The stone circle seems as we left it, with the pillar of blue fire sinking and spreading outward through the water-lines. But there is something else there too, something we didn’t notice before: for though the ‘fire’ spreads easily along some of the lines, there is definite tension in one of them, where the fire moves onward only with evident difficulty. From our vantage-point high above the circle, we look more closely; there is something odd about that line, beyond the limit of the fire. It seems to be radiating ‘blackness’ in the same way that the fire-laden lines radiate light. The blue fire is ch’i; the black line, the black stream, carries sha; and some kind of conflict is taking place at the point where they meet. We see this at first in terms of colours, in terms of whorls and vortices and edges of coloured light, that spin out from that point of contact. But with one of those changes of vision to which we’ve become accustomed, the scene changes: and we see the conflict now as a battle between angels and demons, each fighting for control of the line.
In Chinese terms ch’i and sha are products or processes of the interplay of the two primal forces of Yin and Yang. Ch’i occurs where Yin and Yang fuse together in harmony, and sha occurs where they are out of balance, where the primal energies are separated or stagnant. I’m almost certain that it’s this imbalance that produces the ‘sense of “buzz” or strain’ that the Exorcism Report describes as the effect of ‘demonic interference’; and this ‘interference’ seems to be a force, capable of disturbing the natural tendency to balance of Yin and Yang.
At the same time, there is another force or agency, which I suppose we could call ‘angelic interference’, which tends to bring out-of-balance Yin and Yang into equilibrium. It is this quality which, when associated with a well, for example, makes it into a holy well, for the water from such a well will tend to re-balance the energies in people, making them whole. As we’ve seen, linguistically, ‘holy’ is allied with ‘whole’ is allied with ‘healthy’. It’s ‘angelic interference’ that makes an otherwise ordinary site both holy and healthy. This was literally the case at Lourdes in France in 1858, for ‘angels’ and other sacred personalities of an equally ephemeral nature showed the fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous where to find the springs whose water has been behind all the subsequent miraculous cures in the town.[1] The curative effects of ‘angelic’ water – presumably water laden with ch’iare well-known and well-attested; but what about the effects of sha water, ‘demonic’ water?
Dowsers have known about what they call ‘black streams’ and their effects for more than fifty years. A black stream is an ordinary water-line whose quality, as assessed by a dowsing tool called a Mager disc, is represented by the colour black, meaning that the water is dangerous, worse than merely polluted: in effect, the water in a black stream is water that carries sha. This may be so only at the physical level, as literal ‘stinking water’ carrying sewage or industrial pollution; but it may also be so at other levels, of emotion, of mind and beyond. These other levels are the more dangerous, simply because in a physicaland thus ‘scientific’sense they do not exist, so we therefore try to ignore them. (This is the same problem of existence as with place-memories, which we looked at earlier.) Physical poisons carried by the water can only be dangerous through physical contact such as, for example, when the water is drunk. But the other levels of ‘blackness’of emotions, of ideas, of images, of the spirit and the likeact directly on those levels of emotion, of mind, of spirit, without needing physical contact. They have to be dealt with accordingly, in ways more closely allied to magic than to the Westerners’ conventional physical medicine. We’ll look at treatment later; for the moment we ought to look at the symptoms and the effects.
There seems to be little doubt that there are several ways in which water can carry energies or encodings of some kind. The most obvious of these is the way in which it can carry other physical substances in solution or suspension. But there are others, and the key to one of those others is the strange bent structure of the water molecules. Water, as you’ll probably know, is formed of a pair of hydrogen atoms straddling an oxygen atom; the strangeness of the structure comes from the fact that the three atoms do not form a straight line, as we would expect, but form a shallow angle, which is normally around 140�. Water ionises easily because of the tension created by this angle, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s such a good solvent for so many substances.
But note that the angle can change. The angle varies a little from one molecule to another, which I’m told is the reason why snowflakes come in such a bewildering variety of forms. But it can also be made to change a lot, not so much by conventional physical means, but by what would seem to be magical ones. One example is Pavlita’s anti-pollutant ‘psychotromc generator’, which made the angle about 20� shallower in clearing pollutants from a water sample; and water blessed during a blessing ceremony has been shown to change its molecular angle by about the same amount.[2] Water, then, can carry such non-physical information as ‘blessing’, within its physical structure.
This use of water as a carrier for an idea or image is one of the basic principles of homoeopathic medicine. As in conventional medicine, homoeopathic prescriptions are supplied in liquid or tablet form; but unlike conventional medicine, the homoeopath reckons that the less there is of the ‘active ingredient’ carried in the water-droplet that went into the liquid or tablet, the greater will be its effector rather, the higher the level at which it will act. Homoeopathy works on the principle of ‘like cures like’, in that to deal with a given problem the homoeopath will prescribe a substance which, in its normal state, will reproduce in a healthy subject the same symptoms as the patient shows.
This is why so many homoeopathic remedies are derived from poisons: quinine for malarial symptoms, for example, and foxglove (digitalis) for some heart complaints. Having chosen the substance, it is diluted, and diluted, and diluted, shaken hard each time, untilin some homoeopathic remediesthere is almost no chance that a single molecule of the original substance is present in the solution that is taken by the patient. And yet it still works. It doesn’t seem to be a variant of the ‘placebo effect’ of conventional drug-testing: from my own experience I know that homoeopathic remedies have more definite and predictable effects than that.[3]
In homoeopathic circles the theory seems to be that as the physical substance is reduced in each dilution, and as it is shaken with each dilution, the ‘idea’ or essence of the substance is strengthened. The stronger the ‘essence’, the higher the level of being at which the remedy acts. So for a complaint which is mainly physical, the homoeopath will prescribe a fairly mild dilution or ‘potency’ of a given substance, such as a potency of ‘3x’, a dilution to 10-3; for a problem more on an emotional level, 10x (10-10); for one on a more mental or intellectual level, 30x (10-30); and for one on what we might call a spiritual level, 200x (10-200). Since the average density of molecules in a liquid is around 1023 per cubic centimetreplus or minus a couple of orders of magnitudeyou’ll see what I mean about there being little or no chance of any of the original substance being present in some of the higher-potency remedies. But, say the homoeopaths, the ‘idea’ or essence of the substance is still there, and more so with each increase in dilution.[4]
There is an interesting piece of confirmation for this. George de la Warr, one of the pioneers of ‘radionic’ medicinea variant of medical dowsing that uses a radio-like ‘black box’ as a tuning devicedeveloped what he called a ‘radionic camera’, based on the radionic box. This, he claimed, was able to take photographs of diseased parts of the body by what seemed to be a kind of controlled thought-photography. There is still some controversy over his claims, and the camera itself was unreliable, being subject to such usual vagaries of magical or near-magical equipment as refusing to work at all when a sceptic came near it. But in addition to producing X-ray like photographs of what appear to be the insides of people and animals, de la Warr also took some photographs of the ‘essences’ of homoeopathic remedies. In one set that have been published, 2x-potency aconite pilules showed up on the photograph as large, diffuse, but recognisable aconite flowers; while 200x-potency aconite showed up as smaller but much clearer images of the flower.[5] So the ‘idea’ or essence of the substance in a homoeopathic remedy does seem to become more refined with increasing dilution of its physical counterpart.
Perhaps more interesting, de la Warr took some photographs of the ‘radiations’ of ordinary tap-water before and after a blessing ceremony.[6] Before the ceremony, the pattern shown on the plate looks something like a photograph of a cosmic-ray strike in a nuclear-physicist’s ‘cloud-chamber’; after the ceremony, the same pattern is still visible, but almost obliterated by a massive glowing three-axis cross. The trouble with de la Warr’s photographs, though, is that they are useless as proof for anything, for it becomes a case of ascribing one unknown to another.
But radionic practice does provide us with another clue about the ability of water to carry other energies or codings of energies. In conventional homoeopathic practice, the remedyand thus the energies carried by the water within itcomes into the body by being swallowed; but many radionic practitioners broadcast homoeopathic remedies to a patient by placing together the remedy and a ‘sample’ of the patient-usually a blood-spot, a urine sample or a lock of hair. Again, crazy as it sounds, this modernised witchcraft does work: the idea of the idea of the substance travels to the patient by means of an image or ‘idea’ of that patient.[7]
It’s on this level of ideas and broadcast-ideas that sha is most dangerous. Even the image or concept’ of underground water causes problems: quite a few dowsers get rheumatic pains in their joints if they track water-lines for too long, and they reckon this is due to the water below. Traditionally, rheumatism is brought on by damp weather; a water-line is an image or ‘idea’ of a stream, and implies dampness; and it seems to be the idea of dampness, rather than any physical dampness, which brings on the rheumatism in these cases at least.
Studies by a number of medical dowsers over the past fifty years extend this, and seem to show conclusively that rheumatism and arthritis in people and animals can often be linked with water-lines of any kind passing below. These studies were detailed enough to show that in one case of arthritis in a knee-joint, for example, a fine water-line passed under the patient’s bed at the level of where her knee rested in her normal sleeping position; when the patient moved her bed a few feet, clear of the path of the water-line, the arthritis cleared up within a matter of days.[8] It’s probable that these allergy-type reactions to water-lines are not the only causes of rheumatism or arthritis, by the way: there are other more conventional explanations in many cases. The water-lines certainly seem to be one of the causes of these illnesses, but they are equally certainly not the only cause of them.
It seems that a water-line of any ‘colour’ can trigger off rheumatism or arthritis; but it’s when we look at black streams that the links between water-lines and disease start to get disturbing. The same studies of water-lines and disease found cases of a wide range of illnesses, particularly degenerative diseases like polio, multiple sclerosis and some cancers, associated with the ‘noxious radiations of black streams’ running beneath the beds, couches, desks, even kitchen sinks, of the patients studied. In other words, the sha of a black stream could affect those people if the water-line ran below any place at which they spent a large part of their day or night. I’d often wondered about this myself before I read these reports, for in my parents’ medical practice (a conventional one) there was one house in which three unrelated peoplethe successive owners of the house, in fact – had died of different cancers within two years there: and cancers, according to conventional medical theory, aren’t supposed to be infectious.
There was an interesting experiment carried out on this in Germany in the early 1930s. The local hospital drew up a map of ‘cancer houses’ of this kind, and compared it with a map of black streams that the local dowsers had plotted out independently: the two maps coincided exactly. As the writer of the article I found this in said, ‘a better or more final confirmation of the “noxious earth rays” theory is scarcely necessary’: but he forgot to mention which town this test was supposed to have been held in, which was awkward of him.[9] In spite of this, more modern evidence does back him up:[10] the equivalent of sha in underground water-bearing fissures does seem to be a causative factor in an as yet undetermined proportion of cases of a range of degenerative diseases. More research is needed: and it is needed, and now.
In the same research on ‘noxious earth rays’, the dowsers involved found some interesting coincidences which bring us back to our current theme of ‘demonic interference’. As one of them put it, “while looking for ‘noxious earth rays’, I also tested haunted houses: every time I found that such a house stood over crossing streams. In such formations the low Elementals enjoy to live!”[11] Another commented that a ‘geological fault in the ground will produce bad reactions, and also ghostly phenomena’.[12][12a] So if sha is producing hauntings as well as illnesses, what is it? And more to the point, what creates it, and what can we do about it?
I said earlier that sha was the product of an imbalance of Yin and Yang; but I think it’s time we turned to the Christian terms ‘angelic’ and ‘demonic’ in order to study this in more detail. This unfortunately brings us some problems of definition, because of the inherent ambiguity of Christian values, so I’d better deal with those first.
In some Christian writing I’ve gone through, it’s implied that the demonic half of the angelic/demonic duality was and is feminine, the equivalent of Yin. Particularly since the Pauline and Augustinian distortions of the original teachings of Christ, women seem to have been regarded as the main representatives of the Devil in tempting men away from the True Path; and the Yin mode, as the ‘dissolver’, constantly threatened the stasis which the Church, until recently at least, seems always to have been aiming for. This lopsidedness of the doctrine of the Churchwhich cannot in honesty be called Christian – seems to have been inherited from the early days of the Jewish patriarchy. The Jews invented this idea of the willingness of women to side with the Devil as a means of bolstering up the new patriarchy at a time when many Jewish women still preferred the old matriarchal Earth-Mother religion: the idea was derived more from political expediency than religious truth, as far as I can work it out.
And it’s not just historyit’s still a key part of the Church today. Much the same fanatical fear of the feminine can be seen in the current battles in the Synod to prevent the ordination of women as priests. This over-rating of Yang and near-hatred of the Yin mode must have been and must be productive of an enormous amount of sha, so much so that it’s best to describe that aspect of Church doctrine itself as ‘demonic’so we will have to look elsewhere for a better understanding of angels and demons.
Angels and demons, whatever they are or represent, are not themselves ch’i and sha: rather, they are the forces which produce the respective balance of ch’i and the imbalance of sha. We can even define different kinds of sha if we use two of the names for the Devil, namely Ahriman and Lucifer. To modify Rudolf Steiner’s more mystical terminology, we could say that ahrimanic sha, sha produced by ahrimanic action, would be an imbalance caused by excess Yin or a severe shortage of Yang; a luciferian sha would be an excess of Yang. Ahrimanic sha carried in a black stream should create an excess of Yin in anyone above, and thus, from Chinese theory, will tend to give rise to degenerative diseases: an excess of Yin will give a mixture of ‘change for change’s sake’ and constant dissolution. Luciferian sha would lead toward rigidity, and thus, we could theorise, ‘rigidity’ diseases like hardening of the arteries (arteriosclerosis) and all the problems associated with excess fat. The connection between Yin-biased disease and black streams seems to be well-established, but no-one, to my knowledge, has done any work on the streams and Yang-biased disease. It would be worth doing.
The effects of these two senior demons on emotions are also interesting: luciferian sha should produce stubbornness and complacency, while ahrimanic sha should produce impatience, power-lust, tyranny. That brings us back to that category of ‘human sin’ in the Exorcism Report: ‘the office of an organisation devoted to greed or domination may incur trouble or act as a dispersal point’, followed by the comment that ‘human sin opens the door for other forces to enter in’. We could say that the force that enters in in such cases is symbolised by a demon called Ahriman: so while those in the organisation may be killing themselves with coronaries in trying to dominate others, the demon they’ve called up by doing so will be busy killing the people in the area around that office by giving them cancers. As an example, we can see that, given the kind of total social control that both military and civil nuclear power projects will have to demand if they are to be at all safe, it may well be that the anti-nuclear protesters, and the priest who recently performed a public exorcism service in front of a Polaris base, are reducing the world’s cancer risk in more ways than one.
We have here given names to the two different types of sha: but in the past they would have been personified not just with a name but with a visual appearance as well. In an illiterate or semi-literate culture, pictures symbolise things and ideas better than words can. People perceived these forces not as abstract energies, but as entities; and once we look into the folklore behind this we can see that most of the aspects of the primal energies, those which we’ve so far labelled Yin and Yang, ch’i and sha and the forces which produce or arise from them, also have names and personifications. All of them clothe themselves, as far as we are concerned, in images that they borrow from our minds: images which the occultists call ‘thought-forms’, since that is exactly what they are.
The various thought-forms include not only the Church’s angels and demons, but also fairies, goblins, elves, dragons, devas, dwarves, nature spirits and the rest of the mystical menagerie. Under normal circumstances we can’t see these images, as they are personifications of otherwise abstract, obscure and ephemeral forces: they do not ‘live’ or exist as entities in the generally-accepted sense of the words, but simply are. On the occasions when we can ‘see’ them, or perceive them, rather, we do so in the same way as with place-memory ghosts, and under much the same sort of conditions: so some people may see them at a time when others around them may not.[13]
As entities, they exist in our personal or subjective realities, but at the same time exist in a world outside of those realities, a world which the Jews called sheol or ‘invisible world’, which is the proper meaning of the derivative word ‘hell’. But though to us they can only be seen as part of our subjective realities, it’s important to realise that those subjective realities can become physically real in many ways and senses, yet still remain subjective: poltergeists, apportations and all manner of unpleasant things can follow the unwary investigator if he calls too much into existence.[14]
Perhaps it might be useful to look at these assorted ‘spirits’ in terms of their functions. If we take the words back to their linguistic roots, we find that angels, for example, are ‘spirit messengers’, and demons are ‘spirits of unknown intent’. In the original Persian sense a ‘deva’ is a nature-spirit, an aspect of nature; while the word ‘devil’, which is derived from ‘deva’ via the Jews, was taken by the Jews to mean ‘fallen angel’, so we could say that devils are also ‘spirit messengers’ of a kind, even if somewhat unreliable ones. We could say we have two classes of spirits: those who ferry messages around (though from and for whom remains another question), and control the balance of the primal forces regardless of place; and the nature spirits, which also control energy-balances, but which seem to be more closely tied to places, to things or to species.
If we see this vast range of spirits not as entities with fixed appearances, shapes and sizes, but as personified representatives or messengers of otherwise abstract forces whose appearance varies according to the form in which we want or expect to see them, some intriguing coincidences begin to emerge. The ‘spirit messengers’ have, it seems, been with us from the time mankind emerged on this planet. In the past they appeared as gods or ‘sons of god’, as angels, as demons, as nature-spirits, as anything which would make sense to us, as anything which would give them ‘authority’ to make us listen to them. Since we were the ones who supplied the images they used, angel-images and demon-images were the ones they used then; but our expectations have changed, so the images in which they appear to us nowand they do still appear to ushave also changed.
The forces remain the same, and the characters of their representatives remain the same; but their appearances change to match the times, to match our expectations of those times. A clue to their real identities comes in the names with which these entities identify themselves, for they seem to change little with the time or the gambit. There was of old a goddess called Astarte, the destructive aspect of the feminine mode; and an old senior demon called Ashtaroth, a trickster who specialised in supplying misleading prophecies: now a ‘spirit guide’ called Astar supplies misleading prophecies to present-day spiritualist seances, while ‘spacemen’ under the ‘Ashtar Galactic Command’ give identical messages to UFO contactees.[15] The angels use the same ‘flying saucer’ gambit: messages like ‘put a stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposesthe balance of the universe is threatened’ and ‘the inhabitants of your planet will upset the balance if they persist in using force instead of harmony’ are handed to people all over the world by ‘visitors from outer space’.[16] As I said earlier, ‘visitors from inner space’ seems more likely.
But it’s only when we look closer at the ‘flying saucer’ data that we can get a clear idea of the power of these imaginary entities, these modernised angels and demons. The angels appear skilfully to have contrived religious revivals throughout history, by displays of miraculous lights in the sky and miraculous cures on the ground: there are plenty of well-documented incidents of that type, as at Lourdes in 1858, Knock in Ireland in 1879 and the ‘Lady of the Rosary’ incident at Fatima in Portugal in 1917.[17]
The demons play other games, more suitable to their apparent aim as ‘forces tending to unbalance’: they issue sequences of unerringly accurate prophecies about private and public events, and then, as John Keel put it, “when (the contactees) are totally sold, they introduce a joker into the deck”. The ‘joker’ is usually some kind of ‘end-of-the-world’ prophecy that has the contactee shouting from the rooftops or organising attempts at revolution.[18] According to Keel and other researchers, there is a whole range of phenomena associated with sightings of UFOs: sometimes when someone reports a sighting, their phone seems to be tapped, which in the past led to claims about ‘government censorship’ of UFO sightings. But this is only part of the apparently demonic activity, which includes classic but modernised poltergeist activity in the homes of contactees, and visitations by ‘three men in black’ who, in the United States at least, always travel round in a black Cadillac that vanishes with them inside soon after they threaten some contactee. Sometimes the ‘men in black’ turn up before the contactee has had time to report a sighting, and demand all records of the incident immediately; and their knowledge of the personal details of the contactee, as Keel describes, makes it clear that the whole set-up goes well beyond the limits of what any supposed government censor could do. The demons seem to contrive every incident as carefully and apparently meaninglessly as did the angels the incident at Fatima.[19]
People have been healed by UFOs, people have been killed by them. The ‘spacemen’ have left behind elegantly engraved visiting cards in one case, religious relics and symbols in another. They have handed over very ordinary pancakes in one case, dropped lumps of tin and slag in others. A ‘man in black’, it seems, handed Thomas Jefferson the design for the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, and then vanished; while a ‘man in white’ led Joseph Smith to the place where the strange gold plateswhose inscriptions were later deciphered and translated by Smith as The Book of Mormon
And it probably isn’t meant to. The angels and demons are messengers, as their names imply; and whatever they are messengers for undoubtedly has intelligence of a kind. But we have to realise that it is an intelligence that works under different rules to ours, a totally alien intelligence. By ‘alien’ I don’t mean von Daniken’s clumsy and materialistic concept of ‘aliens from outer space’, but rather the pagan concept of an invisible parallel world coexistent with ours, the Jews’ sheol. Angels and demons, as I see it, are aspects of the primal forces of nature, so the intelligence for which they act as messengers is nature itself, in its constructive and destructive aspects. That is the ‘pagan solution’ which I mentioned earlier. That which haunts us, and that from which we hide in the artificial environment of our cities, is nature itself. Materialists may dream of ‘man’s increasing control over the blind forces of nature’: but nature, anything but blind, plays the same mysterious games with us that it has always played. We think we use it, while all the time it is using us.[20a]
The games have remained much the same throughout time: it’s only the tactics and gambits, the outward forms, which change to suit our changing world-views. Despite initial appearances, the energies involved remain the same as always: for we can see the games of the currently most popular gambit, the UFO tactic, fit the same geographical networks behind the natural energy-matrix whose form and effects we’ve been studying so far. This is true of the ‘hard’ phenomena, the ‘flying saucers’, and of all the ‘soft’ phenomena – coloured lights, glowing shapes, fireballs and the likethat go with them.
This comes out most clearly in correlation of UFO sightingsand particularly ‘landing-sites’with ley-lines, the overground part of the energy-matrix. This seems from recent research to be so in Britain, as I’ll describe in a moment; but it was first noticed in France in the 1950s, by the UFO researcher Aim� Michel. In an analysis of the Bayonne-Vichy ‘flap’ of 1954, he found that the sightings all fell into straight lines. Several sightings implied that the UFOs in question had used the intersections of these lines as junctions, changing direction at those points, changing height by the often-noted ‘falling-leaf’ manoeuvre at the same time.[21] Michel published the details on these ‘orthotenies’, as he called them, in 1958; but after initial interest in UFO research circles the idea of alignment was dismissed on the same dubious statistical refutation as was later applied to ley-lines.
The problem with sightings of airborne UFOs, as was the case with Michel’s work, is that it’s impossible to plot out their precise positions relative to the ground. It was this vagueness that allowed the statisticians to prove, to themselves at least, that orthotenies were meaningless. But ‘landing-sites’ and other ground-based UFO phenomena are a different matter, for not only can their apparent positions be plotted with a high degree of accuracy, from the relationship of the ‘craft’ to nearby hedges and trees, but visible impressions and evenin some casesdeep holes have sometimes been left at the points of contact. There seems little doubt that in the few cases of this type that have been fully researched in Britain, the landing-sites can be correlated not just with leys, but with other Fortean phenomena as well. Paul Devereux of the Ley Hunter magazine kindly supplied me with details of two recent examples: one was of leys related to three closely-linked UFO incidents near Winchester in Hampshire, and the other of a UFO landing-site from the 1920s correlated with a classic ley through the city of Leicester, and with a wide range of other Fortean phenomena.[22][22a]
The Winchester incidents are interesting in that they all centred around one woman, a Mrs Bowles, who had suffered so many poltergeist and similar incidents occurring around her, over the years, that she and her family treated them as part of the normal way of things. In the first of these UFO incidents, in November 1976, the car she and a Mr Pratt were travelling in was ‘jerked’ across the road and onto the opposite verge, where a ‘spacecraft’ and then a man-like figure appeared. This humanoid walked round the carthe car’s engine and headlights flaring into life at one point while he did soand then vanished, as did the ‘spacecraft’ itself. The second incident, which occurred in December 1976, was a ‘rather less tangible contact’ in the car park at the Devil’s Punchbowl, a few miles from the first site on the Chilcomb road.
By the time Paul Devereux was asked to study the case, a Mr Frank Wood had already noticed that the first site, that of the supposed landing, lay on an alignment of six prehistoric sites (mostly tumuli), on which that section of the Chilcomb road and its very wide verge also aligned. Paul found to his surprise that, according to the map, both the Chilcomb road site and the Devil’s Punchbowl car-park fell on another precise alignment of prehistoric sites (once again mostly tumuli, but most of them with specific names this time) which crossed the first line at an angle of about 4� precisely at the Chilcomb road site. A section of the A272 road aligned on this second ley, and both leys passed through modern ‘trig-points’ (small concrete pillars used in map-survey work), which were built by the Ordnance Survey Service at the highest points in each areaanother correlation with Watkins’ formulae for leys.
The third UFO incident, early in 1977, was even more bizarre than the first, for Mrs Bowles and Mr Pratt claimed they were ‘beamed aboard’ a UFO while they were travelling along another minor road, the B3404. This site is not on the first two leys; but as Paul explained, that section of the B3404 is dead straight for nearly two miles as it approaches Winchester from the east, and is visibly aligned with two churches in Winchester itself, and a tumulus just to the west of the city. These three incidents, which can all be pin-pointed precisely in relation to the ground, do seem to have occurred on leys, and thus on the overground part of the energy-matrix.
The Leicester ley that Paul Devereux researched is in many ways a classic type. It starts at Oadby Church, just to the south-east of the city of Leicester, and runs for ten and a half miles to the trigonometry point at the top of Green Hill, to the north-west of the city. On its way it passes through two more churches, a standing stone, an obvious ridge-notch and the middle of a copse that looks like a tree-clump grown round a mark-stone. Careful walking of the ley showed up other classic details, such as a mark-stone near Frog Island, now the industrial area of the city; the line ran through the site of one of the ancient city gates, next to a modern cross-road on the main A50 road, and up the side of one of the roads that led to that cross-road; it ran up an ancient stretch of bridleway before coming to the ridge-notch at the Old John folly; and it then ran through paired footpath gates where it crossed the next road. In many ways a classic ley.
But the line showed some not-so-classic aspects of leys as well. Part of Oadby, just by the church, had been subjected to a clear-blue-sky delugeheavy rain from a cloudless skyin June 1976; the UFO landing-site I mentioned earlier was apparently beside a section of road near Anstey which aligned on the ley; and from the Anstey standing stone and three other points towards the Old John folly, a series of apparent lines ran off to the south-west, converging at Barwell village, about seven miles away. Several incidents have centred on the point at which the lines converge, between Barwell’s two churches: a large meteorite strike in 1966 damaged a factory there, and a fireball demolished a house in 1975and both incidents preceded UFO ‘flaps’. The oddest aspect of the line was by the mark-stone at Frog Island, for there there is a factory which straddles the line, whose work-force have the unusual distinction of having gone on strike until the place was exorcised. A poltergeist and hauntings by a ‘hideous monster’ had damaged machinery and caused several accidents, so the workforce regarded them as a safety hazard. (The exorcism was successful, apparently.) This seems to be a general pattern linking leys and the underground part of the energy-matrix with Fortean phenomena like hauntings, ‘impossible’ weather and not-so-natural ‘natural’ events like meteorite strikes, and the modernised hauntings by UFOs and mysterious lights in the sky.
If we equate Reich’s ‘orgone radiation’ and ‘deadly orgone radiation’ with ch’i and sha respectively, we can see, from our earlier look at that possible weather-control system, that airborne OR and DOR could account for much of the ‘impossible’ weather phenomena. We could suggest that those phenomena are aspects of the workings of the energy-matrix, side-effects of its now rather erratic working. Much the same could be said of the ‘soft’ UFO phenomena, the strange lights in the sky: we could suggest that they are side-effects of the passage, or possibly disruption of the passage, of energies in the overground part of the energy-matrix. The ‘hard’ phenomena, like the poltergeist and haunting in the factory at Frog Island or the meteorite hole in the factory at Barwell, could be regarded as ‘messages’ of a very crude sort, or as distortions of the natural energies, or both.
Either way, when we see this kind of activity in relation to the energies in the energy-matrix, it does seem that the ‘non-human mischievous sprites’ that the Exorcism Report refers to may not just be mischievous: they may, in their crude ways, be acting as ‘messengers’ of a kind. So we could see them too as angels and demons, representatives of that ‘intelligence’ which seems to be behind the energy-matrix.
That, of course, was the pagan solution: that the earth, that nature itself, was alive and intelligent. The earth was the ‘earth mother’, from whom all things came, and to whom all things went; nature was Pan, literally ‘everywhere’. If we are to understand nature, we have to understand the pagan approach to naturean approach based more on keen observation than on ‘mere superstition’. Paganism was and is a way of living with, and perhaps rationalising, man’s real and inescapable relationship with nature; while civilisation, the city way of life with its dream of ‘man’s increasing control over nature’, was and is nothing more than an attempt to ignore that relationship. If we are to get out of the mess to which civilised ignorance has brought us, we must prepare ourselves, in some ways at least, for the return of paganism.
[1] See Keel, Operation Trojan Horse, p.252.
[2] See Lyall Watson, Supernature, pp 34-7 and 175.
[3] The ‘placebo effect’ is that a ‘dummy’ drugusually calcium lactatewill work as well as or better than the ‘real’ drug with up to half as many patients as the ‘real’ drug during drug tests. It has been known to work half as well, in these terms, as aspirin, or heroin, or anything which is the ‘real’ drug at the time. One of my mother’s patients still asks for “those tablets that made my arthritis better, because none of the others work so well”: ‘those tablets’ were, of course, calcium lactate. The fact that chalky sugarwhich is effectively what calcium lactate isworks better than the so-called ‘wonder drugs’ in many cases is quietly ignored in medical circles.
[4] Two useful introductions to homoeopathy are Sharma, A Manual of Homoeopathy and Natural Medicine, and Wethered, An Introduction to Medical Radiesthesia and Radionicsthe latter deals mostly with its use in the medical applications of dowsing.
[5] See John Wilcox, Radionics in Theory and Practice, pp.85-6 and Figs. 20-1.
[6] See Radionics in Theory and Practice, pp.85 and Figs. 16 and 18.
[7] This is discussed in Wethered, An Introduction to Medical Radiesthesia and Radionics.
[8] There is a detailed article on the relationship between water-lines and arthritis in JBSD XXIV, No. 167, Mar 75.
[9] The article was Helmuth Husserl, The Earth Rays and Their Importance, in JBSD IV, No. 26, Dec 39, pp. 52-60.
[10] See, for example, the comments by the American dowser Jack Livingston in Francis Hitching, Pendulum, pp.227-8.
[11] Letter from Frau Anka von Knoblauch in JBSD III, No.20, Jun 38.
[12] From V.D. Wethered, The Problem of Obnoxious Earth Rays, in JBSD XVI, No.113, Sept 61, p.253.
[12a] For a parallel study of historical records of hauntings, UFO phenomena and geological faults, see Paul Devereux’s Earth Lights, particularly chapters 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8.
[13] This is something of a characteristic of religious ‘visions’ and ‘apparitions’, as well as many types of UFO incident, as Michell and Rickard show in their book Phenomena.
[14] This is now recognised to be a risk that UFO researchers undertake, as John Keel discusses several times in his UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
[15] See Operation Trojan Horse, pp.273-90.
[16] This kind of ‘message’ appears several times in the incidents described in Keel’s and Vallee’s studies.
[17] For Lourdes and Fatima see Operation Trojan Horse, pp.252 and 256-64 respectively; for Knock see Vallee, Passport to Magonia, pp.132-9.
[18] Keel gives several examples in Operation Trojan Horse, particularly on pp.278-84.
[19] Vallee gives an example of ‘man-in-black’-style telephone disturbance in Passport to Magonia, p.84; Keel describes several variants on the ‘man-in-black’ theme in Operation Trojan Horse.
[20] These can all be found among Keel’s reports in Operation Trojan Horse.
[20a] It was only after writing this that I came across James Lovelock’s Gaia, which shows the Earth’s remarkable ability to adapt and direct its physical environment in order to maintain life. It seems to me that the bizarre menagerie of angels, demons, non-‘spacemen’ and the rest seem to be maintaining the Earth’s non-physical environment in much the same way: it’s certainly a striking parallel.
[21] Aim� Michel presented his main ‘orthoteny’ thesis in his book The Truth About Flying Saucers; it has also been discussed in many issues of The Ley Hunter magazine.
[22] The reports on these can be found in TLH 72, pp.10-11 and TLH 72, p.10 respectively.
[22a] As mentioned elsewhere, Paul has since published this research in book form as Earth Lights.
