They came. And they went. They went scorching along the south coast of Britain toward the Netherlands. The storm gods, that is. It was a right old holy hoolie, a demonstration of the Power and the Glory for everyone in Cornwall to hide away from. And we did.
It’s one of those situations where you just have to huddle down, say your prayers and wait. One of those situations where even proudly hubristic secular rationalists start saying a prayer, just in case. You have to wait until it’s over, because it’s no longer in your power to do anything much else.
The winds were resolute, firm and consistent, not blustery or tricksy – they were forceful, merciless and thoroughly unrestrained. This was what in capitalism they call a hostile take-over. No consultation, no regard for human rights, no compassion: just the energy and might of a full-on Atlantic storm, a gift of the gods to remind us how small we are and how easy it is to wipe us out and dispose of us, if Nature so chooses.
Too often, we arrogant, self-centred, comfort-addicted humans forget this. It’s not that difficult for Nature to blink or cough, sending us beetling off to Heaven in our thousands, for the angels to sort out. Well, I’m heading that way anyway, sometime soon, and if the weather gods wish to take me today, getting in there first before the cancer gods get me, then what a way to go. I won’t complain. You have to get to Heaven somehow, after all, and in this there is no choice except for timing and method.
But it was okay. The lights went off and I sat in bed, reading in candlelight a novel about the Dreyfus Affair of 1890s France – as it happens, topically, a prime example of institutional anti-Semitism if ever there was one. Then I dropped off to sleep, with 100mph winds screeching over my little cabin, The Lookout.
They were coming from the northwest, and a hill stands there behind the farm, sheltering us from the Atlantic vastness, 3,000 miles of it, and it was okay. Had the winds been coming from the south, as in some of the storms of 2014, there would have been trouble on the farm. We were okay, but across Cornwall a lot of people were not, and many trees lost their lives. I found myself wondering what small birds do in super-storms like this, like the tits, dunnets and the robin who patronise the feeder outside my door.
Anyhow, I’m a survivor, and programmed up for it. Well, much of the time. The main dangers I have faced in my life have been from humans – control-freaky Israeli soldiers, nervy Palestinian freedom fighters, gritty ISIS terrorists and crack-addled Nigerian criminals – and the force of Nature has a more comforting side to it.
It is mighty, threatening and decisive, administering justice in a remarkably even-handed way and singling out all those things you’d failed to notice or do anything about during calmer times, making them fly. But it speaks the words of The Ultimate, and no one can argue with that – even The Donald, living as he does in a hurricane corridor called Florida, the land of the flowers, who badly needs to realise that he is not God and never will be.
But human dangers are another matter, and with them you’re dealing with a different, more capricious and regrettable kind of randomness.
When I woke up there was no power or water. Jon, the farmer, was clearing up the mess in the farmyard – the roof of his woodshed had radically repositioned itself. There was no phone signal, so a neighbour had driven to where there was a signal, finding out that we might, with luck, expect power back Friday afternoon. It took until Saturday afternoon.
Well and good. Except there’s one problem. Why is it that the power always returns just at that moment when you’re beginning to enjoy the calm and the candlelight?
But I do have a woodstove, and it soon was alight. There was the light of a lovely golden dawn over the valley, exhibiting another kind of Power and Glory from that of the night before. The birds were very quiet, probably a bit groggy after a long, trying midwinter night. There was no sign of the flight of geese who pass over the farm in the morning, hooting and croaking to the Void as if sadly lamenting the insecurity and non-attachment that migrating animals have to accept. They’d probably come from Greenland, Iceland or Norway, now wondering whether they might have been better to stay there.
So I pottered around. The worst that can happen is that the food in my freezer defrosts. No bombs are falling, and no earthquake-aftershocks are to be expected. Before long a saucepan was on the woodstove, warming up for the first pot of tea. I stumbled down into the farmyard and along the track to check a neighbour – yes, she was okay and huddling in bed with her dog. I came back, making my walking-stick work hard, poured the tea and read more of my book. Then I rooted around in the cupboards and found a Tilda pack of lemon and herb rice – and that went on the stove too, with some grapes thrown in.
One of the best meals I’ve ever had was during an Israeli lockdown on the West Bank. People in the rich world, all neurotic about our loss of freedoms, complained loudly during the Covid lockdowns, but with an Israeli lockdown, well, if you go out, you risk getting shot – it’s quite simple. Israeli troops are trained to shoot first and think later. In circumstances such as this, a kind of culinary gallows humour takes over and, using what you have in the cupboards, some amazing feasts can be had.
This is partially a perceptual issue. At a Palestinian refugee quarter outside Damascus, since I was a European with some diplomatic skills, I went out to see if I could find some food for the family I was staying with. We outsiders sometimes could get to places and negotiate things that others could not – though it would depend, of course, on the mood and values of any gun-toting man you met along the way, and whether they spoke English, German, Swedish or French. My ageing, sixty-something brains were having difficulty absorbing Arabic.
I usually managed to convince them I was a decent chap. Arabs are good at reading your body-language. Anyway, it was my lucky day and I came back with a shoulder-bag of bread – including, strangely, a plastic-wrapped pack of German pumpernickel. We had a true feast – of bread, with a few old, chewy olives thrown in. And, believe me, it was a wondrous and happy feast. Palestinians are well used to this kind of thing, though they have one weak point: they go through big coffee-withdrawal problems during lockdowns and hard times.
People often ask me what I used to do in Palestine and Syria. Well, I’ve done three books and an audiobook on the matter (links below), but the short answer is, things like this. Such as finding bread for a family to eat because, in the circumstances, I had the capacity to do so. It’s a small matter, finding food, but a meal can have a big effect on people’s mood and welfare. And you get to eat something too.
So a Cornish winter hoolie, well, it takes me back to that alert, resigned, improvisational, ready-to-run state that you get into when stuck in an emergency. You’re out of control of your fate, yet strangely in control too – though it’s necessary to leave the fear until later. In a funny sort of way it brings out the best in me. Comfortably normal regularity is not my forte, as my former partners can easily testify.
My computer battery is running out and I’ve said enough. I’ve been churning out verbiage for a whole lifetime, so no more is necessary. And, as usual, I’ve forgotten my tea and it has gone cold. So I’ll put my mug on the woodstove and, lo behold, in a few minutes it’ll be warm again. What simple delight can be found in small mercies.
And, as Arabs often say, Allahu Akbar, God is Great. Life is a wondrous thing. It’s a gift that’s worth cherishing while we have it. As something of an expert in other worlds and their characteristics, I can safely inform you that the tea on Earth is the best in the whole Universe. If you don’t believe me, your turn will come to find out.
However, compensations are available in Heaven. It’s a cool place to be, so don’t worry about the tea or other such things. Other things matter there. But just make sure that, when your own time comes, you’ve had enough of the experiences of this world to have, in another sense, truly had enough of them.
The seventh Aha Class, in Penzance, Cornwall Weds 12th March, 6.30pm, at The Hive
A settler incursion and tricky situation in the historic souk in Hebron, Palestine
Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world’s problems – instead of wringing hands and feeling helpless.
In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence – it goes deeper than mere ‘public opinion’.
Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. They can affect the collective psyche and sometimes help swing things.
But it’s possible to get closer in. It’s possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them – literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.
That’s what this evening is about. This might be a valuable inner tool to add to your repertory. This is not ‘lightworking’ but spiritual humanitarian work – bringing in truckloads of spirit, rescue and healing.
This is not simple. It carries responsibilities, and it’s not a matter of imposing our wishes – benign or biased – on world situations. The key issue is to help humanity learn, to become more aware in making the choices it makes, for the longterm resolution of what are often deep-seated problems.
In the first half of this evening, I’ll outline considerations and issues involved in such work, how we choose issues and crises and work with them, and the blessings, delusions and dangers involved and what it’s all for.
In the second half we’ll go on an inner journey to work with a particular area of focus that is currently afoot in the world. (And, first time round, we won’t be working with polarised Trump-related issues!)
You might or might not wish to go into this kind of work but, even if you don’t, world situations do come up at times, touching our hearts, to which we respond, and inner journeying (conscious dreaming) is one way we can play a part in world affairs as situations arise. Once you get the gist of it, it can be applied in areas that interest you – socio-cultural, ecological, geopolitical or simply encouraging forward-moving change.
If you’ve done this kind of thing before, this class might help you clarify a few things and take it a step further. If it’s new territory, it’s a good place to start.
Since most of you will not be able to come, audio recordings will be posted online within days after the class (no charge) – just follow the link below. Recordings of all of the Aha Classes can be found here.If geopolitical healing interests you, you might find this site useful: The Flying Squad.
It’s funny how sometimes we fall into things unwittingly, then to find that they take up years of our lives. This is what happened with my research into the ancient sites of the area where I live, in West Penwith, Cornwall. It all started one day when I was sitting chatting with Cheryl Straffon, an archaeologist and goddess-oriented pagan who for decades has been a key person here, bringing together a full spectrum of prehistorians, from archaeologists to pagans, and editing Meyn Mamvro, a magazine about Cornish archaeology and earth mysteries.
We were talking about John Michell who, in the 1960s-70s, brought the idea of leylines, sacred landscapes and earth mysteries to wider attention in a seminal 1969 book The View over Atlantis. John came to Penwith, doing fieldwork here to demonstrate his point, producing a catalogue of ninetyish ancient site alignments in Penwith, about which he wrote in his 1974 book The Old Stones of Land’s End.
I asked Cheryl whether anyone had made a map of the alignments John had found. No, she said. Hmmm. In former times, I had made a map of the alignments around Glastonbury… “Would it help if I made an alignments map of Penwith?“. “Oooh, yes, it would.“
I thought at first that it might be easier than it turned out to be. It landed up being seven years of work, starting in 2014, and it still gets tweaks and updates now. I’d had one of those falling-into-things moments, just then.
Carn Galva, a classic Neolithic Tor and the axis mundi or world centre of Neolithic Penwith – as seen from Caer Brân
Things had changed since I did the Glastonbury map, hand-drawn in 1982 and revised around 2003. Aerial satellite mapping had arrived on internet. For alignment-oriented geomancers like me this greatly changed the equation, opening up many new possibilities and making alignments maps easily accessible online to the public.
At the beginning it came clear that a genuinely useful map would need to show all of the known ancient sites in Penwith. But there are more than 800 of them, big and small, surviving or destroyed, so this was no small job. They were listed in a variety of online databases which, to complicate things, sometimes gave differing or inaccurate information, so every single site had to be examined closely.[1] I spent months trawling through these sources and building up a base map on which later to mark alignments. Later on I continued the mapwork to cover Scilly and the whole of Cornwall.
Some sites were difficult to confirm, being disappeared, disputed or subject to discussion. Some were visible in the field and others, now destroyed, were beyond trace, though many are mentioned in antiquarians’ records from former times – especially those of one called Dr William Borlase, who tramped around Penwith in the mid-1700s.[2]
Eventually I completed a map of Penwith’s sites. Then it was a matter of working through John Michell’s list of ninetyish alignments, plus others found since his time and listed in Meyn Mamvro.
One can argue till the end of time about the validity of megalithic alignments and sceptics love to do so, claiming an assumed authority of scientific rationality when, to me, all that these complaints demonstrate is that sceptics have not properly researched the matter. There is a simple, evidential, inescapable fact: ancient sites are commonly located in exact alignment with each other. This can be seen and checked by anyone on maps and in the field.
That’s the evidence, whether or not we have an explanation. It happens too much, too exactly and with too many supporting details to be a case of chance or randomness. There are discernable patterns to the specific nature of differing alignments – some are made up solely of cairns or menhirs (standing stones), or they link sites of similar antiquity, or they make some sort of sense in a wide variety of ways. Some alignments are even parallel.
If you look at the online map of Penwith’s alignments [3] it looks like a meaningless jumble with only a modicum of order to it. There’s a ridiculously large number of alignments and it’s difficult figuring out how and why the megalith builders went to the trouble of setting things up like this.
But when you look closer at individual alignments and the sites they connect, they begin making more sense. It’s worth remembering that the ancients walked everywhere, so a lot more happened for them in the space of a mile than it does for us, speeding along in our cars and looking at overview maps.
What is most interesting is that alignments stretch not just between man-made sites, but they also involve natural sites such as hilltops, carns (outcrops) and cliff promontories. The whole system is based on these prominent points – I call them ‘base sites’. The pattern of ancient sites is draped over the three-dimensional canvas of the Penwith landscape and arranged around it. There are also astronomically-oriented alignments and other factors such as energy-vortices, underground and overground energy lines, site intervisibility and even geometry that are involved in the positioning of ancient sites. [For more on this, here’s a talk by me.]
Entering Michell’s ninety alignments on the map, I found that only two were inaccurate and implausible, and I removed them. He had done good, accurate work. While making the map and checking the alignments, I started finding new ones and, before long, the list of alignments grew bigger. Some were found logically, by examining a chosen site to check for alignments, and some were found intuitively, happening on them ‘by chance’. After visiting sites around the fields and moors of Penwith, I would come home to examine their location and possible alignments, sometimes adding a few that way.
Late one evening I had a Eureka moment. I was thinking about Cape Cornwall, a conical-shaped headland in a marine context, and St Michael’s Mount, a conical-shaped island in a marine context (though originally it stuck out of the forest on dry land). They are rather similar. I wondered whether there was a connection. I looked on the map and, lo behold, a line between them intersected a collection of four Bronze Age barrows on top of the hill on the farm where I live!
Gosh. I had sat many times on those barrows.[4] They are not well-known because, being on what’s now a boggy heather-moorland hill, they look unimpressive, but their 360-degree panoramic location is spectacular. In the Bronze Age they would have been far more attractive, situated on sweet hilltop meadows – the climate was more agreeable 4,000 years ago than it is now.
Then I started looking for further alignments emanating from St Michael’s Mount and Cape Cornwall. Within an hour I had found quite a few. This doesn’t happen very often – I’ve never had such a big discovery of new alignments before or since. These proved to be a new kind of alignment that John Michell and others had not seen.
John was looking at constructed Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, menhirs, cairns and barrows, which were built from around 2400 BCE onwards. The new alignments I had found involved Neolithic sites from a millennium earlier, and natural sites such as granite tors and cliff headlands. These alignments acted differently to Michell’s Bronze Age ones, covering longer distances and with fewer points on them. I called them ‘backbone alignments’ – alluding to the main system of fibre-optic cables that connects the internet globally. Connecting Neolithic and natural sites, these alignments were clearly far older than John’s Bronze Age ones.
The very first constructed sites in Penwith, Neolithic tor enclosures, were built around 3700 BCE – over a millennium before the stone circles. There were four – Carn Galva, Carn Kenidjack, Trencrom Hill and St Michael’s Mount – and one outside Penwith that features in its landscape, Carn Brea near Redruth.
Many of the newly-discovered backbone alignments also stretched to what I call cliff sanctuaries. Archaeologists call them cliff castles – a term that persuades many people to believe they were used for defensive purposes, which I would argue they were not. They are customarily dated to the Iron Age around 300 BCE, long after the megalithic period, because Iron Age remains are found on them. But the new alignments, associating them with Neolithic sites, suggest they were much older in the first use. Neolithic artifacts have been found at some cliff sanctuaries, but these have not caused them to be properly re-dated to this early time.
Then came the clincher. I found that Lanyon Quoit, one of the key Neolithic sites of Penwith, built around 3600 BCE, was located exactly at the intersection of three of these alignments. In other words, Lanyon Quoit could not have been placed where it is without these three alignments being known at the time – it was positioned to align with two cliff sanctuaries and three Neolithic tors. This definitely re-dates the cliff sanctuaries to the Neolithic, also making them far more important than they previously were understood to be.
Penwith’s four surviving stone circles are all located on backbone alignments. The Merry Maidens, for example, are located exactly on an alignment stretching between Carn Brea and St Michael’s Mount, both Neolithic tors, and Treryn Dinas, a cliff sanctuary. These three natural sites happen, strangely, to be aligned with each other (there are a number of such cases in Penwith). So the stone circle was located there to reinforce the alignment and to draw on the antiquity and earlier primacy of the three Neolithic sites, which came from what in the Bronze Age was a distant former time, some 1,500ish years before.
Eventually, the alignments map of Penwith became really busy with alignments – around 250 of them. They were all genuine alignments, accurate to within 10ft or 3 metres, checked and verified by three people – so this was not a product of sloppy mapping, wishful thinking or ley-hunting zeal.
Alignments are not energy-lines of the kind that is picked up by earth energy dowsers. They are different, even though overground energy lines, like alignments, are also straight. Some overgrounds coincide with alignments, but we yet need to find out the extent to which this is the case.
Trencrom Hill (foreground) and Carn Brea (background) – two Neolithic tors
I’m of the opinion that alignments are not actually lines that are detectable in the landscape. Some dowsers might disagree, but I think they might be picking up on overground energy-lines, or perhaps the thought that links the two sites involved. Instead, it seems that, when a new site was being built, it was simply aligned with other sites in order, presumably, to associate it with them. If you line up five or six objects on a table with gaps between them, aligning them nevertheless gives their distribution some order and coherence. Rendering order out of seeming chaos was important to the ancients. But aligned sites don’t seem to have a connecting current like overground energy-lines do.
It seems to me that aligned sites are instead programmed with the same algorithm, so that they pulsate and resonate with each other, as if tuned to each other. But there isn’t a ‘wire’ connecting them – it’s an internal, implicit connection. It works a bit like what physicists call ‘quantum entanglement’, and as an informational rather than an energetic relationship. An energetic relationship is created by energy-lines that dowsers identify, but alignments don’t do this. So we’re talking here about two different circuitries that each focused on the same ancient sites. And it’s the sites, not the lines, that matter most.
Many ancient sites are thus placed exactly where they are to align them with other sites, though there is no ‘pipe’ connection between them. Instead, they seem to be remotely associated, programmed with the same intent, frequency or behavioural patterns, so that they do similar things at similar times and in similar ways. But they aren’t necessarily directly connected, unless there is also an energy-line between them.
Thus, the Boscregan West cairn, a prominent clifftop cairn on Penwith’s west coast, is aligned with the Neolithic longbarrow on Chapel Carn Brea, and with the now-destroyed Tregurnow stone circle, which was part of the Merry Maidens complex. So these three sites, associated with each other, somehow co-resonated. Or, put another way, two Bronze Age sites, Boscregan cairn and Tregurnow stone circle, were plugged into a Neolithic site on Chapel Carn Brea.
The cliff sanctuaries, embracing the Radiant Land
Interesting, huh? The megalith-builders had quite sophisticated ideas. They weren’t building ancient sites just to decorate the landscape or because it was a nice thing to do. It was a lot of work. They can only have done it because they perceived a definite benefit.
Here’s a much bigger idea. The density of sites and alignments in Penwith, and the way they seem to be integrated into complex relationships with each other, suggest that they operate as one big system. The fundamental substructure is marked out by backbone alignments (yellow on the map), and while the profusion of local alignments (red on the map) seems chaotic to our eyes, it has a certain order of its own. They all seem to make up one big system.
This leads us to the idea that Penwith is an integrated and perhaps super-charged landscape with hundreds of constituent components to it, big and little. That’s the way we should think about it, and not as a disparate scatter of separate sites. After all, Penwith’s ancient name is Belerion – the radiant land – and a place doesn’t pick up a name like that without good reason.
While Penwith’s stone circles and other sites are each modest in size when compared with Stonehenge, Avebury or Callanish, together they make up an enormous system contained by a necklace of cliff sanctuaries and studded with many subsystems. They constitute what can be regarded as a single, big ancient site that is draped over the peninsula’s natural topography and energy-centres.
Each stone circle has a complex or constellation of lesser sites around it – mainly menhirs and barrows. These supporting sites and the surrounding landscape vista exist as an integral part of the stone circle to amplify its purpose – a stone circle doesn’t exist in isolation. In the case of Boscawen-ûn and the Merry Maidens the surrounding agricultural landscape of hedges and fields obscures their wider complexes, but at Tregeseal and the Nine Maidens, located in wilder landscapes, they are more visible.
Tregeseal, for example, sits in a perceptual bowl of hills with a westward vista featuring the Isles of Scilly – almost as if the sweep of hills collects energy from the cosmos to funnel it toward the Scillies. Each stone circle is associated with a hill or tor that is visible from it and a key part of its landscape setting. These complexes are whole systems. In turn, they are aligned with other sites further away, knitting the whole of Penwith into a wholeness.
The stone circles are located on backbone alignments plugged into Neolithic sites – tors and cliff sanctuaries which, in the heavy-forested Neolithic, were the only places where people could get out of the wildwoods. This changed in the Bronze Age, with far more cleared land, which enabled the building of stone circles, menhirs and cairns, but the stone circles, as the ‘cathedrals’ of the system, drew their primacy, authority or blessing from earlier Neolithic sites.
They are key nodes planted in a landscape energy-system with a natural, topographic, geological and subtle-energy foundation. The system fashioned itself around the lay of the land. Here we come to the idea of landscape temples, or whole landscapes that have been developed and consecrated by amping up the natural energies inherent in the land. This was done not only through ‘megalithic geoengineering’ at sacred sites but also through repeated, longterm consciousness-work by successive generations of people. This was an advanced deep-shamanic culture. They imprinted their sacred sites and landscape with repeated and reinforced psychic traces of the shamanic and spiritual practices they conducted over many centuries. They loved the land that gave them a life to live.
An approximate timeline for megalithic Penwith
There is a key aspect of ancient sites that archaeologists miss, and without it ancient sites cannot truly be understood: it concerns earth energy and its psychoactive effects, especially when they are focused and enhanced at man-made ancient sites. These effects cannot easily be detected scientifically, but any person with a modicum of awareness can feel them when visiting sites. We become changed in mood and spirit, sometimes feeling inspired, healed or as if our problems have evaporated. Some people are changed for life – for me, five decades of preoccupation with ancient sites began in 1970 in the Ring of Brogar, a stone circle in the Orkney Isles off Scotland.
These psychoactive effects are a key factor that should be considered ‘legitimate evidence’, regardless of whether or not it can be measured or slotted into existing scientific frameworks. You do not need a doctorate to feel these effects: simply note your feelings and state of being before you enter and after you leave a stone circle. There will be a real change of feeling. Fascinatingly, it can also be quite different in quality and effect each time you visit.
This, I suggest, is a key reason why the ancients went to so much trouble heaving stones around, digging and piling up earth, and doing regular, intentional, collective consciousness work at ancient sites. They spent centuries building up a sophisticated landscape-wide energy-system, and they must have perceived this massive infrastructure investment to be beneficial and worth the effort.
If they had been deluding themselves, it is unlikely that the Bronze Age megalithic period would have lasted 1,200 years. Delusions don’t tend to last that long. There was something very sensible and realistic about the megalithic geoengineering they developed. With our planetary problems of today, we might do well to learn more about what they were up to.
Here’s a final thought. Since right now the world is rather obsessed with warfare, we might also ask ourselves how and why West Penwith is one of the few parts of Britain that has never been invaded – not by Romans, Saxons, Vikings or Normans. In later times Penwith was quietly regarded as lying ‘beyond the reach of the king’s men’. We’ve had some medieval Corsair raids and in the last century or so a seasonal tourist invasion, but Penwith has never actually been invaded. But that, of course, is pure luck and chance, isn’t it?
NOTES:
The main sources were: Heritage Gateway, Historic England, Cornwall Council, Megalithic Portal, Modern Antiquarian, Meyn Mamvro, The Holy Wells of Cornwall map, The Atlas of Hillforts and snippets from other books and sources.
This is for people living in or near Cornwall. Audio recordings of the talk, with accompanying material, will appear online a week or so after the talk, for those who cannot attend.
In my talk in June about the ancient sites of West Penwith (worth a listen) I proposed that the whole of Penwith is one big ancient site – an enormous cliff sanctuary. It’s not just a scattering of stone circles, quoits, carns, menhirs and cairns. Why did ancient Penwithians bother to build so much of this ‘holy machinery’? What was their thinking and what did they seek to achieve?
I’ve been studying ancient sites since around 1970 in Britain, Scandinavia, Greece and Palestine. Since moving to Penwith in 2009, I’ve been working on mapping Penwith’s sites, researching their (John Michell-style) alignments, and divining some valuable psychic-intuitive clues concerning their possible meaning and function. These observations are outlined on the Ancient Penwith website and in my book Shining Land.
In the first half of this evening’s talk, I go further into the sacred energy-technology of Neolithic and Bronze Age Penwithians, and the patterns that suggest that they function as one big megalithic system. We’ll look into how it all took shape from the beginning, the functions of different kinds of ancient sites, and how it all fits together into one big geomantic system.
In the second half I propose what I feel needs to happen next, in terms of researching and working with Penwith’s ancient sites. We need to find out more about how they actually work, geomantically and energetically, and what we can do now to enhance and re-enliven their energy-fields and world-healing qualities – not just an hour-long ceremony now and then, but sustained energy-work, learning more about the specifics of how to do it.
Penwith is an ideal area for this kind of work because it is concise and contained, with plenty of ancient sites and people interested in them. Also, this is Cornwall, not England, and Oxbridge-style archaeological thinking is not the only way to understand megalithic civilisation – here in Penwith, out of sight and out of mind, we have an opportunity to frame things in a rather different way.
There is the possibility of starting a research project involving 10-20 people, in which (say) about forty local sites are surveyed, mapped and chronicled by dowsers and sensitives over (say) a three year period, for their subtle energy characteristics and place-memory. (See below for a shortlist of sites.)
Steadily and systematically, we can visit the sites and truly listen to what they want to say – not imposing our own ideas and predilections but letting the sites and the landscape speak, using methods such as pendulums, meditation, inner journeying and talking stick as research methodologies. Then a report (or a series of them) or a website can report on the findings uncovered by the project.
So I’m wondering out loud whether we need now to take things further, stepping beyond a ‘Wow’ stage to try realistically to penetrate the minds of the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalith builders, to uncover more about ancient sites’ energy-mechanics, their intention and usage, and what we can do about them now. That’s what this evening is all about and, if you can, you’re welcome to come and join in.
I realised on Friday that I must be reviving. I started back to work. Well, in a slow, step-by-step way. It was relatively easy work – checking and updating maps. Throughout life I’ve tended to run two tracks in parallel (being a Gemini mooner): harder work that takes a lot of thinking and creativity, and routine work that, while it’s necessary to do, it demands less focus and intensity.
I’ve been doing the latter, updating a series of online maps I made between 2014 and 2020, showing the ancient sites and alignments of West Penwith, and also of Scilly and Cornwall as a whole. They contain every known and identified site in Cornwall, precisely positioned. The alignments are most properly researched in West Penwith, the bit at the very end where I live, though the rest of Cornwall is covered too. If you click on any site or alignment on the map, you’ll get a popup providing further information and links concerning that site or alignment.
So that’s what I’ve been doing, as a way of getting my brains back into gear, after two weeks of energy-suppressing opioid painkillers. They blanket you in an insulated fog of unwittitude and swimmy drowse – or at least, that’s what they do for me. Opioids are not good for the brains – I can testify to that.
The Quarter and Cross-Quarter days.
But they kept the pain at bay until the problem I had started subsiding – a painful spasmic tightening of the muscles in my back and torso. For two weeks my muscles had pulled tight and rigid, as if a neurological overreaction to the deterioration of my bones. My psyche was fearing disintegration of my bony frame, and it was overreacting though seeking to protect me. This deterioration was stemmed last month by the first round of my new cancer treatment and, today/Saturday, I’m starting the second cycle of this treatment. It’s a maintenance treatment that I’ll be taking for a while, until it becomes clear it’s no longer working, or there’s a better alternative. Myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes the bones, cannot be cut out or irradiated surgically, like tumorous cancers, so it has to be regulated and held in check.
I still have residual pain and difficulty, but it’s at a 30%, not a 90% pain-level, and it’s in my manageable zone. Yesterday I visited John Tillyard, a gifted chiropractor in Hayle, who worked his magic on me, balancing up my bony frame. Claire, who took me to the appointment, reported that I walked back to the car in a very different way.
So I’m re-entering ‘normal’ life, such as it is. I re-start cancer treatment today. It’s pills, taken in a four-week cycle for three weeks, with one week off. On the first day I take a big dose of cancer drugs, then for the rest of the week I’m on a tick-over regime until, next week, the routine starts again. But on the fourth week I get a week off.
Recently, during the Sunday meditation, I’ve had a funny twist in the experience while I’ve been on opioids. During the meditation itself I find I’m very present, quite centred and ‘in the zone’, despite the opioids. Over the years I’ve found that the ‘channel’ distinctly switches off dead on time (currently at 8.30pm UK time) – I get a definite feeling of it – and this has been happening clearly in recent weeks. After the shut-off I sit there for a while and then the opioids take over, seeping into my psyche, and I drop off for an hour. It’s funny, that.
I find the ‘switch on’ of the channel is less distinct – it’s as if a space opens up, though it takes me a while to grow into it, or perhaps to slow my churning psyche – sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. But when the ‘switch off’ comes, it’s quite noticeable. Fascinating. Over the last thirty years since I started doing this Sunday meditation, on the few occasions when I’ve lost track of time and forgotten the meditation (often because of jetlag after travelling), I’ve even experienced an altered state coming on of its own accord – only then to realise that it’s meditation time.
You’re welcome to join the meditation on Sunday (or any Sunday).
The clocks are changing soon. In UK and EU it’s Sunday 27th October, and in USA/Canada it’s on Sunday November 3rd. The meditation will be one hour earlier from those dates onward and through winter. (In UK it goes from 8pm to 7pm.) Remember: the ‘real’ time of the meditation doesn’t change – it’s just that our clocks change. Nature doesn’t change its clocks either. Changing our human clocks is connected with our modern human preoccupation with diaries, lists and appointments – it started particularly with industrialisation and urbanisation, particularly when trains arrived, running to strict timetables.
This has led to an exaggerated dissonance between ‘objective’ ticktock time and natural, inner, ‘subjective’, intuitive cosmo-time – the time-waves by which the Earth and cosmos resonate and reverberate. One of the core problems of our civilisation is that we impose ticktock time, with its plans and timetables, on natural time. This produces a disharmonic grating and grinding within nature and our own psyches. This friction lies at the heart of our psychological issues, our ecological and climatic situation and in the self-destructive nature of our civilisation. Put another way, we need to re-attune to our natural timings.
That’s what the next Aha Class is all about: time. Since getting cancer five years ago I’ve become curiously time-rich, while most people around me are time-poor, so this could be interesting. This matter of time, and our experience of it as we live our lives, is a key ingredient of the Earth experience – this is what we chose to engage with by getting born in this world. Everything on Earth is a matter of time – and also timing. That’s at times frustrating and yet it’s what we came here to evolve through, psycho-spiritually. Time is what stops everything happening all at once.
The talk is astrologically-based, but if you don’t understand astrologese, a multidimensional language, you’ll still get pings and lightbulb moments. One intention behind the Aha Class is to help broaden your general knowledge – concerning things it’s useful to know about even if we focus mainly on other things. Most of you will have a smattering of astrologese though and, since we’ll be talking about fullmoons, solstices, planetary line-ups and energy-configurations, all of you will have lived experience of these, and the talk will help you make more sense of them. I’ll explain how they work. Each talk is audio-recorded and, where relevant, maps and diagrams are put online afterwards, and they’re all found on the Aha page on my site.
Chart for the Aha Class, 23 Oct 2024
On the day of the talk there’s what I’d call a ‘magnitude three’ planetary configuration or thrum-pattern, involving outer and inner planets, and the atmosphere of the evening will thus serve as an example of how it works. This rather fleeting configuration is an illustration of something that has recently started happening, a Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triangle for a few years, which is a door-opener for the world (see ‘2020s’ below). Whenever the faster planets swing round to activate that triangle, energy-changes are triggered, and the chart for the day and time of the class will be an example. The full astrological details of all this are laid out in my book ‘Power Points in Time – ancient festivals, lunar phases, planetary line-ups and historic moments’.
Classically, for an evening talk about time, Maria and I got mixed up with the dates. It’s now on Wednesday 23rd October at The Hive in Penzance, inshallah. After my illness I needed more time to get my body-psyche systems up’n’running properly, so the class has now been set to the new date. Which just goes to show, it’s all a matter of time. Even though I’m time-rich, I needed more time.
And now it’s time for breakfast. Love from me. Palden.
Here’s the audio recording of my recent Aha Class in Penzance, about participating in changing the world. It’s my thoughts on the realities of being a ‘world server’, about rattling the bars of our cages and contributing to furthering what we believe to be right.
It’s in two 50 minute parts, with some (I hope) interesting anecdotes thrown in, about the dilemmas, tests, magic moments and benefits we can encounter along the way.
Free to listen and download – no strings. You’ll find it here:
This is a recording of a talk I gave on Wednesday 19th in Penzance, here in Cornwall. It would interest anyone who knows and loves West Penwith, and also folks interested in geomancy and alternative prehistory.
It’s about energy-fields, ancient site alignments and the geomancy of ancient sites. I make a radical proposition that the hundreds of sites in Penwith all constituted components of one enormous ancient site covering the whole peninsula.
A collection of interesting maps is provided with the recording of the talk, which is 1hr 48mins long.
To follow in autumn in Penzance, there will be four monthly AHA classes, covering activism (changing the world), prehistory (more about Magic Penwith), power points in time (astrology and the way the tides of time move) and extraterrestrials (about life off and on Earth).
I’m speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium on Sunday July 28th, and I return to Glastonbury on my birthday on 5th September. The subject is ‘Sludging through the Void with Muddy Boots – and why ETs have spindly legs‘.
If you want a really special experience, you might consider coming to the Oak Dragon Camp, Friday 26th July to Sunday 4th August in Somerset. I’ll be there. www.oakdragon.org
On Sunday, Ba Miller and I shared the floor in Penzance, speaking to a lovely crowd, on the occasion of the late Hamish Miller’s 97th birthday.
Ba herself is 91 – though, with me at 73, a mere stripling, we’re both beat-up and still going strong!
Ba told some anecdotes of what happened when they were following the Apollo and Athena lines from Ireland to Israel, and some really valuable dowsing tips (since it was also World Dowsing Day).
I talked about the energy-landscape of West Penwith, about building megalithic structures for consciousness-engineering and how Penwith is one big ancient site with hundreds of components.
A big thank you to Rachel, Lucy and Lyndz for initiating and organising it, and for their rousing spirit.
To hear our talk (1h 15m), go to my Audio Archive and look for ‘2024 PodTalks’:
Also: my latest book, Blessings that Bones Bring – a spirited Myeloma patient tells his cancer story, is coming out soon in digital PDF format, and before long as an audio book. Whether it gets published in print remains to be seen.I’ll let you know when it’s available.
I’m up on Botrea Barrows in West Penwith, Cornwall, recounting why they’re there, and what life was like 5,500-3,500 years ago in the megalithic era, in the neolithic and bronze ages, when they were built.
St Michael’s Mount
It’s also about the reasons why the ancient people of Britain went to so much trouble to build sites like this.
They weren’t fools, and they did it to create practical benefits, and they were onto something that is relevant to our day.
It has something to do with building a sustainable civilisation – one that works more or less in harmony with nature. Although it did come to an end, megalithic bronze age civilisation lasted around 1,200 years – pretty good.
Cape Cornwall
Introduced by a Cornish chough and outroduced by oystercatchers and a raven, and the Atlantic waves at Carn Les Boel, a cliff sanctuary just south of Land’s End, at the furthest end of Cornwall.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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