The Michael Line, the Qabalah, and the Tarot.

As Beltaine approaches and mythic archetypes stir in Great Britain, it seems a good time to give this material an airing again. It has appeared in various forms since my first ever journey along the line almost exactly 20 years ago.



In July 1990, during a visit to Glastonbury with my friend and psychic questing colleague of the time, Alex Langstone, I had a wild idea. Why not try and traverse the entire length of the famous St Michael leyline, initially presented by John Michell in The View Over Atlantis, during the Mayday Bank holiday weekend (a time when the sites along it are alleged to align with sunrise)? The pace we would set led to the event being named the Michael Line Rally. It was conceived of as a holiday, a pilgrimage, and an experiment. Some sort of activity other than simple site-seeing was intended for each place we visited. Perhaps a meditation or ritual of some kind.









The sites represented a tremendous diversity of aspect. A theme was needed to link them together, to provide some conceptual continuity. I was looking for something that could incorporate the idea of pilgrimage through the multi-faceted sites, within the continuum of earth energy currents of the St Michael force and its counter-balance, the newly formulated St Mary Line, which weave their way around the basic line of sites. (For a full explanation of the Michael/Mary interaction, see The Sun and the Serpent by Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst.)





I put my mind to work.






In the extraordinary Green Stone of Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman there is an episode known as the “Lights of Knowledge” Quest. From my association with Andrew Collins I knew details of this not mentioned in the published version. The main point is that in traversing most of the Michael Line, heading down towards Cornwall, Graham Phillips came to believe that various sites along it resonated with the energies of the Qabalah in an orderly sequence, so that a coherent Tree of life could be drawn with them mapped out upon it.

For what follows I have to assume some prior knowledge of the Qabalah in the reader. Here’s a listing of various sites assigned to the Tree of Life. See if they feel right to you or not.

Kether. The Merry Maidens stone circle.
Chokmah. St. Michael’s Mount.
Binah. Dozmary Pool, Roche Rock, Hurlers stone circle area.
Chesed. Brentor.
Geburah. Crediton.
Tiphereth. Glastonbury.
Netzah. Avebury, Silbury Hill.
Hod. White Horse of Uffington, Wayland’s Smithy area.
Yesod. Dorchester on Thames.

The Merry Maidens stone circle is not normally considered to be a part of the alignment. In recent years Miller and Broadhurst’s dowsing work has suggested it does connect to the main current. A Malkuth site was never designated. I opted for Bury St Edmunds as a workable possibility.






The Michael Line has sometimes been thought of as a possible spinal column of a Blakean Albion figure. This is not conceived of in the sense of physical earthworks in the manner that the Glastonbury Zodiac landscape supposedly models giant effigies. It somehow lives in an inner realm of the nation’s consciousness. A Suffolk village named Eye has influenced views on which end of the line the head would be. Central to Qabalistic lore is a giant cosmic being named Adam Kadmon on whom the Tree of Life can be drawn. His feet are in the earthly realms, his head at the Crown of Creation. The path of High Magic lies in realising that cosmic figure is latent within us all and can be activated, thus raising us to our highest, fullest, most total capacities. In the specific physical locations on this figure of the different spheres of the Qabalah, a similarity can be seen with the Yogic concept of the chakra centres of energy along the spinal column. The middle pillar of the Qabalah correspond s to the spinal column of Adam Kadmon and ourselves. There are specific practices arising out of the Golden Dawn tradition for working with and energising the centres of this middle pillar. Knowing that Blake was aware of the Qabalah, I didn’t find it hard to broadly equate Albion with Adam Kadmon. I wondered how far, working with Graham Phillips’ material, the analogy could be profitably extended? Maybe the giant’s head was in Cornwall?







I began to toy with the idea of taking it as read that, in some archetypal realm, an Albion figure exists along the Michael line and that treating it as a kind of Adam Kadmon and playing Qabalistic games with it would be doing it a favour. My attitude was to treat it as an experiment with reality. Believe it and see what happens as a result of believing it. I also felt that Adam Albion was generally conceived of as being distinctly male. I didn’t think it was taking too many liberties with Qabalistic thought to think of the figure as androgynous in some way. It was in keeping with the theory of the Qabalah, if not always the practice. This idea could be taken further with the concept of the dual Michael/Mary energies that wind, like a caduceus, around the spinal column, in the manner of the Ida Pingala currents of Kundalini yoga.

As pilgrims of the path of light, we would start at the source, the crown, trying to fill ourselves up with light and take it down through ourselves, through Albion following the downward eastern path of its manifestation in the sunrise orientation. By the end, hopefully, we would have helped to in some way activate the centres of this figure and their corresponding areas in ourselves. This was the plan to get the line humming.

The middle pillar would be our centre of gravity and the caduceus of Michael/Mary a continual balancing process throughout the journey. I felt that the Middle Pillar sites needed the Qabalistic cosmic figure emphasised, but how to do it? I also knew that Graham Phillips had done some unpublished work using the Tarot in the landscape. He believed that sometimes certain sites embodied the aspects of particular cards. Once this was understood the card could be used as a gateway into the inner realms of the place. In the Golden Dawn/Crowley tradition the Tarot cards are assigned to different places on the Tree of Life. The 22 Trumps correspond to the paths between the Sephiroth. Regarding the middle pillar, the path from Kether down to Tiphereth is Atu II, the High Priestess. Tiphereth to Yesod is XIV Temperance. Yesod to Malkuth, XXI the World.

I looked at the Michael Line sites that corresponded to the middle pillar of the Qabalah and the Tarot cards that joined them to see if there might be any possibilities for visualisation pathworkings. What I found was so apt and fertile for creative exploitation I could hardly believe it possible. I shall give a detailed description of these examples, and how they were used, as it possibly gives the essence of the feel of our journey.






Glastonbury Abbey’s ruined Mary chapel was the place I chose to enter the realm of Atu II, the High Priestess, linking Kether with Tiphareth. Its floor no longer exists and the crypt Chapel of St Joseph of Arimathea beneath it has now effectively merged with it, creating one vibrant space. We sat in front of the altar focusing, in our imaginations, on a cross that used to sit atop it in those days. A point of blue light emanated outwards from it filling the whole place, until seeming to have become a transparent veil with the pillars of the Temple and Qabalah, at either side of it. Behind the blue light, the cross faded, leaving the outline and sense of presence of a female form. With this the veil parted, revealing the Virgin Mary in a Queen of Heaven Isis aspect, seated on a throne. Behind her, steps led up to a door opening onto the landscape we had travelled from Cornwall, in particular the Kether Merry Maidens site.

The Qabalistic sphere of Yesod is concerned with the astral realms. It incorporates lunar and water symbolism. Graham Phillip’s Yesod site was at Dorchester in Oxfordshire. This is the place where the Michael Line and the River Thames cross. To bring the energy from Tiphareth to Glastonbury, we would pathwork with the Temperance card. The particular one that had inspired me was in the Mythic Tarot, in which the figure represented (often the Archangel Raphael), was Iris, the Rainbow Goddess, and which featured a rainbow as a prominent part of its imagery.

Now think of all the many versions of this card you may have seen and try to picture our scene. It is dusk by the banks of the Thames in early May. The evening star hangs in the heavens and reflects rippling in the river’s waters. Around a lantern at the water’s edge we sit now, closing our eyes. In our imaginations the light of the lamp expands outwards, through and around us, until an egg of glowing energy encompasses us. Just beyond we begin to see, as if in daylight on the bank, a shimmering wavelet of light that condenses into an ever clearer form. The Rainbow Angel of Temperance stands tall and serene before us. One foot is in the waters of the river and one is on the bank. In each hand is a chalice. One is gold and is filled with the solar aspects of the Michael Line. The other is silver and of the Thames and Mary. Endlessly, gracefully, the Angel pours the contents of the chalices between them. Eternal equipoise in the harmony of the two currents at this site. In the mid-distance the Dorchester landscape blurs as a giant rainbow arches across the sky. As it reaches the ground on the left we see Hod with the White Horse of Uffington and Wayland’s Smithy. On the right we see Netzah, Avebury and Silbury Hill. In the centre, just beneath the rainbow, in the far distance, we see Glastonbury Tor. We try to feel a sense of energies moving through the landscape to find their harmonisation at Dorchester.



A painting specially commissioned from Glastonbury artist and Michael Line Rally veteran Yuri Leitch for my 2006 Megalithomania conference presentation.



Bury St Edmunds proved to be a good Malkuth. Its ruined Abbey provided the setting for the Qabalistic climax to our epic journey. Two ruined pillars, once joined as an arch, formed the frame for an imagined recapitulation of our complete travels to that point. We saw ourselves dressed as monks and pilgrims travelling from site to site and finally emerging through the gateway between the pillars to rejoin our physical bodies sitting nearby. We then saw, using AtuXXI, the World card as a jumping off point, the figure of Albion flanked on either side by St Michael and the Virgin Mary. Behind Albion, on the horizon, the sun appeared, ascending, and as it moved just above him, Michael and Mary both reached a hand out into it, and on doing so, it became a crown which they placed upon his head. Mission accomplished. A rendition of Blake’s Jerusalem was in order regardless of what any passing tourists may have thought.



Drawing by Yuri Leitch from 1991 depicting the journey from Michael's Mount to the ruined church at Hopton that included recurring lion and unicorn imagery.







The Michael Line Rally was carried out in full in 1991 and 92. In 1997, now living in Glastonbury, I felt the need to try the journey again when the General Election was announced for Mayday. It seemed likely that the archetypes and energies of the sacred landscape would be massively switched on. Sure enough, in the week leading up, I had a major brainstorm in which a flood of further Qabalistic Tarot imagery enabled me to make good use of the complete Major Arcana linking all of the spheres. As we travelled the line I did wonder if this cerebral Qabalah was imposing a structure onto the landscape that was not appropriate, however much it seemed apt to me.






On returning I discovered that, during the course of our journey, at a place near the course of the Mary current, a crop formation had appeared in the form of a complete Qabalistic Tree of life with all 10 sephiroth and the 22 paths between them. Regardless of how it arrived there, the concept of “hoax” would have to be re-defined in order to accommodate its synchronistic levels of meaning. Crop circles have been appearing for a long time now. A Tree of Life could have manifested on numerous occasions. As it is, it waited until a group of people were travelling the landscape carrying out detailed Qabalistic pathworkings at sacred sites (and not that many people are doing such things anyway). This was all the affirmation I needed. My work with the Michael Line continues to develop and represents one of the great joys of my life.

Beneath Giza: Crystal Chambers of the Elder Race

Here is a second extract from my recently published Avalonian Aeon, a multi-faceted autobiographical look at the complete Glastonbury experience that includes previously unpublished material from the archives of historical mysteries researcher Andrew Collins. This piece is a companion to the section on the Mary Chapel from a few days ago. Psychic questing in Glastonbury with a remarkably talented visionary named Bernard in the mid-eighties was crucial to the later development of his work and led directly to his interest in what may lie beneath the Giza plateau, a subject he covered in Gods of Eden and recently returned to with his spectacular book Beneath the Pyramids.



Andrew Collins







Both pieces are from the Avalonian Aeon chapter Aegypt and link Glastonbury and Giza. The section here has been edited to bring together paragraphs from different pages and excludes some material that links them together in the book. They certainly represent unconventional modes of investigation and I (and Andrew Collins) make no dogmatic claims as to the validity of the ideas. The material is nonetheless striking and therefore may be potentially stimulating. It ultimately served to lead Andrew Collins to something very tangible. This piece is a deliberate teaser, making mention of topics dealt with elsewhere. I would hope it may encourage you to buy Avalonian Aeon which can be done through the cover image on the right hand column from this piece or from the books website

www.avalonianaeon.com

Those in the USA can find it on Weiser Antiquarian

www.weiserantiquarian.com


“On April 9th 1985 Bernard was showing Andy his Mary chapel design. He drifted into the Egyptian zone again, stating emphatically that there is a chamber beneath the Giza plateau. Andy was familiar with the famous American psychic Edgar Cayce’s ideas. Perhaps primed by Theosophical and Rosicrucian input, he had talked of refugees from Atlantis travelling to Egypt and building the Sphinx and Pyramids. They also created a “Hall of Records”, an underground chamber filled with the lost knowledge of pre-deluge humanity. Cayce claimed that the place would be uncovered in 1998 and this momentous event would form part of a sequence of massive global transformations that would usher in a new epoch.

Serpent in the Sky was primarily an exposition of an immense corpus of esoteric work by the mystical polymath Rene Schwaller de Lubicz. It was he who had first suggested the possibility of water erosion on the sphinx. The man had spent fifteen years at the gigantic Luxor Karnak temple complex in Egypt. He and his team measured every inch of the place, recording each hieroglyphic and piece of artwork. Schwaller didn’t have the mindset of a typical archaeologist. He was part of a potent stream of European esotericism that is sometimes overlooked in Britain and America in favour of the Golden Dawn and Theosophical legacy.

He was particularly concerned with finding evidence of phi. Conventional history credits the Greeks with this crucial mathematical geometrical discovery. Schwaller became convinced that it was known to the Egyptians. He was clear that it was a glimpse into the working of the divine, the blueprint for reality.

In his later years he told his pupil Andre VandenBroeck that the basic material of Fulcanelli’s work on the cathedrals had been his own and the man he claimed to be behind the Fulcanelli myth, Julian Champagne, had been lent the manuscript and essentially ripped it off, adding material of his own and various associates. VandenBroecks Al-Kemi tells the full story for those who may be interested. There is no doubt that Schwaller was an alchemist. He had a fully functioning laboratory in his home of which photographs exist. Anyone who looks at his Egyptian work could probably see that it is coming from a very high level of insight indeed. Schwaller stated that “I could not have recognised the cosmology of the Pharaohs had I not known the medieval book of the cathedral”. In his own way Bernard rapidly went through a version of the same process, from the Mary Chapel to what he began to call the Crystal Chambers beneath Giza.

During the second half of April, Bernard went through an ongoing brainstorm download in which he received a detailed design and explanation for the Crystal Chambers in a similar manner to his Mary Chapel experience. Bernard came to believe that the underground complex dated from the astrological age of Leo, over 12,000 years ago. He didn’t really talk about Atlantis in the usual way. It was sufficient to think in terms of a previous cycle of an advanced civilisation that had all but disappeared through planetary upheavals. He referred to the “Elder Race”. Those dudes were a bit strange. They were etherial, extremely tall, viper-visaged, virtually albino types. They weren’t standard issue Homo Sapien Sapien. They weren’t ETs either. It was a now extinct line but it had bred into the current human race. Their Crystal Chambers were not a repository for books and conventional treasure but a living cosmological temple. The knowledge it held was the understanding of how the present universe came into being. It represented the form of the process of creation and the actual point of creation itself. The rites that Bernard believed to have occurred therein had a haunting otherwordly feel to them that was both archaic and futuristic. They maintained, harmonised, and adjusted the very form of the laws of nature as they functioned within the planet.



Drawing by Bernard G featured in Andrew Collins Beneath the Pyramids.



The whole complex lay beneath a mound island on a lake. At the entrance was a large rectangular panel of polished grey stone. Depicted on this in base relief, on the left, was a man facing right wearing an Egyptian style headdress, a skullcap with uraeus serpent. He held a staff with a curved top. Facing him was a lion with upraised wings, standing up on its hind legs. Ray-like spikes emanated from its stomach. There was a line of glyphs between and beneath the two figures. The leonine being seemed to be a form of the Mithraic Aion cosmocrator Lord of Time.



Artwork by Yuri Leitch inspired by an original drawing of Bernard G featured in Avalonian Aeon



The ground-plan was in the form of a twelve-pointed double hexagram. Domed-roofed chambers were situated on the apex points. On the floor were a series of concentric rings, slightly differently configured in each room. From their central point of emanation, there were also three straight yellow grooves cut into the floor that formed paths outward. The left and right grooves connected through doorways with adjacent chambers, forming paths that marked the twenty four sides of the whole design. The third central groove reached down a long corridor to the central chamber producing a total effect like the spokes of a wheel.




Painting by Bernard G featured in black and white in Andrew Collins Gods of Eden.





The central chamber was twenty-four sided. In the middle was a twelve pointed, twenty-four faceted pyramidion crystal, several feet in height. It was the “Knowledge Stone”. Its facets in combination represented all known colours, dimensions, aspects of reality etc. The last Glastonbury imagery Bernard had seen, at the climax of the first spiral of the zodiac quest, clearly recalled the Egyptian creation myth. Atum caused a hill of creation to arise out of the primordial ocean of darkness that preceded the first morning. The island became the sun temple of Heliopolis. At its centre was a black pyramidal stone with a quartz top representing the Ben-ben stone. The crystal reflected and refracted the rising sun’s rays each morning. This was a living demonstration of a cosmology showing how the one became many. It seemed that the underground Giza complex with its central crystal was perhaps the original temple of this myth. The Heliopolitan form of it told of the phoenix bird that alighted upon the stone at the start of each new epoch. Bernard had seen Glastonbury Tor, the Zodiacal phoenix, arising out of the waters. It was an extraordinary mixture.”




Design plan featured in Avalonian Aeon.

In common with the companion piece on the Mary Chapel, this extract from Avalonian Aeon has also been posted on the excellent Ishtar’s Gate site. Do check it out.

www.ishtarsgate.com

For full coverage of Andrew Collins recent Giza work, regular updates on all the ongoing Giza news and controversies, and to buy his books, go to

www.andrewcollins.com

Super Psychics: tribute to Bernard G

Painting by Bernard depicting details of Glastonbury Zodiac quest.



This week saw the passing of a man whose psychic abilities were a legend to those that knew of him. Bernard G was of fundamental importance in the work of Andrew Collins, featuring in his cult classic work The Black Alchemist and inspiring the research that led to Beneath the Pyramids. I have been fortunate to have had access to enormous archive material of Andy's to use in the writing of my work in progress Avalonian Aeon that will feature an extensive treatment of Bernard's extraordinary work on the Glastonbury Zodiac and the Giza plateau.

In my book I introduce Bernard's abilities in a chapter called Super Psychics. I am posting the original version of this piece that includes some comparisons with material in Spear of Destiny which has been edited out but may still be of interest.



SUPER PSYCHICS

One of the things that had most impressed me about the Green Stone story was the way that accurate psychic information had been produced in abundance. I soon got to hear far more detailed versions of those events and realised that in fact the psychism was even more spectacular than at first appearance. The book suggested that Gaynor Sunderland had been the centre of gravity of the strange phenomenon. Her role was undoubtedly crucial but Graham Phillips had probably been the driving force. As things had got going he’d developed extraordinary abilities himself. The historical details he’d come out with, tracing the story from Akhenaten and megalithic Britain through to Victorian times, were full of names, dates, and places that were readily checkable. Many of the Victorian names were very obscure but eventually traced. Andy came to refer to this talent as Direct Information Psychism and those with the rare ability to manifest it as Super Psychics. After the Green Stone saga had played itself out, Andy had left the Midlands and returned to his original home of Essex. He set up an earlier version of Earthquest to see if it was possible to duplicate the kind of events that had happened around the Meonia group. He met a man named Bernard who soon demonstrated all the classic abilities of the Super Psychic.

I heard many accounts of Bernard’s prodigious talent. What really appealed to me was that he didn’t need any of the trappings of the Victorian medium or New Age channeler to get a result. Andy would meet up with him at a pub. They’d settle down with some beers and cigarettes and have a chat. As the conversation turned to esoteric matters, Bernard would begin to pick up information and start relaying it. A pub full of people and a juke-box didn’t make any difference. He didn’t even necessarily close his eyes. Andy would tape record or take written notes of each session.

To adequately convey the kind of information he produced I feel it’s necessary to give an extended example. On one evening, the subject turned to the Middle Ages. Bernard came up with 37 pieces of information in quick succession. They were all on a topic that had not been discussed before.

1) There is a medieval castle at a place called Coucy in France.
2) A family of the same name owned it.
3) Coucy was in an area called Picardy.
4) It’s not far from Paris.
5) The castle was constructed around the twelfth century.
6) It was built upon an earlier structure.
7) The land was once owned by Clovis, the French King.
8) It is large and positioned on a very significant strategic point.
9) It had five towers, four at the corners and one large central one.
10) Over the entrance to the castle was a base relief of a knight without armour fighting a lion.
11) In front of the entrance is a statue complex of four lions.
12) One of the lions is devouring a child.
13) Nearby is a standing cross.
14) A group of monks there performed a kind of ceremony there that involved circling the cross and then pouring the contents of a cup over the lions.
15) There is a complex of tunnels and chambers beneath the castle.
16) There is a central chamber beneath the central tower.
17) Thirty-seven steps lead down to the central chamber and three corridors lead away from it.
18) More steps lead up to the tower from the ground floor.
19) There is a large banqueting hall in the castle with a raised dias at one end.
20) Behind the dias are carved reliefs of the Nine Worthies (remember them from The Green Stone?)
21) Six of them are: Hector, Charlemagne, Alexander, Arthur, Godfrey de Bouillon, and Judas Maccabeus.
22) This hall contained battle standards to the left and right of the stage.
23) Servants with torches stood on either side of the hall during banquets.
24) There is also a smaller hall featuring female Worthies.
25) The banqueting hall was constructed during the fourteenth century.
26) Someone named Ingelram de Coucy had built it.
27) He built it to honour his wife.
28) Her name was Isabella and she came from a very important family.
29) Her family connected to previous questing work.
30) Bernard drew the family coat of arms and named the colours.
31) Ingelram de Coucy was tall, dark roundish face and bearded. Seemed a very powerful character.
32) He was strongly connected to the King, possibly an Ambassador.
33) The Germans occupied the castle during the war.
34) It was badly damaged then.
35) It is now just a ruin.
36) The Germans tried to locate treasure there.
37) Ingelram was the last of his dynasty.

The important thing about this kind of material is that it’s checkable. Andy’s later research revealed that the castle was built in the thirteenth century. Nothing could be found about the wartime German treasure hunt. Other than that, thirty five of the thirty seven points proved to be accurate. That’s a good batting average. Bernard was, like Frederick Bligh Bond, a suitably prepared vehicle. His strange experiences over the years had stimulated an interest in medieval history, heraldry and so on. This seemed to help an input of material that had never been present in his head in the first place. Of course, sceptics will simply never believe this. It would always be assumed that he had prior knowledge of the material.

The castle was only one of the topics covered that evening. A few minutes later, Bernard was pouring out the same quality of material about something else altogether. He’d been doing it every week for years. Direct Information Super Psychics can function that way. Compare this with the ramblings of most New Age channelers or even the successful psychic espionage of remote viewing experiments. The level of quality was outrageous. Bernard had made a major contribution to Andy’s Glastonbury Zodiac work. The saga of the Black Alchemist revealed his abilities functioning at their most intense level.

There was only one example of comparable psychism I was aware of. It was detailed in Trevor Ravenscrofts’ cult classic, The Spear of Destiny. The contents of this work, which deals at length with the alleged occultism of Hitler, are contentious to say the least. Large chunks of it have been rubbished over the years for various reasons. I’m aware of these controversies and they’re not relevant to my main concerns here.








The legend of the Spear of Destiny suggests that it is the very weapon that pierced the side of Christ on the cross. The Roman soldier responsible for this act supposedly held the fate of the world in his hand as his act prevented the legs of Christ from being broken to accelerate his death. If he had been thus injured it would have messed with a Jewish messianic prophecy telling about no bones being broken on the body of the chosen one. I wasn’t interested in whether or not that was really true. In order to believe that side of the story it would be necessary to fully endorse Christianity, to accept the Jesus drama as a unique world-redeeming event. I wasn’t ready to go that far.

What did seem plausible was that a spearhead believed to be that very artefact had indeed been in the possession of an impressive sequence of major historical game-players, at least from Charlemagne onwards, right through to Hitler. Somehow it had become magically spiritually powerful. That was the concept that really fascinated me. It seemed to serve as a potential portal to a kind of Time Spirit that could see history in its totality, the rise and fall of empires, monarchs, and messiahs. Extraordinary episodes in the inner life of the founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, and his follower Walter Johannes Stein had allegedly occurred in its physical proximity in a Vienna museum. This access to the Time Spirit or the Akashic records seemed to provoke the telling of previously hidden or neglected historical tales from a new perspective.

Stein is the main protagonist of Spear. His psychic awakening, as Ravenscroft recounts it, began in earnest when he was studying the famous Grail romance Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. In a strange space between sleeping and waking, he found himself reciting words in the original old German dialect of its composition. Writing them down on waking, he was perplexed to discover their verbatim accuracy with the original text further on from where he had already read. This led him into a lifelong study of the Grail mysteries. A faculty of “Higher Memory” developed, whereby detailed visions of historical events unknown to him led to research that seemed to confirm their truth and unfold a coherent narrative. Being in the presence of the spear significantly moved the process along. Stein’s greatest achievement was his book The Ninth Century, which connected events of that time with the later composition and contents of the Grail romances.

A major aspect of this uncovering of the hidden spiritual dimension of the historical process was the tracing of strands of reincarnational identities across the millennia. The most dramatic example concerns Steins belief that Hitler had been one Llandulf of Capua, a notorious necromancer based in ninth century Sicily who had allegedly provided the model for the wicked sorcerer Klingsor in Parzival. According to Ravenscroft, Steiner and Stein also psychically picked up on hideous magical rites practised by Nazi occultists and tried to counteract them.

I cross-referenced what I’d read in Spear with the data I was now gathering concerning the Meonia saga. A huge historical narrative was being unfolded. It involved a mixture of famous and obscure figures in a spiritual drama that was working towards some kind of contemporary culmination. It had a sense of contending forces and high stakes. The modern Meonia players were conspicuously different from Steiners’ Anthroposophical circle though. I didn’t quite imagine Walter Johannes Stein getting fifteen cans of Guinness down his neck before a session of writing The Ninth Century. I rather think a jukebox might have disturbed Rudolf Steiners’ contemplations as well. What really blew my mind was realising that, in many ways, the Direct Information Psychism of the likes of Graham Phillips and Bernard was of a higher quality in terms of its minute historical details than what was recounted in Spear. It also wasn’t as flavoured by religious and metaphysical beliefs. The strong reincarnational theme was largely absent. Details of the occult workings of the opposition were more informed with credible knowledge and not as lurid. I pondered the two powerful “transmissions” in Spear and The Green Stone and wondered what guiding intelligence determined why and when such details were ready to release? What factors were involved in the selection of the human vehicles for this process?

Babylon Rising: Glastonbury and the Seventh Sword Quest.

Yuri Leitch's depiction of the third Key of Balance.


There's been a lot of talk in Glastonbury recently about the alleged terrestrial zodiac.Beyond its perimeter there is supposedly an effigy of a guardian dog. One aspect of its magical mysteries was dealt with in my last blog post. Here is another. This extract from my upcoming Avalonian Aeon features a previously unpublished episode in the psychic quest for the Seventh Sword partly dealt with in Andrew Collins book of the same name.It expands the existing magical mythology concerning the possibility of Mesopotamian travellers in Somerset and may be of interest to dragon enthusiasts.







A short version intro just isn't possible but this piece is sufficiently self-contained to be understandable despite some references to other material outside it.The fundamental point is that finding a magical sword that would complete a set also involved obtaining three mysterious artefacts known as Keys of Balance. Two are discussed in Andy's book. They were made of plaster glazed with a turqoise finish and measured but a few inches in length. The first was in the form of a caduceus, the second, a Celtic cross. The third manifested in the Glastonbury locale in the immediate run-up to the first Gulf War and proved to be a doorway not just to the eventual finding of the sword but to the emergence of the Nephilim material that would feature in Andy's masterpiece From the Ashes of Angels.

So here, featuring the spectacular psychic talents of Andy's partner of the time, Debbie Benstead (now Cartwright), here is an extract from the section entitled --


BABYLON RISING


In the lead up to Christmas, knowing that another Glastonbury New Year visit was looming, Debbie inevitably found herself looking back on the events of 1990, in particular the ongoing dragon theme that had led to the two Key of Balance eggs amongst much else. She became agitated with the feeling that the dragon was even more important than we had realised. There was something that we had so far not understood. She wondered what was coming next?

It had been perplexing that we had received two Keys on subsequent weekends and then had to wait so long for the third. There had been a number of occasions when things appeared to be set up for number three and then not quite happened. The actual form it would take seemed mutable. The destiny matrix kept reconfiguring. Debbie believed that a set of the artefacts had been constructed during the twentieth century by a man who was now dead. The one that would manifest as the third Key would determine massive future karma. The mechanism of all this was impossible to understand. How the set had been put into hyperspace as Terma type treasures could barely be speculated upon. It was clear that whatever the hell it was we were up to it was not separate from the bigger world drama. The Gulf crisis might well be a significant factor.

From December 23rd, Debbie began to repeatedly see an image of an arched stone bridge and an eastern, maybe Sumerian, looking priest leaning over it towards the river beneath in which lurked a huge, monstrous, open-mouthed dragon. The priest was tossing a red stone into its’ gaping jaws. It was an offering made in order to be able to cross over the bridge. The feeling was that this character had physically come to Glastonbury from Mesopotamia bringing dragon power of some kind with him. Every time the scene appeared it would conclude by turning into turquoise stone. This seemed to be a clear Key of Balance indicator. It was all connected with very powerful Glastonbury dragon energies.

In a dream she found herself present in the scene which she now knew was somewhere in the Glastonbury vicinity. The bridge had been located. She could hear chanting. The last words of the sequence were “Ehieh Metatron” and each time they repeated, a blinding flash of light was seen on the water. Debbie ran across the bridge saying urgently, “it’s there, we must get it.” She put her hand down into muddy water by the riverbank only to find her arm then being eaten by something beneath the surface. The excruciating pain caused her to leave her body and watch herself screaming. A procession of ten Sumerian-looking men appeared, crossing the bridge, repeating the chant for the third and final time. An unknown person, connected in some way with our group, threw something into the water. This sacrificial offering was sufficient for the beast to release Debbie. Some of the Sumerians helped pull her from the water. Her arm had mutated. There was a blue disc stuck to her stump on which was a picture of a dragon being fed the stone. The perplexing thought arose that just because we got it didn’t mean we’d succeeded, in fact we failed because they got across the bridge. The same dream repeated twice.

The chanting words heard were clearly Jewish Qabalistic and both associated with the sephiroth of Kether. Why would they be recited by alleged Sumerians? There were all kinds of nuances in the air. Abraham, the founder of Judaism, originated in the famous Sumerian city of Ur. The Jews took much from the Babylonians (heirs to Sumeria). Metatron, so the story goes, had once been a human being named Enoch who had attained unique archangelic status. A book concerning him was present in some versions of the Bible and he was of some significance in underground esoteric lore. As was so often the case with Debbie’s psychic material, there were seeds of future developments in what seemed to be peripheral details.

A further vision then followed on the 29th where Debbie was standing on a windswept hilltop. A strange young man named Eserkyll was with her. He had dark skin and hair and sported a bizarre inverted cone-shaped brown and gold hat. He also wore a thick necklace and a long white robe, enlivened by zigzag and square designs with a kind of squashed eye in the middle. He told her that an oath should to be taken on the hill on which they stood and then, from the starting point of a tree, the path of the beast needed to be walked to the crossway. “On oath the bridge is in sight.” There was talk of the River Pharet.

There was enough information for Andy to understand where we were being directed. Oath Hill is a well-known site in the region of the girt dog and also lies in an area that Somerset folklore says was once terrorised by a dragon that used to fly between Curry Rivel and Aller. It was slain by a man named Hext. In Loham Church, the spear allegedly used to kill it is displayed on the wall. Janet Roberts, wife of Tony, had looked closely at the landscape of the legend and believed it to hide a dragon effigy to add to the girt dog as a Zodiac guardian figure. There is an article by her discussing it in Glastonbury: Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem. About nine miles long, the serpentine creature has a head at each end, one of which was at the foot of Oath Hill. Churches in the general vicinity do seem to contain an abnormal amount of carvings of dragons and associated saints.

The area is full of evocative history and legend that strongly hints at ancient mysteries. It was in this area that Alfred the Great was based during the darkest days of the war between Wessex and the Vikings. After his victory, the mighty Dane Guthrum and his warriors were baptised at Aller, which is situated on the back of the girt doggie. As for offerings to the beast, it was also in the vicinity that the famous tale of the burnt cakes comes. Some have speculated that they were a ritual burnt offering put into the mouth of the Zodiac dog in a manner similar to Greek offerings to Cerberus the guardian hound of the underworld.

In a semi-dream state Debbie saw a place she named the Temple of the Blue Flame. It was in Mesopotamia and constructed around natural flame from the earth. The disc was seen tumbling through blue flame. Something untoward had occurred there. A presiding priestess had been murdered. Some group of travellers had carried the flame away. They had the Key.

As the Glastonbury visit got nearer, Debbie’s feelings on what was involved became more strongly focused. She believed that during the Christmas/New Year period a kind of astral video of an event that really happened replays. A Sumerian boat sailed up the River Parrett. It left the Key and loads more temporarily available there. The vessel sailed on to Glastonbury. It was red, white and green, colours associated with the travellers’ home city. They came at a time of unusual flooding that was primarily natural but also amplified in some occult manner by the powerful magical contingent. They stayed on board for a while before making landfall. Subsequent imagery such as the Ship of Solomon derives from these people. The great hero Gilgamesh was the son of one of them, who in turn was connected to the original form of Noah.

It was clear that a Sumero-Babylonian Key of Balance hung in the air. If we wanted it we had to bring the boat back to us. The third Key would take us to the root of our myths, in particular the dragon. The retrieval of the first Key had involved releasing a dragon. The second involved facing one. For the third, we needed to make an offering to it. They all represented very archaic magical acts.

On New Year’s Day the group diverged somewhat. Some had other business to attend to. I accompanied Andy and Debbie out towards Burrow Mump. An interesting dream of hers from the previous night was the first point of discussion. She was standing on Oath Hill in the company of a warrior king named Gwythyr who was directly descended from the wandering Mesopotamians. His name meant Head Dragon. He was also known as Uther and was the son of Hext who was also Hercules. He was the father of someone called either Amhearty or Amahita, which were versions of Arthur.

This was a bewildering blend worthy of Mary Caine. We were being invited to contemplate a series of potential associations. Gwythyr is primarily known for his role in the Mabinogion story of Culch and Olwen. He was betrothed to a beautiful maiden who is abducted by Gwyn ap Nudd. Arthur intervenes and rules that the two shall fight each other for her hand every Mayday until doomsday. The two protagonists appear to represent summer and winter. Their potential prize Creiddylyd, in some variants Cordelia, is the landscape goddess, sovereignty. Things start to get a bit complex when it is realised that she is daughter of Lludd who likewise features in a tale of Mayday conflict involving the two dragons that get buried at Dinas Emrys. Gwythyr was appearing for us in the middle of a two-headed dragon. If he was a Head Dragon, a pendragon, then it seems that he and Gwyn and their contention represent another pair of fighting dragons. There was a sense of thematic continuity in this from the first two Keys and all the way back to Cornwall. To suggest that these Celtic warrior types were descended from Sumero-Babylonian wanderers was a weird variant on the recurring eccentric British Israelite theme.



Marduk.



Debbie was only just getting warmed up for the day though. Having mentioned the previous night’s dream, she turned her attention to the present moment, picking up on the girt doggie. It’s not the guardian of the Zodiac, it’s the creator. This is where the mysterious boat travellers first let loose the power they had. It was in the form of the dragon because of “Mardek”. She began to use this alternative to the usual Marduk. Bel Mardek is god of light like the Celtic Lugh. More than that, he’s the oldest god of light, the first source of power for all sun kings and sun men, all god of light imagery. He was light, and a serpent, born of a fish. The ancient middle-eastern travellers believed life came from the sea. The old ones came and lived in the sea before any gods were formed in man’s mind. Baal, son of Dagon, came from the sea as knowledge and light. When priests acknowledged Bel the first knowledge began. Bel was the serpent of knowledge, symbolised by a flame above the head. He turned the wheel of man’s advancement. Something went wrong. They believed they’d got the wrong apple, temptation, and banished him, cutting off his arms and legs, making him into a serpent. Some priests stuck by him. They left in a boat and travelled to Britain, bringing Bel’s serpent power. At Burrow Mump they first let it loose. It’s not a dog, it’s a dragon. The dog is a later layer like Uffington’s horse over a dragon. The Gilgamesh legend reflects this. The Merdek name carried thru to the Druids as Myrrdin. The Merlin archetype is a wielder of dragon power. “Bel Merdek” was an initiatory title passed down that had mutated into Merlin. In Wales in April, at the foot of Dinas Emrys in the Grove of the Magicians, Myrrdin had spoken of the distinctive difference of the third Key. Our journey to the dog was becoming a journey to the origins of the source of the Matter of Britain and our work.



Dion Fortune as Sea Priestess by Chesca Potter. Brean Down in the background.

There were definite echoes of Dion Fortune in this material. The idea that Arthur , Merlin, and Morgan were titles passed down from an Atlantean lineage was one we had already made some kind of connection with in Cornwall. I noted that the location she used for her novel The Sea Priestess was at a powerful primal promontory called Brean Down by the Bristol Channel just before Weston super-Mare. It would have been a location that foreign seafarers in the Somerset vicinity would surely have been aware of. Debbie believed that the lineage connected by Dion Fortune to Atlantis was proper to Sumeria. It came to this country from the Middle East and not the mid-Atlantic. Its more ancient antecedents were not immediately relevant.



Burrow Mump



On a muddy, rainy, and windy New Year’s Day afternoon, we climbed to the top of Oath Hill and did our best to visualise the boat coming up river. Gwythawr appeared. He spoke of the two-headed dragon that flew between the nearby Crimson Hill and Red Hill. The nose of the Mump is the flame of fire from the dragon’s mouth. He asked, “do we come to strangle Cerberus or do we come to offer her?” We replied, “offer”. Having earlier been linked to Hercules, this was a clear link to his myth cycle. We were instructed to cross the bridge where the two rivers Tone and Parret meet, the area of the mouth of the dog or dragon. Gwythawr’s final advice was to, “always follow the path of the dragon for at the end of that path is the source of the power you’ve been given.”

On the bridge we offered up an artefact that had once been found in the usual bizarre circumstances by Bernard. It was a serpent bracelet with an orange stone set into it. We went to stand where the rivers meet. At first nothing seemed to be happening. Debbie then began to hear a tone coming from the ruined church atop Burrow Mump, which was clearly visible from where we were. It was the same sound that a Meonia sword made if struck. This was an obvious encouragement for Andy to use a sword he had with him for a similar purpose. To Debbie’s psychic hearing, the sounds met. Orange flames were seen ascending from the church tower and coming down to the water. Along each of the two rivers, a dark green shadow moved along, underneath the water. They converged at the meeting of the rivers, where the fire had touched the water. Debbie then started to hear the chanting from her dream of the procession.

We rushed back to the bridge, anticipating the appearance of the Sumerians. There was no sign of them. Debbie rapidly became confused and then upset. No instructions were forthcoming. We began to randomly search on the riverbank for the elusive Key but to no avail. Time passed. The mood was becoming increasingly despondent.






Suddenly, a typically strange Sumero-Babylonian type appeared on the opposite end of the bridge, identifying himself as Utnapishtim. The procession stood behind him but not very vividly. This was indeed an A List magical celebrity. He features in one of the most ancient extant myth sagas of the human race, the Epic of Gilgamesh, recorded on cuneiform tablets in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh but much older and found in varying forms across the Middle East. Gilgamesh is a proto-hero whose long journey in search of immortality finds later echoes in stories of the labours of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts and the Grail sagas. He may have originally been a real historical king who ruled from the city of Uruk around 2700 BC, an interesting date for Glastonbury Zodiac enthusiasts. Within the cycle is a flood tale that is clearly a major influence on the Bible story, including an Ark full of animals. Utnapishtim (known as Ziusudra in earlier Sumerian) is the main protagonist, a Babylonian Noah. He was once a king and seeds a new wave of the human race. Utnapishtim and his wife were made immortal after the flood. He was taken by the gods to live forever at "the mouth of the rivers." This makes him a kind of Ascended Master although I’m not aware of any New Agers channelling him. I felt it was interesting to put him alongside Melchizedek who had made his presence felt over the previous New Year.

This was an obvious further development of some of the fragments of material which had come out over the previous week where Gilgamesh and Noah had been mentioned along with a flood. The hero was indeed descended from Utnapishtim but wasn’t his son in the known versions. It suggested Ark connotations for the Sumerian boat.

Utnapishtim swept his arms through the riverbank rushes a few times. “Where did you find Moses?” he said. Aha! This set us off into frantic investigation amongst the rushes. It was Andy who found it. Debbie’s initial response was not jubilation but tears. She shook her head saying, “No, this isn’t supposed to be this way, this is wrong,” shuddering with an intimation of the path that had now been laid out ahead. There was no escaping Saddam’s rebuilding of Babylon and what was returning with it.













So what was this strange artefact? What did it depict? It was obviously part of the same batch as the first two Keys. The plaster and turquoise finish were identical. It was circular, about an inch and a half across. The design carved upon it was faded and difficult to discern at first but it was undoubtedly Debbie’s repeating vision. Despite her earlier successes with the first two Keys, she was profoundly shocked to see her imagery physically displayed in front of her, especially as on this occasion it was so distinctly unusual. There was a mountain in the background. A bridge stretched over an expanse of water. A robed figure standing on it, lent over the handrail to put a small spherical object into the gaping jaws of some dragon/crocodile type creature in the water. There was a tree by the right end of the bridge. What did it mean? They came down from the mountain and crossed the bridge over four rivers. The figure was feeding the dreamstone, the word the oracle speaks, back to the land, the dragon serpent, the beast, the father. Everything we do he will take from us. Our fruits will be offered to him. If we want to cross the bridge to where they’ve come from that’s the price we pay. Some kind of sacrifice might be involved. The hand that gives the offering could be torn off by the beast. It would be a long time before the immensity of what that really meant became clear. In the short term, Debbie was convinced that the final Key would act as a homing beacon for the seventh “black” sword. We wouldn’t have to go and dig it up somewhere. It would find us. All we had to do was ensure that certain things were set in motion and to keep calling to it.

Back in Essex, after yet another extraordinary New Years Day, Andy and Debbie retired for the night. The three Keys had been brought together for the first time in the bedroom by a mirror. Before long, a small very bright ball of powerful dark blue energy appeared out of the darkness, seeming to arise from the combined presence of the three artefacts. It was pulsating like a snakes tongue, sensing, waiting. Debbie realised that she was paralysed and could barely speak to alert Andy about what was occurring. It moved towards her. One side of her face became ice cold. She had trouble breathing. This was seriously scary. The small ball of light entered her head, slowly moving down through her body. She began to hear a deep, slow, voice that sounded as if it was echoing through immense caverns. It wasn’t speaking directly to her. She was overhearing something but could only hear some of the words. The energy finally left through her feet and she was released.

A feeling of powerful lingering presences in the flat remained for days. After a week, one night around 5 am, Debbie became aware of not being asleep anymore. It felt like the bed was floating but this was not unpleasant. A sudden sense of urgency made her feel it was important to sit up. She then realised that she was incapable of moving. Looking in the direction of the window, it seemed to disappear in glowing darkness. It was as if the night came through the window. It had a very long face with glowing eyes, long pale hands with long fingers that came ever nearer, making snaking movements across her body. The night then tapped it’s hands together, uttering a strange incantation that sounded like “ulab anhadre”. Debbie tried to force her face away feeling that if she looked for too long she would become the darkness.



Shemyaza crucified upside-down in the constellation of Orion by Debbie Cartwright.





Coming in 2010.