ancient sites – Page 2 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Turning the Inside Out

Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary in West Penwith

I wasn’t expecting to be alive now. Just over five years ago, it genuinely felt as if it was ‘game over’. But after a year or two I was still here and marginally improving – as it goes with the blood cancer I have, Multiple Myeloma. I’d become partially disabled, ageing ten or more years (it felt different on different days), and squeezed through a big change with no going back. Many elements of my old life were now outside my range of physical and mental possibilities – though, to compensate, my spirits went through a big boost.

This boost was partially a ‘gift of God’ and partially I chose to take it that way. Though perhaps there was only one option. It was a choiceless choice, really. Gifts of God can be like that.

Even so, after two years, early in 2022 I sank into a deep, dark, muddy, wintertime crisis. Hm, this gift was grinding me down, squeezing and pushing me to see how far I could go. Astrologically, Neptune was opposing my Saturn – a revelation of uncomfortable truths, old shadows, limitations, inhibitions and self-sabotaging patterns. Again, I got used to the idea that I might be approaching ‘game over’. There I was, deteriorating, 90% dead and hovering. Part of me was withdrawing from life, giving up, feeling worn out. My hope account was overdrawn.

Then something started happening which, again, wasn’t on my roadmap. By springtime 2022 I started emerging from the shadowlands and reviving. Not back to where I’d been before, but to a new place. I wasn’t ‘better’, yet something in me was lighting up. Something was slotting into place.

Looking back from here, I was going through an archetypal, deep-self change. It necessitated a systems-reboot – a slough of despond trip. Archetype-change is a deep thing, hardly conscious, though clues come through at odd moments. I had no sense of the archetypal identity I was receiving or adopting, yet I could feel the change. There was a feeling of lostness, a lack of anchorage, together with an as yet shapeless feeling of new-foundness. I was switching tracks.

At different phases of our lives, deep down, we live out a succession of selfhoods and archetypes. An archetype is universal, but archetypes of a more personal kind mould themselves around us, our characters and our trans-life storylines. Through these selfhoods we plug into more universal archetypes, acting them out in the context of our lives and our available life-possibilities. These change and develop over time. That is, we learn – sometimes whether we like it or not!

In my experience, one selfhood can be dominant for a period of life while others operate as sub-threads or sub-personalities. Then, at critical points, major life-changes come and a rearrangement can occur. This, for me, is connected with other lives I’ve had, or am yet to have.

In Jungian psychology they talk of twelve classic archetypes: everyman, the innocent, the hero, outlaw, explorer, creator, ruler, magician, lover, caregiver, jester and sage. Well, that’s not a bad attempt, though such classifications of higher-dimensional forms can be rather limiting.

What was slotting into place was perhaps a variant of the sage, spiced with a dash of the creator and the ruler. Deep down, I’ve always been rather old in character, an inbuilt patriarch and natural leader, but something didn’t quite fit when I was younger. I didn’t handle it well and, though a lot was achieved, I came in for painful criticism. As an older soul in a younger body and personality, there was a disjunction. There was guilt hiding in there too, with impostor syndrome and a feeling I wasn’t good enough.

I managed to step out of that around age 42 – helped, no less, by a bunch of ETs. When I asked them whether I was the right person to work with them, they simply said I was the first person they’d encountered for a long time who needed no preparation. Boom – that rather changed things. I’d been kinda talent-spotted by them.

But there’s an advantage to self-doubt, as long as you don’t loiter too long in its shadows: it makes you work hard at life and become good at whatever you’re attempting to do. During my forties I was getting things more right.

Later in life, this ‘old soul’ thing suddenly began making more sense. Cancer came along, inducing a rapid ageing, physically and psychologically. I was in my early seventies and cancer pushed me into my eighties. Suddenly, ‘old soul’ started to fit.

I was starting on a new path. Which was strange, because I had thought I’d reached the end! People were beginning to call me an elder, though I had reservations – especially when standing alongside my friend Ba Miller, who is a sprightly 92. Certainly I was a veteran, having been through stuff that ‘sensible’ people wouldn’t touch. But in true Aspie fashion, I tend not to do fashionable things, and elderhood was becoming fashionable and I didn’t want to sit in that box.

However, in 2022, when I had to work hard at staggering five metres from my bed to the kitchen, I realised something about elderhood. If you’re wizened with experience and advancing in age, and getting to a disabled stage where you just can’t do things and participate in things as you once did, you start moving from veteran to elder. But if you’re still involved in all sorts of concerns and rushing around fixing the world, you might be a veteran but something hasn’t happened yet.

It has to do with dependency and helplessness. Worldly reality and our involvement with it change bigtime. There’s a lot you can no longer do, and death’s hollow eyes are eyeballing you. On the approach to death you acquire a growing incapacity to control things. Ultimately, death is pretty much the most out-of-control thing we ever encounter in life – though birth, sex and life’s rollercoaster do at times come close.

This helplessness forces levels of acceptance that are deeply transformative. Acceptance leads to revelations about the true nature of things. At death, the money you earned and spent is of little relevance – and if it is, perhaps you have a problem. What’s important is what you’ve really done – and what you’ve not done and might have done. It’s about the balance of goodness and harm you’ve brought, the lessons you’ve learned and taught, and the net effect and the underlying meaning of it all – and how it all ended up.

I had an earlier archetypal change at age fifty on the year of the Millennium – astrologically, on a Pluto square Sun and Chiron Return. It was a dark-night-of-the-soul year when I was obliged to question everything I’d done thus far, after thirty years ‘on the campaign trail’. Had I got it all wrong? Was the world going down the tube?

Two deep messages came through: head for the heart of darkness, and do only those things that people ask you to do. Not long after, Palestinians asked me, and I found myself getting involved more and more with them. It was a risky decision but it had an overwhelming feeling of rightness and inevitability to it – it was a classic choiceless choice.[1]

Archetypally, this represented a transition from the imprint of a medieval Muslim holy warrior during my life in the 1980s-90s, to that of an early 20th Century Austrian aristocratic philanthropist in the early 2000s. With the first, I was running camps, editing books and playing a prominent role in Glastonbury, working in the ‘new age’ sphere, and with the second I was involved in humanitarian and geopolitical issues, particularly with Palestine and Syria.

As for the aristocrat, our dynasty, the Habsburgs, had fallen when I was twentyish and I’d spent my twenties and thirties in that life campaigning with other Habsburgs for the uniting of Europe. In WW2 I was a diplomat, involved in discreet manoeuvrings and string-pulling.

And guess what? In this life, when I was sixteen in 1966, I won a schools’ public speaking championship giving a notes-free talk on, of all things… why we should join the European Community (as it was called then). That’s an example of the way that stuff leaks over from other lives into our current life – whether or not we’re aware of it.

In that early 20th Century life, it all ended suddenly at age 46 in a bombing or fire, at the end of WW2. I died with a painful feeling that demanded deep self-forgiveness: despite my efforts as a philanthropist and diplomat, people’s needs in WW2 were so great that I and others like me just couldn’t do enough to help. I felt that responsibility heavily. For every person I could save, ten or a hundred would die. It was an enormous, tragic challenge riddled with oversized moral dilemmas.

Many things suddenly ended in this life too when, in 2019, I keeled over with cancer. Except the chop didn’t come down fully. Instead I was shoved through the mill and squeezed into a different shape – literally. One day, as I was emerging from the 2022 crisis, a rather loud voice within said, in no uncertain terms: “Ah, before you go, there’s something more we’d like you to do”. Part of me groaned and part of me lit up – that’s my pattern.

So now I’m sitting in a new archetypal selfhood. I’ve got the gist of it and am sitting in it, and it’s playing itself out as life goes on each day. In character it’s aged, wizened, megalithic British, fragile and yet strangely strong and lively in spirit.

I did a regression with my friend Jen.[2] When she counted me down I was immediately there, in that version of me, in that time – perhaps the early Bronze Age around 2200 BCE. I was at Bosigran Castle, here in Penwith, at a summertime gathering of our people – a few hundred of them. I was sitting in what I call the ‘druid’s chair’ – people who know Bosigran will easily guess the place. As Jen was counting me down I sank into the granite, melding with it. Despite its solidity, something in me was expanding and extending toward infinity. I realised this wasn’t the ‘druid’s chair’, it was the ‘oracle’s chair’. I wasn’t the oracle, though I was permitted to sit in the chair.

There was an emotional twist to this. As a Bronze Age druid I was peripatetic – I had renounced my home as part of my druidic vows. Here at Bosigran I felt as if I was amongst ‘my people’, except they weren’t my people, though they were welcoming and I stayed with them when I could. I was in charge of the longterm festivals in the isles of Britain – the ones that happened once every twelve or sixty or 500 years. I was at home here in Penwith, but I had to move on – the next stop was in the Glastonbury direction. That’s my story: I’ve always been part of many tribes, always having to move on.

Archetypal shifts come to us all at certain times, though it depends greatly on how much we tune into them and act them out, in the context of our lives and possibilities. Or do we conceal ourselves, playing safe and hanging back from the callings of our souls? This is where free-will comes into play, though ultimately there is only one answer and we know what it is.

Spirit has a plan. When I was younger, I feared disability more than death. The idea of landing up in a wheelchair put the shits up me. Well, the soul delivers specially customised lessons. Eventually I was indeed given disability, though it came later in life so that I could do other things first. It was tailor-made for me – a partial disability, carefully designed to confront me on issues that were specifically mine and even give me a few benefits. The disability was enough to change my life but not too much to completely incapacitate me. It has opened up a new, strangely different chapter of life, with some lenience and mercy to it. Brilliant. Just enough, and not too much.

Seeing things this way has been really useful. What I like about working with past-life regression is this: it isn’t just a matter of gaining information about other lives. That’s useful, but it’s not the whole deal. For me, regression connects me up with those lives more consciously and kinetically – an energy-exchange is set up. The interactive circuitry between me and my other lives has been more fully activated, and they’re cooperating far more.

Inputs from other lives into this life can happen unconsciously, or they can be permitted more consciously – that’s our choice. Bringing them to greater consciousness tends to make them less problematic and more of an asset. Besides, they are there anyway, operating as aspects or sub-personalities of ourselves that sometimes jostle to express themselves.

In a few of my lives I’ve been a public figure – known by large numbers of people, for all sorts of reasons – and, in this life it has helped greatly to understand things in these terms. That’s quite complex. Old lieutenants, friends, wives, foes, fathers, rivals and followers have reappeared and, while this is the stuff of life, it’s also an enactment of bigger narratives on a deeper level. Some of these narratives we can tap into, and others remain a mystery – something that we will perhaps only see and understand in the fullness of time.

Photo by Selina al-Mukhtar. (The rest are by me.)

For this is not really about time, about the linear passage of the future through the present to the past. We are all extensions of the soul, and each of our lives is a bit like an arm of an octopus. Soul exists in a ‘quantum’ realm where time and space do not exist. It extends and inserts itself into time and space through the different lives we live. These are lived in differing situations and historical periods, each acting out amazing variations of a basic, core story that threads through all of our lives.

But, from the viewpoint of soul, all of these lives are being lived and experienced simultaneously. Not exactly at the same time, because there is no time when you’re outside time. But the same soul experiences and computes the whole lot. It doesn’t get involved in the day-to-day details, but it does attend to the overall story.

In these day-to-day, year-to-year details we have a lot of free-will, if we exercise it. This involves aligning a multiplicity of day-to-day details with the wider, deeper story – at least to the extent that we can do it in each life. But equally we can choose to resist, divert or screw up the narrative – and the consequences go into a pile of learnings and corrections we sooner or later will need to go through.

Looking uphill from Bosigran. Carn Galva, a Neolithic Tor, is on the left

Going back to the starting theme of this blog… I still have no idea how long I’m supposed to be here. Many people blithely instruct me to think positively and have a determinedly long life, as if to protect them from facing the facts of death. But then, once in a while, I’ll have a choking fit or a sudden dangerous wobble to remind me that my account could be terminated at any moment. Sorry, but we don’t choose in advance the moment and manner of our passing. It’s possible to feel it coming, but the time and circumstance are unknowns.

This is the case for everybody, but it’s rather different when cancer or another terminal illness comes along. It becomes an acute question that can’t be set aside. Before cancer came, I assumed life would go on and I didn’t have to think about it. But cancer placed a yawning gap in front of me, demanding a fundamental change in attitude. Life became a very temporary thing.

This unpredictability seems to have been a necessary precondition for the emergence of the new archetype that has been surfacing over the last three years. I seem to be on a new mission, though the duration and extent of it remains a mystery. It’s all a matter of making provisional plans based on contingencies and possible realities.

I mean, what on Earth am I doing starting (with others) a new project, when my life’s going down the drain? But there’s something about the approaches to death that accentuates remaining, outstanding issues – things that need to come to some sort of completion before we go.

At present I’m involved with starting the Belerion Project, researching the ancient sites of West Penwith.[3] I cannot be its leader because the clock is ticking on me, so I need to render myself expendable from the beginning. That’s a happy challenge and a refreshing change, for a rather reluctant and jaded leader-type like me.

This project means a lot to me on a deep level – something to do with connecting with the deep memory of an ancient British selfhood. A selfhood who sat in the Oracle Chair at Bosigran, shrinking into the quartz to probe the depths. A man of knowledge who had realised that – as my Tibetan teacher Gyalwa Karmapa once put it – it’s all just like a fart in the Void.

The whole lot… a pile of crap. Life is a surprisingly rapid foray into a very strange world. And here we all are, doing a funny dance on Planet Earth. But remember, the idea behind educational courses is to graduate and then move on, readied for service.

With love, Palden

FOOTNOTES

1. For my three books about Palestine: www.palden.co.uk/pop/
2. Jen Stokes, regressionist, lives and works in Penzance (find her on Facebook).
3. The Belerion Project: www.ancientpenwith.org/belerion.html

Prehistoricals

A HISTORY OF PENWITH’S PREHISTORY

I’ve produced another audiobook. (The other two are about my cancer process and my times in Palestine).

This is about the ancient sites of West Penwith in Cornwall, where I live. It runs through the prehistory of this area from the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, featuring particularly the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze Age – the time of the quoits, menhirs and stone circles.

It will be of interest to locals in Cornwall, or people from elsewhere who visit our ancient sites, or people with a general interest in prehistory and megalithic times.

It’s in four episodes – and for binge-listeners there’s a three-hour omnibus edition. If you prefer reading, there’s a PDF version of this short book that can be read on-screen or printed out.

Originally it was part of my book Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith, but I took it out because it made Shining Land too long. It works well on its own.

Britain has had two periods of national greatness. One was the 250-year empire-building period in relatively recent times, and the other was the Bronze Age and a megalithic civilisation that lasted a thousand years. This is its story, as it happened in West Cornwall, one of the hubs of megalithic activity in NW Europe 4,000 years ago.

If this interests you, I hope you enjoy the book! It’s free to stream or download.

With love, Palden.

www.palden.co.uk/penwithprehistory.html

Ancient Cartographicals

West Penwith, at the far end of Cornwall

It’s funny how sometimes we fall into things unwittingly, then to find that they take up years of our lives. This is what happened with my research into the ancient sites of the area where I live, in West Penwith, Cornwall. It all started one day when I was sitting chatting with Cheryl Straffon, an archaeologist and goddess-oriented pagan who for decades has been a key person here, bringing together a full spectrum of prehistorians, from archaeologists to pagans, and editing Meyn Mamvro, a magazine about Cornish archaeology and earth mysteries.

We were talking about John Michell who, in the 1960s-70s, brought the idea of leylines, sacred landscapes and earth mysteries to wider attention in a seminal 1969 book The View over Atlantis. John came to Penwith, doing fieldwork here to demonstrate his point, producing a catalogue of ninetyish ancient site alignments in Penwith, about which he wrote in his 1974 book The Old Stones of Land’s End.

I asked Cheryl whether anyone had made a map of the alignments John had found. No, she said. Hmmm. In former times, I had made a map of the alignments around Glastonbury… “Would it help if I made an alignments map of Penwith?“. “Oooh, yes, it would.“

I thought at first that it might be easier than it turned out to be. It landed up being seven years of work, starting in 2014, and it still gets tweaks and updates now. I’d had one of those falling-into-things moments, just then.

Carn Galva, a classic Neolithic Tor and the *axis mundi* or world centre of Neolithic Penwith – as seen from Caer Brân

Things had changed since I did the Glastonbury map, hand-drawn in 1982 and revised around 2003. Aerial satellite mapping had arrived on internet. For alignment-oriented geomancers like me this greatly changed the equation, opening up many new possibilities and making alignments maps easily accessible online to the public.

At the beginning it came clear that a genuinely useful map would need to show all of the known ancient sites in Penwith. But there are more than 800 of them, big and small, surviving or destroyed, so this was no small job. They were listed in a variety of online databases which, to complicate things, sometimes gave differing or inaccurate information, so every single site had to be examined closely.[1] I spent months trawling through these sources and building up a base map on which later to mark alignments. Later on I continued the mapwork to cover Scilly and the whole of Cornwall.

Some sites were difficult to confirm, being disappeared, disputed or subject to discussion. Some were visible in the field and others, now destroyed, were beyond trace, though many are mentioned in antiquarians’ records from former times – especially those of one called Dr William Borlase, who tramped around Penwith in the mid-1700s.[2]

Eventually I completed a map of Penwith’s sites. Then it was a matter of working through John Michell’s list of ninetyish alignments, plus others found since his time and listed in Meyn Mamvro.

One can argue till the end of time about the validity of megalithic alignments and sceptics love to do so, claiming an assumed authority of scientific rationality when, to me, all that these complaints demonstrate is that sceptics have not properly researched the matter. There is a simple, evidential, inescapable fact: ancient sites are commonly located in exact alignment with each other. This can be seen and checked by anyone on maps and in the field.

That’s the evidence, whether or not we have an explanation. It happens too much, too exactly and with too many supporting details to be a case of chance or randomness. There are discernable patterns to the specific nature of differing alignments – some are made up solely of cairns or menhirs (standing stones), or they link sites of similar antiquity, or they make some sort of sense in a wide variety of ways. Some alignments are even parallel.

If you look at the online map of Penwith’s alignments [3] it looks like a meaningless jumble with only a modicum of order to it. There’s a ridiculously large number of alignments and it’s difficult figuring out how and why the megalith builders went to the trouble of setting things up like this.

But when you look closer at individual alignments and the sites they connect, they begin making more sense. It’s worth remembering that the ancients walked everywhere, so a lot more happened for them in the space of a mile than it does for us, speeding along in our cars and looking at overview maps.

What is most interesting is that alignments stretch not just between man-made sites, but they also involve natural sites such as hilltops, carns (outcrops) and cliff promontories. The whole system is based on these prominent points – I call them ‘base sites’. The pattern of ancient sites is draped over the three-dimensional canvas of the Penwith landscape and arranged around it. There are also astronomically-oriented alignments and other factors such as energy-vortices, underground and overground energy lines, site intervisibility and even geometry that are involved in the positioning of ancient sites. [For more on this, here’s a talk by me.]

Entering Michell’s ninety alignments on the map, I found that only two were inaccurate and implausible, and I removed them. He had done good, accurate work. While making the map and checking the alignments, I started finding new ones and, before long, the list of alignments grew bigger. Some were found logically, by examining a chosen site to check for alignments, and some were found intuitively, happening on them ‘by chance’. After visiting sites around the fields and moors of Penwith, I would come home to examine their location and possible alignments, sometimes adding a few that way.

Late one evening I had a Eureka moment. I was thinking about Cape Cornwall, a conical-shaped headland in a marine context, and St Michael’s Mount, a conical-shaped island in a marine context (though originally it stuck out of the forest on dry land). They are rather similar. I wondered whether there was a connection. I looked on the map and, lo behold, a line between them intersected a collection of four Bronze Age barrows on top of the hill on the farm where I live!

Gosh. I had sat many times on those barrows.[4] They are not well-known because, being on what’s now a boggy heather-moorland hill, they look unimpressive, but their 360-degree panoramic location is spectacular. In the Bronze Age they would have been far more attractive, situated on sweet hilltop meadows – the climate was more agreeable 4,000 years ago than it is now.

Then I started looking for further alignments emanating from St Michael’s Mount and Cape Cornwall. Within an hour I had found quite a few. This doesn’t happen very often – I’ve never had such a big discovery of new alignments before or since. These proved to be a new kind of alignment that John Michell and others had not seen.

John was looking at constructed Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, menhirs, cairns and barrows, which were built from around 2400 BCE onwards. The new alignments I had found involved Neolithic sites from a millennium earlier, and natural sites such as granite tors and cliff headlands. These alignments acted differently to Michell’s Bronze Age ones, covering longer distances and with fewer points on them. I called them ‘backbone alignments’ – alluding to the main system of fibre-optic cables that connects the internet globally. Connecting Neolithic and natural sites, these alignments were clearly far older than John’s Bronze Age ones.

The very first constructed sites in Penwith, Neolithic tor enclosures, were built around 3700 BCE – over a millennium before the stone circles. There were four – Carn Galva, Carn Kenidjack, Trencrom Hill and St Michael’s Mount – and one outside Penwith that features in its landscape, Carn Brea near Redruth.

Many of the newly-discovered backbone alignments also stretched to what I call cliff sanctuaries. Archaeologists call them cliff castles – a term that persuades many people to believe they were used for defensive purposes, which I would argue they were not. They are customarily dated to the Iron Age around 300 BCE, long after the megalithic period, because Iron Age remains are found on them. But the new alignments, associating them with Neolithic sites, suggest they were much older in the first use. Neolithic artifacts have been found at some cliff sanctuaries, but these have not caused them to be properly re-dated to this early time.

Then came the clincher. I found that Lanyon Quoit, one of the key Neolithic sites of Penwith, built around 3600 BCE, was located exactly at the intersection of three of these alignments. In other words, Lanyon Quoit could not have been placed where it is without these three alignments being known at the time – it was positioned to align with two cliff sanctuaries and three Neolithic tors. This definitely re-dates the cliff sanctuaries to the Neolithic, also making them far more important than they previously were understood to be.

Penwith’s four surviving stone circles are all located on backbone alignments. The Merry Maidens, for example, are located exactly on an alignment stretching between Carn Brea and St Michael’s Mount, both Neolithic tors, and Treryn Dinas, a cliff sanctuary. These three natural sites happen, strangely, to be aligned with each other (there are a number of such cases in Penwith). So the stone circle was located there to reinforce the alignment and to draw on the antiquity and earlier primacy of the three Neolithic sites, which came from what in the Bronze Age was a distant former time, some 1,500ish years before.

Eventually, the alignments map of Penwith became really busy with alignments – around 250 of them. They were all genuine alignments, accurate to within 10ft or 3 metres, checked and verified by three people – so this was not a product of sloppy mapping, wishful thinking or ley-hunting zeal.

Alignments are not energy-lines of the kind that is picked up by earth energy dowsers. They are different, even though overground energy lines, like alignments, are also straight. Some overgrounds coincide with alignments, but we yet need to find out the extent to which this is the case.

Trencrom Hill (foreground) and Carn Brea (background) – two Neolithic tors

I’m of the opinion that alignments are not actually lines that are detectable in the landscape. Some dowsers might disagree, but I think they might be picking up on overground energy-lines, or perhaps the thought that links the two sites involved. Instead, it seems that, when a new site was being built, it was simply aligned with other sites in order, presumably, to associate it with them. If you line up five or six objects on a table with gaps between them, aligning them nevertheless gives their distribution some order and coherence. Rendering order out of seeming chaos was important to the ancients. But aligned sites don’t seem to have a connecting current like overground energy-lines do.

It seems to me that aligned sites are instead programmed with the same algorithm, so that they pulsate and resonate with each other, as if tuned to each other. But there isn’t a ‘wire’ connecting them – it’s an internal, implicit connection. It works a bit like what physicists call ‘quantum entanglement’, and as an informational rather than an energetic relationship. An energetic relationship is created by energy-lines that dowsers identify, but alignments don’t do this. So we’re talking here about two different circuitries that each focused on the same ancient sites. And it’s the sites, not the lines, that matter most.

Many ancient sites are thus placed exactly where they are to align them with other sites, though there is no ‘pipe’ connection between them. Instead, they seem to be remotely associated, programmed with the same intent, frequency or behavioural patterns, so that they do similar things at similar times and in similar ways. But they aren’t necessarily directly connected, unless there is also an energy-line between them.

Thus, the Boscregan West cairn, a prominent clifftop cairn on Penwith’s west coast, is aligned with the Neolithic longbarrow on Chapel Carn Brea, and with the now-destroyed Tregurnow stone circle, which was part of the Merry Maidens complex. So these three sites, associated with each other, somehow co-resonated. Or, put another way, two Bronze Age sites, Boscregan cairn and Tregurnow stone circle, were plugged into a Neolithic site on Chapel Carn Brea.

The cliff sanctuaries, embracing the Radiant Land

Interesting, huh? The megalith-builders had quite sophisticated ideas. They weren’t building ancient sites just to decorate the landscape or because it was a nice thing to do. It was a lot of work. They can only have done it because they perceived a definite benefit.

Here’s a much bigger idea. The density of sites and alignments in Penwith, and the way they seem to be integrated into complex relationships with each other, suggest that they operate as one big system. The fundamental substructure is marked out by backbone alignments (yellow on the map), and while the profusion of local alignments (red on the map) seems chaotic to our eyes, it has a certain order of its own. They all seem to make up one big system.

This leads us to the idea that Penwith is an integrated and perhaps super-charged landscape with hundreds of constituent components to it, big and little. That’s the way we should think about it, and not as a disparate scatter of separate sites. After all, Penwith’s ancient name is Belerion – the radiant land – and a place doesn’t pick up a name like that without good reason.

While Penwith’s stone circles and other sites are each modest in size when compared with Stonehenge, Avebury or Callanish, together they make up an enormous system contained by a necklace of cliff sanctuaries and studded with many subsystems. They constitute what can be regarded as a single, big ancient site that is draped over the peninsula’s natural topography and energy-centres.

Each stone circle has a complex or constellation of lesser sites around it – mainly menhirs and barrows. These supporting sites and the surrounding landscape vista exist as an integral part of the stone circle to amplify its purpose – a stone circle doesn’t exist in isolation. In the case of Boscawen-ûn and the Merry Maidens the surrounding agricultural landscape of hedges and fields obscures their wider complexes, but at Tregeseal and the Nine Maidens, located in wilder landscapes, they are more visible.

Tregeseal, for example, sits in a perceptual bowl of hills with a westward vista featuring the Isles of Scilly – almost as if the sweep of hills collects energy from the cosmos to funnel it toward the Scillies. Each stone circle is associated with a hill or tor that is visible from it and a key part of its landscape setting. These complexes are whole systems. In turn, they are aligned with other sites further away, knitting the whole of Penwith into a wholeness.

The stone circles are located on backbone alignments plugged into Neolithic sites – tors and cliff sanctuaries which, in the heavy-forested Neolithic, were the only places where people could get out of the wildwoods. This changed in the Bronze Age, with far more cleared land, which enabled the building of stone circles, menhirs and cairns, but the stone circles, as the ‘cathedrals’ of the system, drew their primacy, authority or blessing from earlier Neolithic sites.

They are key nodes planted in a landscape energy-system with a natural, topographic, geological and subtle-energy foundation. The system fashioned itself around the lay of the land. Here we come to the idea of landscape temples, or whole landscapes that have been developed and consecrated by amping up the natural energies inherent in the land. This was done not only through ‘megalithic geoengineering’ at sacred sites but also through repeated, longterm consciousness-work by successive generations of people. This was an advanced deep-shamanic culture. They imprinted their sacred sites and landscape with repeated and reinforced psychic traces of the shamanic and spiritual practices they conducted over many centuries. They loved the land that gave them a life to live.

An approximate timeline for megalithic Penwith

There is a key aspect of ancient sites that archaeologists miss, and without it ancient sites cannot truly be understood: it concerns earth energy and its psychoactive effects, especially when they are focused and enhanced at man-made ancient sites. These effects cannot easily be detected scientifically, but any person with a modicum of awareness can feel them when visiting sites. We become changed in mood and spirit, sometimes feeling inspired, healed or as if our problems have evaporated. Some people are changed for life – for me, five decades of preoccupation with ancient sites began in 1970 in the Ring of Brogar, a stone circle in the Orkney Isles off Scotland.

These psychoactive effects are a key factor that should be considered ‘legitimate evidence’, regardless of whether or not it can be measured or slotted into existing scientific frameworks. You do not need a doctorate to feel these effects: simply note your feelings and state of being before you enter and after you leave a stone circle. There will be a real change of feeling. Fascinatingly, it can also be quite different in quality and effect each time you visit.

This, I suggest, is a key reason why the ancients went to so much trouble heaving stones around, digging and piling up earth, and doing regular, intentional, collective consciousness work at ancient sites. They spent centuries building up a sophisticated landscape-wide energy-system, and they must have perceived this massive infrastructure investment to be beneficial and worth the effort.

If they had been deluding themselves, it is unlikely that the Bronze Age megalithic period would have lasted 1,200 years. Delusions don’t tend to last that long. There was something very sensible and realistic about the megalithic geoengineering they developed. With our planetary problems of today, we might do well to learn more about what they were up to.

Here’s a final thought. Since right now the world is rather obsessed with warfare, we might also ask ourselves how and why West Penwith is one of the few parts of Britain that has never been invaded – not by Romans, Saxons, Vikings or Normans. In later times Penwith was quietly regarded as lying ‘beyond the reach of the king’s men’. We’ve had some medieval Corsair raids and in the last century or so a seasonal tourist invasion, but Penwith has never actually been invaded. But that, of course, is pure luck and chance, isn’t it?

NOTES:

The main sources were: Heritage Gateway, Historic England, Cornwall Council, Megalithic Portal, Modern Antiquarian, Meyn Mamvro, The Holy Wells of Cornwall map, The Atlas of Hillforts and snippets from other books and sources.
For a brief history of Penwith’s early antiquarians by Ian McNeil Cooke: www.ancientpenwith.org/menhirs/antiquarians.html
West Penwith alignments map: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1rZQT0gYvH9uD_nxg9f4sNByaHQbbBqTw&ll=50.124895599257094%2C-5.568005112493055&z=12
For a 32-min podcast from Botrea Barrows, called ‘Badger Setts and Platform Barrows’: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/palden-jenkins/episodes/Badger-Setts-and-Platform-Barrows-e297obl/a-aabjqc8

Chûn Quoit – Neolithic, around 5,700 years old. These were energy-chambers, not tombs.

Belerion

Belerion – the Shining Land
West Penwith as a Landscape Temple
Weds 18th December 2024
At The Hive, Penzance, Cornwall.

This is for people living in or near Cornwall. Audio recordings of the talk, with accompanying material, will appear online a week or so after the talk, for those who cannot attend.

In my talk in June about the ancient sites of West Penwith (worth a listen) I proposed that the whole of Penwith is one big ancient site – an enormous cliff sanctuary. It’s not just a scattering of stone circles, quoits, carns, menhirs and cairns. Why did ancient Penwithians bother to build so much of this ‘holy machinery’? What was their thinking and what did they seek to achieve?

I’ve been studying ancient sites since around 1970 in Britain, Scandinavia, Greece and Palestine. Since moving to Penwith in 2009, I’ve been working on mapping Penwith’s sites, researching their (John Michell-style) alignments, and divining some valuable psychic-intuitive clues concerning their possible meaning and function. These observations are outlined on the Ancient Penwith website and in my book Shining Land.

In the first half of this evening’s talk, I go further into the sacred energy-technology of Neolithic and Bronze Age Penwithians, and the patterns that suggest that they function as one big megalithic system. We’ll look into how it all took shape from the beginning, the functions of different kinds of ancient sites, and how it all fits together into one big geomantic system.

In the second half I propose what I feel needs to happen next, in terms of researching and working with Penwith’s ancient sites. We need to find out more about how they actually work, geomantically and energetically, and what we can do now to enhance and re-enliven their energy-fields and world-healing qualities – not just an hour-long ceremony now and then, but sustained energy-work, learning more about the specifics of how to do it.

Penwith is an ideal area for this kind of work because it is concise and contained, with plenty of ancient sites and people interested in them. Also, this is Cornwall, not England, and Oxbridge-style archaeological thinking is not the only way to understand megalithic civilisation – here in Penwith, out of sight and out of mind, we have an opportunity to frame things in a rather different way.

There is the possibility of starting a research project involving 10-20 people, in which (say) about forty local sites are surveyed, mapped and chronicled by dowsers and sensitives over (say) a three year period, for their subtle energy characteristics and place-memory. (See below for a shortlist of sites.)

Steadily and systematically, we can visit the sites and truly listen to what they want to say – not imposing our own ideas and predilections but letting the sites and the landscape speak, using methods such as pendulums, meditation, inner journeying and talking stick as research methodologies. Then a report (or a series of them) or a website can report on the findings uncovered by the project.

So I’m wondering out loud whether we need now to take things further, stepping beyond a ‘Wow’ stage to try realistically to penetrate the minds of the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalith builders, to uncover more about ancient sites’ energy-mechanics, their intention and usage, and what we can do about them now. That’s what this evening is all about and, if you can, you’re welcome to come and join in.

Full details are here: http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-penwith.html

With love, Palden.

The Magical Landscape of West Penwith

This is a recording of a talk I gave on Wednesday 19th in Penzance, here in Cornwall. It would interest anyone who knows and loves West Penwith, and also folks interested in geomancy and alternative prehistory.

It’s about energy-fields, ancient site alignments and the geomancy of ancient sites. I make a radical proposition that the hundreds of sites in Penwith all constituted components of one enormous ancient site covering the whole peninsula.

A collection of interesting maps is provided with the recording of the talk, which is 1hr 48mins long.

http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-prehistory.html

To follow in autumn in Penzance, there will be four monthly AHA classes, covering activism (changing the world), prehistory (more about Magic Penwith), power points in time (astrology and the way the tides of time move) and extraterrestrials (about life off and on Earth).

I’m speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium on Sunday July 28th, and I return to Glastonbury on my birthday on 5th September. The subject is ‘Sludging through the Void with Muddy Boots – and why ETs have spindly legs‘.

If you want a really special experience, you might consider coming to the Oak Dragon Camp, Friday 26th July to Sunday 4th August in Somerset. I’ll be there. www.oakdragon.org

With love, Palden

Energy Lines and Power Points

On Sunday, Ba Miller and I shared the floor in Penzance, speaking to a lovely crowd, on the occasion of the late Hamish Miller’s 97th birthday.

Ba herself is 91 – though, with me at 73, a mere stripling, we’re both beat-up and still going strong!

Ba told some anecdotes of what happened when they were following the Apollo and Athena lines from Ireland to Israel, and some really valuable dowsing tips (since it was also World Dowsing Day).

I talked about the energy-landscape of West Penwith, about building megalithic structures for consciousness-engineering and how Penwith is one big ancient site with hundreds of components.

A big thank you to Rachel, Lucy and Lyndz for initiating and organising it, and for their rousing spirit.

To hear our talk (1h 15m), go to my Audio Archive and look for ‘2024 PodTalks’:

palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

With love, Palden

Also: my latest book, Blessings that Bones Bring – a spirited Myeloma patient tells his cancer story, is coming out soon in digital PDF format, and before long as an audio book. Whether it gets published in print remains to be seen. I’ll let you know when it’s available.

A Trip to the Iron Age

One of Palden’s prehistory podcasts

This 30 minute podcast is recorded while sitting in the remains of an Iron Age Courtyard House, up the hill on the farm where I live.

It doesn’t look very exciting nowadays, though it’s a nice place – but then, if you were 2,000 years old, you might be a bit worse for wear too!

This podcast is all about what life was like in the Iron Age in Cornwall, two millennia ago, and the way people saw things then.

Looking into the yard of the courtyard house. Behind are Sancreed Beacon (left) and Caer Brân (centre right), and far behind them is the hill on which the Merry Maidens stone circle sits.

This was the Celtic period – though the Celts shared a culture, and they were not one people. In West Cornwall many were descendants of the indigenals of the Bronze Age.

It’s about life and reality systems in our time, and in the Iron Age, and also in the Bronze Age and the Neolithic – how people saw life and the world in each of these periods, and how their technologies reflected that.

With some insights into what we can learn from them now. This is important. As elder dowser Sig Lonegren often used to say, quoting his Seneca teacher Twylah Nitsch, ‘We seek not to emulate the ancient ones – we seek what they sought‘.

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5sRfUDrjLuJq1S8gHSogtt

Or you’ll find it on my podcast page:
www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

(On the podcast page, check out ‘Ancient Civilisation‘ for more prehistory podcasts.)

With love from down’ere in Cornwall. Palden.

You can see Mount’s Bay and St Michael’s Mount from the courtyard house

Megalithic Penwith

Geomantic secrets. This is a telephoto shot of Carn Kenidjack, a Neolithic tor, seen from atop a barrow five miles away at Carn Les Boel, a cliff sanctuary. Here’s the rub: step off that barrow and you can no longer see Carn Kenidjack. That sightline is important.

Over the last month I’ve been doing a complete revision and rewrite of the Ancient Penwith website and, with relief, this morning, on the Piscean new moon, I uploaded it all.

www.ancientpenwith.org

This is the key map that illustrates my main point in this work: that Penwith was an integrated ancient site and cliff sanctuary covering the whole landscape. That integrated system was pegged out between the cliff sanctuaries and Neolithic tors of the peninsula.

I built the site in 2015-19 in connection with my researches into Penwith’s ancient sites and geomancy, leading out of the ancient sites and alignments maps I was also making at the time. Initially the maps covered West Penwith though, by 2019, I had extended it across the whole of Cornwall. The maps, together with fieldwork, were the basis of the research.

It’s a resource site focused on the alternative archaeology and geomancy of West Penwith, as I understand it. In a way it’s a bit like the course on that subject that I never taught. It’s now around 100 pages in size and quite comprehensive.

There will be tweaks and amendments in coming weeks. If you find glitches, errors or dead links, please tell me their page and location! Thanks.

I’m not sure how much longer I have to live (being a cancer patient) and God usually doesn’t tell you when your bucket-kicking initiation will come – so this rendering of the site might be a parting shot. Whatever is the case, do enjoy trawling through it. It’s for you.

Whether or not you agree with this kind of stuff, there are gems there for the finding, and archaeologists will definitely miss something if they omit to give it a trawl and a good think – and a feel too. It’s all a matter of what we consider to be viable and useful evidence, and what conclusions we draw from it.

Near-parallel alignments across West Cornwall

This work is probably incorrect in some details, but the overall points made suggest that this peninsular landscape was built over many centuries into a single large, integrated ancient site and cliff sanctuary. One symptomatic outcome of this is that it has never been forcibly invaded. Well, except perhaps by tourists during summertime.

Have fun! With love, Palden

Archaeoastronomy. The summer solstice sun setting between Trink Hill, left, and Rosewall Hill, right, as seen from the top of Trencrom Hill, a Neolithic tor. This isn’t man-made – this is natural. Think about it…

Landscape Temples

St Michael’s Mount from Botrea Barrows (telephoto shot)

One of the strange gifts that cancer gives is the prospect of dying soon. It’s is a motivator. You can’t leave things till later or leave them incomplete. So I’ve been moved to bring things to completion as much as I can – with success in some areas and less in others. One area I’m focusing on wrapping up now is my study of the Megalithic period of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

For the last ten years I’ve been researching ancient sites in West Penwith, where I live, drawing on fifty years of study and experiences in Britain, Scandinavia, Greece, Jordan and Palestine. Having done an alignments map of Glastonbury twenty years ago,[1] in 2014 I started making a map of the ancient sites and alignments in Penwith.[2]

West Penwith, the shining land of Belerion, has more ancient sites per square mile than anywhere in Europe. It’s the far promontory at the very end of the long southwestern peninsula of Britain. Surrounded by cliffs on three sides, it has a distinct energy-boundary on the landward, eastern side, made up of three hills lying in a straight line – St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head. On the A30 to Penzance it crosses the road by the shop in the village of Crowlas.

Alignments in Penwith have been studied over the decades by John Michell and a number of other researchers. John wrote the 1974 book ‘The Old Stones of Land’s End’, identifying around ninety alignments involving mainly Bronze Age and early Christian sites. Checking these alignments with online satellite mapping, not available in John’s day, I found that only two of the ninety were inaccurate and questionable.

Cape Cornwall or Kilgooth Ust, with the Brisons Rocks behind

Then late one night came a Eureka moment, after an evening working on the Penwith map. I was tired yet unready to go to bed. I sat there musing about St Michael’s Mount, a roughly conical hill in a marine setting, and then about Cape Cornwall, a prominent headland near me, with a similar character. Both were prominent ancient sites on either side of the peninsula.

Spontaneously I got out a ruler, placing it between the two sites to see if an alignment was there. Lo behold, indeed there was. It passed through a set a four barrows up on the top of the hill on our farm, not far from my house. Gosh, that was a surprise.

I spend a lot of time up at Botrea Barrows and, though they don’t look impressive, they have a remarkable panorama and they certainly have that distinct feeling you get at an ancient site that is still energy-alive. It’s a feeling of being changed in mood and perspective, energy-bathed, both calmed and energised.[3]

A lightbulb lit up. I started checking to see whether there were further alignments like this. The Mount and Cape Cornwall are both cliff sanctuaries. They form a necklace of magic headlands around Penwith, and also much of Cornwall and parts of Devon (there’s a big one in Somerset called Brean Down). So I started checking other cliff sanctuaries and suddenly a lot of new alignments appeared. Normally called cliff castles, they aren’t defensive, and they’re not just beautiful places but also they have a special feeling of being consecrated, so I call them cliff sanctuaries.

I found about eight alignments in twenty minutes – a record never again repeated, since usually they don’t come easily. Not only this, but many of the alignments connected with Neolithic tors, the very first dedicated ancient sites in Penwith, Cornwall and Dartmoor. There are five in this area: Carn Brea, the Mount, Trencrom Hill, Carn Kenidjack and Carn Galva.

Something interesting emerged. Three of these newfound alignments crossed exactly at Lanyon Quoit. One came from Carn Brea near Redruth (a Neolithic tor), through Trencrom Hill (a Neolithic tor), Mulfra Quoit and Lanyon Quoit (Neolithic quoits or cromlechs). It continues to the Tregeseal stone circle complex and eventually to the Brisons Rocks off Cape Cornwall. This implies that, when it was built in the Bronze Age, Tregeseal was deliberately placed on this alignment, or that the site was known in the Neolithic even if it took a millennium to build a stone circle on it.

Another alignment went from St Michael’s Mount (a Neolithic tor) through Lanyon Quoit to Pendeen Watch (a cliff sanctuary). A third alignment went from Treryn Dinas (a cliff sanctuary) through Boscawen-ûn stone circle and Lanyon Quoit to Bosiliack Barrow and a proxy menhir at the Nine Maidens stone circle. Thus, the location of stone circles is significantly determined by these alignments (though multiple interlocking factors are usually involved).

Lanyon Quoit, with Carn Galva behind. Lanyon Quoit is not in its original shape – it fell down in Victorian times and was incorrectly re-erected.

That sounds straightforward, but the implications are quite big.

Lanyon Quoit was built around 3700-3500 BCE, as were the enclosures built to encircle the Neolithic tors. Since the quoit’s precise position is fixed by these three alignments, each aligning with tors or cliff sanctuaries, it means that cliff sanctuaries date back in their first us to at least that time. In one fell swoop, the number of Neolithic sites in Penwith doubled.

Cliff sanctuaries are not usually regarded as major ancient sites.[4] This discovery changes that. Archaeologists ascribe them to the Iron Age around 2,500-2,000 years ago. But we now have geomantic evidence that they were far older in first use and far more important. They were consecrated – you can feel this when you visit them, since they don’t have the same feeling as other headlands. To test this, visit Zennor Head, an ordinary headland, and then neighbouring Bosigran Castle and Gurnard’s Head, both cliff sanctuaries. They’re special. The discovery of Neolithic archaeological remains at some of them hasn’t caused archaeologists to drop their attachment to Iron Age fortresses though.

These new alignments I call ‘backbone alignments’. They are different from the alignments John Michell and most ley-hunters studied, involving Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, cairns and menhirs. In Penwith, what’s special about the backbones is that they represent a more coherent order than the Bronze Age alignments. I’m surprised no one has discovered them before.

More implications… The backbones reveal a coherent structure to the 600 ancient sites of West Penwith. They hint at a master plan – a plan to make Penwith into one big landscape temple, one big cliff sanctuary. This idea hasn’t caught on down here, except with one archaeologist (David Giddings) who struck upon it independently, using a different logic and terminology from me.

We aren’t looking at a random collection of ancient sites splattered across Penwith wherever anyone fancied. We’re looking at a planned, integrated network and system of ancient sites.

It evolved according to basic protocols but not a rigid plan. Here’s an analogy. The Internet was not planned, and what has emerged in recent decades is not what was foreseen and intended early on. However, it evolved according to consistent protocols – a bundle of coding that operates internet networks in a coherent, expandable, adaptable way. Although it grew organically, there was system to it.

Similar applies to the principles established in the Neolithic 3000s – principles first developed in Iberia and brought to Britain around 3700 BCE with a wave of incoming migrants at that time. (They spoke a language related to Basque.) Later, in the Early-to-Mid Bronze Age (2500ish to 1200ish) the Brits took these principles further than anyone, to high degrees of astronomical, mathematical, geomantic and cosmological sophistication.

According to Knight and Lomas [1] even the Egyptians are likely to have learned some mathematical tricks from the Brits concerning the curvature and size of the Earth and the precession of the equinoxes. The Bronzies were doing Pythagorean and Euclidean mathematics two millennia before Pythagoras and Euclid, and they understood the astronomical Metonic cycle two millennia before Meton, another Greek philosopher, wrote it down and got the kudos for it.

This gets bigger when we look at the reasons why the megalith-builders went to so much trouble building megaliths. Here we go right outside the scope and beliefs of archaeologists into the wilder territory of geomancers. When the Neolithics and Bronzies built ancient sites, they plugged them into astronomical variables, underground water, networks of energy-lines, networks of alignments (those are two different things), and they built them using advanced mathematical and astronomical systems. They locked time into space through the designs, orientations, proportions and alignments of ancient sites, particularly stone circles, the ‘cathedrals of the Bronze Age’. Why?

Well, go to an ancient site and spend time there. You’re entering a multidimensional energy field. The evidence lies in observing our feelings, registering those feelings and taking them seriously. The depth and significance of experience is magnified at ancient sites. When you leave, it’s worth noting what’s different in your state, mood and optic. It’s far more than the uplift you might gain from a walk in the countryside. Test it out.

The character and feeling of this experience depends on several factors, contingent on the time you visit, your motivation and respect, how openly you and the place interact with one another, how the place itself is feeling at the time, what you do, what you don’t do, and also there’s a mysterious ‘factor X’, a magical concatenation of conditions that makes some visits extra memorable, even transformative. These variables influence the character of our experience of ancient sites when we visit them – and their experience of us.

This is a consciousness effect. We don’t understand how it works, but it does, and there are hints of proof in neuroscience and parapsychological research. You don’t have to take my word for it: simply visit ancient sites and try it for yourself. The principle here is that containing, fixing and enhancing energy fields seems to be the key reason why ancient sites were built, and why they were placed and designed as they were. This was a technology of consciousness.

It isn’t difficult to feel or sense subtle energy, at least instinctually or semi-consciously. If you’re capable of feeling love, you’re capable of feeling energy, and this is a capability we are born with. But it is more difficult to square this with our overlaid, educated rationality which, together with fears, conditioning, insecurities and emotional armouring, tends to edit, dull, obstruct, corrupt or suppress our sensitivities.

To many people, what I’ve written about consciousness effects makes little or no sense – it’s imagination, woo-woo and hocus-pocus. ‘No evidence’ – though actually, there is. Academics and archaeologists are missing something really big here.

The consciousness effect was valued because these people worked magically – shamanically. This matter lay at the heart of their culture. They worked with the inner components of reality, knowing that what happens within us is entirely connected with what happens around us (called non-dualism). Ancient sites of different kinds were built to exploit various opportunities of consciousness.

Some sites train our awareness upwards, some out to the landscape, some to the earth-sky relationship, some downwards (such as wells) and some inwards (such as chambered cairns and fogous). Stone circles, the reactors, telescopes and laboratories of megalithic times, create a palpable and measurable energy-intensity within their enclosed space.

This would be used at auspicious times for high-pressure magical-ceremonial workings. A few hundred people would surround the circle, fasting, chanting, dancing and visualising, probably with the help of mind medicines, while inside it ‘proto-Druids’ would perform the specifics of the work. They did this to create an intensified energy-field to perform healings, balance the etheric bioelectronics of land and sky (affecting fertility and climate), carry out ceremonial consciousness work in connection with the environment and the welfare of the people, make decisions through an oracle, communicate over long distances, protect the land and keep the spirits of land and sky happy.

But this is not all, since West Penwith is one big ancient site made up of hills, tors and headlands, stone circles, menhirs, cairns and barrows, quoits, enclosures, holy wells and other sacred spaces. These represent a significant buildup of geomantic infrastructure designed around the landscape itself, using subtle energy technologies. It took until the peak of the Bronze Age around 2000-1800 BCE for the infrastructure to take full shape.

However there are signs of a trial run in the Neolithic 3000s in the northern highlands of the peninsula, where most people then lived: the quoits were arranged in a structure involving astronomical and parallel alignments, suggesting that the quoits were built to a coordinated plan. They might all have been built around the same time.[5]

Recently I’ve been studying landscape temples in Penwith. These are areas that hang together in terms of the psycho-geographical, perceptual and magical lie of the land and its features. It is likely that these roughly coincided with the social subgroups or tribes of Penwith. Everyone was related somehow, but social subgroups occupied certain areas, calling them ‘home’. These were not days of territorial frictions, and what mattered most was heartlands more than boundaries.

Based on my knowledge of the area, I’ve drawn a map of what I think those landscape temples and tribal areas might be, as they might have been seen in the Bronze Age, around its zenith. It is hypothetical with little backup, but it’s an interesting thought-experiment and it makes some sense in terms of the lie of the land and the way ancient sites are arrayed.

Here’s an example. On the west coast of Penwith, between Mayon Cliff near Sennen in the south and Cape Kenidjack in the north, a landscape temple is marked out by a series of clifftop cairns.[6] They all face the sea, toward the setting sun and the Isles of Scilly, with the Longships Rocks and Chapel Carn Brea acting as focal points of attention. From every one of these cairns you can see Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain – it has a Neolithic longbarrow and Bronze Age cairns on top. Sennen was the main landing beach for Scilly boats, and the people of this area will have been involved with Scillonians and probably related to them.

I live in another landscape temple made of four hill sites and a valley between them, at the centre of the peninsula. Bartinney Castle is a high, convex, rounded hill with a circular enclosure, eight cairns and a well on top, probably used for quite high-level magical purposes. Caer Brân is a circular enclosure on a hillbrow with a remarkable panorama – I think it was the parliament site for the whole of Penwith and, within its magic circle, a neutral space. Sancreed Beacon feels to me as if it was a ceremonial centre and seat of power for the local tribe. Botrea Hill has four large platform barrows on it, likely to have been used for ceremonial-magical purposes. All four hills are within view of each other, part of the same perceptual landscape and complementing each other in character.[7]

Caer Brân (pronounced ‘care brain’) as seen from Botrea Hill

Penwith was one large landscape temple with a variety of localised areas within it, each with its own character and geomantic facility.

Gradually I’ve been building a picture of life in Penwith in the Neolithic 3000s and the Bronze Age. These periods were quite different, not least in population numbers, which were much bigger in the Bronze Age. But what many people miss is the esoteric depth of the culture of the megalithic period. The bottom-line issue is that megalithic sites cannot be understood without appreciating the crucial role of subtle earth energy in their construction, location and reason for being.

It’s also important to acknowledge the role of shamanic consciousness work in the way the people of the time managed their affairs. This was a theocratic, magical civilisation and, while it didn’t build cities, roads and empires, its thinking was advanced.

This is not just a captivating fascination with the past: it has something to do with our future and the healing of our world. My work in West Penwith has led me to this.

Mulfra Quoit, with St Michael’s Mount behind. I think Mulfra Quoit and Zennor Quoit were both intentionally decommissioned.

This year I wish to bring this work to completion so that I can drop it and pass it on, while I can. It’s not just about completing a body of work. It’s about resolving something inside myself. With others like me, I’ve lived in a time where people like us are not believed – the tide of convention and groupthink has gone the other way. When I was young I knew it would take time but I believed that, by the end of my life, the tide would have turned. Astrology would be accepted, geomancers respected, healers would be accepted as a mainstream medical option, war would be going or gone, the world would be changing and oddbods like me would be seen and heard. This hasn’t happened, so completion now involves leaving clues for others to pick up in future.

For me, it’s also about resolving and healing personal pain. The pain of having ideas rejected because they don’t fit with the prevailing ideology of our time. Things aren’t properly discussed or peer-reviewed, people like me get rubbished, discredited, sidelined, we don’t get the grants and we’re kept off the BBC. Being a vegetarian, meditatator, aged hippy, astrologer, crop circle researcher, social healer and Palestine activist has not been popular with the mainstream. Some things I’ve done have even been illegal – talking to terrorists, delivering babies or using mind medicines – and it is disgraceful that these are still considered crimes.

The pain of being misjudged and discriminated against is a big learning experience for a sensitive soul, and since getting cancer I’ve become more aware of how it has affected me throughout life. I’m working on it by rattling away on my computer, creating an online archive of material which I hope people will find and make use of after I’ve gone.

But it’s a forgiveness process too, because ultimately the weight of unforgiveness rests most heavily on our own shoulders. Time is a healer, and what goes around, comes around. To quote Bhavabhuti, an Indian mathematician and philosopher of the 700s CE: “If learned critics do deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.” Until he came along, in mathematics the number Zero did not exist.

With love, Palden

–

FOOTNOTES

For a key to symbols used on the online maps: www.ancientpenwith.org/key.html

Map of the Ancient Landscape around Glastonbury, Gothic Image, 1983 and 2005. www.palden.co.uk/leymap
Map of the Ancient Sites and Alignments of West Penwith: www.google.co.uk/maps/d/viewer?mid=1rZQT0gYvH9uD_nxg9f4sNByaHQbbBqTw&ll=50.122514747105356%2C-5.6038752366332645&z=12
Podcasts from Botrea Barrows: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PFB03-210613-BotreaBarrows.mp3 and www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PFB40-BotreaBarrows-230909.mp3
About cliff sanctuaries: www.ancientpenwith.org/cliffcastles.html
Online map of quoits: www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=115Hwb1BI-_lmNyQ4bz-gF0dhciU&ll=50.16159288655412%2C-5.593891490692237&z=13
The Boscregan landscape temple: www.google.co.uk/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=10TKtQKR4aFSymGj23xUiYmCBQ1Frnfz5&ll=50.09990259589591%2C-5.670959956329282&z=13
About sacred enclosures: www.ancientpenwith.org/hillforts.html#SacredEnclosures

Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain

Badger Setts and Platform Barrows

Here’s a new podcast (my fortieth)…

I’m up on Botrea Barrows in West Penwith, Cornwall, recounting why they’re there, and what life was like 5,500-3,500 years ago in the megalithic era, in the neolithic and bronze ages, when they were built.

It’s also about the reasons why the ancient people of Britain went to so much trouble to build sites like this.

They weren’t fools, and they did it to create practical benefits, and they were onto something that is relevant to our day.

It has something to do with building a sustainable civilisation – one that works more or less in harmony with nature. Although it did come to an end, megalithic bronze age civilisation lasted around 1,200 years – pretty good.

Introduced by a Cornish chough and outroduced by oystercatchers and a raven, and the Atlantic waves at Carn Les Boel, a cliff sanctuary just south of Land’s End, at the furthest end of Cornwall.

It’s 32 mins long.

With love from me, Paldywan Kenobi.

or go to the podcast page on my website