Walk the Line (2)

 He talked of poetry and Cornish saints;

He kept an apiary and a cow;

He asked me which church service I liked best —

I told him Evensong… “And I suppose

You think religion’s mostly singing hymns

And feeling warm and comfortable inside?”

And he was right: most certainly I did.

                 John Betjeman

Paul Screeton dedicates an extended chapter of Quicksilver Heritage to UFOs. It opens with a rather moving account of a childhood holiday in the 1950s: 

"Once upon a time a small boy stayed for his summer holidays with distant relatives at a house in the scenic village of Redmire in Yorkshire in Wensleydale, where time passes so slow. He had a den at the bottom of the garden, beyond the nettles, where newts were hoarded in a glass tank..."

After a couple of paragraphs in this vein, he reveals that, during the holiday, he saw "a discoid golden craft" manoeuvring over Pen Hill.

"Years later the small boy read books about flying saucers, eventually heard of leys, began publishing a magazine on the two subjects and subsequently wrote this book. That day at Redmire my future path was marked."

The light is extraterrestrial rather than celestial; but meadow, grove and stream appear to be apparelled in it.  Everything else follows from that visionary gleam.  A charming holiday; a UFO sighting; a book about English pathways; enlightenment and the great work of the alchemist. Join the dots. My future path. The old straight track. 

The point is not that Alfred Watkins drew some lines on a map. That wouldn't be particularly interesting. The point isn't even that stone-age man might have used stones or trees to find his way. He very probably did. Hikers sometimes use churches as landmarks, or used to before the invention of mobile phones. Churches are very often aligned East-West, but that doesn't prove that the Ramblers Association are sun-worshippers. But ley lines aren't a theory; they are an epiphany. 

"Alfred Watkins discovery was in the nature of a vision" writes Screeton. "The revelation took the form of a rush of images forming a coherent whole. The insight...was as breathtaking as any vision any shaman, guru or mystic has experienced."

John Michell goes a lot further. "Suddenly in a flash he saw something which no-one in England had seen for perhaps thousands of years...The barrier of time melted and spread across the country, he saw a web of lines, linking holy places and sites of antiquity...In one moment of transcendent perception Watkins entered the magic world of prehistoric Britain, a world whose very existence has been forgotten."

If ley-lines are real, then it makes perfect sense that believers look for big, dramatic markers on maps, and then for smaller, less obvious markers on the ground. You'd expect them to have compasses and spirit levels and metal detectors and spades. Maybe they'd divide an area up into squares, and catalogue what was in each square, and look for statistically significant patterns. 

But this is not how Screeton and Michell envisage the Quest proceeding. 

"....He will walk through sunlit glades, meditate under gospel oaks, rest his weary feet on special mounds while listening to highflying skylarks....Slowly he will become attuned to the scene; his perception having shifted, there will appear a vibrant countryside humming not only with the buzz of bumblebees, the call of the curlew, or the scamper of rabbits, but throughout it all, the energy of nature, and criss-crossing it, always straight, the heartbeat of magic power which keep it alive...."

My paperback edition of Quicksilver Heritage was published in 1977.  A not insignificant date. If you wanted to, you could sum up the entire message of the book in five words.  "May the force be with you".

We are sometimes told that there is a thing called spirituality in all religious faiths. Politicians sometimes say that they support religious education because it promotes this thing called spirituality. Sometimes they say that they would happily get rid of religious education altogether and teach this spirituality thing instead. Spirituality has recently been repackaged as "mindfulness" -- as if that part of Buddhism where you sit facing a wall not thinking of anything in particular can be detached from the noble eightfold path and sold to people with boring stressful soul-destroying jobs as a technique for not minding too much. Different people: same old opium. 

But I guess we broadly know what spirituality is. It's what Daleks and Chatbots don't have. It's the bit which Thomas Gradgrind and Richard Dawkins don't believe in. Two chaps see a waterfall: one says "this is pretty" and the other says "this is sublime". But the third chap feels that it is imbued with significance and importance and meaning that he can't quite put into words. That thing which he can't put into words is spirituality. 

And there will probably be a fourth man saying that if you can't put it into words and express it to three significant figures and a margin for error, that it doesn't exist. Even the word "pretty" is a bit dodgy.

Evangelicals and Charismatics are inclined to reduce Christianity to a feeling -- an intense, personal moment of being "saved"; an ecstatic, shamanistic hysteria which sometimes breaks out at religious performances. They talk about "getting religion" and "being full of glory"; they may be "slain in the spirit" or start to "speak in tongues".

I don't know how many people in the born-again community have honestly experienced this. I don't know how common it is to have an overwhelmingly specific sensation of "making peace within" and "having your vile sins lifted". I strongly suspect that most of them merely point to a particular moment when they vaguely thought "Maybe I'll swing by that church and find out what they do there" or "This preacher seems to be making a lot more sense than I expected him to" and defined that as their moment of being Saved. They talk about chains falling off and dungeons flaming with light after the event because that's the kind of language they've been taught to use. The New Testament has a good deal to say about upper rooms and roads to Damascus, but you'd have to search quite hard for the primacy of the conversion experience.

If you start out with the idea that the world is a huge battle between God and Screwtape it's not so hard to attribute spiritual significance to every day vicissitudes. "Satan hid my keys. I thought this was because he wanted to make me late for work. But in fact, he was trying to provoke me to use vulgar language. I resisted the temptation to swear. And sure enough, God revealed that I had put the key-fob down right by the kettle, like I always do. And then Satan departed from me, biding his time."

And that's not necessarily an unhelpful or unhealthy way of thinking. If anything has a spiritual dimension than everything does. And it did stop you from saying shit. But the fact that you lost your keys and found them again is not, I think, proof of the existence of God. Or Screwtape. Or anyone else.

If you have a strong belief that there is a magic line between Warwick Castle and Stratford-on-Avon Parish Church, then it is not particularly surprising that, when you walk along the line, you start to notice things that you wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't been looking for them. And if that makes you love this English earth more than you ever did before -- if it makes you feel that you are at some spiritual level transmuting base metal into gold -- I have not the slightest intention of telling you that it's not true. 

It's the concrete claims which are problematic. 

"To say that leys do not exist is to say that motorways do not exist. Both can be found on maps."

No, they can't. 

 "To say that ley power does not exist is to say that electricity does not exist. Both can be felt."

No, they can't. 

I come back to one of the men who taught me Chaucer at college. One day, out for a walk on a very cold night, he found a baby, abandoned in a telephone box. He took the infant to hospital; she recovered; he became her godfather. If he had gone for his walk at a slightly different time or on a slightly different path, the baby would certainly have died. He later described the event as "Providential". 

"I do not mean that if I did not already believe in Providence this event would have made me do so, but that, since I have that belief, the event fits readily to it."

You don't need to believe in flying saucers to think that if you get away from it all for a while, you will start to perceive sermons in stones and books in the running brooks. Alfred Watkins was hardly the first person to think that one murmur from the vernal Brook will teach you more of moral evil and of good than all the sages can. xxxx

Quicksilver Heritage mentions in passing that the early Christian Gnostics believed in a singular God; but that their unique insight was that humans could have direct contact with Him. A lot of Christians, particularly Christians of the born again protestant flavour, would say that "direct contact with God" is the unique selling point of Christianity.

Screeton suggests that the main point of ley lines is that they are a means of getting in touch with what he calls (following one John Keel) The Great Whatzit In The Sky. He's a bit vague as to whether The Great Whatzit is God or the Space People. I don't suppose it makes much difference. 

Joseph Campbell said that all mythology points us towards the Final Incomprehensible Mystery. He shares with the ley hunters the bad habit of drawing lines between things which have nothing in common. The Hero's Journey is every bit as imaginary and every bit as methodologically dubious as the ley system.

But that doesn't mean it isn't real. Joseph Campbell and Alfred Watkins had ideas, and we can't unthink them. We can't look at a stone circle without seeing lines of power. We can't watch a movie without seeing the Hero With a Thousand Faces. If all stories are true, then stories about stories are true to the power of truth. I rather suspect that the Final Incomprehensible Mystery and the Great Whatzit in the Sky are the same fella. 

Campbell tells the story of the western philosopher who asked a Shinto practitioner to explain the ideology and theology of his faith. 

"We don't have any ideology" replied the Shinto guy "We don't have any theology. We just dance."

Plenty of people would tell you that there is a nothing in the sky, great or otherwise. Plenty of people would tell you that nothing is mysterious, nothing is final and quite definitely nothing is incomprehensible. The belief in ley lines is a belief in something. Ley hunters don't have an ideology or a theology. They just went for a walk. 

The closest I ever got to actual ley hunting was a hiking holiday around Glastonbury when I was maybe nineteen. I was probably already too critical and too actually knowledgeable about the King Arthur literature to look at the landscape in quite the right light. I fairly consciously decided that if I was really interested in the Holy Grail, Glastonbury Abbey and Joseph of Arimathea, the most rational thing to be was a common or garden English Christian. I believe that is what pandits tell westerners who want to convert to Hinduism. It's Anglicans, not hippies, who literally drink from the chalice of Jesus's blood every Sunday. 

But the vibe -- the olden days England vibe, and the sense that stone circles are esoteric and mercurial never quite goes away. I deeply adore the Celestials and the Monolith. But Stone-Age-Man walking an invisible grid system and opening himself up to the Cosmos with a capital C has a magic all of its own. 

Quicksilver Heritage is a silly book. Researching this article I came across an essay (actually an interview) with one man who thinks that it is very silly indeed.  The "crystals, chakra, ether, orgone energy and spiritual bluff and guff" amounted to  "New Age pap" he says.  

"It now looks upon a quick scan" he goes on "like a right rag-bag of undiluted pseudoscience, pseudo-philosophy and too much following others’ woolly-thinking" 

The man expressing this opinion was, of course, Paul Screeton. He now describes himself as a gnostic Christian. 

I was there when it happened, so I guess I ought to know

Johnny Cash 

This is an epilogue to a series of articles on the Doctor Who story Stones of Blood. 

The whole series has already appeared on my Patreon. 

Patreon followers have also read my definitive guide to the UK election, and are about to read my essay on the Doctor Who story Androids of Tara.

It would be great if the majority of people reading this could join them. 

Rilstone on Stones of Blood

Rilstone on Androids of Tara

Rilstone On the Election

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