OBSERVATORY

A miscellany of geomantic and other Ancient Mysteries from the AM monitoring service and readers. Anything in the same vein gratefully received.

Sussex Dragon. The West Sussex Gazette 11/10/79 carried an article “Did Komodo Dragons roam in Faygate Forest?” Komodo Dragons, large reptiles still extant in Indonesia, according to L.N. Candlin, may have existed in Sussex. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks of “Wondrous adders that were to be seen in the land of the {21} South Saxons”. In 773 Ethelward’s Chronicle records that “monstrous serpents were seen in the country of the southern Angles, that is called Sussex.” Early in the 1600s rumours about the Faygate Dragon began to circulate beyond the confines of Sussex. The tale eventually came to the ears of John Trundle, and he decided it was worth investigating. He made a journey to the forest and interviewed four people who had seen the monster. These were a carrier who plied between Horsham and the White Horse Inn at Southwark; John Steel; Christopher Horder, and a ‘widow woman’ who lived near Faygate. In 1614 <was published> Trundle’s pamphlet A True and Wonderful Discourse relating to a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great Annoyance …. The animal was described as 9 feet long, with a body shaped “like the axel-tree of a cart” covered with black scales and with a powerful tail. It was said that at the sight of man or cattle “it will raise its long neck, supposed to be an elle long, and look around with great arrogancy.” The Komodo Dragon, according to David Attenborough, is 12 feet long, shaped like a lizard, lifts its head on a long neck when its curiosity is aroused, and is similar in many ways with the Faygate Dragon. Candlin believes that the two creatures may be the same species. Further comment, reptilian experts, please.
cr. Alan Gardiner

Ye cannot serve God and Mammon … Daily Telegraph 24/1/80 reported on admission charges to cathedrals, Lincoln 60p, Salisbury being the only other one the journalist, Brenda Parry, knew of. Well, Guildford, the modern masonic/geomantic masterpiece charges admission as well. Anyway, 1,000,000 × 60p is a tidy sum to add to the Church of England’s already massive coffers (See Walrus No. 15 article by Chastity O’Bedience).
cr. Valerie Martin

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Terrestrial Magnetism. Two interesting bits recently on TM with a bearing on the use of the magnetic compass in feng-shui and the general use of orientation. New Scientist 18 Sept 80 had an article explaining the work of Robin Baker of Manchester University on the sense of magnetism in people. Blindfolded students were taken to various places and were found to be better able to detect directions and ‘home’ when blindfold rather than with open eyes. Tests with magnets and magnetic headgear showed the sense to be related to terrestrial magnetism. The implications of such research to geomancy are obvious – the position of beds etc. has now got a ‘scientific’ explanation. Also Cambridge Evening News of similar date mentioned the latest medical research at the university on pulsing magnetic fields used to aid the rejoining of broken bones. In this technique, mineral formation in the bones is accelerated in some as yet unknown way. The parallels with the orientation of medieval healing shrines and the energy connexions there are obvious, and require some further research with magnetometers etc.
cr. Nigel Pennick

Nature Sept 4 1981 carried an article Bahamian Atlantis reconsidered by Marshall McKusick and Eugene A. Shinn which detailed the famous submarine blocks much vaunted as human artifacts and Atlantis to boot. Their geological researches have shown that this artifact is actually ‘beachrock’, a natural geological formation. On the Bimini beaches the high calcium content of the seawater allows the rapid formation of natural limestone beachrock – a fact shown by glass shards, bottle caps and other beach litter incorporated into the stone. Similar rapid formation of limestone has been shown in coral atolls of the Pacific {23} where the debris of World War II is found incorporated into the rock. Beachrock formed by the circulation and evaporation of calcium laden seawater has tabular fractures, keystone vugs, a surface slope and internal laminations and a geometry which reflects the tidal zone origin, making a narrow band frequently extending a mile or more along the sea front. These patterns are all found on the Bimini specimen, which has been carbon dated to 2200±150 years before the present, as computed by the University of Miami Radiocarbon Lab.

Such an observation must be of the highest importance to students of ancient mysteries, yet the authors spoil their case by an attack at the end on believers in Edgar Cayce and a diatribe “it must be said that Bimini is just one of the growing number of archaeologic ‘shrines’ which have become the object of cult worship. Pyramid worship is becoming more common, and in England itself, mystic cults centre upon the alleged religious powers of Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments. Whatever the explanation of these new religious movements, they have led to an unfortunate rejection of the scientific explanation of natural and physical phenomena among a significant segment of the reading public”. This diatribe, worthy of the great days of Chinese Maoist doctrine in scientific publishing, is unworthy of a scientific periodical of the stature of Nature.

“Thulean’s” article in the last AM about the Age of Aquarius mentioned a festival whose organizer is funding an office on the profits. Joan Andrews of the Aquarian Festival, to whom this apparently referred, would like readers to note that she is not paying a landlord for office space but is offsetting her own loss of a tenant for the use of the space necessitated by the difficult and time-consuming task of running a valuable New Age festival.

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MORE OBSERVATIONS IN OBSERVATORY

Sunday People June 1 1980. Strange things happened to salesman Bill Raven’s car as he motored past Stonehenge. The temperature and petrol dials on his new Granada flickered out of control. He stopped the car and checked everything, but nothing seemed amiss. {27} When he moved off, the same thing happened again. As soon as he left Stonehenge, everything returned to normal.
cr. Thulean

NUTHAMPSTEAD ZODIAC UFO SIGHTING An undertaker, Ian Thrussell, and one of his employees, David Dodkin, were sitting in a van on the outskirts of Barkway crossroads at 1.30 pm on September 15. Thrussell, of Address, Royston, saw the object cruise past at a height of about 60 feet at only 20–30mph. “It looked like two dustbin lids stuck together only bigger – saucer shaped. It was travelling from south to north and seemed to be under power. It was moving in a dead straight line, not going up or down … it was not with the wind which was blowing from east to west.”

Zodiac investigator Daryl Potter contacted the UFO spotter who told him that the saucer was going along like a wheel and not in the traditional fashion of Adamski-style saucers. The Police were contacted and the report was sent to the Ministry of Defence, for whatever good that will do.
cr. Ann Pennick/Daryl Potter

SACRED GROUNDS Native Australians (usually called by the ‘nigger’ name Aborigines, but not here) according to a report in Daily Telegraph April 14 1980 have stopped the American petroleum company Amax from drilling for oil in their sacred ground, where burial and initiation rites are held. The Native Australians warned the drillers that if the ground were broken ‘mysterious beings below the ground’ would do them harm.
cr. Valerie Martin/Rupert Pennick

RADIATION-SACRED SITES AND URANIUM The Black Hills of Dakota are also threatened {28} sacred sites where modern technology has found useful minerals – this time uranium. Recent work on the connexion of uranium and sacred places has shown some physical possibilities for this – the suppression of static electricity by radiation. A recently-introduced tool for laboratory ‘de-statifying’ has Polonium-210 in it for its radiation. Thus uranium sites may be areas of no static – ideal for magical happenings.

AIRLINE FENG-SHUI The London Evening Standard August 4 1980 carried an article on the air fare ‘war’ going on over trips to Hong Kong from London. British Caledonian Airways has “also called in a soothsayer, an expert in Fung sui (sic). He said after a visit to the new offices in Hongkong that the airline would make a lot of money. Managing director of British Caledonian, Alistair Pugh, said ‘The Fung Sui plays a major part in Chinese life and is taken very seriously.”
cr. Colin Murray.

ALFRED WATKINS’S REVELATION – AGAIN! The revelation to Alfred Watkins: no horse, but seemingly 30 June 1921 was a hot summer day. From 28 June to 2 July “very generally the weather was fine, sunny and dry.” (Weekly Weather Report, 1921, p.101); “absolute drought” was recorded in Hereford from 28 June to 14 July (British Rainfall, 1921, p. 29).
cr: Ursula Mitchell, Useless Academic Research Ltd., Cambridge.

OBSERVATORY is a catalog and record of material on geomantic and ancient mysteries, any material welcome.

Finally, a new journal: Speculations in Science and Technology, the blurb of which reads as {29} follows: “Yes, now there is a journal for your speculative paper. General, detailed and/or interdisciplinary papers in the physical, mathematical, biological and engineering sciences are now being accepted by the editor:

Dr W.M. Honig, Western Australia Institute of Technology, Perth, S. Bentley 6102, Western Australia.

Note: Papers on UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects) or ESP (Extrasensory Perception) will not be considered.”

It’s nice to know that science is being so open minded, isn’t it (UFOs and ESP not permitted) so send yer papers folks, let ’en ’ave it!