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Speakers are being spoken to, and field trips suggested, so we should soon have some details of next year’s events. Hopefully we will have another special access visit to Stonehenge.
Not a trip as such, but our annual “fire”, or more accurately, sparkler event. Barbara and Adrian Crocker have once again kindly invited members to their farm for a bonfire and a pot-luck spread. Bring a contribution to eat or drink, sparklers if you wish, and join the fun.
Last year we dowsed around the recently completed house and grounds, before they had been lived in. It will be interesting to see if the energy lines discovered then have altered.
See map for details. Do not go to the house go straight to the farm buildings. We aim to start around 16:30, when it should still be light enough to do some dowsing.
A recent week based at an excellent camp-site situated 4 miles south of Hereford on the banks of the River Wye, afforded an opportunity to visit several fascinating places that had been on my “must do” list for some time. One of the highlights of the week was the very ancient yew tree at Much Marcle church. This giant of a tree is so big, and has such a large hollow centre that benches have been installed inside it so that you may experience the tree in comfort. However, the energies of this yew are so powerful that it is probably not a good idea to stay inside for too long – the expression “away with the fairies” springs to mind! Dowsers interested in earth energies would find plenty to investigate here, and the church is worth looking at although a bit tame after the wonders of the yew tree.
Another high treat was the church at Kilpeck, which lies a few miles West of Much Marcle. The stonework is a fine example of the “Hereford School of Sculpture” which is the name by which this particular style of stone carving has come to be known.
The imagery mixes Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian forms and Kilpeck is reckoned to be the most celebrated example. The village of Kilpeck lies in what was once the Welsh kingdom of Ergyng, and had a tradition of Anglo-Welsh co-operation, resulting in the Norman Earls of Hereford allowing the inhabitants to retain their Celtic customs provided that they acted as vanguard and rearguard during forays into Wales.
The name of Kilpeck probably derives from the cell of St. Pedic, of whom little is known, although he may have been a local Celtic holy man. The oldest mention of the church is in the “Book of Llandaff”, the oldest document dealing with the history of South Wales and the Marches, where it states that the church was given to that diocese in about 650.
Not surprisingly, the churchyard is oval in shape and raised, indicating that this may have been a sacred place for a long time before that. There is a possibility that megalithic stones may lie beneath the present church, which does not lie on an exact east-west axis. This may be because a stream of very pure water runs directly along the exact line of the apse, chancel and nave. This line aligns with the road running through the middle of the 6-acre medieval village to the east of the church. In addition, the many springs here would have made it an ideal sacred site.
Much dowsing has been done here, confirming these findings, and has also indicated the probability of a large Roman courtyard just outside the new churchyard to the North-east.
What is particularly interesting is that the dowsing work gets several mentions in the official guide book for the church, where much of this information comes from. The book also proudly describes [along with illustrations] the well-preserved sheela-na-gig on the outer side of the apse. Several of the carvings were destroyed by a Victorian lady because the caused her offence. Since she did not destroy the sheela-na-gig, one can only speculate what these other carvings depicted! Green men are in abundance. There is a very old stoup under the chancel arch which represents hands around a pregnant belly, this is believed to be much older that the church, possibly pre-Saxon.
I think that any dowser who visits this area would find a visit to Kilpeck richly rewarding.
If, like me, you are of a totalitarian disposition, you ponder the big issues all the time, looking for streamlined scientific solutions in all avenues of life. The judicious application of mathematics and social engineering, that's all it takes.
How mass vegetarianism might be achieved, for example, without widespread damage to butchers?
An excellent way with butchers, because they're not sensitive, by definition, is to go down just before the market closes on a Wednesday afternoon and beat them down on price.
"What's your best offer on a pound of dolphinburgers?" you demand.
"I'm not a fish-monger," he says.
"Mmm. Well, leaving that aside, what's the best you can do me on a pound of Gloucester old spot sausages?"
He names some price.
"Come come," I say, "there are no fixed values in Capitalism. You can do better than that."
He's full of grievances, of course. About health and safety, and the Common Market, and the big supermarkets, and some fancy French marketeers who were recently invited into town on preferential rates.
"Never mind all that," I continue. "You're closing in half an hour. Do me a decent price on a pound of sausages."
The trick is to get in the way of his other customers and show him up generally as a petit bourgeois.
Eventually he straightens up in his blood-spattered blood-soaked apron and tells me where to park my carcass.
"Just joshing! Can't you take a joke?" I say. "No sense of humour, some people!"
And off you go, the ritual satisfied, and with a good feeling about having achieved three things:
A healthy walk into town and back. A nice argument to raise the spirits and activate the liver. A further step towards giving up red meat altogether.
You can apply a similar technique at the local Healing Centre.
You just stand there in the scented smoke and the whale-song aura and brow beat them.
"Turn off that dolphin muzak, won't you, it's giving me such a head-ache. Come on, come on, everybody's Reiki Level Two. Next-door's cat is level one and, like Mrs Beckham, he's never finished a book in his life. Come on, you can do better than that!"
They may look a bit floral and spaced out, these people, but I think they came up in a hard school, of the sort provided by parents who have lots of money; big, wonky ideas about society; and never enough victuals in the fridge when little mouths are hungry.
Far more rapidly than the butcher they divine that their leg is being pulled. And they don't like it. Out comes the yard-broom and, serenely chanting a mantra to aid space-clearing, they bundle me down the stairs to the street.
Once again, you've had a stimulating morning, some interesting conversation, a good laugh and a bit of a pipe-opener. The self-healing process has begun.
In Autumn, it's hard not to mope around. Once the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe has been run in early October, the aches and pains begin.
I seldom wake without pain in some part of my body. How do the jump jockeys get by, falling off galloping horses all winter? Fit as fleas, they are.
For myself, I can no longer remember leaping carelessly out of bed of a morning. I can no longer remember my youth.
Nostalgia is an ache too. One is always remembering a better time, which may never have existed, when things were done properly.
How darkly agreeable to put on a Compact Disc in which a classically trained singer murders some popular songs and think, yes, for all his success in the realm of Mozart, he hasn't a clue about this material.
Hear how he bellows through Some Enchanted Evening, putting the emphases in all the wrong places, turning it into something ominous and Wagnerian.
Hear how he misses the light humour of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'! Perhaps he shouldn't have attempted the American accent.
Can he bludgeon Rodgers and Hammerstein to the canvas in this fifteen-¬round contest, or will their material somehow survive his attentions?
Now he's moved on to Edelweiss. Oh dear. The delicacy and restraint in the falsetto baritone seems to bulk behind the song like a battleship. A bull in a china shop, if ever there was.
Then, of course, the blighter gets If I: Loved You absolutely spot-on and the listener is reduced to blubbering tears as he sits in his study apportioning alms for the Injured Dowsers Benevolent Fund.
I'm seriously thinking about allowing financial assistance to those suffering from nostalgia.
Of course the IDBF is used to seeing dowsers who have fallen down the side of an iron-age hill fort not looking where they were going, and tiding them over.
Our files are crammed with more senior members who have been eclipsed on a five-bar gate or who have underestimated the effectiveness of modern ¬day barbed wire (not the gently rusting candy-floss of their youth).
But these are mere physical injuries. Nostalgia is something else.
When dowsers tramp across miles of fields to an ancient long barrow, they are unquestionably showing an interest in the past.
But, in that moment, how much are they rejecting the modern-day? Are they not trying to break the spell of our times, and make a better place for the mind to dwell, if only for a day?
But, you know, when you stand next to a long barrow, it's such a streamlined thing. It's such a labour-intensive status symbol, dream object. It's such a cutting-edge piece of technology for transporting you to ancestral heaven.
In fact, of its time, it's horribly modern.
The nostalgics of the Bronze Age wouldn't have been found dead at Stoney Littleton or West Kennett. They'd have been out on the road somewhere, heading for the coast and easy pickings, catching pigeons, singing the old songs of the hunter-gatherer.
Temple building? Not cool. Too butch. Too controlling.
All you need is Nature's bounty and the changing year.
The weather vane at Lord's cricket ground has Father Time stooping over the stumps. His hour-glass and his scythe decorate his long, skeletal, cloaked and bearded form. He is a silhouette, as black as your hat.
Is the bail between his bony fingers going down on to the stumps to signal the start of play, or is he lifting it up? Is the game over?
You can measure out an existence in cricket matches, and in the lives of the horses and dogs that keep you company down the road.
And you no more know than they do, if the game is ending, or about to begin.
Grey Wolf
The life and times of Wilhelm Reich
What do we remember about the 1950’s? The BOMB, Elvis Presley, Orgone Energy? Well perhaps not many are familiar with orgone energy and its discoverer Wilhelm Reich. In the following article I hope to introduce you to him and to his work with what he called orgone energy.
Reich died in a USA prison in 1957. His work had been suppressed and his books burnt. (Yes burnt, and remember this is 1950s America, not 1930s Germany or Medieval Europe.) Mind you he had fallen out with the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) so I suppose it’s surprising that he wasn’t just shot out of hand.
He also experimented with cloud busting techniques which may have been the main reason for his downfall. For those that don’t know the 1950’s saw experiments in the USA and Britain in cloud busting (also known as rain making). One of the more extreme conspiracy theories doing the rounds at one time suggested that rain making experiments carried out by the USA caused a drought in China which resulted in wide spread famine and the death of millions of people.
Judging by the troubles he encountered during his life I suspect that Reich was rather a difficult person to deal with.
Biography of Reich
Reich was born in Austria in 1897 into a well-to-do-family. This stable environment was shattered by the suicide of his mother after the 12-year old Reich discovered she was having an illicit affair and informed his father. A few years later, Reich's father apparently also took his own life in bizarre circumstances.
After a short period in the army Reich moved to Vienna to study medicine where he became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society led by Freud.
He soon started to develop his own ideas which led to the souring of his relationship with Freud. He joined the communist party and related his ideas of ‘Orgiastic Potency’ class struggle of ‘Sex-Economy’ and sought to free the proletariat from the straightjacket of sexual statis through the Marxist concept of ‘abolition of the family’.
In the early 30’s Reich moved to Berlin where he came under increasing attack from the Nazis, the Socialists and The Psychoanalytical Movement. After being excluded from the International Psychoanalytic Association he moved to Oslo in 1933 and then in 1939 to the USA.
Reich died of a heart attack on November 3rd 1957. He was in jail serving a criminal contempt of court charge for disobeying an injunction.
Orgone Energy and Cloud Busting
Using a high quality microscope Reich observed that under high magnification it could be seen that luminous blue/green globules are released by decaying food. He described these as some form of biological ether. He likened these globules to Bions which were named and researched by H. Charlton Bastian, a contemporary of Louis Pasteur.
Reich, pleased with the rediscovery of bions found that a side effect of observing occurred. His eyes started to burn and caused a form of Conjunctivitis along with tanning of the skin. He tried numerous methods to shield, protect and contain the bions and by 1940 he had constructed his first 'accumulator'. This consisted of a six-sided box which was then insulated alternately with organic and inorganic substances (glass wool, steel wool, upson board and galvanised sheet iron).
Reich claimed that the particles he could see in the microscope were actually an unidentified energy or radiation form which in turn caused the conjunctivitis and tanning. Reich named this energy 'Orgone'
Amongst his findings Reich found that unlike most energy forms where potentials flow from higher-to-lower, with Orgone it was the reverse. He argued that the greatest concentrations of Orgone were to be found in water. Eventually, Reich built accumulators big enough to sit in and it was claimed to have noticeable healing results in the cure of mental disorders and cancer. These became known as 'Orgone accumulators' and were later advertised and sold to the public. This is when the USA government started to investigate Reich's claims. They believed the claims that were made about its ability to cure the ill were unfounded.
In 1948 Reich founded the 'Orgone Institute' at Rangeley, Maine, USA. It was here that the experiments with orgone energy and electromagnetism were carried out and discussed in the 1951 publication, 'The Oranur Experiment'.
As experiments were being carried out, it is reputed that menacing clouds formed above the institute, lab workers and visitors became sick and it was said that the general area felt oppressive, with an impending sense of doom. Even trees and shrubs were reported to have blackened and died. It was then that Reich maintained that he had started to produce what he called 'DOR'. (Deadly Orgone Radiation).
'OR' (Orgone Radiation) was believed by Reich to be a life giving process, DOR was the reverse which is why people fell ill and plants died. Reich then decided that he needed to clear the air of DOR by producing OR to cancel out the effects.
It was at this point Reich invented what would be known as a 'Cloud Buster'. This was a series of aluminium pipes/tubes of different lengths which sat on a revolving platform. From the tubes came an earthing cable which led to water. When pointed at the sky, it is claimed that clouds could be dispersed or formed.
Many of Reich's published materials were burned on two occasions between 1957-1960 by the United States F.D.A.
If you are interested in following up Reich’s career and ideas here are a few web sites that you might find interesting. Health warning – reading about Reich, his life and his work may change the way you feel about democracy and the way it works.
forums.cloud-busters.com.. This group is for the purpose of discussing all aspects of building and using the classic orgonite Cloud Buster (CB), also known as a ChemBuster, as well as other similar orgone producing technologies.
www.orgone.org.. Public Orgonomic Research Exchange (PORE). Orgone Energy. A place to share orgone energy information, research, articles, discussion, and other topics in Orgonomy. Orgonomy is a science created and developed by Wilhelm Reich.
www.orgonelab.org.. Orgone Biophysical Research Lab: Orgonomy and Wilhelm Reich
www.orgonomy.org.. Orgonomy - The American College of Orgonomy is a non-profit educational and scientific organization devoted to setting and maintaining standards for work in the field of orgonomy. Medical orgone therapy has proven to be effective in the treatment of a wide range of emotional and physical illnesses.
ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/selfheal/reich.htm.. Reichian Stuff.
all-ez.com/science.htm.. Mad Scientist's Strange Theories and Zany Gadgets! Details efforts to develop free energy sources, and motors that require no fuel, to prepare for the new millennium, and its exciting new scientific discoveries.
www.amasci.com/weird/const.html.. Not your average construction project.
www.eskimo.com/~billb/weird/wlists.html.. Free Energy antigravity physics cold fusion overunity.
www.mystical-www.co.uk/reich.htm.. Wilhelm Reich and Orgone Energy.
Next month I’ll write a bit more about Orgone energy and Accumulators.
Sill Hilbury
The car-park at Mere was the meeting point for the September field trip. Frome the car-park it was a short walk up through the small town to Mere Castle. The climb up to the top of the hill is well worth the effort for the magnificent view, quite apart from the historical interest. We were accompanied by Isobel Geddes, the local geologist, who lives in the area, and she brought geological maps showing the Mere Fault which we were attempting to dowse through the town. Isobel gave the society a fascinating talk on the geology of Wiltshire some time ago, and was happy to come along to give us some info. on the fault-line. Geological information can be very useful when dowsing as it can give answers to a lot of the anomalies.
After the rigours of the castle it was time for lunch then a trip to Mere church, still tracing the fault-line. After the church Isobel took us up to an old chalk-face to show the fossilised ammonites and other creatures which were the basis of what we now know as chalk. The last part of the trip was up to Whitesheet Hill, with its Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age earthworks. This part of the trip was unfortunately shorter than planned, due to the rapid deterioration of the weather – not a good place to be in storms as it is very exposed. However the weather was great for most of the day so we can’t complain.
Jim Lyons was the speaker for the September meeting. The topic was Understanding Ancient Sites, and was largely about sacred geometry. Jim used slides to show the geometric properties of numerous ancient sites, and showed that many of the properties were common to many sites in spite of huge distances between some of them. Many of these ancient sites are situated on places where there is known to be frequent seismic activity, many being on or near fault-lines. He also discussed the findings of several researchers who have been measuring the acoustic properties of chambered tombs, stone circles, etc., and how they all resonate at the same frequency. Jim has dowsed at many of these places and discussed some of the work he has done with Billy Gawn, in Ireland and other places.
Jim has a fund of very technical knowledge, but was able to explain things in a way that even I could understand! Thanks to Jim for a fascinating and educational evening.
Below are extracts from a letter recently received from a new member who, due to living some distance from Purton, is unable to attend many of the meetings. If any members are able to answer his queries, or have the “Sun and Serpent” maps they would be willing to show him, perhaps they would let me know and I will pass on the info. [Sib Cole]
………A more active interest in dowsing has been generated by the two visits of the society to Bradford on Avon with “Singing Round the Town” and by a talk by Shaun Ogbourne to the Crop Circle Study Group.
Two years ago I read Hamish Miller’s book “The Sun And The Serpent”. Absolutely fascinating! I’ve tried to get hold of the maps but they are no longer available. So, as a result of Shaun’s talk, I thought I would try to map-dowse them myself. I have the OS 1/50,000 maps from Land’s End as far as east of Oxford. I’ve plotted the lines from Avebury to the eastern extent of my maps and am now working back from Avebury and am now at the south side of Dartmoor. On the way I’ve found two areas where the lines were re-arranging themselves but where one of them had settled down enough for me to continue.
The most amazing aspect to emerge during this work is that the lines seem to be a constant record of Michael and Mary dancing together. This may sound daft, but is the very strong impression I get from looking at the lines after I’ve plotted them. They cross, they approach each other and seem to bow to each other and then retreat as one would in Scottish or country dancing.
There’s nothing static about the lines.
My second Question is whether I can be put in touch with other members of the society who have map-dowsed the lines or whether you know of any published work on this topic.
I look forward to hearing from you. My greetings to all the other members of the society.
Tony Boult.