Needles of Stone Read online

  Author's Note (eBook edition, 1998)

  This eBook version of Needles of Stone is based most closely on the second edition (Needles of Stone Revisited, Gothic Image, 1986). The text is essentially unchanged from the second edition: apart from a few OCR transcription errors which I'll no doubt have missed, the only significant difference is that I've reinstated a few paragraphs and sentences that were accidentally cut out during the preparation of the second edition. The footnotes and footnote-numbering are exactly as in the second edition.

  I've avoided editing unless absolutely necessary: which means that in some ways the language structure may seem somewhat dated. For example, I'd be far more careful these days about avoiding the use of 'he' or 'his', such as occur far too often in the text for modern tastes; these days I'd also remove most of the ecofeminist-inspired male-blame that mars the book in more than a few places, even though many still seem to need it. If such things offend you, my apologies: that's who and where I was then; that's where we were then as a society. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there..."

  Needles of Stone was my second book. It was first published in 1978, by Turnstone Books, long before they were swallowed up by the Thorsons/HarperCollins combine. I was lucky in that I'd met up with one of the best publisher/editors in the business - Alick Bartholomew, who now runs Gateway Books in Bath; trusting man that he is, he hardly changed a word from the original manuscript - though I had a close shave when I accidentally left the only copy of my final draft in a London furniture store, and very nearly had it blown up by the Bomb Disposal Squad! When the time came to check the page-proofs, Somerset was deep in snow, and the only way I could get to the printers in Bristol was by motorbike, sliding across the snow-drifts and dodging a huge snow-plough: a good job we did go, though, as two of the illustrations had been missed, and had to be reinstated.

  Unlike my first book Dowsing: Techniques and Applications (still in print as The Diviner's Handbook), Needles of Stone was too English to be much of an international success: there was a mass-market paperback by Granada, and the second edition by Gothic Image which stayed in print for another dozen years, but that was it. It was also, perhaps, too much ahead of its time: Paul Devereux of The Ley Hunter described it as 'only an ideas book', and commented, perhaps unkindly, that it seemed that I'd been a bit like "a small boy in a car, with [my] nose pressed to the window, wanting to be the first one to say 'there's the sea!'". Yet it's been surprisingly influential in its own quiet way: though I'll admit I wasn't pleased when I discovered that a certain well-known and obnoxiously arrogant New Age cult had based a central part of their ideology on a particularly stupid misreading of one of the analogies in the book... More constructively, I've been told recently by quite a few specialists that it's still the only book which provides a consistent overview of the entire earth-mysteries field, and which provides a firm theoretical foundation for more recent developments such as the upsurge of interest in feng shui and geomancy. And a few years back I was delighted to find, in discussion with an Aboriginal Heritage Officer who was visiting Melbourne from the 'Top End', that what I'd described in Needles is an almost exact description of some aspects of Aboriginal experience: he told me he'd previously had no idea that there was any Western tradition so close in concept to the complex system of thought and awareness that's so often mistranslated as 'the Dreaming'.

  It's also true that, as I commented in the 'Preface' to the second edition, "more and more modern research adds weight to what so many dowsers have been saying for years: that something beyond our current understanding is active at the standing stones, those ancient 'needles of stone'". One example is the recent discovery at Stanton Drew of a succession of concentric rings enclosing the existing stone circle: although the archaeologists involved apparently did not know this, they'd used the same magnetometer technique pioneered by the Dragon Project research at Rollright, which in turn confirmed the pattern I'd found there by dowsing (shown in Figure 12, Chapter 3). Some of the same old archaeological fallacies are still promoted to the public - it's now known for certain, for example, that the Stonehenge bluestones did not come from the Prescelly Mountains in South Wales, though no archaeologist seems to have the courage to say so - but in general there's far more willingness to accept that the earth-mysteries have something useful to contribute to the archaeological debate. That's a real improvement, one that we'd never have expected then - though it's due in part to the hard work of Paul Devereux and others, ensuring a careful balance of analytic and intuitive in the earth-mysteries, no matter what the wilder end of the New Age movement might want!

  Elsewhere? It's difficult to say. Although most of the formal references to Needles that I've seen have been from the arts world - Lucy Lippard's Overlay, for example - I've also seen some of its ideas quoted word-for-word in writings by the motorway resistance movement, for example, or by the peace campaigners in the mid-1980s. And I now live in a quiet country district in southern Australia, so these days I'm a long way from the mainstream of British politics and practice, or from the sometimes strange meanderings of the 'Glastafarians' and their ilk, always in the forefront of new environmental/spiritual developments. It does still seem true to say, though, that "Despite its flaws and its occasional forays into the overly implausible, the text seems to have stood the test of time": Needles is still a useful book, and I'm very pleased, and very grateful, that through the help of Palden Jenkins and the Glastonbury Archive it's been made available once more. Enjoy!

  Tom Graves, September 1998

  Tom Graves

  PO Box 70

  Malmsbury

  VIC 3446

  Australia

  email: [email protected]

  http://www.wyrdsmiths.com

  The Glastonbury Archive can be found at http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/archive.html

  The Isle of Avalon website can be found at http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk

  Needles of Stone

  by Tom Graves

  This book is a search for a magical technology: the elusive 'earth energies' connected with standing stones and other sacred sites. As Tom Graves puts it, "it is a study in ideas, an attempt to put some of the ideas that have arisen in the 'earth mysteries' field into a coherent shape or form, to place them in a context that makes practical sense at the present time".

  Combining original research in dowsing with a review of many different aspects of the sites - from archaeology to geomancy and magic, from physics to ghost-hunting and parapsychology - the book shows that we need to look at them not so much in terms of the past, but in the effects and reality of those earth-energies now. It ends with a call for a re-assessment of the pagan view of reality, to see where its experience can be of value in our present over-civilized world.

  This on-line edition of Needles of Stone is based on the second edition, published by Gothic Image in 1986, and includes that edition's additional chapter on developments in the 1980s, including a summary of the important Dragon Project research and its implications for our future.

  Preface

  This book is a study in ideas, an attempt to put some of the ideas that have arisen in the 'earth mysteries' field into some coherent shape or form, to place them in a context that makes practical sense at the present time.

  It is not a thesis: I'm not trying to prove anything conclusively. Rather, I've tried to show where those ideas seem to lead us now, and where some may have misled us in the past. Some of these ideas may prove to be wrong, and many will and must change as new information arises: they can only be based on the present state of research into the 'earth mysteries'. But the underlying theme of the study - the idea that the earth itself is alive
and aware - is ageless, and indeed is being reinforced rather than proved false as time goes by.

  Much of the information on which this study is based comes from my own research and fieldwork: but much has necessarily come from other sources. I know that I owe a great deal to all those who've helped me in this study, named and unnamed, known and unknown. In most cases the detailed information on the sources is given in the notes at the end of the book; but in some cases, particularly among dowsers, information was only forthcoming on the promise that the source would not be published. This attitude is at last changing, however, as more and more modern research adds weight to what so many dowsers have been saying for years: that something beyond our current understanding is active at the standing stones, those ancient 'needles of stone'.

  In revising this book for its second edition, the main alteration has been the addition of a new Postscript chapter, discussing some of the research and other happenings of the past ten years in the context of 'earth mysteries' studies. I have left the original text largely unchanged: a few minor corrections and updates here and there, and a number of additions to the notes (indicated by an a or b suffix, such as [23a] for example), but that is all. Despite its flaws and its occasional forays into the overly implausible, the text seems to have stood the test of time: it does its job. And that is what makes it all worth while!

  Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press for permission to quote from Megalithic Sites in Britain by Alexander Thom; to S.P.C.K. for permission to quote from Exorcism edited by Dom Robert Petitpierre OSB; and to Darton Longman and Todd for permission to quote from But Deliver Us From Evil by John Richards.

  The 'Dod' cartoons were drawn and kindly provided by Ian Thomson, art editor of The Ley Hunter magazine.

  Footnotes

  Notes are indicated by a number in brackets in the text, such as [18]. The respective footnote will be found at the end of the chapter (end of 'page' in the on-line version of the text).

  Publishers and publication dates for books referred to are given in the bibliography. Journal titles in the footnotes are abbreviated as follows: JBSD, Journal of the British Society of Dowsers; TLH, The Ley Hunter magazine; JSPR, Journal of the (British) Society for Psychical Research.

  Introduction

  The earth is alive: living, breathing, pulsing.

  It lives, but sleeps, stirring at times: and the people of the cities try to ignore it, hoping it will stay asleep.

  It breathes: and the wind batters the grimy arrogance of the townsman, who dreams of 'Man's increasing control over the blind forces of nature'.

  It pulses, its seasons and cycles turning in all their subtleties: and those pulses are accepted and realised in the lives of everyone and everything in the countryside.

  Our problem is that we've become too civilised to accept that the earth is alive. Our whole way of life is civilised, 'citified': we think of cities and towns as the normal places to be, to work and to live. To our culture, the countryside is a sort of inter-urban space, partly just 'pretty' landscapes and partly areas where food-production for our cities goes on, now greatly improved by the resourcefulness of modern science, technology and economics. The country is a place to get away from the cares of the city when we want to: just for a drive, perhaps, or - if we're wealthy enough - to our nicely modernised country cottages for the weekend. Apart from some minor problems - soon, no doubt, to be solved by the constant progress of science, technology and economics - our world, and our view of the world, is secure: nature is tamed, and does what it is told by us to do. The old, near-forgotten war between civis and pagus, the world-views of the city and of the village, seems indisputably to have been settled in favour of the city and its Law and Order: and the victory is symbolised by the power in our culture of the schoolroom, the law-court, the laboratory and the bank.

  But for all the apparent power of that image of Order, it is only an image: and a very tenuous one at that. Even in our culture, the veneer of 'civilisation' is thin: behind it, the real forces represented by the religio paganorum, the religion of the villagers, are still at work, no matter how hard we may try to deny their existence. Those forces are the subtle and not-so-subtle forces of nature: pagan cultures were based on an acceptance of those forces, while our civilisation is based on an artificial separation from nature, based on the belief that we can be 'above' or beyond those forces and can control them to suit our whims. In some ways that belief is correct, for compared to the old pagans our material living standards are remarkably high - but so is the level of misery in our civilisation. The richnesses of the quality of life, the dignity and wisdom that are such a characteristic of the great pagan cultures,[1] are conspicuously lacking in ours. Despite our centuries of mocking and despising them, the pagans still have much to teach us about living with the reality of the forces of nature.

  This is hardly news: the cry of 'Back to the land!' has been a recurrent one throughout the centuries, and its present forms can be seen in the increasing number of 'weekend country cottages' and 'self-sufficiency communes', and the increasing use of the 'fresh from the country' theme in advertising. This idyllic view of nature and the countryside is a false one: it's a civilised image far removed from reality. The country-cottage boom has pushed the prices of country properties way above the level that those who have to work in the country can afford: the country idyll meets with the 'market forces' of civilised greed. The average life of a 'self-sufficient' commune is apparently now around six weeks: few civilised people appreciate the sheer hard work needed to survive in the country at all, let alone to pay off the bank-loan and taxes as well. Few would-be communards appreciate the reality of human nature, and those communes that do survive do so either through strict self-discipline, through falling back on the civilised safety-net of Social Security payments, or both. The food advertised as 'fresh from the country' is, more often than not, just another variety of factory-processed pap, carelessly grown to produce maximum profit regardless of real quality, and carefully selected and scrubbed to remove any uncivilised irregularities and dirt. In looking to the countryside to provide the quality of life that our civilisation lacks, we take our civilised ideas along with us, and are then surprised that the expected, demanded miracles don't happen. If we are to 'go back to nature' in a realistic way, we have to deal with nature as it is, not how we assume it to be.

  The trap is our belief that we can be 'above' nature, for we can only understand nature if we accept that we under-stand it, literally 'stand-under' it. That is what the pagans did. It's clear that people in pagan cultures never saw themselves merely as being 'close to the land', but as an inseparable part of it: they accepted they were part of nature, and could live best by working with it instead of trying to fight against it. They realised that to fight nature was to fight human nature too. For all its irrationality, paganism was a way of working with nature, a way that worked so well that even in Britain it flourished in most country areas until well into this century, and still continues as the basis of most local traditions and religious festivals.[2] Paganism was a way of working with nature to provide quality, meaning and hope in life.

  But if we are to look to paganism to help us balance out some of the excesses of civilisation, and to restore some quality, meaning and hope into civilised life, we have a real difficulty in knowing where to start. The old pagan gods just seem ridiculous in a city context, and the 'country bumpkin' and 'ignorant peasant' images of paganism that civilisation has so carefully nurtured don't help. Without a pagan awareness of nature, the old techniques of paganism can be terrifyingly destructive, particularly on an emotional level, as many civilised fools who have played with witchcraft have found out: the civilised Church, which still denies the existence of many aspects of nature, was right at least in that respect. The whole pagan worldview is different from our civilised one: it has a totally different definition of reality, one that makes little or no sense in terms of our religion of 'sc
ience'. If we are to make use of the pagan world-view to help us understand nature, and thus understand ourselves, we have to find some key point around which the pagan world-view and our civilised one can be made to make sense.

  That key point seems to be the pagan view of the 'spirit' of a place, the genius loci. To our civilised view, places are just commodities, to be bought and sold like any other commodity; but in the pagan view, probably best typified by that of the American Indians,[3] places can have a sacredness, a spiritual importance, that seems to bear no relation to the more physical characteristics of the place.

  We normally look to the past to study paganism, since civilisation has made sure that very few pagan cultures survive intact; but the procedures of conventional archaeology are of little use for studying 'sacredness', for they are only suited to finding and studying objects, not beliefs or forces. As far as conventional archaeology is concerned, our knowledge of why sacred sites and structures are where they are has progressed little further than Defoe's comment about Boscawen-un stone circle in the seventeenth century: 'that all that can be learn'd of them is, That here they are'.[4]

  But if conventional archaeology cannot help us in our search for a new understanding of nature, the work of researchers like Guy Underwood, Alfred Watkins, Tom Lethbridge and Alexander Thom, on the less conventional fringes of archaeology, can. Looking at their work, it becomes clear that the pagan sacred sites are not as randomly placed as they at first appear to be: there are definite if subtle characteristics, apparently natural characteristics in some cases, that go together to make up the 'sacredness' of a site.

  In looking at the past in this study, we have to remember why we're doing so. We're not looking at the past for its own sake: the past is gone. Our aim should be to learn from the past, to put our studies to practical use, to understand the pagan world-view in terms of its practical relationship with nature. We have to remember that paganism worked, in areas where our civilisation so obviously does not.