Large stones, and stones in formations have been venerated for thousands of years. I posted an article here 7/21/2006 entitled Mysteries in Stone, ignored or unsolved. You may like to check that one too.

Computers are now being used to sort out the significance of the patterns in ancient stone monuments, and because of this we are now achieving new insights into the ways in which Man used to be in touch with his universe. It seems likely that in Man's early days, great single, and isolated stones were worshipped as gods.

I had better say right now, before getting complaints from people who don’t know my views about women, that when I say Man I'm writing according to the literary conventions of English, and it is short for Mankind, which is short for Humankind, which includes women, and that when I say ‘gods’ I use it in the standard metaphysical sense as divinities, which includes goddesses.

It is hard for a city dweller who lives in a concrete jungle to appreciate the effect of coming across a huge boulder in a forest or plain, with no other boulders in sight.

This happened to me in Northern Canada after trekking through miles of dark coniferous forest with no trail, very dim light, and only a compass to guide me.

Quite suddenly I came across a clearing. The light was dazzling after the miles of gloom, and it splashed down in a circle. Standing in the middle of that circle was a huge glacial boulder the size of a fire truck and naturally shaped like a recumbent wolf.

Writing these words brings back the shock. The impression of great power, waiting for some signal before moving into action was immediate, and very intense.

The Black Stone in the Kaaba at Mecca was sacred in its own right as a meteorite—a gift from heaven—before the added significance given to it by the religion of Islam.

The rock on which Jacob slept while he had his famous dream is supposed by many to be the Stone of Scone—the stone which is part of the British ritual of coronation of the monarch.

The Anglo Saxons crowned their kings on a sacred stone by the river Thames. The town still bears the name Kingston upon Thames.

It is probable according to anthropologists, that the stage of worshipping the stone as god was followed by the consideration that the god is not the stone, but lives in it.

This has been true in many cultures, and the next stage has been the concept that the stone can be used to focus the divine energies, or to cause divine associations to become manifest. Lots of New Agers are at this stage when they work with their crystals.

Delphi was considered sacred because Zeus marked it as the center of the world with the navel stone—the omphalos.

The idea of the altar stone as the place where divinities were best invoked is a common one in many religions. Throwing a stone on the cairn as an offering to the local spirit or god of the mountain path is a widespread tradition.
The association of spirits with stones may be the origin of the rows of tombstones in cemeteries.

Marie Louise von Franz is a Jungian psychologist who believes that the original tombstones , especially those of Germanic tribes, were places where the spirit of the dead could dwell. The association of eternity with the durability of rocks is a more obvious connection, but to think that funeral directors, even today, are providing—usually at gross expense—a stone domicile for the spirit of the departed shows how tenacious the old ideas are, however disguised by modern flummery.

Flint, of course holds a special place in ancient memories because it was the stone that could generate fire.

Search your childhood memories and you will be able to recall, even in the current artificial environment, how important a stone, or stones were to you at some time. It is my custom to carry a dozen or so polished stones of various kinds with me whenever I go out. Everyone who helps me as a clerk or a waitress or whatever is asked to choose themselves a 'rock' from my handful.

The person concerned often agonizes over which of the beautiful stones to choose. I have met people in restaurants who come up to me and say, "I've still got that rock you gave me three years ago when I worked at X" People naturally value a gift of a pretty polished stone without an agenda attached.

I remember how the last boat of the fishing fleet out of the harbor on the Isle of Man, always had a piece of coal on board to ward off bad luck. The Blarney stone is well known to a huge proportion of Celtic immigrants to this country.

And maybe Arthur C. Clarke, in his 2001 A.D. really stumbled on an archetypal truth when he had the original teachers of the human race work through the agency of great stones, with complex electrical properties programmed into them.

This reminds me of a story told me on e-mail by Mark Roberts, the man who has investigated the Pleiades connection in 98 countries, who has discovered the ancient Ogham writings in far off places, who took part in the Camelot dig, and is currently the Merlin of Avalon.

He was investigating the legend of the Tuatha de Danaan, the original inhabitants of Ireland. He went to the place where they were supposed to have been searching for the treasure of Ireland. and found it just about inaccessible.

The locals were sympathetic when they heard of his quest and gave Irish advice. While wandering around the area he picked up a piece of quartz crystal.

When he got back to the States he was in his TV station, where he worked as a producer. One of the technical staff asked him about his expedition and he confessed that it was quite unsuccessful. "All I got out of it was this crystal."

The technician took the crystal and his eyes bugged a little. Then, complaining about the technical ignorance of the production staff he took Mark into the heart of the transmission area. " See this transmission equipment." was the tenor of his comment. "It all depends entirely on the accuracy of the vibratory rates of slices from quartz crystals. And none of them here in this equipment is the quality of the one you found."

Maybe he had found a sample of the ancient treasure of Ireland after all. And it was a stone.

But how about the many ancient arrangements of stones. Why did the ancient ones put up long lines of stones like those in Brittany, or circles, like that at Stonehenge?

And what of the well documented occult tradition that the older cathedrals of Europe, and abbeys like Glastonbury, and chapels like Rosslyn, contain secrets, written, as it were, in the very proportions of the stones. Recent research at this famous chapel has revealed a possible system of writing music in the carvings of the stones. And it is very interesting music. The amount of material about these matters has filled hundreds of books since the '20's.

Consider Glastonbury abbey, the first Christian church built in Britain. The tradition says that St. Philip sent 12 missionaries to Britain, among them Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph, 'tis said, stuck his thornwood staff in the ground on the proposed site of the abbey, and the staff sprouted. From this staff a cutting was taken and became the ancestor of the Glastonbury Thorn that is still there, and blooms at Easter and Christmas, strangely enough.

This site was already sacred to the Celts and was the traditional burial place of King Arthur the Pendragon and his fey Queen Gwynhwyfar, and was also associated with the Holy Grail. Remember that Arthur pulled his first sword from the Stone of Sovereignty outside Westminster Abbey, and was loaned the unbreakable Faery sword Excalibur when he broke the first sword in a battle.

Willliam of Malmesbury, in the 12th century, wrote that the pavement of Glastonbury was inlaid with triangles and squares that seemed to have some significance.

In 1921, Frederick Bligh Bond was the architect in charge of maintenance at Glastonbury. He it was who unearthed the original Celtic church beneath the abbey, a few yards from where mediaeval monks claimed that Arthur was buried. That made him famous.

But then he made public a message that he had received from a monk, through a medium, that the abbey was a message in stone, and that the floor of the Mary Chapel was the Zodiac.

The abbey had burned down in 1184, so there was no archaeological evidence remaining of Bligh's assertion. Since his employer was the Church of England, and since going to a medium was the practice of witchcraft under the Witchcraft Act, Bligh was fired.

For the sake of some members of the Sacred Grove of Cerridwen who I know read these articles I will mention another matter known to very few.

Bligh died in 1945 and was buried in the cemetery of St. Illtyd's Church in N.Wales. This church used to be served by a very old Cistercian abbey. The Cistercians are connected, as those members will know, with the Grail stories, and the Mithraic reincarnation of soldier mystics who became the Templars.

Two miners, sheltering from a mountain storm at the beginning of this century found a chalice and a plate, hidden by monks of the abbey centuries before—the chalice of Nannau; some say Grail.

That's one thing. Another is that Bligh founded a Mystery School at Glastonbury called The Order of Brigid. One of the members was William Sharpe, who became famous for his books on the Celtic Christian mysteries, written under the name of Fiona Mc Leod. Forgive this little aside. It is important to some people who I know read this blog.

Back to the 20's. A Mrs. K. Maltwood noticed that the artificial banks and ditches in the area near Glastonbury are combined with natural features to give models of the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

Aerial photography was becoming popular then and confirmed her astonishing hypothesis which was then strengthened by the discovery of some previously unknown documents from Dr. Dee, the chief magician and scholar at the court of Elizabeth 1st.

He visited Glastonbury in 1580 and noticed the prehistoric earthworks there. Being Dr. Dee he made a map of them and noted that they were laid out in the pattern of the Zodiac. He also said that this showed that the ancients understood at least as much astronomy and astrology as the scholars of Elizabethean times. The scholars of the present time are more arrogantand ignorant.

It should be pretty clear that the people who knew the science and mathematics needed for aligning earthworks with celestial bodies were not all ignorant barbarians. Not many graduates of modern universities would have a clue how to start doing it.

And now we know that Glastonbury and its Zodiac were not unique. Stonehenge was studied by Professor Hawkins of Boston. He used the then state-of-the-art IBM computer to study the 27,060 possible alignments of its stones with celestial bodies.

The results were amazing. Stonehenge can be used as a calculating device to predict eclipses and the 12 extreme positions of the sun and moon respectively. It also seemed that the builders knew something about the magnetic properties of the Earth.

The mathematics involved in doing this in 1500 B.C. when Stonehenge was supposed to have been erected, is not the mathematics of primitive people. Moreover, some of the stones were brought many miles from a quarry in North Wales.

Enter Professor Thom. He retired from his profession as an engineer and applied his mathematics and insights to the matter of stone circles, megaliths, and mining.

Don't forget that Wales was once famous for its tin and its gold, and these 'so primitive' people had the engineering capacity to mine ore 150 feet below the mountains in Wales.

One of Professor Thom's discoveries was an ancient unit of measure that he called the megalithic yard. In modern terms it is 2.72 feet, and seems to have been a standard measure of the British circles, the Glastonbury squares of Bligh, Stonhenge and the Great Pyramids.

Another, and to me more astonishing find was in the very ancient stone circle at Moel Ty Uchaf in North Wales where he was able to show that the builders used the geometry of the pentagon a thousand years before the Greek geometers found how to construct one, using Plato's rules.

The theory that holds all such investigations together, and includes the great cathedrals in France initiated by the Templars, is that the mathematics of the constructions was such that any special earth energy on the site was focussed into a small area. The buildings and constructions were designed to focus both solar and terrestrial energies.

And lastly, Alfred Watkins. He was an experienced surveyor in Britain. As he went riding on his rounds one day he looked down at the familiar countryside and suddenly became able to see straight lines of white light joining certain places together.

He went to his map room instead of to a doctor, and found that the lines corresponded with pre-Roman tracks that moved in dead straight lines irrespective of obstacles. He investigated further with his new-found ability, and called the lines 'ley' lines. This was because so many of the places joined together by these lines had names ending in -ley, -ly, or -leigh.

Since then many psychics have encountered such lines in ancient sacred places, such as Mt. Shasta, Findhorn, the Brittany stones and of course, the usual suspects. It certainly looks as though Watkins had stumbled on a visible map of the invisible meridians of the acupuncture points of Gaia.

That marvellous book The Temple in Man by R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, deals with his discovery that the temples of ancient Egypt are lessons in physical and spiritual anatomy. This was already known about the cathedrals of Europe because of the book by Fulcanelli, the alchemist.

No wonder the ancient Greeks went to Egypt for wisdom. They had to read the books of stone.

It seems then, that long ago, people established their lives, and worship, and technology, so that they were an integral part of the universe. They consciously placed themselves, or their important artitfacts at places where the energy of Planet Earth could help the matters they had in mind. How different are we who cannot even climb a mountain, but have to conquer it.

Instead of finding the harmonies of the universe and ensuring that the music of our lives will not be discordant with the main theme, we just destroy, pollute, and wage wars— economic, political, and environmental—on our own mother, the Earth.

Verily, as a great Master said, we are getting our reward.
We, in Dar' Shem and Reiki, and other disciplines of the Ministry of Sophia and the Grove, know that those ancient builders were our spiritual ancestors. We know we have strong connections with helpers from a far distant past.

Most of us have become increasingly aware of the acceleration in the elevation of consciousness that is occurring in humanity. We see how the gap in awareness between the materialists who seem to be in power, and those of a more extended consciousness, is increasing every day. We progress. They don't.

It is going to be easier for us to master the material realm than for them to access our spiritual realm, because we KNOW that life is lived from the inside out. We know that if we change our mind we change our world. They still think that it is circumstances that have the power.

With every discovery in the realms of quantum physics, energy bodies, and the new discoveries about the origins of religions their uncertainty grows, and ours diminishes. Nowadays it’s possible for a movie or a book called The Secret to have popular appeal.

Maybe it's time to claim our old world back so that the kind of thing I have written about in this article is commonplace, and known to all, like the current worthless diet of sit coms and court cases involving celebrities, that is deliberately designed to divert attention from things that really matter.

Think about it. If all those who could do so just spent time daily knowing that everyone is becoming more aware of the invisible, it would happen. All we need is a critical mass, then the world would change without anything else being needed.

The others have spent centuries trying to crush those who knew better, and they haven't succeeded in spite of having ALL the money, ALL the armies, and ALL the material power. Doesn't that give you an indication of which group has the real strength? They have the expensive watches. We have the time.

It's time for us who can live to some extent in both worlds to realize that the power is with us. A revolution in consciousness is already occurring all over the world. Let's use our gifts from many incarnations to help it along for the good of those, who like us, are on the side of Spirit, Love, Healing, and of Gaia, our Mother. Blessings, Douglas