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.
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…
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.
One of the Botrea Barrows
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?
The Nine Maidens stone circle
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.
Boscawen-ûn stone circle
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.
Caer Brân from above
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.
The long and winding road (near Falmouth, Cornwall)
I’ve been rather quiet recently. My energy has been under par. Nowadays I’m not good at doing winter. I’m often told that I look well, and part of me indeed is well, though this is more a matter of a grin-and-bear-it attitude than a medical reality. Since getting cancer I’ve found I give off an unintentionally deceptive appearance, looking better than I actually am, or feel. Sagittarius rising with Venus trine to it (the grin bit) and Saturn square it (the bear it bit). I’m not sure what to do about this.
Oh yes, I forgot… a health warning: beware of smatterings of astrology.
Though I’ve been relatively quiet, I’ve been at it, extracting parts of my blog from the last four years that tell my cancer story, turning them into a book for patients with cancer and other serious conditions, and their helpers – at least, for those interested in my approach. It will come out dreckly (sometime) as a free online PDF book, and possibly as an audiobook later on. I’m pleased with the way it’s developing.
In my birth chart I have Jupiter in Pisces – a dreamer perhaps, but for me the challenge has been to make dreams manifest. There’s fantasy and there’s vision, and there are doable and impossible dreams. The difference is a matter of discernment and not always clear, even if, like me, you have a forensic Saturn in Virgo, a dreadfully factual place for it. I’ve had successes and failures in this manifestation business, though a lot of things wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t tried. Jupiter, in my case, is the handle to a bucket formation of planets – so it’s an energy-focus in my being. A bucket is a pattern where all but one of the planets in a chart are located in half of the zodiac, with a singleton on the other side acting as a handle.
In my chart the bucket tips so that it pours or perhaps spills out – all of my planets except one, Jupiter, are above the horizon (the horizontal line across the chart), in the social and public domain. But the key to that array is Jupiter, down below, in the personal, local-neighbourhood sphere. In my case it allows a certain privileged access to inner wealth – though I had to make a progression of big, sometimes difficult choices to unlock it. The Tibetans gave me the name ‘radiant merit’ and the Bedouin called me ‘always giving’, and these have been a challenge to live up to and live with. Had I oriented my life another way, I might have been a senior civil servant or an ambassador serving Tony Blair’s government. But I didn’t.
Pendower Cove, Land’s End
Life as it stands today is rather peculiar: I’m out there with my writings and podcasts, with a public presence, while in real life I’m very much on my own. That’s Jupiter in Pisces and Saturn in Virgo again. I live in an uplifting, ancient landscape, peppered with geomantic technology from millennia ago, surrounded by high granite cliffs and the wide ocean. Here lies the taproot of my being – the sense of space here nourishes my soul. Jupiter in Pisces needs a spiritual anchorage. Before this, I’ve lived under Glastonbury Tor, in Bethlehem, in the Swedish forests and the mountains of Eryri, Snowdonia.
Yet ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main‘, wrote John Donne in 1624. For me, solitude is a way of sourcing original experiences and perceptions which then I can bring to the wider world. I’m not one of those authors who can write a book for three hours a day while doing other things – instead I go into a hyperfocused voluntary lockdown for months, totally immersing myself in it.
I’ve even manifested electrosensitivity in my life, which is very isolating. I live in furthest Cornwall to be as far away as possible from the dense cloud of radiation that England emits. I’m close to other emitters instead – humpback and minke whales, dolphins, basking sharks and seals. And buzzards, geese and owls. The construction of our realities, both intentional and unconscious, has so much to do with what we tune into.
Dolphins playing in Nanjizal Bay
The funny thing is that, although West Penwith is relatively isolated, in my psychic work I find it’s easy here to reach around the whole globe. It’s geographically peripheral and psychically quite central, relatively free of etheric noise. I have Neptune in the ninth house (an eclectic spiritualist) and Chiron in Sag in the twelfth (a penchant for behind-the-scenes stuff). As George Harrison, lifting words from Lao Tzu, once sang: “Without going out of my door I can know all things on earth; without looking out of my window I can see the ways of heaven; the farther one travels, the less one knows… Arrive without travelling, see all without looking, do all without doing…” [1] This is certainly true for me now, though I’ve travelled and done plenty of things before, and this makes it easier to accept my current confinement. If cancer had come in my thirties or forties it would have been a very different story.
Currently, transiting Saturn has been sitting on my Jupiter. Normally I’d interpret this as a crisis of faith. Well, my faith is more or less intact but circumstances are having a good go at eroding it, with many disappointments, big and small. Singlehanded, I’m not keeping up with everything that’s involved in staying alive – at times the ‘to do’ list overwhelms me, and I need help with critical things like transport, shopping, laundry, lifting, specific tasks and particularly companionship. And a PA for online assistance and organising things, and a minder for travels. Ideally.
But reality is something else. No one covers my back or keeps their eye on me, and that’s the lesson of my life. Or perhaps I deserve it, or perhaps it’s a gift in disguise. One of the gifts you get when you die is that you see all these facts and nuances from an entirely objective viewpoint, and the end-chapter in life is, if we so choose, a time of revelation and release as insights like this trickle up. Life is, after all, not only about what we tell ourselves is happening.
On the other hand, I’m kinda managing, keeping many things together, as long as it doesn’t get too complex and demanding. My task pile is increasing though, not shrinking. Even so, a strange kind of peace and acceptance has settled on me. Last year I was lonely while this year I’m alone – circumstances haven’t changed though my feelings about them have.
Godrevy Head, East Penwith, Cornwall
Ironically, one issue that’s stretching me a lot is that, although I need help, quite a few people nowadays seek help from me. I even need help explaining to many of them why I can’t help them – this requires careful diplomacy. The world’s needs are rising and people from the past naturally come back hoping I can wave a magic wand once again. Mostly not, in concrete terms, though occasionally I can given them a magic key. But the human contact between us is important – it helps them plug into some sanity, perspective and encouragement, with a feeling that someone is bearing witness and feeling their pain.
It’s heart-wrenching too. I’m talking to Bashar, a young doctor in Gaza, when he can get messages through to me. I haven’t heard from him for over a week now – might have lost him. Some years ago I helped him write articles about life in Gaza, under the auspices of We Are Not Numbers.[2] It’s an NGO that trains young Gazans in writing, photography, video and social media outreach, to help them speak for themselves. One of its founders, Prof Refaat al Areer, has recently been killed in bombing.[3]
Bashar graduated as a doctor in August this year after six years study at the Islamic University in Gaza City and was plunged straight into working at Al Shifa hospital – the big one recently in the news. I asked if he could write something about it but I haven’t heard from him. He wished he could come and work in Britain, where a doctor can have the resources, drugs and equipment they need for their work – well, much more than they have in Gaza. He doesn’t want money or to immigrate here permanently – he wants to get experience and raise his game so that he can return home, where people like him are much needed.
Another friend, Aminha, had a baby a few weeks ago. I’m relieved that she and her child are still alive – well, they were, last time I heard. What a life to be born into, stuck in a devastated concentration camp with little food or security and no escape.[4] Her brother had been a nurse in Gaza – he managed to escape in 2016, got to Europe, was talent-spotted by the Belgian health service and later died of Covid while working in a frontline intensive care unit. Poor chap. Some years ago I asked him what was the most difficult job he had had to do as a nurse in Gaza. He said, “Holding down patients during surgery without anaesthetics“.
One of the reasons I’ve had a strange peoccupation with conflict zones is this. Kahlil Gibran puts it well: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars“. In conflict zones I’ve met some of the most impressive people I’ve ever met.
Sakyamuni Buddha put it another way: “The path to enlightenment begins with the experience of suffering“. That is, if shit happens, it might be a gift in disguise. It’s not fair to say that to a person in Gaza right now, but there’s truth in it – a truth better confronted in retrospect for the deepening of our understanding, at a time when we’re not actually being bombed.
Gurnard’s Head, West Penwith
I’ve been facing facts recently, regarding my health. I’m doing alright with cancer, though my current treatment, Daratumamab, is slowly losing its efficacy. So in the coming year I might have to change to Lenidalomide, which intuitively I feel nervous about. My anticipation is that I might not get on so well with it as I have with Dara. I’ll lose the visits by the nurses too, since it involves a daily pill rather than a four-weekly injection.
But my real concern is the peripheral side-effects of cancer. I have two critical issues – osteonecrosis of the jaw (my jaw is dying) and a compressed stomach (leading to difficulties digesting and eliminating food). The stomach is Virgo’s place in the body, while the jaw is critical for scrunching up the stuff of life. Experience is food too, so there’s symbolism in this. The stomach is where we assimilate the nutritional experiences that life gives us.
The osteonecrosis gives me anticipations. A specialist at the Royal Cornwall Hospital was concerned about it recently. We like each other, and he can see I’m very much alive, but the disintegration of my jaw, possibly in a year or two, could be a critical issue heralding my end – not a very happy ending either. Either this or the stomach issue are more likely to kill me than the cancer itself.
I’m not one who will struggle and fight to stay alive just for the sake of it. If I can, I’ll stick around until living becomes too difficult, but no longer. I’m okay about passing on, and I’ve had a full life. Over the last four years with cancer I’ve done my best to release regrets, accept facts, forgive and be forgiven, and to stay happy. However, without adequate support and with no one close to me in daily life, I’m concerned about what happens when I start deteriorating. I need someone who’s tuned in, an alternative type with some health knowledge and a good heart, with time available and willingness stand by me to the end – funnily, rather like my former partner, with qualities akin to hers.
She was into David Bowie and I was into John Lennon (having grown up in 1960s Liverpool). Lennon’s recent song, ‘Now and Then’, says it for me exactly.[5] Now and then I really do miss her. Nearly two years have passed and I’m moving on, gradually opening to other options. Not that options are here, but I’m opening up to them.
However, if I get close to someone or move house or join a new situation – a family or group, perhaps – this will be the last time, baby the last time, and I won’t be able to do another big change. If this can’t be the case, then it might be better to stay alone and handle things myself. This involves a promise to myself to pull out of life quickly and go home when the time comes to do so, and no later. I’ve spent my life pushing against the wind, and there’s no point doing it in death.
Life always has its compensations and our prayers are always answered – not necessarily when or how we might want them, but they’re certainly answered. When I was in the depths of cancer four years ago I was concerned about my humanitarian work. I could continue as an author and thinker, and my post-cancer blogs, podcasts and webwork are some of the best output I’ve done, but the humanitarian work died right then – I couldn’t travel and I’d be more of a liability than an asset at the frontline. Or so I thought.
But in the last two years I’ve worked with the Akan priestess Maa Ayensuwaa to disable a violent, Nigerian-led, drug-addled criminal gang, I’ve had involvement with the Tuareg in Mali, and recently I’ve been back with the Palestinians. It all happens from my desk here in Cornwall – online stuff – and in bed, or sometimes up on the bronze age barrows behind our farm – psychic stuff.
Something in me has been strangely calm about getting involved in human wrongs, death and devastation once again, even though at times it has been grief-filled and rather a strain. I’ve been given grace-time and opportunity to do it – a prayer answered. Which goes to show, there’s a gift in everything, even in disability, and even when it seems that all the wrong things possible are happening. But then, to quote a peacemaking Ulster vicar from some time back, ‘Better to fail in something that eventually succeeds than to succeed in something that ultimately fails’.
Treviscoe, West Penwith
When it comes to popping clogs, I think I might be able to fold myself up and pop out voluntarily, if necessary – though I’ll find out only when I get there. It’s a matter of shifting away from the apparent difficulty of letting go of life, toward being reborn into a new world with a sense of relief and homecoming. We don’t stop being ourselves when we die, but the location changes, you wave goodbye to your old, damaged, tired, physical self and body, and you say hello to welcoming souls who await your arrival. You get processed through a decompression, a debriefing and a healing of wounds, a few truth sessions, some re-education and recuperation, and then other options come before you.
So, I’m getting used to the possibility that my time might be shorter than otherwise it might be. My current state isn’t going to last forever. However, the conundrum is that, when you’re kept alive by spirit, anything can happen.
But I do need friends to quit trying to oblige me to stay alive for their own convenience. I’m here now, alive in incarnation, in physical form. If you wish, you may invite me places, get me to do a holy gig or two, join us at the Oak Dragon Camp in summer [6] or visit me here in Cornwall. But please don’t leave it too late. When it’s time to go, I’ll need to go, whatever anyone thinks and whether or not I fit their timetable.
After that, I’m in the hands of two Geminis – Tulki, my son, looking after my remaining affairs, bless him, and a dear soul sister, Rebecca, looking after my funeral. I’m pretty Mercurial (Sun in Virgo and Moon in Gemini) and, as you may have discovered, rather effusive with words – miles and gallons of the effing things – so being sent off by two Geminis somehow fits, and thank you, you two.
My Mum, also with a Moon in Gemini, was a prizewinning shorthand typist in the 1940s-70s and she got arthritic fingers in the end. I’ve managed to bypass that, thankfully. Instead, my fingers are losing their keyboard-accuracy and I have to go over and over everything multiple times until it’s right! We each have served the bane of being a compulsive scribe.
I’m Saturnine – it’s central in the array of my planets – and my cancer, Myeloma, is about bones (Saturn). Without treatment my bones would hollow out, crumble and break. Bones hold us up, enabling us to live in a functional planetary body with a humanoid architecture. They give us a frame to hang our body on, counteracting gravitation and the heaviness of physicality. When my energy is up, I’m more or less upright, looking bright, and when it’s down I’m stooped, dragging myself around like a corpse on double gravity, and I need putting to bed with a cuppa, some music, a hot water bottle and a cuddle – therapy for a saturnine old crock with a limited shelf life.
So it feels a bit like I’m poised at the top of a slalom slope and it could be downhill from here. We shall see – I don’t have a sense of the future right now, the gods like keeping me on tenterhooks and it’s a scary-ish seat-of-the-pants matter. Goes to show, I do get fear, in case anyone wondered. But I’m usually alright on the night – fear is more about anticipation than factual realities. One of the great things about being a senior is that, having got through many scrapes over the previous seven decades, I know that, live or die, I’ll get through the next lot too, somehow. It all lies in attitude, really. Only in certain respects can we genuinely control the circumstances of our lives, but we have much more influence over the way we respond to the circumstances we face. That’s what free will is all about.
Love from me, Happy New Moon and Happy Everythings. Palden
The next blog is half-written, and it’s a ‘Paldywan’s top tips for cancer patients’ blog. It’ll also form the final chapter of the book ‘Bones’.
This being Britain, as soon as the tourists went home, the sun came out. It seems to be a law of British meteorology. My wooden cabin, with its big windows, gets quite hot when it’s sunny. I sat outside today, soaking it up. One of the very best cancer medicines is sunshine – and it’s free. I need to rest, because I’m shagged out – my legs in particular. Yesterday – pat me on the back, please – I did it. And it well and truly did me.
View from near Pordenack Point
A friend, Kellie, came round and we did the hike from Land’s End to Carn Lês Boel [map here]. For me this was rather special – a personal pilgrimage to a special place. It’s the place where, if I could, I would dance my last dance. I go there whenever I need to say prayers and come home to my soul.
But it’s a long haul, for me in my condition – my walking sticks, serving as legs three and four, get tired too. It’s two miles each way, with a lot of up and down, but it feels like four. I was not at all sure I would make it, but part of me realised that this was my last chance – now or never. There’s a shorter route from Porthgwarra, but this route is special, and I wanted to do it while I could.
Pordenack Point (see the people on top?)
Heading south from the car park at Land’s End, first you come to Pordenack Point, a high cliff bastion which, from the first time I went there fourteen years ago, I knew to be a major clifftop sacred site. But back then there was little evidence of that – to local archaeologists it was just one more of Palden’s crazy, rather left-field ideas. That evidence has appeared since then. It’s a friendly, strangely homely place where you can sense happy gatherings, unions and reunions, even choral singing. The panorama over the sea is spectacular.
One of the simulacra at Pordenack Point
Pordenack has a prominently-placed chambered cairn, which would have been used 4,000 years ago as an initiatory chamber for deep retreats in this definitely cosmickle place. Also it would probably have been used for dying – it’s a great place for disincarnation, an esoteric spaceport for soul-takeoff toward the Western Heaven. Or it would have been a repository for relics and revered personages put there, at least for a while, to bless the landscape – rather like charismatic saints’ relics in medieval times.
The new discovery was that of a circular enclosure at Pordenack Point, perched on the edge of a near-vertical cliff. That changed things. It was found using LIDAR, a brilliant new form of aerial radar mapping that can pick up hidden remains under the earth’s surface.
Here comes the interesting bit: the enclosure is lined up exactly with two other circular enclosures inland – Castle an Dinas and Caer Brân (pronounced ‘Care Brain’). Both of these enclosures are large enough to host gatherings of a few hundred people, though at Pordenack the enclosure might hold twentyish people. These were all concerned with the coming together of people.
By my reckoning, Caer Brân – it’s just over the valley from the farm where I live – was the parliament and moot site for the tribes of Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Archaeologists are far more cagey. It is right at the centre of the peninsula, at the intersection of two major trackways. One goes west-east from Sennen (for the Scillies) to Madron and upcountry, and the other, NE-SW, links all of Penwith’s stone circles, from the Nine Maidens and Tregeseal to Boscawen-ûn and the Merry Maidens. This trackway goes past four bronze age platform barrows at the top of Botrea Hill on our farm and over the valley to Caer Brân – I made a podcast about this trackway two years ago.
Castle an Dinas was a further gathering site further east, probably for the meetings of tin traders and for fairs and celebrations at Beltane and Lammas. This is deduced from two astronomical alignments emanating from the enclosure, aligned to the rising and setting points of the sun at those times – the sun rises over Trencrom Hill and sets over Conquer Cairn.
Caer Bran
My feeling is that Caer Brân was rather more for formal and jurisdictional assemblies, while Castle an Dinas was more of a marketplace and social gathering site. Just up the hill from Caer Brân is Bartinney Castle, a hilltop circular enclosure with cairns inside it, which has a distinctly spiritual-religious character and a remarkable panorama. Legend has it that the Devil can never get at you inside the enclosure on Bartinney.
But, get this, three of these circular enclosures – Pordenack, Caer Brân and Castle an Dinas – are exactly aligned along a summer solstice sunrise orientation. Gatherings and festivals were really important to ancient peoples, and the people of the tribes of Penwith would come together at these enclosures at special times of the year.
In those days, folks weren’t as peopled-out and time-pressed as we are – there weren’t so many people around and, if you went anywhere, you walked. Much of the land was wooded, which gives a different space-perception to the open farmed landscapes we’re used to nowadays. Jumping in the car to visit friends wasn’t an option, so you met with them periodically, when you could, at gatherings like these, particularly at the solstices and cross-quarters.
You’d meet your relatives, distant friends, old acquaintances and new people too – at Castle an Dinas there would be interesting people from abroad, even in ancient times. There would be discussions, decisions, the making of deals and the settling of disputes. There would be trading, flirting, celebration, partying and morning-after hanging out, with moments of invocation, spectacle and holiness. They’d troop there from their living places around the peninsula, stay for 2-3 nights and troop back home again.
Pordenack Point is special not just for the above reasons. It hosts what must be one of the world’s largest collections of rock simulacra – natural rock shapes resembling ancient beings. There are whole gaggles and convocations of them – guardian rock-beings who face the vastness of the Atlantic at the far end of the Isles of Britain, holding the winds and waves at bay and protecting these isles from the storms, currents and weather gods. Some of the simulacra stand there chatting, and some are watchers, peering toward the far horizon. Some are Keepers of the Law, some are the Chanters of Intonations, and some are grumbly earth beings who resent the dwarvish bane they carry.
Carn Boel
Then you head onwards to Carn Boel, the next headland along the coast. Carn Boel (‘headland of the axe’) and Carn Lês Boel (‘headland of the court of the axe’) form the bounding headlands of Porth Nanjizal (Nanjizal Bay, pronounced ‘Nanjizzle’). Carn Boel has a big outcrop with a hooked nose, on top of which is a rather magical stone and sitting place, looking out to sea. Perhaps a place for consulting ancient seers and soothsayers.
Then you follow a cliffside path – a bit challenging if you have vertigo – alongside Porth Nanjizal, past a fascinating granite outcrop called Carn Cravah. We had a good sit and a round of tea there – I was already having to pace myself because, since I got cancer four years ago, I have few energy reserves to draw on. So it’s an exercise in prana-management, energy-management, pushing myself but not pushing too much. Often there are seals hanging out in the water below, but they weren’t around yesterday, possibly because of all the humans frolicking happily in the water.
Nanjizal Bay
Then you get to Nanjizal, a lovely sandy cove. It lost all its sand in the storms of 2014, but the sand has returned now. It was quite busy. It was lovely to see children getting lost in the magic of the place and playing in the waves, without a care. At least half of the people present seemed to have foreign accents – central Europeans, accustomed to being landlocked, love Cornwall and its wide-open, oceanic coastline. Since Covid we’ve had a new wave of non-white, second-generation Brits coming to Cornwall, laying claim to the extremities of their homeland, to plant their hearts in the landscape and tune in to its roots, and I really like that – they’re welcome.
Then it’s a steep climb up endless steps to the top of Carn Lês Boel, a few hundred feet above the sea. This was a killer and I had to take it slowly, step by step, with two pauses and one sit. An old dog came puffing up the steps like a steam engine, gave me some friendly slobber and continuing on its way, followed by a puffing human, smiling as he passed at this old hippy sat there in his Arabic jalabiya.
The path onto the carn is on the right of the propped menhir
But I got up there. It was painful, but the Carn makes the price worth paying. Its energy-field is strong and uplifting. It’s a place of transformation and healing, with a lightening (levitational) and enlightening (uplifting) effect. You can feel it as you approach. There’s an ancient ditch crossing the neck of the Carn, marking the boundary of its sacred space – I stop there to ask permission to enter but the answer is always ‘Yes, welcome back‘.
The propped menhir
Then there’s a gateway marked by two menhirs, one now fallen. At times, before cancer, I had a sneaky urge to come here one night with a few friends to re-erect it, but it never happened. The other gateway stone is a rare propped, crystalline granite menhir – raised up on small stones so that there’s a gap underneath, so that the menhir doesn’t itself touch the ground. The purpose of this is difficult to tell, but there’s quite a concentrated energy-field in the gap underneath. A similar thing happens at two other such stones: one at Trevean, half a mile away and probably built by the same builders at the same time, and the other a few miles up the coast at Carn Creis, amongst the Boscregan Cairns.
At the top of the carn is a rock platform with an energy-vortex that makes my body sway involuntarily when I stand on it. A nearby tipped-over stone probably stood on this vortex in former days. There’s another energy-centre further along the carn – a natural rock pile with a vortex emerging from the top – and, yesterday, over this and the first energy centre there were swarms of flying ants, swirling around psychedelically in the heat, following the flow of the energy-vortices.
When I’m there I settle and eventually lie down, finding myself drawn deep inside the carn. Esoterically it feels hollow. It does have seal caves in it, but this is a different kind of hollowness, as if there is an enormous atrium of vastness and voidness underneath, Tardis-like and bigger than the already enormous carn itself. There’s a feeling of very ancient beings here – geological beings who were here long before humans were ever thought of. There’s also a wide-open, upwards-and-outwards, infinite-space feeling to the carn, with its oceanic vista. The next stop across the ocean, thousands of miles away, is the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, the Mayalands.
Carn Lês Boel marks the western end of the Michael Line, a line stretching across southern Britain along its widest axis, crossing Glastonbury Tor, Avebury and other major sites along the way. That’s one reason why this site seems to me to be working at a higher level than many other sites around Penwith – the carn is on a global great circle energy-line.
I needed to come here because I feel I’m at a junction point. I’m drawing a blank on where the roads lead from here. Unusually for me, at present I see no future – no sense of where I’m going or what happens next, or even what I want or need. I’m not sure how to interpret this, but I see three possibilities. One is that I’m just plain blank and need to feel alright about that. One is that I am on the edge of something, a new chapter, the form of which I should not even try to pin down at this stage, in order to allow it the space and freedom to develop. Or the third possibility is that my life might end quite soon, and that I see no future in life because there isn’t one – the path leads through a threshold to another, less physical world.
I can accept any of these, for although I turn 73 on my birthday (Tuesday 5th September), and I’m not that old, I feel like a hundred years. Life has been an uphill grind in recent years and I feel rather worn out. Tired of pushing hard to get through life, tired of all the palaver and complexity. But I’m not set on that either. I’ll be wherever it is most useful for me to be.
I’m rather a mission-driven kind of chap, and if there is something meaningful and manageable for me to do here on Earth, then I’m up for it. But my life has developed a kind of emptiness. I miss my family, my partner and her family. In the wider world I am well liked but not greatly included. Regarding will-to-live, it does make a difference when there’s someone to live for, and perhaps I haven’t appreciated this sufficiently, earlier in life. I’m not good at doing nothing, staying alive just to stay alive, and I’m uninterested in watching TV, entertaining myself, feeding my face and living in glorious isolation. There’s more to life than this, and if there isn’t, then perhaps I’ll be better off going back home.
That’s why I went to Carn Lês Boel, to place myself before the Vastness, to make a ‘here I stand‘ life-statement, to ask a question and make a prayer. I chose the hard path to get there since it might be the last time I can do that route. It’s special to me because, this time in particular, I have to work at it, wear myself out, and that’s a quality that pilgrimages need to have. I needed to open myself up to whatever is to come. To ask for clues.
I didn’t get anything definite for an answer except for one thing: when leaving the carn I paused and asked, “Is this my last visit?” and the answer was definitely ‘No’. That perked me up. But instead of giving answers, this pilgrimage brought a change in me, a change of state. The questions started mattering less, and I came to a feeling that everything is alright, okay and perfectly in order.
Even so, I had to build myself up for getting back. Part of me didn’t want to leave. Another part of me knew that I had to start now, while I still had energy and before my body stiffened too much. Being on the carn had recharged and reconditioned me, and I knew I just had to apply mountaineer’s grittiness, persevering through the next bit to get myself home – well, back to Kellie’s car.
So I psyched myself up and went for it. My legs and back were hurting and my strength wasn’t great, but I just had to do it. At times like this, when I’m out in the wilds, I have a secret wish my dear son would winch me up into one of his helicopters and teleport me back to the farm. But this is Planet Earth, and he’s busy with other things.
This said, the whole trip was really worth it. Kellie was great company too – a right-on lady who’d been a road campaigner in the 1990s and who, I sense, stands on the edge of taking on a new mission of her own sometime soon. She’s one of those women whose kids are hitting twenty, who finds herself standing in front of a rather big, wide-open space. She was attentive to my needs, pace and timings, which was great, but she didn’t fuss over me, letting me stagger along at my own pace – and this old cripple likes that! She also seemed to like the Queen Mary’s Rose Garden tea that I brought in a flask. And I liked the lunch she had brought, which we had at Nanjizal Bay, just before climbing up to the carn. Thanks, Kellie – and I hope the trip was auspicious for you too.
Another person who came along, in spirit, was the Okomfo Akue Ayensuwaa – a new soul-sister I’ve never met, and queen priestess of the Ayensu River in the Gold Coast of West Africa. We have worked together on a shared mission for the last nine months and, while Kellie and I were doing this pilgrimage, Maa Ayensuwaa was at her shrine, accompanying us in spirit. This lady is deep, and if she so chooses she really is with you. There’s a Nepali seer who has also entered the equation, and we form a sparky triangle. I’ll tell you more about this and our story another time, when it’s safe and proper to do so.
Today, on the day following our walk, my legs ache, and I’m happy. Sometimes I have a question but it turns out that I don’t really need an answer. Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing my state. Something is reintegrating. What I love about visiting a power point like Carn Lês Boel is that it can transport me out of the confines and coordinates of my life and raise me to another level. I get more of a panoramic sense of life – a sense of context and meaning that seems to slot everything into place. It’s a shift of viewpoint that casts another light on things so that they look different – and this in turn leads to different outcomes.
On this walk something else came clear. There are advantages to being aged, especially if I accept it fully and completely. There’s no longer a need to hurry. It isn’t a time of goal-orientation but a time of allowing. The urge to get there, to achieve objectives, and to get on with the next thing, fades into the past – almost as if it was another life. As my physical powers have declined, my psyche has become more spacious since I’ve been obliged to drop many of the concerns, activities and preoccupations that used to fill it. It means that, with an undertaking such as walking to the Carn, I can take each stage, each footstep, as it comes. I just keep on going, step by step, neither pushing nor giving up, and I keep on going until, suddenly, I surprise myself by finding I’ve actually got there.
Life is nowadays more of a here-and-now thing – not least because the past is fading in memory, and there isn’t a lot of future ahead, and when I spend a lot of time alone, other people aren’t around me, keeping me attuned to the issues, struggles and woes they face. So I lose track of most people’s sense of reality, floating off in my own bubble. That makes the present time expand into more of a timeless zone. It has a beatific effect, adding an enlivening sparkle to life, giving a rather childlike sense of spontaneous discovery of every moment. The urge to get there, to reach the destination, to tick off everything on the list, is a compulsion that touches me much less than ever before.
Yet again, Carn Lês Boel gave a gift of time, out of time. At life’s junction-points it’s a good place to go, as if to clock in to the universe to renew my contract with the Great Wide and Wonderful, to go through a reassessment turnstile, to get worked over by the spirits of the ocean and vibrational field of this holy cliff sanctuary.
So that’s what I did on Saturday.
Lots of love from me, Palden
The photos here were taken on earlier trips – I wasn’t in a photographic mood yesterday.
My website has just gone through its Saturn Return – 28 years old. Erk.
Born in the antediluvian days of the ‘information superhighway’, when John Major was prime minister…
Every coupla years I’ve added an extra bit to it, and it’s like a new age minefield now. Tread carefully.
Unless I suddenly earn a million between now and the time I pop my clogs (with Jupiter in Pisces, such things can sometimes happen, as a kinda cosmic joke!), this is the legacy I’m leaving.
Wurdz. Bl**dy loadsa them.
Perhaps you might now understand why, in late life, I’ve developed a slight allergy to sitting at my computer to chat with people… (‘cos computer keyboard=work, for me).
It started with pink and green punchcards on tea trolleys in 1971. I was on the world’s fourth largest computer at the time (London Univ), and it had a memory of 56k – hot shit! We had the latest tech too – dot-matrix printers! But no keyboards or screens – they came later.
It was my dear old friend Sig Lonegren who nudged me to get on internet in 1994. Initially I had reservations. Perhaps part of me knew this would be a life-changer. I’d been in printing and publishing for some time, but this… well, I had to get ready for it.
Actually, I was on my Saturn opposition, at age 44. This was a step-change. And then… whoosh… egged on my whizz Avalonian programmer friend Barry Hoon, before long, with him, I was creating www.isleofavalon.co.uk which, by 2002, was getting a million visitors per year. (Apart from the content, people liked it because it had zero advertising – no estate agents or shop adverts in sight, and it worked, for the town as a whole.)
One thing I’m looking forward to when I die is the possibility of returning to direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication. Paper, print, messages and web-pages, well, they have their virtues, but when we’re talking about ‘sharing’, internet just doesn’t measure up.
As an early adopter of internet, one thing that disappoints me about the way things have gone is that too many people, imho, quote and re-post other people’s stuff and media stuff, and too few actually speak for themselves and create from themselves.
I get five-ish friend requests every day, and I look at everyone’s FB page. If you speak for yourself, you interest me more, and you’re more likely to become my friend. People who hide behind re-posted material or blankish pages… well, please come out and give us a sign of who you actually are!
I do have a way of making uncomfortable statements (a bit like Martin Amis, wordsmith, my age, who’s just died)…
One of them is that withholding is a crime against humanity.
I submit this for your consideration.
Having lived through a remarkable slice of time (1950 to now), I’ve been privileged to be surrounded by and adding to a pool of emergent knowledge that lays foundations for the future. My website’s Saturn Return is significant (at least to me) because it marks a transition from a website to an archive.
An archive of an old codger who saw some stuff and did some things to add to what’s changing in this world. This, on the offchance that, like William Blake, my stuff might be valued more after my passing than during my life!
But then, a Saturnine soul like me has to accept that time makes its own decisions, and his Jupiter in Pisces speaks from the Void, and it can take time for time to catch up with Voidness.
If you wish, join me and us in meditation this evening (Sunday) at 8-8.30pm UK time (7-7.30pm GMT). Let’s give this world a push to get through the rather dangerous Mars-Jupiter-Pluto triangle that’s been firing off for the last few days. Angry stuff – facing the music – grasping the nettle – time to be brave.
If you’re resident in Cornwall or a Cornwall fan, or you’re likely to visit here this year, and if you’re into visiting ancient sites, these maps are useful.
The last five days, since it has been rainy a lot and quite often really white-out foggy, I’ve been doing my six-monthly updates of the ancient maps of Cornish and Scillonian ancient sites that I’ve been working on since 2015.
There are two main maps: 1. ancient sites 2. ancient site alignments
These are not just maps but also rather encyclopaedic databases. That is, if you click on an ancient site symbol, a popup give you information and links to other sites where there’s more info about that site.
The location of ancient sites is very accurate and these maps can be used in the field, so that you can find sites when tramping around.
However, before entering ancient sites, please switch your phone off completely, so that you don’t pollute the site and you feel and experience the site more clearly.
If you live in Cornwall or are visiting this summer, or if you’re a fan of Cornwall, these maps are very useful!
One of the big themes of my life has been time – dealing with the present, understanding the past and envisioning the future.
The future has preoccupied me since I was a late teenager – sitting around with friends, discussing things, trying to see which way the world will go. That’s still an open and evolving question, though for me the issues are clearer now [see:The World in 2050] and my perceptions of fifty years ago, honed by experience and the passing of time, in essence remain quite consistent.
Looking at the future led me to the past. As a student at the London School of Economics during the ‘troubles’ of 1969-71, I’d experienced what it’s like being in a revolution that is suppressed and fails – a devastating transition from inspired ferment to cruel disillusionment. Many are the peoples round the world who have experienced similar since then.
Trying to deal with my ‘political pain’, I studied the movements of change of the past, seeking clues. Then I was given a gift.
Ragged and burned out, one summer’s day I hitched out of London, landing up two days later in the Orkney islands. I found the Ring of Brogar, a big stone circle, and innocently I decided to sleep in the middle of it. I wasn’t expecting a major soul-intervention that night. But it came.
I had a profound lucid dream in which hundreds of people danced around the circle. Chanting and stamping rhythmically as they moved round it, they made the earth resound like a deeply donging bell, generating a charged magical atmosphere.
Loving my favourite stone at Carn Lês Boel
One of them came, reached down and said, “Come and join us“. Which I duly did. From then on I was a smitten megalithomaniac. A deep memory of ancient times was reawakened. Back then too I was involved with time, responsible for organising longterm observances and rites to work with Metonic, Jupiter, Saturn and other longer cycles of time.
Guess what, in this life, by the mid-1980s I was initiating consciousness-raising camps, doing a modern version of the same thing. And they were astrologically timed. After one of the camps I had a moving inner experience where the modern I and the ancient me were dialoguing, sharing our perspectives from our contrasting points in time.
So, I’ve been an astrologer, historian, antiquarian and futurologist. I didn’t particularly plan this but that’s the way it unfolded, in paragraphs and chapters through life. While studying astrology in the 1970s it felt more like remembering than learning afresh. By 1990 I had compiled The Historical Ephemeris of historical cycles with a timeline of events, showing how major-scale changes in human ideas and activities can be identified by observing such cycles. A labour of love, much ignored by historians, it needed doing and I did it.
For the last decade I’ve been studying and mapping West Penwith’s prehistoric sites. We have lots of them. One day I realised why the ancient Penwithians had gone to all the trouble of building these things. Experiences gathered in world healing [see:The Flying Squad] over the previous 35ish years led to a lightbulb moment that came up at Bosiliack Barrow, where I go whenever I seek insights. It’s funny how a revelation often simply uncovers something obvious and already there, though until then it is unseen.
I’m not particularly into earth healing, lightworking or healing and prayer circles, though it’s important that people do these. I’m more into working surgically with specific issues that obstruct progress, in an inner journeying and energy-working sense. It involves addressing fundamental social and cultural patternings, tendencies and institutions that become spotlighted by current events, digging down to get closer to the heart of things, unconcealing and helping to heal the layered pain and damage that humanity has brought upon itself over time. In our own time, these issues are getting in the way of necessary change.
CASPN members, after doing maintenance work at Boscawen-ûn
Consciousness work is upstepped immensely when groups of people work together. Over time, in activities with others that I’ve been involved with, remarkable outcomes have occasionally arisen from it. The Council of Nine (I wrote a book for them in the early 1990s) had emphasised this too: “If there are thirty-six with one mind, focused together, then the entire world, even the universe, may be changed“.
However, an undistracted, unwavering, one-minded focus is needed for that, and it’s not easy. If a group or network knits itself together over time, melding as a group, it can build up a momentum and focus that can take us at least part way along that track.
Sometimes it even happens unintentionally in the public sphere – moving moments experienced at a captivating music concert, a funeral, an uprising or even in a football crowd. Notable in particular are those moments that shake the awareness and feelings of mainstream people in their millions – poignant events, situations and crises that can sometimes evoke a one-mindedness in millions of people at the same time.
When the numbers rise, the intention and energy-holding are good, and there is real feeling behind it, the work people do in this field does have a positive effect, incrementally raising the world’s vibrational level. I encourage you to include this kind of work as a slice of attention in your life, in whatever way is best for you.
Brane chambered cairn, near Carn Euny
Back to ancient sites. The key sites are those that enclose space – stone circles, enclosures, chambered cairns, caves, wells and dolmens. Here intense vibrational fields can be built up within that space. That’s what the people in my dream fifty years ago were doing.
In many ancient sites we can still feel vestiges of those energy-fields, built up over the centuries during the megalithic era. A presence is in residence. At Boscawen-ûn stone circle, a couple of miles from me, it’s quite common that, when you arrive, someone else is leaving, and when you leave, someone else arrives. There’s something bigger going on here.
Being a peninsula at the end of a bigger peninsula (Cornwall and Devon), West Penwith has definite edges, bounded by the sea. Even the landward side in the east is guarded by three hills in a dead straight line (St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head), creating a threshold and energy-shield. (Interestingly, the G7 conference held in Cornwall in 2021 was located exactly on this line.)
Bosiliack Barrow
As I did my research, it came clear that this was not just a fascinating collection of ancient sites – they constituted one big, integrated system, roughly 10×15 miles in size, and purposefully built. It was rooted in the landscape, anchored to key hills (neolithic tor enclosures) and promontories (cliff sanctuaries). The location of major sites such as stone circles is largely determined by these.
These sites are also variously plugged into underground water-energy systems beneath them. Stone circles and dolmens are sited on top of ‘blind springs’, energy-springs emerging as a vortex on the surface, which the ancients then entrained and focused by building an ancient site on top.
They’re also plugged into the wider cosmos by alignments to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon at key times of year, as well as, in some cases, certain key stars – marked out by alignments to menhirs, cairns or natural features. The designs, geometry and mathematics of many sites also embodied principles such as the Metonic cycle, a 19-year cycle of relationship between the solar and lunar calendars, both of which were used at the time.
Tregeseal
Stone circles and other sites are placed in remarkable locations, with a visible relationship with the lay of the land. Tregeseal stone circle, near me, lies in the apex of a U-shaped bowl of hills which meld together to highlight a gap in the west, toward the sea and the distant Isles of Scilly, which float on the ocean like a mystic realm on the edge of the world.
Stone circles, enclosures and certain hills and features were amped up by cairns, menhirs and other markers that were aligned to them, acting as feeders, relays and batteries. These integrated the system as a whole into a network. In some cairns, bodies were buried not for the memorialisation purposes we now practice with our dead, but to bless and light up the land and the network by burying the relics of revered people at carefully-chosen places – rather like the medieval reverence for saints’ relics.
It was all for the engineering of conditions in which advanced consciousness levels could be achieved – though there were other purposes too. Enclosed energy-spaces such as stone circles and chambers are insulated, charged-up spaces. In Penwith, background radiation in a stone circle is much lower inside than outside it, and this applies also to background psychic noise. A protected, charged space like this allows clearer and stronger psychic, shamanic and healing work – and many of you will have experienced this yourselves.
At the Hundredth Monkey camps of the mid-1990s we built up an energy-field in the circle that resembled those that they built up at ancient sites. An energy-field morphs into a reality-field, where the framework of reality changes gear and things become possible that are not available under normal circumstances.
This was noticeable at the end of a camp when we closed the circle – the mood would subside like a slow puncture, ‘normality’ would restore its grip and the background noise and clamour of the busy world around began intruding again. We had been in a magic space with very different character, norms and rules.
Treen chambered cairn
Inside chambered cairns there’s a profound quietness providing ideal conditions for solitary meditation, vision-questing, innerwork and conscious dying, and also for the treatment of seeds, tools, elixirs and magical objects. Insulated from outside by stone and earth, such cairns sit on energy-vortices generated by the intersection of two or more underground water streams underneath. This makes the chamber into an energy-bath or orgone accumulator, valuable for entering into altered states.
Apart from ‘getting high’, why did they bother with all this? It had a direct bearing on the fortunes of people and tribes, as an investment that paid good dividends. Although their civilisation was materially simple, it was culturally and spiritually sophisticated. They had an advanced technology that worked esoterically with the essence of life, the core dynamics within all things, with which they could carry out forms of genetic modification, long-distance communication, medical procedures, ecological and climatic regulation and societal problem-solving.
They weren’t manipulating genetics the way we do today: instead they created energised conditions within which organisms could modify and enhance themselves, and this has been demonstrated to be possible in modern-time experiments too. They needed no telegraph wires or radio waves for communication: trained psychics, often some of society’s neurodiverse people, trained up, would enter a state in which time and distance ceased being an issue.
As for weather-modification, by siting menhirs, mounds and stones on top of energy-conductive water and metal veins and magnetic anomalies, they could neutralise the excesses of bioelectric charge between land and sky, reducing climatic extremes and damaging weather events. Conducting sometimes long and complex rites they focused on keeping Gaia and the spirits of land, sea and sky happy.
Caer Brân
Different kinds of sites evoke different responses – this concerns consciousness-engineering. Just over the valley from me is Caer Brân, a circular hillbrow enclosure surrounded by earth banks, which could hold a gathering of at least 300 people – I believe it was the parliament site for Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Parliament-moots were probably held annually at a fullmoon around summer solstice, exploiting the virtues of the time and the site, which is exactly aligned with two other circular enclosures (Castle an Dinas and Pordenack Point), with a summer solstice orientation. Though it has a remarkable panorama encompassing Mount’s Bay and the Isles of Scilly, you can’t really see the view from inside because the surrounding banks obscure it. This entrains consciousness upwards and inwards.
Chapel Carn Brea from Boscawen-ûn
Meanwhile, on a neolithic tor hill or a hill camp, awareness opens out over a wide vista, invoking an upward-and-outward feeling. Or at some sites our attention might be entrained in certain directions – at Boscawen-ûn we are drawn toward Chapel Carn Brea, the very last hill in Britain, a beacon hill topped with a neolithic longbarrow and bronze age cairns. In contrast, in a chamber or holy well a deep interiority arises. Ancient sites had added properties engineered into them.
People did ongoing magical work over many generations, well-trained, focused and serious in intent. To crank it up further, they chose power points in time – an eclipse, solstice or planetary configuration – amplifying and pushing their energy-work over a critical potency hump.
There are things to learn from all this. I’m not suggesting building new stone circles everywhichwhere, but there are ways we can amp up world healing work by learning from the shamanic methodology and philosophy that megalithic peoples used. One key element is groupwork and another is the focus such a group can build up. In some respects this was easier for the ancients since they were mostly related, well accustomed to it and also much less psychologically scatterbrained than we. But we moderns have our virtues, such as psychospiritual diversity, a lot of creativity and a good measure of despair regarding the state of the world.
My feeling is that, in the coming decades, events on planet Earth will reach moments of intensity where everyone worldwide gets a deep and clear sense of the full extent of what’s at stake. Events have a way of manifesting scenarios before us that stir us up, press our collective buttons and present sharp dilemmas – whether they’re big events such as the recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, or small, highly poignant events such as a refugee baby washed up dead on Greek shores. These experiences focus minds and hearts, invoking archetypal imagery, stirring sentiments and moral choices. This global process will intensify in coming times and there’s an inevitable crunchpoint approaching, or a few of them, where we’re faced with events of a ‘this really is it‘ kind.
Chapel Carn Brea
It all hangs around whether we pull together globally or atomise into a tangled mess of narrow interests. It’s not just a matter of practical cooperation, effort and peacemaking, but also one of one-minded and one-hearted inner consensus. We’re faced with a mountain of global issues that require a miracle, or a stream of them, and normal means of fixing our problem are too slow and clunky. Only a quantum shift of approach and priorities is likely to prevent disastrous levels of hardship and disruption in coming decades.
A miracle requires the focusing and intensification of an energy field to the extent that our former understanding of reality flips. Nothing much might immediately change, but everything looks and feels very different. A new reality-field supersedes the previous one. The rules change and remarkable things happen. This depends greatly on how, collectively, we see and judge things – a disaster can be made good if if leads to fundamental changes.
This involves going to the heart of things, dealing with them in a psychospiritual way. Not to the exclusion of practical solutions, but complementing them. Making a big step in the collective heart of humanity. Creating a resonance that overrides the psychic disarray and disturbance of today – a central cause of today’s global problems.
‘Disaster’ means out of tune with or loss of the stars. Out of sync with nature, human nature and the cosmos. Out of sync with the guiding light within. The ancients did their shamanic energy-work to keep things resonating well, knowing that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Fixing the world today involves a big cooperation in every possible sense, between humans and with nature and the cosmos.
We have this in our collective memory – it’s a taproot memory in humanity’s collective soul. If we read the underlying meaning of current events to be a manifestation of all that we semi-consciously fear, dread, need and hope for, it is possible to see how events are leading us toward a crunch point, a truth point. A point of focus where everyone’s awareness potentially comes together to think a new and deep thought.
Mên Scryfa and Carn Galva
So something in our deep memory from former millennia holds a key here. And it concerns the future.
Time is a strange thing, and dimensional. When I went down with cancer, my life expectancy was shortened yet strangely I was given a gift of expanded time. In a time-poor world I became time-rich. Not long ago I asked myself whether I’d like my old life back, and I realised I didn’t really. Though life is more difficult now, and serving time as a cancer patient, 70% dead and hovering there, mostly alone, has tested me to the limit, time has morphed toward a more timeless zone where other things start happening. Loss of physical capability has led to something of a gain in inner ability. Life on Earth always has its compensations!
Perhaps that’s where the world is heading. Global loss of traction caused by increasing crises and disruptions could well lead to a similar compensating factor, experienced by growing numbers of people. I’ve discovered this in the crisis zones I’ve been in – such intensity can pull out the true human in us. When your life is at risk you play for high stakes, and there’s no alternative. You’re drawn into the immediacy of now, and time changes in power and potency. That’s where root-questions are met. From a world healing viewpoint, that’s where the crunchpoint lies, and from it will be born the next world, whatever shape that takes.
Logan Rock or Castel Tredhyn, castle of Tredyn (SW 3972 2198)
With a daunting magic and brooding mystery hovering around it, Treryn Dinas is a fascinating place, though it’s also a place not to be messed with. Enter with respect or the Cosmic Trickster might knobble you with a dash of unsolicited reality.
You get the feeling odd things might have happened here. It’s a place of mystery, power, sorcery and truth. Not exactly tranquil, it is nonetheless impressive in its strong underlying feeling of power. In folklore it was the home of giants.
On the actual dinas there aren’t easy assembly places or comfortable places to hang out – precarious scrambling is involved – so at any time people will have been in small numbers only on the dinas. Something about this and its obstacular nature gives the dinas its character. It’s strong in feeling, and worth visiting to feel the brooding, enigmatic character of the place.
The headland has two parts, the rocky headland itself and a large encampment to its landward side called Treen Circle, built in the Iron Age, according to archaeological orthodoxy – and the banks on its landward side probably were Iron Age.
However, its first use would have been in the Neolithic 3000s BCE, if not earlier, even if little or nothing was built there then. Neolithic artefacts and relics have been found on the dinas – items and offerings hidden in the rocks.
How otherwise can we say it’s Neolithic? First, the dinas is so prominent and rich in character that it must have been important.
Second, Treen Circle lies exactly on a backbone alignment (108) through the Merry Maidens, St Michael’s Mount and Carn Brea – an alignment of three natural features (two Neolithic tor enclosures and one cliff sanctuary) with a Bronze Age stone circle dropped onto it. Treen Circle is where people would hang out and camp when visiting the dinas. Antiquarians once thought there was a stone circle in Treen Circle, but this is improbable.
It was the most inhabited of the cliff sanctuaries of Penwith except perhaps for St Michael’s Mount. Treen Circle encampment was large – it could have hosted some pretty big gatherings and, in the Iron Age, quite a few people in roundhouses. This would have been a summer residence – in winter it is exposed.
It was strategically placed, not far from Porthcurno, one of Penwith’s prime landing beaches. But still, it’s a bit far away for defence of the beach, if such were necessary, so a defensive purpose to the dinas is questionable, even though Treen Circle is separated from the surrounding landscape by a significant Iron Age rampart and ditch.
Just outside it, a strongly aligned menhir has recently been rediscovered and re-erected.
Unlike many cliff sanctuaries, Treryn Dinas had practical value, with good farmland and fishing grounds nearby, situated in a commanding position that is a twenty minute trot from Porthcurno.
One wonders whether rocking the logan rock at Treryn Dinas was done to make sound and rhythm for geomantic reasons, to pulse the earth, or even as an ancient kind of foghorn, sounding out a slow drumbeat to warn boats when sea mists were down.
The rather unique upstanding stone at its summit gives Treryn Dinas a special character – it might have been placed there.
Another backbone alignment runs from Treryn Dinas to Boscawen-ûn stone circle, Lanyon Quoit, Bosiliack Barrow (a rather special chambered cairn) and a menhir just yards from the Nine Maidens. So, three of Penwith’s stone circles are linked with Treryn Dinas – that’s significant. Even so, no alignment has been found with Tregeseal, the fourth stone circle of Penwith.
I’m doing a series about cliff sanctuaries in West Penwith, Cornwall, where I live. I forgot to post the first one here when I did it, so you’re getting a bonus blog this time, about two cliff sanctuaries. The first is about Cape Cornwall and the second about Bosigran Castle. Also, at the bottom is mention of my forthcoming visit to Glastonbury at Easter – if you happen to live in or around it.
Cape Cornwall as seen from Nancherrow valley
Cape Cornwall
Down’ere in West Penwith, Cornwall (right at the end) we have an important coastal feature called cliff castles – though I call them cliff sanctuaries, a far better descriptor. Archaeologically they are customarily dated back to the iron age (from 500 BCE on), though actually they go back to the neolithic 3000s BCE.
Cape Cornwall and the Brisons rocks from near Cape Kenidjack
That is, when this area was mostly forested, the main places you could get out of it, ‘get some space’, were on the neolithic tors and hills and the cliff sanctuaries. So these formed the first major ancient sites in the area.
This is one cliff sanctuary, Kilgooth Ust (pr: ‘east’), the Gooseback of St Just, or Cape Cornwall, and it’s near St Just. It was severely affected by the tin trade 150ish years ago – hence the remnant chimney and the houses. But it is a classic, and it’s one of the major alignment centres of Penwith. Originally it had four barrows on its neck. Here’s an alignments map: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/d/viewer…
Cape Cornwall as seen from Carn Gloose
Around Cape Cornwall were some of the richest deposits of metals in ancient times, with arsenic-rich tin, gold and other rare metals used in metal smelting to create different qualities and finishes, from around 1800 BCE. On either side of Kilgooth Ust was a landing bay where metal ingots were exported.
The rocks offshore are called The Brisons. It’s the left-hand, southern one that is the energy-centre there. In neolithic and bronze age times they were probably not islands.
Cape Cornwall as seen from Sennen
I’ll post a few more cliff sanctuaries as time goes on. See the map to see the other cliff sanctuaries in the area, forming a necklace around Penwith, the ancient Belerion, or ‘radiant land’. These were sanctified spaces, and you can feel it.
Until someone did a proper theodolite job in late Victorian times, this was regarded as the Land’s End. But actually, what’s now called Land’s End is a matter of yards further west. But this, in a way, is the energetic Land’s End.
Bosigran Castle
Bos chy carn, ‘home house [under the] crag’, often translated as ‘Ygraine’s home’ (Map ref: SW 4169 3688)
This is one of my favourite cliff sanctuaries, mainly because of its friendly atmosphere. There’s a story that it was the home of a queen – Ygraine, after King Arthur’s mythic mother, but it has other possible meanings too. It has a hospitable, sociable feeling. So, this queen, whoever she was, might well have been a great lady, leaving a strong imprint.
Today, it attracts lots of rock climbers – avid Bristolians in VW vans. You can be sitting there listening to the waves, looking wistfully over the sea toward Ireland, when a clinking starts up and, sooner or later, a helmeted climber appears over the parapet, trailing ropes and looking pleased. On one occasion a school of minke whales cruised past and the climbers were spellbound, frozen to the spot, hanging in weird positions on their ropes. I was moved too, preoccupied as I had been with my prehistoric ponderings and customary flask of anthropocene tea.
The top of Bosigran Castle is rocky and divided into a number of different natural spaces. Carn Galva is behind
Bosigran has a pleasantly healing and relieving feeling. Good for spending time when the weather is pleasant, it’s a great place for picnics, in both Neolithic and modern times. It could easily accommodate around 200 people for a summer weekend shindig, though there is no evidence and little likelihood of permanent occupation (too exposed in winter). Summer nights spent around a campfire would have been wonderful. It lies below Carn Galva, the magic mountain of Penwith, and perhaps the tribe that had Bosigran Castle lived around Carn Galva, coming down to the cliff sanctuary for special occasions. Summer sunsets there can be special.
The ‘throne’
A rocky Iron Age rampart sections it off from the surrounding land, though defence is only one possible reason it is there. More likely it was simply an energy-threshold, since when you cross it you get the feeling you’re entering special space. There are several distinct areas on top of Bosigran, each with rock platforms that could serve as outdoor ‘rooms’ – so it’s a place where a number of things could happen at the same time. At one of these areas is a throne-like rock where one can imagine a chief, wise-woman or druid sitting, with their flock arrayed around them.
The logan rock
The top of Bosigran is littered with earthfast rocks and, apart from the boundary rampart, there are few signs of rock-moving or the placing of stone, except in two instances. There is a logan or rocking stone on the top, near the ‘throne’. These are flattish granite boulders balanced in such a way that they could be rocked. It’s possible they were natural, or placed there or adjusted slightly to make them rock. What the purpose of logan stones was, we do not know, but the ancients clearly thought them special. These were the bass drums of the Neolithic era. Perhaps people drummed along to the deep rocking sound, building up a stirring, thumping beat.
The ‘council circle’
Further along the left side of the headland and down a bit, there is a sunken, west-facing area with an array of rocks which suggest a ‘council circle’, as if it were a place for undisturbed discussions.
Nearby is a line of three rocks with their lined-up edges aligned toward Pendeen Watch, a neighbouring cliff sanctuary. These are (I think) deliberately oriented stones intended to highlight the relationship between the two cliff sanctuaries.
The zawn (inlet)
Bosigran is a good example of a cliff sanctuary potentially serving as a coastal beacon site – the prehistoric equivalent of a lighthouse. A few of the cliff sanctuaries will have been connected with trade, but this is unlikely at Bosigran. This was a place for gatherings and events. It’s a pleasant half-mile walk down from the road, and it’s worth going down into the zawn (inlet) on the western side too, to watch the seabirds, waves and climbers. There are some interesting tin-mining remains in the valley, with signs of tin-streaming methods having been used in centuries past.
I shall be in Glastonbury over Easter and doing two gigs while there.
One is at the Legend Conference in the Assembly Rooms on Sunday 9th April at 10am on Sunday morning, and here’s the blurb…
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Consciousness work and the way it can affect our reality
My talk will be focusing on consciousness work and the way it can affect our reality. I’ll be going back to our roots, in the neolithic and beyond, to the early inner imaginal work that gave root to the core stuff of our culture, to our beliefs and ways of perceiving things. Using my home area, West Penwith in Cornwall, as an example, I’ll show how ancient sites were built for consciousness work in order to penetrate and engineer the heart of reality – amongst other things affecting the climate, the ecosystem and human society. Which happen to be issues that are a wee bit important today.
Forty years ago, the Assembly Rooms hosted some very early experiments in ‘working the circle’ – something that is now accepted and common – and Glastonbury is a place with deep historic and esoteric roots too. So the heart of my talk is about consciousness work in the imaginal sphere, how this might be used in jogging the prevailing reality-field of our world, and how it all started several millennia ago.
I shall also be doing ‘An Evening with Palden Jenkins’ on Friday evening, 7th April, hosted by the Inner Light Community, and that will be announced on their site and on my Facebook page soon.
On Saturday I’ll be around if anyone wishes to meet up. However, I’ll need you not to wear me out, and to have your phone switched off! I’m a bit of an old crock and I’m electrosensitive (my cancer is caused by EM radiation). Still here though!
This is not a christmas card. This is Kvikkjokk in the north of Sweden, north of the polar circle, last year. It’s where my daughter Maya lives. It was -30C there last night.
There’s one robin that comes from the thicket above my cabin, and another who lives in the brambles down below the barn.
Problem is, being male robins, and with breeding season coming, they’re doing their territoriality trip – much to the consternation of the tits and the blackie, who also want to get to the feeder just outside my door.
When you spend much of your time alone, issues like this do matter! But it’s a welcome diversion too because, as you might imagine, my thumbs haven’t exactly been twiddling very much recently, and I’ll welcome an off-duty break one day.
It hasn’t snowed here in Penwith, though it went sub-zero and icy in the last few nights. Stuck out in the Atlantic and bathed in water that not too long ago passed Miami Beach, we’ve been about 5 degrees warmer than most of Britain. But then, though Brits love to complain, whatever the weather, up where my daughter Maya lives, north of the polar circle in northern Sweden, it was -30C last night – and the sun won’t rise until mid-January. Welcome to Planet Earth, dear friends – this is what you get on this world, and this is what you chose when you decided to come here.
I get cold feet. I’ve got this weird thing called Peripheral Neuropathy – a side-effect of chemo drugs where your nerve-endings die off. So I can feel the inner feelings in my feet but not the outer ones – and I never knew there was a difference until the Good Lord (or whoever) gave me cancer. This also means I don’t feel the cold in my feet very much – which goes to show how, in life, you win some and you lose some, and that’s the deal. I still have warm double socks on though.
An Indonesian Christian rock band in Bethlehem
One of the narratives of my life has been about dealing with paradox. My mother did love and care for me but she didn’t have the time and presence to mother me in the way I needed – that kind of thing. But that’s alright: it gave me some mother patterns to work with. Or this: my Tibetan name means ‘radiant merit’, my Arabic name ‘servant of the light’ and my Brahmin name is god of the sun, but there’s a shady side to me too, who gets involved in gritty, underworldy, heavy stuff. I’ve been exposing this side of me in the last month, with the strange thriller I’ve found myself in.
It goes to show, I’m not a holyholy meditation teacher at all, but a lawbreaking aged hippy charlatan who does nasty things, corrupts dishy young ladies, leads people astray and ought to be locked up forthwith – a danger to civilised society. Be warned.
I’ve been breaking the law recently, paying bribes. In West Africa, if you don’t pay enablement payments, nothing gets done. However, as my late senior barrister friend Keith used to say, in his endearingly bombastic Leo kind of way, “I, dear boy, am a purveyor of the Law of Man, but you, sir, are a purveyor of the Law of God”. Well, that’s a bit over the top, but there’s truth in it too, and sometimes divine will does need to prevail, whatever anyone thinks. So I’ve paid some bribes because, actually, it’s usually just to pay the guy’s phone bill or taxi fare so that he can do what you’re asking for and perhaps take a few bob home to his missus.
Well, if they want to arrest me for that, I’m over here. It’s a professional expense, and not the least of the sins I’ve committed. I’ve been a traitor, consorted with terrorists, smuggled tofu though Israeli checkpoints (they think it’s Semtex), taken on false guises and a few other things I’d better not mention.
But on the other hand, bad as I am, my life-saving stats measure well against any doctor or paramedic, and I’ve had the pleasure of uplifting thousands of people, and many of the bad things I once did, or decidedly didn’t do, are now, a few decades later, strangely approved of. It took a while. Some people think I’m brave, though my rather naive Aspie response is simply, ‘But why is that unusual?’.
Manger Square, Bethlehem, full of people
I have another weird Aspie thing too. I have an aversion to Christmas. I don’t do it. I’ve always felt unhappy feeling obligated to be happy and congenial when, at the time, I’m feeling contemplative and quiet. So I have a no-compromise approach that, before Xmas, is frowned on and, after Xmas, is envied.
On Xmas Day, if the weather allows, I’ll be out on the moors or the cliffs with a flask and a pie, attending to the top of my head and a few related matters, and if the weather is bad I’ll be huddled round the woodstove, propped in my chair or inner journeying in bed, busy not drinking sherry. Unless I find another person who would delight in an utter non-Xmas with me, I’ll be on my own, and that’ll be alright. You might wonder why.
Well, it’s a time for wrapping up the past and looking toward the future, and I have rather a lot of both at present. That’s solstice, the turning of a tide.
But it’s also a time when, rarely, the Christian and Westernised elements in the world suddenly get excited about peace and goodwill for a day or two. This is really good. My only reservation is that it suddenly ends around lunchtime on Xmas Day, when everyone starts blotting themselves out with food and booze, only to regret it afterwards.
Manger Square, Bethlehem, Palestine, at Christmas
Nevertheless, as a guerrilla planet-fixer with an esoteric style, I find it’s worth scooping up some of this goodwill for good use. After all, there are at least a billion people on Earth who really need some peace and goodwill to be shoved their way right now. If not, truth be told, the whole eight billion of us.
So I spend my solstice-to-Xmas doing consciousness work. It’s secret – don’t tell anyone. It’s a good time for doing some gentle infiltration of the collective psyche, to strengthen that thought: goodwill. If you’re on your own this Christmas, then, wherever you are, stick up your antennae and see whether you can find me in that ‘reality-field’ and come join me. Try 11am and 2pm GMT, Xmas Day.
I’m always there on Sunday evenings at 7pm GMT too, for half an hour.
Ten years ago I was in Bethlehem at Christmas. The slightly sad thing is that Christian numbers for the Christmas Pilgrimage are much diminished nowadays, so Muslims make up the numbers – Palestinians do appreciate Bethlehem’s global name-recognition in such a forgotten land, and Jesus is also one of the prophets of Islam.
The Catholic Xmas is a bit like ours in NW Europe, with a lot of the jingle-jangle, and big concerts in Manger Square with Christian singers and bands from Germany, Indonesia and Nigeria, and a few Papal delegates thrown in. And why on earth do they import Father Christmas to Bethlehem, already replete with Christ Mass primacy, when most Palestinians have no idea where Estonia is or what slieghbells are?
Then comes the Orthodox Xmas, which is a bit more sedate, very ornate and quite delightful to a jaded old heathen like me. The chanting is done with deep faith and mystique, and the archangels and cherubim really do seem to hover around.
Then in mid-January comes the Armenian Xmas, which actually, if I were Christian, is the kind of Christmas I’d prefer – ruminative and richly calm. Either way, they’re all resplendent with candles, incense, chant and reverence – that’s very different to the mosques, where there’s nearly no ceremony or pizazz, just quiet prayer. They both have their virtues, but give me an ocean clifftop or a desert outcrop anyday, and I’ll be happy.
It looks like I’ll still be on duty over Christmas, monitoring the West Africa situation daily. Here’s the latest news from there.
Phyllis, now three, some time ago
Phyllis, the child, is happy and in good shape. She underwent an amazing turnaround last week, going from fever and coughing blood to wanting an ice cream in two days flat. I think you lot, with your prayers, played a key part in that. She is now staying with Dr Isaac and his family. Phyllis seems to be a great kid, easy to have around, and everyone loves her. I’m so happy about that. She’s special, that one.
Felicia… well, she’s improving, but we hit a setback two days ago. She has been reviving, and three days ago we moved her out of hospital into accommodation near the doctor and his wife. She was awake and becoming able to function, but she fell over, and it was bad. She needed two blood transfusions, a drip and medication. I’ve managed to finance that. So, it’s tenuous with her at present.
Those of you who have been giving your prayers, healing and positive thoughts to Felicia… may I ask for another round? Please hold her and raise her up. She has brain injuries from the ‘accident’ two weeks ago (they were rammed, actually). We think she’ll be alright, and she’s in good care, though she isn’t out of danger yet.
I want to put in a word for Dr Isaac and his partner Millicent and their children. They have taken in Felicia and Phyllis. They live simply and have their own family concerns, but they care a lot, and they’re definitely not in it for the money.
One of the greatest benefits I’ve had from my humanitarian work has been meeting simple, good-hearted folk like these who are the real saviours of our planet. They just get on with it and hold the world up. They do so much of the mopping up of the world’s mess.
Here’s Dr Isaac
The people I’m involved with in West Africa, and also my handler with the fraud investigation company, are all good and remarkable people. In this business, you develop ways of finding out who you can and cannot trust, and everyone depends on each other, and there’s a certain implicit code of behaviour, and you bond closely with people you encounter when sharing intense situations with them.
The Syrian Orthodox church, Bethlehem, Palestine
In something like this, to use an old sexist term, it sorts out the men from the boys. The people who hang with you through thick and thin are often amazing people. Dr Isaac is like that. He lost his job for us (though I think he’ll get it back). He risked his and his family’s lives. He’s gone several extra miles. He’s a man of faith and a good doctor who deserves more than a one-room home for his family.
I’ve met many remarkable people, and he ranks high, a true server, a doctor of whom Hippocrates would be proud. We’ve known each other for three rather long weeks. God bless you, Isaac. People like you convince me that this world will survive. My daughters, son and grandchildren do that too.
I guess I’m a sucker for crisis situations because it brings out the best in many people, and I like working with them, and it brings out the best in me. I’m not good at normality, you see. I’ve always felt I’m there to help the helpers, the social healers and the frontline people, and it’s an area of deep late-life satisfaction now.
Here’s the Mosque of Omar on the other side of the square. Sensibly, when they invaded, the Muslims under Caliph Omar didn’t take over and convert the church. Bethlehem has had very good Christian-Muslim relations throughout history. I wonder why?
As an independent ‘freelance humanitarian’, for want of a better term, I’ve held to certain principles I feel are important such as: ‘don’t give a person a fish, but teach them how to fish’, and ‘teach a man and you teach a man, but teach a woman and you teach a generation’. There’s even William Blake’s statement: ‘the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ – and war is excess to human need, in my judgement.
I feel also that, as an educated, white, male, privileged Brit whose ancestors built the empire and kept it going, and living through its downfall and seeing its very mixed outcomes, I have a bit of an urge to complete the job. I’m not a great believer in reparations, guilt or sorrow – I just like to get in there and do something to help people have a better life and rise to their full potential. To the extent I can.
People have asked who or what I work with. To my surprise, at present it’s for a big bank – though that’s not my style. One of my PodTalks, The Only Planet of Choosing, gives clues. I’ve worked with all sorts of people, but the bottom line for me is their humanity, and progressing humanity’s evolution. My focus has been community-building, conflicts and crises, and helping social leaders stay on the rails.
You have to have your wits about you. This is strange because, as an Aspie, I can be at times apparently naively open but it’s not exactly that – it’s because I sense people’s hidden motives and agendas, and I often get delayed-action clarity on what’s really happening. So I look blank for a while. Then it all comes. So I’m best working with others, inputting what I’m good at. Such as total attention, hyper-focus. When I’m on form, I’m brilliant, and when I’m not, I’m best back here in Cornwall, out of everyone’s way.
Which is where I am now, on the farm, and it’s a dark and rainy pre-solstice night, and the owls and crows are all tucked under their wings down in the woods and hiding from the feather-ruffly wind. Wherever you are, may all be well with you.
Don’t worry too much about your circumstances, even if they’re tough at present – look at your attitude, and be innovative. Find simple ways to be happy. We all get inner friction and pain, but these are things we can reduce, even if we can’t reduce the adversity. That’s what’ll get us all through.
The Church of the Nativity began as a goddess temple (hence the Virgin Mary came here), then a Greek Apollo temple, and only then did it become a Christian Church. The front entrance is really low and you have to duck to go through – this is to force Crusaders to dismount and it stopped their hunky stallions from entering the church. But the Israelis just roll bombs in. Interestingly, in Bethlehem, I don’t get a feeling of Jesus – it’s Mother Mary’s or Mariam’s town, and the matriarchs there definitely let you know it
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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