Journal of Geomancy vol. 2 no. 2, January 1978

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LEY-HUNTING AS ORGONOMIC RESEARCH

by PRUDENCE JONES

Two articles have appeared in the Journal recently on the subject of the Earth’s subtle body, both to the effect that geomantic alignments may be pathways of earth-energy that correspond to the pathways of the human body recognized and manipulated by orgone therapy, Yoga, polarity therapy and others unknown to me.  I quote what appears to be the salient passage from each one:

Seismia is a magical discipline for charging the body with Earth Waves.  In more technical terms, Seismian practices, if successful, may result in a field coupling of Earth and Body waves. (1)

… truncating and blocking the action of leys is equivalent to building up unnatural muscular tension in a person, terminating in psychosis.  What is more disturbing is that this is not only the anthropomorphic Mother Earth, it is also our common psyche. (2)

Two important questions are left unanswered by the passages above.  They do not say what magic is, i.e. what conditions a procedure has to fulfil to count as a magical procedure, and they do not say what a ley is either.  The articles from which these passages are taken both presuppose a range of answers to the questions that seduce us into a rosy view of the use of geomancy past and future. 

The role of Seismia is said (1) to be “to change and bless a landscape”.  The magical activity concerned then is essentially one of CONSECRATION.  Consecration must not be confused with dedication, which is an arbitrary affair of honour and free choice.  Consecration is the SUFFUSION of an object or a piece of ground with subtle energies.  The object then radiates these energies, either all the time, to those who are susceptible, or some of the time, on performance of a renewing or releasing ritual.  Subtle energies are the energies of which magicians and hierophants speak.  They are not always energies that appear on recognized physical meters, such as electricity and radioactivity.  It depends also on the group of subtle energies involved in a consecration, to which deity the object is consecrated.  That is, the consecration cannot be done ‘in vacuo’.  It must always involve changing a neutral or hostile object into a fit tool for a deity, ideal, force or other power, with its associated energies.  Consecration of a Person is known as INITIATION.  Christian baptism is an initiation-ceremony, it infuses a person with the energy known as the HOLY SPIRIT which is proper to the service of GOD. 

Mr Adams obviously intends his areas of countryside to be consecrated to the Great Goddess with energies of the sort involved in sexual intercourse.  Seismia is a kind of WITCHCRAFT, it uses one of a family of Craft rituals to arouse the usual Craft energy in the service of one of the Craft deities.  In his article (2) Mr Oannes speculates more broadly on the nature of any magic at all.  His article embodies the classic Hermetic arcanum: QUOD EST INFERIOR EST SICUT QUOD EST SUPERIOR – what is below is similar to what is above.  Mr Oannes refers to several examples of a parallel between macrocosm and microcosm and cites (1) as further support.  He then goes on to suggest that magic, specifically witchcraft, is the atrophied remains of ancient geomantic practice, using energies that have been restricted from their original function of magically charging the landscape. 

Magic is a means of consecrating and focusing a person’s WILL, to direct it successfully towards its end.  All the tools and rituals of magic have only this one function: to concentrate the will.  The power of will itself is, of course, a mystery, but it is certainly not to be confused with the “won’t-power” that popular religious apologists have taken it to be.  In fact the will is essentially an ORIENTATION, a tendency towards some goal or ideal, a desire.  Since the most easily aroused and concentrated desire is the sexual urge, sexual magic has always played an important part in magic ritual.  Desire for food, sleep, for {26} physical comfort, can also be used after they have been negatively aroused by deprivation; fasting and watching are utilized in most of the schools of ritual magic, but sexuality is alone in being a positive attraction rather than a flight from deprivation.  Women are more skilled than men in experiencing sexuality as desire rather than need, and so priestesses have predominated in witchcraft, whose rituals are based essentially on sexual magic. 

Arousal and transmission of desire across a stretch of land, sealed or fixed by the mystic transcendence of orgasm (as completion of the ritual, grounding the energies aroused), would certainly imprint a magical orientation on the landscape.  But what are these leys along which the energy is to be passed?  Specifically, what sort of independent existence do they have?  Are they suitable for this kind of ritual?  And how do we know when we have found one? 

Consider first of all the possibility that some geomantic structures are themselves magic devices: pentagrams (et al.) writ very large.  That is, they have been drawn by technicians upon a pre-existing landscape, rather than being the natural veins and channels of Mother Earth herself (2).  Now we are aware of the purpose with which later geomancy was carried out: it was one of IMPOSITION.  King’s College Chapel was IMPOSED upon its correct omphalos, in the face of violent opposition from the town, whose main street and dockland were cut down the middle by the new boundary.  The ‘holy lines’ of ancient Germany were IMPOSED on the pagan countryside by an imperialist church determined to subdue the natives once and for all.  The dragon lines of China, the mosques and palaces of Persia – all appear at the instigation of an authoritarian regime.  How then can we suppose that pre-historic alignments have any better credentials than historical geomancy?  What energies should we be awakening by reactivating them?  Is it not possible that geomantic structures “are directed solely at maintaining power balances” and carry with them the psychic imprint of the oppressed masses forced to construct them (3), as a magic sword, say, may be ‘fouled’ with unpleasant energies from its previous owner? 

Such an argument raises several points that can be dealt with separately.  First of all, a fouled instrument can be cleansed by the appropriate ritual.  Indeed, if we are to believe that the Christian church built upon pagan sites because of their magical importance as well as to block them physically from further pagan use, such a cleansing ritual must have been used.  Exorcism is the remaining “approved version” of magical cleansing.  Secondly, documented geomancy may be “oppressive” only for a trivial reason, that the powerful are the only people who have the resources and leisure to modify a landscape.  Folk-customs die with the folk who practise them.  The executive body of a people’s democracy, if inclined to geomancy, would presumably construct alignments in accordance with the people’s will.  Historically, however, there haven’t been too many people’s democracies.  In addition, Church geomancy, originally used for imperialist ends, has been practised more altruistically quite recently by Antoni Gaudí, the architect of the Temple of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona.  Such an omphalos, consecrated to the power of an imperialist, male chauvinist god, would serve splendidly as the node of a power-system serving such a god, but similarly, if balanced in a network with an equivalent omphalos of the equally imperialist, female chauvinist Great Goddess, would set up a balance of harmonious tension across the landscape between them.  The nature of one node is not necessarily the nature of its embedding network.  Geomancy considered as a system of large-scale magic, then, could be practised as “white” or “black” (each in several Ways) according to the use made of energies which are in themselves neutral. 

The final point, though, and the principal one raised, is not so easily dismissed.  Can we reactivate, not just one node, but a whole system of geomantic alignments with impunity?  Even if we knew what we were dealing with (and I suspect there are few if any magicians who do), could we cleanse and purify a whole geomantic network so that it would work towards harmony and (say) the glorification of the Great Goddess?  You’re unlikely to work beneficial magic with an inverted pentangle.  If a system of alignments has been set up to behave {27} as a black magical device, only destruction and reassembly (in a different form) will turn it to the opposite use.  A crucial question for would-be macrocosmic magicians is this: what would serve to reactivate a network?  Does energy have to be passed between all points in order?  – does it suffice to reactivate one startpoint?  – does the “current” have to be boosted at intervals?  Given the second possibility, to play around with power-raising along randomly-selected or even only suspected leys, even using the Great Rite of the Craft, as (1) suggests, seems a bit irresponsible.  Perhaps Mr Adams could let us know more about how he selects his leys in the first place. 

The second hypothesis is that geomantic alignments are not part of a power-system at all.  Then Seismia either becomes a harmless sport for eccentrics with automobiles, or else really does create new orientations of desire.  Some people will approve of the new developments, others will disapprove strongly – the practice will be highly political in any case. 

Thirdly, let us consider the original hypothesis of (2), that geomantic alignments are in some sense the earth’s natural energy network.  Artificial structures, then, would be built along existing natural structures, as Yoga and spinal manipulation artificially accentuate the natural pathways of etheric body-energy: prana, ki, orgone.  If so, reactivation of any geomantic network could only promote natural balance, painful as it might be for humanity in the short run.  Similarly, as (2) says explicitly, blocking an alignment could only lead to imbalance and ill health. 

Let me call this the “happy hippy” view of geomancy.  Now, consider the said h.h. view to be correct.  It does not follow that reactivating more alignments will lead to better earthly health.  Activating all alignments to the optimum degree will do so, but exciting some areas while ignoring others could lead to an imbalance at least as bad as the earth’s present sluggishness.  Who is prepared to go out and find all existing geomantic alinements – and to stop other h.h.’s from titillating some alignments before the rest are found?  If the h.h. view is not correct, on the other hand, it may be that the earth has no natural energy pathways.  In that case, no network of lines discovered could be guaranteed harmonious.  Or it may be that some pathways are natural, others artificial.  Then some decision-procedure has to be found to distinguish between natural and artificial networks, as well as a different one to distinguish between harmonious and inharmonious artificial ones! 

Proponents of the h.h. view assume then (a) that magic is always the intensification of a natural orientation and hence is beneficial to Mother Nature and her children.  Except insofar as all orientations (desires, tropisms, tendencies, etc.) are natural because possible, as all deformities are natural because possible, this is not true.  I suspect that Mr Adams subscribes to the view that all permissible magic works in accordance with the harmony of the Craft’s two great forces, but he does not say so explicitly, and anyway Mr Oannes generalizes the hypothesis, by reference to Feng-Shui and orgone theory, far beyond its neolithic Pagan base.  That is, he assumes (b) that all leys correspond macrocosmically to the microcosmic subtle body as do those along which sine curves can be generated to “change and bless a landscape” (1).  (b) may be true (accidentally) but has not been demonstrated, and in view of the known history of geomancy, it is probably false. 

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