I am returning to the Blog Talk Radio format. After changes in their programming earlier this year, meaning that the potential hour of free broadcasting had been reduced to 30 mins, I wondered if my information-dense presentations could still be effective. This has led to a rethink and the initial result is now available.
Intro to Avalonian Aeon: Synchronicity and Destiny.
My most recent book massively features Glastonbury, Crowley, Psychic Questing, and 2012 but its fundamental themes are the mystery of destiny, the glimpses we catch of it through synchronicity, and what that means about the nature of our true identities. In this half hour, I shall discuss some aspects of the work of Whitley Streiber and Carlos Castaneda and the possibility of playing games with synchronicity to provoke it. Although an extended advert for the book, the material featured stands in its own right as capable of provoking deep processes.
Here is the next part of the 1979 festival pilgrimage that begins Avalonian Aeon and moves the action from Stonehenge to what becomes its centre of gravity at Glastonbury, beginning to explore its enormous mythos. The summary of View Over Atlantis has been blogged up before back in April as Part One of my tribute to John Michell who had just died. Here it is re-presented in its full context. There are piccies and videos again. Shame I couldn't find one for Tim Blake's New Jerusalem. There's a lot more text than part one yesterday and less personal reminiscences but they are there and form a crucial part of the huge impression that Glastonbury made on me. The state I was in enabled me to be sensitive to the personality of the place. Some of my Facebook friends will again recognise themselves and some of the events depicted. Only one name has been changed for the sake of what a wider audience might come to know on eventual publication.
NEW JERUSALEM “It was ragged and naïve, it was heaven”. David Bowie. Memory of a Free Festival.
The Pilton festival has gradually attained the status of some kind of cultural institution. It makes the front pages of most national newspapers and gets covered by TV and radio. The scale of the event has become immense. Many local causes benefit from the profits and organiser Michael Eavis has become something of a hero. Much opposition and hostility had to be overcome over the years before this level of success. In fact the story of the festival is inextricably intertwined with that of the place it is always associated with, Glastonbury.
It had all begun in summer 1970 when Methodist dairy farmer Eavis attended the Bath festival and liked the music and colourful hippie types in evidence. He contemplated the idea of a similar sort of gathering at his own Worthy Farm, which his family had worked since 1894. Later that year, in September, a small-scale event took place. A mere 1,500 people saw Marc Bolan’s T Rex headline. It was enough of a success to be noticed but Eavis lost money nonetheless.
At this point, visionary initiative was added to the dynamic. Andrew Kerr had been personal assistant to Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston’s son. When Randolph had died, Kerr sought a fresh outlet for his energies. He read John Michell’s The View Over Atlantis and was inspired by the idea of reviving the celebration of the summer solstice. He had the funds to set his dream in motion. Initially he had considered Stonehenge to be the ideal venue. The mysterious weavers of destiny were keeping back something special for the stones though, something that required a particular cast of characters. Glastonbury was to press the “on” button. After the success of the small Pilton gathering, Kerr realised the possibilities of the site and approached Michael Eavis who readily agreed to his plans. A charming tale tells how Kerr was atop Glastonbury Tor when he saw a rainbow that seemed to descend onto the Worthy Farm area. This confirmed for him that it was the necessary location.
John Michell’s book, published in 1969, had become an instant Earth Mysteries cult classic, presenting a comprehensive survey of a widely varied field. Its ideas permeated the whole of hippiedom. Various notions that had previously been held only by obscure eccentrics now reached thousands of impressionable minds.
The modern idea of “Earth Mysteries” can be said to begin with the work of one man. Alfred Watkins was a Herefordshire merchant who travelled the country as part of his work. He developed antiquarian interests and was always fascinated to hear local landscape legends told by members of families who had lived in the same, virtually unchanging locations, for countless generations. This helped prepare his sensibilities for a moment of revelation. In 1921, at Blackwardine, Herefordshire, he was admiring the view when a strange intuition came over him. It was a way of perceiving the landscape differently and it seemed to represent a glimpse of an archaic forgotten worldview. He sensed a web of lines linking holy places and ancient sites: mounds, old stones, crosses, ancient crossroads, churches on pre-Christian sites, legendary trees and holy wells. They all seemed to stand in straight alignments that ran over beacon hills to cairns and mountain tops. When he came to investigate his vision on maps it appeared to be confirmed. Such features fell on straight lines with a frequency he felt to be above chance. Particular names seemed to regularly appear along such alignments: Red, White, Black, Cold, Cole, Dod, Merry and Ley. The last gave the phenomenon a name that’s stuck and since travelled the world. Ley lines.
Watkins’ discoveries were published in the 1925 work, The Old Straight Track. It attracted a small group of enthusiasts who formed a Straight Track Postal Portfolio Club and went on picnic-type outings to further his studies. It was all seen as a kind of charmingly eccentric manifestation of the inter-war years. The archaeological establishment barely deemed it necessary to refute the book. Watkins was not alone in looking at prehistoric sites in an unconventional way. At that time the idea of astronomical alignments at places like Stonehenge was already being discussed. It was Watkins who managed to stimulate a wider interest though, and he will always be remembered as the pioneer.
This whole way of looking at the landscape proved to be a potent beginning to a recovery of an ancient way of relating to the land. Other cultures were looked at with fresh eyes. John Michell provided a supremely eloquent, poetic vision of what these studies seemed to suggest.
Australian aboriginal spirituality provided fertile ground for comparison and stimulation. Their mythology told of a primordial period of creation known as the dreamtime, when the landscape was brought into its current form by the activities of divine beings whose deeds formed the eternal exemplary models for human behaviour. Paths across the land called songlines connected sacred sites. At certain times in the calendar it was necessary to walk these lines to revitalise them and ensure their proper alignment to the forces of creation by singing the very songs by which the world had been brought into being.
Ancient China yielded fine fruit in the form of the art of Feng Shui. The Chinese had a complex culture concerning the land as a living entity that needed to be related to in a state of harmony. To this end, buildings were sited in accordance with precise laws. The energy of the lifeforce, symbolised as a dragon, moved in channels through the land and ebbed and flowed depending on the nature of the terrain, whether mountain and valley and so on. Subtle procedures could aid and enhance its beneficial effects in an individual home and in the larger design of towns and cities. A wrongly placed building could bring misfortune and ill health to occupants. The art is still in use in the present day and can therefore be investigated in great detail.
All over the world, traditional societies had a way of interacting with their locale that had many points in common. In the light of these cross-cultural studies, it seemed valid to look at our own legendary traditions and prehistory in a similar way to look for indications of the same kind of patterns here. An exciting picture was revealed. The megalithic stone circle at Avebury had been considered by the eighteenth century antiquarian William Stukely to be a serpent temple of the Druids. We now know it considerably predates them but the serpent idea seems to gel with the Chinese concepts. The serpent perhaps symbolised the life energy in the ground. Alfred Watkins had originally felt that the leys were practical means of navigation. In later life he began to acknowledge the possibility that they had more esoteric purposes. John Michell affirmed that they marked paths of earth energy. It seemed the megalithic builders had a way of understanding this force and perhaps the ley system served a similar function to the Chinese Feng Shui arts. Dowsers are a modern example of people who appear to be sensitive to invisible forces beneath the ground, whether it be water, magnetic currents, or something more unclassifiable. Such sensitives have always existed and it seems likely the megalithic people could have made use of them.
William Stukeleys depiction of Avebury as a serpent temple.
British folklore concerning dragons yielded remarkable results. The English patron saint, George, is of course the most famous of dragon killers, closely followed by the Archangel St Michael. It is interesting to see how many churches dedicated to Michael are situated on hilltops. Glastonbury Tor is the obvious example. One of John Michell’s most important and enduring visionary insights was to notice an apparent alignment of Michael churches across the south of England. This has become probably the world’s most famous ley line.
It stretches from St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall,through his churches at Brentor,Burrow Mump in Somerset and the Tor, and goes on through Avebury stone circle and into Norfolk and the abbey at Bury St Edmunds.
St Michael's Mount
Brentor
Burrow Mump. Photo Stu Quigley.
It travels across the longest continuous stretch of land in southern England. Many more churches dedicated to St Michael fall upon it. The suggestion is that the dragon force in the landscape was recognised by early Christians and certain esoterically-inclined church builders of the early Middle Ages. It became equated in the popular mind with the Devil. Michael was considered to be the ideal figure to keep these forces in check, due to his role in the Book of Revelation “War in Heaven”. The real nature of Michael’s relationship to the dragon force and what he himself may truly represent is an ongoing study. The original formulation of the line has set countless pilgrims off along it. It is now officially marked on a National Trust direction-finding plinth on the summit of Glastonbury Tor as the “dragon path”.
The second part of Michell’s book claims to reveal a cosmology of sacred geometry and mathematical mysticism that the creators of these ancient edifices, from Stonehenge to Glastonbury Abbey, and even Egypt’s Great Pyramid, had in common. The suggestion is that they all may have been heirs to knowledge that was a relic of some unknown previous culture, generally thought of as “Atlantis”. This canon of thought has formed a major part of the wisdom tradition of humanity, supposedly being passed down through the ages by the likes of Pythagoras and Plato, the Masons, the builders of the Gothic cathedrals and so on. Music has been an integral part of it, as its laws are believed to show how the harmony of creation functions. Even if one is not mathematically minded it can be an intoxicating experience to try and follow Michell’s elucidation of these ideas.
The most evocative of all the Glastonbury material in the book is the suggestion that the geometrical plan that its abbey was constructed upon was deliberately intended to duplicate the pattern of the city of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. A similar geometry may, perhaps, be found in the layout of Stonehenge. The plan predates Christianity and represents an ideal of harmony that brings together the laws of heaven and earth through the geometrical forms of divine creation. Glastonbury Abbey was considered to be the successor to Stonehenge in a new epoch. That this is so is not only suggested by the geometrical gridplan but also by the existence of an apparent ley alignment that travels right up the centre of the abbey and the aptly-named Dod Lane just outside it, to Stonehenge. The complex unfolding of the geometry and the Stonehenge, Glastonbury, Egypt connection was further elaborated in Michell’s next book, City Of Revelation (later revised as The Dimensions of Paradise).
The contents of The View Over Atlantis hung in the air, like an esoteric energy transmission, around the inception of the 1971 Pilton festival. Powerful forces were at work. The story of the famous pyramid stage is a good example of that. In 1970 Bill Harkin was camping with a friend on the south coast of England. One night, gazing at the stars over the sea, he experienced an intense feeling of light. He decided to allow himself to be guided by it and they set off in his car, navigating solely through the vibe, with no sense whatever of any destination. Eventually they saw a road-sign for Glastonbury and arrived at the Tor. The synchronisation beam got them there in time to meet a group of extravagantly dressed hippie characters descending from the summit. One of them was Andrew Kerr. He and his friends were on their way to meet Michael Eavis to discuss the possibilities of a solstice festival the following year. Harkin fed them with tea, honey and oatcakes. They exchanged phone numbers. The next Wednesday, Harkin was out driving when he saw a vision of Andrew Kerr’s face on an upcoming phone-box. He immediately stopped and rang him. The news was that the festival had been given the go-ahead and that Kerr and his associates were moving in to Worthy Farm to begin the preparations. Harkin offered to help them that weekend. On the Thursday night he dreamt of a stage with two beams of light forming a pyramid. He was impressed enough to take the morning off work and make a small cardboard model of his vision. Within a few days he arrived on the Festival site. Kerr showed him a location he had dowsed as being auspicious for the stage to be constructed upon. Harkin recognised his dream landscape. Before long, his model was on a table at the farm and a phone call was being made to John Michell for advice on the sacred dimensions for the pyramid stage.
When the whole thing finally came to fruition months later, Kerr introduced the bands with this inspiring invocation: “Glastonbury is a place far too beautiful for yet another rock festival. If the festival has a specific intention it is to create an increase of awareness in the power of the Universe, a heightening of consciousness and a recognition of our place in the function of this, our tired and molested planet. We have spent too long telling the Universe to shut up; we must search for the humility to listen. The Earth is groaning for contact with our ears and eyes. Universal awareness touches gently at our shoulders. We are creators being created and we must prove our worth.”
What followed became a mythic event. After the massive downers of Altamont in 1969 and Britain’s gigantic 1970 Isle of Wight festival, Pilton showed there was still plenty of life in the hippie dream and its ideals had not been permanently sullied. Fortunately for posterity, the festival was filmed by David Puttnam and Nicholas Roeg and later released as Glastonbury Fayre. The event worked on many levels. Most obviously, it was a rock festival and a truly impressive line-up was assembled. Traffic, Arthur Brown, Daevid Allen’s Gong, Fairport Convention, David Bowie, Hawkwind and Quintessence, provided a time capsule of the musical vibe of the era.
Daevid Allen
Robert Graves
Many of the musicians were serious in their esoteric interests. The story of Daevid Allen, for example, represents a good case study. He was a personal friend of Robert Graves, the poet and novelist. Graves is generally remembered for I, Claudius. His magnum opus The White Goddess dealt with what he believed to be the primordial religion of humanity; veneration of the divine feminine principle. To Graves the true test of a poet’s inspiration will be their connection to the presence of this force throughout nature and the seasonal mythos it produces. It was a work written in a strange fever of inspiration. Beginning with a study of an obscure piece of Dark Age Welsh literature, it expanded to take in the whole of the classical world. When it initially appeared in 1948, it had set people’s heads on fire and played a part in preparing literate audiences for the revival of witchcraft and general paganism. He also supplied a very interesting introduction to Idries Shah’s seminal work The Sufis, published in 1964. This book suggested that most of the esoteric ideas circulating in Europe during the Middle Ages had been inspired by, and sometimes directly monitored by, mystical schools operating from within Islam. It was a contentious but fertile hypothesis. Perhaps the most fascinating example concerned the wandering troubadour minstrels who had played a large role in the dissemination of Arthurian literature. A case could be made for their connection to Saracen groups in Spain. It seemed the Celtic mythos was deemed suitable to be the carrier of other ideas. The troubadours sang the praises of “the Lady” and extolled the virtues of a cult of “Courtly Love”. They fitted Graves’ criteria of true poets. This remarkable movement had helped to mellow out the brutal aristocratic warriors of the time with a sense of the chivalric ideal.
Graves was a long-term resident of Deya on Majorca. The village was located at the foot of a small mountain capped by a church, on a site supposedly once sacred to the moon goddess Diana. In the spring of 1966, Daevid Allen was also living there and feeling himself being pulled towards some imminent initiatory event. All of the omens seemed to point towards Easter Sunday, which was also a full moon. An American visitor brought with him some of the legendary Owlsley acid. On Good Friday, Daevid chanced upon Robert Graves who took him for an exhilarating ascent of a steep hillside path. Graves gave forth a freeform discourse on themes from The White Goddess. It seemed to Allen that he experienced some kind of “bio-energetic power transfer by osmosis”. He felt that he was being empowered to “take a burden of fame and responsibility”, to become a modern troubadour. On the full-moon Sunday he ingested the psychedelic sacrament.
Allen experienced his partner Gilli Smyth as the Goddess in her many aspects. The climax of their acid sex session annihilated his normal sense of identity, leaving him as “zero in infinity”. Somewhere in all this he began to sense the presence of beings, entities of some kind, “spiritual gardeners, like experimenting doctors from another dimension,” who were moving some part of him into another realm and mode of functioning. He was aware that others were being similarly manoeuvred, “all being prepared for a common purpose in the hope that at least one of us will succeed in manifesting this mysterious purpose in the difficult field of dense physical reality.” The feeling took form in a vision of being on a stage. A large rock festival audience were giving him rapturous applause. There was a vibe of love and soul connection. “Looking up I see with psychic vision an enormous luminous cone of etheric light which is simultaneously drawing astral shadows up from deep below us and dissolving them in the downpouring radiance focused at its peak. As I look out into the audience I see that same light sparkling sweetly in their eyes.”
It was this experience that moved Daevid Allen to enter the field of rock music. He was a founder member of Soft Machine (named after the William Burroughs novel), noticeable on the London scene during the golden daze of the UFO club, in 1967, amidst the early careers of Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. It was the later Gong project that finally made him feel that he was moving towards the fulfilment of his vision. Allen consciously considered Gong to be a magical endeavour, “a Self Initiation to the Path of the Heart through the medium of Rock Music”. Their first British appearance was at Pilton. The sound of Gilli Smyth’s “space whisper” vocals actually begin Glastonbury Fayre, to the visual accompaniment of atmospheric shots of the pyramid stage.
Gong became a great musical family who nurtured many fine talents. Steve Hillage emerged from their ranks. Their classic line-up recorded a trilogy of albums notable for a mixture of superb and innovative musicianship, whimsical humour and transcendental magic and mysticism. A full-blown Gnostic invocation features on the track Master Builder from the You. album (see video below) A world traveller, Daevid Allen made his British base in the Glastonbury environs and published the autobiographical gong dreaming 1 from there in 1994.
IAO ZA-I ZA-O MA-I MA-O TA-I TA-O NOW... Q: Master Builder, tell me how you make a temple? A: Tools and moon stones, you don't really need them, you know... Q: Master Builder, tell me what the temple's made of? A: Deep inside you, you can build an invisible temple in your own imagination if you will lyrics Daevid allen.
One of the most striking performances in Glastonbury Fayre was given by Arthur Brown. This was the man who had appeared on Top of the Pops in 1968, wearing a flaming head-dress, proclaiming in an unsettlingly powerful voice, “I am the God of Hellfire.” Arthur was a kind of daemonic vaudeville trickster artiste. He dug into the shamanic roots of showbiz and rock to invoke an archaic gnosis disruptive of the grey comforts of consensus reality. He didn’t disappoint at Pilton. In front of the stage were three burning crosses. At each side of them stood a robed figure holding a flaming torch. To some of the clearly tripped-out audience the blazing triangle of light of the pyramid stage must have seemed like a doorway into another dimension. On the threshold of that realm, the hierophant Arthur invoked the appropriate energies through into manifestation. With his face painted black and white, dancing like a jerky marionette possessed by some voodoo deity, he intoned:
“Let, from the Father and the Mother, Come forth the son. Out of Chaos,bring forth the forms".
That was one aspect of the dynamic energies that were inspiring the alternative realities of the hippie dream. Directly after Arthur Brown’s appearance in the movie, a major complementary force in that process can also be seen. Once again a sea of people dance before the stage, but this time they are themselves singing. In joyful ecstasy they are chanting Hare Krishna. They part to let a car slowly drive through, showering it with flowers. It contained the thirteen-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji, (pictured above)leader of the Divine Light Mission. In the aftermath of The Beatles interest in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation and George Harrison’s promotion of the Hare Krishna movement, many began to look eastwards for inspiration. Like a number of the influences that erupted into mass consciousness at that time, Hinduism and Buddhism had been powerfully present with a small, cultured and creative minority for most of the century, but this level of exposure was something else altogether.
Guru Maharaj Ji was, in 1971 in Britain, the most well-known and successful Indian export. His father Sri Hans Ji Maharaj was a spiritual master with thousands of followers. He had founded the Divine Light Mission, teaching a form of initiation called The Knowledge. This was supposedly an esoteric wisdom that had been in existence since ancient times and been transmitted from generation to generation. At any one time only one “Perfect Master” was alive who was able to pass it on. When his father died in 1966, the eight-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji inherited the mantle. It may well seem a bit odd that a child could be expected to effectively represent such wisdom but The Knowledge was not just a series of meditation exercises but an energy transmission. The young man had received something beyond information and ideas from his father. Entering into connection with him rendered others susceptible to the mysterious process.
The combination of his youth and the high level of wealth that seemed to surround him made the teenage guru a media magnet. His highly publicised first visit to Britain in 1971 coincided with the Pilton festival. At the peak of his success, a small, slightly plump, Indian-featured figure, dressed in white, sitting on a specially prepared chair, he addressed the audience from the pyramid stage. “Every materialistic thing is perishable. You should know such a thing as is un-perishable, the Holy Knowledge of God and that is within you.”
Somewhat at odds with the festival vibe, the guru taught a path of definite discipline. No drugs and an engagement in social responsibilities. In the early seventies the Divine Light Mission rapidly expanded in Britain and America. Some sort of denouement came in 1973 when the movement hired the huge Houston Astrodome for an event that was hyped up as being “the most holy and significant event in human history”. Maharaj Ji was to announce his plans for world peace, which was assuredly very near. Devotees were primed with some outlandish possibilities for the coming event. The Astrodome itself, or at least its roof, would fly into the air. All within would go with it, protected in a safe bubble as flower petals fell, singing angels appeared, and flying saucers formed a guard of honour. The rest of the world stood a fair chance of being trashed whilst this was going down. For those too young to remember, it didn’t exactly work out that way. In fact the event could easily be seen as a total kitsch gross-out. The young guru appeared seated on a throne, dressed in robes and an enormous crown, creating an effect that made the seventies sartorial excesses of Abba and Boney M seem tasteful and restrained in comparison. Accompanying this spectacle was a musical soundtrack full of lyrics like “the Lord of the Universe has come to us this day”. Not surprisingly his reputation declined somewhat after such an apparent fiasco. Some felt that a new epoch really was inaugurated at Houston in 1973, but on an inner level. Maharaj Ji has some devotees in Glastonbury in the present day. Now known as Prem Rahat, he still visits Britain, initiating people into The Knowledge. Some of those who were around in the early days will affirm that, regardless of any of the oddities of the time, he really was carrying some voltage, and connecting to it did change lives for the better. Such is the enigma of the guru.
Arthur Brown’s performance was suggestive of the way of self-mastery, of magic, the way of the western magus. A lonely path.
“Nobody’s here to show you how. Nobody’s here to help you now. You have to face yourself alone.”
“In my image, by my Will do I hereby create all forms and distinctions.”
By its side is the apparent opposite, a way of austerity, surrender, devotion, and mysticism. The guru.
“I can help mankind and everybody of you by giving that Knowledge.”
Out of that blazing triangle of light they beamed out together. How separate can they really be said to be? Just over twenty-five years later, Arthur Brown could be seen performing a devotional song in front of Adi Da Samraj (the former Da Free John) at his Mountain of Attention Sanctuary in California. He is also interviewed on video, freely confessing how overwhelmed he was by the awesome love Adi Da forcefully radiated. Had Arthur become a burnt-out old hippie who had lost it? Had that fiery head-dress melted a bit of his brain? It’s just not that simple. There’s a mystery here.
Perhaps the real stars of the movie were the audience. At the slightest excuse a huge drumming session would develop, ecstatic dancing break out, and clothes be discarded. An attempt at a Christian Service went that way. Many normals were somewhat perturbed by the spectacle of naked people crawling around in mud, licking the ground. Spliffs were mightily in evidence. Tripped-out weirdos stared into space and beyond for the cameras.
Watch this video for Andrew Kerr, Bill Harkin, Maharaj Ji, and the festival goers.
By all accounts it was a splendid time for all. All except the local residents, who had felt like they were on the receiving end of some sort of alien invasion. A number of the festival-goers and others who had connected to it inevitably became interested in Glastonbury itself. The place loomed large in The View Over Atlantis and John Michell’s earlier classic of psychedelic ufology, The Flying Saucer Vision. Strange hippies had been visiting the town in small numbers since the mid-sixties. Now they became increasingly visible, getting banned from local pubs and not exactly welcomed with open arms.
By the mid-seventies a few idealistic types had settled there. The opening of the now-famous Gothic Image shop began the transformation of the High Street into the New Age Mecca it has now become. They were strange and testing times for the town. Flourishing industries had gone into terminal decline. Many locals became unemployed. Complex economic factors were to blame. The arrival of a load of weirdos and the changes in the High Street were all but simultaneous and came to be inextricably linked in many minds. A mythos developed whereby the decline of Glastonbury’s industries and the closing of many old shops had actually been caused by the hippies. Unfortunately the most extreme forms of this belief attribute to the recent arrivals qualities not unlike those that the Nazis saw in the Jews. The bottom of the High Street has been referred to as the “hippie ghetto”. Get rid of these people and everything will be okay. These issues remain unresolved in the present day and constitute one of the town’s greatest challenges. The 1971 event had set all this in motion, so it wasn’t surprising that there was little local enthusiasm for a repeat. It would be eight years before another opportunity arose for a major gathering.
In 1979, after the dreamtime solstice journey, I awoke to the first full day in my new surroundings. Pilton festival proved to be another shock to the system but a subtly different one from Stonehenge. The site was far larger. There were more people. And it was legal. We were allowed to be there and that made a big difference to the general atmosphere. Music was ostensibly the centre of gravity. There were stalls. Food, books, and counterculture paraphernalia were for sale. Various organisations representing causes political and spiritual had tents amidst what was a kind of hippie village.
An interesting selection of music played from the sound system of the stage (which unfortunately wasn’t a pyramid this time) between acts.Different eras were brought together, at least in my head, by hearing Tubeway Army’s then current hit, Are Friends Electric?
and It’s a Beautiful Day’s White Bird
I soon met up with some friends who had also made the journey from Stonehenge and we settled into some predictable activities. After days of head-mashing it didn’t take much to wipe us out. On that first afternoon, we sat in the field of the main stage and started smoking. In no time at all myself, Mike, Mark and Dean were lying, flat on our backs, staring at the sky, incapable of moving. We were, in some indeterminate sense, conscious. There was conversation, like a half-remembered dream. Bands came on stage and played their sets. It began to get dark. Stars appeared in the sky above us and still we remained immobile. The night’s entertainment ended. People shapes drifted by us, back to their tents. Finally we stirred.
Something else was also happening. At one of the stalls I bought an A4 size booklet called The Glastonbury Giants by Mary Caine, on the alleged terrestrial zodiac. It was she who had presented the idea on Nationwide in 1976. As I sat around in my open altered state, I glanced at it, throughout the festival. She believed that the great earthwork edifice had been constructed by Sumero-Babylonians. I wasn’t aware of any confirmatory archaeology. The way the book was written made it difficult for me to assess. Only a year before, I’d completed “A” level History and Caine’s work was not presented in a way that my teachers would have appreciated. I felt it was important somehow though. I knew I had to persist with it. There were things that would reveal themselves to me. I would understand the cryptic, allusive, poetic text one day.
Another group of friends arrived from Essex with fresh energy, ready for mayhem. Gary set about intoxicating himself in a manner remarkable for its single-minded intensity. He began by consuming an unhealthy amount of Abbot Ale. I avoided this respected brew following a sad episode, at the age of seventeen, when I had attempted to climb out of the emergency exit of a bus that was, unfortunately, in motion. No such qualms inhibited Gary. Having attained to a rarefied state of raving delirium, he now invited the rest of us to partake of his speciality party piece, a Rasta cone This was a monster spliff involving an intricate arrangement of Rizla papers, an entire packet of twenty cigarettes, and a quarter of an ounce of dope. Even in his generally incoherent state he was able to construct this engineering marvel. As the time came to light it, the whole scenario seemed to take on a mythic quality. Some kind of salute and dedication was required. We were positioned such that a fine view of the distant mystic Tor commanded our attention. Some deep instinct inspired Gary to rise, unsteadily, to his feet and raise the monstrous artefact, like Excalibur, towards the sky. Facing the Tor he gave forth a strangulated sound that was both the proud affirmation of a warrior and the last gasp of a man who was about to write-off the rest of the day. The cone was lit, and after taking some mighty tokes, he passed it on whilst spiralling into a slumped heap in the remains of one of the previous night’s bonfires. As he dribbled and gurgled most of the group of chums were focused on his antics. I remained transfixed by the Tor. Something was being communicated to me. Of this I was certain.
To celebrate the Saturday peak of the festival, I dropped yet more acid. It was a very different experience to Stonehenge, subtle but ultimately deeper. The mystic input was making itself felt. With eyes closed, I entered into an Arthurian Glastonbury reverie. Something of the ambience of Mary Caine’s booklet was permeating my mind. I seemed to imagine a Merlin-type figure viewing the whole landscape from above and also, somehow, taking the whole festival into his comprehension. This was not a vivid visual episode but an apprehension on some other level. In the external realm of forms we were taking turns in being responsible for Gary, who had sacrificed basic motor skills and mouth-brain co-ordination to bring us the sacrament of the cone. This became quite surreal to me.
The climax of the stage entertainment was provided by former Gong keyboard player Tim Blake’s performance of his synthesiser epic, New Jerusalem. He had obviously been reading John Michell’s books. The lyrics had definite references to them. Blake was ahead of John Michel Jarre in pioneering the combination of electronic music and lasers. The presentation was spectacular.
And so, as I helped a man to walk who barely even knew who he was, let alone where he was, synths and lasers tingled my acid consciousness as these words emanated from the stage:
“Pyramids and Stonehenge are ley lines to this place, City of Revelation, that governs inner space. So now, tune in your auras, let solstice music sound and build New Age vibrations and feed them to the ground. For here, inside these valleys, that are so full of energy, we’ll build a New Jerusalem, with love, from you to me.”
A mist had arisen in those very valleys whilst the set was being played and, for some, it was a combination that proved unforgettable. The depth of the experience expanded with time. A mighty mythos had been downloaded into my brain. The intensity of it was to change my life forever.
Paul is the author of Avalonian Aeon, Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus, Mysterium Artorius, The Glastonbury Zodiac and Earth Mysteries UFOlogy,, Glastonbury Psychogeography, The Michael Line, the Qabalah and the Tarot, Atargatis, William Blake and the Glastonbury Gnosis, The Occult Battle of Britain, and Glastonia Aegyptiacus.
Paul is available for lectures, tailored Glastonbury tours and Reiki initiations.
