The Glastonbury Zodiac
Andrew Collins
With permission from www.andrewcollins.com
An example of a mystery that should not exist but does is the so-called Glastonbury Zodiac.
In the late 1920s a London-born graphic artist and sculptress named Katherine Maltwood (1878-1961) was asked by the publisher J M Dent to submit black and white illustrations for a new edition of an Arthurian romance entitled Perlesvaus, better known as The High History of the Graal, written in c. 1210 and translated from Old French into English by Sebastian Evans. With an interest already in folklore, myth and legend she accepted the challenge whole-heartedly, knowing that on the last page of the medieval text was a statement claiming (quite probably falsely) that the whole thing was recorded down in Glastonbury Abbey.
From her home at Chilbolton Priory, on the Taunton to Glastonbury road, Mrs Maltwood compared mythical scenes in the 'High History' with the Glastonbury landscape in the hope of determining the paths taken by the questing knights. It was whilst in this frame of mind that the outline of a lion jumped out at her from the map. Topographical features, such as hills, rivers and contours, as well as artificial features, such as roads, ditches and field boundaries, brought it alive. Located in and around nearby Somerton, she recorded the feline's whereabouts before noticing another landscape figure a little to the west. This time it was a giant child traceable around the village of Compton Dundon.
Mrs Maltwood began to consider that she was bringing alive the geo-mythical reality that inspired the 'High History'. However, she also came to believe that these landscape effigies formed part of a larger design, and very possibly a terrestrial zodiac. The lion obviously represented Leo, while the giant child she took to be Gemini, which she also identified with Lohot, a knight and son of King Arthur beheaded whilst lying asleep by a giant that then laid down upon him. She thus looked closer and discerned on the mape a circular arrangement of twelve key figures, all as they were positioned in the night sky. For her, these features were not chance designs - they were purposely engineered by a Sumerian priesthood who sailed to Britain from ancient Iraq and laid the foundations for this divine ground-plan on a spring equinox around 2700 BC.
Having determined the twelve signs, she attempted to substantiate her discoveries by linking the astrological influence of each 'sign' with the Celtic-Arthurian imagery of the 'High History'. This was in turn backed up with local folklore, topography and place-names.
Convinced now that she had something special, she decided that the twelve signs were the key to achieving the Holy Grail, the ultimate expression of divine illumination and wisdom. Medieval Grail knights and, in ages past, Celtic warriors would have navigated the paths tackling the psychic constructs of the terrestrial zodiac, before experiencing the zodiac's ultimate mysteries at its centre point, marked on the map as a triangular enclosure next to the site of an ancient cross just outside of the medieval village of Butleigh.
Katherine Maltwood approached Watkins of London to publish a book on the subject, and this appeared anonymously in 1935 under the title Glastonbury's Temple of the Stars. By 1961, when she died, the book had gone through new editions, this time under her name, although there is very little evidence of it making any lasting impact. It was left to writer and artist Mary Caine to take the subject on to a new level with the publication of her book Glastonbury's Giants in 1978. With her enthusiasm and the interest given to the subject of terrestrial zodiacs by ley hunters and earth mysteries enthusiasts, Glastonbury's 'Temple of the Stars' continued to attract attention, even though it simply should not have existed.
In fact, when looked at more thoroughly, the whole theory can be ripped apart by anyone with even a basic knowledge of British topography, for the reasons given here:
1. The effigies are constructed in the most part from roads, field boundaries, canals, and other water channels that did not exist prior to 1875.
2. If a star map is placed over the Glastonbury zodiac, many crucial stars fall nowhere near their corresponding landscape effigies.
3. The stars of Aquarius have never been represented by a Phoenix, as they are in Mrs Maltwood's zodiac, just as Libra has never been a dove holding a holy wafer in its beak, and Cancer has never been a ship.
4. There is no evidence that Sumerians ever came to Britain, or that the Babylonian zodiac, from which the Glastonbury example is formulated, was known in this country prior to Roman times.
5. It is a simple exercise to find and draw landscape effigies on a large-scale map, and many of these would look a lot more convincing than those offered by Mrs Maltwood.
Other criticisms might easily be brought against the Glastonbury giants, but those cited are reason enough for any serious researcher or earth mysteries enthusiast to avoid the subject like the plague.
All this might be so, but the Glastonbury zodiac exists today, and this anyone will find difficult to deny.
In January 1981, I knew nothing about Mrs Maltwood's discoveries, and yet as my friend and colleague Graham Phillips and I approached Glastonbury in a car on a psychic quest he unexpectedly glimpsed in his mind's eye a phoenix rising from the ashes. We saw it as linked somehow with the Tor's genius loci, or 'spirit of the place', and so asked around as soon as we entered the town. Eventually, we were put in touch with Tony and Janet Roberts, earth mysteries writers who lived locally. They informed us that Mrs Maltwood believed Glastonbury Tor and the surrounding landscape to be sculpted into the form of a Phoenix, signifying Aquarius in her zodiac. Only interested in the Phoenix imagery, and not its sculpted presence all around us, we climbed the Tor and went about our business.
Two years later in January 1983, new psychic imagery led me to explore 'Kingweston', a place-name that simply popped into my mind during a meditation one evening. I saw it connected with golden solar imagery, divine kingship and a lion of sovereignty. On learning that a place of this name existed a few miles outside of Glastonbury, I wondered whether it formed part of the Leo figure in Mrs Maltwood's zodiac. It did, and on exploring there I felt drawn to another location where a giant knight lay sleeping on the landscape and a hill would be found known locally as 'Golgotha', the Place of the Skull. This is the name given in the Gospels to the site where Christ was crucified. It was information that led me to Dundon Beacon, which along with nearby Lollover Hill constituted the giant child identified by Mrs Maltwood as Gemini and Lohot, the beheaded knight and son of Arthur. An occultist and modern-day Templar who lived in a house beneath the Beacon confirmed that it was indeed known as Golgotha. Furthermore, each Good Friday a Calvary Cross is carried to the summit of Lollover Hill, where it is left standing until Easter Sunday. An early aerial photograph of the place, seen covered for the most part in trees, bears a striking resemblance to traditional images of Christ's bearded face, a simulacra worthy of FORTEAN TIMES.
It was only then that I realised I was mimicking the manner in which Mrs Maltwood discovered her own landscape effigies - Leo first and then Gemini, almost as if these were to be seen as steps one and two on an ascending ladder that would one day lead to the achievement of the Grail.
The following year, 1984, I employed the services of a psychic friend named Bernard to see if we could determine the exact route of Glastonbury's psychic assault course. After he led me from Leo to Gemini with no prior knowledge of my own experiences, we ended up covering exactly one half of the zodiac, and finding an artefact along the way. This came in the form of an ebony and silver 'happy death' crucifix, as worn by monks and nuns, retrieved from the edge of an Iron Age tumulus named Wimble Toot, located in the third figure - Virgo. We were directed to find it by a holy woman in medieval dress, whom we saw in terms of the sentient personification of this particular sign. The rest of the signs had similar guiding influences which you needed to communicate with on a subtle, sympathetic level if you wanted any chance at all of completing the course. They included a fierce black knight, who answered to the name Modred, and wore the arms of Satan as they appeared in apocalyptic art from around the year 1280-5. He guarded the domain of Scorpio in a churchyard at a place called Hornblotton.
I resumed the zodiac quest over the midsummer period 1985, navigating the final six signs on my own in just 36 hours (Bernard declined to take part, saying it was for me alone to complete). At the centre point, in the middle of a cold, wet field at dawn, I experienced a profound vision of the Holy Grail, which culminated with a fleeting glimpse of cosmic creation.
For me, the Glastonbury zodiac is no longer a figment of Mrs Maltwood's fertile imagination. It exists out there for all to experience and encounter, and there seems little point in assuming that the whole thing simply came into being following the publication of her first book on the subject in 1935. A much better explanation is needed to try and fully explain what is going on.