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Wednesday, 23 October 2013

Song-lines: circles and snakes.

The dead are more than the process of death.
Marks the spot.

Almost all prehistoric lines and circles around Avebury once contained the remains of the dead..

Under the earth, within Neolithic pits, post-holes and within long barrows, people once placed human remains, fragments of precious pottery, shards of stone.

Each line or curve of bone, placed under the dark soil alongside chalk and flint is part of a hologram: when a holographic plate is fractured into a thousand pieces, I can take any one of these single fragments and when the laser is shone through, the whole image will appear.

A holograph embeds the total image within every part of the whole. Each fragment contains the whole image. The more pieces the more detail.

A single fragment will provide the whole image.

In a similar way, a fragment of bone from the ancestors is all ancestors.
Because this is the way our minds work...
Monuments commemorate events, and their existence creates memories.
Therefore it follows that events at a monument add meaning to that monument...
Without understanding the holographic nature of meaning, all we are left with are ditches and earthworks and broken things.

Over the centuries there have been many answers to the questions the rings and rows of stones and post-holes, pose; created from the outlines of structures and the remains of objects found there.

If the dead are included in the story of a place, they are, by convention, always located in the past.

Whole or broken
They have been removed.
Sometimes reburied and lost.
Other times placed in biscuit tins or cardboard boxes and stored.

Instinctively we know that the dead remain in the present.

Archaeology provides linguistic tricks to help distance ourselves further. Skulls and bones signify 'rites of intensification', or 'ancestor worship'.

They cannot be a part of us.

With that in mind, I take a deep breath and dive into the song-lines of Avebury.
A story that excludes the dead.

I begin with Stonehenge.

Inigo Jones was given the task of surveying Stonehenge for King James the first. His conclusion was that Stonehenge had not been built by the ancient Britons, but was, in fact, a Roman temple of the Tuscan order (a style of architecture) and dedicated to the sky god Coelus.

Inigo was quoting from Vitruvius, who described open air temples as dedicated to the gods of air and sky, in particular those who wield thunderbolts. Tuscan temples dedicated to Jupiter were common, Inigo reasoned, therfore Stonehenge must be, on account of its great age, dedicated to the father of Saturn, grandfather of Jupiter: Coelus.

Stonehenge is circular.

Inigo Jones says that within the thirty Sarsen circle there are three equilateral triangles.

Vitruvius writes that to construct a plan for a Roman theater, the architect should inscribe three triangles within a circle, just as astronomers do when dividing the zodiac into twelve parts, according to musical ratios...

Enter stage right: William Stukeley.
Inigo Jones's book on the architecture of Stonehenge was published in 1655.

William Stukeley had made up his mind about Avebury, in 1743...

Following Inigo, henges and stones represented ancient temples, and following Althanasius Kircher [who was following Plotinus] in Stukeley's mind, the complex arrangement of earth and stone of Avebury was a hieroglyph.

Stukeley was looking for an older, pure religion.

Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth had argued in 'The True Intellectual System' [1678] that the idea of the Trinity could be found in Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato, and in the theology of the Egyptians, Persians and Romans, and that this knowledge had been passed to the Jews.

In Avebury, Stukeley saw circles and snakes:
The Holy trinity.

"... is the representation of god or the great soul of the world among the Persian magi, the Egyptian priests and we find it here among the Western Druids doubtless tis of vastest antiquity and borrowed by them all from the post-deluvian times"
Stukeley believed that there had been a time of revelation; that in the past god has spoken to man
"If there was no Revelation made to men in the first ages how came the knowledge and worship of god so early into the world?"
He held to an earlier scholarly tradition that Pythagoras had through his "diligent searches" in Phoenicia, Egypt and Babylon "acquired a great stock of ancient truths" and that
 "Plato's works are everywhere full of the ancient traditions".
He believed that:
"instead of maintaining the credit of their philosophy, they [the Pythagoreans] corrupted it  by degrees, made it subtle and unintelligible, until in time it was sunk into nothing"
I must admit I have some sympathy for his point of view...except of course we still use 'Babylonian' time, dates and angles. Babylonian gods are re-imaged as Jesus and Mary, Meslamtea's blue flame burns as the Holy ghost. Naram-Sin's image of himself as Nergal stalks the Christian underworld as Satan, whilst Ishtar terrifies the world as Lady Ga Ga and Marylin this film adds Ningishizida, the twins and Erra to the mix.

What came after Stukeley is hard to follow...

But in the 1930s Avebury was recreated with money from marmalade.
You couldn't make that up!

And Maud Cunnington was digging up The Sanctuary.

Seems that the 1930s were an interesting time.
Sandwiched between Margaret Murrey and Gerald Gardener.

It is clear that Maud Cunnington thought that the Midsummer solstice was significant in our prehistory, because she remarks that the child-burial at Woodhenge was aligned with the midsummer sun-rise...

Maud didn't waste time with ambiguities: the midwinter full moon wasn't considered at all. Nor any of those pesky stars!

But I'm missing the Avebury point.
Avebury isn't obviously aligned on anything...

But Stukeley had seen a hieroglyph of circles and serpents...

Now Plotinus [AD 205- 270] had said that "The wise men of Egypt embed 'secret knowledge for those with wit to read' and in the 15th century, Plotinus was translated into Latin by Ficino.

From then on, Egypt and hieroglyphs went all Dan Brown...

In 1652-54 Kircher's Oedipus Aegytiacus, took Plotinus a bit too far, and shows a figure of a globe, serpent and wings which Kircher [as a good Jesuit) translates as the Divine Trinity.

Stukeley said that..
"All writers Jewish and Christian with one mouth assert the snakes practice of shedding its skin and returning to life again was a fit emblem of Christ's Resurrection"...
And thus the way became wide open for people, such as Hargrave Jennings (1817- 1890) to quote Stukeley and write all about ancient serpent worship in Britain as evidenced by the Avebury avenues.

The New Age branch of Modern Paganism, as a synthesis of historical practice and modern innovation; a desire to find an authentic religion preserved in the past of British prehistory begins in my view, with Stukeley.

It may look back to the work of those who preceded him, but it is Stukeley's serpents who slither under the hills and barrows of Avebury, as Lung-mei, or geodetic forces: the soul of the world.

Stukeley's notion that prehistoric 'temples'are full of sacred secrets, fuels hours of research for those who diligently work at proving alignments based upon Euclidean geometry between the myriad post holes, henges and circles of Britain.

Manly P. Hall is a particularly useful reference for this.

But eventually, in keeping with contemporary experience, a new mythology, a scientific mythology began to appear in the late 1950s as a high alpha wash, over the lines and contours of Avebury.

In 1958 a French researcher Aime Michel  noted that UFO sightings seemed to follow straight lines (orthotony). He published a book called 'Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery'.

His work was taken up by Bruce Cathie who in 1968, drew up an earth energy 'grid'.

Inter-dimensional vortexes and portals...
Ways to navigate between realities
Harmonic 695.

And paranoia.

Tony Wedd had read Alfred Watkin's work on lay-lines and had attended a lecture about Adamski...who in 1952 had met an otherworldly being called, Orthon:
'a medium-height humanoid with long blond hair and tanned skin wearing reddish-brown shoes, who took him to Venus'.
God damn it!
Why doesn't this ever happen to me?

Ex RAF man, Tony Wedd found his own Adamski in the person of Mary, a woman who received telepathic messages from space people.

One day whilst studying the landscape around Chiddingstone and plotting the alignment of pine clumps, Tony saw a UFO and  put 2 +2 get Aime Michel's theory.
"I began to suppose that saucer crews knew about leys'...
In 1961 Tony Wedd  published 'Skyway's and Landmarks' .

But there was nothing new here. Forty-seven years before Aime Mitchel. in 1911, W Y Evan-Wentz' published "Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries". This describes processions of spirits, of the souls of the dead:

The Ankou who is a king of the dead, and his subjects, like a fairy king and fairies, have their own particular paths or roads over which they travel in great sacred processions; and exactly as fairies, the hosts of the dead are in possession of the earth on November Eve, and the living are expected to prepare a feast and entertainment for them of curded-milk, hot pancakes, and cider, served on the family table covered with a fresh white table-cloth, and to supply music. The Breton dead come to enjoy this hospitality of their friends; and as they take their places at the table the stools are heard to move, and sometimes the plates; and the musicians who help to entertain them think that at times they feel the cold breath of the invisible visitors. Concerning this same feast of the dead (La Toussaint) Villemarqué in his Barzaz Breiz (p. 507) records that in many parts of Brittany libations of milk are poured over or near ancestral tombs--just as in Ireland and Scotland libations of milk are poured to fairies. 

And the Area 51 guy remembers 'Odin's Wild hunt'...

Finally it all came together with 'The View Over Atlantis' by John Michell  published in 1969.

The book that:
 "put ley lines on the map, re-enchanted the British landscape and made Glastonbury the capital of the New Age." [Quote from Bob Rickard]
And linked:
 Platonic idealism, sacred geometry, ancient metrology, leys and alignments, megaliths, astro-archaeology, strange phenomena, simulacra, crop circles, UFOs, the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and the nature of human belief. Link..
The UFO/earth-energy link was still alive and kicking around ten years ago in the form of crop circles.

Anyway, Alfred Watkins is supposed to be the one who began this malarchy about energy-lines, but in fact Alfred wasn't particularly interested in energy, more the problem of navigation. Standing stones, church spires and the like give landscape meaning...I'm not sure that he used dowsing.

Why would he need to?

Dowsing was used to find water underground
You can see spires and stones.

Guy Underwood, on the other hand, wrote a book in 1939 called "The Pattern of the Past". He had come across the work of Reginald Smith, who, in the 1930s had described testing stone circles and henges and found underground streams of water radiating out from blind springs...

I don't know what that means?!

Guy Underwood set about investigation and described 'geodetic lines': natural forces related to, or dependent on magnetism of gravity.

The mythos has shifted a long way away from Stukeley

Seriously though...
Crop circles and the END of the WORLD
last year...

How the Nibiru myth becomes Melancholia...

Is for another day!