Ancient Mysteries no. 19, April 1981 (continuation of Journal of Geomancy)
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In these pages we have become accustomed to recording the not-so-wonderful world of the desacralized cosmos and recently
we detect a new trend, or rather, perhaps, the re-assertion of the old values of the Witchfinder-General. For in the
consecrated Christian church of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London, we now see a holy fane converted into a
soap-box for the outpourings of political assertions of dubious secular and certainly dubious sacred validity. Firstly,
we see the spectacle of Margaret Thatcher raving against all whom she thinks threatens her political power. To see this
in a Christian church is sickening, for the founder of her religion said that it is easier for a camel to pass through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. She obviously has not read her Bible lately
– perhaps there is a new Conservative Bible with all references to the vanity of wealth expunged. Her
profanity by using the church as a soap-box was only to be expected as a provocation which resulted in members of a
communist organization heckling her. If one uses a church as a beer-hall, then one expects attempted putsches. Helmeted
policemen, profaning the sanctity by refusing to remove their ample helmets, then dragged the communists out, to the
applause of the Churchmen present. Those churchmen should think twice before allowing their sacred charges to be used by
the power-hungry extremists thrown up out of that bottomless pit at Westminster. But no! They did not learn, for some
weeks later the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis was there, railing on against all whom he sees as a threat to
his vision of Christian Order. In full uniform, again profaning the sacred building with his para-military trappings, he
launched into a viper-like diatribe, wholly unsuitable for a temple of brotherhood and universal love. His spiritual
forebears sent the founder of Christianity to the Cross for rocking the boat. At least Pontius Pilate did not
pontificate in the Temples, for in Roman times the sacred was held truly sacred and politics was left on the
bloodstained steps of the Senate. For these bastions of conservative establishment which ought to know about sanctity
(most of them are Freemasons, after all) to profane sacred buildings in this way is doubly sad, for (1) they ought to
know better and (2) they bring the idea of holiness into disrepute, and strengthen the spiritual successors of the
revolutionary who in the 1831 Bristol Riot shouted: “Down with the churches, and mend the roads with
them!*’’
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* NOTE: The unfortunate who uttered this historic slogan was executed for it.
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Planners are strange beings, motivated by only the best intentions, or so they would have us believe. Be this as it may, their actions sometimes astound us. For their crass behaviour in circumstances like that related below, we can ascribe only two reasons, firstly that they are indeed stupid, in which case they would not be able to do their jobs, or secondly that their ‘blunders’ and ‘stupidity’ hide an ulterior motive darkly clouded from the eyes and minds of lesser mortals.
Now in planning, one gathers that there are certain priorities and inviolables to take into account, and the greatest of these must be ancient monuments, irreplaceable relics of a glorious past national heritage etc. And of these, dear geomants, Stonehenge stands alone as the great symbol of ancient British mysteries, the Druids, Dunwallo Molmutius, Aurelius and his friend Merlin etc. etc. If Stonehenge is not inviolable, then God help the rest of the antique stones we know and love. But …
A piece of self-styled ‘rescue’ archaeology was recently carried out at Stonehenge of all places! Yes, rescue (or ‘salvage’ as some other less dramatic archaeologists of the fossilized core would call it). It seems that some unspecified bozos, on whose authority we can but guess, ordered that a ‘telecommunications cable’ should be laid across the sacred site of the mighty henge, impinging, would you believe it, on the Heelstone in the Avenue! Michael Pitts of the Alex. Keiller Archaeological Museum at Avebury {16} came along with some Southampton University volunteers and dug along the course of this proposed secret intelligence cable (or whatever it is, I can’t imagine anything other than something associated with the dark recesses of Government security would get carte blanche to cut smack-dab through Stonehenge). They discovered the filled-in socket hole of a stone next to the Heelstone, and it has been suggested that there may have been two stones side-by-side with the marking of sunrise accomplished by the gap between them. There might even have been a vast stone avenue approaching the Giant’s Dance, suggest the diggers.
Interesting though the find is, as geomants and ley hunters we must strongly deplore this vile intrusion of
telecommunications cables into a sacred site of this nature. As guardians of our heritage, the Department of the
Environment must be given a black mark (not the first, unfortunately), for falling down in its duty of protection. The
more speculative of readers will note that there is the connexion between ancient sites and Government establishments of
the loosely-termed ‘defence’ type. Ley hunters have observed microwave towers on geomantic points, and Colin
Bloy has dowsed significant earth-energy patterns in connexion with such works. Not so long ago, we noted a report of a
car stalling mysteriously near the Henge, a phenomenon noted with UFOs and with the mysterious transmitters erected by
the Nazis on the Brocken, an ancient pagan holy mountain in the Harz.
Perhaps there is more than meets the eye to this telecommunications cable!
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It has recently been mooted that the Ordnance Survey, that invaluable source of maps for geomants and armchair
ley-hunters, should be sold off to the highest bidder. The present Government likes to sell off profitable parts of
their organization to their well-off friends, and the poor old OS which has done stalwart work in the past will pass
under the hammer to a big-business set up which will expunge all ancient monuments but those in private hands open for
gain and the amusement of the Town and his Frau. Big Chefs will replace Standing Stones on maps as motorways become the
dominant reason for the maps’ existence, and bridleways will no longer be marked, making it ultimately easier to
plow them up when Agri-Business deems it necessary. What can be done? Like all those other great Government ideas which
blight our everyday lives, nothing can be done about them. The only thing to do is to root out sets of old OS maps and
make them available by photocopying to geomants when the black day dawns that Privatization makes the OS useless for our
purposes.
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By Khark Singh.
A foreign businessman recently moved to an office and immediately was plagued by an assortment of ailments. His Chinese colleagues finally persuaded him to call in a Fung shui (geomancy) expert to study the layout of the office. The verdict: the businessman should move his desk to another part of the room. He did and the mysterious ailments vanished. In another incident, a new restaurant owner could not understand why he was doing so poorly when all the other restaurants around his were packed with customers. In desperation, he sought the advice of the fung shui man. “Rebuild the door so it is at a slight angle to the building” the geomancer ordered. The reason – evil spirits cannot turn round corners, he explained. The owner took the advice and now says business has improved. Coincidence or not, the 3,000-year-old practice of fung shui – which literally means wind and water – is taken seriously by most Chinese in Hong Kong, even by those educated abroad. It is based on the principle that health and happiness are carried by wind and water, which pass through hills and valleys. “Any man-made structures which do not blend into harmony with these natural elements will lead to trouble”, says Mrs Chan Oi Kwan, an expert in the field. “We Chinese believe that there must be a balance between the natural world and the world {17} made by men”, she said.
A few months ago, about 100 villagers in the rural New Territories, bordering China, almost rioted when a car knocked down part of their ancestral hall. The villagers claimed the accident had destroyed the geomancy of their area. Earlier this month, residents of another village alleged that two dragons on the front of a monastery were emitting evil spells and that 10 villagers had died or fallen sick since the monastery was completed in May. A fung shui expert was called in to study the situation but he was skeptical, pointing out that the dragons were located at an angle from the village and everyone knows that only good spirits can turn round corners.
The first thing a Chinese enquires about when he buys or rents an apartment is about the fung shui of the place. “I don’t care if it is a fabulous place <–> as long as the atmosphere is bad, I am not going to live there”, one Western-educated businessman said.
If a Chinese finds that evil spirits have invaded where he is staying because of the construction of new buildings,
he need not despair. He can always get a ‘pak kwa’ – “eight angled” mirror – and hang
it in front of the house. The idea is that the device will deflect evil spirits back to where they came from. “You
can hang up a wok (a Chinese frying pan), or other cooking utensils” says Mrs Chan. “They will do the
trick”. The only trouble with such deflectors is that if you put up one facing your neighbour’s home, you
will find the next day that he is giving you the same treatment.
cr. john billingsley, Harold Wicks.
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… and as ANCIENT MYSTERIES goes down, so might some other of the world’s great monuments.The monuments of
Egypt, to be precise. Although the Nile has for years been eating away at them, recent dam construction at Aswan has
made things a damn sight worse. The culprit is salt. As it crystallizes, salt mechanically breaks down the sandstone
foundations of the temples. In bygone eras, the salt came from the river. As the temples dried out after each annual
flood, a tiny amount of salt was left behind to do its damaging work. Archaeologists believed that by stopping the
flooding of the Nile, they would stop the deterioration.
But, as in so many of such things, the opposite is the case. The salt now comes from water that runs through the ground from nearby irrigated fields. Near the temple of Karnak about 2.4 grams of salt per year crystallize in a square metre of land, calculate Thomas Billard and George Burns of the University of Toronto. This salt is then left behind as the water evaporates in the hot Egyptian sunshine. The salinization is thus continuous and cumulative. “Over a period of 50 to 100 years it should cause a lot of deterioration” quoth Billard recently in the journal Science. The Karnak temple is on unirrigated land where the water table has been raised to within about 6 feet of the surface by the intense irrigation of nearby fields. Because the water table is so high, salting of the foundations is continuing apace, threatening the great edifice. A similar phenomenon is also occurring in the vicinity of the Pyramids. At Karnak, archaeologists are attempting to drain the area of the great temple and render the salinization harmless. If they fail, the temple’s decline will be seriously and irreversibly accelerated, leading ultimately to its collapse.
Also in Egypt, President Sadat has requested the return of all “Egyptian mummies” back to their native land for decent burial. So many of his erstwhile countrypersons are yet displayed to the hoi polloi in glass cases of museums worldwide that the President has called for a stop. Mummies in Egyptian musea are to be reinterred in a special mausoleum being built for the purpose. Sadat believes that these people should be accorded the dignity of human beings and not displayed as curios for the spectacle loving Town and his constant companion to gawk at of a Sunday afternoon. Let us hope that the musea of Britain accord to his request and send back the bodies of the poor souls of archaic Egypt. Let the Brit. Mus, the Fitzbilly and others empty their cases of the erstwhile dust of Egypt and dig up a few British monarchs from their mausolea for us to gawp at their embalmed remains for a change. Shock! Horror! I hear you saying. Sacrilege! Blasphemy! To imagine disinterring King Edward VII and sticking him on view at 50p a time for Lebanese tourists to poke their fingers at in between licking their 75p ices. Disgusting! Quite. Why is that any more disgusting than someone named Ramesses III or Aten-Hotep? Only because names like Neb-Kheferu-Re or Thutmosis are strange and alien. Call them Pope John Paul George Ringo I and things come nearer home. So let us act like civilized people and respect the dead, however long they have been dead, and send them back to their rightful resting-places.