Glastonbury: A Place apart

Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart/ Isle of Apples

Like many people I have long had an awareness of Glastonbury, which in my case predates the annual (or is it biannual now?) music festival held by Michael Eavis on his farmlands. Indeed if we momentarily glance towards that festival, its strangeness when compared to the plethora of festivals now staged in these islands, is immediately apparent: this uniqueness, I would suggest, stems not only from the creative talents of the artists involved, but also from the place where it is situated; a sacred place the holiness of which has been recognised by its inhabitants for thousands of years; a place identified with Arthur and the Grail Quest; a place where even the topographical features shout out the hermetic maxim “As Above, So Below”. 

The long journey, temporally that is, which resulted in my wife and I standing on the summit of Glastonbury Tor, began some years ago, over the weekend of my First Stage Reiki attunement. On the Saturday evening I returned home, literally spaced out from the energies I had experienced during the attunement, and lay down on our sofa for a few moments. I had no sooner closed my eyes when I was immersed in a vivid vision of what I recognised as Glastonbury Tor; this seemed to last for quite a while before it subsided and I came back to something approximating my senses! I immediately commented on this to my wife and we both agreed that Glastonbury obviously was a place of significance for us, and that we should arrange to go on a pilgrimage there in the near future. Life however, as it has a habit of doing, intervened (or perhaps the time wasn’t quite right) whichever, it took us a few years to actually make our way there.

The Holiest Earth in England

When we did the journey was one filled with high anticipation; our spirits weren’t even dampened by the torrential rain which greeted us in Bristol, and which accompanied us on the coach journey through Wells to Glastonbury. However, as we arrived and turned onto the top of Glastonbury High Street, the rain ceased and the sun illuminated the town – a very auspicious portent: the sun stayed with us for our entire visit. The favourable omens continued when we sat down for lunch and started to browse a local free sheet, which included details of upcoming events in the town. We were staggered to discover that the author Paul Weston, who was probably my favourite esoteric author at that time, was giving a talk the next night, 20 yards from our B&B on Jose Arquelles, Quetzalcoatl and the path to 2012. [I highly recommend Weston’s work – a mix of esoteric history, popular culture and personal experience which resonates with me partly because we are the same age and seem to have a catalogue of similar interests and because of his limpid writing style; the book I had just finished before leaving for Glastonbury was his Avalonian Aeon: A Personal Occult Odyssey which is focussed on Glastonbury – a good place to start would be his book Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus.] Needless to say we attended the talk which was fascinating – as was the atmosphere in the room: spirits teasing; the aural becoming aura; and the heaviness of  (k)now.

Goddess Dances in the Abbey Grounds

For me one of the leading practitioners and commentators on the Western Esoteric Tradition, along with the often maligned (usually from ignorance, seldom from good reason) Aleister Crowley, is Dion Fortune. Fortune lived in Glastonbury, beside the Chalice Well, between the Wars and wrote extensively about its mystical significance. Here is a short extract from her introduction to Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart.

There are many different roads leading to our English Jerusalem, ‘the holiest erthe in Englande’.We can approach it by the high-road of history […] or we can come to [it] by the upland path of legend.[…] There ia a third way to Glastonbury, one of the secret Green Roads of the soul – the Mystic Way that leads through the Hidden Door into a land known only to the eye of vision. This is Avalon of the Heart to those who love her.

For the threshold pilgrim, this is an excellent supplement to the more common or garden travel guides; helping you along the mystic way and pointing towards the threshold experiences, which are to be found in abundance. 

Next time in Glastonbury: A Place Apart 2 – thresholds aplenty: Tor, Well, Thorn and Zodiac.

Water thresholds1: Holy Wells

Ladywell: Glasgow

At the foot of the imposing mound on which sits the City of the Dead, we finally discovered Glasgow’s Ladywell. Nestled between the lower reaches of the Necropolis and the modern equivalent of a dark satanic mill, seemingly cast out by its location, but yet most obviously significant by its presence/ atmosphere. We had fruitlessly tried to locate it during one of our previous visits; this time armed with information gleaned from Google Earth, we would not be denied. The clouds, which just moments previously had threatened a significant level of precipitation, were cast aside by the Sunny boy keen to get into the act.

It is no accident that the well is located at the end of one of the oldest streets in Glasgow; that is the reason why the street is one of the earliest to be trodden by our ancestors  when it was no more than a track – and so, no doubt, the story goes in all of the oldest settlements on these islands. The head of the well has been capped for years, but there is no mistaking the feeling of power emanating from the depths; biding its time – Nature will return to all such places, to restore the essential flow and to re-set the balance.

Water – one of the four alchemical elements, from which primordial ooze our ancestors spilled forth onto the Earth: making an elemental connection overwhelming in its significance. And yet an arching back to the water, a short circuit of evolution, producing Undines, Mermaids, Mermen. 

Come away, O human child!/ To the waters and the wild/ With a faery hand in hand/ For the world’s more full of weeping/ Than you can understand.

                                   W.B. Yeats: The Stolen Child

[As an aside - check out The Waterboys version of Yeats's poem here: The Waterboys: The Stolen Child

Yes! The Waterboys (no accidental name) with chief diviner Mike Scott channelling W.B.Yeats and dowsing deep into the heart spring to which we are all connected; linking to the fixed stars which govern all our lives; focussed on the Water signs: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces.] 

By our very dependence on alchemical H2O, we are unwittingly ruled by the Early European Bird and Snake Goddess who rules over the life giving force of water; symbolically everywhere on ancient pot and wall, her eyes burn forth from the deep centre of the world: the perfect sphere with a mythical stream of water issuing from its heart spring.   The bicameral minds of our Celtic forbearers not only venerating the water of river, spring and well, but in direct and literal holy communion with them. The Thames a holy river – a Celtic Ganges given the name of the holy Egyptian goddess, our beloved Isis; clogged with votive offerings: swords, brooches and bodies. 

Once we danced naked on the banks of our rivers, by our wells and springs all holy, all connected, all one – no separation, the dead and the living alike. Celebrating our ancestors at holy head wells; the head, the temple of the soul, placed in the holiest of locations, in close proximity with life giving water. Life-giving and protecting, a deep source of healing and a connection to the underworld; but also, paradoxically separating the land of the living from the land of the dead by way of the River Styx.

Glasgow's City of the Dead

And then the rebranding of pagan holy sites ordered by Pope Gregory in 601 CE, leading to the “blessing” of pagan springs and wells and the  sprinkling of  droplets of “holy” water on the relatively vast oceanic springs and wells, on their deep holiness in homeopathic ritual and a re-wiring of the circuit to connect to the Christian Goddess, Earth Mother Mary. But the holiness remains, unmoved by the changing nomenclature, unchanged by the moving away from the three worlds by the majority. They have survived, they are maintained and they await any pilgrim shaman who wishes to re-connect to the past and the future. Seek them out, tread the pathways of your ancestors, re-vitalise both yourself and this world. Blessed be.