Healing the Land
Three people sit on the ground of a Cotswold farmyard, discussing intently the work they are about to do. One of them, evidently the leader of this group, seems to be foreign, but speaks with a rich Oxford-academic accent; the other two are more obviously English. Discussion over, but still sitting on the ground, one of the three picks up what seems to be a bow, loops a stick through its string and, rocking the bow back and forth, rotates it to grind the tip of the stick against a block of wood on the ground. A wisp of smoke rises from the block, then flames as the tinder round the tip of the stick catches light. Lighting a spill from this tiny flame, the leader reaches over and lights a paraffin storm-lamp. A lamp lit by an ancient and awkward method, on a bright and sunny day.
A short while after, the three can be seen on the hill-slope above the farm. One is kneeling on the ground, another is holding the lantern, and the third, the leader, has his hands raised to the sky. He is foreign, despite his excellent English; he is chanting in Persian, a Zoroastrian fire-ritual. But it's more than the ancient ritual, for at a signal the kneeling man hammers the stake he is holding into the ground. The short ritual comes to a close, and they move on to another of the sixty-odd points they have marked out in this valley. A complex process of earth-acupuncture, to heal and make holy the 'atmosphere' of this small Cotswold valley.
The operation above occurred a few years ago, when I was visiting a small religious community in the southern part of the Cotswolds. It was actually the last part of a very complex piece of earth-acupuncture, in three stages, that had taken two years to complete. The process started soon after the community had bought the farm, for they found that the place's atmosphere was in such a bad state that not only was the valley devoid of wild-life, but every person staying for more than a couple of hours picked up some kind of 'stomach-bug' – whether they had drunk the water there or not. The leader of the community and another member – the Persian with the Oxford accent – were both dowsers, and I was told that they had traced the source of the trouble to a new quarry about fifty miles away. The energy imbalance this created had somehow focussed on the valley; and though the problem could not, for practical reasons, be dealt with at source, it could be dealt with by isolating the valley from energies arriving from outside the immediate area, and then restructuring the energies as they arrived at that point.
The first stage – the 'first aid', we could say – involved placing about twenty wooden stakes, with copper wire wound round the top of each, into the ground at various points selected by dowsing: the 'stomach bug' disappeared within days. The second stage, the repair operation, involved staking the ground in more detail, patching up gaps and loopholes: the wild-life began to return. The final 'cosmetic' stage, which was the one I saw, used copper-sheathed iron stakes to restructure the energy-flow, removing the imbalance rather than simply isolating the valley from its effects. The balanced energy-flow that came into the valley brought with it deep peace and quiet – the deep silence of a cathedral. Earth-acupuncture, and a large amount of commitment on the part of the community, had changed the atmosphere of the place from hellish to holy in just two years.[1]
It was an impressive piece of work, but I'm not sure how much of the trimmings of the operation were essential to its working. The community insisted that the ritual and the chanting were an essential part of the process; but since I've seen dowsers doing similar work – though admittedly on a smaller scale – with just the basic staking, I think that while the ritual was useful and valuable 'priming' in a magical sense, it probably wasn't as essential as they believed it was. Dowsers have been using stakes to neutralise 'noxious earth radiations' from black streams for more than fifty years, in a variety of ways and forms; and their work can be seen as part of a more complex system of earth-acupuncture that is now being developed as a means of healing the land.
The idea of earth-acupuncture has strong roots in European tradition; and these traditions begin to make sense once we realise the interaction between people and the natural energies, and realise that most of these energies are non-physical codings carried by and within physical energies, as we saw earlier. The best-known of these traditions, and the ones that tend to make rationalists dismiss the concept of earth-acupuncture without even looking at it, are those about the staking of vampires or about witches sticking pins into models of people or of land. The horror-movie images that these traditions conjure up are, to say the least, a little erroneous compared to the reality behind them: but we do need to recognise that there is a reality behind them.
The blood-sucking variant of the vampire legend we can, I think, ignore for our present purposes. But the idea of something draining away a kind of 'life-blood' is very real, for in various forms and modes it can be seen in action around us all the time. We talk of people or places or situations that 'drain' us: a tiresome person, for example, is literally a vampire in the sense of draining away physical or emotional energy. We don't deal with such people by staking them through the heart, of course (though from practical experience I know that the traditional magical 'banishing' rituals are usually more efficient at keeping them at bay than physical restraint); but extreme forms of social 'vampires' – particularly suicides or, to a lesser extent, executed murderers – were traditionally buried at crossroads, often with a stake through the heart. Church law forbade the burial of suicides on consecrated ground; this can be seen in Shakespeare's Hamlet, in the discussion about the burial of Ophelia. The crossroads, as an 'un-sacred' node-point in the energy matrix, was and is a more sensible place to bury such a focus of negative and destructive energy, for it should allow the dispersal of the sha attached to that person well away from inhabited sites. Much of the traditional lore about crossroads only makes sense when seen in this kind of energy context.[2]
This crude manipulation of energies was almost certainly organised at an intuitive level; it's only in the last fifty years or so that Western dowsers have built up a systematic form of energy manipulation, both isolating and restructuring 'bad' energy, sha. The isolators and insulators used are usually physical insulation materials of some kind, such as asbestos or plastic sheeting. These are placed directly over the black stream at key points such as beneath a bed or desk, to protect the area above it. The various dowsing studies I've seen state that these do work, but only for a matter of months at most, as the insulator itself becomes 'charged' with sha and has to be replaced and disposed of.[3] Isolation is at best a temporary palliative measure, and should only be used while a more permanent means of protection is being worked out.
The only permanent means of protection – or at least as permanent as can be expected when every new development alters the structure and interactions of the energy-matrix – is to restructure the local energy network. Most dowsers use stakes or coils or similar gadgets for this, and the process resembles acupuncture, as the term 'earth-acupuncture' implies. Like acupuncture, the principles are very simple; but the practice is anything but simple, for the right kind of stake has to be sited at exactly the right place, and even – in some techniques – at exactly the right time. Diagnosis of the problem in any given case is as complex as diagnosis in acupuncture, if not more so; at the present time there are only a handful of dowsers in Britain with the skill and experience needed to do a safe and reliable job. It's probably illegal to do it at all in the United States, on the usual pseudo-scientific grounds that block the development of most unconventional medicine there. I know quite a lot of this work goes on in France and Germany, and some probably goes on in most of the countries of Europe.[4]
From my own knowledge of this earth-acupuncture, and going on the published case-histories of the more recent work in Britain, it seems that this staking with stakes or coils can indeed restore the energy-balance and the health of quite large areas of land. One dowser claimed that he had stabilised more than twenty square miles in one operation, but that, if true, would be exceptional: a couple of acres or so at any one time is more usual.[5] Ideally, the 'needle' should neutralise the wayward components of the sha all the way downstream (or downline in the case of the overgrounds) of its point of insertion; but in practice, partly because of the difficulty of siting the needle precisely on the line, most of the case-histories I've seen describe the protected area as a comma-shape spreading downline from the needle's point of insertion. The size of this comma-shape is dependent more on the accuracy of the siting of the needle than on any other factor, so the skill and experience of the dowser is critical to the success of any operation.
In principle, the needle staking a black stream is like an upside-down version of Reich's cloudbuster, in that it selectively removes and 'earths' aspects of the energies from downstairs; or else, in some cases, it unscrambles the tangled coding of the energies that comes out as sha, to convert it to a stable ch'i. How it does so is still obscure, but then so is the effect and operation of acupuncture needles applied to the human body.
If we look at earth-acupuncture in Reich's terms of orgone – which is both a coding of physical energy and a non-physical energy in itself – we can see 'cloud-forming' work with the cloudbuster to be a shifting of orgone from the cloud into an ordinary stream. DOR-cloud-busting transfers the DOR/sha into the water-lines below ground, and may in fact convert it to a black stream in some cases: I don't think Reich had any way of knowing where or how the energy he drew from DOR-clouds went. To make sure that sky-borne sha is not just transferred underground, so causing further problems elsewhere, it would probably be best to neutralise it by taking it into the ground at a point with a high level of ch'i, a holy place – which is where we come back to sacred sites and sacred structures.
Before we leave Reich's theories, I'd better mention one misapplied aspect of Reich's orgonomy that has caused quite a few problems in the recent past. A number of would-be acupuncturists, recognising the connection between DOR and sha, connected earth-stakes to small orgone accumulators. For a while a black stream so treated will indeed be neutralised – but only while the accumulator is being charged by the sha drawn up through the earth-stake. Once the accumulator is fully charged, the problems caused by the 'blackness' of the stream will re-start – and the earth-acupuncturist will be left with an orgone accumulator that is fully charged with sha.
Since this represents a disposal problem as serious as – and possibly identical with - that of the disposal of radioactive wastes, it's not a good idea to use orgone accumulators for earth-acupuncture work without the back-up of a suitable and safe means of disposing and dispersing the collected sha.[6] It's possible that the observable effects of the barrow-and-stone weather-control system described earlier are in fact side-effects of just such a dispersal system. The Fortean phenomena associated with the sites may be the result of erratic and inefficient dispersal of sha, caused by the ruinous state of the system. Again, assuming this to be so, I don't think it's likely that the network of barrows and stones was deliberately set up with this in mind. It's more likely that the builders put them where and how they did because it 'felt right' to do so. At a time when people recognised their dependence on nature, those feelings could well have been seen and recognised as the direct instructions of nature and its gods.
Much the same could be said of historic (rather than prehistoric or modern) structures at sacred sites. Buildings were constructed far more to some preconceived system, such as the old Quadrivium of Number, Music, Geometry and Astronomy, but there was still the same deep concern with feeling – a concern that is largely absent in modern buildings as a result of the inhumanity of civilised cultures. We can see, by looking at the work of Underwood and his contemporaries in a slightly different way, that the great sacred structures of the historic period do operate as gigantic earth-acupuncture needles; and their effects seem to be far more selective and sophisticated than in the simple, ancient 'needles of stone', because of the far greater concern with shape, and thus the shape-power effects of the structure.
The same interest in the shape-power effect can be seen in the bewildering variety of different gadgets and constructions that modern dowsers have used for this earth-acupuncture work. Comparing this with conventional acupuncture, we can also see that the concern with materials in the barrows and standing stones, the churches and cathedrals and the modern earth-acupuncture needles, has a lot to do with the elemental attributions of the various materials. Each different element (wood, earth, metal or whatever) has a different effect in controlling the balance of the energies behind ch'i and sha.
An interesting theoretical and practical problem is whether the various needles should be left in place or, as in conventional acupuncture, be inserted and then removed after a short period. Much of this has to do with the tidal ebbing and flowing of the energies and the levels of those energies. It is here that the known astronomical aspects of sacred sites and their structures – historic and prehistoric – may come into earth-acupuncture. Where the needle cannot be removed from the site – as is obviously the case with a permanent structure like a cathedral – it may be that the astronomical aspects of the structure were designed (again, probably unconsciously) so as to handle the constantly changing energy-patterns through astronomical alignments, and possibly through the elemental attributions of the astronomical and astrological aspects and functions of the structure. This is, I admit, rather outside my field; but the attributions and interactions of the various aspects and functions of Number, Music, Geometry and Astronomy are known to have formed the major part of Medieval university studies, and are still used a great deal in present-day magical practice.
Until recently, most earth-acupuncturist dowsers simply stuck their gadgets in the ground in what they hoped was the right place, and left them to work in peace, coming back from time to time to check if they were still having the desired effect. But a number of dowsers involved in this work have recently insisted that earth-acupuncture stakes should be removed soon after insertion, in the manner of conventional acupuncture needles, and that the old practice of leaving the stakes in place is wrong. They point out that a needle left in a patient in conventional acupuncture could have the opposite effect to the one intended at the opposite end of the daily cycle of energy-flow. In reply, other dowsers have pointed out that in much conventional acupuncture the needle is left in the patient 'until the flesh no longer clings to it'. It then drops out of its own accord, having done its job. One dowser even said that the ground pushed out the stake when it was no longer needed. From my own practical work, it seems that both sides, as usual, are right. In one case at a stone circle, for example, I was 'told' by my pendulum to remove some of the stakes after insertion, but to leave some of the others in place, pushed just below the surface. To my knowledge, they are still there now.
But the use of needles, you'll remember, is only one part of acupuncture: conventional acupuncture includes moxibustion, massage and diet as well. Moxibustion, as we have seen, is paralleled in this earth-acupuncture by the controlled use of fires as wend- or need-fires and as the beacon-fires on the old Beacon Hills. Our civilisation has completely concealed the magical use of fire, though it's something which comes out in children's sometimes lethal fascination with matches and bonfires. In our civilised culture, the Beacon Hills seem to be regarded as nothing more than pretty view-points from which people can look out over a countryside that is now so civilised and so ignored. But the Beacons were and are something more than that.
Something of the power of the Beacons was seen recently in the lighting of the bonfire chains for the Queen's Silver Jubilee. It was nothing like as powerful as it could have been, since few of the bonfires were on the ancient Beacon sites (the National Trust, among others, would not allow it), and the glare of orange streetlights obscured the official and unofficial bonfires in many areas; but some of the power was still there. I was with the Ley Hunter team at the Dunstable bonfire at the time, and we all felt the extraordinary sense of unity and non-verbal communication – so rare in a civilisation - that was brought home as each bonfire in succession was lit and linked with others.
Even so, civilisation had to meddle in the process to make sure that everything 'still worked', for the firing of the first few bonfires in the chains radiating out from Windsor was controlled not by visual sighting but by portable microwave links. The Windsor bonfire wasn't even visible from Dunstable, supposedly the first bonfire in the northward chain - a pity, but never mind. I feel sure that if we were to re-activate the old Beacon Hills, and use them for their proper magical and communications purposes instead of leaving them dead as 'pretty viewpoints', then they would have a highly beneficial effect both on the natural energy network and also – as was clear at the Jubilee bonfires – on the national morale.
Massage of the landscape is easier to see and to understand. In conventional acupuncture, massage is used to reduce the damage and blockage caused by bruising and scarring: so by analogy we can see that the filling-in and re-turfing of quarries, and the grassing-over of slag-heaps and spoil-tips, does a great deal for the energy aspects of the landscape as well as for its visual appearance. The same is true of careful 'landscaping' of new motorways and building developments. Feng-shui's concern with the shape and harmony of the landscape can be seen in earth-acupuncture terms as the landscape equivalent of massage.
If we are to restore some kind of balance between civilised people and the landscape, we also need to do a kind of 'massage' on our minds. We need to instil a greater respect for the natural harmony of the landscape, and a realisation, particularly among architects and planners, that man-made systems and man-made 'convenience' will only work in the long run if they take the natural forms of the area into account. The planners need to be made to realise just how fragile and artificial cities and city 'conveniences' are; they need to have a true education to show them the limitations and destructiveness of their civilised 'solutions' to civilised problems, and to show them how pagan experience, far from being 'primitive and mindless', is far better suited to handling the total reality imposed on us by nature than is their civilised arrogance and ignorance.
One example is whether we really need motorways. A study of earth-energies redoubles the doubts about their necessity: concrete and tarmac have disastrous effects on the 'colouring' of energy-flows both above and beneath, for one point, since both materials are essentially sterile and sterilising. The process of constructing a motorway often crushes and blocks underground streams; and the speed and continuous flow of the vehicles on the completed motorway, as we saw earlier, breaks up any time-based coding on overgrounds that pass close to a motorway's surface.
When we couple these worries with those of the neo-pagan ecologists – worries about the twenty or more acres per mile of farmland that disappear beneath the motorway, and the efficiency (or lack of it, in any terms other than the artificial and constantly changing terms of economics) of moving so many passengers and so many tons of freight in so many vehicles – the doubts about the viability of motorways in real terms become even stronger. But as I would reply myself, as a car-driver and motorway user, motorways cut down the time we have to spend in that unimportant inter-urban space; they allow us to travel at a civilised (in other words excessive) speed; and besides, now that the railway system in Britain is all but demolished, how else can I or the freight of trade get about the country? No matter what we feel, no matter what we do, a civilised culture forces us to be hypocrites.
It certainly wasn't very intelligent, except in the terms of the economics of the now-gone days of cheap fuel, to demolish two highly efficient networks that we already had - the canals and the railways – which had already consumed a vast amount of land between them, in favour of yet another, but highly inefficient, transport network, the motorways. And it's even less intelligent to continue destroying thousands of acres each year of our best farmland – on whose produce once more we are soon going to have to rely for our survival – in favour of what is proving to be a very short-lived convenience.
This is only one area in which pagan practicality clashes with civilised suicide; and it's only one of several areas in which our 'unimportant' study of the earth-energies and the earth mysteries is forced into the political arena.[6a] There's no point in studying the past as a means of escaping from the harsh realities of the present: the only valid reason for studying the past is to learn from it, to apply those lessons to the problems of the present day. That we will have to return to before we leave this study; but for now we'd better return to the practice of earth-acupuncture.
One of the controls for the energy-matrix, as we have seen, is ritual; and this would suggest that 'diet' in a landscape-scale acupuncture would be the ceaseless round of rituals kept up by pagan communities. Those rituals have a real effect on the matrix. Our civilised culture has made sure that not much meaning is left in the old rituals that still survive; those that do retain some meaning, such as the Padstow Hobby Horse and the Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance, are in danger of being defused into civilised tourist attractions. About the only ritual attention that the earth receives is the weekly libation of dirty soapy water in the urban ritual of 'wash-day' or the suburban ritual of 'washing the car'. Once we see rituals for what they are – not as superstitious games, but as tools or constructs with real effects – we can see their importance and their value as part of a re-introduction of pagan awareness into our ailing civilised culture.
So far we've only looked at ways of manipulating the energies in their existing channels. But in some cases this is not enough, for to repair completely a piece of damage we may need to isolate a small area, or to divert the energies around it. These diversions use much the same tools as in routine manipulation of the 'colour' or 'texture' of the energies, but need slightly different techniques. In the routine staking of black streams, only one stake is used on each stream, and they are regarded as being independent. A typical, badly-affected house may have five or more black streams crossing beneath it, and so the same number of stakes would be used, one placed upstream from the house on each of the streams. Diversion is rather trickier, depending on where the problem lies. In some cases two stakes may be used on each stream, on a 'spark-gap' principle, to move an energy-flow from below ground to above for a short distance, or vice versa. In others the effective course of the energy-flow may be altered by hammering, by the orientation of quartz-based crystals, or by connecting a series of stakes in a chain or ring.
The 'spark-gap' diversion is particularly useful with roads. There have been a few cases where 'accident black spots' on apparently clear stretches of road have been shown to be due to a powerful underground stream crossing under the road at that point. A car's steering wheel, like a dowsing rod, is designed to amplify small movements of the driver's hands; so a reflex twitch triggered by the stream in someone who slips unconsciously into a dowsing mode would be enough to send a car travelling at a fair speed – particularly on a wet or greasy road – into an uncontrollable spin. I have heard of one or two of these 'black spots' being successfully exorcised, which we could see as a 'psychic diversion' of the energy of the stream; but the usual dowsers' solution to the problem would be to insert a pair of stakes into the ground directly above the stream, one on each side of the road, to divert the energy of the stream itself above ground instead of below, where it apparently has less effect.
The same technique has been used in reverse with overgrounds crossing motorways near ground level. The 'coding' which the cars were breaking up is sent underground, below the motorway, and then lifted back overground again by the stake on the other side. The different types of energy, the image of the stream and the 'coding' in the overground, are different in their effects upon us, and need different techniques to neutralise their unwanted side-effects without neutralising the energies themselves. We have seen much the same with the standing stones, which both mark and are the points through which energies and 'codings' are interchanged between the overgrounds and water-lines.
Several dowsers I've talked to have suggested that there were at one time several independent standing-stone networks, each constructed at a different period for a different purpose. They suggested that the ruinous state of the networks, and the 'melted' appearance of many of the stones, might be due to a late tampering with these networks, at a time when the intuitive knowledge of how to handle them was lost, and which didn't work in quite the way the meddlers expected. We should never forget that the energies the stones operate on are real, and can do real – and sometimes immediately physical – damage if we are not careful in what we do with them; so we need to approach any redirection or reconstruction of these energy-networks with care and with caution.
It seems to have been the late Evelyn Penrose, the one-time Official Dowser for one of the Canadian provinces, who discovered about twenty years ago that hammering on a stake above an underground stream appeared to change the stream's course. It's been a matter of some controversy among dowsers ever since, whether it does or does not work, and what it can or can't do.[7] The idea is that by banging a large number of times on a boulder or stake directly above a water-line, a dowser can block the water-flow down the line and divert it along whatever alternative route may be available down there. The problem, which has been much aired in the dowsing journals, is whether the physical water-flow itself can be diverted in this way – and if so, how, since as with all this kind of work the stake only goes a few inches into the ground – or whether it only diverts the water-line, the image of the water that the dowser sees.
Either way, it is the water-line that carries much of the coding which concerns us in a system of earth-acupuncture, and so we could say that this hammeting technique could be used as a diversionary tool in this respect. I have heard of one or two earth-acupuncturist dowsers who use it as part of their regular toolkit, but I haven't yet been able to find one who has been willing to discuss the details of how it is done and under what circumstances it can or should be used.
I have had more of a chance to discuss the use of quartz-based crystals as 'needles' with an earth-acupuncturist dowser. According to him, the different quartzes have different properties. Amethyst, for example, is a slow-acting but long-term stabiliser for the 'colour' of energies travelling both below and above ground. I had an opportunity to try this use of amethysts in an experiment I did with the Druid Order at a stone circle. They said that although the crystals, which I had placed on all the water-lines and overgrounds around the perimeter of the circle, seemed to make little appreciable difference to the atmosphere of the circle during the ritual they held that day, they did notice that the crowd of spectators was the quietest and most respectful they had had for more than five years – so the amethysts did seem to have affected the atmosphere of the place in some ways.
Some of the other quartzes change in other ways the 'colour' of energy-pathways they are placed above or below: one of the other quartzes (I won't say which) changes an ordinary water-line to 'black', for example. The dowser I discussed this with suggested that the intersections of two water-lines, one white, one black, crossing beneath church altars at right-angles something he'd found in several cases – was due to the 're-colouring' and diversion of existing energy-pathways by this means. It's possible: but again, as with the hammering technique, we need to do a lot more work and experiments on this before we will know how to use them accurately and safely in a system of earth-acupuncture.
The last diversionary technique, using a 'chain' or 'ring' of stakes or needles, coincides more closely with conventional acupuncture practice. The standard procedure in acupuncture for dealing with a spontaneously painful point, or a swelling of any kind, is to surround it by placing needles on the nearest approachable acupuncture points on the appropriate meridians – never on any part of the the painful area itself. As the pain subsides, the needles are moved into acupuncture points closer to the centre of the original area, but outside any area that is still painful. The idea seems to be that the ring of needles around the swelling allows the energies to by-pass the area without being affected by the problems of the area itself, and also allows the swollen area to get on with the job of healing itself without being bothered by other energies that would only be passing through.
Taking this as an analogy, it should be possible to isolate 'scarred' areas in the landscape, such as quarries and slag-heaps, by placing stakes or needles into the ground on minor node-points of the lines of the water-lines and overgrounds that pass through the area of the scar. The idea would be that the scar not only causes less interference to the 'colour' of the energies passing through, but is also allowed to get on with repairing the damage of itself without hindrance from outside.
It was a more complex variant of this technique that the religious community I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter used to stabilise their valley. They defined an area with the stakes they used, and then worked on repairing the energy structure of that area – through ritual and through the other religious and magical means at their disposal - before re-connecting it with the rest of the natural energy-structure, the energy-matrix, outside the ring of stakes. It seems likely, from the dowsing results we saw in the early chapters of this study, that the ring of stones in a stone circle acts as a 'shield-ring' in this way, isolating the inside of the circle from the outside world, and insulating the outside world from whatever may go on inside the circle.
The principle of the shield-ring is thus analogous to that of shielding electronic apparatus from stray magnetic fields (with soft-iron casings) and electromagnetic radiation (with a Faraday cage). As far as the outside world, as seen by those forces, is concerned, that which is inside the shield does not exist, for the forces bend round the surface of the shield; and conversely, as far as the equipment is concerned, the outside world of those forces does not exist either – which is, of course, the whole point of the shield in the first place.
This use of stakes to provide a by-pass shield for the energies to use in by-passing a defined area could resolve the dilemma posed by 'offices of organisations devoted to greed or domination'. In an ideal world such places should not exist: but we don't live in an ideal world, and while the present crazy international systems of politics and economics - which are based on 'greed and domination', to quote the Exorcism Report - continue to exist, they will unfortunately continue to be necessary. But at the same time, as the Report put it, such 'offices ... incur trouble or act as dispersal centres; they also open the door for other (demonic) forces to enter in'. As we saw earlier, there are strong suggestions that they adversely affect the health of the areas surrounding them, so we do need to do something to reduce their impact. The shield-ring technique may provide us with a way of doing so.
Ideally, as I say, our aim should be to eliminate the need for such offices: but this is definitely a long-term aim, for it would demand a total overhaul not just of our political and economic systems, but of our own attitudes to ourselves, to each other and to nature. In the meantime we could reduce the impact of such places on the energy-matrix - and thus on the health of the surrounding areas – by constructing shield-rings of earth- acupuncture stakes around them. A stake would need to be placed on most, and preferably all, of the energy-lines that pass through the sites of such 'offices'. It's possible that a side-effect would be that the 'bad vibes' created by such an office would be trapped inside such a shield-ring, in the same way that the religious community carefully built a 'holy' atmosphere within their shield-ring before re-connecting it with the outside world. If so, we would expect that the 'atmosphere' within the shield-ring would rapidly become intolerable, more or less so depending on how much the organisation was 'devoted' to greed or domination. This could perhaps be seen as a form of aversion-therapy – it's certainly an interesting prospect.
With military sites, particularly those parked by demonic assistance or otherwise on node-points of the energy-matrix, the picture is slightly more complicated. Isolation of offensive sites by shield-rings should produce the same results as above – good for the community, but not too comfortable for the military. But defensive sites, if truly defensive and so ethically speaking neutral, should not have the same build-up of 'bad vibes' inside a shield-ring: an interesting deterrent against offensive military intent![7a]
The dilemma for the military is that apart from the safeguard it provides for the health of the surrounding community, there are good military reasons why both offensive and defensive sites need to be shielded. If such places are sited on node-points of the energy-matrix (which, as I suggested earlier, many of them would appear to be) they are far more liable to damage by magical or demonic attack at crucial times than are ordinary sites. A shield-ring gives a certain amount of protection against such bizarre forms of attack.
To the materialist, such a suggestion will seem ludicrous; but from what I've heard I would be surprised to find that it is not being taken very seriously in senior military circles. The military risks presented by human or non-human magical action, particularly on electronic apparatus, are recognised and real, and cannot safely be disregarded. Given our more magical interpretation of UFO incidents, it should be noted that UFOs are routinely reported to have a keen 'interest' in military activity, dating back at least to the 'foo-fighters' of the Second World War, and typified by the repeated 'flaps' at Warminster, in the military area on Salisbury Plain in the south of England. Their well-documented ability to stall or start car engines and confuse electronic apparatus such as radar and radio sets could cause disaster in a crucial military situation. As for the reality of magical action, my recording engineer friend Richard witnessed, about five years ago, a magical operation which was useful to him and his friends at the time, but which has disturbing implications in military terms:
'It was quite late one night, and a couple of acquaintances in the music business and myself had returned from the pub to the recording studio complex not far from Ladbroke Grove. A member of our small party of travellers had left his bags in the studio reception area, and needed to pick them up before moving off homeward. Unfortunately, on arriving at the studio, we found the door locked. A heavy door, solid, about ten feet high by four feet wide I would guess, with a circular window in it. We peered through the window at the empty reception area where the security guard usually sat after hours, watching TV or listening to the radio. We rang the bell, and waited. Probably the guard was in one of the studio control rooms, chatting to tape ops as they cleared up after the last sessions of the night. Perhaps he was otherwise engaged. Whatever the reason, he did not answer the bell. We rang several times, but nothing happened.
Finally, one of our little group walked forward, inscribed some brief designs on the door [with his finger], and mumbled a few words under his breath. With a loud bang, the door swung almost wide open. The amount it opened was surprising in itself, as the door was on a very strong return spring. I reckon it would have taken the simultaneous impact of three people on the door to have the effect of opening it so far. In such a case, however, it would not have opened so rapidly as this one, which was just closed one moment and open the next. We went in before the door closed on its spring, and went over to the bags.
The door didn't close completely, however: it couldn't, as the tongue of the lock was still in the locked position. It could not pass the plate set in the door-frame, and hence could not close. Neither lock, door or frame were damaged, or marked in any way. It was as if the door had been unlocked, pushed open, and relocked in the open position. But this had not occurred ... Neither had I been hypnotised, and so persuaded that the door had been opened by an invisible agency: that would not have got me past the door, and it would not have explained the bewilderment of the security guard when he finally arrived. What had occurred was a magical operation with an objective result.'[8]
Combine this magical lock-picking with directed poltergeist from children and the known ability of some psychics like Matthew Manning to tamper with or eradicate information from computer tapes from an indefinite distance, and you'll appreciate why the American and Soviet governments have suddenly started spending vast sums of money on 'useless' ESP research.[9]
An earth-acupuncture shield-ring rig is a defence against most kinds of demonic attack because the area inside the ring 'disappears' as far as the energy-matrix is concerned; and human magical action against sites on node-points in the matrix is made more difficult, because it has to be done without 'hitching a ride' on the energies of the matrix. Just making things more difficult for magical action would seem to be an adequate defence in many respects, for it seems to be a fact that as magicians develop the awareness needed to handle increasingly complex problems, they also become increasingly aware of the relative pettiness and pointlessness of political and military squabbles, and try to avoid becoming entangled in them. The real if magical action and reaction of the 'law of karma', the natural law of inescapable responsibility for the results of our own actions and inactions, soon brings home the necessity of that to every magician, master or novice – and in some senses we are all magicians, whether we like it or not.
Traditionally, a magician's training has just one aim, 'to know thyself'. The aim of the post-Druidic witchcraft in Britain, 'the craft of the wise', was the same; and the same is true of all forms of mysticism, including the Christian ones. Knowledge, 'Truth', is a personal matter as much as a common one: it's only when the organised religions like scientism and the Church try to define and enforce their version of 'the Truth' that that knowledge, and the chance of knowing one's-self, dies. No true mystic or magician is fool enough to believe that he can define nature or 'Truth', or to believe that he can control it or be above it: and that isn't a matter of belief, as it is with the man-made religions, it is a matter of personal experience, personal knowledge.
The final aim of both the mystic and the magician is to know their own nature, and thus become 'at one with nature'. To try to control nature, to fight against it, is simply to fight against one's own nature. But by knowing nature, aiming to become at one with it, we can work with nature instead of against it, and come to know our nature in the process. We have, throughout time, created and maintained those demons which harass us; and the more we continue to fight against nature and our nature, the more power we give to those demons, and the more hellish life becomes in civilised society and elsewhere. In healing the land, in healing our relationship with nature, we need to become at one with it: and to do that we need to recognise and develop, in and for ourselves, a magician's awareness and a mystic's knowledge of nature and our nature.
We need to remember this in using the techniques of earthacupuncture. We are not, and cannot be, 'above' nature: the most we can do, with earth-acupuncture, is help nature to heal itself. No system of medicine ever cures a patient; it can only provide conditions under which the patient (whatever it is) can heal itself. Meddling or tampering, without the total knowledge of the nature of the patient that only 'being at one with nature' can provide, can only make things worse. If we remember our limitations, earth-acupuncture may well be a useful tool for limiting the effects of the damage we have already done to the earth, and which we are still doing today.
But this is not enough: we cannot continue to ravage the earth in the way that we have been doing, and still hope to survive for long. Earth-acupuncture is a palliative, not a cure. We should be looking to the future as well, looking to other ways of reducing our impact on nature, on the earth and its energy-matrix. Most of all, we need to change our civilised arrogance and ignorance of nature. We need, like the pagans, to recognise and realise that our relationship with nature can only be one of lord and servant – and that we are not the lords of that relationship.
Notes
[1] The leader of the community, Reshad Feild, commented on this in an interview in Seed Magazine, Vol.V No.9, pp.21-3.
[2] See Martin Puhvel, The Lore of the Cross-roads, in Folklore 1976 ii, pp.167-77.
[3] See, for example, V.D. Wethered, The Problem of Obnoxious Earth Rays, in JBSD XVI, No. 113, Sept 61, p.253.
[4] Articles on local versions of earth-acupuncture appear from time to time in the French dowsing magazine Radiesthesie and the German equivalent, Radiasthesie, Geopathie, Strahlenbiologie.
[5] There have been dozens of articles on this over the years in JBSD. Two worth looking at are Wethered, The Problem of Obnoxious Earth Rays, in JBSD XVI, No.113, Sept 61, p.253 and H.O. Busby, Further Notes on Earth Radiations, in JBSD II, No.18, Dec 37, p.32. See also A.D. Manning, The Neutralisation of Harmful Earth Rays, in Bell (ed.), Practical Dowsing: A Symposium.
[6] Reich claimed that according to the results of his ORANUR experiment radio-activity was a side-effect of the over-activation of orgone by radio-active substances, producing DOR. See Section VI in Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings, pp.351-431.
[6a] In this respect it's interesting to see the increasing involvement in politics of ecologically-minded groups: the activist/pressure-group Greenpeace and the British Ecology Party (now re-named the Green Party) are two examples that come to mind.
[7] See the correspondence on this in JBSD XXIV No.168, Jun 75, pp.228-3.
[7a] This concept has actually been put into practice on at least one occasion, by anti-nuclear protesters at the Greenham Common cruise-missile base: they surrounded the base with a human chain, with the express intent of excluding the base, in an emotional sense, from the outside world. It would certainly be interesting to know what it felt like from inside the base.
[8] Adapted from Old Magic, New Magic, an unpublished manuscript by Richard Elen. I've since had this incident independently confirmed by another member of the group involved.
[9] John Taylor discusses directed poltergeist in his book Superminds, and Batcheldor and Brookes-Smith have developed a technique for teaching people in groups to develop poltergeist skills, as described in several articles over the years in JSPR. The best recent example of a psychic capable of tampering with computer tapes and memory-banks is Matthew Manning; Uri Geller claims to have done both poltergeist work as well as computer-jamming, but it seems probable that some of his methods are not magical in the sense that we're using the term here.
