DRAGONSLAYERS

by David Stringer

Leylines are otherwise called Dragon Lines – not that they were air corridors for latter-day pterodactyls where we now have Concordes instead – and are supposed to link-up POWER-Points and carry electromagnetic forces by their more way-out adherents (A kind of spiritual International Grid). A number of activities are carried out by Leyline seekers, such as twitching hazel rods on ancient British earthworks and holding mystical vigils in the hope of being visited by flying saucers. To the average citizen, this recent subculture is a harmless, if somewhat zanie, eccentricity – but no more objectionable or subversive to the State than worship of pre-1940 steam engines or the deification of Georgie Best or the Bay City Rollers.

I hope that serious geomancers will forgive my flippancy in this matter. Every predominant Culture has some kind of POWER GRID which has a certain pattern. The Romans had a grid of military roads – being military rulers, and as precursors of the centralized state, their grid looks remarkably like the motorway map of the 1970s Britain centering on London. {69}

The Celts, a confederal cluster, had a grid line of fire-signal communications beacons that warned of threats of invasion and places are named to indicate this (Bron Gwelle = Brown Willy, Kernow = The Hill of the Watcher/sentinel).

Modern technological Britain with its cult of conquest of natural forces through sophisticated knowledge has a whole gamut of such WEBS – telegraph poles, telephone wires, radio and television aerials, radio stations, power stations and subpower transformers for electricity – added to the legacy of roads, railway lines – military and civil ‘administrative’ power and control centres and systems plus computers. This tangle may be bewildering – but it quite clearly defines the goals and nature of the society, at least as a Majority Culture,

The Incas had their grid – a communications network of major highways on a cross pattern centering on Lima and Cuzco with a system of postal runners (a kind of crude GPO) to ensure central power worked well. Perhaps one day some futuristic archaeological explorer from another planet will wax lyrical about the mystical implications of the telecommunications network?

As the NATIONAL GRID defines the Majority Nature of modern Britain, the Leyline/Dragonline grid defines the nature of the prehistoric animistic tribal society that held certain places along these lines as being more ‘sacred’, focal points of mysterious forces in the search to ‘tap’ their power – the same motive as for the metal National Grid? We have mentioned elsewhere how the cerebral cro-magnons sought to tap the magic they believed tappable by the cerebellic Nature-conscious Neanderthaloids (this is not nonsense – the Kalahari bushmen know when an antelope is ‘near’ and where it is at miles distance as the Australian aborigines can locate a minute object in 100s of miles of desert) – how, in the complex relationship between Artos, of Lugres and the White Goddess priestesses of Britain, the male warriors constantly seek the secret (‘the Holy Grail’) of the serpent/Dragon Cult’s magical powers.

Hence the leylines link up the power points of the Pre-Celtic, pre-Patriarchal Serpent/Dragon cult of pre-2500 BC Britain – the conquerors, afraid of the POWER of the matriarchal serpent cult (that threatens their masculine rule) must slay the Cult Power at the same time as seeking to take over the powers it is supposed to possess.

Like the National Grid, this web has its major power centres, its lesser provincial power centres and its local sub-power stations. The aim of those running these ritual centres is social control by one’s own particular ‘theocracy’ – though many of the sites were sacred to Neolithic peoples who intuitively made them into shrines, as they seemed to represent their vague notion of divinity – even here we have a ‘hierarchy’ of sanctity. Many village wells are sacred sites, some retaining their ancient customs (well-dressing with flowers at Tideswell in Derbyshire), but some are ‘more sacred than others’ i.e. the well of St. Brigit (The Sungoddess Brigit) in Ireland, where kissing the Blarney Stone will give you the gift of poetry, visions and many tongues (despite the joke about Guinness coming out of it) – the Cauldron of Ceridwen on Cader Idris at the source of the river that falls to Tal-Y-Llyn, which place will likewise inspire you to bardic gifts and beautiful insights – or drive you insane, as the legend goes?

On that point, a place that can either inspire you to the most marvellous of poetic visions or drive you insane reminds one of a ritual place for taking hallucinogenic drugs. A serpent is supposed to issue out from a kind of Underworld at Wookey Hole in Cheddar Gorge – in Druidic lore, it is supposed to be killed, and a good thing too, it is ‘evil’.

It is pointless here to list all such places.

The role of honoured Dragonslayers is quite an impressive one. (There is only one supposedly ‘nice’ dragon around these days that many of us know about and that is Puff the Magic Dragon of Children’s Favourites fame).

THE CHERUBIM with the flaming sword who drives Adam and Eve out of Eden whereupon the Serpent (Neyesh) politely disappears from the plot, though in that case, perhaps it just went into hiding. {70}

The UNNAMED ARTHURIAN WARRIOR who, by slaying a serpent, breaks the truce that leads to the battle where Arthur dies on the plain of Camlann – slain by the bearer of the dragonshield, a day when dragonslayers didn’t have it all their own way!

The Doughty Saxon PEASANT GRIMSHAW who slays the HODDEL (griffin) at Hoddlesden near Darwen in Lancashire.

An equally doughty Teuton BEOWULF – in which case the dragon is a GRENDEL.

ST. PATRICK drives the snakes out of Ireland, while ST. NEOT chases them off Bodmin Moor and ST. GEORGE slays one in England! No latter day saint worth his salt is really deemed worthy of a high place amongst the blessed unless he has performed a similar deed.

The mortal dragonslayers are however merely parochial heroes compared with the arch-dragonslayer, the Archangel Michael. I quote from Ron Kelly: “St. Michael was God’s right-hand angel, his principal hardman (the chappie who waved the flaming sword at Adam and Eve?) and also the dragonslayer of the book of Revelations. Thus, as was the custom, whenever the Christians came on a Pagan holy place, they converted it to their own use and renamed it after some Christian saint – or as in the case of ‘Saint’ Brigit, after a canonized local deity. In the case of all sacred places which have churches dedicated to St. Michael, this is almost certainly because there was a local dragonslayer legend there and the Christians were thus substituting their own dragonslayer (authorized) for the Native one. Who then were these dragonslayers and even more important, who were the dragons they slew?

Look at the statue of the Cretan Mother Goddess, say, and notice how she is either clutching serpents or has them twined around her arms. The Dragon/Serpent is the MOTHER SYMBOL (Hathor, Cow goddess of Old Egypt had a serpent coming out of her forehead). It is the symbol of the Feminine Power – in Man, it obviously corresponds with Lungi Anima. In suppressing the dragon, one suppresses the Feminine in oneself, one destroys, in other words, the feminine, intuitive, gentle part of ones own nature.

In Hindu mythology the dragon-serpent was KUNDALINI (the Power Serpent) which was coiled around the base of one’s spine, where the adrenalin glands were located. If one loosed the power of the Kundalini upon oneself (set loose the dragon) it could OVERPOWER YOU – you became dominated by your emotions, hence to KILL/CONTROL (bind up the dragon for 1000 years) was to master your emotions and become the Cold Abstract Thinking Man of Power,.You were in other words destroying your natural personality and were off on a power trip.

To the followers of the ancient Matriarchal religion, the earth was like a GREAT WOMAN’S BODY with power flows criss-crossing it (as in acupuncture, the human body is said to have many different power-lines through which the chi or Yin-Yang energy flows). The meeting-points of the two currents were held to be power points fertilized by the MOTHER SERPENT. Undoubtedly these were sacred sites where the Dragon of Wisdom (Mexico = Quetzalcoatl, Greece = the Python of Delphi, Islam = Idris, Canaan = Leviathan) fertilized his people. The dragon of wisdom could also be responsible for the Loch Ness Monster story – the Picts were a Matrilinear people claiming descent through the female line, though they had Kings – these kings were probably princes who married the local Princess, as in the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ legend.

When the Patriarchal ‘Battleaxe’ (Cretan Labrys) People invaded Western Europe, they despoiled these shrines and installed their own (usually Sun Gods) in the Mother Dragon place (Apollo slew Hera’s serpent at Delphi) and these gods could be said to be dragonslayers or equally DRAGONMASTERS. The rest is obvious – when Christianity came along and absorbed the local religions, they substituted the name of St. Michael for that of the local dragonslayer. St. Michael Cults are thus dragonslayer – anti-feminist cults. They are built around male supremacy and anti-sex (the body is the source of sin, lusts etc.). Someone who is trying to raise the dragon to kill/control it is trying to divert this warm, feeling human side into a heavy, male character, armoured personality. There is a mediaeval painting showing some Pope – I think it was LEO THE GREAT – conquering the dragon, or killing his sex-drive. {71}

The sex-drive cannot be killed – no more than the ‘food drive’ can – but it can be sublimated sometimes into ART – but usually into a POWER DRIVE. Thus dragon-slaying can be said to either represent a POWER TRIP – or a Black Magician trying to master his body’s energies in order to work magic”.

The serpent goddesses of Western Britain were not so easily suppressed as the serpent still twined the Celtic Crosses and church decorations as done by Kernewek craftsmen after the Norman Conquest along with the totemic deer, these becoming a symbol of Celtic resistance to ‘foreign rule’. Kerid (wen) may have been thrown off the hilltop at St. Michael PENKEVIL near the Fal (the end of the worm) at St. Michael Caerhays and the important centres of Kredington (Crediton) where Our Lady continued to be revered at the Holy Well, well into the middle ages. Many lesser hillocks with springs still bear her insignia in scattered upland areas and her sacred mountain Cader Idris proved unassailable. Here, in the extreme west, it was Christianity itself had to do the dragonslaying, whilst to the east the druidic sun god HU Gad (KAD) ARN had already done it, in taking over the Cadburies, here it became a question of substitution – IF there was a population remaining there. In this case, it was not necessary, as the Saxons had evicted the native Britons anyway – and what was in a name?

The legend of King Arthur in glorifying the ‘Battleaxe’ dragonslayer, itself served to keep alive the memory of the serpent goddess. Apart from undoing the anti-dragon propaganda of dragonslayers (most of whom are more often than not the figureheads or founders of large national states – i.e. St. Patrick of Eire, Artos of Britain, Elijah of Israel, St. George of England; believers in a central, directing power without which ‘civilization’, in their eyes, is doomed and in chaos, like the State Power philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, of the 1670s who calls the ‘anarchy’ of being without strong rulers after the Canaanite serpent abhorred by YHWH – Leviathan), the myth of Arthur holds that Britain is in chaos before a chosen, strong ruler draws the magical sword of power from the stone and falls into chaos afterwards when Logres breaks up.

Suggesting some of the culturally curious antiquities that may be concealed beneath leylines, back to king Arthur and the Plain of Camlann. Literal legend suggests that he is slain by Mordred, the serpent warrior, on the plains of the Camel estuary in Kernow due to the similarity of names – Cam Alaine = (roughly) the crooked/twisted beautiful one or perhaps Kernewek Cam (twisting/serpentine HA – (with) lann (sacred) one understood. Therefore Camlann is the name given to the twisting one, such as the River Camel (Kernow) – QUEEN CAMEL – below Cadbury Castle near Wincanton, the place where a spring erupts from below a sacred hill. Camelot, the established seat of Artos’s power is upon a site incorporating the root CAM. Other place names – which also crop up quite definitely on leylines – are Mev-ag-Issy in Kernow (two ancient shrines that later became a fishing village, the Irish Maev with Issy (=Isis?), the three Tor cluster of Bodmin Moor – (Row Tor, of no significance; RW = boulders, BRON GWELLE, the hill of the sacred Cornish midsummer bonfire (SUNGOD HILL) and opposite LISkernek Hill, the Court of Kerid (White Goddess Hill) which happen to be above the springheads of the River Fowey.