Showing posts with label ley lines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ley lines. Show all posts

Monday, May 14, 2018

GEOSOPHY: An Overview of Earth Mysteries (1988) Part 2 and Continued



"Speak to the Earth, and it shall teach you"    .....Job 12:8

"Like all holy wells, Chalice Well is a feminine place, a place of receptivity to the Earth's spirit.  Here at Chalice Well you can strongly feel the feminine Mother force of the Earth." ....John Michell
Landscape Geomancy, which we are considering in this particular presentation, has to do with placing your structures,  your temples,  homes,  seats of government and healing centers on places on the surface of the earth where what the Chinese called Chi or or vital energy is up welling from the Earth through Geo-magnetic factors such as  water factors.  Animals recognize these places, they will sleep on them or give birth on them.  Ancient people built their sacred structures, like Stonehenge or Avebury, on these sites so as to enhance or amplify whatever rituals, healing concerns, or astronomical measurements were being made there.  Geomany is a way of reading the Earth's body language.  What is Gaia doing at this place?  Is this an energy sink, or an energy source?" .......John Steele

Part 2 and continued (I was not able to upload one of 4 parts of this film, my apologies. I will keep trying.) From GEOSOPHY - An Overview of Earth Mysteries, a 1988 Documentary by Vakasha Brenman. This hard to find video features Paul Devereux, John Steele, Martin Brennan, John Mitchell, Harry Oldfield, and other important researchers of Earth Mysteries and present day Geomancy. "This video takes us to ancient sites around Britain to explore sacred geometry. "Geosophy" literally means "Earth Wisdom" - derived from the name Gaia, Goddess of the Earth, and Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom."



https://youtu.be/jJ8w4mSohEg




https://youtu.be/iFictRS4LDc



Sunday, April 22, 2018

Sacred Places and "Talking with the Gods"


"Australian dream time seems strange to us because we distinguish stories from places.  For the aborigines places are stories:  song-lines.  To "settle" a wild place means to create not only houses and farms, but also the stories that make them a home.  For native Australians, their deserts are home because they are verdant with stories."

David Loy, The World is Made of Stories

I have acquired a rare video called GEOSOPHY - An Overview of Earth Mysteries, produced and directed by Vakasha Brenman (Mystic Fire Video) in 1988  which features interviews with John Steele and Paul Devereux, authors of EARTHMIND and co-creators of the Dragon Project, a decade long investigation into the phenomena associated with Neolithic sacred sites in Great Britain.  Earth Mysteries has always been my passion, and the sense of Gaia, the living Earth, always speaking to us beneath our feet and in our cells..........is the fundamental truth I am always seeking to speak of in my art.  Gaia.  Mother Earth.  So very much we have lost and forgotten.  I feel the work of these people is very important, and should not be lost.  So I intend to put excerpts from this documentary on this Blog (and hope I don't get in trouble for it), and to pursue the subject of "Talking with the Earth" in future posts.  In this time of political and ecological despair, this matters to me.  This is worth sharing!   


There are so many stories I could tell as I look back on how this subject informed my art, worldview, spirituality, and sense of purpose.   I often credit a  synchronistic encounter  with geomancer and spiritual dowser  Sig Lonegren, in 1982, that planted the seed of a whole new way of seeing life for me, as well as teaching me to dowse.  I had a studio in Putney, Vermont in 1982, and it was my habit to meander down to the Putney Inn for coffee on a Saturday morning.  But that particular morning in June there were people everywhere - tables with brochures set up, discussions going on, buses and vans out front.  Coffee in hand, I saw an interesting group of people sitting on the grass in a circle in front of the building, and for some reason I sat down and joined them.  Sig, who was leading this group to one of Putney's mysterious stone chambers on Putney mountain, ushered us all into a van, and invited me to come along as well.  So that's how I found myself before a stone cairn in the woods, roofed with a massive stone, and with an entrance that faced perfectly the rising of the sun on the Summer Solstice.  Sig put a pair of divining rods in my hands, and I was  amazed to learn, with the others, that two "leys", each about 6 feet wide, ran through and crossed at this chamber.  When I held one of the rods at the center of the "roof" it "helicoptered"......turned rapidly as if it was a windmill for earth energies! 


It was many years later that I had the privilege of visiting  Sig and his wife Karen at their home in Glastonbury, England.  Sig was one of the trustees of the Chalice Well, and had spent many years exploring the sacred sites of the British Isles. I celebrated Lammas with them at the Chalice Well, an event I shall always treasure.   Sig is  currently on the faculty of the Fellowship of the Spirit near Lilydale, N.Y., he has a fascinating website:  http://www.geomancy.org/       and now lives with his wife in the Netherlands.   One of Sig's books, Spiritual Dowsing, goes into the phenomena of dowsing for Earth energies. 


As a dowser myself, I've experienced shifts in energy - which means also shifts in  consciousness and perception -many times when visiting areas that are geomantically potent, be it the henge of Avebury,  or the labyrinth at Unity Church in Tucson. Sites are able to change consciousness (raise energy) because they are intrinsically geomantically potent, and  they also become potent because of human interaction with the innate intelligence of place, what the Greeks called "genus loci".  John Steele coined the term "Geomantic reciprocity" - as human beings bring intentionality, reverence and focus to a particular place, building sacred architecture, or engaging in ritual.  The conversation becomes more active as place accrues myth and story in the memory of the people, and the memory of the land.   Sacred places have both an innate and a developed capacity to transform consciousness.  And the power of myth is important if we wish to engage the numinous presence, to  "talk to the Goddess and petition the Gods".
"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced:  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."

R.F. Foster

Why would the ancient people who built Stonehenge spend generations hauling monstrous (and apparently specific) stones hundreds of miles to pose them in  circles, laid  in various alignments with the skies, seasons, and land?   


According to Sig, who references psychologistcontroversial book from the 80's  The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, possibly because, as human culture and language became increasingly complex,  we began to lose mediumistic consciousness,  a daily, conversational Gnosis with "Spirit".  We became more individuated.  With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning he suggests the ancients developed a concern with how to continue contact with the gods, the ancestors, the numina of the land.  Stonehenge was a temple on a sacred landscape - according to Sig, it may also represent a "last ditch effort" to keep in touch with the spirit world, to enhance communal experience.   As the rift between personal gnosis and spiritual contact deepened, and especially with the later development of patriarchal institutions, gradually the tribal and individual Gnosis was replaced by complex religious institutions that removed individuals from the earlier tribal mind, and rendered spiritual authority to priests who were often viewed as  the sole representatives of  the  Gods or God.


Perhaps this capacity is returning to us, a new evolutionary balance. As crisis engulfs us, we need, once again, to re-member how to  "speak to the Earth". 


"I have been arguing for decades that these (sacred) spaces were special 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 balance.

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, 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 shift in 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."

Sig Lonegren
www.geomancy.org
www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk


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

Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

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. 

Thursday, May 8, 2014

"Numina" Article Revised



NUMINA:  Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage

By Lauren Raine MFA

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced:  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."

            R.F. Foster 1

The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called Numina, the "genius loci" of a particular place.   I personally believe many mythologies may be rooted in the experience of “spirit of place", the numinous, felt presence within a sacred landscape.

To early and indigenous peoples, nature includes a “mythic conversation”, a conversation within which human beings participate in various ways.  Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious.  Mything place provides a language wherein the “conversation” can be spoken and interpreted, and personified.   Our experience changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou" instead of "it".

In the past, "Nature" was not just a “resource"; the natural world was a relationship within which human cultures were profoundly embedded.   The gods and goddesses arose from the powers of place, from the powers of wind, earth, fire and water, as well as the mysteries of birth and death.  

In India, virtually all rivers bear the name of a Goddess.  In southwestern U.S., the “mountain gods” dwell at the tops of mountains like, near Tucson, Arizona, Baboquivari, sacred mountain to the Tohono O’odam, who still make pilgrimages there and will not allow visitors without tribal permission.  This has been a universal human quest, whether we speak of the Celtic peoples with their legends of the Fey, ubiquitous mythologies of the Americas, or the agrarian roots of Rome:  the landscape was once populated with intelligences that became personified through the evolution of local mythologies. 

The early agrarian Romans called these forces “Numina”.  Every river, cave or mountain had its unique quality and force – its inherent Numen.   Cooperation and respect for the Numina was essential for well-being.  And some places were places of special potency, such as a healing spring or a sacred grove.

As monotheistic religions developed, divinity was increasingly removed from nature, and the natural world lost its “personae”.  In the wake of renunciate religions that de-sacralized nature and the body, and then the rapid rise of industrialization, nature has become viewed as something to use or exploit, rather than a relationship with powers that require both communion and reciprocity.   Yet early cultures throughout the world   believed that nature is alive, intelligent, and responsive, and they symbolized this through local mythologies. 


From Hopi Katchinas to the Orisha of Western Africa, from the Undines of the Danube to the Songlines of the native Australians, from Alchemy’s Anima Mundi, every local myth reflects what the Romans knew as the resident “spirit of place”, the Genius Loci.   

Contemporary Gaia Theory 2 revolutionized earth science in the 1970’s by proposing that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, interdependent and continually evolving in its diversity.   “The Gaia Hypothesis, which is named after the Greek Goddess Gaia, was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s.  While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being used in subjects such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry, systems ecology, and climate science.  ................In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all life forms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.”2


If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, it might follow that everything has the potential to be responsive in some way, because we inhabit and interact with a vast living ecological system, whether visible to us or not.    Sacred places may be quite  literally places where the potential for “interaction” is more potent.  There is evidence that Delphi was a sacred site to prehistoric peoples prior to the evolution of Greece.  Ancient Greeks built their Temple at Delphi because it was a site felt to be particularly auspicious for communion with the Goddess Gaia.  Later Gaia was displaced by Apollo, who also became the patron of Delphi and the prophetic Oracle.   Mecca was a pilgrimage site long before the evolution of Islam, and it is well known that early Christians built churches on existing pagan sacred sites.

There is a geo-magnetic energy felt at special places that can change consciousness.   Before they became contained by churches, standing stones, or religious symbolism, these “vortexes” were intrinsically places of numinous power and presence in their own right.

Roman philosopher Annaeus Seneca junior commented that:

  "If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numen.”3


Personal Encounters

Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one morning I went down to the local Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont's mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain, the subject of a popular book by Barry Fell, a Harvard researcher 4, and under continual exploration by the New England Archeological Research Association (NEARA).  I had stumbled upon their yearly Conference.   Among them was Sig Lonegren 5, a well-known dowser and researcher of earth mysteries who now lives in Glastonbury, England and was then teaching at Goddard College in Vermont.  Through his spontaneous generosity, I found myself on a bus that took us to a chamber constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly framing the Summer Solstice. 

Fell and others suggest that  Celtic colonists built these structures, which are very similar to cairns and Calendar sites found in Britain and Ireland; others maintain they were created by a prehistoric Native American civilization,   but no one knows for sure who built them.  They occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River.  Approaching the site on the side of Putney Mountain, I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away.  I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as we traced the “ley lines” that ran into this site. Standing on the huge top stone of that submerged chamber, my divining rod "helicoptered", letting me know, according to Sig, that this was the “crossing of two leys”; a potent place geomantically. 

According to many contemporary dowsers, telluric energy moves through stone and soil, strongest where water flows beneath the earth, such as in springs, and also where there is dense green life, such as an old growth forest.  Telluric force is affected by planetary cycles, season, the moon, the sun, and the underground landscape of water, soil and stone.  Symbolically this “serpentine energy” has often been represented by snakes or dragons.  “Leys” are believed to be lines of energy, not unlike Terrestrial  acupuncture lines and nodes, that are especially potent where they intersect, hence dowsers in Southern England, for example, talk about the “Michael Line” and the “Mary Line”, which intersect at the sites of many prehistoric megaliths, as well as where a number of Cathedrals were built.

At the time I knew little about dowsing, but I was so impressed with my experience that months later I  gathered with friends to sit in the dark in that chamber, while we watched the summer Solstice sun rise through its entrance.  We all felt the deep, vibrant energy there, and awe as the sun rose to illuminate the chamber, we all left in a heightened state of awareness and empathy.

Earth mysteries researcher John Steele 5 wrote in EARTHMIND, a 1989 book written in collaboration with Paul Deveraux and David Kubrin,   that we suffer from what he called “geomantic amnesia".  We have forgotten how to “listen to the Earth”, lost the capacity to engage in what he termed “geomantic reciprocity".  Instinctively, mythically, and practically, we have lost the sensory and imaginative communion with place and nature that informed our ancestors spiritual and practical lives, to our great loss.  

We diminish or destroy, for money, places of power long revered by generations past, oblivious to the unique properties it may have, and conversely, build homes, even hospitals, on places that are geomagnetically toxic instead of intrinsically auspicious.   Our culture, versed in a “dominator” and economic value system, is utterly ignorant of the significance of place that was of vital importance to peoples of the past.  Re-discovering what it was that  inspired traditional peoples to decide on a particular place for healing or worship  may be important not only to contemporary  pilgrims, but to a way of seeing the world we need to regain if we are to continue into the future as human culture at all.



Making a pilgrimage to commune in some way with a sacred place is a something human beings have been doing since the most primal times.  Recently unearthed temples in Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe 6 reveal a vast ceremonial pilgrimage site that may be 12,000 years old.   The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for over two millennia.

One of the most famous contemporary pilgrimages is the "Camino" throughout Spain, which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella.  Compostella comes from the same linguistic root  as "compost",  the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter -  the "dark matter"  to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form.  Pilgrims arriving after their long journey are being metaphorically ‘composted’, made new again.   When they emerge from the darkness of the medieval cathedral in Composella, and from the mythos of their journey, they were ready to return home with their spirits reborn.




In 2011 I visited the ancient pilgrimage site of Glastonbury, England.  Glastonbury’s ruined Cathedral once drew thousands of Catholic pilgrims, and Glastonbury is also Avalon, the origin of the Arthurian legends, a prehistoric pilgrimage site.  To this day thousands still travel to Glastonbury for the festivals held there, and for numerous metaphysical conferences, including the Goddess Conference I attended.  The sacred springs of the Chalice Well and the White Spring have been drawing pilgrims since long before recorded history, and many people come still to drink their waters.  

Making this intentional Pilgrimage left me with a profound, very personal sense of the "Spirit of Place", what some call the "Lady of Avalon” and taking some of the waters from the Holy Springs back with is ever a reminder of the dreams, synchronicities and insights I had there. 

Sacred Sites are able to raise energy because they are geomantically potent, and they also become potent because of human interaction.  “Mythic mind”, the capacity to interpret and interact with self, others and place in symbolic terms (as, for example, the way the Lakota interpret “vision quest” experiences) further facilitates the communion.   Sig Lonegren, who is one of the Trustees of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, and a famous dowser, has speculated that as human culture and language became increasingly complex, verbal, and abstract, we began to lose mediumistic, empathic consciousness, a daily intuitive gnosis with the "subtle realms" that was further facilitated by ritual.   Dowsing is a good example of daily gnosis.  “Knowing” where water is something many people can do without having any idea of how they do it.  Sometimes, beginning dowsers don’t even need to “believe” in dowsing in order to, nevertheless, locate water with a divining rod. 

With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning, and with the development of patriarchal religions, he suggests that tribal and individual gnosis was gradually replaced by complex institutions that rendered spiritual authority to priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of God.  The “conversation” stopped, and the language to continue became obscured or lost.

Perhaps this empathic, symbolic, mediumistic capacity is returning to us now as a new evolutionary balance, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering mythic pathways to the Numina.


Footnotes:

1  Foster, R.F., The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press 2001)

2   Wikipedia:  The Gaia Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis)

3  L. Annaeus Seneca junior, (Epistulae Morales at Lucilium 41.3]

4  Fell, Barry, PhD., America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World, (1976) Artisan Publishers, 2013 Edition, 352 pages

5 Lonegren, Sig, Mid Atlantic Geomancy, website and blog (http://www.geomancy.org/)

6  Steele, John, Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia, with Paul Devereaux and David Kubrin (Harper and Row, 1989)

Curry, Andrew, Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization,  Smithsonian Magazine, 11/2008, ,http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/#4uZO1s0yHlpACGLu.99


Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Sig Lonegren on Spirit Paths and Ley Lines


My introduction to Earth Spirituality and Earth Mysteries was Sig Lonegren, who I met, completely by accident, at the NEARA conference in Putney, Vermont in 1982.  Sig assumed I was with his class, and I assumed I was invited to join the friendly group I blundered into when I went to the Putney Inn for a cup of coffee......and the next thing I knew, I was at an ancient monolith site hidden on Putney Mountain, and learning to dowse for ley lines. I find his weekly articles fascinating, although I suppose this is pretty obscure for those who aren't familiar with dowsing and geomancy.  But I felt like copying his article here because  of my long interest in these ancient sites, and also because I can attest to having experienced, and located with many others, the energetic phenomenon of  leys and ley crossings - and I've also taught ley dowsing to people who found them without even "believing"  in them.


Doodwegen/Dead Straight Lines

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.
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!


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