Paul Devereux speaking at the Rollright Stones, February 5th 2000
Part 2. Misunderstood Sites and the Ancient Mind
Audio for Part 2 is missing, sorry
You
mentioned how hazy the whole ley-line subject is and indeed it is, it's a terrible mess.
But I do have a book out, a very big book [laughter] that thoroughly correlates all the
stuff on all this and brings up to date the very latest thinking and findings on that
subject. Because it actually is a valid part of...an element that has come out of the ley
hunting is very important with regard to ritual landscapes. sacred landscapes; it links
very heavily to ideas of ghost lores and spirit beliefs in the past. And the monuments to
the spirit lore, these can still be found in the landscape to this day.
We have tried to correlate that stuff and it's a perfectly valid part of archaeological enquiry. It has got nothing to do with the popular view of leys: energy lines from all directions that you read about. There's a total schizophrenia on the subject and it's largely due...the problem has arisen really from hacks, basically, recycling stuff from 1972. From before, even, the Dragon Project. It just goes round and round and I'm old enough to have seen it come round three or four times. The actual research base, and what is false about that information, never really gets discussed. People want the buzz, they don't want the facts. So there's that element - that's the hazy part of it.
But a line of enquiry has come out of the ley hunting field and was originated by that, that now fits in very well with aspects of cognitive archaeology and so on. It's a perfectly valid and very intriguing area. Ideas like you've talked about, folklore that was first ways through the landscape...we did something similar in Cornwall where you have legends of giants throwing rocks at one another across the landscape. These are actually routes through the landscape, you can actually plot them. There are song lines in merry England, just as there are in aboriginal Australia, and in some cases it is just possible to re-map some of those song lines. And there are death roads and spirit ways and ghost paths, all of which are a complex - it's not been teased out yet - it is a complex of, if you like, a mythological veneer over the physical landscape.
You've got to remember whenever you come to a site like this, to a stone circle or standing stone, it is standing in a different map of that landscape. It may be there physically with it, but the people who built it had a completely different mapping system - cognition - of that landscape. They didn't think of boundaries; they thought of ways through. They actually believed that there were spirits in the air around them, moving. Structures were built to deal with these perceptions. I make no judgement one way or the other about whether they were actually perceiving something or whether we're right to have empty space in our landscape, or whether perhaps all of us are wrong and there's something else. But they did see the world around them in a different way. So these things - we may all be sharing the same space, but we're not sharing the same mind-set and the same perceptions. These are like fragments of broken dreams. You wake up and you remember a bit of a dream, you can't remember it all...that's what prehistoric sites are. They come out of the unconscious, they come out of prehistory - it's the same thing.
THE
ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
Places of Power - Paul Devereux
