Mrs Maltwood looked with a geomancer's eye at the Somerset plains and understood in a flash the secret of the zodiacal giants hidden in the landscape.
Alfred Watkins, envisioned on the Bredwardine hills, perceived the veins and arteries standing out clear against the Hertfordshire fields. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson and many others sought the vital spots to penetrate the layers of time that cover the face of the country. The feeling they shared was of some forgotten secret.
They glimpsed a remote golden age of science, poetry and religion in which the vast works they saw in the landscape were accomplished.
Each of these English visionaries knew that what he saw was but a fraction of the great mystery, the key to which had been lost.
Britain, they felt, was the holy land under enchantment.
At the castle of the Grail King certain things must be asked before the spell is broken, so must the right question be found to lift the veil that hides the form and spirit in the landscape.
From The View Over Atlantis - by John Michell, 1969.
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John Michell was probably the most influential 'New Age' thinker in Britain over the past 50 years - it is his (evolving) synthesis which forms the basis of most work since. The basis for his ideas, the 'evidence', was numerology and geometry - and I personally find this dull and unconvincing; but when he simply wrote from his intuition and love of England he could be genuinely inspired and inspiring.
1 comment:
Absolutely. His 'Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist', a compilation of his pieces for The Oldie, shows him at his visionary best. A much missed presence.
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