Lethbridge was always a loner. The ‘occult’ books, starting with Ghost and Ghoul, received scant attention from reviewers, and sales were modest. Working away quietly at Branscombe, he had no reason to suppose that the world was becoming more receptive to the ideas that excited him so much. It is a pity he paid so little attention to the weekly reviews and current literary fashions; he might have realised that he was less of an ‘outsider’ than he supposed.
By the late 1950s, Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today had achieved a succes de scandale and led to the formation of dozens of witch covens; but it reached only those who were already predisposed to an interest in the subject. Then, in 1960, there appeared in Paris the first book on ‘magic’ to reach a mass audience: Le Matin des Magiciens, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. The authors were an oddly assorted pair: Pauwels, a journalist who had edited a hostile book on Gurdjieff, denouncing him as a charlatan, and Bergier, a physicist, a student of Kabbalism, and a practising alchemist. Almost single handed, these two inaugurated the modern ‘occult revival’.
The Dawn of Magic became a best-seller largely because of its startling suggestion that Hitler was a psychic, possibly a practising ‘occultist’, and that the Nazis were basically a magical movement. But this was only a small part of the astonishing material that the authors gathered together. The basic thesis of the book is that science is too narrow-minded, and that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth …’ They discuss UFOs, alchemy, astrology, the world-ice theory, the Great Pyramid, Atlantis, black magic, mediumship, telepathy and the ideas of Charles Fort. The book is full of strange odds and ends of information and curious anecdotes; for example, it tells of a German engineer who discovered in a Baghdad museum electric batteries manufactured ten centuries before Volta. It speaks of the mysterious markings on the desert plain of Nazca, in Peru: gigantic drawings of flowers and spiders, tremendous intersecting patterns oflines, some of them miles long, and all made by moving small stones on the surface of the desert—and, the authors point out, all of them invisible except from the air. They discuss the mystery of the Piri Reis maps. Admiral Piri (Reis means admiral) was a Turkish pirate of Greek nationality who was beheaded in AD 1554. Some of his maps found in Istanbul in 1929 seemed to indicate a knowledge of trigonometry and geography far beyond that of the sixteenth century. They show Antarctica—which was not discovered until 1818—and, moreover, seem to show it before it was covered with ice. Another map of the same period shows a land bridge across the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, a bridge that geologists believe existed many thousands of years ago. The inference seems to be that Piri’s maps were based on far older maps that were made from space craft or aeroplanes by alien visitors to our planet. The authors mention legends of tribes being transported to the north by great metallic birds.
Critics pointed out that the book is full of inaccuracies. Typical of its misinformation is the statement that Piri Reis was a nineteenth-century naval officer who presented his famous maps to the Library of Congress. Still, in spite of its faults, the sheer range of its conjecture is exciting. There are few subsequent works of ‘occult’ speculation that are not in some way indebted to it.
In suggesting that the gods of ancient man were beings from outer space, Pauwels and Bergier were almost—but not quite—the first to give a new twist to the curious saga of the flying saucers. This saga had begun on June 24, 1947, when a businessman named Kenneth Arnold, piloting his private plane near Mount Rainier, in Washington State, saw nine shining discs travelling against the background of the mountain. He estimated their speed as being about a thousand miles an hour. The incident was widely publicised in Fate magazine, and during the next few years there were thousands of sightings of flying saucers—now called Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs—from all over the world. One investigator, Dr George Hunt Williamson, was convinced that the space men were contacting him through automatic writing; in his book The Secret Places of the Lion, published in 1958, he explains that visitors from space arrived on our earth as long ago as eighteen million years, and that they have since been devoting themselves to the evolution of mankind. The Pyramid of Cheops was one of their creations; it was built 24,000 years ago (and not around 2500 BC, as historians believe), and a space ship is concealed in its foundations. Most of Williamson’s book is taken up with Biblical exegesis, which may explain its lack of impact on first publication. It was Pauwels and Bergier who first captured the public imagination with speculations about visitors from remote galaxies.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey transformed the idea into a part of the intellectual mythology of the twentieth century. Criticised at first as a monument of obscurity and dreariness (angry customers wrote to Kubrick asking for their money back), it quickly became a cult among the young, who may have been attracted by its ‘psychedelic’ visual effects. The film was scripted by Arthur C. Clarke, and it popularised the notion that ‘visitors from space’ had played an active part in man’s evolution. There seems to be no obvious and agreed explanation for man’s sudden appearance on the evolutionary stage at the beginning of the Pleistocene era, some three million years ago. In Clarke’s version of the myth, unseen aliens place a crystal monolith on earth near the cave dwellings of primitive ape men; it probes their minds and stimulates their intelligence, enabling them to discover the use of tools and weapons.
Now at this time, Lethbridge was also meditating on the problem of human evolution, and explaining his objections to the Darwinian version in The Monkey’s Tail (his last book to be published in his lifetime). When this was completed, he turned his thoughts to the problem of flying saucers, and whether our planet might have been visited by aliens in the remote past. Because of his illness, the new book—Legend of the Sons of God—progressed slowly, and was not completed until 1971. Lethbridge felt that it contained some of his most important and exciting ideas. And then, while the book was still in typescript, he had the devastating experience of realising that he had been anticipated. Someone sent him Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?—a book that had first appeared in Germany in 1967 under the title Memories of the Future, and had since become an international best-seller. Lethbridge was at first tempted to destroy his own manuscript. Then he read Däniken and decided that this sacrifice was unnecessary. ‘I saw that there were points of difference and that this was an interesting example of the often observed phenomenon of a particular idea occurring to people in different parts of the world at the same time.’
Lethbridge was typically—but unnecessarily—charitable. Däniken’s book is an expansion of the ideas already put forward by Pauwels and Bergier (although neither are acknowledged in the text). Däniken has added a great deal of speculation, a mass of unassimilated facts, and some downright inventions. He takes from George Hunt Williamson the idea that the pyramids were built by space men—on the grounds that they are too massive to have been built by human beings; but he somehow manages to multiply their weight by five. He explains that the engineering problems would have been beyond men who knew nothing about the use of rope—although there are rope-making scenes on the walls of Egyptian tombs dating long before the building of the great pyramid. He suggests that the Nazca lines are giant runways, without pausing to reflect that the most powerful modern aircraft does not need a runway several miles long. (And if modern reports of UFOs are anything to go by, they land vertically, as our own space craft do.)
At times, his information seems to be wilfully distorted. Chapter Five of Chariots of the Gods? begins with an account of the Assyrian Epic of Gilgamesh—‘a sensational find [that] was made in the hill of Kuyundjik around the turn of the century.’ (In fact, the Epic was discovered by Hormuzd Rassam, an assistant of the great archaeologist Layard, in 1853, and further missing portions were unearthed twenty years later.) The aim of Däniken’s re-telling is to demonstrate that the ancient races of Mesopotamia knew about space ships; so he describes how the sun god seized the hero Enkidu in his claws and bore him upward with such velocity that his body felt as heavy as lead—which, as Däniken rightly observes, seems to show an astonishing knowledge of the effect of acceleration. A visit to the tower of the goddess Ishtar (Innanis) is described, implying that it is a space vehicle, and then ‘the first eye-witness account of a space trip’ in which Enkidu flies for four hours in the brazen talons of an eagle and describes the earth as seen from the air.
Anyone who takes the trouble to check the Gilgamesh Epic will discover that all these episodes appear to have been imagined by Däniken; nothing remotely resembling them is to be found in it. The sun god (Shamash) does not seize Enkidu in his talons; there is no visit to the tower of the goddess Ishtar (she makes only one appearance in the Epic as the attempted seductress of Gilgamesh); there is no four-hour space trip in the claws of an eagle.
Däniken also tells us that ‘the door spoke like a living person’, and that we can unhesitatingly identify this with a loudspeaker; he goes on to say that Gilgamesh asks whether Enkidu has been smitten by the poisonous breath of a heavenly beast (i.e. has breathed in the fumes of a space ship), and asks how Gilgamesh could possibly know that a ‘heavenly beast’ could cause fatal and incurable disease. The answer is that he couldn’t, for he does not ask the question; neither does the loudspeaker doorway make any kind of appearance in Gilgamesh.
Däniken’s books provide, to put it kindly, plenty of examples of intellectual carelessness combined with wishful thinking and a casual attitude towards logic. In Gold of the Gods, he offers a photograph of a skeleton carved out of stone and wants to know: ‘Were there anatomists who dissected bodies for the prehistoric sculptor? As we know, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen did not discover the new kind of rays he called X-rays until 1895!’ It never seems to have occurred to him that every graveyard must have been full of skeletons.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about Däniken’s books is their hectoring, table-thumping style. He spends a great deal of time abusing the experts and railing at imaginary objectors. Whole pages seem to consist entirely of ‘unanswerable’ questions. ‘Why are the oldest libraries in the world secret libraries? What are people really afraid of? Are they worried that the truth, protected and concealed for thousands of years, will finally come to light?’ The answer to which is that the oldest libraries in the world are not secret.
Altogether, it seems a pity that the theory of ‘ancient space men’ should have become identified with Däniken’s name. He is by far its least plausible advocate.
Lethbridge’s work differs from Däniken’s in one basic respect: it is based on the down-to-earth research of a practising archaeologist, and when he is merely presenting imaginative speculation, he says so frankly.
The starting point of Legend of the Sons of God is the passage about giants in the Book of Genesis: ‘There were giants in the earth in those days …’ And this is followed by a statement that has intrigued so many students of the Bible, declaring that when the sons of God ‘came unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown’—in short, heroes. Of course, the ancient Greeks conceived their gods in human terms, and saw nothing incongruous in the idea of a god having an affair with a mortal. Clearly, it never struck them that a god would find a human being as unattractive as an intelligent man would find a female ape. But the Biblical angels seem altogether less anthropomorphic, and it is correspondingly more difficult to imagine them as rakish seducers.
Lethbridge always approached legends in the spirit of The Golden Bough: that is, with the belief that they may contain memories of things that actually happened, and that if the pattern is scrutinised closely enough, it is possible to glimpse this kernel of reality.1
Lethbridge was also intrigued by the legend of the ‘war in heaven’ in which Michael and his angels fought against the ‘dragon’. Although he does not say so, it is probably safe to assume that Lethbridge was originally interested by the mention of the giants and the dragon, wondering if there was any connection between these and the giants and dragons of the great chalk carvings. In this case, the war might symbolise the clash between the old religion and the new. In the event, he was to come to a totally different conclusion.
Typically, Lethbridge begins his investigation with Stonehenge, the giant circle of megaliths on Salisbury Plain. The great uprights of Stonehenge—the sarsens—weight fifty tons each, and are more than thirteen feet high. Thirty of these, surmounted by massive lintels, were originally arranged in a thousand-foot circle. Inside this there was another circle consisting of sixty ‘bluestones’, each weighing about five tons; and inside these, a horseshoe, also of bluestones. Between these was another horseshoe of five vast ‘trilithons’.
Most people are aware that, as an engineering feat, Stonehenge compares with the Great Pyramid. Yet it requires an effort of imagination to grasp the sheer magnitude of the conception, and the effort of willpower it represents. Even today, it would tax the ingenuity of a construction engineer to transport the fifty-ton sarsens. The builders of the outer circle had to rely on manpower, ropes and wooden rollers. The megaliths were cut from outcrops of rock on the Marlborough Downs, twenty-four miles from Stonehenge. Then the stones were dragged—on rollers or sleds—by a workforce of about fifteen hundred men. Each stone must have taken more than two months to transport. Since these men were farmers, who would not be able to spare more than a few months each year for these immense labours, it probably took most of two generations—forty or fifty years—to move all sixty stones. But even when they were finally on the site, the labour had only just started. Sarsen is so hard that it is impervious to most modern steels. The great stones had to be shaped and smoothed by being pounded with other stones. It would have taken a dozen masons, pounding away steadily through the daylight hours, three months to shape each stone. Then came the dangerous task of erecting them into position. The uprights would be tilted into holes that had been dug for them, and slowly levered into the vertical position with the aid of solid platforms of treetrunks. The lintels were then raised inch by inch on ramps, and slid over onto the uprights, held securely in place by mortice and tenon joints, a stone nipple on the top of the uprights fitting into a hole in the lintel.
The labour of transporting the five-ton bluestones—sixty in the outer circle, nineteen in the horseshoe—must have been even greater; the nearest quarry from which they could have been cut is 135 miles away; again it must have taken hundreds of men and decades in time.
In his History, Geoffrey of Monmouth states that Stonehenge was built by a certain King Ambrosius in the fifth century AD, as a memorial to earls and princes who were treacherously slain by the Saxons. According to Geoffrey, the wizard Merlin—the same one who appears in the King Arthur legends—told the king of a stone circle known as the Giant’s Dance, near ‘Killaraus’, in Ireland; these stones, said Merlin, originally came from Africa. An expedition fought the Irish and brought back the Giant’s Dance to Salisbury Plain with the aid of Merlin’s magic.
A few centuries later, the Jacobean chronicler John Aubrey expressed the opinion that Stonehenge was built by the Druids, which places its date around 500 BC—a thousand years earlier than Merlin. By the mid-twentieth century, more accurate historical—and scientific—techniques had suggested a new set of dates which came to be generally accepted by scholars. The original great ditch that surrounds Stonehenge was constructed around 1900 BC by Neolithic farmers. A century later came the invaders we call the Beaker people; they brought the Bronze Age to England and also constructed the double bluestone circle (no trace of which now remains above ground), and the avenue leading to the monument. Finally, around 1500 BC, the merchant aristocracy we call the Wessex people erected the great ring of sarsens and the inner horseshoe. In fact, new methods of radiocarbon dating have since shown most of this to be incorrect—but this is a story that can be left until later in the chapter.
Most books on Stonehenge state dogmatically that the bluestones were brought from the Prescelly mountains of North Pembrokeshire, in Wales; some writers believe they were already part of a sacred circle. Transporting them would have been a tremendous task. The favourite modern theory is that they were floated down the Bristol Channel on rafts, then brought to Salisbury Plain by means of rivers, dragging them across intervening tracts of land on sledges. (Another theory, that they were carried close to their present site by glaciers, is now generally rejected.)
Lethbridge was inclined to wonder if there was any foundation of truth in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story about ‘Killaraus’ in Ireland. It is true that the Prescelly mountains are the nearest site from which the bluestones could have been obtained, but there is no actual proof that they came from there. On the other hand, Killaraus can be translated the church on the River Ary’, and there is a River Ary in Ireland; the town of Tipperary stands on it. And not far to the west of Tipperary there is an area of diorite, the stone of the bluestones. The River Ary joins a larger river, the Suir, which in turn flows into the sea at Waterford; so the stones could have been transported from Ireland as easily as from Wales.
Lethbridge decided to check his theory with the pendulum. He borrowed some fragments of the Stonehenge bluestones from an archaeologist friend; the pendulum gave a date of 1870 BC.
Next, he conducted an experiment in map-dowsing. This is certainly one of the most controversial aspects of divining, and one that provides most ammunition for sceptics. Yet, for some reason, it works. (Doctor C. E. M. Joad, himself something of a sceptic, once described on a BBC Brains Trust Programme how he had seen a map-dowser tested; he was given a map on which there were no rivers or ponds marked; with the aid of the pendulum, he traced them all accurately.) Lethbridge himself had no difficulty coming to terms with it; a map is an abstraction, and he had discovered that the pendulum responds to abstractions as easily as to physical objects. He now used a large map of the British Isles, on which he placed a chip of bluestonc (to ‘tune in’), and held the pendulum over Stonehenge. It proceeded to gyrate. He tried it over the Prescelly mountains. There was no reaction. But when he tried the pendulum over the beds of diorite near Tipperary, there was a strong and unmistakable reaction. He concluded that Geoffrey of Monmouth had probably been correct; the original Giant’s Dance was near Tipperary. The pendulum even gave a precise age for the setting up of the Irish stone circle—2650 BC.
In fact, Lethbridge’s theory provides a simpler explanation of how the bluestones were transported. One of the main arguments against the Prescelly theory is that the stones would have to sail on the open sea, which would have been dangerous. (Rafts are difficult to navigate—particularly when carrying a five-ton load.) But Lethbridge points out that an extremely heavy type of anchor, known as a kedge, is easily carried slung between two ships, so that the sea bears most of its weight. The bluestones could have been taken by sea all the way to the south coast of England—near present-day Christchurch—then up the River Avon to within three miles of Stonehenge with a minimum of effort. (His guess about how the lintels were placed on the sarsens is equally logical; the snow on Salisbury Plain is deep in the winter, and the lintels could have been dragged up long ramps of snow.)
Which brings us to the question: why were the stones erected? Not just Stonehenge, but many other monuments in Western Europe: in Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Malta, France, Italy, Ireland and the Hebrides. France alone has no less than 6,000 such monuments, including the immense avenues of standing stones at Carnac, in Brittany—a thousand of them set up in lines amounting to four miles. Cornwall is full of stone circles, including one—Boscawen-Un—which is probably the oldest in Britain; it also has hundreds of solitary monoliths. There has always been a vague assumption that they are pagan religious sites (with the result that the villagers of Avebury have systematically destroyed one of the greatest ancient monuments in Europe over the centuries). But, apart from that vague guess, they have always remained a mystery.
In 1934, a forty-year-old Scots engineer named Alexander Thom anchored his sailing boat in Loch Roag, near Callanish, in the Outer Hebrides. He had always been vaguely interested in the great stone circle—a kind of miniature Stonehenge—that stands on a hilltop there. Looking along the avenue of menhirs, he realised that it was pointing at the pole star—and therefore ran north–south. But in megalithic times, the pole star was not in its present position; so the builders of Callanish must have aligned the stones without its help. ‘It struck me,’ said Thom, ‘that these boys were engineers, like me.’ And as he examined megalithic sites all over the British Isles and Europe, he became increasingly certain that they had been constructed with painstaking accuracy by men who knew all about geometry and engineering. The key to the construction was a measure that Thom discovered by comparing hundreds of measurements: the megalithic yard, 2·72 feet. It seemed to have been in use from Scotland to Spain. But why were the stones erected? Thom reached the conclusion that they had been vast calculating machines, whose chief purpose was to predict eclipses of the moon. There were so many, says Thom, because obsolete ‘observatories’ were always being replaced with new ones. On the question of why ancient man had erected these vast seasonal calendars, Thom had little to say; he seemed to feel that they were merely huge clocks. Yet his theory remained startling enough, for it implied that the men of nearly four thousand years ago had a civilisation sufficiently complex to require a standard unit all over Europe. (The implications are even more startling since carbon dating has pushed back the dates by about a thousand years.) Professor Gerald Hawkins was later to popularise Thom’s ideas in his best-selling Stonehenge Decoded.
Now Lethbridge produced an even stranger hypothesis. Since most of the megaliths are not visible from the sea—where they might serve as landmarks for sailors—could they have been intended to be visible from the air—to serve as guides to some kind of aircraft? Which would seem to suppose that our earth was visited in prehistoric times by men in flying machines. Unlike Däniken, Lethbridge is not convinced that the answer is yes; he subtitled the book A Fantasy? Yet he had always been struck by the similarity of ancient objects from Europe and America. Easter Islanders believe that certain planets are inhabited and that there are people living on the moon. Our space probes have proved that this is unlikely—but then, primitive people would simply know that the visiting aliens came from ‘up there’. The ancient inhabitants of Easter Island certainly seem to have known the difference between the planets and the stars, and that the sun is the centre of the solar system. (They say: ‘All the planets worship the sun.’) They also believe that an invisible race of people live among us. As to the mysterious statues of Easter Island—whose erection is as much a mystery as Stonehenge—Lethbridge finds the most interesting tradition that the statues were transported from far away and set up in their present position by a king who could command magical power—‘mana’.
If Lethbridge had lived another five years, he would have found exciting confirmation of his ideas in the researches of Robert Temple, an Oriental scholar who was intrigued by the astronomical knowledge of an African tribe called the Dogon. Modern astronomers know that the dog star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, is actually a double star; it has an invisible companion, known as Sirius B, which is a white dwarf, a star in which the atoms have collapsed in on themselves, giving it enormous density. The Dogon not only have a tradition that says that all creation originated in Sirius B (which they call the Digitaria star); they also know that it is ‘the smallest and heaviest of all stars’, that it rotates on its axis, has an elliptical orbit, and revolves around Sirius A every fifty years. Temple rightly feels that such accuracy of information is incredible for a primitive tribe. In The Sirius Mystery, he argues skilfully that their knowledge probably came from the ancient Egyptians. An Egyptian treatise attributed to Hermes Trismegistos—the legendary founder of magic—asserts that Hermes landed on earth to teach men the arts of civilisation, then returned to his home in the stars.
Temple also has an interesting observation about Stonehenge. He notes that, like the Rollright stones of Oxfordshire, it had sixty stones in its outer circle.2 Temple cites evidence to support the view that this is related to the sixty-year cycle in the astronomy of the Dogon, the Hindus and the Chaldeans, the founders of astronomy. The cycle is based on the fact that Jupiter and Saturn—the father planets—came into close alignment once every sixty years. The Hindu sixty-year cycle is known as Brihaspati, the Hindu name for Jupiter. We may recollect Lethbridge’s belief that the religion of the great mother originated in India.
But Lethbridge was not thinking of Stonehenge merely as some kind of astronomical calculator, although he was aware of the theories of Professor Thom and Gerald Hawkins. What intrigued him was the power in the stones—the force to which a pendulum or dowsing rod will respond. Why was Stonehenge originally called the Giants’ Dance? Why are legends of dancing associated so persistently with stone circles? (One of the most frequent is that the megaliths were men and women who were changed to stone as a punishment for dancing on the Sabbath.) We have seen that in the final pages of Witches he suggests that stone circles were ‘accumulators’ that could be charged—like batteries—by the activity of dancing. And in Legend of the Sons of God he suggests that this activity was not simply connected with religious ritual, but was intended to enable a space craft to home-in on the stones. He calls the energy ‘bio-electricity’.
As to the ‘war in heaven’, Lethbridge advances his theory—which he properly admits to be little more than a fantasy—in the ninth chapter of the book. Why are the moon and Mars so heavily cratered? It suggests either a level of volcanic activity far beyond that of earth, or millions of years of bombardment by meteors. Of course, we know that earth’s atmosphere has protected it from meteors, most of which burn up before they reach the surface. Even so, some of the craters on Mars and the moon are so vast that meteors of that size would certainly have reached the surface of the earth. Is it not possible, he asks, that the moon and Mars suffered a real bombardment with atomic weapons? He goes on to suggest that the war took place between the inhabitants of Venus and Mars, perhaps for the mineral resources of the earth. The Martians had bases on the moon.
Lethbridge evolves his theory to explain the origin of the alien visitors. Elsewhere in the book, he makes the equally plausible suggestion that the aliens came from ‘another dimension’. In fact, if there is anything in Temple’s Sirius theory, this suggestion is rather more plausible than the Venus-Mars theory. Distances in space are so vast—it takes light almost nine years to reach us from Sirius—that voyagers would need some less pedestrian method than travel in our own space-time continuum.
But Lethbridge is less concerned with these cosmic speculations than with more down-to-earth problems. The notion that the megaliths could be giant accumulators had come to him when he and Mina visited the prehistoric stone circle known as the Merry Maidens, a few miles west of Penzance, in Cornwall. It consists of nineteen upright stones, mostly about four feet high. The legend asserts that they were maids who were turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath; in a nearby field are two tall stones known as the Pipers. Lethbridge took his pendulum, set it at thirty inches (the length for age), and allowed it to swing. He stood with the other hand resting on one of the stones. After a few moments, the hand on the stone began to tingle, as if a mild electric current were flowing through it, and the pendulum began to swing so strongly that it became almost parallel with the ground. The stone felt as if was moving. He counted precisely 451 gyrations before it stopped and returned to its normal swing. Allowing ten years for each turn, this gave the date of the circle as 2540 BC. Mina tried it the next day and got the same result. He also tried his pendulum on the Pipers; they gave a date of 2610 BC, which makes them more than a century older than the maidens. In this case, it was a perfectly normal response without the tingling and violent gyrations.
At this point I should speak of my own experience of the Merry Maidens, which are a ninety-minute drive from where I live. At Easter, 1975, a friend—Gaston St Pierre—suggested that I ought to test the stones for myself. I agreed to go, but without much expectation. When investigating the powers of Robert Leftwich, I had tried to use both the pendulum and the divining rod, and obtained no result with either. (My wife, on the other hand, obtained immediate results with both and proved to be a natural dowser.) We drove down on a windy, rather dull day; the entrance to the field was muddy and the grass waterlogged.
Gaston produced two dowsing rods, and handed one to me. It was made of two thin strips of whalebone from an old corset bound together at one end with cotton. When I took hold of the two ends between my thumbs and forefingers, he explained I was holding it wrongly. The ends have to be bent outwards at an angle of about ninety degrees, so the rod is in a state of tension, like a spring.
I now walked between two stones on the west side of the circle; the rod suddenly jumped upwards. Suspecting that I had caused this myself, I readjusted it, and walked back; again, the rod twisted upwards. Gaston said: ‘Ah, you are an upper.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘For some people it points up, for others, down. I am a downer.’
Subsequent experiments have led me to wonder if it is as simple as that. If I walk along our kitchen holding the rod, it dips over a spot where I know there is an underground water pipe. But near the standing stones, it invariably twists upwards. (Many dowsers find that the rod twists upwards when held above the solar plexus, and downwards when held below it.) The next time I visited the Merry Maidens, I was accompanied by the writer David Cornwell (John Le Carre) who lives nearby. Like me, he was expecting that it wouldn’t work. (‘These things never do for me.’) In fact, he proved to be a natural dowser, the rod twisting upward so strongly that it almost turned itself inside out. But although he seemed to be an ‘upper’ for most of the time, there were places near the circle where his rod dipped downward. More recently, I took the psychic Matthew Manning to the Merry Maidens. As he walked towards them from the stone stile at the western edge of the field, the rod rose and fell as regularly as a metronome every four paces.
At first I suspected that I was causing the rod to twist upwards by unconsciously changing the pressure—this is easy to do. Two simple experiments convinced me this was not so. Walking up to the stones, I tried to make it move downwards instead; it refused. Again, I tried a different way of holding the whalebone strips, twisting the ends inward, so that all the natural tension of the rod points downward, at an angle of a few degrees from the horizontal. Approaching the stones, the rod still twists upward against its natural tension.
The force seems to be in the stones themselves, and in between them. It also extends in a line from the stone circle to an outlying stone which lies half buried in the ground. The centre of the circle also gives a powerful response. It is possible to walk across it with the eyes tightly closed, and to know when you are over the centre by the response of the rod. When I first did this, I had the impression that the response was somehow connected with my solar plexus.3
What is this force to which the rod is responding? It seems to be magnetic or electrical in nature. The Welsh dowser Bill Lewis is convinced that it is produced by underground streams, and that two or more of them cross underneath all major standing stones. He believes, further, that the standing stones act as some kind of amplifier for this force and that it circles the stone in a spiral, with two ‘coils’ hidden underground and five above. In his book Earth Magic, Francis Hitching has described how two physicists from London University—Professor John Taylor and Dr Eduardo Balinovski—decided to check the theory with their electrical measuring instruments. They took a gaussmeter—which measures magnetic fields—to a twelve-foot megalith near Crickhowell, in South Wales. As soon as the probe was pointed at the stone, the needle on the meter swung across the dial. In a later experiment, the two physicists constructed a kind of wooden lift-pulley that would raise the gaussmeter up and down the stone; as it moved up, the needle again revealed that the magnetic field of the stone had different strength at different points. Bill Lewis made chalk marks to indicate where he felt the spiral to be, and again, these areas of the stone showed a strength about double that of the rest of the stone. All this seemed to prove conclusively that, for some unknown reason, the stone had a far more powerful ‘charge’ than the land around it.
Lewis made another curious observation: that the direction of the spiral changes once a month—so the stone changes its polarity. He has no idea why this should be so. (But it may be worth pointing out that the astrological tradition also asserts that the heavens change their polarity once a month, as a result of which half the signs of the zodiac—Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius—are linked to extraversion, while the other half—Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces—are regarded as introvert.) Professor Taylor has pointed out that none of Bill Lewis’s theories can be regard as proved scientifically.
Lethbridge was aware that there was a contradictory element in his assumption that the megaliths were set up as ‘accumulators’ or beacons; stone circles may look like induction coils, but what about great avenues of stones, like those at Carnac in Brittany? So he introduced an alternative assumption. He had studied similar rows of stones on Dartmoor, and made the observation that Black Tor, when projected, cuts another row at Warren House. He writes: ‘It may be coincidence, but these two lines could have given you a cross bearing on rich deposits of tin …’ He goes on:
The two rows mentioned are not the only suggestive ones. That at Sharp Tor when produced runs very close to Avebury itself. Those at Fernworthy, Chagford and Higher White Tor hit the great monolith on the summit of Exmoor near the Chains … It has been hinted that Carnac might be the most important place in the whole system. If so, and if there is anything in the idea at all, one at least of the stone rows on Dartmoor should give an approximate bearing on Carnac. Actually, three do, the double row on Headland Warren, and the single ones at Dartmeet and Butterdon.
Now if Lethbridge had spent more time reading other people’s books, he might have discovered that his idea was less wildly eccentric than he supposed. Half a century earlier, on June 30, 1921, a Hereford businessman was riding his horse across the hills near Bredwardine when he was suddenly struck by a kind of revelation. The English countryside is criss-crossed by various footpaths and farm tracks. But as Alfred Watkins looked down from his hilltop, it struck him that there seemed to be another network of lines connecting up old churches, standing stones, hilltops and ancient mounds (known as tumps). In some cases, there were still remains of such ‘old straight tracks’. But it seemed clear to him that such tracks had once existed, forming a network of straight lines across the landscape.
Alfred Watkins was not an ‘occultist’, or a member of any esoteric or magical group. He was sixty-five years old, a brewer, and a local magistrate. In his youth he had been a brewer’s representative working for his father, which involved riding all over Herefordshire. He was a lover of the countryside and became an enthusiastic photographer; many of his plates of countryside scenery can still be seen in Hereford Museum. And, like most lovers of the English landscape, Watkins was fascinated by ancient sites. He was familiar with a book called The Green Roads of England by R. Hippesley Cox (1914), which opposed the view that hill forts (like Wandlebury) were merely local defences, thrown up wherever they happened to be needed, and argued that they were part of a highly developed system of travel ways—staging posts, as it were. Long before Alexander Thom, Cox had suggested that megalithic circles like Stonehenge were astronomical observatories, which implied that Stone-Age—or Bronze-Age—man was more sophisticated than had generally been supposed. So Watkins was not entirely unprepared for his sudden vision of a system of old straight tracks criss-crossing England.
He called them ‘leys’ or ‘leas’, borrowing the word from the archaeological writer Williams-Freeman, who had also pointed out that ancient landmarks seem to be connected by invisible tracks. Many place names end in ‘ley’ or ‘leigh’, and etymological dictionaries declare that it means an enclosed field; Watkins pointed out that there are dozens of ‘ley’ names to which this explanation cannot apply, and suggested that it simply meant a grassy track across the country.
Watkins attached no mystical significance to his leys. He took the straightforward view that they were simply roads. Some of them may have had a certain religious significance, in that they joined old churches—and probably old pagan sites—and others may have had some astronomical use, connected with sunrise and sunset. But most of them, Watkins thought, were simply trade routes. In a wild, heavily wooded, sparsely populated country, these routes would tend to move from hilltop to hilltop. When they descended into the valleys, their course would be marked by standing stones, crosses, man-made mounds, gaps in hedges, and so on.
And how was all this accomplished by Stone-Age man? By a simple method still used by modern surveyors. If a man wishes to mark a straight line from where he is standing to a distant hilltop, he needs only three long staves. He sticks one of them in the ground, closes one eye, and looks past the staff towards the hilltop; an assistant then places another staff in a straight line from the first. (The surveyor, of course, has to signal exactly where to place the staff.) Then the third staff is placed further along still, in such a position that it is blotted out by the second staff. The first staff is pulled out of the ground, and the whole process is repeated. The result is a perfectly straight line.
This led Watkins to an interesting explanation of such monuments as the Long Man of Wilmington, who seems to be opening a pair of vast doors—or holding a long staff in either hand. Surely the man who was entrusted with the work of constructing the leys would be of priestly rank? In which case, it would be natural to represent him in drawings at sacred sites? The same explanation could apply to the staves carried by mummers, tuttimen, even morris dancers (who often carry two short sticks in either hand). They could be the staff of office of the priest-surveyor who drew the leys.
Surprisingly, Watkin’s harmless suggestion provoked violent hostility. The editor of Antiquity magazine declined an advertisement for The Old Straight Track (1925) on the ground that it was a crank work. But the book also found many friends—not cranks, but serious-minded country lovers who enjoyed searching for the remains of leys, and reporting their finds to Watkins at the Straight Track Postal Club. The qualifications for the recognition of a ley were fairly strict—it had to be acknowledged by several independent observers. Watkins died in 1935, but ley-hunting continued, although interrupted by the war.
In the late 1930s, a leading ley-hunter, Major F. C. Tyler, made an observation that puzzled his fellow enthusiasts: that leys often consist of two parallel tracks. This hardly seemed to make sense; why make two tracks close together when one would suffice? It seemed to suggest that Watkins could have been mistaken about the whole trade-route theory. Many ley hunters were also discouraged and disconcerted by theories about the alignments of ancient sites. In 1909, the astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer had observed that Stonehenge, Old Sarum (the ancient Salisbury) and Grovelly Castle lie at the angles of an equilateral triangle. A ley-hunter named Arthur Lawton began to note similar alignments, and he and his followers soon covered the ordnance survey map with dozens of squares, triangles and other geometric figures. Ley-hunting seemed to be getting a bit out of hand.
Yet at this time, when there was a certain confusion and disarray among the members of the Old Track Club, a dowser named Guy Underwood was rediscovering the leys by his own methods. Underwood, like Watkins, was a respected figure in a small country town—Bradford on Avon, in Wiltshire. He was a solicitor, a JP and a local councillor; he was married with one son (who was killed in the war).
Underwood had been intrigued by theories of two British dowsers, Captain Robert Boothby and Reginald Smith of the British Museum. Boothby asserted that barrows and other prehistoric sites were crossed by underground streams, and that long barrows had a stream running along their full length; Smith stated that at the centre of every prehistoric site a spot could be found from which a number of streams radiated; he called these ‘blind springs’. When he retired—at the end of the war—Underwood decided to devote his days to exploring prehistoric sites with a dowsing rod. He quickly reached the conclusion that Boothby and Smith were both correct about underground streams and blind springs; his rod detected these without difficulty. He found that the rod responded ‘negatively’—that is to say, the left hand seemed to take most of the ‘pull’. And then, to his surprise, he found another type of force that caused a pull on the right hand. This did not seem to be water, but some magnetic force under the earth. In fact, there seemed to be two types of magnetic force, one at least twice as wide as the other. Underwood called the narrower type ‘track lines’; they seemed to consist of two parallel lines of magnetic force, between one and two feet apart. He called the other, more powerful, type ‘aquastats’; these consisted of two sets of parallel lines„ like two railway tracks running parallel. Sometimes, the ‘negative’ water lines and the positive aquastats ran along the same course. These he found particularly significant because they seemed to explain why certain sites were chosen as holy. Because he found so many of these ‘double lines’ on sacred sites, he named them ‘holy lines’.
Track lines, he discovered, seemed to be used by animals for their regular perambulations; moreover, all old roads seemed to be aligned on them, arguing that early man also recognised them instinctively. But such lines could not be identified with Watkins’ ‘old straight tracks’, because neither they nor the roads aligned on them ran straight for long. The same applied to the other two types of line. They might meander like the track of a drunken man, or proceed in a series of loops or S-bends. Sometimes they formed whorls or whirlpools, and such shapes seemed to have a particular significance on sacred sites. He found that all ‘lines’ cross one another at regular intervals, so that a drawing of a track line or aquastat looks rather like a string of sausages.
Underwood had no doubt that he had discovered ‘a principle of Nature … unidentified by science’.
Its main characteristics are that it appears to be generated within the Earth, and to cause wave motion perpendicular to Earth’s surface; that it has great penetrative power; that it affects the nerve cells of animals; that it forms spiral patterns; and is controlled by mathematical laws involving principally the numbers 3 and 7. Until it can be otherwise identified, I shall refer to it as the earth force … [It] manifests itself in lines of discontinuity, which I call geodetic lines, and which form a network on the surface of the earth.
So Underwood’s geodetic force is undoubtedly related closely to Watkins’ leys. He adds:
The philosophers and priests of the old religions seem to have believed that—particularly when manifested in spiral forms—it [the earth force] was involved with … the generative powers of Nature; that it was part of the mechanism by which what we call Life comes into being; and to have been the ‘Great arranger’—that balancing principle which keeps all Nature in equilibrium, and for which biologists still seek. Plato gave this force the name of ‘Demiurge’ …
Such assertions may sound highly speculative; yet Underwood started from scratch, without preconceptions. He began by assuming that dowsing is an electrical response, because all streams have a weak electric current.4 Yet dowsers react only to underground streams, which seems to dispose of the notion that the rod responds to electricity. Underwood thought the answer lay in the negative nature of the dowser’s response to water, which suggests that an underground stream somehow interrupts a positive force in the earth itself, ‘in the same way that a wire over a candle casts a shadow on the ceiling’.
Many dowsers, he discovered, are wholly negative: that is to say, they can dowse only for water. Such men may show extreme sensitivity to water. Underwood cites the well-known French dowser Barthelemy Bleton who discovered his abilities accidentally at the age of seven because he always felt sick and faint when he sat on a certain spot. Digging at this spot revealed an underground spring powerful enough to drive a mill wheel. (Similarly, I have watched a Cornish water diviner who dowsed by interlocking the fingers of both hands; above water, his hands rose and fell with a violent pumping motion that left him perspiring and breathless.) These negative dowsers seem unable to pick up track lines or aquastats. ‘Positive’ dowsers, on the other hand, can pick up underground streams and track lines, and their response is altogether more delicate. A negative dowser would not be aware that an underground stream had a zigzag course because he would be reacting too strongly to the total field; a positive dowser could trace the course of the stream with precision.
Underwood spent the last years of his life investigating various ‘sacred sites’ with his divining rod; the results were published after his death in The Pattern of the Past (1969). He was particularly fascinated by Stonehenge, and his investigation showed that it was the centre of geodetic lines. The great outer ditch, the earliest part of Stonehenge, is defined by the enormous loop of an aquastat which forms an almost complete circle; one end of this aquastat runs northward and curls in a double loop around the Heel Stone. Underwood concluded that Stonehenge is a kind of whirlpool of geodetic lines, with dozens of minor eddies. It is hardly surprising that it should have been chosen as sacred by the Neolithic priests of the moon cult.
An examination of the White Horse of Uffington—the one that looks like a dragon—revealed that its weird outline is almost wholly defined by geodetic lines. Dragon Hill, below the horse, has two bare patches of chalk where the grass never grows; legend says that dragon’s blood was spilled there. Underwood found that the two bare patches covered blind springs, ‘which themselves mark the terminations of right-handed multiple spirals—a phenomenon of great sanctity and rarity’. The Cerne Abbas giant again is defined almost wholly by geodetic lines. Underwood believed that the ancient priests—who were, of course, also dowsers—traced these lines, noted their resemblance to a human figure, or a horse, as the case may be, and so decided that the site was sacred. This would explain the rather weird drawings of many of the hill figures—for example, Lethbridge’s Wandlebury giants.
Underwood extended his researches to medieval churches and cathedrals, and concluded that they were also aligned on geodesics. ‘With few exceptions, the naves of churches and cathedrals are aligned on a geodetic line running along the central aisle and terminating in a blind spring enclosed at the chancel step by one or more spirals.’ This, of course, is hardly surprising, since we know that most old churches and cathedrals were built on pagan sites. But the precise alignment of the nave, chancel, altar and so on implies that the builders of cathedrals—traditionally, the Freemasons—also knew about the forces of the earth and continued the ancient tradition of the priests of the old religion.
Underwood made no attempt to publicise his findings; probably he anticipated derision. At the same time, he had no doubt whatever of the revolutionary importance of what he had discovered. In the last chapter of The Pattern of the Past he writes with uncharacteristic immodesty: ‘By stating that I have written this book for posterity I risk being thought presumptuous, but because that is exactly what I have felt compelled to do, the fact must be admitted without apology.’ He felt that he had discovered an unrecognised force that had been the basis of all ancient religion—Oriental as well as Western. (The spirals, he felt, explained the universality of the serpent symbol.)
For a long time I was unwilling to believe that I was on to something, if not new, at least unwritten. But as I delved into books and papers, and as I questioned and corresponded, I was to discover that in a great many spheres of learning the effects of the Earth Force were accepted without recognition of the Force itself. Biologists, naturalists, archaeologists, historians and many other practitioners of the -ologies and -isms have observed anomalies of growth and construction, and a world-wide code of symbols, without looking further.’
But he also felt that he had only begun to scratch the surface of the mystery. It was interesting to know that the great avenues of stone at Carnac were built on parallel underground streams. But why should that make the site sacred? How did the ancients use the force? ‘The question must arise as to what use geodetic lines are to man. As yet I do not know enough to answer.’ And, regrettably, he died before he was able to come to any decision.
Underwood several times makes the interesting observation that the patterns of great temples like Stonehenge could be comprehended only from the air. Yet he never entertained Lethbridge’s wild hypothesis that perhaps they were intended to be seen from the air.
This same idea had occurred independently to another student of antique monuments named John Michell. In fact, Michell published the idea in a book that appeared in 1967, before Lethbridge or Underwood—or even von Däniken—had committed their speculations to print. The book received less attention than it deserved, perhaps because its title—The Flying Saucer Vision—made it sound as if it was merely another addition to the voluminous literature on UFOs. In fact, Michell was not primarily a ‘ufologist’; he was a retiring, slightly eccentric scholar with an enthusiastic devotion to Plato, and wide knowledge of ancient historians, philosophers and mystics.
His rather curious erudition led him to discover that the ancient Chinese had their equivalents of leys, which they called ‘dragon paths’ or Lung Meis; lines from hilltop to hilltop that were supposed to be the routes of dragons flying between their nests. Michell also wrote of the Chinese science of feng-shui, ‘the science of wind and water’ (or geomancy) which is basically a philosophical (or religious) system concerned with the harmony between man and nature. Feng-shui treats nature as a living entity, and believes that man must learn to conform to it if he is to be happy. According to feng-shui, the surface of the earth is a ‘dim mirror’ of the powers of the heavens (i.e. the stars and planets of astrology). ‘Wherever there is nature’s breath pulsating, there will be visible on earth some elevation of the ground.’5 It seems to differ from Watkins’ theory of leys in certain basic respects—for example, feng-shui holds that benevolent powers usually reside in crooked, wandering lines, and that straight lines are associated with negative forces. Yet it is remarkably close to Underwood’s theory of geodetic lines. Basically, as Michell points out, the ideas of the ley-hunters are a rediscovery of principles that have been recognised in China for thousands of years.
Speaking of Watkins, Michell observes: ‘Whereas Watkins supposed that the leys were ancient footpaths, modern ley explorers are inclined to see them as having some meaning as lines only to be seen from above.’ And he remarks that ancient religious sites, hilltops and artifical mounds (like Silbury) are linked by a system of ley lines. He also notes that there have been an unusual number of sitings of flying saucers above Cley Hill, near Warminster, where several leys intersect. Yet, at this point, Michell seems inclined to regard the leys as markings on the surface of the earth, not as lines of force running below its surface.
But in his next book, The View Over Atlantis (1969), Michell takes this conclusive step. ‘It was as if some flow of current followed the course of these man-made alignments’, he says, summarising Watkins. But, in fact, Watkins never went this far, even though, towards the end of his life, he was inclined to abandon the view that the leys were trade routes. Michell has stumbled on Underwood’s discovery, the earth force. The Atlantis referred to in his title is not the legendary lost continent of Plato, but the ‘ancient knowledge system’ that underlies the ‘old straight tracks’. Michell now boldly identifies the leys with the ‘dragon paths’ of China, and quotes a nineteenth-century traveller, W. E. Geil, who was informed: ‘The positions of [the Great Mound of Ching] was fixed by men of magic as being auspicious. The dragon pulse, meaning the magnetic currents with which the dragon is supposed to be connected, is good. The mountain south is a dragon at rest. The river north is a dragon in motion.’
This leads Michell to one of his most exciting ideas. He points out that the whole face of China is heavily ‘landscaped’ in accordance with the laws of feng-shui, even to the extent of building an artificial hill on which to place a city. He elsewhere6 quotes Ernst Borschmann’s book on Chinese landscape: ‘Certain summits of the neighbouring mountains, often the main summit, are crowned with pagodas, small temples or pavilions to harmonise the magic forces of heaven and earth. The thought is akin, for instance, to our conception of the outflow of a magnetic force from a pointed conductor. And the Chinese geomancer also regards the forms of nature as a magnetic field.’ This knowledge of the harmony of heaven and earth, Michell believes, existed all over the ancient world, and was the foundation of the religion of the earth mother and the sky god. Man recognised that the harmony of society depended on the harmony of the earth force. And so in ancient China, ancient Greece, ancient Britain and Gaul, men built their temples where the forces of the earth were most powerful. Legends of the ‘Golden Age’ were not an invention; there was once a kind of golden age on earth. It was not the kind of golden age depicted by the creators of Utopias, with their various political systems, but a time when men lived in harmony with the forces of the earth and made use of these forces to supply their simple needs. Nowadays this concept of harmony has vanished; men tear up the earth and leave it scarred and disfigured with slag heaps, or build ugly skyscraper blocks. Consequently, man lives in an increasingly claustrophobic civilisation, endlessly beset with problems of poverty and violence.
Michell’s observations on Chinese geomancy are confirmed by the scientist and historian Joseph Needham in a section on geomancy in his monumental Science and Civilisation in China.7 Feng-shui is defined as ‘the art of adopting the residences of the living and the dead so as to cooperate and harmonise with the local currents of the cosmic breath’. Needham adds that the force and nature of the invisible currents ‘would be from hour to hour modified by the positions of the heavenly bodies’, so that these also had to be taken into account. The earth force consisted of two currents, Yin and Yang, the negative and the positive. (These obviously correspond to Underwood’s negative and positive lines.)
There is only one point at which the Chinese idea seems to conflict with those of the ley hunters. Leys are straight lines. But Needham says of the Chinese: ‘There was in general a strong preference for tortuous and winding roads, walls and structures, which seemed to fit into the landscape rather than to dominate it.’ Here Underwood may serve as intermediary to reconcile the two views. His track lines seldom ran for any great distance in a straight line. But lines of earth force may nevertheless run for long distances in various forms, track lines alternating with water lines and the whorl-like aquastats. Lines of earth force cannot be expected to run absolutely straight, any more than streams do; yet streams run for long distances and connect distant places. Moreover, streams may be deepened and straightened by skilful engineering, or even connected together by canals. (Perhaps the standing stones played some part in canalising the forces.) This was also part of the art of feng-shui.8
Michell writes:
A use of feng-shui that became even more important with the growth of the Chinese empire was to assist the concentration of the power in the imperial capital by diverting the natural, serpentine streams of earth energy into long straight channels and directing them towards the emperor at the seat of government in Peking. These channels were the imperial dragon paths (lung mei) of China, carefully preserved even into the present time by the Government Board of Rites; on their course, no buildings or tombs other than those of the emperor and his family were allowed to be sited.
And he mentions a case of a Japanese student who had committed suicide and was buried on a lung mei; as soon as the authorities found out, the grave had to be moved.
In ancient Europe, Michell believes, man also learned to make use of the earth forces. In the Chinese science of acupuncture, pins are placed in the skin at the junction of certain lines of vital energy that criss-cross the body. The great menhirs and dolmens serve the same function on the surface of the earth. This is what Borschmann meant when he described pagodas and temples as ‘pointed conductors’.
Why ‘dragon lines’? The answer probably lies in Underwood’s observation that the whorls of his aquastats look like coiled serpents. The dragon and the serpent symbol tend to be interchangeable. The whorls are the positive form of the earth force. This speculation seems to be supported by the prevalence of the whorl (or spiral) symbol in ancient Celtic monuments. Evan Hadingham’s book Ancient Carvings in Britain contains dozens of illustrations of these Celtic spirals and concentric circles. Speaking of the ‘crude circles, entwined spirals and meandering zigzags’ carved in Lhwyd’s cave in Ireland, he comments: ‘The vision behind these patterns seems quite different from the vivid representational art of the European cave painters.’ And to understand what is being represented in the whorls and zigzags, it is necessary only to look at Underwood’s drawings of the forces he detected under Stonehenge or Dragon Hill. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the Lhwyd’s cave drawings date from about 2500 BC, the period of the Neolithic farmers who raised Silbury Hill and the first circle of Stonehenge. John Michell’s Earth Spirit book contains an illustration showing similar enormous carvings on a rocky hillside at Routing Lynn, in Northumberland. Michell speculates that drawings showing St Michael driving his lance into the dragon symbolise the tapping of the earth force by the ‘acupuncture’ system of standing stones.
He also observes that many hills and mounds named after the dragon ‘stand at the junction of well-marked leys, and in one case, at least, the straight line between them is of the highest precision, elaborately engineered and of obvious astronomical significance’. He is referring to the ‘great ley’ that runs from St Michael’s Mount—the beautiful island off the coast of Cornwall—through stone circles on Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor, the ‘Mump’ at Burrowbridge, Glastonbury Tor and the Avebury circle, along a ridge that marks the edge of the Midland Plain, and across the east coast above Lowestoft. The two greatest abbeys of medieval England, Glastonbury and Bury St Edmunds, lie on it; so do a remarkable number of churches dedicated to St Michael (who, as we may recall, Lethbridge believed to be Lugh, the sun god).
Michell makes another interesting observation that throws a new light on the problem of the tuttimen of Hungerford (near the Vale of the White Horse). He writes: ‘Watkins compared the straight track leading to the Greek cities with the leys of Britain, and found in both cases an association with Hermes, known to the Egyptians as Thoth, to the Gauls [Celts] as Theutates, the name surviving in the numerous Tot or Toot hills all over England.’ This comment brings many things into focus. Hermes is the Greek god of fertility—he is responsible for making the corn grow—and is credited with inventing animal sacrifice, another basic part of the Druidic ritual. He is the god of roads, and heaps of stones were raised at crossroads in his honour. In Egypt he was Thoth, the god of learning, who later became transformed into Hermes Trismegistos, the legendary founder of magic and alchemy, to whom is attributed the most famous of magical sayings: ‘As above, so below.’ In Celtic mythology he is Theutates, after whom the tuttimen are named. The tuttimen carry staves; Hermes carries a caduceus, a staff with two serpents twined around it; the serpent is one of the basic symbols of alchemy as well as of ancient religion. The Reverend W. Stukely, one of the early writers on Avebury—a prehistoric temple even older than Stonehenge—discerned the design of a vast serpent in the landscape. Both Lethbridge and Michell have speculated on the purpose of the great Serpent Mound of Adams County, Ohio, pointing out that its shape—a writhing snake—would be visible only from the air.
What begins to emerge is a complex yet astonishingly integrated theory of ‘the occult’. Lethbridge came very close to grasping the whole picture, even though he was unacquainted with the work of Underwood, Michell or even The Dawn of Magic. His inspiration came from dowsing. He guessed that the earth has its lines of force, and he felt that force as a tingling sensation in the palms of his hands at the Merry Maidens. He guessed the importance of alignments and worked out for himself a considerable portion of the ‘great ley’ that crosses Dartmoor. He even stumbled on the significance of Hermes; he quotes Caesar on a number of occasions to the effect that Mercury (Hermes) is the chief of the Celtic gods.
The earth itself is, in a certain basic respect, a living being, and its surface is permeated with magnetic forces that are influenced, like the tides, by the heavenly bodies, particularly the moon. But these forces are not purely magnetic or electrical. The most important thing about them is that they can interact with the human mind. A ‘negative dowser’ can be shaken by them so violently that he falls down or feels faint. Moreover, the human mind itself can affect these earth forces, somehow causing them to ‘record’ strong emotions—as Lethbridge realised on Ladram beach.
Ancient man understood these forces, and knew something of how to harness them. The standing stones served two purposes: to canalise the force, and to act as outlets. They could be compared to the needles placed at acupuncture points in the human body, which serve to stimulate and direct the vital energies. They also made the energy available to human beings—perhaps even (if Bill Lewis is right) acted as amplifiers. But the chief clue to their actual use comes from Standing Rock, in South Dakota, a megalith against which Sioux Indian medicine men used to press their spines to revitalise their powers of telepathy, healing and second sight. It would seem that these powers of the earth can be used by human beings to activate their psychic forces. Moreover, many of the stones and the wells standing on ley lines are reputed to have powers of healing and fertilisation. According to the thirteenth-century poet Layamon, Stonehenge was a healing centre where all kinds of people went to cure their ills; in Brittany, peasant women still embrace the standing stones to ensure fertility; the holed stone called Men-an-tol in Cornwall is still used to cure children of rickets (they have to crawl through the hole nine times). But the force can also be dangerous; as has been mentioned earlier, most dowsers believe that streams running underneath houses can cause illness—even cancer. Dowsers can be drained and exhausted by the force; Bill Lewis remarked to Francis Hitching: ‘If I feel it building up in my body, I back away very quickly.’ Like electricity, it must be treated with respect. And these effects are not confined to underground streams; many ley-hunters claim that leys can produce dizziness and disorientation.9
Lethbridge’s experience on Skellig Michael seems to suggest a connection between these earth forces and poltergeists. He was standing on a spot where the earth forces were exceptionally powerful, and where they had been ‘used’ by human beings in religious worship. Dion Fortune, the occultist, writes: ‘Whenever a place has had prayers and concentrated desires directed towards it, it forms an electrical vortex that gathers to itself a force … that can be felt and used by man.’ Skellig Michael had been the scene of a shipwreck tragedy the previous winter, which may or may not have been connected with the ‘ghoul’ Lethbridge felt as he clambered down the cliff. Then the force was unleashed, perhaps triggered by his own uneasiness, knocking him on his face.
This would also seem to suggest that poltergeists in general are connected with the earth forces—earth forces that have been affected by human negativity. In fact, Lethbridge came to exactly this conclusion, mentioning the case of a poltergeist on the Isle of Mull that caused all the bells in a house to start ringing. If he is correct, then a poltergeist is a kind of active ‘ghoul’. This is not as strange as it sounds. Mina felt as if someone were urging her to jump over the cliff at Ladram. Dowsers can be shaken by the presence of water. A human being can apparently become a conductor of the earth force, in its positive or negative forms. Underwood pointed out that nearly all children can dowse, which means that they are sensitive to the earth forces. When children reach adolescence, they fall victim to forces of depression and confusion, which may well trigger the negative earth force.
And surely, if the force of water—or a ley line—can cause a dowsing rod to twist, it could also, when concentrated, move far heavier objects? Lethbridge actually suggests this: ‘If such power can be utilised, surely that is how Stonehenge and other monuments must have been moved and erected?’ ‘Mana’ is the name given to this power of the earth by the Milanesians, and Lethbridge mentions the legend that the stones of Easter Island were erected by a king who used the force of mana. The suggestion will strike rationalists as preposterous; yet rationalists find it difficult to explain how monuments like Stonehenge were raised by Neolithic farmers. One menhir in Brittany, now fallen and broken, was over sixty feet high, while any number of standing stones in Brittany are between ten and twenty feet high; it baffles the imagination to conceive how they could have been erected.
Both Michell and Lethbridge also mention that ghosts and other supernatural occurrences seem to be associated with ley lines. Michell writes: ‘Traditionally they are also paths of psychic activity, of apparitions, spirits of the dead or fairies, particularly on one day of the year.’ In Ireland, leys are known as fairy tracks, and The Earth Spirit has a photograph of an Irish cottage whose corner has been removed because it had been built across a fairy track. It also contains a photograph of a church path at Bishop Cannings in Wiltshire (not far from Stonehenge) where a black dog is often seen to run across the road. The apparition of a black dog is associated with the Rollright stone circle in Oxfordshire—a site linked persistently with witchcraft, even in modern times; the dog was actually seen by detectives investigating the savage ‘witchcraft murder’ of Charles Walton in a nearby field in 1945. Lethbridge devotes several paragraphs in Witches and subsequent books to apparitions of dogs, both black and white, and he recognised them as a manifestation of the site itself. (We already know that Hole House—where the white dog was seen—was associated with a Celtic religious site, and that the moor above was sacred to the sun god Lugh.) He would have been fascinated by the researches of Ivan Bunn, a collector of black dog legends in the East Anglia area. Bunn noted that almost all apparitions of black dogs—and he collected over forty from the same fairly small area—were seen near water, either the sea or rivers, and on low-lying (i.e. damp) ground. ‘In about fifty per cent of these accounts, the witnesses state that shortly after their encounter with the black dog a close relative has died suddenly.’10 Another researcher, Phil Grant, noted that in the Bournemouth area, over ninety per cent of the UFO and supernatural phenomena, including black dogs and pumas, were sited on ley lines.11
But why black dogs—or any other kind of dog? Lethbridge’s explanation is typically original. Anyone who thinks hard enough about something, he believes, can imprint the thought—or emotion—on the surrounding ‘field’. This is particularly so in damp places. So supposing a young man, sitting on the banks of a stream, indulges in auto-erotic fantasies about a naked girl. Because of its intensity, the thought imprints itself on the ‘naiad field’ of the stream. And later, some casual visitor to the spot, thinking about nothing in particular, is astonished to see a naked girl hovering around the stream …
Black dogs were associated with Diana, the witch goddess, whose cult was particularly strong in country areas. It is easy to see why their image should be associated with such areas. But why as harbingers of death? Because some level of the mind already knows about the future; this is its method of conveying the information symbolically. Similarly, Carl Jung believed that flying saucers are a production of the subconscious mind, a ‘projection’ of modern man’s desire for a saviour, and ‘intervention from heaven’.
All this suggests that there is a close interaction between the human mind and the earth forces. When this occurs spontaneously it is called a poltergeist; when it happens deliberately, it is called magic or psychokinesis.
John Michell speculates that in ancient times, man was a nomad who moved from one religious site to another. Even today, some primitive people live like this; Charles Mountford has described a journey with Australian aborigines, travelling along the earth lines that join sacred centres, in order to re-animate their forces. Each tribe looks after its own stretch of line. They believe that each centre can bring about the fertility of a particular plant or animal. Rocks at these places show the symbol of the serpent; but the aborigines say that the power does not reside in the drawing, but in the rock itself. Michell suggests that ancient European man—perhaps 5,000 years before Christ—led a similar existence. There were no monuments at the sacred sites then, for man was directly aware of their earth forces. Then the tribes began to settle; they became farmers. They erected monuments on the sites—huge stones to facilitate the flow of energy. ‘Magi’ and priests became necessary. Monuments like Carnac and Stonehenge were not only ‘markers’ of the lines of force, but were also aligned to the stars, since the earth force varied with the heavens. People who live near the sea—as I do—keep a tide table handy. I know that there is no point in taking the coast road past Portmellon in winter because it will probably be flooded, and if a high tide combines with an inshore wind, the resulting waves may knock down sea walls and wash slates off rooftops. Primitive people who lived close to nature needed to know about earth power. Michell has pointed out that a map showing ancient dwellings is almost the reverse of a modern map. You would expect ancient man to choose sheltered valleys and forests; instead he seemed to prefer bleak hilltops and moorlands. He made dew ponds on the tops of hills by lining hollows with an insulating material so that they were colder than the surrounding land and would precipitate dew. But why bother when there must have been more convenient streams in the valley? The usual answer is: because he was afraid of enemies, and wanted a good defensive position. This hardly seems likely in a sparsely populated land; besides, as Michell points out, some of the hill forts were so vast that it would have taken an army of thousands to man them; the Dorsetshire cursus, for example, is over six miles long. Primitive man lived on hilltops because they were holy places and centres of natural power. He travelled along the ridgeways for the same reason, which is why so many dew ponds and stone circles are found on these roads that ran against the skyline.
Primitive religious observances were an interaction between man and nature, between the human mind and the earth forces. You could say that their purpose was to propitiate the gods, or to keep the earth ‘sweet’. If bad vibrations can pass into the earth and cause a site to be accursed, good vibrations can have the reverse effect. (It is horrifying to think what the earth’s ‘field’ must be like after the wars and disasters of the twentieth century.) ‘In this way,’ says Michell in The Old Stones of Land’s End, ‘the earth, understood as a living creature, were made fertile and contented, a mood which it communicated to all living things inhabiting its body.’
When I visited the Merry Maidens, and later, the nearby Boscawen-un circle (one of the oldest in England), I found myself wondering why both contained nineteen stones—it seemed a curious number. Similarly, Hawkins found himself puzzled by the fifty-six ‘Aubrey holes’ in the outer ditch of Stonehenge—its oldest part. He fed astronomical data about the second millennium BC into a computer, and made the interesting discovery that an eclipse of the moon or sun occurred every nineteen years, when the winter moon rose over the Heel Stone. It was not quite every nineteen years—the exact figure was 18.61. A nineteen-year interval would have been inaccurate; the simplest way to calculate correctly would have been with two lots of nineteen years plus an eighteen. The total is fifty-six—the number of the Aubrey holes. By simply moving a stone every year from one hole to the next, the priests would have had an accurate computer of lunar eclipses. The Merry Maidens and Boscawen-un are slightly less accurate computers. In his book Megalithic Lunar Observatories, Alexander Thom has shown how many other stone circles could have been used in the same way.
We have no way of knowing precisely how primitive man made use of his knowledge of eclipses. Did the eclipse of the moon increase the earth forces in some way so they could be used for ‘magical’ purposes? We know that even now the moon affects the human mind; police forces all over the world report a rise in crime at the time of the full moon, and mental homes take care that violent patients are in strait-jackets. It is conceivable that the priest—or shaman—was somehow able to unite the forces of his own mind with those of the earth at such times, and perhaps even transmit the power straight along the leys, as a modern engineer could transmit an electric current along a cable. At all events, there seems little doubt that the ancient Celts—and their forerunners—had a reason for wanting the sources of earth force joined together.
At this point, let us pause to enquire: how much solid evidence is there for these extraordinary theories?
The question of what constitutes evidence is controversial; for Lethbridge, it meant what he had seen and tested for himself. As a dowser, he had no doubt that some powerful force resides in the ground at places like the Merry Maidens, or possibly in the stones themselves. Underwood, another cautious and pragmatic investigator, reached the same conclusion. I am a worse dowser than either, but I certainly entertain no doubts on this particular matter. The sites were chosen because there was ‘something there’—perhaps merely blind springs, as Underwood and Bill Lewis both believe.
We know next to nothing about the ancient religion of the earth mother, except that one of its main concerns was fertility—this is still apparent in modern survivals like the Furry Dance and the hobby horse. Connect together these two known facts—that the sites were chosen for their ‘power’, and that the rituals held there were concerned with fertility—and you have a glimpse of a religion that regards the earth as a living being in the most literal sense.
All this, we must admit, proves only that ancient man had his own unique form of religion: not that he was visited by aliens from Sirius, or that he somehow managed to acquire a higher level of civilisation than historians admit. Here again, the question of evidence depends upon what the individual finds convincing. Robert Temple writes in The Sirius Mystery:
Arthur Clarke introduced me to one interesting professor after another—each with a pet mystery all his own. Derek Price, Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University, had discovered the true nature of the now famous mechanical computer of approximately 100 BC found in the Anti-Kythera shipwreck at the turn of the century and unappreciated until it was dropped on the floor in Athens, cracked open and they saw what it was. He also found traces of Babylonian mathematics in New Guinea and talked a lot about ‘the Raffles shipwreck’. Then there was Dr Alan McKay, a crystallographer of Birkbeck College at the University of London, who was interested in the Phaistos Disc of Crete, in a mysterious metal alloy found in a Chinese tomb, and in the wilder stretches of the Oxus River …
The passage is a reminder that interest in such matters is not confined to Däniken and his followers.
Lethbridge was an archaeologist; what intrigued him was the universality of ancient culture. Irish goldwork found in Palestine, Greek and Egyptian ornaments in Bronze-Age tombs, Phoenician glazing on Saxon pottery. Early Welsh settlers in America remarked that the language of the Mandan Indians had a number of Welsh words; it seemed to lend support to a legend that the Welsh Prince Madoc had led an expedition to America about AD 1170. Then there is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s assertion that the megaliths of Stonehenge originated in Africa.
Most modern archaeologists take a highly sceptical view about such matters. Jacquetta Hawkes, for example, dismisses the ‘astronomical’ theories of the megaliths as wholly untenable. Professors Richard Atkinson and Glyn Daniel lost no time in condemning Michael Dames’s great mother theory of Silbury Hill as a fairy-tale. Yet Atkinson’s book on Stonehenge—a standard work—contains a chapter entitled: ‘Was there a Mycenaean Architect?’ He explains that among the Wessex-period graves found at Stonehenge, small ribbed beads of blue faience were discovered. ‘Careful examination leaves no doubt that these beads are of Egyptian manufacture, and their sporadic occurrence both in Crete and on the Atlantic coasts of Iberia and France suggests forcibly that they reached Britain by sea … Is it then too fanciful to regard this handful of trinkets … as the tangible relics of some unsung Odyssey?’ He points out that the postern gate at Mycenae in Greece is very similar to the trilithons at Stonehenge, with mortice-and-tenon joints to hold the lintel in place. Atkinson suggests that the architect of the trilithons may have travelled from Bronze-Age Greece at the behest of some powerful British king, and speculates that the king may be buried in Silbury Hill—a guess we now know to be unfounded. The objection to the ‘great king’ theory is that such a man is unknown to history; surely a British Charlemagne or Alexander the Great would have left some traces behind, in legend if nothing else. Why, however, assume the existence of such a king? Because he provides an alternative hypothesis to the theory that there was more intercourse between Bronze-Age civilisations than is generally supposed. The great-king theory suggests that one man was powerful enough to send to North Africa or Greece for his architect. The alternative theory is that there was already a two-way traffic between England and the Mediterranean.
One of the most interesting parts of this story is still to come. In speaking of the modern dating of Stonehenge, I indicated that this has subsequently been corrected. What happened, in fact, was that certain historians and scientists began to have their doubts about the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. This depends on the discovery that all living creatures absorb a radioactive isotope of carbon known as C-14 from the atmosphere, and that when they die, the C-14 decays into nitrogen at a fixed rate. So provided an archaeological site has a few bones, the ‘carbon clock’ enables scientists to check its date within a decade or so.
The method of carbon dating depends on the assumption that the amount of C-14 in the earth’s atmosphere has remained constant. In the late 1960s, scientists devised a method of checking this by examining the rings in Bristlecone pine trees—many over 4,000 years old—in California. This revealed the startling information that only fairly recent C-14 datings can be relied on at their face value—say within 500 years. Beyond that, the dating becomes increasingly inaccurate, and greater allowances must be made. And when the C-14 dating was corrected, it was revealed that the original ditch around Stonehenge was not built in 1900 BC, but a full thousand years earlier, in 2900. In fact, at the same time as Silbury Hill. The double bluestone circle was built some time after 2400 by the Beaker people, who thus must have arrived in England some six hundred years before anyone had supposed. The sarsen circle was constructed soon after this; an antler-pick in one of the sarsen holes has been dated around 2150 BC. This clearly rules out the possibility of a Mycenaean architect. On the other hand, the inner horseshoe, and various holes intended for bluestones (known as the X and Y holes) were, apparently, constructed by the Wessex people sometime between 1550 and 1450 BC, and there is no reason why a Mycenaean architect should not have supervised the task.
The implications of these discoveries are startling. To begin with, they offer strong support to Michael Dames’s theory about Silbury Hill. He assumed that the priests of the Neolithic fertility cult must have had an exact knowledge of astronomy—a contradiction of the generally accepted view that the Neolithic people were simple farmers and agriculturalists. But the outer ditch and Aubrey holes of Stonehenge reveal the same astronomical knowledge as the later parts; and if they were constructed at the same time as Silbury Hill, this points to the existence of a caste of priest-astronomers in that ‘primitive’ time.
This is a conclusion that has been carefully examined by Dr Euan MacKie, of the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow.12 Dr MacKie is a supporter of the Thom-Hawkins theory that the megalithic circles were astronomical observatories. This leads him to conclude that ‘by about the twenty-ninth century BC an élite class had appeared in Wessex … and had reached a stage in which they commanded considerable prestige, power and authority … The two sites [Silbury Hill and Stonehenge I] seem to symbolise the start of a new era in which theocratic rulers had established themselves to the extent that they were able to control men and supplies to a degree never before achieved in Britain.’ This power was not achieved through wealth derived from the metal trade, for that lay 500 years in the future. ‘We may conclude that somehow the astronomical and magical expertise of these wise men had given them this power …’ In other words, in England around 3000 BC, at a time when there was supposed to be only a scattered rural community, there was actually a powerful caste of magician-priests who could organise vast numbers of people to construct immense public works, much as in Egypt at the time of the building of the pyramids. The scale of the pyramids is, of course, far greater; but then, the population of Egypt in 2500 BC was far greater than of England in 3000 BC.
Comparison with the pyramids raises another interesting point. For many centuries scholars assumed that the Great Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu) was built as a tomb; yet when Arab workmen, under the direction of the Caliph Abdullah Al Mamun, succeeded in breaking into the pyramid in AD 820, they discovered the ‘King’s Chamber’ to be empty except for a lidless granite sarcophagus; seals indicated that the pyramid had never been entered by robbers. And instead of being riddled with passages and chambers—as everyone had expected—the structure proved to be very nearly solid. There was an ascending passage, a descending passage, and a mysterious well joining the two. But the Roman historian Proclus makes the interesting remark that the pyramid was used as an astronomical observatory before its completion. In the late nineteenth century, a British astronomer, Richard Proctor, saw that this provided the likeliest theory to explain the pyramid. In the days before telescopes, the Egyptian priests constructed a vast observatory, with its descending passage aligned on the meridian, and a pool of water at the bottom of the ‘well’ to act as a reflector. Proctor showed in detail how the pyramid could be used as a combination of computer and observatory—like so many other ancient monuments.
In more recent years, Professor Livio Stecchini has shown that the ancient Egyptians had calculated the size of the earth—which they knew to be a sphere—its circumference, and even the fact that it is flattened at the poles. His study of the temples of Karnak and Luxor revealed that Egyptian mathematics was 2,000 years in advance of the Greeks, who knew less than the Egyptians about the subject in the time of Plato. Advocates of the Atlantis theory have suggested that this knowledge came from the great submerged continent. Däniken would argue that it proves that ancient Egypt was visited by space men. But if MacKie is correct—and it is difficult to see how he can be faulted—the explanation is rather less bizarre: late-Neolithic man had evolved a sophisticated fertility religion in which the study of the heavens played a major part and the priests possessed a high degree of ‘magical’ and astronomical knowledge. The evidence suggests that their interest in the heavens was the direct outcome of their interest in the earth. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why they took so much interest in the sky. Apart from its astronomy, their civilisation seems to have been extremely crude and practical; the only ‘astronomy’ needed by a farmer is a knowledge of the seasons. The Chaldeans, who are generally regarded as the founders of astronomy (and astrology) appeared on the scene much later. In his history of astronomy, Watchers of the Skies, Willy Ley remarks: ‘Early astronomy, with written records … comprises approximately the period between 800 BC and the time of Pythagoras of Samos [530 BC].’ And he makes the interesting observation: ‘[Chaldean] astronomy did not end because of a specific political event such as a war … It just petered out; the last tables … dealt with the year 10 BC, and later an astronomical table from AD 75 was found. And after that, nothing.’ But then, towards 800 BC, civilisation was nearing the end of the Bronze Age; the religion of the earth mother was more than half forgotten. The astronomers of Mesopotamia and Persia studied the heavens because they were looking for omens, for methods of predicting the future. The astrology of the Babylonians and Assyrians seems to have been basically a jumble of superstitions: ‘When [Mercury] approaches [Aldebaran] the king of Elam will die’; ‘When Mars is dim, it is lucky, when bright, unlucky.’ Chaldean astronomy petered out because it had lost its raison d’être: its contact with the earth, and its power to predict the fluctuations in its forces.
We can say, then, that the carbon dating of Stonehenge seems to provide a certain basis of support for Lethbridge’s theory of the ancient religion, as well as for Michell’s belief that Neolithic religion was more sophisticated than anyone realised. It also disposes of some of the chief objections to the Thom-Hawkins theory of the megalithic monuments: for example, why the Wessex people—whom Hawkins describes as ‘great lords and international financiers’—should have troubled to build a vast computer like Stonehenge III (the sarsens). Nature worship hardly seems to fit in with an artistic merchant aristocracy. Now we know that the major part of Stonehenge was not erected by the Wessex people, but by the far more energetic and warlike Beaker people, not long after the construction of the Great Pyramid. Although the Beaker people were warriors and traders, they were also wanderers. Professor Gordon Childe comments: ‘They roved from the Moroccan coasts and Sicily to the North Sea coasts, and from Portugal and Brittany to the Tisza and the Vistula.’ And, like their Neolithic predecessors, they worshipped the earth mother. If we can attach any credence to the notion that the Great Pyramid was built as an observatory, then the picture that emerges is of a religion as universal as Christianity—although with many local variations—that covered most of Europe and the Mediterranean.
Such a notion raises another historical problem. It seems to suggest that the civilisation of 3000 BC had a fairly sophisticated communication system, not only by land but by sea. And this runs counter to the views held by most historians. Although we know that the Sumerians were sailing the Persian Gulf as long ago as 4000 BC, and that the Egyptians often made the 400-mile voyage to Byblos, in Lebanon, around 2600 BC, there is a generally held view that real ‘seafaring’ began in the Bronze Age, some time after 2000 BC. It is true that there are drawings of boats with many oars on Aegean pottery of 3000 BC, but they are believed to have been used only for voyages between islands.
In 1973, these views were challenged by an amateur historian and archaeologist, James Bailey, in a closely argued book, The God-Kings and the Titans. Studying at Oxford immediately after the Second World War, Bailey had become intrigued by references in various classical writings to the possibility of land on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. In the Timaeus and Critias, Plato seems to describe a great sea battle involving men from the other side of the Western ocean. Diodorus Siculus, writing about 21 BC, describes how Phoenician sailors were driven off course by strong winds, and eventually reached a fertile island far out in the Atlantic; this could have been the Azores or even one of the islands of the Caribbean.
In 1967, an essay by a retired Nigerian judge, M. D. W. Jeffreys, revived Bailey’s interest in the subject; Jeffreys contended that Africans had reached the New World long before Columbus. Bailey undertook a detailed study of the evidence of South American arahaeology for contact between the Old World and the New in pre-Biblical times. A rock inscription in Brazil, three thousand feet above the ground, mentions Tyre and Phoenicia; it dates from 900 BC. Another Brazilian inscription—which some authorities think a forgery—describes how a ship from Sidon was separated from its companions and crossed the Atlantic. Bailey was particularly impressed by a great body of evidence linking the Sumerians with Brazil and Mexico as early as 2370 BC.
The evidence that Bailey assembles in The God-Kings and the Titans is not easy to digest; much of it is concerned with the similarity between artifacts—and language—in the Old World and the New; and he is frank enough to admit that some of his speculations lack a solid foundation. (For example, that the Sargasso Sea was named after the Sumerian king Sargon.) But the total weight of evidence is impressive, particularly when he speaks of universality of symbolism. (The Egyptian serpent symbol is a spiral, like Underwood’s aquastats.)
Bailey’s views failed to reach a wide audience. His argument is too complex for the general public, and serious scholars were inclined to dismiss him as an eccentric amateur. Yet if MacKie is right in believing that the Britons of 3000 BC had a sophisticated culture, then Bailey is certainly right in believing that exploration by sea began far earlier than historians have assumed.
Oddly enough, Bailey makes far less than might be expected of some of the most convincing evidence that Westerners arrived in South America long before Columbus. When Hernan Cortes arrived on the shores of Mexico in 1519, he was welcomed by the Indians because they took his men for white gods who had promised to return; by coincidence, Cortes landed close to the spot where they were expected. The Indian legend told how fair-skinned men with blue eyes had come by sea in the remote past; they wore ornaments like snakes on their heads (snakes were associated with the earth goddess from Europe to India). They brought knowledge of science, engineering and the law, and their leader was finally worshipped as a god throughout the continent. To the Toltecs he was Quetzacoatl, the plumed serpent, to the Mayans, Kukulcan, to the Aymaras of Peru, the blue-eyed Hyustus. After defeat in battle, he flew away on a magic carpet, promising to return one day.
Däniken, writing in the 1960s, takes the predictable view that the white gods were space men, in spite of the fact that they arrived in ships. But a decade earlier, a German-speaking Frenchman named Pierre Honoré had studied the legends and had reached the slightly less preposterous conclusion that they were Cretans. His study of the Mayan script convinced him that it bears fundamental resemblances to the ancient Cretan pictorial script, and to the later—and more symbolic—script known as Linear A. There is not much resemblance to the late Cretan script known as Linear B, which is closer to Greek, and which persisted in Greece as late as 1100 BC. There are differences between Mayan script and ancient Cretan, but this is to be expected, since Mayan civilisation began about 300 BC, and its hieroglyphs were presumably taken from some earlier civilisation. Honoré describes a journey into the Amazon jungle, near the town of Manáos, Brazil, where he was able to see many stones carved with symbols, submerged in the river. A rubber planter named Ramos had investigated the stones during the First World War, and wrote a book about them, with many illustrations, which Honoré saw in the Sao Paolo Library; Ramos assumed that the language on the stones was Phoenician. In his book In Quest of the White God, Honoré details his reasons for believing it to be Cretan (for example, he mentions seeing the Cretan symbol of the double-headed axe). He concluded that it reached Brazil around 1500 BC, the date Atkinson believes his Mycenaean architect came to Stonehenge.
It is obviously unnecessary to assume that the white gods reached South America in flying saucers. It is startling enough that the culture of Crete—or Mycenae—could penetrate as far as England in 1500 BC; it would be even more astonishing if it could be established that it reached South America. The problem is not simply a matter of seamanship; Crete had a fine navy before it was destroyed by the tremendous volcanic explosion of Santorini, which occurred around 1500 BC. The real question is how primitive people, whose world was the Mediterranean, dared to sail so far. If Honoré is correct—and his parallels of Mayan and Cretan are certainly impressive—this would be one of the most convincing arguments so far in favour of a visit by space men to our earth in the remote past. Mariners would not have dared to face the Atlantic—or Pacific—in wooden ships unless they knew what land lay on the other side; and the likeliest source of this information would have been someone who had seen it from the air.
Lethbridge himself maintains a balanced attitude towards these speculations. He admits that the legends of the white gods—Quetzacoatl and so on—are thought-provoking. But he maintains that they may have reached South America as late as AD 1100, about the same time that Prince Madoc reached North America. And he believes that Prince Madoc probably learned of the existence of America from earlier Norse voyagers who had reached it via Greenland. As far as he is concerned, the visitors from outer space are simply an interesting hypothesis. And he finds the alternative hypothesis just as intriguing: that our remote ancestors may have been more inventive and more adventurous than anyone has given them credit for.
But then, Lethbridge was centrally concerned with other, and even stranger, matters.