Posts Tagged ‘secret society’

A day in Cowan’s Country: Part 1

I recently got the chance to scout around the countryside between Loch Tay, Crieff and Dundee. This is David Cowan’s neck of the woods – the Scottish earth energy researcher – so I was delighted at the prospect of visiting some of the megalithic sites in the area.

In this first part of a two-part report I visited some of the megalithic (and other sights) that may be of interest to earth energy students, or students of the arcane and esoteric – all of which are accessible in a day’s drive around the area near Dundee in Perthshire, Scotland.

Dundee Town

In dry dock at the Discovery Point (brown signs everywhere in Dundee pointing to it) is the RSS Discovery ship formed part of several polar expeditions by Captain R.F.Scott.

Discovery - Dundee

Interesting design inlaid into the floor outside Discovery Point, with the cardinal points guarded by four vicious-looking penguins. I thought the personification of the winds was quite traditional, along with the presence of the sun, moon and stars. Knowledge exchanged with the Phoenicians about navigation, perhaps? Certainly a knowledge of the movements of the stars and the moon must have been treasured information, as it enhanced the naval prowess of any country that could use it.

Discovery - Dundee (1)

In the centre of Dundee, in the middle of the main shopping thoroughfare, you can find this fairly large dragon statue. It’s a magnet for kids who want to be ride it. It’s also close to the main banks, and so echoes the dragon statues that surround the financial centre in The City of London.

Dundee Dragon 2

Walking from the central church in Dundee towards the Discovery Centre you may come across a newly-built wall. It looks very organic and yet intricately organised. It’s a delightful work of art, and more walls should look this good! Every so often a small decorative stone is featured, and the symbols carved hark back to quite ancient roots: the trefoil and spiral, for instance…

Dundee Energy swirls

…or some Ogham script, the language created by the British druids, the tree alphabet…..

Dundee Ogham script

Cultural echoes of a past being re-discovered and reclaimed. It’s like we’re blowing the dust off our heritage, bringing it once again out into the light of day and exposing its symbolism and shape to a new audience who are more able to listen, even though the modern world has been constructed in such a way as to distract us, to obscure its significance, and often to simply annihilate it without trace. Like the Green Man the familiar foliage re-appears each year anew. That’s happening in Dundee. You wouldn’t have thought it was a prime candidate for an archaic revival!

Eassie sculpted stone

In the ancient church of Eassie village, just west of Glamis Castle on the A94, you can find the encased remains of a Pictish Sculptured Stone. It is one of many in the surrounding area (see ‘Fowlis Wester’ below). Pictish culture, so-called because their legacy of mainly pictorial, was around for the transition from a predominantly Celtic imagery and mythology to one that was a mixture of Celtic and Christian imagery.

This quote published on the Megalithic Portal site by C.Michael Hogan:-

“The appearance of a tree branch in conjunction with the cross on the Eassie Stone is taken to represent the sacred manner that certain trees were held in regard by the Caledonians. (Wise, 1884) The appearance of sacrificial cattle on the Eassie Stone is common to other Pictish Stones after the instruction from Pope Gregory to Abbot Melletus in 601 AD; that instruction permitted the Picts to sacrifice cattle at their ancient pagan temple sites, only if the sites were sprinkled with holy water and consecrated to the true God. (Bede, 731). A procession of ecclesiastics is also evident on the stone, a theme being common to other carved stones of this era. (Hogan, 2005) A portion of the Eassie Stone has been likened (Leslie, 1866) to a crouching warrior image (Kells, ) in the Book of Kells, potentially connecting this site to events at Iona, where the Book of Kells may have been produced.” {Eassie Stone entry on Megalithic Portal}

Not to mention the angels that stand sentinel perched on either shoulder of the stone like some kind of Angel and Devil figures as expressions of conscience.

Eassie sculpted stone (7)

Eassie sculpted stone (11)

Take a wee look at those symbols that are shown in the plaque above. A boar – a symbol used to denote King Arthur – is easily discernable. The other look more artistic. A crown, perhaps, with the two central swirls similar to the cobra symbols on Egyptian crowns? The symbol on the right looked to me like a geomantic map of the energy formations at a sacred site, but I’m sure it’s just a stylised squid or something.

A quick digression

In the churchyard itself there are lots of graves that still display their carved symbols of the hourglass, the skull and crossed bones, and the ceremonial vase used to contain a person’s ashes. Now, either there were a lot of pirates buried in Eassie (although it’s far inland), or these are masonic symbols. Some people do propose a link between the Templars and the Pirates, so when I say “charnal urn” you say “bottle of rum”, okay?

A strong link is often made by authors tracing the history of the masonic teachings between Scotland and France, a link of Knights Templar and Freemasons, Masons supposedly emerging out of the dispersal of the Templars. You may recollect we found such symbols on the graves at the church in Dyserth village too, in North Wales. One often finds Templar or Masonic symbols of bones, skulls, time markers, swords, unicorns, lions, dragons and shields emblazoned with simple crosses at ancient churchyards, usually where an ancient pagan church has been built over by a Christian replacement (always aligned East-West to follow the sun).

Some authors make a convincing case for these organisations being the receptacles of an ancient knowledge that has to be handed down through generations unchanged so as to preserve it. The organisations insist upon a belief in divinity, but not in any specific deity. Their history includes the building of round towers and churches on ancient aligned sites to the proportions of sacred number. In short – they retained and re-educated their members in some very old traditions that incorporated ancient deities that have been regarded as sun-gods and moon-goddesses. Quite pagan.

Some authors argue that these organisations were of an altogether different spiritual alignment, and that they are a boys club for the super-rich families and the well-connected to retain power over decision-making bodies. Sounds like a description of the ancient druid orders where rich kids would be sent to the druid colleges to be taught by a group of powerful men who were exempt from much of the law. These royal children were sent for an education in what is now called “The Classics”, but which back then would have been the Western Mystery Tradition.

Others say that the symbols simply mean something quite banal: an hourglass denotes a full life is vertical, a life cut short if horizontal; the cross-bones denote the mortality of man; the skull means…er..the mortality of man; the cross-swords that he was a warrior, veteran of a war; the urn denotes…er..human mortality encapsulated in a vessel of….er..hope of the resurrection into the eternal life. There you go – all easily explained. Unless you’ve read John J.Robinson’s “Born In Blood“, then things look a bit less arcane. (See also: Skull & Bones Society)

Some of the Eassie grave symbols:

Eassie sculpted stone (6)

There we can see an hourglass, crossed swords, a skull, a charnal urn (“bottle of rum!”) and crossed bones. This was repeated with only slight variations (some had fewer symbols) on many of the graves around the church. “3-2-1 – you’re back in the room“.

Fowlis Wester cross (not circle)

I say “not circle” because there is a circle somewhere up in the hills around Fowlis Wester, but I didn’t have time to find it. I satisfied myself with the sculpted stone that rests in the centre of the village.

Fowlis Wester sculpted cross (2)

Fowlis Wester sculpted cross

This stone had very similar markings to the Eassie stone, and was in a very well preserved state, possibly because it’s a replica! The original in on display in the nearby church of St Bean’s, but the replica was interesting enough. The sculptor has used the bottom of the stone to represent the sea, and it is replete with human figures, animals (seals?) and a great decorated serpent. Very similar to how the Aboriginals of Australia depict the Rainbow Serpent.

Glamis Castle and Fergus Well

A fairy-tale castle is how most tourist literature describes it. Well, you have to think of some way of pulling in five coach loads of tourists in an afternoon. And that was just one firm’s coaches! Luckily they have a big tea room and toilet facilities at the back.

Glamis (24)

The grounds were superb, consisting of a “pinetum” (an arboretum of pine trees), a natural trail, a walled herb garden (currently being re-constructed) and a area where city kids can see what animals really look like.There’s also a free “museum” and video history of the castle, although some of the exhibits are a bit … tenuous. You get a mannequin sporting a royal dress from the 1930s next to a tableau showing a farmer on a tractor ploughing a field near some sheep. Still, when it comes to the royal history they’ve got some jazzy coloured carboard displays with gold lettering and pictures and everything. No expense spent, I mean ‘spared’.

There were some spectacular trees in the grounds, such as this very old sycamore tree:

Glamis (23)

Inside the tree were the ancient bowed branches forming a welcome shelter from the hot summer sun:

Glamis Tree

Some interesting things about Glamis Castle:-

  1. It is mentioned by Shakespeare in the play Macbeth.
  2. It was home to Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
  3. A castle existed on the site 1000 years ago

Glamis Church and St.Fergus’ Well

Coming out of the castle ground you arrive at  Glamis village, with its churchyard and well dedicated to St.Fergus. The well is situated down a path alongside the church and is well worth searching out. You almost walk right past it, so keep an eye out for the sign on the wall.

Glamis - Fergus Well (5)

As you descend to the river there is an air of calm, broken only by the sight of a swarm of gnats buzzing furiously over a part of the rover where it breaks into white horses on the pebbles and rocks on a bend. Also on that bend you will find Fergus’ Well. Not much to look at, but when I dowsed it there was a strong neutral energy coming out of it and flowing towards the river. A female line also emerged from the well and rolled along the river bank, following the flow of the water.

I have never seen gnats, even Scottish midges, swarm so furiously before. Exactly at the point where the neutral energy from the well intersected the river, and where the river was bring churned up by the stones. Somehow, those things are all related. I will have to watch the activity of gnats a bit more closely in future.

Glamis - Fergus Well (3)

Glamis - Fergus Well (4)

Kirkwynd, St Fergus’s Church, Glamis village

At the local ancient church I found more of those gravestone with the esoteric symbols carved on them. Yo ho ho! The church is also the repository for the departed Earls of Strathmore. If only they had lived to see their bottled water concept go global! A sculpted Celtic cross was found at the site during some excavation. The site is described as an early Christian church (probably). What were they doing with a Celtic cross, then? Ahh…borrowing it for good luck. A gift from the local pagan community, no doubt. Kind fellows.

Glamis Church

There’s them there sim-bulls again. In part two of this blog post about the area around Dundee I go looking at some stone circles that reveal some fascinating aspects: a cup-marked stone that provides a central link point for several earth energy leys, and a beautiful circle with a tree in the centre.

Gwas.

Following the high road.

Nine Ladies stone circle: Dancing in the dark – Part 3

3rd November 2008

This is the last part in the account of our time at the Nine Ladies stone circle in Derbyshire. In this part I relate how we attempted some psionic experiments, I get to talk with the Wishing Tree, and we stumble upon the haunt of some exponents of sacred geometry. Oh yes, it’s all going on in this part of the tale! We really start pushing it now!

PART THREE

At the end of the last post we had been trying to figure out the unusual response (one rod straight ahead, one turning to point back at you, or swivelling round). We were thinking along the lines of Kal being attuned to male energies, whereas I was more attuned to female. On this full-moonlit night it seemed as though I was finding it easier to tune it to some of the features of the site in particular.

We decided to begin some experiments. We asked for the best place to do some energy work, and were each directed to a different power centre. Oddly, Kal was standing on the one where he had planted his umbrella, which I had taken to be the one I would go to. Oh no. I was directed to stand in the one that Kal had been sitting in, and had dowsed into a spiral earlier. So be it.

Nine Ladies stone circle

Nine Ladies stone circle

We decided beforehand that we would try to get into a state of mind where we might be able to connect to each other. The two power centres were linked by arcing neutral energies, connecting male to female, and travelling over and under in a vertically circular trajectory. We hypothesised that we may be able to send each other images. I tried to relax on the power centre, but I had a Kings of Leon tune running around in my head that wouldn’t shift. It kept repeating the same refrain. This was not funny! I was trying to work here! No good. I was mainly ‘awake’ and could tell my focus was wandering – what was Kal imagining, would it be a shape, or an animal? Oh, dear. This was hopeless! Despite the stillness of the dark night I kept dropping out of trance at the slightest sound – a distant rumble, a passing car on the hillside, a hooting owl, a gust of wind.

We tried. We failed. We weren’t even close. And it was because I couldn’t get into it. Was this another effect of the grounding stone? Had I not charged myself back up, or something? I pondered on that for quite a long time before heading off to the Wishing Tree for a drink. Time to get back to dowsing to reconnect with the stone circle. We headed to the grounding stone again, as it seemed to be the hub of the action this night. Hoping to get some answers I dowsed the stone again asking,

“Do I need to clear myself through this stone to regain my connection (with nature and the circle)?” I asked. The rods crossed for a ‘Yes’.

I put the rods down again and placed my hand on the stone instead of sitting on it I started to tune in. My mind started to gently swirl around like someone had taken the sink plug out and my brain was draining its water into the stone! Then it got faster. The vortex in my head reached such a pace that it sent me dizzy! I spun away from the stone, but kept turning around and around, staggering like a drunk whilst laughing elatedly at the madness of being spun around. My head was swimming in a really fun way, like having spun yourself around a broom handle and then tried to walk in a straight line.

Kal just stood looking on curiously as I waltzed around giggling and laughing. I asked something, anything, to give me a hand here! Couldn’t something help me to get out of this tailspin? A split second later I was prodded forcefully right in the back of the neck by one of the Wishing Tree’s branches! I jumped – woke up – and stopped spinning, thankfully. “Thank you!” I responded with genuine gratitude. I felt a warming under the tree’s canopy the air got lighter and more friendly. We had re-established a connection! That was just great. Now I was really happy, not giddy.

Back to the dowsing. Time must have been drawing on, but really I didn’t care what time it was. It wasn’t important. I had to know more before we left the site. Rods in hand I walked back to Kal in the circle to continue trying to locate some connections and flows. The first thing we found were the male and female spirals coming out each stone. Just like many other sites, but with the male spirals on the inside, and female spirals on the outside. Other sites have it the other way around.

Next we located the neutral lines that went between the stones. I went for the concept of opposing stones being connected and found a connection for each pair. Oddly, all of the lines were perfectly straight except for one, which bent back into the circle stone in a short curve. Was it going bending in order to avoid something? It seemed to coincide with the avoidance of the location of the two power centres we had been standing on. Noted anyway, if not understood. Kal, however, had found a few connections that were not a part of this perfect ‘spoked wheel’ pattern. Some stones connected with others that were not directly opposite. We vowed to return to map them all when it was lighter and we could draw them out.

Whereas our sketches of energy patterns at sites are representational (and not always to scale) you should compare them with those of StoneDowser on his site (listed also in our links section on the right hand side of this page). Mr. Ian Honeygood, now sadly passed away, was quite precise in some of his diagrams, although he only seemed to recognise two types of line: a radial spoke and a ‘ritual path’, which he surmises was the path taken by the worshippers at the sites. Well, that concept doesn’t convince me, I’m sorry to say, but that’s a discussion for another day. Either way, he has done some accurate and helpful diagrams to show those two types of energy formations.

StoneDowser’s ritual path is what I would call the unwinding of the nemeton of the site. Like Hamish Miller we often find three (he finds more, but then he’s like that) circles of male energy enclosing sites, and this energy trail then comes into the site to spiral to a point which we usually confirm as being a power centre for one of us (i.e. male or female oriented energies dwell in or emit from these points). Each time around the three outer spirals of the male nemeton energy the path gets closer to the stones. At Nine Ladies it started about three feet away from the stones, going to about one and a half feet, then six inches for the last time around. The path then turns into the ‘entrance’ of the site before looping into a spiralling energy centre.

On my last visit to Nine Ladies I had dowsed a link between the Wishing Tree oak and the main power centre, coming into the site via the ‘entrance’. I decided to verify if that was still present or not. It was. Exactly the same path, same entrance point, same power centre, same direction of spiral, everything. Good. Consistency was being achieved in some of this dowsing now.

As we were near the tree Kal decided to try his luck in doing a bit of communing with it. Now, I have already recounted my own difficulties with this species, and particularly this tree. It is amenable to contact, but it has to be handled very carefully and with great patience. Kal is, how can I put this, not one for such finesses! In all openness and in his usual hearty style I watched him outstretch a metaphorical hand of welcome. And then I watched him knock his head on a low branch and stumble over a tree root. I pretended I hadn’t noticed this blatant rebuttal. He tried again, complaining to it that he was trying to be nice. Nothing. What did he expect? He was not one for the patient building of relationships that such communications often insist upon. His talents lie elsewhere, I guess. I tried to wipe off my wide smile. “Give up, mate!” I implored. He was fighting a losing battle, it seemed.

One thing we both noticed about the site that night was how slow the energies were. As we dowsed them we walked slowly; as we circled the site the energy plodded along with us but didn’t overtake us as it has at other circles in sunlight, or my time at Moel-Ty-Uchaf. The Genius Loci was docile this evening. Nocturnal nature, however, was wide awake. Occasionally we would get a hint of agreement at just the right time whilst dowsing or communing – a sudden gust of wind, or a hooting owl would chime in at just the apropos moment.

Things had gone well. We had learned useful things about the way that energy was being transformed in the circles by specific stones. With this, and more, still buzzing in our heads we retreated one last time to the Wishing Oak to pack and leave. On my way there my eye was drawn for a fourth time to a twig of laurel lying by the north side of the circle – the moonlight made its dark leaves shine with an odd tint. I picked it up, and placed it inside one of the many crevices formed by the oak’s roots, and left it with thanks and good wishes to the tree. It gave enough out often enough – why not have some back? ;-)

As we wandered back to the car I asked if we could try to see what kind of place might be benefiting from the flow of energy that I knew went down the cliff edge via a steep gulley. Kal was game, so we drove down a side of the hill that I had never been down before. Kal said this was the way he often came up, so I was confident we could find our way back to the Bakewell area pretty easily soon enough. Ten minutes later Kal was saying, “Well, I’ve never been in this bit before!” as we trundled curiously through a small town that suddenly arose next to a river.

We passed a pub called “The Square and Compass” and that struck a chord – that was a masonic sigil. It would seem that Darley Dale, as the place turned out to be, was home to at least one group of people who were interested in ancient secrets! Societies are not for me, however. My path is mainly alone or with Kal, and my progress is swift because of that, I feel. It’s my path I’m treading, not following someone else’s agenda.

There was a lot to think about, and it kept us in conversation for several weeks afterwards. To recap, we learned:-

a) The rules of the collaboration with Nature must always be followed to get good results – a quiet mind is essential; good strong intent; a clean body (not caffeine-fuddled, tobacco doesn’t help the cause either); be prepared for fun, but do your work seriously and focused.
b) The double helix appears at several stone circles, possibly many more, linked to an outlier stone, which is identified as a main feature of the energy field system at a stone circle
c) Moon energy is slower, possibly weaker than sun energy. Certainly it is less vigorous.
d) A stone in or close to the circle, usually flat, acts like a solar, lunar and stellar panel that absorbs the radiant light.
e) In moonlight, on the correct power centre, we were both unable to experience any intuitive responses either between each other or towards any external location. The EMF was supposedly low, as it was night time. A lecture by Serena Roney-Dougal taught us that at times of low EMF are more favourable for telepathy and remote viewing. I blew that experiment by not being able to quieten my mind.
f) Although StoneDowser didn’t dowse this site (to our knowledge) his ‘ritual path’ was present – a spiraling line coming from outside to inside the circle. The radial links between the stones that he drew at other sites were also there. We thought that the lines bent between some stones sometimes, and that there were more links than simply those that were opposing stones.

It would seem that manifestation patterns can be willed into a particular shape, although my intention got transformed whilst I was forming it in my mind. Is this due to an interactive collaboration between human and nature, or was I simply unable to hold a shape using my willpower? The shape dowsed as increasingly complex when Kal came to verify it. I also verified Kal’s shape too. “Thaat be a pentangle, and no mistake, zurr.” What is it about wizards and their five-sided shapes?

Don’t phone in – it’s just for fun! ;-)

Gwas.

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