The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘third-eye’

Saturday 29th May - Four Knocks, County Meath

On the morning of Saturday 29th May I roped Kal into one of my crazy ideas. We would spend the next two days on a modern pilgrimage, just like we had done at Glastonbury the year before. We would find a starting point and then let the dowsing rods direct us from site to site. For me, I would set my intention for this pilgrimage to be to work on each of the seven chakras and to see what came out of trying to do that. For Kal, he would just do what he does – see what happened at each place and go with it. So, with the help of the iMegalith iPhone application and my SatNav system we trekked off to the starting point, which I had determined would be a henge and mound close to Four Knocks.

We didn’t get very far trying to find the henge and mound. The mound was visible in a farmer’s field, but the supposed henge had been… well, let’s assume it was removed and ploughed out of existence! Not a good start. Was there anywhere else we could pick up the quest? Our dowsing showed that nearby Four Knocks would be suitable. As soon as we got the rods crossing we kind of knew that this had actually been the right place all along, but something had been preventing us from dowsing that from afar. We sort of had to be in the area to zoom in on it. Perhaps we had prevented ourselves from ‘finding’ Four Knocks prior to actually being there because we knew you had to obtain a key in order to get in? Who knows. We obtained the said key (by the way – the directions are not very clear – but we found the house eventually and got the key by leaving a small deposit with a nice lady) and went to discover this famous mound’s secrets and begin a quest.

Entrance to Four Knocks

We opened the iron door up (iron – aaargh!!) and began to settle in. I needed some stuff from the car that I had forgotten, and by the time I got back to the mound it was swarming with a minibus-load of tourists from various parts of the world – America, Japan, Australia….all over. Their guide had clearly gone off to get the key without realising that we already had it. Ten minutes later he was in the mound beginning his guided tour of the place, which I earwigged into, of course. Hey – it was free for me to listen!! And jolly interesting it was too, although I could see Kal twitch every now and again, and I was biting my tongue at some of the speculative leaps the guide was making to fill the gaps in the archaeology with fantasy and pure imagination. He was very careful to preface everything with “My guess would be...”, or “Perhaps they might have…”, and even in the dim light I occasionally caught Kal swinging his dowsing rods behind the guide, shaking his head as though to say, “Nope!” It’s funny how dowsing can sometimes make you feel quite confident about being able to find out hidden knowledge, and yet later in the day that confidence would be completely reversed, but we’ll come to that in a later tale.

I don’t know if this is the traditional position but at Four Knocks we have the female on top and the male underneath. Yes, on top of the rounded mound there was female energy all over it. All around the outside of the mound was a male energy line, waving and running around in a sunwise direction. Kal was spending quite a time outside, pacing around and around, working something out, but I decided to get myself inside to take some pictures of the rock carvings and to try to work out what I might have to do to work on my Root Chakra – the first part of my modern pilgrimage. That was the intention, but instead Four Knocks had its own agenda for working my chakras!! I will explain in a moment.

Inside there was more than the usual amount of decoration. Many of the swirling circular shapes were familiar to us, but there was an abundance of zig-zag lines and lozenge shapes carved into the lintels of the recesses in the mound that seemed to be quite unique to this particular chamber, or at least rarely seen in such quantity elsewhere.

Zig-zag lintel decoration at Four Knocks

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Glastonbury Pilgrimage Notes – Summer Solstice (June 2009)

On June 20th and 21st Kal and I went down to Glastonbury to begin a spiritual pilgrimage. That wasn’t our intention initially, but very quickly that’s what it turned out to be! We had no set agenda, other than a starting point that I had identified after reading Mary Caine’s book about the Glastonbury Zodiac in which she had revealed that the Girt Dog of Langport may have been the first place that initiates to the ancient druidic colleges and mystery schools landed by boat on the Isle of Avalon, the only high ground in the flooded Somerset Levels. This first contact was at Burrow Mump at Burrowbridge. So that was where we started too. From that point onwards I was hoping for some guidance from elsewhere as to the path I should take.

Little did I know quite how successful that approach would be! What follows is an account of how we were lead through the Isle of Avalon, each site opening at least one of my chakras, to profound effect. Follow me now as I show you the trail and the experiences I had – truly a solstice to remember.

Stage 1: Burrow Mump – Throat Chakra

We started the morning looking for the nose that formed the Girt Dog of Langport. Having read Mary Caine’s book about the Glastonbury Zodiac I was interested that she considered it to be the entrance way for the initiate into the Isle of Avalon and the Mystery School transformation process. Not that I was going to subject myself to some sort of masonic ritual! I believe the tradition to be far older than that, and to have been a spiritual initiation of the kind that is symbolically referenced in ancient Welsh bardic texts. Certainly, now that I am recounting this story I feel as though it is the transformation that you seek for yourself that you find, and nothing to do with arcane and involved rituals. Just time, patience, endeavour and a willingness to try.

I was not convinced as to the existence of all 12 of the zodiac signs in the Glastonbury landscape (13 including the dog) despite Mary Caine’s well-argued case. I felt that some of the signs were older – especially the incongruous Girt Dog, which equates to the dog Dormarth – the companion of Gwyn ap Nudd. I am starting to formulate the idea that there may have been only five original shapes – the original fixed zodiac signs and the dog, but that’s an argument that I will spell out in another post. The Girt Dog fitted with the Gwyn ap Nudd tales, but was out of place with the zodiac signs, many of whose shapes I feel were a bit ‘forced to fit’. Nevertheless I felt there as something in the Dog, and that it would form a good starting point, as I hadn’t visited it before on previous visits. We bought an Explorer Map of the area and located it.

The Church of St.Michael

We followed dowsing rods to locate the most energetic paths for ourselves to the top. As usual, Kal’s solar path weaved a little but was almost direct, whereas my lunar-oriented path wandered around ascending at intervals and circling around each of the trees on the slope’s southern side. Then we arrived at the ruins of the St.Michael’s Church on the top of the Mump. If you’ve been reading our posts on this site for a while you’ll know the significance of St.Michael – the archangel of Christianity who pins the dragon energy, or Dark forces, under his sword of Light. However, another way of seeing it, as I saw it that day, was that the Archetype of Light was dominating the natural balance of energies. There ought to be a constant battle between Light and Dark, as is the flow of the forces in Nature. To dominate and subdue the dark forces throws the human world into a state of imbalance. This is how I felt standing in St.Michael’s Church on Burrow Mump – the earth and radiant energy forces were being subjugated by the design and designation of the church. The design channelled the energies, whilst the designation ensured that generations of believers would imbue the site with their dedicatory energies, maintaining the imbalance in the name of the Light (the Sun, the Male force).

Is not Christianity just such a religion? Does it not promote The Light and seek to eradicate The Dark, vilifying it as “evil” and un-holy? Has it not tried to associate all the worst aspects of humanity with the forces of darkness, of night and of magic? The result has been 2000 years of what Terence McKenna would call “the dominator culture“, promoting masculine ideals, favouring male energies, denigrating and subjugating the feminine. Only now is the tide slowly turning in the last hundred years as we slowly transfer alignment to the new Aquarian age from the Piscean. For the established Christian Church trying to maintain masculine sun energy exclusively in the face of this turning tide will bring about the dissolution of these established institutions – unless they can change.

Dowsing The Mump
The St.Michael church was of course aligned East-West. It could hardly fail to be so. Having read Ross Nichol’s article about the layout of churches in the selected collection of his works called “In The Grove of the Druids” I knew that this ancient Sun alignment was important, as was the structure of the church, which also conformed to the divine proportions and layout of almost all early Christian churches. It also happens to be on the St.Michael ley line that the late John Michell re-discovered, and which was popularised further by Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst.

We set about discovering the ley lines and earth energy formations of the site. We immediately identified a strong and powerful ley line consisting of neutral, male and female energy lines. It travelled all the way through the large empty windows set into each end of the ruined church. We quickly found our respective power centres – on opposite sides of the church’s North-South walls. Mine was to the south, and consisted of female and neutral energies, whilst Kal’s was directly opposite on the northern side and registered for male and female energies. I took the picture below whilst standing in my power centre, and Kal’s was just through the arch on the opposite side.

There was also a power centre slap bang in the centre of the church. This was very interesting indeed – we learned something new here. The three types of energies coming into the church along the East-West axis was hitting a female earth energy point in the centre of the church. As it did so it split into two rays that were channelled by the church’s walls outwards in North and South directions, effectively forming….a cross! To the south this extended through my power centre as a female and neutral line. On Kal’s side (north) the line was refracted as a male and female line. What we don’t know is how the power centres at those points affected the constitution of those lines, but perhaps we can leave that for someone else to determine until we get back there another day?

As Kal will no doubt relate he was wearing a bracelet of blue stones. An unusual thing for him to do, as I had never seen him wear it before. Turns out I needed it. I dowsed for which of my chakra points this Burrow Mump energy centre would affect and got a response for the colour blue – the throat chakra. I didn’t have any context for what that might mean, but Kal decided to offer me his blue bracelet. He felt it may help my meditation, so I took it.

I used the L-rods to find the point at which I should meditate (something we are getting accustomed to doing now). A point was detected about ten feet away from the central crossing point. If you consider that the church’s design is an elongated cross resembling a human being with outstretched arms (see Ross Nichols’ essay on church design and human proportion) then this point would have equated to …you know what’s coming, right? The throat of course. I only realised this once I came to write this post. My higher self is obviously a lot more intelligent than my normal self.

From that spot I could see a visible earth energy line flowing across the landscape to the south-east. It was like a line I had seen before when I ascended from Llandrillo stone circle late one night. A softly-glowing overlay on reality. Quite beautiful and mesmerising. I saw it snake across the Levels towards a hill in the distance. It curled around the hill and out of view but I felt that this hill was the next place to visit. At this point I knew not why – Burrow Mump was our starting point but there was, as yet, no sense of any journey or purpose to our weekend visit. Oh, how that was about to change!

When we checked the map to determine where the line went (based on my description) it was pointing at Wearyall Hill (instinctively I knew which hill it was even though I’m not familiar enough yet with Glastonbury’s local geography)! Kal had been meditating on his power centre and had seen a new power centre forming at a spot that my imaginary line crossed, at the south-east corner of Burrow Mump. Kal located it with his rods, and shortly afterwards I did the same. However, the moment we had both recognised what it was, it disappeared! We decided to head for Wearyall Hill and see what we could find. Again – no agenda – no preconceptions. Just following our lines and intuitions.

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