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Needles of Stone

Return to that stone circle that we saw before, glowing and pulsing with points and lines and zones of coloured light. As you watch, the battered and timeworn stones seem to dislimn, becoming smoother, finer, sharper: needles of stone set in the body of the earth, to match the needles of bone the ancient Chinese set in the body of man. Stone or bone, the needles controlled, and still control, the flow of energy through each body.

But stand back – you stand too close to see. Rise up into the air, higher, higher, like a hawk: the stone circle recedes to a glowing dot in a landscape that rolls away into the distance below you, a patchwork quilt of light. Around the circle the glowing lines spread out to connect every cell of that body: you see a fine filigree of threads just below the surface, weaving their way outward from the centre that glows; you see harsh beams of light connecting centre to centre across the country in straight lines. These centres are dotted along every line, but here and there you can see major intersections of the straight lines and the filigree, like focal points in a vast multi-layered cobweb. In some ways the whole scene is reminiscent of a micrograph of nerve cells and their ganglia, but on a much larger and brightly-coloured scale: in a sense, that is what the centres are, for in a sense what we see here is the circulation and nervous system of the body of the earth.

It is a mistake to think of ley-lines and the like solely in terms of the past. It's true that evidence for some kind of geomancy in Britain can be found most easily by studying the placing of ancient and historical sites: but the same pattern can be seen in the siting of much more modern structures. Sometimes, as with the towers and the postboxes, there are obvious geographical and socio-geographical reasons why this should be so; but with others, particularly the extraordinary frequency with which railway stations fall on ley-alignments, there is no sensible reason.[1]

This leads us back to the same questions that Underwood avoided: Are the patterns, the matrix of energies, the patterns of the past, or the present, or both? If there was a system of geomancy in the past, was it applied with or without conscious knowledge? And if it was applied consciously and deliberately in the past, as Underwood and most of the recent writers on the 'earth mysteries' have maintained, do we have to credit the Victorian railway-builders and the present-day Post Office and Ministry of Defence with conscious knowledge of the same system of geomancy? The more we look into it, the more confusing and improbable the whole field becomes.

There is one solution to this set of conundra which every writer seems to have avoided, and that is the pagan solution: that the earth is not only alive, but intelligent, and capable of a crucial if limited range of actions on a number of levels.[1a] The aim of any system of geomancy. in pagan terms, is to locate and identify sites where human actions of one kind or another would – to put it in anthropomorphic terms – please or displease the earth: as Eitel put it, 'it is the boast of the (geomantic) system that it teaches man how to rule nature and his own destiny by showing him how heaven and earth rule him'. It is indeed 'left in great measure to man's foresight and energy ... to modify and regulate the influences which heaven and earth bring to bear upon him', but not all the choices are due to man: something else has choices too. That 'something else', or at least part of it, is the earth itself.

This probably sounds insane, when seen from a common-sense viewpoint; and in those terms I suppose it is. But it's only in the past few centuries that 'common-sense' has become so blinkered that it denies the very existence of vast areas of human experience. It is only when you realise the full scope of geomancy – stretching far into the distant past, and including as it does many areas of experience that modern common-sense ignores - that you realise the inevitability of the pagan solution. It is the pivot around which all of the 'earth mysteries' begin to make sense.

But we haven't got there yet: and I don't think it can make sense until we have a clearer idea of what this geomantic earth-acupuncture is, and what the energy – or energies – that it is supposed to control are, so we'd better return to those first. To talk of an earth-acupuncture presupposes the existence of something equivalent to both acupuncture meridians and acupuncture-points. The leys or overgrounds and Underwood's water-lines (and possibly also his track-lines and aquastats) would seem to be equivalent to meridians, while sacred sites would seem to be the equivalent of acupuncture-points. If we can assume – for the moment at least – that this is so, then we do have at least the basics of a system of earth-acupuncture.

It's not just the obvious sacred sites, like churches and standing stones, that form the acupuncture-points of this earth-acupuncture: the pre-Christian pagans in Britain recognised a wide range of types of site to have special characteristics that set them apart from the rest of the landscape. These include not only those sites whose use was forbidden by later pro-Christian law – 'we strictly forbid ... the worship of... sun or moon, fire or flood, water wells or stones, or any kind of wood-trees', as Canute's Laws of 1030 AD put it[2] – but also those picked out and emphasised by local folklore: particular cross-roads,[3] bridges, fords, castles, forts and barrows. Note, though, that it's only specific cross-roads, particular barrows: some visually impressive examples have no folklore and no local importance attached to them, while others have plenty of folklore and seem, in the case of barrows, to be concealing more than just an ancient burial. If we combine both law and lore, we can see that all the types of site that Watkins and Underwood and their followers researched are represented; and we already know from their work that such sites are interconnected both above and below ground. Watkins' and Underwood's work, when viewed from an 'earth-energies' angle, does fit in with an earth-acupuncture model of nature.

The system of geomancy I'm suggesting would be a combination of acupuncture and Feng-shui: from what we can see of the sites it seems likely that any structure at the site will act as a 'needle' in an acupuncture sense. We can suggest, then, that different characteristics of the site and its structure – elemental attribution, shape, astronomy, number, colour and so on – will select the effect the site has on the flow and interchange of energies at and through the site. We can see in Canute's list, for instance, the elements Fire, Wood and Water; barrows and earthworks are obviously Earth in terms of their elemental attribution; but it seems that in the past the elemental Metal was not used or represented. It may be that in the early period hard stone was equivalent to Metal; but we can see that in the present time there is far too much Metal, and it seems that the only element 'worshipped' is Metal, combined with the lifelessness of concrete. But that again is something for later

The element Water can be seen in Watkins' ley-ponds and other water mark-points, and in Underwood's 'holy wells'. It seems odd to think of water at a sacred site as a 'needle', and it may be that it is more a needle in reverse, a needle of nothing connecting the energies of the water to the outside air. There may be a needle connected to the water, as in Creyke's system of depthing which we met earlier; if so, it's possible that one interpretation of the mysterious 'cup-and-ring' marks to be seen on stones in various parts of Britain would be that they are maps of local water and energy networks, shown up by the circles and dots to which the Creyke system converts the water-lines, as far as the dowser is concerned. There are other interpretations of the cup-and-ring marks, of course, but this one has a certain degree of elegance from a dowser's point of view.

But to return to the element Water, it may be that 'holy wells' and the other Water points are not so much controllers of the energies as tapping points from which to withdraw energies as needed. The adjective 'holy' does seem to imply this: linguistically the word has many links and meanings, and these include 'whole', 'hale', 'healthy' and 'healing' as well as the obvious sense of 'sacred'.

The element Fire should be obvious, as the fires of the old pagan festivals of Beltane and Hallowe'en; as the Beacon fires on the old beacon hills (the real 'needles of fire', perhaps); and as the wendfires or need-fires that were lit by peasants during times of livestock disease until well into the last century. These latter fires were lit at particular points on local trackways; the entire livestock of the area were then driven through the flames in the hope of curing and protecting them of the murrain. It seems to have worked, or the peasants would never have done it.[4] It could have worked partly by a crude high-temperature sterilisation of the skin, to kill off infective bacteria on the surface; but 1 think there is probably an element of 'needles of fire' or moxibustion there as well. The Beacon fires may also have had a double function, agents of moxibustion as well as 'needles of fire'.

It's interesting to note, thinking of the Beacons, that very few of the Beacon hills had any structure on them. It seems as though they were 'forbidden to structure', analogous to 'forbidden to needle' in acupuncture, although there is also the point that any structure high up on the hill might have obscured the flame and reduced the Beacon's effectiveness as part of a communications chain. The reverse is true of some sites, in that they seem to be 'forbidden to Fire'. The owner of Rollright stone circle often held a firework party there around Hallowe'en each year, until recently. She had candles placed, in jam-jars, on almost every stone, so that the circle glowed with points of coloured light; but she had no bonfires. "The very idea of having a bonfire here seems wrong, my dear", she said, "the stones wouldn't like it". She was probably right: and the 'feel' of a site can tell us a great deal about it.

The element Earth is represented by earthworks in general, whose functions are more complex than those of the Beacons. All the varieties of earthworks seem to act as energy stores or reservoirs that stabilise the energy-flow passing through them: but the way they store the energy depends on their shape. Round barrows, and possibly long barrows, store their energy statically, like water in a tank; where barrows are closely linked to standing stones they may have a special storage function which I'll come back to shortly. But the other earthworks store their energy in a different way: for the energy trapped within them is constantly on the move.

I first discovered this during some work on Gors Fawr stone circle in Pembrokeshire. I'd just been studying the 'spin' energy moving round the perimeter of the circle, and was surprised to find an energy-flow almost identical to the spin crossing a gateway that had been cut through a nearby stone-and-earth 'hedge'. The flow crossed the gateway at about waist-height, almost exactly level with the middle of the hedge's cross-section. If I remember correctly, the energy was moving in both directions across the gap at that height. But this was only one aspect of a maze of energies moving very fast backwards and forwards inside the stone hedges surrounding Gors Fawr; I had only found the energy in the gateway because it was jumping the gap between the two sections of that hedge. Further along the same hedge, part of the structure of the hedge had been broken down to make room for a road-widening scheme: the stored energy came ripping out of the broken edge, hung around for a moment, apparently trying to find something to hold on to, and then shot back inside the hedge. The broken edge seemed to be 'boiling' with loose energy in this way. When we look at practical earth-acupuncture, we shall see that loose energy of this sort can cause some serious problems.

Circular structures, like henges and ring-ditches, store their energy by moving it round the circle, jumping any gaps as necessary, like the spin of stone circles; more complex earthworks, like some of the so-called hill-forts, hold the energy locked in each section. There is a visual analogy between this energy storage and the trapping of high-energy physical particles by the earth's magnetic field in the two Van Allen belts about two and ten thousand miles above the earth's surface. Loose electrons are caught in the higher of the two belts; the heavier protons are trapped in the lower belt. The amount of energy involved is very high, and poses serious problems for space-flights: to give an idea of the level of energy, on average it only takes the electrons in the upper belt two seconds each way in their endless travelling from one magnetic pole to the other, and back again.

We can use this as an analogy for one of the functions of the hill-forts. The complex hornwork of forts like Maiden Castle, which was undoubtedly a fort in later days, may originally or incidentally have been designed as an energy-store, being derived from a barrow-complex already existing on the site. It's generally admitted by archaeologists that many of the hill-forts are derived from the linking together of very early hill-mounds, and that some of the fort-like earthworks are too poorly sited or simply too big to have been much good as defensive structures.[5] Many hill-structures only became true hill-forts – defensive forts, in other words – during the Bronze and Iron Ages; there doesn't seem to have been much need for them before then, as the relative rarity of weapon-burials in the Neolithic period appears to confirm.

The shape of the structure seems to control some of the energy aspects of certain other types of site, particularly standing stones, stone circles and churches in Britain, and temples in general elsewhere. Alexander Thom has shown the complex geometry of stone circles in Britain: and that geometry seems, from my own experience, to play an important part in the site's control of energy, particularly energy coming in to the site on astronomically-linked pulses. Of churches, we know for a fact that the Gothic cathedrals at least were designed to precise geometric formulae for more than just structural reasons.[6]

Some writers, such as Keith Critchlow, have demonstrated the use of geometry in sacred architecture to reveal – and presumably to control -'the descent of spiritual energy into material form'.[7] Michell and Critchlow have also shown the complex number symbolism that seems to have been used in sacred structures from the time of Stonehenge to the late Gothic cathedrals, and possibly through to the sacred and secular architecture of seventeenthcentury architects like Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones.[8] This geometry and numerology controls the shape of the structure; and as Feng-shui has told us, the shape of the structure, in geomantic terms, controls more than just its visual appearance.

We can also see that some of the standing stones and mark-stones dotted around Britain would appear to have been chosen and sited according to their shapes. The most obvious example of this is at Avebury, where the stones of the Kennett Avenue are alternate pillar and diamond or lozenge shape; but in other districts it seems that shapes were chosen for something other than or additional to the 'male and female' interpretation that Professor Piggott gave to the Avenue stones. Watkins, in some of his beautiful photographs, showed how the shapes of mark-stones seemed to echo the shapes of the hills on which they were aligned.[9] Stones like the Devil's Arrows at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, the nearby and similar Rudstone at Rudston, and the Fish Stone at Cwmddu in Gwent, seem literally to be 'needles' or 'nails' driven into the ground. Watkins pointed out that the common coincidence of mark-stones with markets, and thus the placing of money on the stone, may have led to the phrase 'paying on the nail'.[10]

Recent research in various countries suggests that particular shapes enable objects to give off or store energy, or convert it to some other form of energy. Sometimes the energies involved are clearly physical, as with the ball-shape that enables a Van der Graff electrostatic generator to store enormous electrostatic charges; but sometimes the energies are not so obviously physical. Pavlita in Czechoslovakia is generally credited with the discovery (or rediscovery) of many 'multi-energy' shapes, including a range of 'psychotronic generators' that revolve when you think at them in a particular state of mind, a toroid shape which appears to kill flies within its space, and another which purifies polluted water, allegedly changing the molecular structure of the water in the process.[11] Another recent discovery has been the way in which food stored in particular geometric shapes seems to keep fresher and longer than otherwise.[12]

But there are hidden catches to this that we ought to beware of. I ought to give a warning here: the energies involved are real, even if they are imaginary in some cases - so if you just play about with the shapes in the hope of attracting energies, without knowledge of what you're doing, you may find yourself in trouble or danger. A friend of mine, whom I'll call Peter, had an experiment of this type go wrong at Stonehenge, when he was using an ankh-shape as an aerial. The ankh was a big one, nearly two feet high, made out of cooker wire in outline form, to resemble a dipole aerial. The aim of the experiment was to see if the ankh could be used to pick up energy from the circle – and it succeeded rather too well.

He climbed onto the roof of a car in the Stonehenge car park (he's not very tall) and, holding the ankh by the loop at the top, and pointing the open end away from him, he moved the ankh like a scanning radar aerial. The moment this aerial came into line with the stones he felt an enormous surge that seemed to burn his arm, and he lost consciousness for a moment. When he recovered from that, he found that he had been – as another friend put it – 'thrown bodily off the car', and his arm seemed to be paralysed. It took six months before he was able to use the arm fully again. Whether the paralysis was objective or subjective, it was still all too real from a practical point of view. So please don't play around with these energies: we don't yet know enough about them to know in detail what is safe and what is not.

Even the well-researched pyramid-shape springs surprises. My friend Peter, and another friend, Richard, were doing some experiments with a hollow wooden pyramid which had a quartz crystal at its tip. Both said they could feel some kind of energy coming off the tip as a stream of upward-moving heat. Peter warned Richard to take his watch off, as 'the energy might damage it'; the watch was a new quartz-controlled digital type, and Richard, thinking vaguely of the stray magnetic fields he dealt with all the day in his job as a recording engineer, ignored the comment, as those magnetic fields don't affect the kind of quartz oscillator used in the watch. Unfortunately, the energy from the pyramid did affect it. A few minutes after the comment, Richard noticed that the display on the watch was visibly flickering; then it slowed, stopped and faded away.

Richard checked the battery, but the watch's back-light was working normally, showing that the battery was still 'live'. Frantically pressing every button on the watch, he managed to restart it – but he found, on checking with the telephone 'speaking clock', that it was losing one second in ten. Half an hour later the display faded out again, and no amount of button-pressing would restart it. Since the watch was still under guarantee, Richard took it back to the importers to be repaired. They were somewhat surprised, for it was the only watch of that type that they'd ever had returned. I don't know if Richard ever told them how he broke it, but I'm not sure that they would have believed him anyway.

The importers didn't repair the watch, they simply replaced it, but it's interesting to speculate on what had happened to it. There are only four parts to a digital watch: the quartz oscillator, the electronic chip, the display unit and, of course, the battery. The battery was 'live', for they had checked that; the display unit seemed to be working normally, and anyway wouldn't affect the time-keeping ability of the watch. This leaves only the chip and the oscillator. The circuitry in the chip – which is itself mostly 'doped' quartz – drives the oscillator and counts and converts the oscillator's pulses into a form suitable for display. There's not much that can go wrong with it, and if it does go wrong it tends just to stop, not slow down. The only way in which the oscillator can slow down is if its shape is changed, for its oscillation frequency depends on its shape. So for the watch to go wrong in the way that it did, it would seem that the energy from the pyramid either overloaded the chip electronically, or physically distorted either the chip, the oscillator, or both – which isn't bad going for a force which many supposed scientists claim doesn't exist.

Quartz is interesting to us in this study for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it is one of the few common factors among standing stones. To my knowledge, it is found in some form or another in every type of rock used for standing stones. Its traditional use in magical and initiatory rites around the world suggest that it has values on more than one level,[13] while its strange mechano-electrical properties may provide an explanation on at least one level both for the magnetic fields reported by Taylor to be round a standing stone, and for the 'tingling' or 'charged' feeling that many dowsers and non-dowsers have experienced from the stones.[13a]

Silica, the basic compound from which all the quartzes are derived, is the most abundant mineral in the earth's crust, so it's not so surprising that it is a common factor in standing stones. Sandstones and conglomerates are chiefly composed of small quartz crystals, and it is found in veins in some rocks, like the veins of milky quartz crystals that can often be seen in granite. On some standing stones you can even see large chunks of the milky quartz standing out from the surface of the stone.

The milky form is the one which most people recognise as quartz; but with the addition of various impurities a whole family of quartzes are formed, a surprising variety of semi-precious crystals and stones: amethyst, citrine, cairngorm, chalcedony, carnelian, agate, flint, onyx and jasper are all members of the quartz family, and all are basically silica. The magical use of these gems and semi-precious stones goes back for millennia; but I've also seen modern dowsers use some of them to manipulate the effective energy-flows In water-lines and overgrounds. For the moment, though, it is the mechano-electric (or 'piezoelectric') aspect of the quartzes which is the most interesting to us, for it provides us with one way of understanding the basis of that elusive 'natural energy' that we have supposed is carried by the water-lines and overgrounds.

The principle of the mechano-electric effect is simple, and it is used a lot in modern technology. In a single-shot form it's used in 'electronic' gas lighters and similar tools that produce a single electrical spark; and in a resonant form it's used in radios, electrical clocks and watches, and any other electronic bits and pieces that need stable oscillators. The idea is that if you apply an electrical charge to a quartz crystal it will change shape or, in some thin crystals, its curvature; and conversely, if you change the crystal's shape, particularly by compression, it will produce a relative electrical charge across its faces. The quartz family aren't the only crystals that will do this, by the way: the tourmaline family will do it as well.

If you apply pressure to one of these crystals fast enough and hard enough – as with the spring driven hammer used in some gas lighters – charges of several thousand volts can be produced across the crystal, enough for a spark strong enough to light a gas jet. If you apply a charge to a crystal that is already under some tension, the crystal will initially expand or curve, but then spring back (producing a momentary opposite charge) and then expand again if the original charge is maintained. This leads to a resonance, both mechanically and electronically, with the crystal alternately expanding and springing back like an electronic tuning fork. This precisely regular oscillation can be used in a number of ways: controlling an electronic frequency in a radio transmitter, for example; for providing a regular flow of electronic pulses for a quartz digital watch; or a regular flow of mechanical pulses for a quartz analogue watch.

The frequency of the crystal's resonance depends on its size, shape and cut; and here we return to the quartzes in standing stones. We know from dowsing work that standing stones are placed over underground water-flows, which might well produce regular mechanical vibration under some stones; we also know from dowsing research that some of the energies are linked to a lunar cycle, so gravitational links could produce another regular change of the mechanical forces acting on some stones.[13b] We could thus expect that the stones might resonate in some way. Certainly some stones do feel as though they rock slowly backward and forward when you lean on them, and others seem to 'buzz'.

This difference in what is admittedly a subjective oscillation could be explained, perhaps, in terms of the different sizes and shapes of natural crystals in each stone applying oscillating charges or deformations when people 'earth' them to the ground around the stone. Many standing stones are not so much poor conductors as semi-conductors, according to the initial results of some experiments some friends and I are doing: their electrical conductivity seems to change according to a variety of conditions, and one of them is whether various points on the stone are 'earthed' either by wires or by people. I don't know of any 'official' scientific research on this – at the moment Taylor's search for magnetic anomalies around the Crickhowell stone, and the more recent Dragon Project studies shown in The Ley Hunter and Don Ronins' Circles of Silence, are about the only sources – but I wouldn't be surprised if this is at least the physical reason why the Tingle Stone at Avening got its name. It may also have been behind the magnetic anomaly that Taylor found at Crickhowell, but I don't yet know enough about the interaction between oscillating electrical fields inside the semi-conducting substance of a stone and the apparently stable magnetic field around it.

Quartz crystals can also be 'excited' electronically to produce extremely high-frequency radio waves, called microwaves. If this is done in a particular way to crystals of a particular shape the waves so formed come off the crystal at such precisely regular intervals that they form a very narrow beam. This is called 'microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation'; the abbreviation of the term, 'maser', is usually applied to the assembly that does this. The visible-light version, which works in much the same way but at a still-higher frequency, is the well-known laser.

There are various types of laser, but the original type used a ruby crystal which had a small proportion of chrome impurity in it. It's the chrome in a natural ruby that colours it red: pure ruby is colourless. The crystal used was a short rod which was fully silvered at one end, but only thinly silvered at the other. Light was 'pumped' into the crystal by repeated flashes from a flash-tube – usually a spiral flash-tube in the early versions. The energy was stored by altering the atomic structure of the chrome atoms in the ruby crystal, until a kind of saturation point was reached. Then one chrome atom, then another, then another, would release the stored energy in the form of red light: there was a kind of chain reaction, in which each atom released its energy when triggered by any other, but only when the distance between the first and second atom was an exact multiple of the wave-length of the light produced. By bouncing the light backwards and forwards inside the crystal, by means of the silvered ends, all the stored energy could be retrieved in one chain-reaction, and finally released from the half-silvered end of the crystal as a very brief pulse of precisely regular light.

All the energy of the light is concentrated into one brief moment, and can be made to do physical work: laser pulses are now used to compress particles to start fusion reactions in nuclear fusion reactors for power plants, and even the early lasers were rated in 'gillette power', the number of razor blades they could punch through in one go. And the pulses of a powerful ruby laser can be very short: the laser used in the moon-ranging experiments after the Apollo landings produced a pulse so brief that the beam was better described as a rod of light only thirty yards long, and the beam's spread was so slight that it was little more than three hundred yards wide when it reached the moon. But what is interesting to us here is that the presence of certain types of quartz in some standing stones may lead to a kind of 'stone maser' or, as one punning friend put it, a 'leyser'.

The closest parallel here comes between ruby lasers and the oolitic limestone used for some standing stones: the Tingle Stone is one example. Oolitic limestone is composed of 'eggs' of limestone formed round a central core of quartz or, occasionally, sea-shell, by much the same process as the formation of a pearl. The parallel here is between the quartz 'seeds' in the limestone and the chrome atoms in the ruby. It seems possible that mechanical vibration from the stream below, or the spiral energy-flow round the stone (note the analogy with the old lasers' spiral flash-tube), or both, could provide energy to be stored by the quartz seeds: electro-mechanical charge from the ground, and possibly some not-so-physical energy from the spiral round the stone. As with the ruby laser, this energy storage should reach a critical or super-critical state, at which any suitable stimulus would set the whole thing off. A 'suitable stimulus' might be a gravitational alignment, perhaps, or the tiny electrical and non-physical charges produced in the fingertips of a dowser spinning a pendulum next to the stone. If this were to be so, the result would be the same kind of 'massive pulse of energy travelling in a straight line' that I noticed when I accidentally released the spin energy at Rollright.

One point where this analogy appears to break down is that, given the shape of the typical standing stone, its base in the ground would be the equivalent of the fully-silvered end of the laser crystal, and the tip as the half-silvered end; so we would expect the pulse to go skyward, not horizontally across country in a straight line. This puzzled me for some time, for the analogy seemed to be so close; and it was not until I found a reference to quartz in in an old dowsing journal that I found anything resembling a solution. The reference was unfortunately only an abstract of an article from a German dowsing magazine, but it stated that it was important to beware of quartzes and flints in buildings, when dealing with earth-energies, for they 'changed the plane of the radiations from the vertical plane to the horizontal'.[14] If quartz can turn its own 'radiations' from the vertical to the horizontal plane, we would appear to have our 'leyser'.

Unfortunately that change of plane doesn't make sense in physical terms, so I think we'll have to say that the energies which this 'leyser' transmits are at the most only semi-physical. But there is another aspect of British geomancy in which physical energies play a large part, and that is to do with lightning and a possible system of weather-control.

The correlation between lightning, certain types of trees, and underground water is important here. If you walk around forests you will have noticed that certain types of trees – oaks in particular – are often blasted by lightning, while other types – beeches, for example – are rarely struck. Some dowsers researching this found that every tree which was struck was sited on or very close to an intersection of two or more water-lines;[15] so the apparent reason why only certain types of trees are struck is related to the way in which those types of tree collect their water. According to dowsing work, it would seem that the oaks prefer to collect their water direct from underground water-courses, while the beeches and similar trees collect theirs from the percolation of water from the surface. Dowsers use these differences sometimes to pick out possible water supplies: I remember one farm I went to had two willow trees growing in place of two cherry trees in a cherry avenue, because the water-line underground at that point had made the conditions below ground too wet for the cherry trees to survive.

The dowsers also noticed that in open country, wherever it was possible to plot the exact position of the strike, lightning invariably struck directly above the intersection of two or more water-lines. There are good physical reasons for this, of course. A lightning bolt is a massive electrical charge trying to find the quickest route to discharge itself, and that means that it has to find the quickest route of highest conductivity within its immediate area. The jagged path of the strike through the air is known to be due to its following slight variations of conductivity: but no-one seems to have thought in similar terms about its landing point.

The charge has to dissipate very fast, and in electrical terms a damp area of ground would be its best bet. Something as damp and that spreads over such a long distance as a water-line would be a very fast pathway for dissipating a charge, and a point where two or more water-lines meet would be better still, from the lightning's point of view. Whether the water-line represents a true underground stream or just a trickle of water in a water-bearing fissure matters not a whit in this respect, since it is still a damp 'cable' for the lightning. Neither does it matter that the water the water-line represents is some way underground, for at an intersection of water-lines in particular the conductivity between that intersection and the surface will still be somewhat higher than that of the surrounding ground. Even if the conductivity is only marginally higher, the lightning will probably still take that route in preference to any other. If this is so, it means more than that the old adage of 'lightning never strikes the same place twice' is wrong: it means that we can use the connection between the water-lines and lightning to build up a limited but effective system of weather-control.

The key to this is the function of the lightning conductor. We tend always to think of these solely as conductors, leading any lightningstrike to earth: but this is only the 'passive' part of their function. A lightning-conductor can also have an 'active' mode of operation, counteracting the charge of a thunderstorm before any lightning occurs; this isn't so obvious as the 'passive' mode, because its effectiveness depends on the siting of the conductor. A conductor is simply a conductor: we should remember that it can conduct both ways, not just from the sky to earth, but from the earth to the sky as well. The conductor connects earth and sky.

Because it connects the two, it tries all the time to stabilise their charges in relation to each other. If a positively-charged cloud passes overhead, the conductor will collect a negative charge from the surrounding area, and try to push it up to the sky to eradicate the difference between earth and sky. With most conductors, sited in ordinary places, the charge that the conductor will be able to collect will be minute, even in wet conditions; but even so, because the charge has to come from somewhere, and because that somewhere is the ground in which the conductor is set, the ground around the conductor will have a net shortage of negative charge (in this case), and will, effectively, be positively charged in relation to other points on the surface. Any lightning strike from a positively-charged cloud will be looking for somewhere that is negatively charged in relation to the surrounding ground; so by inducing an effective positive charge in the ground beneath itself, the conductor makes the ground less liable to a lightning strike.

The area that the conductor protects varies according to the type of conductor: probably the least efficient is the flat-strip type fitted to factory roofs, but even these will protect an area swept by an angle of about 50degrees downward from their run.[16] The most effective kind is the old-fashioned 'spike' type, and this, once again, is due to its shape. The distribution of charge on a surface is dependent on the radius of curvature at each point – the sharper the point, the higher the relative density of charge. On a stormy night you can sometimes see the charge coming off one of these old-fashioned conductors as a faint glow, or even as the strange 'St Elmo's Fire'.

Because of the high density of charge on the tip of a spike, a spike-type conductor can literally 'spray' charge upward into the sky – and it is this spraying of charge that we see as St Elmo's Fire. With a conductor sited in ordinary ground this spraying can't last long, because the relatively low conductivity of ordinary ground limits the amount of charge that the conductor can collect from the surrounding area. But a conductor placed directly over – or even close to – a water-line or, better, an intersection of water-lines, should be able to collect charge from the whole area the stream underlies. In some circumstances a conductor sited over water-lines could put up enough charge to neutralise the charge of the cloud. It would be rather more liable to lightning strikes than an ordinarily sited conductor, because the charge it induces in the ground is relatively low; but if it can put up enough charge as the charged cloud comes into the area, there wouldn't be any lightning to strike it anyway.

A side-effect of this is that since a high charge moves off a point as an 'electric wind' – a vertical 'wind' in this case – a conductor spraying a high charge into the sky would send up a charged air-stream as well. This airstream will carry up with it a fair amount of dust, grit, bits of leaves and so on, all of them becoming charged by the 'wind' in the process. It is around charged dust particles and the like that rain-drops form: so the effect of a lightning conductor connected to water-lines would be to change a potentially violent thunderstorm into an ordinary rainstorm.

This only applies, though, to a lightning conductor in the unusual position of being close to a network of water-lines, and preferably major water-lines at that, if the collection of charge is going to be fast enough to deal with a large area of charged cloud. But we already know from dowsing work that most if not all types of sacred sites are so placed, so we can suggest that the structures upon those sites could be made to control some aspects of the weather in the same way.

Frazer, in the Golden Bough, commented that in Europe at least, the points where lightning struck were regarded as sacred, and suggested that the frequency with which the oak was struck by lightning was the reason why it came to be regarded as a sacred tree: the lightning, he suggested, gave the tree 'a nimbus of glory'.[17] We now have another way in which certain types of structures and sites – particularly church spires, standing stones and 'sacred groves' – could gain a 'nimbus of glory', a visible nimbus of glory, and that is from the visible glow of the charge around them, collected from the streams below during a thunderstorm. Under those circumstances they would literally be 'glowing points in the landscape'.

We can go further than this, and say that the standing stones and circles not only might have controlled thunderstorms in the past, but that they still do to some extent. Megalithic sites are in the right places, and their shapes and semi-conductor properties would help the production of an 'electric wind'. This is not just speculation, for there is statistical evidence for it from another quarter, or at least evidence which could be interpreted in this way. If you look at a distribution map of the surviving megalithic sites In Britain, you'll find that they are mostly sited in the west of the land-mass, particularly in the south-west and north of England, and a very large number up the Atlantic coast of Scotland. There are so many sites on the Island of Jura, for example, that Alexander Thom said he couldn't understand why they were there: some of them, he suggested, could have been used as lunar observatories, to calculate and predict the complex tides of the area, but even so there was simply no need for that many sites.[18]

But if you compare this with the weather distribution maps of Britain, there is a correlation between megalithic sites and weather-patterns – particularly of rainfall and thunderstorm activity. Admittedly there are some geographical reasons for the higher rainfall in the west of Britain, but they could be expanded to include the distribution of the old megalithic sites. The coincidence between the distribution of the sites and thunderstorm activity – or rather the lack of thunderstorm activity – is even more striking. The Electrical Research Association publishes maps of the distribution of thunderstorm-days in each year. The largest number of thunderstorm-days shown on the last map I saw was shared by London and Yarmouth, in East Anglia; the area of East Anglia generally was heaviest hit by lightning, and shortest on megalithic sites. The number of thunderstorm-days fell off fairly steadily to the west, except for a 'high' area that coincided almost exactly with the big conurbations of the Midlands; and the area with the smallest number of thunderstorm-days – none at all, in fact – was the Island of Jura. A 'mere coincidence'? I don't think so.

The coincidence becomes more striking still when you realise that the distribution map shows thunderstorm-days, not the amount of energy involved in each storm. Thunderstorms in Cornwall, for example, may not come very often, but when they do come they can be of staggering ferocity; London and the east of the country may have many days with thunderstorms, but the storms themselves are rarely more than a few feeble flickers and bangs. If we take the eastern storms to be 'normal', it looks as though storms in the west and north are somehow stored until a sort of saturation point is reached: for while the west may have fewer days of thunderstorms, the overall amount of energy expended in each area is probably much the same.

This idea that the energy of thunderstorms might somehow be locked up or stored until some kind of reservoir reaches bursting point brings us back to the idea of barrows as energy-stores, and to an interesting piece of archaeological folklore. There's always been a folk-superstition that some kind of 'divine retribution' follows the 'desecration' of ancient sites, particularly barrows. If you look back through the records, you'll find that this superstition has a basis in fact, for in the case of some barrows a thunderstorm followed within hours or minutes of the opening of the barrow.[19] The same coincidence still occurs from time to time, as happened when a barrow on Parliament Hill in north London was opened recently; and I've heard that it is apparently a respectable piece of professional lore among present-day archaeologists. What is not respectable is to suggest that there might be a causal link between the breaching of the barrow and the thunderstorm that followed.

But it does make sense, even if not in archaeological terms. It seems only to have occurred with a few of the thousands of barrows that have been plundered over the centuries, but the effect on breaching them was exactly like short-circuiting some kind of 'thunderstorm capacitor'. Henges seem to be capacitors too, as a friend of mine found out: he and a group of fellow- researchers were doing a ley-line survey of a stone circle and were soaked through by an 'instant rainstorm', which only lasted two minutes, when they accidentally triggered something in or around the circle. What is interesting, from the point of view of our hypothetical earth-acupuncture, is that the downpour started the moment they rammed a stake into the ground at the circle exactly on line with the ley they were plotting.

We've seen that it makes some degree of sense to suggest that standing stones and the like have the same thunderstorm-control ability as lightning conductors. We know from archaeological evidence, or from simple observation, that barrows and henges are often associated with standing stones and circles. And we know from dowsing evidence that barrows and henges and the associated stones and stone circles are on the same water-lines, and are thus connected in an electrical-cum-electrostatic sense at least. From this we can build up a picture of a more complex system of weather control, based on standing stones, with the barrows or henges as energy-stores, in which the stones have two modes of operation.

The first is the counteracting mode that we saw before, where the stone sprayed charge into the cloud, and received rain in return. The second mode would need to be employed if the area the charged cloud covered was too big to allow the stone to collect spare charge from outside its area – as can often happen, for the whole country is sometimes covered by one cloud-mass. This would be a 'draining and storing' mode, in which the charge of the cloud was drawn off by the stones and stored in the associated barrow or barrow-complex (such as a henge), to be dispersed slowly at a later stage. Given this, we could expect that 'short-circuiting' a barrow by breaching it would release all the stored energy through the associated stones, producing an immediate thunderstorm. Hence the folk-superstition, for the immediacy of the thunderstorm would certainly seem like 'divine retribution'.

The only trouble with this more complex form of weather-control is that it can't work - at least not in electrical terms. It's just possible that the necessary electrostatic switching could be done automatically by the stone itself, using the natural semi-conductor properties of the quartzes in the stone to select current-flow according to the relative polarities and strengths of the charges involved; but there is no way in which a barrow can be made out to be an electrostatic capacitor. It might be able to store a small charge, perhaps, but nothing like the levels of energy involved in the weather-control system I've been describing. But even if barrows and the like cannot be electrostatic capacitors, they do resemble them, and they do seem to be capacitors for some kind of energy.

At first sight a typical barrow would appear to be just a mound of earth: but they are in fact complex layered structures, a point which was first noted by Leslie Grinsell or O.G.S. Crawford during the 1920s or '30s.[20] A barrow may or may not have a burial at its centre; but its structure is almost invariably built up of alternating layers of organic and inorganic materials. Typically, it may start with a wooden structure of some kind in the centre, surrounded by a stone cist; then a layer of brushwood, a layer of earth or stones, a layer of rolled turves, a layer of fine gravel – and so on, alternating layers of organic and inorganic, ending with the turves on the surface, or in some cases a peristalith, a ring of small stones surrounding the barrow. A structure of this kind, made up of layers of natural organic and inorganic materials, may not work as a store for electrostatic energy; but it does exactly fit the description of a store for another kind of energy, described variously as 'od', 'odyle', 'orgone', 'prana' and many other names. A typical barrow, in effect, is more like an 'orgone accumulator' than an electrostatic accumulator. And that means that our complete stone-and-barrow weather-control system - assuming that it does exist – cannot be entirely physical.

But if we describe the weather-control system in terms of 'orgone', we can find an almost exact replica of it designed, built and, sadly, destroyed, within the last forty years: Wilhelm Reich's 'cloudbuster'. Before we can describe the weather-control system in terms of orgone, we have first to define or at least describe what this orgone is – and that's not easy. About the closest I can come to a definition is to say that it is an energy that is mainly seen as an aspect or mode of the atmosphere; an energy that operates most noticeably on the emotions but has physical and physiological side-effects; an energy that exists in two forms, defined by Reich as 'orgone radiation' (OR) and 'deadly orgone radiation' (DOR).[21] In some ways these appear to be identical to the ch'i and sha of Feng-shui respectively.

OR can be sensed as a feeling of 'life' and brightness in the atmosphere, and can be seen (or, more correctly, perceived) as bright fast-moving dots of light; while DOR, according to Reich, is responsible for 'dullness' and bleakness in the atmosphere, most easily sensed as the oppressive 'weight' of the atmosphere that builds up in the days before a big storm. The concept of orgone is more complex than this, though, and has a number of ramifications and side-issues which I haven't the space to go into here: for our purposes I'm only concerned with the concept of orgone as the theory behind Reich's cloudbuster.

The cloudbuster itself was an assembly of ten-foot-long steel pipes mounted as a block on an old anti-aircraft-gun carriage, so that the whole assembly could be aimed at any point in the sky. It looked rather like the truck-mounted 'Moaning Minnie' multiple rocket launcher that the Russian Army used towards the end of the Second World War. The pipes were hollow, and the back end of each was wired onto a large cable, which was itself earthed into underground running water at the bottom of a well. And that was all: no power supply, no chemicals, no missiles, no 'secret ingredients'. Yet from the evidence there is little doubt that with this device Reich was able to manipulate the weather in the area immediately around his base, both forming and dispersing rain clouds.[22]

The principles and practice of the operation of the cloudbuster are both obvious and simple once you accept certain basic assumptions. One is that orgone exists; another is that it is absorbed by water; another is that the ch'i aspect of orgone assists in the formation of ordinary rain-clouds; yet another is that a water-laden cloud is an area of higher orgone energy potential; and there are various other assumptions which needn't concern us here. The next part of the theory of the cloudbuster was derived from an early observation of Reich's, that not only does looking through a long metal tube make it easier to 'see' orgone energy, but the tube will push or pull – so to speak – the energy in direct line with it. Reich originally noticed this when casual pointing of a long tube appeared to cause the wind-ripples on the surface of a lake to change their direction of travel. Given this ability of a tube to draw orgone from a place, it is then necessary to put the collected energy somewhere: hence, in the final version of the cloudbuster, the connection of the tubes to running water, which absorbs the energy that the cloudbuster collects, and carries it away.

Given this as a theoretical and practical basis, the bank of tubes on the cloudbuster are assumed to be able to draw orgone energy from whatever part of the sky they are aimed at. By pointing it at the centre of a cloud, the amount of orgone is reduced, and thus also its ability to hold water in vapour form: the cloud therefore dissipates and disperses. By pointing the cloudbuster to one side of the cloud, the local atmospheric distribution of orgone is upset, and the cloud expands into the drawn area. By some inversion which Reich never explains, this gives the cloud a higher orgone potential, allowing it to carry more water in vapour form. If the process is carried on long enough, the amount of water vapour held by the cloud becomes too much for the cloud to hold, and so falls as rain.

In 'flat' or dull weather conditions cloud-forming tended to produce DOR clouds, but these could, like the ordinary clouds, be drawn into the well by pointing the cloudbuster directly at them. Most of these experiments took place in 1952. During his later experiments (between '53 and '55, I believe) he also pointed the cloudbuster at UFOs which were apparently frequently to be seen 'snooping' round the Reich Institute in Maine in the USA. He found that, as with the clouds, the UFOs faded away if the cloudbuster was aimed directly at them. This was the era when all UFOs were believed to be nuts-and-bolts space machines piloted by aliens from other planets; and Reich became convinced that his 'space-gun', as he began to call the cloudbuster, was the only defence that the United States had against these invaders.[23] The United States Government was not impressed.

His rejection and then persecution by the American authorities led to his death in prison in 1957, following a questionable legal action against Reich by the Federal Food and Drugs Administration. The Administration destroyed most of Reich's equipment and research records on the unproven and largely untested grounds that his work was fraudulent, and many of his works are still banned in the United States today.[24] But the Reich Institute was allowed to survive – though strictly limited in what it was allowed to do or research – and so was the original cloudbuster. I'm told that at that time the only one who really understood how to use it was Reich himself, though others are now starting to work on his cloudbusting techniques again. For many years it stood forlorn on its pedestal, the open end of the bank of pipes pointing at the ground because, although no-one wanted to dismantle it, no-one knew how to turn it off either. A sad end to an interesting experiment, and to a great if eccentric man.

But Reich may not have been as crazy as he seemed when he claimed he had 'dispersed' those UFOs. I'm certain that he was wrong to describe the cloudbuster as a 'space-gun', but he was still right in a sense, because if the barrows in that stone-and-barrow weather-control system are indeed orgone accumulators, a definite link is beginning to emerge between orgone and UFOs – but a link that only makes sense if we abandon the idea that UFOs are 'spacecraft from Outer Space'. The way things are going, 'craft from Inner Space' seems more likely.

The link comes in some recent research by Paul Devereux, the present editor of The Ley Hunter magazine, and a fellow-researcher, Andrew York, on geographical correlations between geological structure, megalithic sites and folklore – particularly folklore about supposed paranormal and other 'Fortean' phenomena. These last, named after Charles Fort, the great collector of information 'damned' as non-existent and ignored by so-called scientists, include anything which doesn't fit the normal pattern of life: reports of hauntings, crazy weather phenomena like fireballs, ice-falls and even a case of rain falling from a cloudless sky, meteorite landings and, of course, UFO sightings. The survey was restricted to Leicestershire, but even so it took three years of their spare time to do.[25]

But the results do seem worthwhile: for a start, working from clues given them by local folklore, they located and identified about forty standing stones (or their recent sites - several were destroyed in recent road improvements) in a county where the archaeologists knew only of one and the former site of another. The most striking part of their results was the geographical correlation: almost all the standing stones were sited in definite zones which coincided with the major geological faults of the county – and the majority of the Fortean phenomena, including UFO sightings and 'landings', fell in exactly the same zones. The correlation was so precise that an apparently anomalous area, which had the right folklore and some Fortean phenomena but apparently no geological faults, turned out in a later geological survey to be heavily faulted, and has become the Belvoir Vale colliery as a result.

Dowsers already knew about the link between underground fissuring – forming water-lines - and standing stones, but the link with hauntings and the like was not so well-established. Some other people, working in a different field of research for different reasons, were only too well aware of the connection: "the proximity of ancient sites may ... be the only explanation of places of disturbance which are not centred on a home", as one of them put it. The disturbance this writer, John Richards, described is an imbalance of many levels of energies at a particular place; and if our geomancy, our earth-acupuncture, is to have any value, it must be able to balance energies of every level within the landscape. That means that we have to broaden the scope of what we are asking it to handle. John Richards continues:

I think you'll see what I mean by 'broadening the scope of our geomancy'. One of John Richards' colleagues stated their problem, and ours, in rather more detail:

From the tone of this passage it is obviously Christian; in fact it is part of the Report of a commission on exorcism convened by the Bishop of Exeter. What may surprise you is the relatively recent date of the Report: it was first published in 1972. The problems it describes aren't superstitions of the distant past, they are realities of the present: and as such they form a necessary part of our new model of nature.

Notes

[1] Most ley-hunters have ignored modern sites, because it seemed ludicrous to suggest that they fell in with the same pattern as the prehistoric sites. No published informationis available on this as yet, for that reason. But it's something I've noticed time and again in my own work; and in discussions with several ley-hunters I've found that they too had noticed the connection, but had dismissed it as 'mere coincidence'. The problem is not whether it is 'coincidence' – which it is – but whether the coincidence is meaningful: and much more research is needed if we are going to be able to answer that question.

[la] This dismissal of the 'pagan solution' is general rather than total. For example, see James Lovelock's Gaia for a scientist's view of the active involvement of the Earth as a totality in its own survival.

[2] See Brian Branston, The Lost Gods Of England, p.54.

[3] See the article by Martin Puhvel, The Mystery of the Cross-roads, in Folklore 1976 ii, pp.167-77.

[4] See J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (Papermac edition), pp.835-9.

[5] See Janet and Colin Bord, Mysterious Britain, pp.71-2.

[6] See, for example, J.T. Lesser, Sacred Geometry.

[7] See, for example, Critchlow's articles on sacred geometry in the Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisations's studies Glastonbury: a study in patterns, Britain: a study in patterns and Earth Mysteries: a study in patterns.

[8] Michell and Critchlow discussed this in their articles on the RILKO studies. Michell covers number-symbolism in more depth in his City of Revelation, while Critchlow has shown the interaction in architecture of number, music, geometry and astronomy in many lectures and books, and in his Arts Council exhibition Working Order (1974).

[9] See Figs.24-5 in The Old Straight Track; also 'Alignment for Issue 73' in TLH 73, p.12.

[10] See The Old Straight Track, p.96-9 and Figs.95-100.

[11] See Ostrander and Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain, pp.368-89.

[12] See Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain, pp.358-67; also Lyall Watson, Supernature, pp.97-101.

[13] See Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp.99 and 296 for examples.

[13a] See Don Robins, Circles of Silence, for more detail on the physics of the mechano-electrical effect.

[13b] Don Robins, in Circles of Silence, discusses a daily cycle at Rollright, with a noticeable 'click' in microwave recordings occurring repeatedly at dawn and dusk; a gravitational anomaly at Carnac which may be related is discussed in TLH 94 (Autumn 1982), pp.7-9.

[14] The original article, in German, was by Peter Reiser in Radiasthesie, Geopathie, Strahlenbiogie, Issue 114, May-June 1973.

[15] Some examples in JBSD are Colonel F.H. Iles, The Question of Protection Against Lightning as Affected by Earth Rays, in JBSD II, No.11, Mar 36, pp.164-70; M.H. Chipperfield, Observation Regarding Lightning, in JBSD III, No.22, Dec 38, pp.275-7; and Helmuth Hesserl, The Earth Rays and Their Importance, in JBSD, IV, No.26, Dec 39, pp.52-60.

[16] See the British Standard on Lightning Protection, published by the British Standards Institute.

[17] See Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp.926-7.

[18] See Thom, Megalithic Lunar Observatories, p.115.

[19] See Barry Marsden, The Early Barrow-Diggers; the relevant sections are quoted in Janet and Colin Bord, The Secret Country, pp.205-9, along with some similar examples of apparent weather-control.

[20] See L.V. Grinsell, The Ancient Burial Mounds of England.

[21] For Reich's own summary of his work on orgone, see Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings.

[22] See Section VII-1, DOR Removal and Cloud-busting, pp.433-46 of Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings.

[23] I'm perhaps being unfair here: since writing this I've been told that Reich was aware that UFOs had other aspects beyond the apparently physical one of nuts-and-bolts 'flying saucers'.

[24] The Administration based its charge of fraud on the grounds that its scientists had found that Reich's orgone accumulators could not work with any of the physical energies they knew and understood, and therefore could not work at all. They never tested the accumulators in the way that Reich had designed them to be used: their approach to the workings of the accumulators was 'like that of a child with a drum: cut it open to see what is inside it', as Watkins sourly commented about archaeologists and barrows.

[25] Part of this material was published in the Fortean Times magazine, then titled The News. See Portrait of a Fault Area, by Paul Devereux and Andrew York, in The News 11, pp.5-10 and 14-19, and The News 12, pp.12-13; see also their articles in The Ley Hunter, Nos. 66, 67 and 68, and a later summary in Paul Devereux, Earth Lights, Chapter 7.

[26]John Richards, But Deliver Us From Evil, p. 211.

[27] Dom Robert Petitpierre (ed.), Exorcism: the findings of a commission convened by the Bishop of Exeter, pp.21-2.

Copyright © 1978-98 Tom Graves

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