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The Return of Paganism

It's a characteristic of pagan cultures that they people the world around them with angels, demons, spirits, fairies and the like; and it's a characteristic of civilised cultures that they sneer at this pagan 'ignorance'. But the research we've been looking at suggests that the pagans weren't far wrong in their beliefs in animism, in spirits and in the life and intelligence of nature: it's the citizens who are ignorant, not the pagans. Civilised anthropologists seem to have assumed that pagans see spirits because they're trained to see them; but in reality it's more likely that we in civilised cultures don't see them because we're trained to not see them, to rationalise away any vision of them that might be so uncivilised as to appear. We need to look at things from a pagan point of view before we can dismiss paganism as 'mere superstition'.

As that engineer said, those fairies and the like may 'only' be energy-fields interacting with us, but they are still aspects of the reality that nature imposes on us, and they are still realities that operate upon us, which we cannot ignore. Almost the whole of our civilisation is based on an ignorance of that reality, a deliberate ignorance of that reality; and that is the reason why life in this civilisation, which at the present time is undoubtedly at its zenith as far as civilisations go, is particularly devoid of both meaning and hope. If we are to recover anything from that civilised carnage, we have to unlearn that ignorance, and learn once again to recognise nature both within and without ourselves. Hence the need for a return to paganism, or at least to some of the pagan values and respect for nature, in our culture.

The re-introduction of paganism, or at least a pagan awareness, would at first have to be somewhat limited, and adapted to suit modern terms and limitations, to give us time to unlearn our ignorance. It's not going to be easy, not just because of the sheer power behind the forces of nature (particularly at the emotional level, which is probably why that ignorance developed in the first place – life was more comfortable if you ignored nature and reality), but also because one of the side-effects of the so-called 'Age of Reason' has been to destroy most of the experiential meanings – in English and probably in most other civilised languages as well – of all the key words we need to describe the phenomena we're dealing with. Without them, we cannot meaningfully describe what we see.

Angels, demons, fairies, goblins, dwarves: these have all been relegated to nursery tales, for according to civilised 'reason' neither they, nor anything that might be behind them, can exist – except as a 'figment of the imagination', perhaps. Other words: we've already seen how the present meanings of words like coincidence and existence limit our understanding of the concepts behind those words – concepts which are vital if we're to understand anything of the pagan view of nature. We also run up against the ubiquity of scientism, the near-worship of an irrational rationalism, when we try to describe fairies and the like in terms of 'frequencies', 'vibrations' or 'radiations': for although such terms make sense in describing what we perceive, they don't make sense in terms of any material energy, and thus in the current social view of science. We have to watch the meanings of words all the time in studying these fields, for all the time we run into traps of modern meaninglessness; it's often best, whenever a word seem meaningless, to look up its meanings in the old languages from which the modern word is derived, for at those times the pagan reality was still real.

The other problem we have to face is the effects of the highly successful propaganda campaign that the Roman Church in particular waged against pagan religions from the time of Constantine, in the fourth century, right through to the present day. The shortlived Celtic Church can be excused from this, I think, for there is little doubt that St Patrick, St Cuthbert and the other great Celtic saints made a sincere effort to graft the original Christian ideas onto existing pagan beliefs; but to my knowledge it was the only Church that bothered to do so. The other Churches tried to obliterate all previous beliefs, dismissing as 'ignorant heathenism' the whole of the reality of the peoples whose territories they invaded.

And invaded is the right word. The Council of Nicaea of 325AD was convened by Constantine to construct an ideology that would unify the peoples of the ailing Roman Empire – his concern was political, not religious, and it has been a characteristic of the organised Church ever since.[2] Within two centuries of Constantine's time, when the Empire had already collapsed, the Roman Church was engaged in an attempt to reconstruct the old Empire by ideological rather than military conquest. The parish system, the central facet of the Church's administration system, is identical to that of the old Empire; and the Church went to great pains to suppress the old oral traditions, replacing them, through its jealously-guarded monopoly of literacy, with its own manufactured history of 'the Truth'. The fact that this supposedly final, factual God-given 'history' now changed with each succeeding Pope was conveniently ignored.

By the time that the Roman missionary Augustine came over to Britain, in the early part of the seventh century, the Roman Church had re-written church dogma several times, Constantine-style, and had conveniently forgotten almost all of the original teachings of Christ. It preferred narrow authoritarianism to the gentle humanity of the Christianity of the Gospels. By the seventh century the Church was, from all the evidence I've seen, little more than a voracious, fast-expanding political bureaucracy operating under a thin disguise of religious concern. Its concern with 'conversion' of the 'heathens' seems to have had more to do with increasing the Church's tithe-revenue than it ever had to do with the saving of souls. That's a cynical view, I admit; but from what I've seen it's probably not far off the truth.

So it's interesting to see what happened when Augustine came over to Britain. The first time he came over, to Kent, in the south-east corner of Britain, he was 'seen off the premises' by the local heathen king. He came back a few years later, slightly less over-confident, and slightly less arrogant; but his instructions from Pope Gregory the Great, if somewhat conciliatory, were as arrogant as ever:

The Roman Christianity of that period was a mixture of political intrigue and expediency, mixed with a large amount of arrogance and hypocrisy. The 'conversions' that took place in England then were more for political security than religious faith, and in one case the king was converted in order to escape the endless preachings of his Christian wife. So much for the glory of the true God!

But the Celtic Church was still very much alive and active at this time. It's noticeable that until his eastern power-base was well established, Augustine never dared to travel west or north to meet with the Celtic Church, which had been there for the best part of six centuries – assuming that the stories about Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury and in Cornwall are true.[4] There's an apocryphal tale that says that the Celtic Church were wary of Augustine, and representatives who were due to visit him in the south of England wanted to know how they could recognise if Augustine really was the 'man of God' that he claimed to be. They consulted their scriptures, and decided that a true man of God would, like Jesus, welcome them after their travels and wash the road-dust off their feet when they arrived at his residence. Going on their own practice, they expected that residence to be a hermit's cell.

The 'hermit's cell' turned out to be a gaudy palace; and Augustine, far from greeting them, stayed seated in his raised up 'cathedra' or bishop's throne, demanding that they bow down to him as the true representative of the 'one true God'. They didn't: they walked straight out, and walked back to Wales again, wiser and warier men. It's an apocryphal tale, but, again, it's probably not far off the truth. Certainly the Celtic Church avoided any dealings with the Roman invaders until the latter forced the convening of the Synod of Whitby in 664AD. The enforced death of the Celtic Church that stemmed from that meeting spelt, to my mind, the death of any true organised Christianity in Britain, and the reinforcement of the cant and hypocrisy that much of organised religion in Britain has spread around itself from that time until now.

Looking back, there is just no way in which the Roman dogma could have made sense to anyone living, as a pagan would, as part of nature. The whole Roman system of belief centred round a nebulous and not particularly benificent Father-God, a sexless Son, a Virgin Mother, and Joseph, an impotent physical foster-father. No birth, no recognition of death as physical death, and no rebirth either, since the doctrine of reincarnation – an original part of Christian belief – had been expunged from Roman doctrine by Augustine's time. Life was a one-way trip to heaven or hell, and what happened to the land that you tilled meant nothing to you after your death. That attitude is the direct ancestor of modern agribusiness monoculture: it destroys the land, but no-one involved gives a damn, because they know the land will last out just beyond their own lifetimes before turning into a desert. The pagan attitude, which is still quite strong among family farmers, was and is one of 'live as if you'll die tomorrow, but farm as if you'll live for ever' - ecologically a far sounder approach.

At least the Celtic Church had a realistic attitude to sex, for although its monks and nuns were celibate, as in all Christian organisations, it was common for people to join the Celtic religious orders after they had brought up their families. They joined those orders when they were mature, when their thoughts turned naturally to wonder about meaning in life – not, as in other Christian orders, when they were too young to have any knowledge of who they were.

Apart from the Celtic Church, most of the Christian organisations maintained a ludicrous attitude to the fact of human sexuality. In the excesses of the Middle Ages, when even the Popes kept prostitutes on call, such an attitude became merely farcical; while in the excesses of the Puritans and the Victorian neo-Puritans it was totally destructive of all the joy of living, productive of much suffering, and often beyond the borders of the barbaric.[5] It is still ridiculous to expect a celibate priest to give reliable advice on sexual problems, as Catholics are daily asked to do; and the costume of the present-day Anglican priest, with the head separated from the black-covered and shapeless body by a circle of light, nicely symbolises the inability of many priests to handle any matters outside the artificial limits of their head-based religion. What is missing in religion is a sense of joy, as the litany drones on; what is missing in civilisation is a sense of meaning, as the rush-hour drones on; and these are things which the pagan reality can provide.

The Church labelled most of the pagan pantheon as 'devils'; and if we can forget for a moment the Church's hatred, and therefore their labelling as 'evil', of anything which they didn't understand or which didn't fit their current system, that description was, for a change, accurate. The term 'devil' was a Jewish corruption of the Persian word 'deva', which literally means 'shining one' – without connotations either of good or of evil. And the concept of 'shining one' describes exactly the energy-forms that people have always seen, and still see, as gods, demons, angels, fairies, spacemen or whatever. The term 'deva' tends to be used in a more specific sense nowadays, as we'll see shortly; but I think it's fair to say that the early English gods were indeed 'devils', in this sense of 'shining ones'. We have another Christian confusion to sort out before we can move on, though, and that comes from the fact that the Old English word 'godi' meant both the god, the 'shining one', and its wooden representation in a temple, through which the god or its attributes could be invoked. Hence Christian harangues like this:

That the same could be said of an altar or crucifix, or a statue of the Virgin or some Christian saint is, I think, a point that should not be missed. But forget that, for what matters here is that the Church once again shows its remarkable ability to miss the point. The idols, the 'godi', are tools for the invocation of a god or its attributes: they are not the gods themselves. The concept of invocation, or literally 'calling into one's-self' the attributes of something, is a standard part of magical practice throughout the world, and a standard part of many religious practices and meditations. It's a key part of the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, in which the wine and wafer of the Communion are seen as the blood and flesh of Christ: so if we are to take that writer, Pope Boniface, seriously, we must also call the wine and wafer of the Communion 'damnable images'. But the Eucharist is of real value and has real effects on many people, bringing, as they see it, the spirit of Christ within them – cannibalistic practice though it may be, as one astute heathen pointed out. We can say the same about the pagan 'godi': that as tools for invocation they brought the spirit, the attributes, of the respective god within the people who took part in the ritual around that 'damnable image'.

The concept of invocation is difficult to understand if you haven't done it yourself. It's kind of possession, in the traditional sense; but if it's done properly the whole operation and the type and level of the 'possession' remains under the operators' control, or at least under their direction. One everyday example of this is in dramatic acting: a good actor does not so much interpret the part as let himself be interpreted by the part, by the character he is 'playing' – and, more important, he must be able to drop that part when he walks off the stage. In a sense, a good actor must be a good magician or medium.

So the aim of religious invocation, for which those 'damnable images' were tools, is to take on the characteristics of a god-form in the same way that an actor takes on a part in a play. The names given to the various god-forms, in religious and magical invocation at least, are simply labels for groups of characteristics. The names are traditional, but any label can be used for any set of characteristics, as long as they are recognisable as such to the operator: an eccentric magician friend of mine once used the names of two commercial glues, Uhu and Araldite, as labels for 'a pair of very sticky goddesses' that he invoked for a group to whom he was teaching the rudiments of magic. But it's more normal, in both religious and magical practice, to use a recognisable name, if only to make sure that the set of characteristics you are about to call up are the ones you want.

And that is an important point: you call up those characteristics in an invocation. In essence, an invocation is a way of emphasising certain characteristics within you, a way of changing both the inner and outer effects of your subjective reality. An invocation, if it really works, will alter the whole structure of your personality. Most of the god-forms dealt with in current magical practice, and in fact most of the named gods, as in the old Norse, Greek and Roman cultures, are sets of entirely human characteristics – groupings which Jung termed 'archetypes'. I've read that on one occasion Jung also evoked an archetype, a far more difficult magical operation, for during a detailed study of one particular archetype he found himself 'walking and talking in the garden' with what was to him a visible personification of that archetype. The conversations he had with that entity enabled him to gain a great deal of information about that archetype. If the archetypes are groupings of human characteristics, we could say that in a very real sense the gods, as archetypes, created man in their own image.

But this accounts for only one class of god-forms, a class which is not particularly important in a study of the energy-matrix of nature and those aspects of it which impinge directly upon us. A god-form is a collection of factors and characteristics which, when operating together as a kind of 'personality', perform some function: Jung's archetypes are good examples of these. But there are other classes of characteristics linked to functions, such as the angels and demons. In their roles as messengers they are sets of characteristics of a kind with functions of a kind, and forms with which they 'clothe' themselves according to the circumstances. Beyond these, there are other sets of characteristics more of the forces of nature than of man, but which also have recognisable functions and forms, and can thus be said, in the magicians' sense of the word, to be 'god-forms'. Angels and demons, in their roles as messengers, are archetypes that arise from an interaction between man and nature; while this other class of archetypes or god-forms, which are usually called 'devas' in the more recent use of the word, are archetypes within and of nature itself, sometimes archetypes of a place (the genius loci), of a plant or animal species – even, it seems, of classes of machines.

Much of the recent data on this comes from the early days of the Findhorn experiment. Like Jung, the Findhorn community learned to converse with archetypes in various ways and on various levels; but these were archetypes of the natural rather than the solely human world. Like Jung, the community were able, by conversing with these 'entities', to obtain a great deal of practical information and advice: specifically, in their case, on how best to grow each species of plant in the initially hostile climate of a caravan park in a cold Scottish bay. From their work we can construct what would seem to be a hierarchy of levels within the natural world – a hierarchy that exists almost entirely independently of man, but without which mankind could not survive.

There appear to be three levels or, as Findhorn would put it, three 'kingdoms' in this hierarchy: the nature spirits or 'elementals'; the devas and landscape angels; and nature itself, of which we are necessarily and inescapably a part. The nature spirits are best described as energy-forms, manipulating the movement of energies in and around plants, animals, minerals, everything; the energies they manipulate are the same as those we've seen in studying the energy-matrix of the landscape. The devas and landscape angels are the archetypes and essences behind each thing or place, laying the patterns on which the nature spirits build. And nature ... nature just is, I suppose, in the same way that we just are.

It's important to realise that each of these levels or kingdoms has intelligence of a kind, taking 'intelligence' to mean 'adaptability' rather than the distorted civilised sense of 'logical intellection'. Within each level are many sets of characteristics, and thus many different 'personalities'; so each level contains many different entities, each with personalities and each with more or less intelligence and scope of action. And all of this is independent of almost anything that we may do. The complexities are enormous, but I think it's simplest to say that if we are to understand nature and our relationship with it, we will have to develop a kind of psychology of nature in the same way as we have developed a psychology of man – for each of these levels has parallels within man. The work at Findhorn is important to us because it lays the groundwork for a modern version of a psychology, and perhaps a sociology, of nature. I can't go into the details of Findhorn's work here because of the scope of this book, but I think I can summarise it as follows.[7]

In the sense that Findhorn describes them, the nature spirits are elementals, similar to the 'barrow-guardians' we looked at earlier: but they are natural rather than artificial. Another way of looking at them is to say they are, like the guardians, constructs, but constructed by nature rather than by man. All are concerned with what we might call routine maintenance work; they rarely have any physical existence, operating on levels outside of such existence, and are traditionally classified according to the symbolic images and forms as which they are sometimes 'seen'. Fairies are associated with plant life in general; goblins and dwarves with the slow changes of minerals (hence the pick and shovel in the classic image of the dwarf), and the provision of the mineral needs of plant life; naiads and dryads are associated with water-supply and with trees; and so on.

Like the barrow-guardians, these nature-spirits seem to be limited in their movements and the scope of their activity, and to have little individual intelligence; but the group-intelligence is enormous, and is traditionally represented by the nature-god Pan. Pan is unlimited in movement or scope of action – in the original Greek he is literally 'everywhere' – and his form, half animal, half human, represents the marrying of the forces of nature with a kind of intellect. The apparent form, again, is symbolic, rather than representational of any physical entity. The elemental archetype is more often sensed than seen; and it's likely, as one of the community explained, that it is only seen when it 'wants' to be seen.

The same is true of the devas, the archetypes of species. It's best to understand them as personalities that operate on things and on places, in the same way as it is easiest and best to understand human archetypes as discarnate personalities that operate on people. Man's civilised ignorance of nature, and thus of these higher 'personalities', means that the latter – to put it in human terms – are sulking, and co-operating only where necessary for the maintenance of nature rather than the needs of man. On a physical level, we could suggest that one result of this non-co-operation is the current spread of desert areas throughout the world. We could also see it in the odd fact that human life expectancy, after infancy, remains substantially unchanged from time immemorial even in civilised countries, despite the technical advances of civilised medicine. On another level, we can see that what Reich termed the 'emotional plague' is pandemic in cities on an enormous scale, and usually coupled with a degree of stress that we could say is literally Panic, a meaningless and irrational fear that is now more a characteristic of civilised cultures than the pagan ones from which the term first came.

The Church must, I believe, take a large part of the blame for this non-co-operation of nature, for it was its use of the Pan symbol as its main symbol for the 'forces of evil' that formed the justification for the deliberate ignorance of nature that now typifies civilised cultures. To the civilised man, that symbol 'proves' that nature is nasty. But Roman Christianity, as we have seen, was an urban ideology par excellence: its weird emasculated view of reality could not be squared with the pagan view, and the Church made sure, in its various ways, that it was the pagan reality rather than its own monstrosity that was buried under the junkpile labelled 'evil – do not touch'. Pan is the symbol of our relationship with nature: if we pour hatred and negativity into that symbol, as the Church has always told us to do, we should not be surprised or complain if we get negativity thrown back at us from that relationship. What is surprising is the tolerance that Pan and nature continue to show us: but I doubt if they can remain tolerant for much longer.

The Findhorn experiments make it clear that we have everything to gain by co-operating with nature, and little to lose except our arrogance. The early years of the Findhorn experiments, when the legendary forty-pound cabbages and eight-foot foxgloves were grown, were exceptional. Some people have interpreted them as a kind of 'publicity stunt' on the part of nature, to show that true co-operation could bring spectacular results. They're probably right, and I don't think we ought to expect results of that kind again – it was a publicity exercise, not a normal mode of operation.

But even in a normal mode, the Findhorn results suggest a number of other possibilities that could arise through a closer co-operation with nature at all levels. We could take the traditional intuitive 'green fingers' approach to gardening up to a conscious level, for example, and ask each archetype or deva for practical advice on the best planting and culture for the plant species it represents under the immediate conditions. Findhorn also suggest that we could ask the archetypes to modify the form of the plant at an archetypal level where necessary, to produce a new version of the plant with special characteristics for special conditions – such as desert – that would be sturdier and more reliable than one modified artificially by man. Plants could be made more resistant to diseases or pest attack by the same approach; and Findhorn claim that they have done this on several occasions through their co-operation with the respective devas.[8]

In The Findhorn Garden, Dorothy, Findhorn's main 'contact' with the devic kingdom in the early days of the experiment, gave several interesting examples of 'pest control' through action at the archetypal level. One was when they had a serious problem with moles, who were uprooting their plants in search of the enormous worms that were growing there. Deciding that it would be wrong to try to trap or kill any of the moles, she tried another means of dissuading them from wrecking the garden. She tried to visualise the archetype or essence of 'mole-ness', and received, as she put it, "the impression of a rather scary King Mole with a crown on his head, sitting in a cavern underground". She 'explained' to this archetype – which we could say was 'merely' an image in her mind – that the moles it represented were damaging her garden at Findhorn. Promising that none of the moles would be threatened or harmed, she asked this King Mole if he would be so kind as to ask his subjects to move to a nearby piece of scrub-land, where they would not disturb or be disturbed by anyone.

This archetypal mole 'sort of grunted', said Dorothy; but for several weeks there were no moles at all in the garden. Each time they re-appeared, Dorothy repeated her request to the King Mole image; and in time no moles wandered back. They weren't bothered with moles again. Not, that is, until the garden was expanded to take in that nearby piece of scrubland, some years later, for the moles were, of course, all there. Dorothy was no longer working in the garden then, but I do think it was unfair of the gardeners of that time to use Dorothy's way of asking the moles to move on again. They had been told that they would be left alone there – an important part of this 'pest control' technique – and the fact that it worked, that the moles did move on, says a lot for the tolerance and co-operation of nature in those circumstances.

The key to all of this is love and respect for nature and all life in nature; and in this the Findhorn experiments are hardly new, as Tompkins and Bird showed in their excellent book The Secret Life of Plants. It's true that we have to kill in order to live, in order to eat; it's true that we can't possibly avoid killing myriads of minute creatures every time we move; and we'd go insane – as some people have done – if we tried, impossibly, to avoid killing anything. But there is a world of difference between killing as a necessary fact, and killing as wanton destruction; and there is a world of difference, too, between killing a stock-animal yourself, and paying someone else to do your killing for you as you pick up your meat from the butcher or from the supermarket fridge.

I'm not suggesting that meat-eating is somehow 'wrong' – in fact from the evidence I've seen it would seem that vegetarian diets are ecologically unsound except in small mobile cultures, which hardly applies to ours – but rather that meat-eating should be done with respect, with awareness of the fact that the corned beef in your sandwich didn't just come out of a tin, it came out of a once-living animal. Recent research seems to show that plants have feelings too, so vegetarians have no reason to maintain a smug 'holier-than-thou' attitude about 'murderous meat-eaters': vegetarian food is still murdered at some stage, just like any other food-source.[9] The fact remains that whatever you ate, whether it came from the garden or from a tin, you – or someone you hired - killed it first. So treat your food with respect, and with thanks for what It gave you. From its death comes its rebirth as part of you: that's how nature works.

Try looking at nature with a sense of wonder, for that's what much of the pagan attitude to nature is about. Learn not to take everything for granted; learn once more, as you knew as a child, to recognise the miraculous in nature. I've talked at times with people who say there are no such things as 'miracles'; but I honestly believe that they need their heads – and hearts – examining, for I have no trouble in seeing the wondrous and the miraculous in nature everywhere. I don't only mean the obvious natural miracles, like the growth of trees and plants, the delicate balances and cycles of nature in the countryside; these are important, but they are by no means the only ones, and they aren't so obvious or so visible in the depths of a city. The miraculous is still there in the city, and you can see it clearly once you have unlearned your ignorance of it. Watch a child go past you, for example, riding a rattly and battered pushbike: see that for the miracle it is. Birth itself is a denial of entropy, the constant running-down of things; and yet here before you is a child, capable even before it goes to school of complex physical motion and balance, of play, of communication, of subtle rational thought. If that's not a miracle, what is?

And see miracles in the workings of man-made things: see the miracles behind them. Even an ordinary light-bulb is miraculous: for no amount of theory, no amount of explaining how it could work, can explain why it should work at all. I find the naturally-coded pulsing of the overgrounds in the natural energy-matrix miraculous; but the pulsing that can be put down a telephone wire to carry a message across a vast distance is no less miraculous. Man's ingenuity, however great, does not create those properties of wires in light-bulbs and in telephone systems: it simply makes use of them. Even such an obviously man-made thing as a car is miraculous, for it is still a miracle that such an enormous mass of metal can be made to move by the explosion of a tiny amount of a simple hydrocarbon compound.

Despite those miracles, there is, it seems, a touch of the demonic in everything that man touches. The orange glare of the city lights obliterates the beauty of the night sky; the telephone carries messages of hate as well as of love; the car poisons, pollutes, maims and kills; and the Concorde aircraft, rightly called a miracle of engineering, is beautiful to watch but makes a noise that can only be called hellish. We admit the miracle of the growing and maturing of a child; but yet, to make sure that the child grows up suitably civilised, we force that child through our so-called education system, a compulsory non-education whose main function seems not to be to 'out-lead' the qualities of the child but to stifle them, limit them, until the child can be turned out into the civilised world classified as one or other type of civilised factory-fodder. There is little or none of this in nature: there is savagery and death in all manner of guises, it's true, but this deliberate cruelty, deliberate evil, seems to be a characteristic of man alone.

I suspect that the 'force of evil' which the Church describes and from which it purports to protect us is not only man-made, but also to a large extent Church-made. Remember the barrow-guardian I described earlier: it was a constructed 'idea' with a function. Once something like that is constructed, it will continue to operate until it is dismantled – which is, to say the least, a tricky job. Demons – personified agents of imbalance of the natural energies – are constructs like the barrow-guardians; and it's probably true that minor demons can be dismantled in much the same way as the guardians, either through exorcism or through what the occultists call 'absorption by love'. But the major demons are a different matter, for they are more than mere ideas: they are complete archetypes which have been built up over millenia. They exist (and that is the right word) in something akin to a 'collective unconscious', and they operate on the forces of nature as part of our interaction with nature. We cannot complain about the evil of demons, for we created them, and we maintain them. They are the personifications of our own imbalances - our greed, our ignorance, our self-aggrandisement and such like – and they are more part of our nature than part of nature.

These imbalances within us are essentially anarchic, and they would normally fight each other for our attention. But it is here that the Church has done its greatest evil to us, for in constructing an image of a demonic hierarchy, comparable to the hierarchy of the natural Kingdoms, it has effectively unified those inchoate forces behind one massive super-archetype, the Devil. Look again at what the Church's Devil really is: the symbol used is that of Pan, but it is better described as a sort of 'dustbin' for all the aspects of human nature that the Church preferred to hide.

The doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope – as the Pontiff, the bridge between man and God – meant that the inevitable mistakes and prejudices of each Pope were concealed as being the effect of the interference of the Devil and its 'forces of evil'. Protestants took the whole idea a stage further, declared the Papacy itself to be the work of the Devil, and effectively declared a doctrine of the infallibility of man rather than God. A reversal occurred, implicit, but never stated: for man was no longer seen as 'being made in the image of God'; rather, God was seen as an extension of man, an image of man. God was and is assumed to rule the universe in whatever way is currently believed to suit man best; and it is the Devil – and thus nature, through the equating of the symbol of Pan with that of the Devil – who is blamed for those little inconsistencies that led to the witchhunts, the persecution of heretics, and the whole mess that civilised arrogance has led us in to.

We can see exactly the same attitude maintained throughout the development of science, and particularly its religious aspect, humanistic scientism. God rules the universe in whatever way science sees fit; science assumes that the universe must have a logical order behind it, so inconsistencies are not allowed to exist. God and nature are forbidden by man to be illogical; and the logic is man's, not God's or nature's. The whole aim of science is the same as that of the old theologians – to define how the universe 'really works' – in other words the aim of both science and religion has been to define what man will permit God and nature to do.

Every so often, the theologians and scientists have claimed that they have finally defined the workings of the universe; but every time they have done this there have been one or two inconvenient inconsistencies that have broken their so-consistent logic. In physics, the atom was at first the 'indivisible building block of the universe'; but the atom has been divided and sub-divided until it is obvious that nuclear physicists are seeing what they want to see – an apparent order – rather than admit that they do not know.[10] In all its history, science has brought us no closer to finding out how the universe 'really works'; and its key principle of 'reductionism', of dissecting the universe into ever smaller and smaller parts, is probably taking us further away from understanding the universe all the time.

The fact remains that if the universe is logical, it follows its own logic, not man's. A system of logic is destroyed if even one inconsistency is allowed to exist within it; and as Charles Fort and his followers have shown, there is a mass of 'damned' phenomena that have been observed throughout history – like freak weather, and horrors such as spontaneous human combustion – which, once admitted as facts instead of being conveniently ignored, destroy not only science's tidy logic, but science itself.[11] Once we admit the 'damned' phenomena to exist, we can see that science, as the way to define reality, has been an expensive fraud from the moment of its inception as a system of belief.

The problem with both science and religion, in their Western forms, is that both claim to define 'the Truth' – and the concept of Truth, when taken to its limit as both science and religion do, cannot admit the concept of Value, of the 'truth' of something under some circumstances but not others.[11a] The same holds good of political systems, which are, if you like, social religions: the variants of Marxism, to take one example, are seen as 'true' or 'not-true' in an absolute sense by their adherents and opponents, with no realisation of their varying value or lack of value in varying circumstances.

When technology is seen as 'applied science', and thus as 'true' and 'value-free', no-one bothers to think about the total value, the wider or long-term effects of the application of that technology. Our present technology therefore tends, at best, to be value-less, but far more often destructive of value, taking the value away from life and living. To say that life in civilised societies has lost its magic is correct, for magic is essentially concerned with values, with the value and use of things and ideas in a personal sense; and the whole aim of science, and thus the 'applied science' of our technological cultures, has been to ignore and destroy the concept of subjective or personal value in its search for its illusory 'objective Truth'.

The Church's construction of the Devil, as a means of concealing its own fallibility, created the very 'force of evil' it fights in its unbalanced way; and scientism, in its effort to conceal its own limitations, has done its utmost to deny the existence of any miracle, any magic, any value or meaning in life, other than its own mechanical, mindless, valueless simulation of 'Truth'. God, both say, is Truth; Truth is God; but if we look more closely we can see that their monotheism, their professed service of the 'one True God' and the 'one god Truth', turns out in practice and in reality to be little more than a garbled and imbalanced worship of the arrogance and ignorance of man – for both Church and Science demand that God and nature should obey man-made logic and man-made 'laws of nature'.

Demons are agents of imbalance in nature; and we could say that as we try to separate ourselves from nature, as we claim we are 'above' it, but yet necessarily remain part of it, we are ourselves the only agents of imbalance in nature. The demons are our creations. Our civilised arrogance, our civilised ignorance, and our civilised denial of nature and our nature, have created the demonic archetypes that harass us: and they will and must continue to do so as long as we try to maintain our illusion of separation from nature.

We have ourselves created the hell that we live in, in our so-civilised culture: no 'force of evil' is at work but ourselves. And we could say that until we learn to recognise – literally, to 'know again' – the unity of nature, recognise the constructive archetypes or gods within nature, and live in accordance with what our inescapable relationship with that unity, those gods, demands, we will always be troubled by the very real effects of demons. We could say that until we abandon our arrogant and ignorant monotheism, our worship of ourselves, and re-adopt the pagan knowledge of nature, the pagan pantheism, life in civilised societies will continue, literally, to be pandemonium.

There is another pagan concept that we need to recognise if we are to regain a balanced relationship with nature: we need to recognise that nature itself has a high degree of intelligence, far higher than ours, and entirely independent of ours. That is not just a concept, that is a fact, no matter how much we may try to conceal it behind our wall of arrogance and ignorance.[11b] We try to think that we control nature; but there's no shortage of evidence that nature controls us or uses us for its own inexplicable purposes. The various devas and the like that were involved in the Findhorn experiments made it clear that they were using the Findhorn community for experiments of their own; the community were well aware that they were being used, but their previous lengthy spiritual training made them only too happy to oblige – and reap an extraordinary harvest as their reward.

There is certainly an element of reward and punishment in our relationship with nature. The 'reward' element is not all that obvious, except in the more spectacular examples like Findhorn; but as the Feng-shui practitioners put it, where nature is balanced, where people are living in harmony with nature, 'health and good fortune result'. The 'punishment' element is rather more obvious, not only in the Feng-shui case-histories but in a large number of folk-tales, in Britain at least, that describe the 'retribution' that follows the destruction or desecration of a site.

John Michell cites some of these tales in his View Over Atlantis, and Janet and Colin Bord made a special study of them in their The Secret Country, so I don't think I need to go into the details of the various tales here. In some cases the effects described would appear to be the result of damaging the barrow-and-stone weather-control system, as I described earlier; in others – the 'Pharaoh's curse' type – the effects would seem to be the result of the activation of a 'guardian'; but there is a hard core of tales whose effects are apparently outside that range, and which would seem to be the result of tampering – accidentally or deliberately – with the forces of nature, at an archetypal level or beyond.

It is here that we come back to our earlier study of the energy-matrix, for the majority of the retribution legends that Michell and the Bords cite are connected with key sites of the matrix or else, as in Ireland, with the obstruction of 'fairy paths', which we could take to be the ground-lines of overgrounds. It may be that these stories are in the majority only in Michell's and the Bords' books, reflecting their interest in these fields; but either way, and whether factual or 'invented', the stories do imply that tampering with ancient sites is a mistake. And as in English law, ignorance of the power of the sites is no valid excuse: retribution still followed, and follows, whether the tampering was done accidentally or deliberately. It seems to be assumed by nature that you should know when you're liable to run into trouble of this kind.

The innumerable church-siting legends suggest that in some cases nature was willing to give man a certain amount of help in deciding where the 'best' site for a new church should be, to be best in harmony with the area and with its energy-control needs. There are few obvious common factors in the stories, but most simply say that 'the stones of the half-built church were moved during the night' to some other site, up hill, down dale, on a marsh or island (as with a fair number of the great cathedrals, such as Durham, Ely, Salisbury, York Minster and Westminster Abbey), but always at a distance from the original site, and usually to one that is apparently more inconvenient in some way or other. The legends have been interpreted in many ways: some historians have suggested that the resiting was due to differences of opinion among the villagers; the Bords and Michell suggested that the differences were between representatives of the Christian clergy and the non-Christian geomancers they employed, or else, as Underwood would have suggested, that geomancers were called in by the villagers during the building of the first site because that site somehow didn't feel right.

These theories all assume that the people knew what they were doing, but I'm not sure that we can assume this. Particularly with the stories of divination by animals' movements, the coincidences involved are such that if the sites are to be perfect in a geomantic sense (which many of them are) and to tie in with both the underground and overground parts of the energy-matrix (which most of these moved-sites and divined-sites do), then something would have to have been manipulating coincidences for the divination to work properly. Animals don't think in the same way as we do, after all. That 'something' that is manipulating coincidence would seem to be nature itself, for by getting people to build in the right places, it ensures that those places and structures help to maintain the harmony of nature by maintaining the flow of energies within it.

The siting-legends tail off sharply after the Reformation; and Michell, for example, has said that he thinks this to be so because the continuity of the geomantic tradition was broken by the religious upheavals of the time. But as he himself pointed out, the Reformation coincided with the rise of humanism and the development of the concept of the city as something apart from or above nature. We could suggest, then, that the geomantic continuity was broken from nature's side, not the clergy's: nature withdrew its co-operation with man because of man's ignorance of it. The few known cases of geomantic layout after the Reformation – such as Wren's churches and Inigo Jones's 'Queen's House' at Greenwich (which is sited on a right-angled intersection of two major overgrounds, according to several independent dowsing surveys that I've seen) – can be seen as coming from people who combined the new humanism with a deep love and respect for nature and its forms. Certainly it is true that most post-Reformation religious architecture is 'dead': as Michell put it, 'while our older churches are still capable of use as precise instruments for spiritual invocation, many of those built in modern times are nothing more than empty halls'.[12]

That, as I see it, is nature's side in the complex business of geomantic layout of sacred sites, such as we first saw in Underwood's work. Unlike Underwood or Michell, I see no need to postulate the existence of some kind of elite secret brotherhood of geomancers in Britain, travelling up and down the country to ensure that sacred – and secular - structures were correctly sited. It's possible that there may indeed have been such a brotherhood: the Masons and the Templars are both likely candidates for the job in the Christian period, and the archaeologist Euan MacKie has shown evidence for the operation of a similar group in the prehistoric period.[13] But I think in many cases the geomancy was more a matter of feeling on the part of the local inhabitants – with a little assistance from nature – rather than cold logic and systems supplied by an outside elite.

Consider, too, the complexity of the complete system of geomancy – which includes, as recent studies show, not only the placing of each site so that it matches with the underground and overground parts of the energy-matrix, and harmonises with the surrounding landscape; but also astronomical alignment, geometrical and numerological structure, musical resonance and much, much more. It seems to be far too complex, and to contain too many factors, to be handled by the kind of systematic analysis that Underwood and some others assumed to have been used by this elite corps of geomancers. The marrying of just two of the many factors in the geomancy – geometry and astronomy – with the surrounding landscape stretches even the present-day capacity for analysis to its limits, as ProfessorThom showed in his study of Castlerigg, near Keswick in Cumbria. As he says:

Analysis just isn't up to handling the complexity of the complete geomancy – so how indeed was it done? There is, as Colonel Bell pointed out to Underwood, no evidence that anything like the present-day practice of dowsing was used in the layout of churches or previous sacred sites. There is no evidence that the Masons, the Templars or MacKie's 'astronomer-priests' included systematic divination or a conscious knowledge of the energy-matrix in their practical work. Michell, in his View Over Atlantis, seems to imply that this knowledge was carried on by the ultra-secret remnants of some post-Atlantean 'supercivilisation'; while others have suggested that the work was all done by von Daniken's 'ancient astronauts'. But there is little or no evidence for the former from archaeology or even from folklore; and the latter theory can be seen clearly to be the materialistic fantasy that it is, once the paraphysical nature of UFO phenomena is fully understood. And that seems to leave us without a theory.

However we try to juggle the evidence to fit those various more convenient theories, we are always brought back to that pagan solution: that nature is intelligent, and is using people, through the forms that people in those siting-legends described as fairies, angels, the Devil or just 'something', to help it maintain its energy-matrix, its nervous system, its veins and arteries. The sacred sites, as we have seen, are on node-points of the energy-matrix; and the structures at those sites were built where and how they are, and with the extraordinary properties they show, not through analysis and logical systems, but because the builders understood and obeyed that 'something' beyond them, through dreams, through divination, through 'coincidence', through feelings.

Our ignorance of our feelings, our ignorance of 'coincidence', of dreams and divination and of our relationship with nature, has left us wide open to attack by the demons we have created and maintained since time immemorial. Sacred sites we can see as being at key nodes in the energy-matrix: when the structures at those sites are used for true worship, for reinforcement of and respect for our relationship with nature, they direct the energies passing through those sites towards creating and maintaining the harmony and health of the area. Literally, such actions at those sites are 'holy'. But what if the node-site is occupied by a 'profane' structure – literally, something outside the temple - such as, to quote the Exorcism Report, 'the office of an organisation devoted to greed or domination'? We would expect, from the comments in the Exorcism Report, that such a structure could 'incur trouble or act as a dispersal centre', would tend to direct the energies passing through that site towards destroying the health and harmony of the area. Going on our previous definition of the term, we could call such a structure 'demonic'.

And that would be an accurate description of the use of the site in more than one sense, for it seems likely that the structure will be where it is – on a site that should be occupied by a sacred structure, not a profane one – because our man-made demons have 'suggested' that use of the site in exactly the same way that nature 'suggested' the sacredness of node-sites in the first place. Our demons' aim is to destroy the harmony of the energies in the energy-matrix: they would therefore, we could suggest, encourage 'offices of organisations devoted to greed or domination' to take up residence at node-sites, so as to promote and increase that destruction.

It's not easy to find evidence for this suggestion, mainly because no-one has yet – to my knowledge – studied the geomantic aspects of the siting of 'offices devoted to greed or domination': but there are several clues which point in that direction. During his Leicestershire fieldwork Paul Devereux found that almost every mark-stone, however inconspicuous, was marked – and presumably 'short-circuited' – by a steel post of one kind or another rammed into the ground beside it, for a sign, a fence or whatever. In ley-hunting work I've been struck by the number of times that railway stations, of all things, fall onto precise alignments of prehistoric sites – there may be demonic Feng-shui-type reasons for that – and by the way that military research establishments and other military oddities both on and off the map fall onto the same lines. There is a small military post within fifty yards of Rollright stone circle, for example, and a whole network of military establishments surrounds Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. But the clearest example of this possibly demonic siting is the layout of the towers of the military microwave chains in Britain.

Officially, the towers form a major part of the Post Office's public telecommunications network – but this is only a secondary function for use in peace-time, a function which can still be switched off at the touch of a button. Their primary function was and still is to provide the Government and the military with a 'secure' system of communications, to enable them to maintain their control over the civilian population in case of war or civil insurrection. As Peter Laurie explained in his book on the towers, Beneath the City Streets, the fact that the designers were told to make the deceptively strong concrete towers of the main 'Backbone' chain proof against attack by civilians makes this quite clear. So the towers' primary function was, and probably still is, one of domination - they are thus 'offices of an organisation devoted to domination'. So, we are entitled to wonder, what are the geomantic aspects of these rather demonic towers?

We saw earlier, when first looking at Watkins' work on the ley-system, that the main principle of the towers – straight-line communications between high points, with minor points 'tapping in' to the straight line – is the same as that of the ley-system, particularly if we can equate leys with overgrounds. At first I took this just to be an analogy; but as time went on evidence began to collect that suggested that the analogy was too close for 'mere coincidence'. It seems, on looking more closely, that at least some of the towers are built on or very near to node-points in the natural energy-matrix. Many times when driving around the country I've seen one of these 'Watchers on the skyline' form part of a visible ley-type alignment. My clearest example so far is to the steel mast at Kelvedon Hatch near Brentwood in Essex, for at night-time the red warning light on its tip can be seen to be exactly in line with the centre-section of a classic ley-type road-zigzag round the church at High Ongar, about five miles away to the north; while the results of some experiments at dowsing from the air that I did recently suggest that at least five overgrounds converge on the concrete microwave tower at Stokenchurch.

But it's particularly on feelings that the towers' analogy with the ley-system seems more than an analogy. For me, a ley, or rather the overground it represents, has a definite feeling as I drive through it, 'pulling' my eyes round to look at the point it comes from. There's a particular point on the A38 main road a few miles above Lichfield where a line from Lichfield Cathedral crosses it, on a low hump in the road; for me, and for several others I know, the ley 'pulls' me round to show me that the central axis of the cathedral, from whence the line comes, is aligned precisely on that point. (This may be one reason, by the way, why that point on the road is classified as an 'accident black spot'.) Time and again, I've had this effect happen not just with churches and barrows, but with the towers as well. Still more interesting is the way that sections of new road or motorway 'coincidentally' align with the towers – as does a section of the M40 to the Stokenchurch tower – in the same way that sections of old road align on churches and cathedrals. Given the destructive effects of motorways and other high-speed roads on the energy-matrix, as reported by many dowsers, it would seem that these too had a certain amount of demonic assistance in the choosing of their routes.

The aim behind a return to pagan values is to reconstruct our relationship with nature - and it is this, of course, that our great demons of ignorance and arrogance, of pride and profanity, fight so hard against. Profane structures, the 'offices of organisations devoted to greed or domination', now occupy many of the node-points in the existing energy-matrix; so if we are to limit their destructive effects we have to take not just remedial action against the results of their discord, but also, if possible, protective and preventive action. We need to isolate them from the energies, bypassing those energies around such 'desecrated' sites. It is here that our earth-acupuncture becomes both useful and important; in using it we can heal not just the land and its energies, but also our relationship with nature, and with ourselves as well.

Notes

[1] Adapted from Elemental Ecology, an interview with Dick Barton, in Undercurrents 19, pp.15-16.

[2] From the accounts I've read, the Council's behaviour was hardly one of religious piety. Fights broke out in the Council Hall as each faction struggled to prove that its system of belief was 'the Truth'. All the key concepts of early Christianity, including the doctrine of reincarnation, were swept aside when Constantine over-ruled this ludicrous squabble, constructing a version of Christianity more suitable to his political needs instead. Such was the birth of modern Roman Christianity.

[3] From Bede's Ecclesiastical History, quoted in Brian Branston, The Lost Gods of England, pp.53-4.

[4] According to discussions I've had with Geoffrey Ashe, it's likely that those supposedly after the death of Christ are true to some extent: see his Camelot and the Vision of Albion, pp. 110-15.

[5] This comes out most clearly in an horrific book on the Victorian attitude to sex, The Anxiety Makers, once published by Penguin.

[6] Pope Boniface, in a letter to King Edwin of Northumbria around 625AD, Quoted in Brian Branston, The Lost Gods of England, p.54.

[7] By far the best source on Findhorn's work is the community itself – best visited in person, but otherwise through their book The Findhorn Garden.

[8] See The Findhorn Garden, p. 74.

[9] This theme is developed in some detail in Tompkins and Bird, The Secret Life of Plants.

[10] Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics gives an indication to the near mystical state of modern nuclear physics.

[11] See Charles Fort's The Book of The Damned for the classic description of this; see also the magazine Fortean Times, edited by Robert Rickard, for an ongoing summary of current Fortean phenomena and their implication. Spontaneous human combustion is a particularly nasty phenomenon in which a person's body is reduced to ashes without apparent heat, without much scorching the surroundings, and even, in some cases, without scorching the person's clothes: Michell and Rickard give several examples in their book Phenomena.

[11a] For a detailed discussion of the implications of moving from a truth-based to a value-based culture, see 'Can't we explain this scientifically?' in my book Towards a Magical Technology.

[11b] This comment was one that Williamson and Bellamy particularly objected to in their Ley Lines in Question. As was usually the case, they quoted the comment out of context, missing the point of the argument here: this is the intelligence of nature as a whole, not of any one of its component parts. Anyone with any doubt about this should read James Lovelock's Gaia or Lyall Watson's Supernature, or anything that discusses real research (as opposed to school-level 'results-only' material) in biology, biochemistry, ecology, the comparative psychology of the herd and the individual, or any related area – anything, that is, that deals with the real world outside the artificial blinkers of archaeological theory.

[12] John Michell. View Over Atlantis, p.35.

[13] See Euan MacKie, Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain.

[14] Alexander Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain, pp.148-50.

Copyright © 1978-98 Tom Graves

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