sacred Space, I wanted to gather data on a significant number of the underground stone chambers that dotted the New England and Hudson River Valley of New York. In retrospect, I did this for two reasons:

I focused on three major aspects of Pre-Protestant Reformation Sacred Spaces:

Archaeoastronomy. Their sacred sites all over the world were oriented towards significant, usually horizonal, astronomical events. I focused on the Sun, but became aware that there were Lunar and Stellar alignments as well.

Sacred Geometry. They were built using a small handful of geometrical ratios all of which were in the ratio of an irrational number to One - the Square Roots of Two, Three, and Five, plus pi ∏, and phi ø. These irrational (i.e. ‘not rational’) numbers could assist the seeker to experience the irrational (read: Spiritual/intuitive) world more easily.

The Earth Energies. These older sacred sites were located at places where different life force systems of this planet came together, and were concentrated. I called these Earth Energy Power Centres, and, as I saw them, they consist of ‘Primary Water’ and ‘Energy Leys’.

So my first reason for this project was to see if these three components were to be found at the stone chambers of New England.

The second reason why I embarked on this project was that back in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, most American archaeologists and anthropoligists were blinded by their paradigm that other than Native Americans, Columbus was first, and so these chambers were Colonial Root Cellars - places where potatoes, carrots and other root crops could be safely stored over the winter. So my second focus at the beginning of this project was to gather enough data to convince the academicians and scientists that these were truly sacred spaces.

It didn’t work. Academicians shift paradigms very slowly (if at all). Columbus was first! They felt, for example, that builders did not know enough to have the precise knowledge of astronomy to orient their sacred places the way archaeoastronomers like Alexander Thom, Gerald Hawkins, Byron Dix and others were suggesting. Sacred Geometry? Are you telling me that the Neolithic people of Britain were using sophisticated geometry in the construction of their stone rings two thousand years before the Greeks invented geometry?!! (Let alone the “primitive savages” in New England!) And as for dowsing, where’s the empirical evidence that it is ‘real?’ There isn’t any.

I’ve learned a lot since 1985 when this Handbook was first published, and I have updated much of the data-gathering information to be found on the pages that follow. Perhaps the biggest change is one of focus. I am not particularly interested in presenting these data gathering techniques so you can use them to convince archaeologists - and scientists in general - of the reality that our ancient foremothers and fathers were into sacred geometry, archaeoastronomy and the Earth energies. I suspect that this paradigm shift for most academic left-brainers to allow these possibilities is damn near impossible.

So, I now feel what is really important is for people who are new to the Earth Mysteries to convince themselves through the application of these essentially left brain practices of the reality that our ‘primitive savage’ ancestors were into these tools for expansion of consciousness and spiritual awareness. This will help you to get ready for (IMHO) the real work: experiencing for yourself the reality of these Mysteries. As I have long said, when ignorant folk use the term ‘primitive savages’, they are talking about a group of people who were more spiritually advanced than themselves.

I trust that you will find this iBook an interesting, useful and exciting read. It can be read on an iPhone or better yet, an iPad. If you have an iBook or Phone, Download the iTunes App, and then get the book. But, if you have a computer (Mac or PC), it won’t work, so you will need to get a special reader. To download it, go to iTunes <http://www.apple.com/uk/iTunes>. Here are a few:

Calibre <http://calibre-ebook.com>

Adobe Digital Editions <http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/>

Sony Reader for Mac <http://ebookstore.sony.com/download/>

Bookle <http://www.macworld.com/article/165235/2012/02/bookle_brings_epub_reading_to_the_mac.html>. Sadly, Bookle is only available in the USA.

The problem with the above computer based readers is that they can not read <.mov> (movie) files - although I am not sure about Bookle). I have two films in my Earth Mysteries Handbook. If you need to use one of these computer book readers and want to see the film and animation, contact me at <sig@geomancy.org>, and I will send you a URL where you can see both a dowsing instructional film, and an animation of the Sun through the year that will give you a different perspective on Orthographic Projections.

I would appreciate hearing from you if you have any feedback or difficulties in getting this iBook. Hopefully a bit later I will also have this for Kindle Fire as an eBook on Amazon. Sadly, the regular Kindle eBook Readers don't do a lot of the things that my book requires - like links and films.

Guess that’s it!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
sig@geomancy.org
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o’ the Week #101 - Re-Membering Abbott Whiting

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:13:19 +0100

Tip o’ the Week #102 - Re-Membering Abbott Whiting

Dear [firstname]

In the early eighties, when I decided that I wanted to live in Glastonbury, I told my English friends of this desire, and almost to a wo/man they replied, “No, you don’t want to live there!” When I arrived, like a smitten lover, at first I didn’t see what had caused them all to have that essentially identical reaction. But then I grew to see that there was an odd division in the town between the local Somerset folks who had lived here for generations, and the incomers, like myself, who had been drawn here by .... something very special - dare I say ‘magical’? But within the alternative community - back then it was called ‘the New Age community’ - there were many deep divisions. It seemed that everyone who had been called here had woken up, been divorced, and came here to ‘do it my way.’ (read: anarchism) Now coming from Vermont, I was familiar with this attitude. Back there it is called ’rugged Yankee individualism’. If I demand the right to do my thing, I must allow you to do yours.

So I found Glastonbury, the Land of Avalon, to be a town divided. While at first I reveled in my right to do my own thing, I soon found that it was damn hard to get anything done as a group. (The New Age philosophy had something to do with it in that everyone - including myself - was working on their intuition, and consciously left behind our rational gifts.) The result was that everybody wanted to do it differently - their own way. Chaos ruled.

In the last decade or so, I have gained a better sense why this might be the case here in Glastonbury, but not in surrounding towns or even in most of the rest of England. It has something to do with the dissolution of the Abbey. A good friend, Jon Cousins, now a Town Councillor, has done a lot to help me understand what might be the cause. In the last six years, he has produced three pamphlets of Glastonbury revisionist history. His first one was Remember Richard Whiting, The last Abbott of Glastonbury Abbey*. On the 30th of January, 2012, I was invited to attend the opening of the second edition of this most interesting eye-opening booklet, and to hear Jon expand his thoughts on it.

In the Fifteen-thirties, Henry VIII, the King of England, was in the process of converting England from Roman Catholicism to National Catholicism (what was to become the Anglican Communion, a.k.a the Church of England). Abbot Whiting had supported the King all the way. He had signed the letter urging Pope Clement VII to dissolve King Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He then signed the paper renouncing obedience to the Pope, and soon after, he put his name to another paper recognising the royal supremacy.

The Glastonbury Tor
where Abbot Whiting, John Thorne and Roger James were Hanged
dominates the Somerset Levels

Yet in 1539, after a sham trial in Wells, Whiting and the Abbey’s Treasurer, John Thorne and sub-Treasurer, Roger James were dragged up the to the Tor where they were hanged on a hastily constructed gibbet. As for the good Abbott, he was hanged only ‘till he was nearly dead, when he was cut down, and drawn and quartered while still alive and had his head cut off. The four body parts we sent to the four quarters of the Abbey’s land - Bath, Wells, Illchester and Bridgewater. His head was posted on a spike at the entrance of the Abbey.

The Glastonbury Abbey
It was being torn down even before Abbot Whiting's trial!

While there are a large amount of records from that time of other events in England, there are almost no records of Abbot Whiting’s trial or even what he was charged with! As Jon Cousins writes,” What I couldn’t understand was, if Richard Whiting supported Henry, why was he killed?” (p. 10) The reality is, we don’t know, but it must have had some secret to do with ‘the holyest erthe in Englande.’ What was the secret that was so important to Henry that he was willing to allow what can only be called a ritual murder of one of his most important supporters? Was it the Holy Grail? Was it (sacrilege) Jesus and Mary's bones? Jon’s conclusion was that Richard Whiting knew the mystery of the 'Something Else'. (He) knew the secret of 'What Glastonbury IS'. (p. 22)

To add to this mystery, is the image of his death - three men crucified - no hanged - on a high hill in most grotesque fashion. (Get the analogy?) Glastonbury author Geoffrey Ashe writes, ‘...one senses a hateful darkness, a memory of witchcraft or druidical rites.’ (p. 21) In other words: ritual murder.

Oh yes, in 1895, this good Abbot who had renounced obedience to the Pope was beatified along with Thorne and James not by the Church of England, but by the Church of Rome! Now that’s weird.

Jon Cousins feels, and so do I, that the dysfunction of our town today has its roots in this macabre black magic act in 1539 of the murder of Abbot Whiting and his two subalterns.

Jon has been contacting Churches here in Glastonbury and the Anglican and Catholic Bishops of this diocese to see if they would be willing to have a healing service of remembrance in the Abbey run by these Bishops, the local churches and all of the people of Glastonbury - Christians, Pagans, Hindus, and others citizens invited to participate in this ceremony to bring the separate parts of this good Abbot back together - to literally re-member the dismembered Abbott Whiting.

Jon reports that none of the Churches wanted to be involved with this healing event. None.

According to Barry Taylor, a Pilgrim in Glastonbury. "Whatever the reality, there is no doubt that the Abbot was brutally put to death on 15th November 1539 and that the town ever since has had the greatest difficulty in flourishing."

As I write this, it is the Celtic CrossQuarter Day of Imbolc. The seed that is planted on November 1st (Samhain), and lies dormant through the dark days of winter, then, like the quickening in the human reproductive cycle, moves on its own for the first time. It is time for the quickening of Jon’s plan, to Remember Abbot Whiting, to have a whole community healing. Jon has planted the seed. It has lain quietly through the winter, and now it is time to get going.

Please send your prayers for this event to come together to bring the re-membering of our town.

Thank You,
and
Happy Imbolc!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

This Tip only scrapes the surface on the story of the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey in 1539. I highly recommend Jon’s trilogy entitled:

The Glastonbury Documents

Cousins, Jon. 2007. Remember Richard Whiting. Concerning the Isle of Transformation, and the last Abbot of Glastonbury. Republished in 2012. £2.00

__________. 2009. What is Glastonbury? Concerning the dichotomy between the Market Town and ‘Sacred Glastonbury. £2.00

__________. 2010. Temple of Reconciliation: Concerning Jesus Maria, and the re-union of the temporal and spiritual aspects of Glastonbury. £3.00

The first and third booklets can be ordered from the Library of Avalon, The Glastonbury Experience, High Street, Glastonbury, Somerset. Contact them for postage and handling charges. I am not sure at this time where you can purchase What is Glastonbury? Concerning the dichotomy between the Market Town and ‘Sacred Glastonbury. When I find this out, I will inform you in a later Tip.

----------------------

Apologies - in my last email to you, I mistakenly called the smaller version of Silbury hill 'Babysil'. Pete Glastonbury, the man who first brought this truncated cone to our attention called it 'Silbaby.' Since talking about it with Steve Marshall, he tells me that archaeologists call it 'Weyden Mound.' As it is found at the southern end of Weyden Hill, this name seems most appropriate. I am sorry for my use of an incorrect name.

Tip o’ the Week #100 - Weyden Mound

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:23:38 +0100

Tip o' the Week #100 - Weyden Mound

Dear [firstname]

This is my first Tip for a while as I have been completing my iBook, The Earth Mysteries Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques. Right now, it is being edited by Frances Howard-Gordon who edited both my Spiritual Dowsing and Labyrinths: Ancient Myths and Modern Uses, and it is also being formatted for iTunes and Amazon by Jay Pritchard. So, as it is now their hands, I have time to tell you about a new discovery (for me) at Avebury that is presently called by archaeologists 'Weyden Mound.' It is at the southern end of Weyden Hill that visually separates Silbury Hill from the West Kennett Avenue.

Avebury is one of my teaching sites. Every time I go there, I learn something new. I made the rough calculation of having visited this wonderful megalithic complex at least twice a year for the last 25+ years. So in over fifty visits, I find it astounding that I have never noticed quite a large truncated cone call Weyden Mound even though I have passed within a football field of it at least twenty-five times on my way to the West Kennett Long Barrow! As far as I know, it was first noted by a man named Pete Glastonbury who called it 'Silbaby', I was taken there by Steve Marshall who knows Avebury like the back of his hand, and is writing a book on it this winter. I went up there last weekend with Jamie George and his wife (my Editor) Frances Howard-Gordon and several other friends.

Weyden Hill is located on the Roman Road that runs from Bath to London, and skirts the edge of Silbury Hill. Weyden Mound is less than a quarter of a mile East of Silbury Hill on the other side of the road.

Silbury Hill, Avebury
The Roman Road is on the other side of the hedge on the left

The West Kennett Long Barrow the largest and best preserved one in England is within two fields from Silbury Hill, the largest man-made prehistoric mound in all of Europe.

West Kennett Long Barrow

From the top of this Neolithic barrow, one can see both Silbury Hill and what is presently called 'Weyden Mound' and like it's big sister, it is a truncated cone.

We're standing on top of the West Kennett Long Barrow
with the stones marking the mouth of the chamber
in the lower right-hand corner of the picture.
To the left is Silbury Hill.
Weyden (Odin) Hill is in the centre in the background.
Directly above the big white megalith (just to the left of our shadows)
and across the field toward trhe southern end of Weyden Hill is Weyden Mound.

This picture shows a good reason why Weyden Hill has not been generally known up until now. Unlike Silbury, it is covered with trees, so it isn't easy to see not only at this distance, but up close as well. Below are two stitched up panoramas of Weyden Mound:


The side of Weyden Mound facing the West Kennett Long Barrow. The flat top of the cone is clearly visible.	To the right of the first picture. Here the flat top and slopes are more visible. (Yes, it is the same guy in the red jacket twice._

The Roman Road running West to East has Silbury Hill tangent to the North side of the road, and Weyden Mound is tangent (actually a bit cut in to) to the South. The road runs on to the town of Marlborough, six miles to the East, where Merlin's Mount, another truncated mound can be found in the middle of the Marlborough College Campus.

Merlin's Mount, Marlborough
(picture from <themodernantiquarian.com>)

So, what are these three truncated cones that are so close to each other doing? What was their function? The Silbury Hill treasure is an old story that has encouraged numerous legal and illegal digs in to the most famous of the three. As far as is known, no treasure was found. Merlin's Mound has a recent grotto (folly) in its side, but again, no treasure has been found. Wikipedia says it was a Moot Hill - where different tribes would meet on neutral turf to decide "moot points." But why would there be three of them within six miles of each other? And Silbury Hill and Weyden Mound are only about a quarter of a mile apart.

I don't have any answers, but it sure is a mystery worth exploring further.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o’ the Week #99 - The Long and Winding Path

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:47:35 +0100

Tip o’ the Week #99 - The Long and Winding Path

Dear [firstname]

As you probably are aware by now, I am an unrepentant gnostic. Spiritually, I would have been right there with the archetypal Christian Gnostic (capital “G”) St. Thomas, who was unwilling to take Jesus’ resurrection on faith, he wanted to feel the holes in Christ’s hands.

According ABCtales.com, “St.Thomas the Apostle is the patron saint against doubt and of architects, blind people, builders, carpenters, construction workers, Ceylon East Indies, geometricians, India, masons, Pakistan, people in doubt, Sri Lanka, stone masons, stonecutters and theologians.” Notice how many of these terms can be associated with geomancers - architects (see below), builders, carpenters, geometricians, masons, stone masons, stonecutters, and theologians.

“In England on St Thomas day, poor women and children went from door to door 'a-Thomassing'. They would beg for the ingredients or "goodenings for a Christmas feast, such as wheat for frumenty and flour for Yule bread.” Frumenty was a popular dish in Western European medieval cuisine. (It was made primarily from boiled, cracked wheat - hence its name, which derives from the Latin word frumentum, 'grain'.)

"Although July 3rd has been the feast day for St Thomas, for many centuries December 21st was also given as a feast day to Thomas for no significant historical reason through out the Middle Ages undoubtedly to divert attention from the pagan rites associated with the day."

But, might there actually be “significant historical reason” for the choice of this date? Hmmm..... Isn’t December 21st usually the given date for the Winter Solstice - the darkest day of the year? The time just before the rebirth of the Light.

This doubting Thomas is my personal favorites of the Twelve.   He wanted direct experience. Right on! Or should I say, "Light on!”

As a gnostic, I’ve been seeking ways to gain this direct experience of the spiritual for a long time. The following is a list of characteristics that I have found can make it easier to have a gnostic experience.   As I quote below, the “experts” don’t claim direct connections between these characteristics, but they do see 'subtle relationships.'” So do I.

In past Tips I have explored:

Dowsing - A large number of dowsers see dowsing as a valid tool for exploring the spiritual path (another word for dowsing is “divining”).

Dyslexia - Several years ago, Jill Moss and I developed a totally unscientific test to see if there might be a connection between dowsing and dyslexia. Two-thirds of the dowsers we queried exhibited characteristics of adult dyslexia, and that group was predominantly interested in intangible target (?dare I say “spiritual”?) dowsing, whereas the other third were more interested in physical target dowsing.

Left Handedness - According to the The New York Times, “Handedness clearly runs in families. The 2007 paper by the group at Oxford identified a gene, LRRTM1, that they discovered in the course of studying children with dyslexia, and which turned out to be associated with the development of left-handedness.” (In the West, only 10% or so are left-handed. In the same article, the Times had this interesting factoid: “Four of the last seven US presidents — Ford, the elder Bush, Clinton, and Obama — have been left-handed”!)

These three characteristics have also contributed to my thinking as a geomancer about the things that make it easier to experience the Spiritual Realms, but this past week, I came across another connection.

Schizophrenia - The above-mentioned New York Times article continues, “Dr. Francks, who is now at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, recalls that the discovery made headlines and attracted a great deal of attention, the more so because this gene (LRRTM1 on chromosome 2p12), was also found disproportionately in people with schizophrenia, even though none of these connections are simple or well understood. “We’re not looking for a gene for handedness or a gene for schizophrenia,” he said. “We’re looking for subtle relationships.”

When I think of schizophrenia in spiritual terms, it has been my understanding that many people who were called shamans (prior to the present burgeoning interest) were identified in their youth, and many of them were schizophrenics (some indigenous shamans today are as well). They worked in sacred space, and it (their psychosis) allowed them to visit the intangible realms more easily than could the vast majority of the population. And they could do it relatively safely because, unlike modern shamanic practitioners, they had the full support of the community they lived in. But shamanism certainly was/is another way to penetrate the veil to the other side.

Finally, I find it fascinating that all of these things that make it easier to experience the spiritual are considered to be handicaps by many in today’s more left-brained/rational society. Oh well, it ain’t easy to make a blind man see...

In 2012, may you find ways of using sacred space to directly and more clearly experience these lands yourself.

Happy Winter Solstice & Doubting Thomas Day!

Question Authority:
Don’t Believe Everything You Think!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tio o' the Week - The 99%ers and The Fool

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:32:16 +0100

Tip o’ the Week # 98
The 99%ers and The Fool

I’ve just returned from the United States where I found my old country sadly dysfunctional and more divided than ever. From the grave concern about health care costs (mentioned by almost everyone) to the do-nothing Congress where half of the politicians have a to-hell-with-the-people attitude and seem determined not to vote for anything the President wants (so they can get rid of him in the next election). So much for cooperation in a time of grave economic stress. The list goes on and on, but perhaps the most exciting activity is taking place in New York where the 99%ers movement is known as “Occupy Wall Street.” This mass movement stretches in numerous cities across the country to the West Coast where students at Davis were pepper-sprayed while they were quietly protesting by sitting arms locked in front of one of the university buildings. And the establishment (purposely) misses the point by saying, “They don’t even know what they want!”

In the late sixties, when I was learning to be a public/state school teacher, undoubtedly the most important book I read was “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. (New York: Dell Publishing Co. ©1969. ISBN 0-385-29009-8). Postman was one of the most highly thought of Primary School educators in the America in the last half of the twentieth century. Back then (and sadly in many schools to this day) the idea was/is to get the students to sit in straight lines, shut up, pay attention, DON’T FIDGET!, and come up with the answer that the teacher thinks is correct.

Postman wanted to be subversive. He asked, “What if we taught them how to think?”

His first chapter on how to get students to do just that was entitled “Crap Detecting.” How do you know when your teacher is full of crap? The idea here is that you gotta first realize that something is wrong before you can think creatively about possible solutions.

I found myself in a similar situation at that time when talking with my father about Richard Nixon and Viet Nam and Watergate. He finally said in exasperation, “Well if you don’t like it, what do you want?” All I could come up with was, “Peace and Love.” (Actually, not such bad ideas.)

(Hey, when is this going to have something to do with Geomancy!?? - Hang in there, it’s coming soon.)

It’s the same thing now. The 99%ers know they don’t like what’s going on. What they don’t like is the entire system, and a lot of Americans agree with them, but the establishment nattering nabobs of negativity call them “hippy fools” because they are not being specific. But these 99%ers' crap detectors are working just fine.

In the Tarot, the Fool is number Zero, and has no specific place in the Major Arcana because s/he is the Pilgrim on the path. Folks who are asleep see what s/he is doing as foolish - “Look at that damned Fool, he’s about to walk off a cliff!!” But only the wise wo/man knows s/he’s a fool. And in the Medieval court, only the Fool could tell the King where it was at and get away with it.

Now most of the 99%ers who are staging sit ins all over the US and Europe (and matched by the Arab Spring in Moslem lands) have an impact by their numbers. Thousands of them. But when I was in the Netherlands with Karin visiting our son Robbert Jan and his family in Baarn, he took me to a demonstration where just three men were out in the woods protesting essentially the same thing as all of the other 99%ers around the world.

The Niburu Protesters of Baarn (180° panorama)
On the left at the end of the Avenue, Queen Juliana’s Palace
In the middle, the three protester’s encampment
To the right, Napoleon’s Obelisk

I went in to talk with them and to offer my support. As usual, I couldn’t hold my curiosity in cheque, so I then asked them, “Why the hell are you protesting out in the woods instead of in the square in downtown Baarn where you would attract much more attention?”

They pointed out that they were encamped on the dead straight avenue (read: ley) that ran from Queen Juliana’s Palace to a massive obelisk that marked the Dutch defeat of Napoleon shortly before the English really finished him off at Waterloo.

They were protesting on a power centre! Those “Fools” were no fools. They were using geomancy to empower their protest!

May the Force Be With Them.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.oreg
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week # 97 - On Technomancy

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:42:44 +0100

On Technomancy

Dear [firstname]

This is the first Tip I've written in a while. I am almost finished writing my eBook, The Earth Mysteries Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques, and while I had thought that I would wait 'till I had completed it before I wrote my next Tip, something has come up that I felt was important to share with you now.

1. The only thing you can't dowse is something you can't think of - (Read: You can dowse anything).

2. I am a Geomancer (Geo = Earth, mancy = divination of). I have been dowsing and studying these Earth Energies for over forty years, and dowsing is integral to my work with these energies of the Earth both in sacred and secular space. There are both positive and negative issues related to them when we humans (and other animals and plants) come in contact with these intangible energies. On the positive side, in sacred spaces, these energies enhance the possibility of connection to the Spiritual World. On the negative side, in secular spaces, in peoples' homes and/or places where they work or spend a lot of time, certain Earth Energies can enhance the possibility of acquiring degenerative dis-ease - arthritis, cancer, colic in babies, auto immune disease, sleepness and more. In that case, these energies are referred to by geomancers as "geostress" - Earth induced/enhanced stress, and geomancers have developed a number of different ways to neutralise these yin energies.

In the past fifteen years or so, there has been more and more talk amongst geomancers who deal with "sick houses" about man-made energies coming from cell phones, computer and TV screens, digital alarm clocks, electric blankets, household wiring, high tension lines, radar sites, etc., etc. These man-made energies that can contribute to ill health fall under a category that dowsers call "technostress." They can be found and shown to exist using scientific instruments.

Last weekend, I was with a group of geomancers who are also members of the British Society of Dowsers (BSD). We were talking about these two different kinds of energies that can be detrimental to a person's health. Geostress can be dealt with by using dowsing and - the word I like to use to describe it - prayer to neutralise their effect. On the other hand, technostress is dealt with through the use of various man-made apparatuses that can read these energies and other bits of gear that can neutralise them.

Some geomancers at the meeting felt that it was critical if they wanted to bring healing to a house, they needed to bring in awareness of this technostress as well. But then, I didn't hear any talk about other things that can make the people living in a house sick - radon gas, asbestos, lead paint and other things that can contribute negatively to the environment.

Where does one draw the line? As one can dowse for everything, shouldn't one look for everything that can contribute to possible illness of the inhabitants?

Well, I would say that ideally, the answer should be "Yes." But in reality, who knows the full list of things that can contribute to environmental degradation and lead to ill health? As far as I know, no one can do it all.

I guess that I am a traditionalist. For the past forty years, I've been involved in Earth Energies, and I have worked with them to help folks grow spiritually or to heal various kinds of ill health.

I'm a geomancer, not a technomancer, and in addition, I honestly don't even consider asbestos, radon gas or lead paint.

This doesn't mean that man-made electromagnetic energies can't mess you over, but so can asbestos and radon and so many other things. I know people who are very good at working with these man-made problems, and if I am aware of issues in that area, I would recommend one of them to my client.

But for me, I am going to stick with energies related to Mother Earth and ones that can be found and worked on through dowsing, and leave the electronic devices to others.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o’ the Week #92 - On Compasses

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 11:59:17 +0100

Tip o’ the Week # 92 - On Compasses

In the past, I have railed against the inaccuracy/accuracy issue with science and the Earth Mysteries (see "Tip" 85 - "How Accurate is Accurate Enough?". Yet I find that the pendulum has swung the other way, and now I am arguing that one of the basic tools Earth Mystery enthusiasts have been using, the compass, is nowhere near accurate enough. This "Tip" is a bit longer than usual because in addition to fascinating info on the use of compasses, I have several other bits of news to tell you about including that I am planning to put these "Tips" on hold for a while. So I apologize in advance about its unusual length, but trust it is worth your attention.

I am having more and more questions about the use of compasses in Earth Mystery/ Archaeoastronomy work that I have done for the last thirty-five years. I have long been using a Suunto Tandem that I thought accurately measured both azimuth and angle of elevation to the horizon, but when I was recently up in Anglesea with my Geomancy Group, I had a rude awakening. We were at the house we were staying when I discovered that my readings did not agree with the compasses of others in the group. I laid it down to being in a magnetic anomaly; however, I found these dissimilarity of compass magnetic azimuth readings was also the case at various chambers and dolmens on that island!

So when I came home to Glastonbury, I was working with Andrew Cox from Bristol (you may know him through the BSD?) and only a few of the compasses tested agreed with each other, and they were clustered in two groups eleven degrees apart!!!

We used the longer side of our dining room table as a long barrow to shoot the magnetic azimuth of the major axis of the table/longbarrow (only we aligned with the routed (grooved) edge of the table for greater accuracy).

In addition to my Suunto Tandem pictured above, we tested a number of different compasses - a regular Sylva, a smaller Suunto, and six compass software apps I have on my iPhone 4. We aligned each in the same place on the longer edge of the table, and their Magnetic readings differed by as much as thirteen degrees! (We did not correct for magnetic deviation. Here in Glastonbury today it is 2° 31' W changing by 0° 9' E/year. )

This Suunto Tandem is the most potentially
accurate hanad held compass I know of.
It also has a clinometer to measure the
angle of elevation to the horizon.


This Suunto KB had the highest azimuth reading	This is an orienteering compass

A military looking one with no manufacturer!	First of the iPhone Apps

iPhone GPS by William McRae	iPhone Compass version 1.2

Handy GPS

Initially, I did not picture one more iPhone App
(perhaps the most useful App),
Theodolite Pro (Hunter Research and Technology.
It showed an azimuth of 356º.
Surprisingly, it had the highest azimuth bay far, but was
only 6º Westof the Handy GPS above.

Byron Dix, who wrote "Manitou" about the astronomical alignments of the underground stone chambers in New England, was my mentor for the study of archaeoastronomy in the nineteen-seventies. He basically told me that if you're going to use a compass to shoot astronomical alignments, "you should strip nekkid!" (Read: Clothing many times will pull the compass needle.)

While we were not "nekkid" when comparing our compasses on my dining room table, if our clothing was pulling the needle off, all of the compasses should have shown the same deviation. But that was not the case. They really varied from each other quite a bit! This ain't close enough even for government work!! (That's supposed to be a joke ; )

So my questions are these: Who/what can we trust here? Do I really have to get a transit like Alexander Thom had to be able to trust the azimuth I'm shooting?

Dear reader, if you have done this work, what tool(s) do you use? Have you noticed that different compasses in exactly the same place give different azmuthal readings?

Why haven't I noticed this before?

______________________________________

I wrote my friend archaeoastronomer and dowser Robin Heath (I recommend that you check out http://www.skyscript.co.uk/moonheath.html) reporting what I had run in to.

Robin replied with helpful clarity not only confirming the reality of what I had found, but also he offered some solutions for greater accuracy:

"The reason you may not have noticed this variance before is that the earth's magnetic field has been progressively weakening since you were born. [There is probably no connection between the two events!] 'Stiction' within the crude bearings of cheap compasses mean that they progressively stick near to where the needle would like to go, but cannot because its gets stuck en route. Every make of compass has a different stiction point, hence everyone fights because they all get a different angle. Earth mysteries people have been known to fight over much less important matters than this fundamental error!

"I do not like compasses for my work, because:

" a) they are pretty useless for archaeoastronomy apart from mildly suggesting where the sun and moon may rise and set to perhaps five degrees, which then means that if you have 'found' an interesting possible alignment, you then have to analyse it further with a theodolite or 'other methods' and you’ll also need the angle of elevation of the horizon or foresight. (More on this later).

" b) over igneous or 'faulted' geology they often are 'out' by as much as 20 degrees. Some locations in the Preselis actually cause (within 6 feet or so) the needle to reverse itself and then resume its original, still inaccurate, position. The cause is ferruginous rocks underfoot whose magnetic field was frozen to the opposite polarity in the very distant past. Isn’t ferruginous a great word?

" c) they are usually far too small to even read their inaccurate readings accurately!

"So, yes, I suppose if you want to throw away your 'white stick' of azimuth blindness, you will need something better. I use a theodolite (£300+) which is heavy, awkward and which takes some time to set up. Once set up it can get the azimuth to better than 20 seconds of arc, even better is you shoot the sun or moon's position and time it, later comparing the result and correcting it against an almanac or ephemeris (all on the web these days), which sets the azimuth to better than a minute of one degree. A theodolite also gives you the vitally important elevation angle of an horizon or celestial body to the same accuracy. With a theodolite one can survey a stone circle in less than two hours, using a tape (£15), and about an hour using a laser rangefinder (£700). A horizon profile can be undertaken in under a couple of hours. Then it's all done and dusted and you don't have to keep going back there again and again to check it all out more accurately.

"Another and cheaper solution to determine azimuth accurately enough for most 'earth mysteries' use is to use a GPS. Define a central point. [technical top tip: check that you have set the GPS to OSGB36 if you want the coordinates to tally with those on the OS map]. Walk the GPS such that the longitude ain't changing and you must then be walking dead north or dead south. The same technique with latitude must yield an east-west line. Staking these two axes with ropes or string then has defined the cardinal points. A large protractor like wot teachers used to use with blackboards at school ( 2' diameter) can then be used to enable the identification of a given azimuth. I have made my own protractor and have used this method many times at sites like Avebury and Stonehenge when with a group and too little time to set up a theodolite, and it easily gives results to better than one degree if you walk the rope and stake 100 yards in each cardinal direction from the central point.

"Finally, on eBay one can sometimes find for sale simple school theodolites made by Philip Harris, Birmingham, which have a no magnifying lens in the ‘telescope’ tube connected to a spirit level, but has crosswires and two protractors which are mounted for azimuth and elevation. They fetch about £40 and I have two I have used for my archaeoastronomy courses. They are good to about a degree, i.e. just about ample for basic work.

"You can find out much more at www.skyandlandscape.com (two free download PDFs about all of this, and theodolites too - in the Learning tools and free programs section). There’s a whole lot more within my recent book Bluestone Magic, available via the website. Fabulous value!

"All the above are my personal opinions and suggestions based on 25 years of surveying sites all over the place. It has been my experience that the earth mysteries movement needs to get savvy with all of this stuff if it is to avoid the awful errors it has sometimes announced as dramatic discoveries in the past. For example, the grid lines on OS maps are not aligned to the cardinal points, yet one hapless ley hunter (whom I won’t name but whom we all know and love!) based a whole theory about ley lines assuming they were so aligned.

"I hope this helps.

"Robin"

______________________________________

Robin's words are cause for some deep thinking. I certainly agree with the reality that our prehistoric foremothers and fathers aligned their sacred sites astronomically, but if we who approach these sites from an archaeoastronomical point of view, to have any credibility with other groups that are also interested in these sites, it is clear that we gotta use other tools than compasses.

----------------- Other News -------------------

This will be my last Tip o' the Week for a while. As I wrote at the end of last year, I intend to write an ebook on various aspects of this material, and I am finding that writing these Tips is taking up too much of my writing time. I suspect that I might be occasionally send you one of my Archived Tips that I feel might bear repeating, but I'm going to concentrate on my eBook for a while. Please continue to write if you have any thoughts or questions.

-------------

You might want to visit our "Tip o' the Week" Archives at: <http://www.geomancy.org/mailing-list/public/archive.php>. There are now 90 Tips you can troll through.

-------------

You also might enjoy checking out Karin's Blog at <http://karinschluter.nl/blog/>.

-------------

This summer, for those of you who live in or near the UK, I am teaching a course for the British Society of Dowsers on the Oxfordshire/ Warwickshire border at the Rollright Stones.

BSD Earth Energies 5
Advanced Earth Energies Dowsing:
Working with Power Centres and applying Geomantic Design

with Sig Lonegren
Sat 9 and Sun 10 July 2011

Venue: Long Compton Village Hall, Shipston on Stour, Warks (near Rollrights stone circle)
Cost: £149 including tea/coffee & lunches. 
Further Information & Booking: Call 01684 576969  or email info@britishdowsers.org

I'd like to meet you there!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.reg
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o’ the Week #96 - Tafelberg/Table Mountain

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 16:32:13 +0100

Tip o’ the Week #96 - Tafelberg

Dear [firstname]

In the Netherlands, Tafelberg/Table Mountain dominates the rolling heathland of Blaricummer Heather. Because settlement remains from the Neolithic and the Ironand Bronze Age, this heathland has been designated as an archaeological monument.

Tafelberg is a peak of 36.4 m above sea level and is the highest point on the heath. An orientation table once stood on this hill, hence the name "Table Mountain". It is quite reminiscent of Silbury Hill in Avebury which is also a truncated cone. Around the base of this cone is a ring of earth, much like a henge in Britain.

Sig standing at inner edge of the earthen ring around Tafelberg

Tafelberg

Taffelberg table

There are a number of other tuncated cones/table mountains in Het Gooi (East of Amsterdam). Two others that we want to visit are Woensberg (?Wotan/Odin?) and Eukenberg. Karin tells me that according to her now-deceased father-in-law, Jelto Schlüter, as it was the highest point in the area, the Germans used this “table” for their antennas during WW II.

-----------------------------------

An addition to my last Tip# 95 on Heresy:

I wrote about Acharya S’s Gnostic take on the Bible, and then offered a critical review of her work from a website called Answering Infidels. Here is a favorable review found on Free Thought Nation. I must admit that this is a website that is connected with Acharya S, but it offers supportive reviews of her work by other academicians and ministers.

While we have been having lots of rain in Holland, I give thanks that it is nothing like the hurricane Irene that swept the East Coast of the US and especially hit my old home state of Vermont.

Send them good thoughts!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week # 95 - On Heresy

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:33:20 +0100

Tip # 95 - On Heresy
(Sorry, No Pictures)

Dear [firstname]

As a geomancer, I am not only interested in cleaning sick houses - secular geomancy, but actually, I'm even more interested in working with and in sacred space. I have been arguing for decades that these special spaces were places that enhance the possibility of connection to the other side - to the One. Please judge what follows in that context. You may well find that it challenges some of your paradigms you hold about the past. It combines two separate lines of investigation that support the perception that these spaces really “did what’s on the box.” The gods came to earth. And us humans in great numbers communicated directly with them. (I end with a counter argument just to keep things in balnace. ; )

Since the mid-seventies when I began work on my Masters’ degree on Sacred Space, one of the major themes I have chewed on has been the shift from the dominance of that more intuitive right brain in prehistory to the analytical left brain brought to us by (IMHO) the increase of influence of the Patriarchy. The book that really turned me on initially was The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, first published in 1976 (see "Works Cited" at the bottom for all book references). I must say that this has been one of the most stimulating and thought-provoking books I've ever read, and is a must in the development of consciousness studies. I don’t agree with some of what he has to say, for example, his choice of a particular word to describe how our prehistoric ancestors received their right brain information - "hallucinations." I don't think that's what they were, and later on, I'll go in to why I think so. But on the whole though, I found his thesis most useful in forming my perception of this shift in consciousness.

It began with the Neolithic Revolution - the increasing use of agriculture rather than hunter gathering. It facilitated a shiftin consciousness. My understanding was that the driving factor in the construction of purpose-built sacred spaces in prehistoric times was the loss of the ability of more and more of humanity to connect on a conscious level with the world of spirit. I felt, and still do, that the archaeoastronomy, sacred geometry and Earth Energies all enhanced the ability of this connection as we became more and more left-brain/rational. I wrote about this at great length in my first book, Spiritual Dowsing, initially published in 1986.

The point here is that I saw evidence that Western Man's Cultures (and I am using the word "Man" to indicate the power of the Patriarchy) had shifted from essentially everyone being able to talk with the gods to only one man (sorry ladies) being able to do so.

Before I go any further, I must say that while I am not a Christian, I honour all Paths with Heart. I experienced the reality of Jesus in my life, and I continue to talk with him most nights when I go to bed.... And I talk to other representatives of the One as well.

The Gnostics

I have also long been fascinated with an early Christian group called the Gnostics who held a number of heretical ideas, among them were:

1. Our Creator was not God the Father, but the Demiurge (imperfect)

2. I will listen to you, and you, and you, and you, good father in Rome, but ultimately... I’ll decide for myself, because I have experienced the other side directly personally.

3. This Earth isn’t where it’s at, so don’t compound this illusion (maya) by having babies.

And here’s the big one:

4.Jesus was not here in the flesh, but was a powerful spirit who could manifest himself.

As I wrote in my last Tip o’ the Week # 94 -  St. Sidwells and Lughnasad/Lammas, for the past year, I have been studying gnosticism with Andy White, an artist and Jungian Psychotherapist in at a Church called St. Sidwells, down in Exeter, Devon. Andy has been focused on the gnostic experience rather than their history. Also, I have been working on a book entitled The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S (a.k.a. D.M. Murdock) that focuses on the last Gnostic Christian point - that Jesus was not here in the flesh. The author covers the evidence that the writers of the New Testament never saw Jesus (she claims that much of it including the four Gospels were written after 150 CE)! But, perhaps more germane to this Tip, is that the stories coming from a number of cultures before Jesus tell about their major deity as having a life story line that was also remarkable similar to the story the early Church Fathers wrote about Jesus. Let’s begin by taking just one example from Egypt:

Isis, Osirus and their son Horus - the sun of God. His story included:

· Virgin birth - his mother “the virgin Isis Mery.”
· Born on 25 December.
· His birth was announced in the East, and attended by three “wise men”
· At 12, he was a teacher in the Temple.
· Baptized at 30 by “Anup the Baptizer” who was also decapitated.
· Horus had 12 companions or helpers.
· He performed miracles, exorcised demons, and raised Osirus from the dead (minus one critical little bit).
· Walked on water.
· Was crucified between “two thieves”.
· He (or Osirus) was buried for three days in a tomb and was resurrected.

Acharya S writes, Jesus Christ is a mythological character along the same lines as the gods of Egypt and many other cultures which had “coincidentally” similar tales. Among them she writes about Attis of Phrygia who was (so similar to the Christian story that the Christians were forced to resort to the specious argument that the devil had created the Attis cult first to fool Christ’s followers.”

As for Buddha, Acharya lists eighteen similarities to the Jesus story from “Buddha was born on December 25th of the virgin Maya, and his birth was attended by a “Star of Announcement,” wise men, and angels singing heavenly songs” to “...in some traditions ... he died on a cross, and was resurrected as his coverings were unrolled from his body and his tomb was opened by supernatural powers, and he ascended bodily to Nirvana or ‘heaven’.”

Dionysus, a remake of the Egyptian god Osirus, was born on December 25th, and as the Holy Child, was placed in a manger; he was a sacred king who was killed and eaten in an eucharistic ritual for fecundity and purification, and he rose from the dead on March 25th.

Others were Krishna, where “similarities between the Christian character ... number in the hundreds.” They run from the now familiar birth on the 25th of December, his earthly father was a carpenter, and he was persecuted by a tyrant who ordered the slaughter of thousands of infants. The list can go on and on, but I will end with Mithra of Persia, who was once again born of a virgin in a cave on the 25th of December. When he died, he was buried in a tomb and after three days, he rose again.

But enough. It is clear that a large number of deities of major religions who came before him had similar life stories to Jesus. (All of these examples - and many more - come from The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S.)

Regardless if you do or don’t believe that there was an historical Jesus, I feel what I am seeing here is evidence that supports my earlier investigations that suggested that in preHistory, there was a time when many different cultures shared a common story line about one of their major deities. Sadly, the closer we get to the time of Christ, the less the masses had direct access to the spirit world. From a geometrical perspective, we moved from a circle to a pyramid - with only one man at the top who got to speak with god.

To counterbalance these thoughts, check out something called “A Refutation of Acharya S’s Book, The Christ Conspiracy” by Mike Licona of TruthQuest Publishers. It is on a website called “Answering Infidels: Confronting the Claims of the Secular Web,” and in addition to Acharya S, I noted that Elaine Pagels, translator of some of The Nag Hammadi Documents and author of The Gnostic Gospels is also on the list of Infadels. Acharya S (a.k.a. D.K. Murdock) holds strong beliefs from her point of view in the circle, Mike Licona’s point of view is quite nearly on the opposite side of the circle. [I include this "Refutation" not to get anything going, I merely want to look at both sides of this Descent of Consciousness issue to better make up my own mind. Many time I can come to greater clarity as to where I stand by reading material that contradicts where I stand.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think!

};-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.oreg
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

--------------------------------------------------
Works Cited:

Acharya S (a.k.a. D.M. Murdock). 1999. The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Kempton, Illinois, USA: Adventures Unlimited Press. ISBN 0-932813-74-7. (Available as a download from Kindle.)

Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. (Available from Amazon Books.)

Lonegren, Sig. 2007. Spiritual Dowsing. Glastonbury, England: Gothic Image. History of the earth energies, healing and other uses of dowsing today. A book for the spiritual pilgrim. Initially published 1986. ISBN 978-0-906362-70-9. (Available from Amazon books).

Pagels, Elaine. 1989. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books/Random House. ISBN 0 679 72453 2. Originally published 1979. (Available from iTunes as an iBook $10.99.)

Tip o' the Week # 94 - St. Sidwells and Lughnasad/Lammas

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:21:06 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 94
St. Sidwells and Lughnasad/Lammas

Dear [firstname]

This is the first Tip in a while, but as August First is almost upon us, I felt the need to tell you about a new way I have been relating to this CrossQuarter Day of Lughnasad (pronounced roughly "Loo' na sa"). For the past year I have been attending a course in Exeter, Devon, called "The Gnostic Circle" taught most excellently by Andy White, an artist and Jungian Psychotherapist. Andy has been focusing on the experiential aspects of gnosticism rather than the historical Gnostic Christians. More right brain than left. We have been meeting in a Church called St. Sidwells, which had begun in the seventeenth century out side the town walls in a less affluent area of Exeter, but due to urban development, is now in the heart of the city (it's the non-stop destination of Exeter's Park and Ride system that I use to get there).

After attending several classes, I began to wonder more and more about just who was this St. Sidwells, a Saint I had never heard of before.

St.Sidwells

There are several different versions about this Exeter Saint. The stories begin in different places with different names, but they have the same ending. She gets her head cut off and a healing spring breaks forth. Here is a succinct version of her life with some salient details:

The story of Saint Sidwells refers to a young woman, Sativola, who lived in Exeter during Anglo Saxon times. She was falsely accused by her brother of sleeping around, and was then persecuted by her stepmother who plotted her death. One day farm workers were persuaded to kill her as she brought them food and sustenance. She was beheaded with a scythe, and a fountain of water immediately sprung up on the spot, and a great oak began to grow as well. But there's more. The girl, meantime, took up her head, walked to her home, put on her head again, reproached her brother, and subsequently dropped down dead. St. Sidwell’s church was built close to the Well that became known as a place where people with various forms of sickness could find healing, health and well-being.

Sidwells has another church dedicated to her at Laneast in Cerniw (Cornwall); however, the association may only date from 1437. Sidwells, the common form of Sadfyl’s name has no doubt, been influenced by the name of her spring or holy well. Her Feast Day is August 1st, the Celtic Cross Quarter Day of Lughnasad.

In the cycle of the Celtic year, Lughnasad, August 1st ±, marks the beginning of the harvest season. In the Christian calendar, Lammas (or loaf mass) is the day that the first loaf of bread is offered to God to mark the first "fruits" of the harvest season - in this case, wheat. So the scythe is a perfectly appropriate weapon to be mentioned as the tool that caused St. Sidwell's decapitation. She is Devon's Anglo Saxon Lady of Harvest.

Now, let's turn inwards. What is being harvested in your life right now? What project have you been working on that you are just now beginning to reap the benefits? May St. Sidwells be with you.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In other news: I am working on an iBook that is a revised version of something that I wrote in the mid-eighties called "The Earth Mystery Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques." It was a report on a project I did for the American Society of Dowsers (ASD) and the New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA). It was written after visiting over forty underground stone chambers mostly in Vermont (USA). At the time, I am sure that I did this project to gather evidence that would convince archaeologists and other academics that many of these chambers were something other than colonial root cellars. We found that 40% of them had significant solar astronomical alignments, were built using sacred geometry, and were located on Earth Energy power centres.

I became convinced that these were sacred spaces, but I don't believe any academician was convinced by this project. It would have caused them to have to begin to operate in a different paradigm - one that gave the "primitive savages" (read: a culture that was more spiritually advanced than the White colonists were) the ability to do things that had here-to-for been assumed by the new settlers to be impossible. Most archaeologists of the seventies and eighties didn't know anything about astronomy, and certainly did not have the math to do astronomical alignments. So, just they have done with Professor Alexander Thom's archaeoastronomical data here in the UK, modern science just ignored my data.

So why revise a project that didn't (and probably won't) impact on the academic mind? I have recently realised that by doing this work, what had really happened was that I had convinced myself that these humble chambers were indeed sacred spaces. I can only trust that if others use these techniques and gather this mostly left brain data, they can convince themselves of their sanctity as well.

When one's left brain is well fed, one is ready for the experiential (?dare I say Spiritual?) possibilities that can happen at places like this. And, for me, that's what sacred space is really about: left brain activity and knowledge can lead to right brain experience of the spiritual.

In any event, I'll let you know when "The Earth Mystery Handbook: Holistic Non-Intrusive Data Gathering Techniques" becomes available to download to your iPad as soon as I have uploaded it to iTunes.

Happy Lughnasad!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank Centre
9, Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
United Kingdom
Skype: sigdowser
email: sig@geomancy.org

Tip o’ the Week #93 - The Magdalene

Fri, 27 May 2011 20:24:54 +0100

Tip o’ the Week #93 - The Magdalene

Dear [firstname]

I am working on my eBook tentatively entitled, “Dowsing for the Divine," but I have also been in to something I felt I just had to share with you.

Daysigns

In the piece I wrote in 1999 about Daysigns, I wrote, "They are like dreams, only they happen during the day when we are “awake,” and it is Mother Nature’s way of speaking to those who have ears to hear. I had been working with an old friend, Sue Barnet, to dowse the energy leys of Glastonbury. We had been doing quite well, agreeing with each other most of the time as to how many and where the Energy Leys were; however, when we got to the Tor, it was like we couldn’t agree on anything. It felt like we were walking waist deep in treacle! She found centres here, I found them there. We just couldn’t agree. So we decided to take a daysign walk on the road that goes ‘round the base of the Tor to seek some guidance.

(One thing I need to say about divination is that you don’t always get the answer you seek, but you do get what is most important.)

"There was one plant that continued to capture my attention throughout and actually, ever since… It was “Lords and Ladies”. In Vermont (USA), we call its American cousin “Jack-in-the-Pulpit”. These Lord and Ladies attracted me at many points in our walk – and in particular, I was attracted to some of these plants (about one in ten) whose extended heart-shaped leaves looked like someone had painted them all over with little shiny black tar-like blotches.


Arum Maculatum with macula		The red light district. (This is a different sub-species)

Arum maculatum is its Latin name. Arum is the genus, and it tells us that it is in the lily family. Maculatum tells us who this particular species really is... Maculatum. Is there a word in the English language that comes from that? “Macula” are the spots on the Sun. There are other similarly arcane words that came in the English language in the 14th century that speak to “spotted, blotted, besmirched, unclean, dirty.” While I don’t know of a word in common usage today that comes from maculatum, there is one today that means ‘not maculate’: ‘immaculate’. And just to add to that besmirched image, in her final glory, this plants produces bright red berries symbolising the red light district. Who was this?

Mary Magdalene

Some say that according to the Medieval Church, women could either aspire to be like the BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) and she was the only one who really made it, or they were whores. Good choice, what? It was the same with making babies. Either you conceived them immaculately like the One-and-Only BVM did with the Holy Ghost, or you made them maculately like every one else, by doing something dirty (read: sex). So if the BVM is the Goddess representing immaculatio, who represents the Maculate Goddess, the Besmirched one? (Clue: She has a street named after her in Glastonbury. It runs along one of the borders of the Abbey.) Answer: Mary Magdalen - the reformed prostitute. This was the major sign that I received from Mother Nature on that walk around the Tor. She showed me that it is The Magdalen’s energy that surrounds the Tor. The Dark Mother encircles that magnificent high tower. If you are working with daysigns, if someone says, “Oh, that’s just a weed”, pay close attention.

I’m reading a book about her that I am finding fascinating. It is The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity. It's a revisionist history of the life of Jesus written from an academic point of view by Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopalian priest. I said revisionist because she brought the importance of Mary Magdalene to me in important ways I had never heard before.

What you see depends on your perspective. I just hadn't looked before at the time of Jesus and the early Church in the clear way this author presents it. Here in Glastonbury. "Maglin" (read: Magdalene) Street defines the west end of the Glastonbury Abbey grounds. She's here! And she was much more important in the time of Jesus than the Church would have us believe.

Now, dear reader, you may be starting to think, "Oh no! Sig's not going to try to proselytise me is he?" Don’t worry, I'm not a proselytute. I'm also not a Christian, but I do have close relationship with Jesus (and a number of other Spiritual teachers as well).

What excited me initially was Bourgeault's interpretation of the role the Magdalene played in Jesus' life and why and how the Early Church went about casting her out. But it is the author's discussions of the philosophy and techniques that early Gnostics used that has spoken directly to my own eclectic spiritual path.

If you don't know much about this "dark" Goddess, I would encourage you to check Mary Magdalene out.

Works Cited:

Bourgeault, Cynthia. 2010. The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity. Boston, Shambhala Publications. ISBN 978-1-59030-495-2)

----------------

A Reminder:

On Saturday the 9th and Sunday the 10th of July 2011, I'm running Earth Energies 5 BSD Advanced Earth Energies Dowsing weekend: Working with Power Centres and applying Geomantic Design. The venue is the Long Compton Village Hall, Shipston on Stour, Warwickshire, and is near the Rollrights stone circle where we will be working.

The cost is £149, and includes tea/coffee & lunches.  For further Information & Booking, call 01684 576969  or email <info@britishdowsers.org>

----------------

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.oreg
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o’ the Week #91 - Born Again!

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:51:01 +0100

Tip o’ the Week #91 - Born Again!

Dear [firstname],

I was going to write this week on the inaccuracy of hand-held compasses; however, something of much more immediate interest has come to my attention:

Hold the Press! Breaking News on the Glastonbury Holy Thorn! IT'S ALIVE!

Holy Thorn with flower offerings & the Tor

I heard yesterday that a single bud has sprouted on the side of the Glastonbury Holy Thorn.

This bud's for you! (The tiny green sprout in the crotch.)
See also the remains of the wrapping that was put on the faces
of the cuts to protect it from freezing.

So, I am pleased to report that this special tree that was devastated by still unknown assailants, has been born again!

Close up of the single bud (so far)
Photo by Morgana West

Please send good thoughts and prayers to this living symbol of Glastonbury's connection with the Holy Land.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.oreg
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

You might want to visit our "Tip o' the Week" Archives at: <http://www.geomancy.org/mailing-list/public/archive.php>. There are now 90 Tips you can troll through.

You also might enjoy checking out Karin's Blog at <http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk/blog/>.

mmm

Tip o’ the Week #90 - Anglesey

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:43:21 +0100

Tip o’ the Week #90 - Anglesey

Dear [firstname]

A while back, Patrick MacManaway and I ran a year long geomancy school here at Chalice Well, and after it ended, our students wanted to keep on meeting, and we gather at different places around Great Britain to explore local ancient sites and to update eachother on the work we are doing. Last weekend we met in Anglesea, an island off the northwest coast of Wales.

Ynys Castell (Innis Castech - “ch” means that you end with clearing of your throat)

We stayed on a small island just off the coast of Angelsea called Ynys Castell {Note: to an English-speaking ear, nothing in Welch sounds like it is spelled, so after each place name, I will enter the closest approximation in phonetic English that I can muster. I will also include comments by our group in “quotation marks” and italics.} It is reached by a causeway that is flooded at high tide, so the one house there had a cut-off-from-the-rest-of-the-world feeling that gave it a particularly magical feeling. As small islets are surrounded by water, and in terms of the four elements, water is the veil to another reality like the spirit world. Humans can only go there for short periods of time, so Water is many times associated with death, and a portal to the spiritual realms. One of the interesting things we found on this island were numerous magnetic anomalies - in fact, there were more of these on Anglesey that I have ever seen anywhere else in Britain! So we couldn’t do much archaeoastronomy : ( I will write more about this in my next Tip o' the Week.

Bryn Celli Ddu (Brin Kethlie Thee)


First came the henge and stone ring		The mound over the chamber

The main entrance		Looking out the other entrance

Anglesea was the last stronghold of the Druids, and is perhaps best known for the butcherous invasion of the Romans in 60 CE. But there were many much older monuments to see as well. Perhaps the most famous is Bryn Celli Ddu (Brin Kethlie Thee). This “burial chamber” was the only place on Anglesea that I had visited on my first visit there, and is perhaps the best “passage grave” in the island. It started in the late neolithic as a henge, but later a chamber was built (covered by a cairn) that contained human remains. The early archaeoastronomer Norman Lockyear proposed that the access tunnel and internal free-standing column were a means to accurately calculate the Summer Solstice.

Dolmen (Ba dowa - not lots of R)


Bodowyr		Patrick meditating inside this dolme

“Where did all the earth go!?” This question is based on an ongoing insistance by some archaeologists that all dolment/hunnebedden etc. were initially covered with earth. While some were (and still are, some of us don’t buy that all of them were covered with earth.

Barclodiad y Gawres (Ba clodiad u Gowres)

Our Geo Group stands infront of the locked gate of Barclodiad y Gawres

One of the things we did at each site, after forming a circle, recognizing the Spirit of the Place, and doing some chanting or Ohming, would be to share what we had experienced in the silence that followed. This is what I saw here: “I chanted - I saw a smiling skull - happy we were there.”

Lligwy (Thclg’ooey)


	Lligwy Dolmen with enourmous roof stone

25 ton roof stone. “A perfect place for a night of druidic dreaming.” And “The stone was so big, and yet when we went under it, the same stone seemed to be weightless.”

Lligwy Chapel (Thclg’ooey Chapel)


Chapel was originally built in the 12th Century	Interior including the stairs that descends into the crypt

An early Christian Chapel with a crypt that reminded me of the one at Roslyn Chapel in Scotland.

Din Lligwy (Dun Thcig'ooey)


Circular "Council Chamber"/home	Rectangular Barn

The houses were circular (reminiscent of Bronze hut circles; however, the barns were rectangular (a very Roman feeling) - In the circular council chamber, we stood in circle where many of us felt protection. We chanted, were quite, shared what we saw.

I saw spirits being released in a beam of light going up from where we stood.

“People were happy and really integrated with their landscape.”

“We lived well in our time - you must live well in yours.”

}:-)

You also might enjoy checking out Karin's Blog at <http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk/blog/?p=1362>.

Tip o' the Week # 89 - There Be Giants in the Land!

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:08:01 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 89 - There Be Giants in the Land!

Dear [firstname]

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the hunebedden in northern Holland. These "Giants' Graves" were reminiscent of our long barrows and dolmens here in the UK, and they got me thinking about prehistoric - dare I say "mythtical" Giants here in Europe and back to Biblical times.

My thinking was augmented by the latest edition of John Billingsley's Northern Earth (Issue 125 Spring 2011). It was primarily about this subject of Giants, and is well wort subscribing to if you want to learn more about the British Earth Mysteries. (U.K. £7.50, Europe £11.00, Elsewhere £14.50 - four issues per annum). We hear of giants in several places in the Bible. The Nephilim mentioned in Genesis 6, verse 4 were giants who originated as a result of the union between fallen angels ("the sons of God") and human women ("the daughters of men".

Drawing of a nephilim

Of course, David slew Goliath who was a giant, or at least a very tall man. Giants called Titans were found in the ancient mythtory of Greece. The Basque called their giants mariaks the "builders of dolmens." In Brittany, they were associated with the stone rows - La Dent de Garganyua at St. Suliac and L'Aiguille de Gargantua at Plevrnon to mention just two.

But my main interest in giants has been here in Britain, and while there are numerous examples, I would like to mention just a few that have been of special interest to me. First are the giant chalk hill figures:

Wilmington Long Man The Cern Abbas Giant

Master dowser, Hamish Miller, who sadly passed on last year, lived just below a hill called Trencrom. He told me that the giant of Trencrom, was supposed to have killed Cormelian (wife of Cormoran) by throwing a hammer across to St Michael's Mount.

View from Trencrom - St. Michael's Mount St. Michael's Mount at high tide
is the island just in the sea toward the right

Here in Glastonbury, we have giants as well - the once mighty Druidic oaks called Gog and Magog (back to the Bible ). These ancient oaks were visited in 1995 by a tour I was leading for the Fellowships of the Spirit, who run a Spiritualist Seminary in western New York where I have taught for twenty-five years. The owner of the trees has built a fence just far enough away from them, so people can't touch them. On this tour, there was a very tall man (in green in this picture) who leaned out over the fence while everyone else lined up behind him so they could touch it as well. But he just couldn't reach it, but he asked for a leaf. At that point the wind came up and blew a branch just close enough so that he could get his one leaf.

Gog and Magog

We all thought that that was a giant miracle. So were there really giants walking the land in prehistory? Many stories as they recede into mythtory do grow taller.

};-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

p.s. You might want to visit our Tip o' the Week Archives. There are now almost ninety Tips you can troll through. Enjoy!

Tip o' the Week # 88 - Back to Avalon - A Tone Poem

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:07:31 +0100

Tip o" the Week # 88
Back to Avalon - A Tone Poem

Dear [firstname]

(I wrote my last two "Tips" in the Netherlands. Some of you have reported that the pictures did not come through. If this is the case with you, I encourage you to check them out at Doodwegen/the Dead straight Ways <http://geomancy.org/mailing-list/public/archive.php?id=126:423> and at the Hunebedden/Giant's Graves <http://geomancy.org/mailing-list/public/archive.php?id=127:425>.)

I returned to Glastonbury a few days ago and one evening, Karin and I took a magical walk to the Tor. When most people think of this dominant natural stepped hill, they think of the tower and St. Michael.

St. Michael's Tower
Glastonbury Tor

But somtimes the Tor shows itself in other ways. That evening, we walked from SunnyBank up through Wick Hollow (known locally by some rather aptly as "the Vulva of the Goddess"). The Sun was sinking low in the west, and it was that time of day when it's beams rush horizontally across the Levels and gives Glastonbury a beautiful bright broadside of light. Here is how it looked when we were walking through this steep little valley:

On the road to the Tor
Wick Hollow

A bit further on our way, we stopped at the crest of a hill, and there it was, the most impressive landmark for miles around, again bathed in the setting Sun.

Tor from the North

But it was when we got to the back of Tor that we found that someone had felt in a decorative mood with one of the well lids that are found around the Tor. (It's a new-to-me addition that some might call "Mindless Graffiti" ; )

Newly painted lid of one of the seven springs on the Tor

But it was the Sun that gave us the greatest gift of the evening. It was one that I had experienced only a few other times since I first came here over twenty-five years ago:

In the Shadow of the Tor

I can, and have, written numerous factual pieces about this wonderful town, but it is the magic that continues to draw me to my home here on the Isle of Apples, the Land of Avalon.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
MAG Webmaster
SunnyBank, 9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
http//:www.geomancy.oreg
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #87 - Hunebedden

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:40:10 +0100

Tip o' the Week #87 - Hunebedden

Dear [firstname]

Last week I was walking a Doodweg, just a bit East of Amsterdam. This week Karin and I moved up to the province of Noord-Holland to her sister Agnès and Martin's home in Enkhuizen, my favourite town in the Netherlands. One of the most magnificent buildings in this Nord Holland gem of town is the 17th century Drommedaris, originally a fort, but now a civic centre. My dowsing tells me that it is at the crossing point of two energy leys. What does your pendulum tell you?


Drommedaris Enkhuizen, Nord Holland	What does your pendulum tell you about earth enerhgies assciated with this magnificent building?

Yesterday, we drove up to the province of Drente, where Sylvia (Karin's other sister) lives with her husband John. She has built the only labyrinth in the entire Province of Drente we can find in The Labyrinth Society & Veriditas' Labyrinth Locator (it's the first one you will come to when you click on that link). It is a Left-Handed Classical Seven Circuit Labyrinth that she built

Sylvia's Labyrinth
Koekange, Drente, the Netherlands

Drenthe also has the largest concentration of Hunebedden, graves where the "Trechterbekervolk" placed their dead around 5000 years ago. These peoples were farmers and the name they have been given is related to the kind of pottery they made. "Hunebed" means: "grave of giants." This one in Borgen is the biggest one in Holland:

Borger 27
The longest Hunebed in the Netherlands

They were apparently originally covered with earth, and are similar to Britain's long barrows but are built much lower that even Stoney Littleton Long Barrow, which is the lowest, most cramped, one I've been in in Britain.

We also saw several others (27 & 29) which were out in a farmer's field. The sign says that these are only the skeleton of the grave. The covering hill and the smaller stones have disappeared over the centuries. There are fifty-four hunebedden In The Netherlands, and similar ones are also found in Germany and Scandinavia.

Hunebedden #28 & 29

The orientation of the one to the right (#29) is a
bit North of East, but the one below (#28)
seems to be pretty much East with no elevation
to the horizon, so it could well be an Equinox
Sun Rise Alignment.

It was good to see that the huner-
bedden we visited were being well
kept up. Brush had just been cut,
and the site was not littered with
papers and bottles. It was wonder-
ful to be with the Spirits of this land.

It is interesting to me how once again, the signs and other information about these chambers refers to them as "graves" or "burial mounds." While I have no doubt that one of their functions could have been as a place to bring the dead, it continues to be my experience in the British Isles and here in the Netherlands, that the ancient cromlechs, dolmens, long barrows, and hunebeden were places for the living as well, places where people could more easily contact the other side.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
Enkhuizen, Nord Holland
and
SunnyBank 
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #86 - Doodwegen/Dead Straight Lines

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:33:09 +0100

Tip o' the Week #86 - Doodwegen/Dead Straight Lines

Dear [firstname]

As I write this, I am in the Netherlands, east of Amsterdam in an area called "Het Gooi" (pronounced: the 'G' in "Gooi" is pronounced like the 'ch" in the Scottish word 'loch', the 'oo' like the 'oa' on 'oat.'). It consists of a number of towns that are essentially suburbs of Amsterdam. Among them are Bussum, Laren and Hilversum. These three towns surround a large bit of moorland - the "Bussumerheide" and the "Westerheide" (in pink on the map below).

These moorlands have a number of perfectly straight prehistoric lines/paths that converge at St. Jan's Kerkhof (St. John's Cemetery). Straight lines that converge like spokes on a wheel at a sacred site. Humm… that sounds familiar. Actually on the map below, I have hi-lighted six lines that converge on that cemetery that have energy leys (six to eight foot straight beams of and energy that have a direction of flow) running along them.

These lines are called "doodwegen." One line is a "doodweg" (pronounce the "o" in 'dood' as in 'oat', 'we' as in 'vet", and the 'g' as the 'ch' in 'loch.' In English, "Doodweg" is "dead way or path," In the past, the dead were carried along these paths from their home towns to the cemetery at what is now St John's Church Cemetery. There are many Bronze Age round barrows in that area. (There is a similar dead way at the Rösaring northwest of Stockholm in Sweden where there is a dead straight path leading from a charnel house to a series of round barrows and a fifteen circuit labyrinth.)

Bussum

Nieuwe Crailoseweg

Hilversum

Laren

Six Prehistoric Doodwegen (hi-lighted in orange) converge on St. John's Churchyard/Cemetery
Niewe Crailosweg (hi-lighted in green) runs diagonally, and is much younger

I walked the Bussumer Doodweg, and while there are slight deviations due to the thousands of years that they have been used not only for spiritual purposes, but now for walking, horse-riding and and bicycle paths, it is an essentially dead straight line from St. John's Cemetery to Bussum.

Three pictures of the Bussumer Doodweg
In the bottom picture, you can see two horseback riding trails running parallel
with the foot/bicycle path.

While I was walking the Bussumer doodweg, I was reminded of Kubler-Ross' book on Death and Dying, and the straight path one takes from this life to the next. When Terry Ross (no relation) taught me how to assist lost spirits to the other side, he described the same straight path, "Don't look to the left or the right; keep going straight ahead; do you see the light at the end of the tunnel?; go for it!" These Doodwegen are portals, paths to the other side.

There is one very straight line running diagonally near the top of the map (in green) called the "Nieuwe Crailoseweg" that is a much more recent "weg," but its first bit, "Nieuwe" shows us that it is much more recent than the "Doodwegen." While it doesn't go to the St. John's Church, it does seem to be carrying on the tradition of straightness.

Nieuwe Crailosweg

A painfully obvious connection between the Dod Man in England and "Doodwegen" in the Netherlands struck me that I had, for some unexplainable reason, never thought of before. Back in the seventies, when Paul Devereaux was Editor of The Ley Hunter, there was a comic strip in most issues called "Dodman." 'Dod' is a local British vernacular word for a land snail, the "Helix pomatia". The comic strip was the story of a snail that had long antennae, and ongoing adventures in sacred space. This snail was a caricature based on the Dodman, best known as the chalk hill-figure known as the Long Man of Wilmington. According to Wikipedia, "the 'inventor' of ley lines, Alfred Watkins, thought that in the words "dodman" and the builder's "hod" there was a survival of an ancient British term for a surveyor. Watkins felt that the name came about because the snail's two horns resembled a surveyor's two surveying rods."

IMHO, at a time when leys are under attack, these doodwegen are some of the best bits of evidence that these spirit paths are real!

------------------------

A totally unrelated bit of juvenile fantasy that I found sprayed on Victoria Buildings, just off the High Street in Glastonbury. Sorry, I just couldn't resist!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town 
Glastonbury
Somerset BA6 8JE 
England 
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #85 - How Accurate Is Accurate Enough?

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:32:37 +0100

Tip o' the Week #85 - How Accurate Is Accurate Enough?

Dear [firstname]

I have written before about the reticence of modern archaeology to accept the reality that our prehistoric foremothers and fathers were in to accurately measuring the movements of the Sun, Moon and perhaps the other planets. Archaeoastronomers like Alexander Thom were at first put down, and then just ignored because their findings didn't fit in the archaeologists' paradigm of those "primitive savages." And besides, when they went to the ancient sacred sites with their modern well machined devices (whose massive standing stones and chambered walls certainly must have moved a wee bit in five-thousand years), they found that the ancients weren't accurate enough - they weren't up to modern standards, so they just weren't relating to the heavenly bodies.

The Egyptian Cubit

The Egyptian Cubit

This issues of how accurate is accurate enough and what is the best unit of measurement to use have plagued modern scientists and academics as they look back through the pages of history, not to mention prehistory. The Egyptians used the cubit. The ruling Pharaoh was considered to be God's manifestation on Earth, so the distance between his/her elbow to the tip of their middle finger was used as the standard measuring unit during their reign. Of course this length changed with each new Pharaoh, but that didn't actually make any difference because rather than the specific units of measurement that were used, the important thing in the construction of Egyptian sacred space (as it was until the time of Oliver Cromwell) was the ratio within the construction that makes the difference in sacred geometry. Whether the room is 10 cubits by 20 cubits, or 10 feet by 20 feet, or even 10 meters by 20 meters, the spaces will create the harmonics of a double square.

Roman Accuracy *

The word “mile” comes from the Latin word for “thousand”, from the phrase mille passus, literally “thousand paces”. Each passus consisted of five pes, the Roman foot, so the mille passus was 5,000 pes. This distance was also known as a milliarium, literally “milestone.” How accurate is that?

Inches and Feet *

England, the USA use inches, feet and yards. For an example, an inch was the length of three barleycorns from the middle of the ear, placed end to end, or the width of the thumb at the base of the nail. The "thumb inch" was especially common in the cloth trade until 1711, when Queen Anne explicitly forbade its use.

Both the Imperial units and US customary units derive from earlier English units. Imperial units were mostly used in the British Commonwealth and the former British Empire. US customary units are still the main system of measurement used in the United States despite Congress having legally authorized metric measure on 28 July 1866. Some steps towards US metrication have been made, particularly the redefinition of basic US units to derive exactly from SI units, so that in the US the inch is now defined as 0.0254 m (exactly), and the avoirdupois pound is now defined as 453.59237 g (exactly)

The Metric System - The Ultimate in Accuracy and Consistency? *

The French Revolution in 1791 brought us the metric system; however, a number of metric systems of units have evolved since the adoption of the original metric system back then. The current international standard metric system has been the result of a number of revisions. For example, the Kilogram was again redefined in 1870s. It is a cylindrical lump of platinum and Iridium cast in London in 1879, and then sent to Paris.

The Kilogram

The international prototype kilogram (IPK). is made of a platinum-iridium alloy and is nested in three bell Jars and stored in a vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France.

Unfortunately, when the original was compared with official copies of it, it was found that there was a discrepancy of up to 60 micrograms - slightly less than the weight of a grain of sand. So on January 24th of this year (2011), it was decided at a meeting of the Royal Society of London to recast it in a material less mercurial than platinum-iridium alloy. Once again, this system is to be readjusted due to our scientific ability to make more and more accurate instruments and measurements. Yes, this will impact on our lives. When one recent Mars flight crashed on landing on the Red Planet, it was discovered that while most of the parts were made using the Metric System; unfortunately, some were constructed using inches and feet. (Duh!)

In the seventies, there was a movement for Britain to switch to the Metric system, John Michell led the anti-metrification movement. Don't Give an Inch! To this day, there isn't a complete switch. We buy petrol or diesel in liters, but drive in miles per hour.

And now science is yet again redetermining the kilogram and probably questioning the length of the millimeter.

So we come back to this question - how close is enough? How accurate does one have to be to determine truth?

And more important, who gets to decide? Is being off by the width of a gnat's ass off enough to make a Neolithic solar alignment not close enough?

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
- Albert Einstein (The man who gave us
the best known scientific formula of the 20th Century.)

I think he was on to something.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town 
Glastonbury
Somerset BA6 8JE 
England 
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk +44 (0)1458 835 818

* I want to thank Wikipedia for much of the descriptions of these units of measurement.

Tip o' The Week # 84 - A Palden Jenkins Guest Tip Oh Fukus & Astrobabble Continued

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 09:52:42 +0100

Tip o' The Week # 84 - A Palden Jenkins Guest Tip:

Oh Fukus & Astrobabble Continued

Dear [firstname]

I have received a lot of feedback from my last "Tip." I especially enjoyed one from an old friend, Astrologer Palden Jenkins. I met him on my first day in Glastonbury at the first Samhain Earth Mysteries Gathering in the Assembly Rooms in 1983. Palden is an astrologer who not only can make a good birth chart, but who also actually knows a lot about the stars in the heavens as well. Since then, we have had a number of adventures together including organizing OakDragon Gatherings and 100 Monkey events, not to mention an exciting series of Mens' Group meetings here in the Land of Avalon.

Several years ago Palden left Glastonbury and moved to West Penwith, Cornwall, UK. He also regularly visits Bethlehem, Palestine. He is currently involved with:
• humanitarian work in the Middle East and community development in Britain;

• communication: writing, speaking, broadcasting, photography and websites;

• insight: counsellor, adviser, historian and geopolitical expert.

I do miss being able to just drop on and talk about anything that I might be in to at the time. Here is his take on my 'Tip o' The Week # 83' - "Oh Fukus & Astrobabble":

------------------------------------------------

Palden Jenkins

In your original piece, you talk about the sidereal and tropical zodiacs, implying that the sidereal zodiac came first and somehow the tropical zodiac was invented later on. I'd suggest that the reverse is demonstrated in the stone circles since, if we look at astronomical alignments, it's not the rising or setting points of stars that predominate, but the seasonal/cyclic rising points of the sun (the ecliptic) and the moon - and these are based on the solstices and equinoxes, or Earth's solar orientation, and the intersection of the moon's orbital plane with the ecliptic (the lunar nodes and the eclipse cycle).

That is, what mattered to ancients was what happened here on Earth, in terms of detectable subtle-energy time-variations. Remember, of all planets in our solar system, the most important to us is Earth (the horizon, meridian and houses in an astrological chart). Or, from an earth-energy viewpoint, it is the modulating resonances of earth energy which matter, these being influenced by the resonances of the other planets - since we live in an interdependent energy-system, the solar system. But it is the Earth's resonances that matter primarily, even though they are influenced by cyclic solar system resonances.

Though the stars certainly play a mythic role in ancient cosmology, when we get to cyclic measurement - which is what astrology and archaeoastronomy are all about - the stars and constellations present a big problem. Stars represent major energy-nodes in a constellation, but the constellations have no boundaries or over-arching spatial, numerological or geometric logic to them. The constellations are stick-men with space around them, not boxes with walls or cusps. But if we take the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarters we get a neat eightfold division based on identifiable, measurable time-periods and solar orientations, which is clearly demonstrated in the alignments of many ancient sites of northern climes. (In more southern climes such as Egypt, where alternation of light and dark was less emphasised, and where such issues as the fluctuations of the Nile were crucial, they based their calendar on the heliacal rising of stars such as Sirius, but not on all stars or constellations - and they mapped and subdivided their calendar from that point in time. *) If we subdivide the quadrants of the solstices and equinoxes by three, we get a really neat number, 12, which divides by 2, 3, 4 and 6, which is very satisfying numerologically and cosmologically, and it's a really good way of mapping time, just as one might map the magnitude of an earth-energy line by identifying harmonics.

(* A note: it also goes to show that 'shamanism' and other ancient mysteries were not 'isms' or rationally-comparative systems at all, because they were based on the localised experience of the wise ones of any area, which was very variable. In Britain the Great Ocean was to the west and in China it was to the east, for example. Or in NW Europe, solstices and equinoxes were important, whereas in Mexico, Israel and Egypt respectively such things as the cycles of Venus, the Shekinah and the helical rising of Sirius were important, differently in each place.)

So I would suggest that, while the stars have played a role in furnishing ancient peoples' cosmologies, or perhaps even in tracing such peoples' perceived extraterrestrial origins, it is the tropical, earthbound calendrical periods that mattered (at least in the Old World, or NorthWest Europe) to astrologers and time-keepers, even from very ancient times. This is not an abstract construct as such, since it is rooted in earthly seasonal experience - it's agricultural and 'political'. If anything, it is the constellations which are constructs, since they are Rorschach images which reflect different cultures' perceptions of how the stars are organised. But they are not useful in measurement - and this is the crucial bit. I think the confusion came up in Ptolemy's time, when tropical zodiac signs and ecliptic constellations somehow acquired the same Latin names. Perhaps it's one of history's bigger errors!

Precession has been known about for at least 10-15 millennia, if the work of Bauval, Hancock and others is to be believed (generally, I think they're more or less right). I don't think there has been any misunderstanding over precession until recent times, when modern astronomers, who believe ancients could not have understood precession (or known of Uranus and Neptune), latched onto the idea that these silly ignoramuses just got confused over sidereal and tropical zodiacs, primitive as they were. Even the Hindu sidereal zodiac is not actually based on stars - it is a twelvefold subdivision of the heavens using one stellar datum-point as its anchorage, and it doesn't really use real constellations at all. The ecliptic constellations are by no means uniform in extent. Even when using the four 'royal stars' as stellar anchor-points, one of them is not located in an ecliptic constellation.

Anyway, fuckit, we do what we do, and it seems to work quite well.

Hope you're well. Love from the end of the world. Keep up the good work with your Tips - they're almost always interesting!

Paldywan

------------------------------------------------

Happy Imbolc!
May any seeds or projects
That you planted last Autumn,
and have been lying dormant through the Winter,
Now begin to move on their own.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank 
9 Bove Town 
Glastonbury
Somerset BA6 8JE 
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' The Week # 83 - Oh Fukus & Astrobabble

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:35:11 +0100

Tip o' The Week # 83 - Oh Fukus & Astrobabble

I first used astrology in 1970. I was learning how to work with the Rider Waite Tarot deck of the Golden Dawn, and A.E. Waite attributed each card to one or more astrological glyphs, signs, or planets. While I did some rudimentary work with birth charts, I never really saw myself as a birth chart astrologer. I was also interested in what we called "the Roots of Astrology" - how might the folks have used astrology back when it began in their stone rings, medicine wheels and other sacred spaces - something that I am more and more interested these days. This is sidereal astrology - where the planets are in the astronomical zodiac - where they are actually in the heavens. Sidereal astrology is used in India and in much of Asia. Here in the West, most use tropical astrology which arbitrarily says that on the Spring Equinox, the Sun is at one degree Aries. It hasn't been adjusted for the procession of the Equinoxes where now, we are at the dawning of the Age (and astrological sign) of Aquarius on the 21st of March.

I need to say here that both methods work and are equally effective. However, this brings me to my first bit of astrobabble. Back in the eighties Kelley Hunter p;nbsp;and I ran a course called "The Roots of Astrology." Most of the people who attended these events were professional birth chart astrologers. I found that when they started to talk amongst themselves they said things like, "Of course he's a Libra with his Moon quincunxed Uranus in the Fourth house." That was not why/how I learned astrology, it was complete astrobabble to me - it was as if they had started to talk in Ukranian or Urdu. On the other hand, some of them were somewhat angry with me when they learned that I dared to organise and lead such an event without knowing birth chart astrology. (I must admit that to this day, these kind of discussions are still astrobabble to me.)

But now we come to the 21st Century. Confusion: "Pluto isn't a planet any more!" say the astronomers. "Yes it is!" say the Astrologers. Babblebabble.

Recently there has been a lot of talk on the social networks on the internet about the "new" thirteenth zodiacal sign of Ophiuchus. I asked Palden Jenkins, my favourite astrologer, about this, and in a nutshell, this was his reply:

"Don't worry about it, matey - it's a pile of crap and propaganda!"

In an article entitled, "Attention All Astronomers - The World is Flat," Eric Francis an astrologer in Kingston, New York, writes, "According to NBC, Astronomer Parke Kunkle says that due to changes in the Earth’s alignment, the dates of many zodiac signs have changed,. In addition, there may be a 13th Zodiac sign: Ophiuchus.

Constellation Opiuchus just touches
the ecliptic (yellow line)
between Sagittarius and Scorpio

Eric continues, "Either this is a joke or Parke Kunkle is truly ignorant of his own science. It’s probably a bit of both."

Eric can explain his thinking behind this Ophuchian babble, and he can say it much better than I can. Go to:

Jan 13, 2011
Attention All Astronomers - The World is Flat
Published by Eric Francis under Daily Astrology
http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/2011/01/13/your-zodiac-sign-is-not-wrong/ (You may have to go to <planetwaves.net> first, and then tack on the rest of the above URL).

Eric cleanly cuts through this latest example of astronobabble. This, for me, is yet more proof that when we deign to peer through the veil to the other side, each of us sees that reality slightly or considerably differently.

One result is babblebabblebabble.

So with this stuff, when it comes to the question, "Who knows what's the truth?", I trust your answer is a resounding, "I DO!"

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank 
9 Bove Town 
Glastonbury
Somerset BA6 8JE 
England
http://www.geomancy.org 
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk 
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #82 - Looking Back as a Way Forward

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:23:38 +0100

Tip o' the Week #82 - Looking Back as a Way Forward

Dear [firstname]

From my very first experience of spiritual realms back in 1970 at a chamber in central Vermont called Calendar II, my major interest in geomancy and sacred space was, due to the realisation that these special places could enhance my connection with the intangible, to become more aware of the One, with what I have come to call 'Great Mystery.'

It has long been my main goal to be at least one step closer to my Maker when I die than where I am now. With this in mind, to make a theatrical analogy, geomancers are set designers. They create an atmosphere where the actors can better do their jobs. So after forty+ years, while I make no claim to gnow every thing about sacred space set design, I am thinking more and more about getting involved with the actual play.

Recently I have been reading "Prehistoric Belief: Shamans, Trance and the Afterlife" by Mike Williams (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0 7524 4921 0). The author has an MA in Archaeology and a PhD from the University of Reading, and is a shamanic practitioner having studied with indigenous shamans in both Siberia and Lapland (i.e. with the Samii). In his introduction he writes, "...at its heart, I want this book to be a good read and, while avoiding playing fast and loose with the evidence, I have always erred towards this aim... I also want this book to challenge the way we think about the past and I have therefore added short vignettes that attempt to recreate the ancient and allow us, even if but for a few brief moments, to journey and experience (emphasis mine) it for ourselves... flights of fancy they might be, but they remain tethered by the evidence." (pp 7&8) For me, these words approach the dance that I would call 'gnowing' - using both sides of the brain and valuing them both equally.

Williams covers the vast scope of prehistory from the Palaeolithic (100,000+ BCE) to the Iron Age focusing primarily on Europe, Russia and the mid-East, though he discusses other places on our planet as well. Of this vast spread of time he says, "...I could not hope to equal the works of the specialist in each field that I cover... Does this mean that books such as this, which attempt a broad sweep of the human condition across many thousands of years should never be written? That is for the reader to decide, but it is beholden on a writer to at least try." (p. 8) I have not yet read even half of this exciting book, but already I am very supportive of his attempt.

There is one chapter (Number 5), "Journey to the Otherworld" (pp 32-36) that I found particularly exciting, and would go so far as to suggest that it is worth the price of this book for just these six pages! In it, he describes his first shamanic trance from both an experiential (read: right brain) and an analytical (read: left brain) point of view, and brings together not only many different pieces of trance work that I am already aware of, but also introduces some new aspects that I hadn't connected with before.

The 'drug/enhancer' he is using for this journey is drumming. The first thing he experiences is what ophthalmologists call "entopic phenomena," patterns created within the eye he calls 'phosphenes' - flecks, hashed lines, zigzags, and starbursts, that are familiar to anyone who has suffered with migraines, or when you put pressure your eyelids. He equates these patterns with many that are found on prehistoric cave walls or on Palaeolithic carved beads. The second thing that he became aware of was that these phosphenes converged and a tunnel or vortex appeared. I believe this is analogous to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' tunnel she wrote about when she described near death experiences in her book "On Death and Dying" (London & New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.2008. ISBN 0-203-88965-7 Master e-book ISBN. First published in 1969.) It is a path to Spirit that as a geomancer I am quite familiar with.

After passing through this tunnel, the landscape opens up and the shaman has reached the other side, the spiritual realm. The author continues with a gnowing description of the journey itself, and disorienting issues that occur upon his return to his 'normal' state of consciousness; however, I won't spoil it further for you, as I trust you will read this most exciting book yourself. But it is, for me, the best holistic description of this journey to the other side that I have read.

Now, having praised "Prehistoric Belief" literally to the heavens, I must say that there is one point that I see differently than the author. He seems to be saying that shamanism went back at least as far as the early Palaeolithic (?as far back as 100,000 BEC±?). In one place, for example on page 39 while talking about the Paleolithiccave wall painters, he says, "...it can be seen that the painted cves did not arise as n independent prctice of using trance but were rooted in a culture that was essentially shamanic in its outlook." I don't think so. While shamanism goes back to the Neolithic and perhaps the late Mesolithic (6,000 BCE±), like Popes and Heirophants, I believe that Shamans became necessary with the introduction of the Patriarchy. Prior to that time, individuals we now call shamans were not needed because everyone was much more right-brain/intuitive. Shamans arose at a time when most had forgotten how to connect directly with the tintangible realms. Over the years, I have written many articles on this shift from Right brain consciousness to left brain analytical thinking. Like Priests and Vicars of today, Shamans were 'hired to battle Satan/disease/contact the ancestors for the community.' Only they actually did travel consciously to the other world(s). (See Julian Jaynes. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. This was the book that ignited my interest in this shift in consciousness. A must in the development of consciousness studies.)

My study of what I would call the 'Devolution of Consciousness' leads me to believe that there was a time as Merlin Stone called it, "When God Was a Woman" (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 1978. ISBN 015696158X) when everyone could communicate directly with the spiritual realms, not just one or two members of the community (?gifted perhaps with schizophrenia?). The more dominant the pyramidal patriarchy became, the less the people could connect directly themselves. The more we became as we are today, bereft of our right brain skills, and the less ability we had to cross over to the other side.

But please don't let this issue get in the way of your reading "Prehistoric Belief"! It is one of the best ones I've picked up in years. I'm feeling that set design is still important, but perhaps it is time to be spending more time out on the stage as a thespian.

};-)  

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank 
9 Bove Town 
Glastonbury
Somerset BA6 8JE
England 
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk 
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #81 - Thorny Update and Other Goodies

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:59:42 +0100

Tip o' the Week #81 - Thorny Update and Other Goodies

Dear [firstname]

The Holy Thorn

The nefarious miscreant(s) who desecrated our Holy Thorn on Wearyall Hill have not been caught (and probably never will), but there are some positive aspects to this vandalism. But first, some pictures of its present state, and a FAQ published by a broad coalition of local organisations.


The "pollarded" Holy Thorn Today		Garden Fleece and bubble wrap protecting the severed limbs

There have been lots of comments about whether it is a good idea to protect the limbs from freezing with bubblewrap because it would make for weakened new limbs come next spring (one friend of mine was threatening to sneak up there and tear it off). As you can see, there is gardeners fleece underneath with bubblewrap on top. This contorversy has not yet been resolved.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Holy Thorn:

1. Why has this list of frequently asked questions been put together?

Following the vicious attack on the Glastonbury Holy Thorn Tree which was cut down by vandals on the night of Wednesday 8 December, many people are asking what will happen to the remains of the tree and, equally important, what will happen to the holy wood from the severed branches?

2. Will the tree recover from the attack and grow back?

The tree trunk remains so there is a chance the tree may grow back. We will have to wait until Spring to find out if the tree recovers and is strong enough to regenerate and grow new branches.

3. Who is looking after the tree?

Wearyall Hill is privately owned and the owner has consulted a Glastonbury based Gardening and Landscape Company to advise on how to keep the tree alive and give it the best chance of surviving the winter.

4. Where are the severed branches of the Holy Thorn now?

Glastonbury Abbey was asked to safeguard the branches until people have had their say and the community has decided what should happen to the wood. All suggestions will be taken into consideration and you are invited to put forward your views.

5. Will parts of the branches be sold?

No, there are no plans to sell any of the branches or wood at this time, as there is a consensus that it would be wrong to make money out of this sad situation.

6. Is it possible to grow a new tree by grafting a section of the tree?

Advice has been conflicting so Tony Kirkham, Head of the Arboretum at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was consulted. We were told the tree can be propagated from semi-ripe cuttings in the late spring, early summer or from hardwood cuttings in the winter and the optimum time for grafting was up until a week after Christmas.

The Grounds Team at Glastonbury Abby received further advice in grafting the cuttings from the severed branches and cuttings were also taken to Ark Redwood, Head Gardener of the Chalice Well Gardens.

Cuttings (scions), taken from last year's growth on the severed branches have been taken back to Kew where they have offered to dedicate their expertise and resources to try and propagate new thorn trees for the community in Glastonbury.

7. Do the scions have to be grafted onto blackthorn or hawthorn?

Kew have informed us that it is hawthorn rootstock that is used, despite some books saying blackthorn.

8. Is there a ceremony I can attend?

Many parts of the community have been organising ceremonies and activities. Please contact Glastonbury Pilgrim Reception Centre (The PRC) for more details. Groups planning to hold ceremonies or services are asked to pass on information to the PRC, preferably in flier format, so they can place it on their noticeboard and share it with the community.

9. How can I have a say in what happens?

You can choose how you want to have your say and send in your suggestions:

Facebook: If you have access to the internet, we have set up a Facebook page called – The Official Page for the Glastonbury Holy Thorn – so that comments and suggestions can be shared.

By email: You can send your suggestions and comments by email to: holythorn@glastonburyabbey.com

Write a letter to: Glastonbury Town Hall, Magdalene Street, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 9EL

Suggestion Boxes: You can drop suggestions into the `Holy Thorn Suggestion Boxes' in the Town Hall, Glastonbury Pilgrim Reception Centre, the Public Library, St John's Church and the Abbey's ticket office. Please do not enclose money.

10. Who takes the decision on what happens?

Because the Holy Thorn is regarded as sacred by countless people regardless of their faith or beliefs, the Team would like local people to agree what happens.

11. What will happen to all the suggestions we put forward?

The informal Glastonbury Holy Thorn team, with the help of volunteers from all parts of the community, has offered to gather together the ideas and suggestions and, if it is possible, group them so that everyone can see the suggestions and help choose which ones should be taken forwards.

12. How can I help?

If you know of people who might like to send in their views, please spread the word and let them know how to get involved.

13. Who has produced this list of questions and answers?

Following a meeting hosted by Glastonbury Abbey on Friday 10 December, representatives from the local community, Glastonbury Pilgrim Reception Centre, Glastonbury Conservation Society, Glastonbury Town Council, the local police, St John's Church and Glastonbury Abbey have worked together to:

a) Agree to work together to keep everyone in touch with what is happening and co-ordinate activities to avoid duplication
b) Ensure everyone has a chance to have their say in what should happen to the Holy Thorn and its branches.

These Frequently Asked Questions will be updated regularly and also published on Facebook and the Glastonbury Pilgrim Reception Centre website.

As I mentioned above, there are some positive aspects to all of travesty. First, it looks like the pollarded tree might shoot out some new branches in the Spring (assuming that it survives the coldest December on record, and the freezing weather doesn't continue for much longer). But more importantly, it has brought our Glastonbury community together in ways that I haven't seen for a long time. Groups who normally don't speak to each other are working together to bring a positive resolution to this violation of our sacred space here in the Land of Avalon.

When Europe Turned Off To Geomancy

I am reading a very exciting book called Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas (Penguin Books: London. 1971. ISBN-13: 987-0-14-013744-6. Available at Amazon). While I am less than a quarter of the way through this fascinating work, it is giving me a much greater awareness of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the shift from Catholicism to Protestantism, and the various reinterpretation conservative Protestants made of the way Catholics had basically taken over earlier pagan rituals - like blessing fields and consecration of the host in Communion/transubstantiation. Until now, the only example of that shift that I was aware of was Oliver Cromwell, in his belief that the place meant nothing, allowing his men to ride their horses in to churches and to defecate on the floor! Thomas provides much more evidence of how this shift in consciousness occurred. I'm sure that I will be writing more about this when I finish this well researched book!

Avalon Rising

This week, I was interviewed by Hugh Newman on Avalon Rising , an internet radio show here in Glastonbury. It was a wide-ranging discussion of all things geomantic from leys to labyrinths. You can catch it by going to their website. You will be able to listen to it live this week and then you can download a recording of it shortly.

How are your New Year's Resolutions going?

};-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

A Greeting from To'tW # 81

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:10:52 +0100

Dear [firstname]

Greetings of the Season!

Bodhi Day (Rohatsu) Buddhism - 28/11 - 4/12
Heavenly Hannukah - 1-9/12
Sinterklaas Avond (The Netherlands) - 5/12
Swinging Saturnalia - 17-23/12
Yule - 20-22/12
Wonderful Winter Solstice - 21/12
God Jul (Sweden) - 25/12
Gelukkig Kerstmis (The Netherlands) - 25/12
Merry Christmas - 25/12
Joyous Kwanzaa - 26/12
and
A Happy New Year!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE&feature=player_embedded>

Tip o' the Week # 78 - Egg or Chicken: Who Came First?

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 22:18:34 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 78 - Egg or Chicken:
Who Came First?

Dear [firstname]

Through the millennia, interest in labyrinths seem to hit peaks of interest, and then fade back into obscurity. The oldest I know of was called Mogor reported to me by Jeff Saward which he found in Galicia in northwestern Spain.

Of course there were labyrinths in Turkey, Crete, Greece and Rome. In the Medieval times, they were in Gothic Cathedrals. From the Sixteenth Century up until the beginning of the Twentieth Century, fishermen in Scandinavia were using labyrinths to ensure a good catch and a good wind. Of course there were many other early examples as well.

Labyrinths in Recent Times

Lauren Artress

Recently, when I was teaching at Rowe Camp and Conference Centre, I had spoken of Lauren Artress as the person who had really popularised the labyrinth in modern times here in America. As a Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, she used what she had learned about labyrinths from Jean Houston, and brought The Chartres Type Labyrinth to main-line mostly Protestant Americans who where seeking a more direct experience to Spirit - which, of course, this 'dance' can provide.

Since I left Rowe, I have receive several emails from Doug Wilson, one of the founders at Rowe that actually it was Jean Houston who introduced this ancient spiritual tool to America way back in the nineteen-sixties. She called her labyrinth a "Dromenon.

Jean Houston

Doug wrote, "Hi Sig - "I was only seeking to place Jean Houston in her proper place in the modern revival… Canon Lauren Artress from Grace Cathedral brought the Labyrinth back to her Cathedral after experiencing the Labyrinth at Jean Houston's Mystery School."

I had been only peripherally aware of Jean Houston's modern-day pioneering work with labyrinths back in the mid-seventies, when I was working on my Master's in Sacred Space, but at that time, I was more involved with dowsing as my tool I used when I wanted intuition on demand. So labyrinths weren't really speaking to me back then.

Jeff Saward

I really became of the power of the labyrinth in 1983, when I was first in Glastonbury, when, among many other folks who were to come into great importance in my life in the Land of Avalon, I met Jeff Saward. It was from him that I first learned how to draw what is now called a Classical Seven Circuit Labyrinth. He has become an old and good friend of mine, and IMHO, when it comes to labyrinths, Jeff is the most knowledgeable person on this planet. His magazine, "Caerdroia", first published in 1980, is I believe the longest running magazine on this arcane topic. It was around that time that I met Jean Lutz, Editor of "The Labyrinth Letter," a magazine that brought together the isolated folks in the US who were working with these ancient single path magical/spiritual tools.

This coming together of American labyrinthophiles led to the founding of The Labyrinth Society (TLS) in 1996. In the first paragraph in their opening statement about the Society they say of Jean Lutz, "She also sponsored the initial labyrinth conferences: the first at Gavilan Ranch in Lindrith, New Mexico (September 21-25, 1995) followed by a second at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York the following year. Many of the individuals who participated in the Society’s Founding Circle met and became acquainted at those meetings." The intro continues, "The impetus that led to the formation of our Society ultimately traces to the immense contribution of Jean Lutz. Many consider her to be the true Founding Mother of our organisation."

Many of us who were at the founding meeting of TLS have become good friends and colleagues.

Robert Ferré, builder of canvas Chartres Types,
put a great deal of energy into the founding of TLS

Others included Marty Cain who has been part of the building of so many outdoor Classical ones; Helen Curry, first Chair of TLS; Jeff and Kim (soon-to-be) Sayward; and David Gallagher, who has done yeoman's duty in the TLS HQ in Trumansburg, New York. I am aware that I have left out many people who have also made important contributions to the growth and awareness of labyrinths in this cycle of interest in this ancient tool that can connect us to emotional, mental and spiritual realms which we normally do not inhabit.

While I must agree with Doug Wilson that Jean Houston holds pride of place in the modern revival of interest in these ancient magical tools, over the millennium, so many have contributed to the present enthusiasm in labyrinths that lead us to intuition on demand that it it is difficult for me to say really who came first.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
Montpelier, Vermont, USA
and
SunnyBank
9, BoveTown
Glastonbury, Somerset
England BA6 8JE
www.geomancy.org
sig@geomancy.org

p.s. Next week I will be in the Netherlands where I'll be telling you about the "Hunnebedden" Neolithic dolmens, where, for example, in the north of the country within a radius of only 30 kilometers, there are 53 of these megalithic monuments are scattered over a beautiful landscape.

Tip o' the Week # 77 - Revisionist Mythtory

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:06:03 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 77 - Revisionist Mythtory

Dear [firstname]

I've just flown in to western New York to teach at Fellowships of the Spirit in Lily Dale. I'll also be teaching next weekend in western Massachusetts (more of that below). On my flight over the Big Pond, I had the pleasure of reading one of the most innovative bits of Glastonbury revisionist mythtory that I've had the pleasure of seeing in a long time. It's The Glastonbury Documents III: Temple of Reconciliation (Concerning Jesus Maria and the Re-union of the Temporal and Spiritual Aspects of Glastonbury)." It was written by my good friend Jon Cousins, who has self published it, and you can get a copy from the Library of Avalon, Glastonbury Experience, High Street, Glastonbury, Somerset, England. (£3.00 plus, I assume, postage).

As the title suggests, this is the third booklet that Jon has written about Glastonbury Abbey and its spiritually checkered history. In this one, he puts forward some rather amazing ideas based on extensive research he has been doing in both historical and modern day alternative interpretations of our town's mythtory.

One of the biggest tourist draws to the Land of Avalon is that the Abbey is the burial place of King Arthur. In 1191, two bodies were found outside the Mary Chapel in the Abbey cemetery during the reign of Edward I, and it has been claimed by all to be both Arthur and a lady, presumed to be Guinevere.

The brown signpost in the foreground marks the spot
where Arthur's bones were found

The bodies were moved to a place of honour in the Choir
in front of the High Altar.

But Jon has a different take on this, and it has to do with Jesus' mother Mary. Indeed, in a straight line from where these remains were found in the Abbey cemetery to the outer wall of the Mary Chapel are inscribed these words:

IESUS
MARIA

In the New Testament Book of John, he writes that Mary fled to the wilderness after the crucifixion of her son. (I suggest that you get this third booklet of Jon Cousins' to follow his thinking as to why she came to Glastonbury), but the point here is that the Abbey became a centre that worshipped both Jesus AND Mary/both God and Goddess! And this is what the Church (and finally Henry VIII) wanted to destroy.

The Gnostic dualists of the Middle Ages like the Bogimils and the Cathars were subject to the brutality of the Albigensian Crusade in 1208. Dualism inevitably says that yin is of equal importance to yang. Therefore, Goddess is equal to God! The Gnostics spoke about a distinct creator God or Demiurge, which is an illusion and as a later emination from the single monad or source. This second God, or Demiurge, is a lesser and inferior or false God. This concept never played very well in Rome where patriarchal thinking ruled in the Church. God's on top; the Pope is on top here on Earth.

Dualists are saying that He is just part of the One.

And you know what the Church did to heretics. Abbot Whilting was dragged up to the Tor, hanged until he was ALMOST dead, and then drawn and quartered. Sweet. Not.

Yes, there are other reasons put forward as to why the Church and Henry VIII and other kings before him didn't like Glastonbury, its abbey, and the Twelve Hides which comprised The Vatican Free State of Northern Europe, but I am more and more suspecting that the possibility that Mary was buried in Glastonbury and that dualism reigned supreme there. This was a the bottom of that nasty take-over of the Abbey on the 15th of November 1539. The result of that violation is still being felt to this day in our town.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
Mid-Atlantic Geomancy
Lily Dale, New York, USA
sig@geomancy.org

p.s. next weekend (19, 20 &21 November) I'll be teaching Archaeoastronomy, Dowsing, & Nature: Prehistoric & Contemporary Uses of Sacred Sites at Rowe Camp and Conference Center in western Massachusetts. I understand that there are still a few places left, and I'd love to see you there. It is the last time I'll be teaching in the US until late 2011.

p.p.s. Here's a neat one - a Tudor Labyrinth found on old Luftwaffe picture taken during WW II.

Tip o' the Week # 76 - On Fear

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:34:43 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 76 - On Fear

Dear [firstname]

I am about to leave for the US to do some teaching at Fellowships of the Spirit (FOTS), a Spiritualist Seminary, in Lily Dale, New York. As an ordained minister, I usually give a sermon for their Sunday evening service when I am there. When I called Rev. Elaine Thomas, the head of FOTS, to see if she had a theme she would like me to talk on, she suggested "Fear."

Edvard Munch
The Scream

It's everywhere. And all the media are doing their best to get us to feel fear about religious fundamentalism, the economy, terrorism, war, the future, death ... the list goes on and on.

And the list of ways to deal with our fears also goes on and on. Carl Jung wrote of our shadow, that dark place in our unconscious where we stuff all those things we don't want to face. Byron Katie urges us (as Ram Dass said) to "Be Here Now." What you fear in the future arrives at the moment you see the period at the end of this sentence. And has that fear become manifest? Be Here Now! Chögyam Trungpa in his book, Smile at Fear – Awakening the True Heart of Bravery, (Shambhala: Boston & London), speaks about all of the various fears we have, and to become truly fearless, he suggests that we must stop running from our fear and begin to make friends with it. We must learn to smile at fear. (Sounds a lot like Jung's method of dealing with our shadow.)
But I would like to suggest a slightly different approach that employs some geomantic magic. Crossings of underground veins of primary water are very yin. I see them like a psychic vacuum cleaner that sucks energy into the Earth. It helps things to fall apart, to decompose. Yes, there are some beneficial things that can happen by spending time over places like this. For example, it's a great place to put your compost pile. But mostly, it is deleterious to human health. It shrinks your aura when you spend time over such places, and helps you get a number of different degenerative dis-eases - like cancer, arthritis, auto-immune diseases and difficulty in sleeping.

But in terms of fear, these yin centres are also great places to get rid of stuff that is no longer useful to you. I first learned this in the early eighties in Vermont when another geomancer moved in to my area and began writing me rather provocative unpleasant letters. One day, I had had enough, so I took his letter to a place on my lawn where there was a crossing of veins of primary water, and Mother Nature had made it clear by having a small circle of English Daisies. As I lit the letter, I asked Her to take this negativity and use it as compost for the new. I just didn't want this negative energy in my life any more. (He never worte again.)

Six months later, someone asked me about this guy and what had been irritating me, and I couldn't remember! I still can't (and have no desire to).

I suggest this technique to some of the people who come to me for Tarot readings when they need to get rid of old habits in order to make room for new, more positive ways of doing things in their lives. I give them a piece of cigarette rolling paper and ask them to write in as few words as possible (preferably only one), what they want to get rid of, and take that to Chalice Well. There, at the well head, they light a candle, and when they are ready, they light the paper, hold it over the well, and when it is really burning their fingers, to drop the ashes in the well. And "Mom" takes it and uses it as fertiliser for the new.

All I can say is that it works.

};-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

p.s. Please remember that I will be teaching a weekend experiential workshop, on "Archaeoastronomy, Dowsing & Nature: Prehistoric & Contemporary Uses of Sacred Space" at The Rowe Conference Center in northwestern Massachusetts on the weekend of 19, 20 & 21 November. This will be your only chance to catch me in the USA this year. You can register online. This class is filling up fast, but there are still a few slots available.

Tip o' the Week # 75 - The Lake District

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:19:02 +0100

Tip o' the Week # 75 - The Lake District

Dear [firstname]

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting with some geomantic colleagues in the Lake District, in Cumbria, North of Liverpool and Blackpool in north western England just South of the Scottish border. We gather on a regular basis to share recent findings and to visit ancient sites in the area where we are meeting. This time we met the area of Lake Windamere, Wordsworth country.

Daffodils
"I wandered lonely as a cloud 
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

-William Wordsworth

It is magnificent country, as the name suggests, full of lakes and spectacular high ridges and mountains. The first ring we visited was Swinside, a magnificent little-visited megalithic ring south of Windamere.


Swinside Stone Ring		North Stone at Swinside

On our way up north again, we stopped at beautiful new seven spiral labyrinth built by Jim Buchanan. It is beautiful seven circuit labyrinth at Holker Hall on the Cartmel Penninsula in South Cumbria. I have to say that it is one of the best maintained labyrinths I have ever seen. It is also unique as far as I am concerned as it is the only seven circuit spirals that I know of.

Holker Hall Labyrinth
Built by Jim Buchanan

The other two circles we went to are much better known than Swinside. The first was Castle Rigg, just east of Keswick. It is one of the most visually impressive prehistoric monuments in Britain. This over-visited stone ring (there are three entrance gates within fifty yards of each other, and all are well worn) is located on a ball - curved like Chalice Hill here in Glastonbury - and has an outstanding horizon of mostly high hills and mountains. There is an unusual feature that intrudes in to the ring in the shape of a rectangular box of ten standing stones. Castle Rigg It was probably constructed around 3200 BC thus making it one of the oldest stone rings in Britain.

Castle Rigg Stone Ring
The rectangular "box" is on the right half of this picture

Long Meg and her Daughters is to the northeast of Castle Rigg in Little Salkeld, and has a diameter of about 350 feet making it the second biggest in all of Britain. It is also one of the youngest, built around 1500 BCE (around the time of the placing of the trilithons at Stonehenge).

Long Meg (the "out rider" in the lower right-hand corner) and Her Daughters - aerial view


Long Meg			Ros examines spirals on Long Meg See the face in the lower right-had of the stone


One of the spirals	Offerings under Long Meg

You can see a panorama shot of Long Meg's Daughters that wouldn't have fit in this email by clicking on this link.

There are wonderful sacred sites all over the British Isles, and these are only a few of them. You can find out more by visiting my website Mid-Atlantic Geomancy or the Sacred Spaces Directory. While I don't agree with everything they suggest, this site has a list of things to do and not to do when visiting sacred space.

Happy Samhain!

};-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

p.s. Sig will be teaching a weekend experiential workshop, on "Archaeoastronomy, Dowsing & Nature: Prehistoric & Contemporary Uses of Sacred Space" at The Rowe Conference Center in northwestern Massachusetts on the weekend of 19, 20 & 21 November. This will be your only chance to catch Sig in the USA this year. You can register online. This class is filling up fast, but there are still a few slots available.

Tip o' the Week #74 - Conkers

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:27:10 +0100

Tip o' the Week #74 - Conkers

Dear [firstname]

I have been struggling to find an escoteric/geomantic relevance to what I am about to write. While I am not sure that there is one, but I'll do my best! ; )

One of the realities of being an immigrant (I'm one of the nice ones - honest) is that when you get with a group of peers, and they begin talking about their youth, I wasn't here to share those experiences. Brits don't know much about Howdy Doody, Ed Sullivan, or Dick Clark and his American Bandstand. On the other hand, I didn't experience Faulty Towers, Benny Hill or Beyond the Fringe as a lad though I did get to know Postman Pat because he was a favourite of Josie's when I first came to Glastonbury and stayed with her parents, Jamie and Frances Howard-Gordon George of Gothic Image, my publishers <http://www.geomancy.org/#resources/books-by-sig/index.php>. Another thing I had never experienced, though I've heard about them was the game of Conkers.

In the middle of a match.

According to Wikipedia, "Conkers or conker is a game traditionally played mostly by children in Britain, Ireland and some former British colonies using the seeds of horse-chestnut trees – the name conker is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself. The game is played by two players, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string: they take turns striking each other's conker until one breaks.

"Again, to give you a taste of Cokorial history, according to Wiki <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers>The first recorded game of Conkers using horse chestnuts was on the Isle of Wight in 1848 – the horse chestnut tree is not native to Britain, but was introduced from the Balkans in the late 16th century; it was not widely planted until the early 19th century. In 1965 the World Conker Championships were set up in Ashton (near Oundle) Northamptonshire, England, and still take place on the second Sunday of October every year. In 2004, an audience of 5,000 turned up to watch more than 500 competitors from all over the world.In 1993, Michael Palin, of Monty Python fame, was disqualified from a Conkers competition in the United Kingdom for baking his conker and soaking it in vinegar."

I was in fabulous downtown Glastonbury having a morning respite with my geriatric Coffee Klatsch. The group began discussing the conkers match that was happening behind me, so I turned around to watch. The big talk this year in the BBC has been about Health and Safety giving Headmasters the right to require students to wear safety glasses whilst conkering each other. While I can understand the risks, this PC Regulation seems to be a bit over the top. No one I saw was wearing them.

So I went over to get a closer look at what was going on, and was invited to join in in the fun and a 12 year old boy agreed to a contest with me. It was wonderful to see his intensity as he focused on swinging his conker, attempting to smash mine, which I held out in front of me. Obviously any sport has its own arcane lingo and rules, so I learned about "Stringsies," Dropsies," and "Stompsies."

Sadly, my mental acumen allowed me to occasionally hit his conker, and to ultimately smash it, so I gave the lad my conker as a prize.

Boy with conker.

I just wanted to write this piece because it was a typically British activity that I had not experienced in the twenty-five years I have been here (I wern't exactly a lad when I came ; ), so it would be less than candid of me not to admit that I have been struggling to find an escoteric/geomantic relevance to this game of Conkers. Fortunately, I have found one!

Conkers make an excellent pendulum!

Duh!

};-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #73 - Avebury

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 17:35:37 +0100

Tip o' the Week #73 - Avebury

Dear [firstname]

This past week I had the good fortune to go to the Henge at Avebury with a European Geomancy student of mine (Mollie Love who lives in Crete). It is always a treat to go back to one of my "teaching places," places because whenever I go there, they teach me something. We walked most of the circle, and visited my favourite "spin-off stone" in the short stone row near where the very tall obelisk that used to be behind the Methodist (I think) Church that is made mostly from blocks cut from Avebury's magnificent Stone Ring(s).

Avebury Spin Off Stone

Beginning in the late Seventeenth Century, it was the custom of "StoneKiller Robinson" and some of the other religious folk in that area to go out on a Sunday and do their good christian duty by lighting fires under one of the stones, and then pouring water over the hot rock and thus splitting it, and thus destroying the pagan idols - or whatever. On others, these destroyers of their cultural heritage used the plug and feather technique for splitting the stone. This technique was used by the Egyptians. A notch was chiselled out, and thin metal plates were put in on either side of the notch, and a wedge was put between them. An number of these would be set up along the desired fracture line and tapped one after another to expand the crack. You can see several of these plug and feather marks in their fortunately unsuccessful attempt to split this one in the Northwest quadrant of the circle.

Plug and feather

Others were just pushed over. One, the Barbour stone, has been given that name because when Alexander Keiller, the Dundee Marmalade King who did the dig/restoration of half of the massive stone ring and henge in the 1930's, discovered a skeleton of a man under that stone with a comb and pair of scissors in what would have been his back pocket. Apparently, it just fell on him and it was too heavy for them to move. Keiller stood it back up in its original footing.

The Barbour Stone
(in the cenetre)

The Four Inch Ley

	In my book, "Spiritual Dowsing," I wrote about a ley (alignment of spiritual markers usually of different ages) that was four inches wide.
Along a straight stretch of the henge (most of the Neolithic construction happened between 3000 and 2400 BCE) and running to the spire of St. James Parish Church, part of which go back to eleventh Century Saxon times.	Turn 180 Degrees - in the other Direction	Along the right hand side of the West Kennet Avenue are two tall stones that have only a narrow viewing field (about four inches). Behind this parenthesis of stones is a clump of trees - (.). You can see two others just to the left of this alignment. All of these clumps of trees that mark the eastern horizon of Avebury are growing on Bronze Age Barrows.

This is a 180 degree panorama I stitched together from six images made with my iPhone.
The Church spire in in the extreme left hand side of the picture,
and the stones of the West Kennet Avenue are on the horizon on the right.

The Avebury Megalithic Complex covers an enormous area from the Wansdyke to the West and South to the Ridgeway in the East. It has at least three long barrows, Silbury Hill (the largest human made prehistoric mound Europe), stone avenues, innumerable Bronze Age Barrows, and the largest stone ring in all of Europe as well - not to mention that it has been a major centre of crop circle activity for over twenty-five years. IMHO, Avebury is Britain's best kept secret.

Four Winds,

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #72 - Geomantic Roots

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 14:40:21 +0100

Tip o' the Week #72 - Geomantic Roots

Dear [firstname]

I must first apologise for the continued massive external hack attack breakdown in my ISP. Difficulty in sending email is just one symptom. They are good folks who got badly hacked (my websites included), and since they had never been so badly attacked before (I must also apologise for any Viagra ads that may come addressed to you apparently from me. I didn't do it, honest!) I need to post this second "Tip" in a row on my website, but I have not able to send it to you by email. Though I shall attempt to send it again today : (

Over a decade ago (I think it was) Patrick MacManaway and I ran a year long school here in Glastonbury in the basics of European Geomancy. After the school ended, a number of us wanted to stay together to keep up on the work each of us has been doing. We call ourselves The Geomancy Group. Recently someone contacted our group wanting to know if we knew anything prior to 1916 about the Germans and "telluric currents." My immediate reaction was nothing. I just hadn't looked in to that preriod of our history.

It sounded like the questioner is digging in to his/her geomantic roots. When I look back down the geomantic tree that I see as my lineage, one of my roots goes way back to Craughan, a sacred space in northwest Ireland. It's perched on the top a hill, and looks like a rectangular box made of knee high toast-shaped slabs of stone that are about a meter wide. It has been dated at 7,000 BCE± by Swedish archaeologists. This is the oldest human-made purpose-built sacred space that I know of (and have been to). Sadly, my very early digital camera was used by a friend to take this picture, so it is quite pixiated:

Croghaun
Northwest Ireland

So my European geomantic roots go back even farther than Egypt or Stonehenge let alone to the Greeks, the Romans or the Templars, builders of the Gothic Cathedrals. But I have a number of gaps in this lineage, portions of that line that I just have not looked in to, and one of these blank periods ends around 1916, that year the questioner mentioned. Now most Western dowsers who are interested in the Earth energies know that it was in the first few decades of the Twentieth Century, when German dowsers found places they referred to as "krebs Haüser/Cancer Houses. These were the earliest mention of "telluric currents" in modern times that I had heard of. I just hadn't been drawn to look back any further on that line. This gap went essentially back from WW I to the fifteen hundreds. Chris Bird, in his book The Divining Hand (77 Lower Valley Road, Atglen, Pennsylvania, USA: Whitford Press/Schiffer Publishing. 1993.), spoke about German dowsers using Y rods to look for minerals. I first saw this photo in that book:

German Mineral Dowsers
in the fifteen hundreds

But they weren't looking for intangible targets like "telluric currents," they were looking for physical targets, mineable minerals. So they were dowsing for physical targets in the 1500's, but how did the awareness of dowsing for Earth energies, which the builders of the Gothic Cathedrals of the Holy Roman Empire (1050 to 1350CE±) obviously knew about, get through The Burning Times to 1917?

I looked up telluric currents in Wikipedia, and I did see several connections to the energies I find in sacred spaces and ones that are not always beneficial in secular houses like the telluric currents German dowsers were finding under private homes in the early nineteen-hundreds. But it seemed to me that it was mostly concerned with other energies, not the ones I have been the studying for so long. So there is a gap of over 500 years between the Gothic Cathedrals to "Krebs Haüser" which I don't know much about. Yes, there's John Dee, Issac Newton and the Masons, but I haven't heard of exactly how the heart of the geomantic tradition got through the Inquisition.

Some scientific researchers are fond of telling us that nothing of this nature got through those burning times/witchcraft persecutions (approximately 1480 to 1700 CE). The Druids are but one example. According to some academicians, nothing Druidic got through. It's all a modern invention. I think what this conclusion is based on is that HIStorians can find nothing in the written record about these things. And apparently, if it isn't written down, it didn't happen. I ask you, who would be dumb enough to write these things down during a time when those in power would gladly burn you at the stake if they had that kind of evidence? I believe geomantic information and Druidic practice got through to us through the oral tradition not the written route that some researchers require before the imprimatur of real proof/truth can be given.

I would be interested to hear from you if you have thoughts of what was going on geomantically - and especially with "telluric currents" in Europe or better, just Germany between roughly 1500 to World War I. Having said that, in a wider picture, I'm sure it is more important for us to be aware that "back then", using one name or another, every culture/everyone was working with these energies. But, while it isn't a priority of mine, I would be interested to hear what you might know about where the Germans of the first part of the twentieth century learned about, and started calling them, telluric currents. If I get any good thoughts, I'll publish them in a later issue of Tip o' the Week.

Four Winds,

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #71 - Yin

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:12:29 +0100

Tip o' the Week #71 - Yin

Dear [firstname]

I had been dithering about what to write for this week's tip, and then my internet Service Provider was horribly hacked requiring them to shut down for a long time before we could use this ListMessenger email program again, so I have to apologize twice for Tip #71 being so late. At first I wrote a piece on dowsing that I wasn't happy with, so this is my second shot! ; ) Recently, when I saw an enormous ant hill when we were in Drenthe in The Netherlands where we were with Karin's sister Sylvia and her husband John, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the effects of veins and domes/blind springs of primary underground water/yin energy.

Karin standing next to one of the biggest ant hill mounds
I've seen in a long time.
Can you dowse the primary water underneath it?

Primary water effects plant and animal life in many ways. It can cause gnarly tree growth as at Culbone Woods just west of Porlock Weir in Somerset:

Culbone Woods
Most of the trees are twisted like this

The crossing of veins can also cause trees to corkscrew like this maple in Stannard, Vermont:

Corkscrew Maple

One of the more interesting manifestations of the power of the yin Earth Mother is the apparently natural formation of circles of trees. This one is in Walden, Vermont.

Cedar Circle
Walden, Vemont

This tree circle is on a mound in the Ashbrittle graveyard in west Somerset, UK. These are amongst the oldest yews in Britain:

Ashbrittle Yews
Ashbrittle, Somerset, UK

But the piece de resistance are Council Trees, especially this one in Oregon. Council Trees are places where different tribes of Native Americans met on neutral turf do decide disputes (i.e. hold council). The Vikings called them Tings and the Brits called them Moots. This was where they resolved "moot points."

Council Tree in Oregon.
Note how each branch goes out horizontally,
and then, (when it crosses an underground
vein of primary water - dowse it),
it turns ninety degrees and goes vertical.

It is examples like this that allow dowsers to sometimes see the Earth Energies without having to dowse. Have you seen any examples like this near where you live?

Autumn Equinox is soon upon us.
May you find the Balance Point in your life,
as the yang light of summer
turns
to the yin darkness of winter.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #70 - The End of The Beginning

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:55:50 +0100

Tip o' the Week #70 - The End of The Beginning

Dear [firstname]

I have returned from my sabbatical in Vermont to the Land of Avalon refreshed and reinvigorated. (I also wrote Tips # 68 & 69 while I was over there. (So much for a real break. ; )

Upon my return to Blighty, I have had a surge of new ideas and creativity. The first project that I have been working on is a series of three workshops I will be giving at the BSD Convention in Cirencester on 10, 11 and 12 September - next weekend, and I am seeing how they can be the basis for further weekend experiences in the future. I have been reading in "Northern Earth" and hearing from friends in the publishing business that the bottom seems to be dropping out in terms of Earth Mystery (EM) magazines and books. The number of magazines covering this subject are falling here in the UK, and in the publishing business, they are just not bringing out as many books in this area as they had been doing in previous decades. Of course, the recession is responsible for some of this, but also, it is my feeling that a saturation point has been reached as far as the archaeological evidence our prehistoric ancestors have left us, therefore, the speculation as to what they might have been up to. How many more articles like "Ley Lines Really Do Exist!" or "Is Alexander Thom's Work on Archaeoastronomy more than Fantasy?" do you really need to read?

Archaeoastronomy in Sacred Space


An Old One Stonehenge Summer Solstice Sunset		A New One Athanor Stone Ring - Winter Solstice Set

How many more pictures of ancient (and new) sacred sites
being oriented towards the Sun do we need to convince us
that all over the planet, our ancestors gnew something we don't?

We live in changing times. The old paradigms that Western Man's civilisation has been living by don't seem to be working so well these days. Climate change appears to have some validity; the rape of our planet is growing ever more evident. Our economic system ain't doin' so good, and, today, regardless of what you think about 2012, its acceptance is predicated on an awareness by many people on our planet that change in one form or another needs to come. (The New Age movement of the eighties was a precursor of this same realisation.)

So now, there is perhaps a shift from "What were prehistoric people up to in their sacred sites?" to "I do not seek to walk in the footsteps of the ancient ones, I seek what they sought. (Read: how can I use all of this Earth Mystery information to experience the reality of the Spiritual World myself?)

Our prehistoric foremothers and fathers were certainly in to the stars and other heavenly bodies. Do you know where Saturn or Mars or Venus will be in the sky this evening just after sunset? I'd put money on the reality that your 17,500th Great Grandfather (5 generations a century x 3,500 years) knew just where these planets were.

Ecliptic->

Horizon->

<- Level Horizon

<- Ecliptic

Sunset on Saturday 11 September 2010 in Cirencester, England

So, how did your 17,500th Great Grandma and Grandpa relate to the heavens whilst in their sacred sites? And, much more importantly for us now here at the end of the beginning of our EM journey, might we be able to do the same today?

Of course, there is not one correct way (I'm no Fundamentalist), but I have developed a process that that might help others to experience this directly. I call it, "ArchaeoAstrology: From Knowing to Gnowing," and I will be offering this in a three part workshop at the BSD Convention in Cirencester next weekend.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o’ the Week # 69 - The Power of Thin Places

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:09:32 +0100

Tip o’ the Week # 69

Guest Contributor Tony Acheson:

THE POWER OF THIN PLACES

Dear [firstname]

((I first started e-mailing things to interested readers here on MAG (in what was then known then known as “MAG e-zine”) in 2003 (see <http://www.geomancy.org/e-zine/index.html>), Back then, other geomancers wrote many of the articles. While Karin wrote a few of the initial pieces in this series of “Tip o’ the Week”, since then, I have written all of the Tips – until now. This was a sermon delivered earlier this month by my friend Anthony Acheson M.Div at his church, the Greensboro United Church of Christ, in Greensboro, Vermont, where I am presently sabbaticaling (if there is such a word. ; )

I am hyper-ecumenical, so I do not follow any particular religion, but among other connections with the One, Jesus is strong in my heart. This piece is a Christian take on the sacred spaces that I have made the focus of my work for the past forty-five years, so I am pleased that Tony has allowed me to post his sermon on... ))

The Power of Thin Places
A Sermon
By Anthony Acheson M.Div
on 1 August 2010
Reading: Psalm 27

A Thin Place In Vermont: Barr Hill

I have a musician friend who comes here to northern Vermont to play in one of our local concert series. He told me this week how important it is to him to be able to bring himself here amid the splendor and beauty of this unspoiled land each year. Despite the modest pay for performing, he told me that he keeps returning because of the profound restoration and renewal of energy that he draws from the lush aliveness of the rural hills and fields we are privileged to have draped around us. There is something about the colors of the plants and sky, the peace of the lake, the friendliness of the morning mists that brings him a kind of calm and healing that is precious and rare, and unavailable in the bustle of the urban or suburban areas where he has also pursued his career. City and country both have their role, of course, in the larger fabric of our lives. But there is something about huddling close to natural land in its original God-made version that provides us a form of food for our souls that is necessary and required for spiritual health.

Throughout history there have been specific places – such as, I believe, we enjoy here – which people have repaired to as unique access points to the spiritual world. The ancient Celtic peoples used to refer to such sites as ‘thin places.’ The Celtic thin places were special spots scattered throughout the British Isles – though they exist anywhere in the world -- where people sensed that there was only a narrow dividing line between this physical world and the spiritual realms that lay close at hand. These were places where people were empowered to experience deeper spiritual dimensions than may be found in the immediacy of their daily locations and preoccupations.

A Very Thin Place: Gallarus Oratory – a Celtic Christain Oratory
on Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry in south west Ireland
(from: members.webone.com.au)

When Christianity became predominant, at least some of the Celtic Christians had the wisdom to keep alive these pre-Christian insights about thin places. They expanded the understanding to include not only ‘thin’ physical locations, but also what we might call ‘thin instants:’ instances when the spiritual dimension of things could be accessed and felt within the stream of human stories and events. Thankfully, the concept of thin places, eventually became included in at least some segments of the vocabulary of the Christian religion.

Alongside these special physical locations, there are also certain passages of the world’s great wisdom traditions, including our own Christian tradition, that can play a unique role in leading us into encounters with numinous powers. In her book, ‘Acedia and Me,’ Kathleen Norris has described the importance to her spiritual practice of reading, and re-reading, the psalms. Those ancient Hebrew poems and songs are resources through which she can consistently reconnect with Spirit, and rediscover the movings of God.
A few moments ago we heard one of those psalms. The words and images of Psalm 27 can be to us a kind of verbal thin place where human and divine meet in a beautiful closeness, as they say:

“The Lord is my light and my salvation;  whom shall I fear?  
The Lord is the stronghold of my life,  of whom shall I be afraid?  
Come, my heart says, 'seek God's face.'  Your face O Lord do I seek.
Do not hide your face from me.  
I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord right here  in the land of the living."

This psalm is a statement of spiritual confidence based on an ongoing and regular approach to God, and to the things of the Spirit. Psalm 27 happens to be only place in the Hebrew Scriptures [what Christians often call the Old Testament] where God is referred to as ‘the light.’ This is interesting and significant because the image of God as light is one that Jesus, and the New Testament generally, put a major focus on. We are told in the gospels that, ‘God IS Light.’ Jesus says of himself, ‘I am the light of the world.’ He also speaks to those around him and tells them, ‘You are the light of the world.’ When he taught he cautioned people to safeguard, ‘the light that is in you,’ and urged people to become, ‘sons [and daughters] of light.’ The fact that this 27th Psalm is the only place where the metaphor of God as light is used in the Hebrew scriptures; and the fact that Jesus made considerable use of this metaphor himself, would suggest that Psalm 27 was likely one that Jesus knew well, and one that may well have had a formative influence on his spiritual education, and on the development of his thinking and teaching. Psalm 27 may well have been one of Jesus’ scriptural ‘thin places.’

The theologian Dorothy Bass has drawn attention to one set of question we sometimes ask each other, such as: ‘How was your day?’ To ask, ‘How was your day?’ is a different question than, ‘How are you?’, which is highly routine and usually calls for a formulaic response, such as, ‘I’m fine;’ or, ‘I’m OK.’ But the question, ‘How was your day?’ is one that invites a more considered response. It invites an actual description of something that happened during the day, as well as how that affected us, or how we responded.   Dorothy Bass goes on to tell the story of a mother she knows who has quite a different way of approaching that question. As she puts her kids to bed each night, their teeth brushed and their hair still damp from the bathtub or shower, she asks them this question: "Where did you meet God today?" And they tell her, one by one: ‘a teacher helped me;’ ‘there was a homeless person I saw in the park;’ ‘I saw a big bush with lots of flowers in it.’ And then mother shares with them an example of where she may have met God that day. Before the children drop off to sleep, the stuff of their day has become the substance of their prayers. And the events of their day have entered into the possibility of becoming a thin place for them. When they are given the encouragement to interpret their experience through the lens of looking for God in its events, they enter a potential thin place. They enter a zone with the potential to feel God’s presence as something that is very near.

What this story reminds me of is that to seek out and access those unique access points to the Divine demands of us proactive discipline and practice. It requires repetition. It requires repetitive behavior. It requires the discipline of habituating ourselves into patterns of life-affirming action that help us learn to see spiritual presences that are always around us, but are waiting to be perceived. An awareness of thin places reminds us that God and the spiritual world are inherently close. This is an important truth to remind ourselves of often, given the widespread belief that many of us have been trained into, that God is a being who is removed and far off.
Today's words from Psalm 27 invites us to seek out an increasing closeness with the Divine spirit, and to re-discover in our own personal experience what it means to sense and feel and rely on the Divine Light. These familiar words of scripture describe one writer’s description from nearly 3 thousand years ago of a thin place, a place where God’s spirit is especially close, and specially to be found.
May the gifts of this table and today’s receiving of this sacrament of communion be the same to us today: a thin place, a transparent opportunity through which the presence of God and the love of the living Christ is known to us in richness and in reality. This we pray in the name of the spirit of God. Amen.

Sermon by Rev. Anthony Acheson

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I return to Blighty (England) day after tomorrow, so my Tips should return to normal next week.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
Mid-Atlantic Geomancy
SunnyBank Centre
9, Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
www.geomancy.org
www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
sig@geomancy.org

p.s. I'll be teaching an intensive experiential three-part workshop on ArchaeoAstrology at the British Society of Dowsers Annual Conference on the weekend of 10, 11, & 12 September. It is filling up fast, but there are still a few slots available.

p.p.s. If you haven't seen it yet, you can still see pictures of Luther's Hill, my beautiful home in Greensboro, Vermont that I wrote about in my last mid-sabbatical Tip. You can find it on Facebook, and Search for <Luther's Hill Lonegren>.

Tip o' the Week # 68 - The Only Constant There Is

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:18:37 +0100

Tip 'o the Week # 68 - The Only Constant There Is

Dear [firstname]

Here I am on my "sabbatical" sitting on an old wooden chair on the front lawn of my old home, Luther's Hill in Greensboro, Vermont, USA, a house I am in the process of selling. As I look at the view, in the upper left-hand horizon is the white wooden farmhouse of George Young, who served with me in the late seventies and early eighties on the Greensboro Board of Selectmen (like a British Town Council only lots more effective); in the middle is the flowering hydrangea bush we planted for my daughter Jordan when she was born in 1978; on the right, thirty-one years later, the path out in to the field led to an enormous pile of brush and old wood that we burned last Saturday to celebrate her wedding to Bradley.

This place is full of memories, and there are parts of me that will be very sad to see it go; however, I know that my heart now is in Glastonbury, and also that there is the probability that I will also be living more and more in The Netherlands, where my wife Karin's heart is.

Change is the only constant there is. If we don't, IMHO, we might as well be dead. Limbo is no place to be. And for those on the Spiritual Path, change is an absolute necessity. I find that at my advanced age of Senior-Bus-Pass-Holder, I initially seem to react negatively to any suggestion of sudden change. But relatively quickly, I have learned to adjust, and to ultimately welcome the new. I've always had trouble with people who are so fundamentally attached to the past that they spend most of their lives walking backwards in to the future. You trip over a lot of stuff doing it that way.

Having said that, it is true that much of my own focus over the past forty years has been firmly anchored in the distant past - on the sacred spaces of prehistory. But with this knowledge and experience, as the old saying goes:

I do not seek to walk in the footsteps of those who came before;
I seek what they sought.

And, so here I am in mid-sabbatical, a time that is supposedly for rest, but what I find myself doing mostly is re-creation. Turning another page.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
and
Luther's Hill
Greensboro, Vermont 05841
USA
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.geomancy.org

p.s. If you'd like to see more pictures of my house in Greensboro, go to www.facebook.com, and search for <Luther's Hill Lonegren>.

Tip 'o the Week # 67 - Sabbatical

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:44:47 +0100

Tip 'o the Week # 67 - Sabbatical

Dear [firstname]

I received lots of emails from last week's Tip o' the Week #66 - "A Day in the Land of Avalon." It's always good to hear from my readers! ; ) Many of you agreed with what I had to say about the prehistoric disconnect between academic science and the more esoteric and spiritual elements of geomancy and the Earth mysteries. After thinking about this topic, there were several ameliorating issues that I wish I had mentioned.

A reader from Australia writes: "Don't know if you have read David Bohm, Fritjoff Kapra and more recently Hank Wesselman. All scientists who talk about the interconnectedness of all living matter through quantum physics." I must apologise for not mentioning these lovely exceptions to the rule that I was winging about. Indeed there are some people in scientific fields - on the leading edges - who are quite open to spiritual possibilities. My earliest experience with this was in the nineteen-seventies. I remember the excitement I had when reading "Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness" by Itzhak Bentov! Here was a scientist who talked and understood my language! But sadly, while more and more are beginning to open up to the spiritual possibilities, they are still in the small minority of the academic establishment.

To clarify my image here, it is that most of academia is looking at the past with only one eye open (their right eye that connects with their left/rational brain. In all fairness, many of us Alternative Earth Mystery Types have been equally guilty of exactly the opposite blinkered vision - looking at the past with only our left eye/right brain. I look for the day when ALL of us - academicians and spiritual seekers - can look at the past with BOTH eyes open. Then, working together, we can ALL see the past more clearly.

A Completely Different Topic

As I mentioned in my last Tip o' the Week, I have been thinking of taking a sabbatical. On Thursday, Karin and I are flying to Vermont in the USA where I am going to marry my daughter, Jordan. Oh, did that sound weird? I am an ordained Spiritualist Minister, and I am overjoyed to officiate at the marriage of my daughter Jordan to Bradley Robbins. Just so I don't slight my son Lucas, a competent glass blower who lives in Vermont with his wife Bev, and their three children, I thought I'd better include them all in this picture of my American children and grandchildren.

Sig's American Family
Bradley, Jordan, Bev, Lucas, Sig
"Little Jordan", Elsa and Finn

Jordan and Bradley have been together for some time now - first in California, then in England where Jordan worked on her Masters Degree at the London School of Economics in Organisational and Social Psychology, and Bradley continued his career over there as a brewer at Oxfordshire Ales in Marsh Gibbon, Oxfordshire, England where he picked up several awards for excellent brewing. They now live in Fort Collins, Colorado where Jordan works for Global Explorers and the Discovery Channel, and Bradley is with the New Belgium Brewing Company.

Karin and I plan to be in Vermont for most of August, and unless I am inspired to write something while we are there, this will be the last Tip you will be receiving until the beginning of September. One other thing, we are in the midst of a big change to our SunnyBank web site, and one of the things we will be doing is to migrate these Tips over to a new email program where you will be able to comb through our archives much more easily than now - which IMHO is almost impossible. I will be using the same WordPress software as Karin has been using in her blog.

So, have a great summer, and we will be in touch in a bit more than a month.

To the Fruitful Search!

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
and
Greensboro, Vermont 05841
USA
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
mail: sig@geomancy.org

Tip o' the Week #66 - A Day in the Land of Avalon

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:46:45 +0100

Tip o' the Week #66 - A Day in the Land of Avalon

Dear [firstname]

Recently, as Mondays roll around, I have found myself thinking more and more, "So, what am I going to write about this week?" Karin and I are bound for Vermont in less than a week to be at my daughter Jordan's wedding. Perhaps it is time for a month's sabbatical. (This could well happen.) At the same time, Karin's reaction to my last Tip (about Michael Dames' problems with establishment academicians) is that I have been bashing science too much recently. It is not my desire to bash science, it is just that I feel because of the rationalist-based paradigm that they have adopted, they can't see the whole picture. I am indebted to the Scientific Method, and what it tells us about history. Because of the blinders they have chosen to adopt that do not allow them to experience right brain/intuitive/spiritual material, I just can not give them the power they demand to define ultimate reality as far as the past is concerned. But having said that, I do want to stop harping on these folks - at least for a while ; )

So, instead, I thought that I would give you a picture of how I spend my time on this magical Isle of Avalon. First I want to tell you about my main group of support here in Glastonbury that I fondly refer to as my my geriatric coffee klatsch.

Some members of Sig's Geriatric Coffee Klatsch
(Sig is in the red suspenders/braces)

While the above folks are only part of the whole group, it gathers almost daily at one of several coffee houses (depending upon the weather). We all share an interest in alternative thinking. One member is in to the history of Glastonbury and dowsing, another looks to the American Indian as their main focus of interest, a third is a photographer and supporter of Chalice Well, while another has set up alternative talks. Others are interested in witchcraft and the Druids and the Masons. The lists goes on and on.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, not every coffee dispensing establishment appreciates our business. One went so far as to actually kick us out! So we immediately began to wear buttons/badges that said "Barreds of Glastonbury." (not to be confused with Druidic Bards ; ) Our conversation can range from questions about early Christianity to quite off colour jokes, and everything in between. While I certainly do not join them every day, any morning at about 11:00 a.m., I can wander downtown, and find some of them gathered at the Backpackers, The Mochaberry, and in the winter, at the bar at the George & Pilgrim. I am fortunate to have these folks in my life.

The BoveTown Chicken Coop Co-op

I am also very fortunate to live in Bove Town where we have a wonderful neighbourhood of friends who gather frequently to celebrate such esoteric holidays as the Twelfth Night, birthdays, and any other reason to get together. Karin is a member of our neighbourhood chicken coop co-op where each member has one day of the week where it it their job to feed the chickens, and they get the eggs produced on that day. Some days it's only one or two, and on others it can be more than a half a dozen. Good community building.

Karin doing her weekly chore with the girls
Three eggs today!

Living on the Land of Avalon

And then, of course, there are the sacred sites - the Glastonbury Tor, Chalice Well, the Abbey, and the Tercentennial Labyrinth, just to mention some of them. So, along with the rest of the colourful alternative community here, Glastonbury, this Sacred Earth, is a wonderful place to live, and to grow spiritually.

The Tor disappearing into the Mists of Avalon

I've tried it, and I like it.

};-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

Tip o' the Week #65 - Goddess - A Re-Vision

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:28:00 +0100

Tip o' the Week #65 - Goddess - A Re-Vision

Dear [firstname]

Over the years when I have looked in to our past, I have invented some words to explain ways of looking at things that we just are not brought up to see today. Mythtory is one, when I am using both what history and other academic pursuits like archaeology can tell us about the past and mythology - the oral tradition and stories that have come down to us from the past. IMHO, these are equally important in learning, no, experiencing, gnowing about the past. So gnowing is the second word I have made up. It is from "gnoscere" in Latin "to get to know."

We get the word "Gnostic" from the same root. These early Christian heretics were willing to listen to whatever anyone had to say, but they ultimately made up their own mind because they had direct access to the higher realms. Their intuitive channel was open for answers as well as their rational one. For me, if I "gnow" something it is because I have related to it both rationally and intuitively.

Herstory is another word I use a lot that I picked up in my readings of feminist herstorians in the early seventies. It is the language of the Goddess that was not allowed to get through. And it is with things to do with Her that establishment HIStorians have worked so diligently to expunge from our consciousness. I wish to devote the rest of this week's Tip to this issue.

Silbury Hill

The seminal book for me in the early seventies, about that time when Goddess ruled rather than God was called When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone¹ (it was called "Paradise Papers" here in the UK). Then in nineteen-seventy-six, Michael Dames published a blockbuster book entitled The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered² for which he was ridiculed, dismissed and ignored by the academic anthropological, historical and archaeological establishment. They just couldn't switch their paradigm enough to include spiritual possibilities at Britain's ancient sites, or even more, Goddess. In Dames' latest book, Silbury, Resolving the Enigma³, he takes on all of the academic criticism full on. And so much of his work is based on things that I would call "Mythtory," "Gnowing" and "Herstory."

He presents material about the Goddess at Silbury Hill, offering cogent evidence of Her being represented by this biggest prehistoric wo/man-made mound in all of Europe.

Silbury Hill from the air.

The black arrow at the top of the picture points to the West Kennet Long Barrow.
The white rectangle on the top of the hill itself is where archaeologists
were filling in the Drax shaft made in in 1776,
the first of a number of tunnels done to find the Silbury Hill Treasure - none was found.
The hill itself is the pregnant belly of a squatting Goddess,
and the moat around it forms the rest of her body.
Sadly, when I took this picture in 2004, I wasn't looking to photograph the entire goddess
formed by the moat, just the hill.
Her head is missing in the lower right-hand corner of this picture.

Two drawings of the Silbury Hill Goddess:

The body of the Goddess was made by a moat that was dug to make the hill.
This would be a pond today, but it has filled in with silt.

This squatting goddess is giving birth (note the corn child in the in the right-hand illustration). She is found replicated throughout Europe:


Squatting Goddess from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia (Dames 2010. p24) (I have flipped it horizontally it so it is oriented like his plans above.	Modern ceramic Goddess figurine made by Phillipa Bowers

In his new book, in addition to the Silbury Hill Goddess, contrary to the on-going denial of establishment academicians that Goddess was worshipped in prehistoric Britain, Dames presents a significant amount of evidence that Goddess was alive and well on this island. While I am not going in to this evidence here, I would encourage you to read his new book.

But Dames does offer a new (to me) reason why academia has found itself in such a blinkered paradigm where they essentially do not want to say anything about the spiritual activities of our pre-historic Biritsh ancestors - let alone admitting anything about a female deity. He speaks of the State's reaction to the Church beginning shortly after Henry VIII and brought to its logical conclusion by Oliver Cromwell a century later in their demolition of essentially all images of worship from stained glass windows to statues, murals and the destruction of rural shrines. As Dames says, "English historians have often deplored this iconoclasm, yet beneath an outward show of dismay, they have also inherited a discomfort with the very notion of sacred imagery of whatever period. The sixteenth century Reformation has to some degree remoulded the national psyche. Our minds have been whitewashed against the re-emergence of idols, including those bequeathed by prehistory."⁴

And this, along with the increasing emphasis on rational/analytical thinking that began with the "Enlightenment" (or was it the "Endarkenment"?) has brought us to today where intuition is anathema and spiritual realities are automatically dismissed by atheist academicians like Richard Dawkins.

In this process, the notion of Goddess - to the best of their ability - has been expunged from their vocabulary. For example, Sheffield Archaeologist Andrew Fleming wrote, "The Mother Goddess has detained us for too long; let us disengage ourselves from her embrace."⁵ And Bristol historian Ronald Hutton greeted anti-Goddess statements like Fleming's and others as definitive, and declared that, "...there was no possible answer to their analysis." The very existence of a Stone Age Goddess (in Hutton's opinion) has been shattered and "blown to pieces for ever by them."⁶

Then Dames tells us about Dr. Amanda Chadburn of English Heritage when she spoke to the science Editor of The Telegraph about a particular tale from archaic folklore that it was the devil (a concept invented by Christians at least several millennium after Silbury Hill was built) who was on his way to bury nearby Marlborough under a shovel full of Earth when he accidentally dropped it near Avebury, thus creating Silbury Hill. It is here that Dames gives us his most succinct and telling statement about the reductionist vision of these researchers:

"Satan has a PhD in false trails."⁷

For me, this sentence says it all, and explains why it has been necessary for me to use words that don't exist in the modern university lexicon. Too many false trails. What you see depends upon where you stand. Goddess naysayers just can not see what is outside their specialist-focused rationalist (?atheistic?) paradigm. Sad.

Michael Dames' Silbury, Resolving the Enigma is a must read book, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in Geomancy and the Earth Mysteries.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

----------------------------------------
Footnotes

¹ Dames, Michael. 1976. The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered. London.
² Dames. Michael. 2010. Silbury, Resolving the Enigma. Stroud, Glocestershire, England The History Press. ISBN 978 0 7524 5450 4
³ Stone, Merlin, 1976. When God Was a Woman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
⁴ Dames. 2010. p. 19
⁵ Dames. 2010. p. 22
⁶Hutton, Ronald. 1993. The Pagan Religions of the British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. ISBN 0-631- 18946-7. pp 38-39.
⁷ Dames. 2010. p. 22

Tip o' the Week #64 - Midsommar

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:43:31 +0100

Tip o' the Week #64 - Midsommar

Dear [firstname]

June 24th has always been an important date in our family. My mother and father were married on that day in 1933, and in Sweden, my father's homeland, it is Midsommar. Some of my earliest memories are of being in Sweden for Midsommar - I think it was 1948. Everyone was in costume, and they danced around what I would have called a May Pole with their colourful ribbons weaving in and out. The Swedes call this pole a "stang." (As in "Midsommar Stang.") Here in Glastonbury and as one walks through the countryside, one comes across with many men and not so many women carrying a staff that is called a "Stang." The Vikings were here!

There were other summers in the Swedish archipelago outside of Stockholm. "Kräftor" - we called them "crawfish" were eaten in prodigious amounts, and there were innumerable toasts with shot-glasses of Aquavite, a painful heart-burning delight.

Over the years, I have been at a number of Midsommar celebrations in Sweden. One of my most memorable ones was with my children when they were much younger. Here is Jordan (now in her thirties) in Sundsvall:

Jordan by a Midsommar Stang in Sundsvall, Sweden
Most Midsommar Stangs are taller than this one

St. John the Baptist

In addition to being marked by many as "Mid-Summer, June 24th is also St. John the Baptist Day. So why was the 24th of June - only two or three days after the Summer Solstice - chosen to mark his day in the Solar Year? "Sol-stice" means "Sun stands still." The date of the Summer Solstice can be determined to the nearest nano second by astronomers as that point in time when a line from the centre of the Earth to the Sun crosses the Tropic of Cancer. For seven days or so around that time, the Sun rose at the same point. But on the eighth day (read a couple of days after the Solstice), if you have been paying very close attention, you can see for the first time that the rising Sun has turned South. The days are getting shorter. The light is going away.

And, of course, John's role was to say that the Light was coming. Then at the opposite end of the year, on the 25th of December, again, if you have been paying close attention, you can see that the rising Sun has turned North. The Light has returned.

I thought I'd end this week's Tip with some shots I have taken around sunset on June 24th here in Glastonbury. I refer to the Glastonbury Festival that happens around this time every year in nearby Pilton. 175,000± people descend on a farm there.


Sunset from Gastonbury Tor 24 June - interesting lens artifact		Sunset over Chalice Hill


Full Moon June 24th The Tower was artificially lit up during the Glastonbury Festival	Tor and Moon

Mammon
The lights of the Glastonbury Festival
The lighted round globe iis supposed to represent the Moon

Have you been looking at the stars and planets?

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org
http://www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk
http://www.sunnybankstore.co.uk
+44 (0)1458 835 818

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