In Praise of the Genius Loci. Glastonbury World Heritage Site Musings. A History Mystic’s Perspective.

In the summer of 2024 immense contention arose in Glastonbury concerning the moving of a Madonna and Child statue in the Chalice Well gardens. One remarkable aspect of the situation was the extent to which it brought out a large number of deeply personal accounts of transformative experiences that would perhaps never have surfaced without that circumstance. By the end of the year, another contentious issue arose and it set me off on an interesting consideration that I could have had decades before but it waited for this strange stimulus. The material was already in my head. I’d written about it and presented some of it whilst tour guiding. Something about the current controversy switched it on to the max. It concerned the idea of Genius Loci. The initial stimulus brought forth some historical musings on the main issue as well and I shall begin there.

I’ve had many thoughts concerning the debate as to whether Glastonbury should try for World Heritage Site status but I resisted airing them at a recent public discussion as I didn’t want to take up too much time with what might be considered irrelevant. As a cycles of time history mystic there are a number of things that stand out very strongly to me about this issue.

2024 was only ten years before the five-hundredth anniversary of the start of the Dissolution of the Monasteries – 1534 -2034. Fifteen years to the five-hundredth anniversary of the state-sanctioned murder of the Glastonbury Three. I’ve already been talking to people about the need for extensive transmutational commemorations of this.

 

 

Jon Cousins, four-time Mayor of Glastonbury, wrote three pamphlets between 2007-10 on the 1539 trauma and its lingering effects on the life of the town. Remember Richard Whiting, What is Glastonbury? and Temple of Reconciliation. It’s a measure of the weird depths stirred by these works that the public launch of the third, back in December 2010, also became the night that the Holy Thorn on Wearyall Hill was decapitated to global publicity and widespread lamentation. The Temple of Reconciliation seemed a long way off. Jon has now positioned himself at the forefront of the impetus to investigate World Heritage status and I find that perplexing for reasons that will become apparent. I’ve talked with him in person about this.

One particular theme that he presented struck me as very important at my first reading and now seems even more so. The civic entity of modern Glastonbury came into being through various local families scavenging the Abbey and its holdings in a generally unscrupulous manner in which can be read all of the negative aspects of the broader emergence of western capitalism at that time. This was the shadow side of the Protestant work ethic. This process reached a culmination in 1705 when a Royal charter created a governing Corporation.

From this came a sidelining of the history of Glastonbury as sacred site pilgrimage centre. The town was in a state of profound material decline at the start of the nineteenth century but then things improved, Clarks, Morlands, and so on. At the point where what might be termed the inner rebirth of Glastonbury began, the Avalonians era of John Goodchild, Wellesley Tudor Pole, Frederick Bligh Bond, Alice Buckton, and Dion Fortune, the place would be characterised as an “industrious market town”. Jon Cousins has argued that a tension ran right through the twentieth century down to the present day, as those who represented and identified with the civic entity wanted to assert that the industrious market town was the true identity of this place and was how it should be presented to the world, and that the stirrings of the Avalonians, which ultimately led to the remarkable developments of the sixties and seventies, and to where we find ourselves today, were an eccentric aberration, a sideshow, sometimes to be tolerated, often to be decried.

 

 

One of the great masterpieces of English literature, the 1933 A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys, has this ongoing tension as a major plot dynamic. The simplest level of the narrative concerns the interplay of two contending forces. Phillip Crow, a powerful industrialist who despises the Glastonbury mythology, tries to effectively take over the town and turn it into a dark satanic mill. At the same time a religious revival had been initiated, focused by John Geard, a mystical preacher obsessed by the redemptive power of the blood of Christ but with a dark earthy side that hints at the pagan Merlin. He sets up a kind of Grail cult at the Chalice Well. The climax comes when a huge flood washes the works of both men away.

 

 

 

In the last few decades, it seems clear that the sacred site pilgrimage aspect of Glastonbury has become the centre of gravity here. We have a global profile to that effect. This was demonstrated very strongly during the 2022 Royal Jubilee. The BBC wanted to film the lighting of our Tor beacon a few minutes ahead of the synchronised nationwide event so as to rapidly edit it and place it at the very start of the TV coverage so that the Tor was the first image seen after the Queen set the thing in motion. It was not lost on many of us then that this was a nicely symbolic nuance evoking our Joseph of Arimathea mythos. The first church in England. The first beacon lit. A whole host of royal representatives, the Lord Lieutenant of Somerset, the High Sheriff of Somerset, sub-lieutenants, have demonstrated definite consistent attraction to our events here and they have been clear in communicating that it’s not just our history and mythology but the amazing modern blend of our town that draws them and leaves a profound good-feeling behind. We have triumphed and it has been a gradual organic triumph that has emerged as it were from within and, I would argue, from the very land itself.

John Cowper Powys made the landscape, history, and mythology of Glastonbury a character in his novel. The different elements cannot be separated. They constitute an elusive something that can interact with a person as strongly as a human character, stirring passion, idealism, madness, asceticism, horror, mysticism and eroticism in all possible combinations. He talked about “the invisible watchers of the Glastonbury aquarium” and characterised them as amoral and inscrutable.

This represents a Powysian restatement of the old Genius Loci idea, that of the presiding spirit, tutelary deity, or character and atmosphere of a place. Us mystical weirdos do feel that an inner plane dynamic has been at work here that sometimes sees that Genius Loci effecting a profound interface between landscape and psyche. This has demonstrated that the Glastonbury mystery can be considered to be alive, not a museum piece. I’ll provide some extensive diverse examples of what I think that means. They speak very strongly of what I have come to call Deep Glastonbury. This will eventually lead us back round to the World Heritage issue.

 

 

 

 

The psychic archaeological work of Frederick Bligh Bond has generated plenty of contention but how remarkable that the modern epoch of the Abbey begins with him in situ engaging in such practices and presenting to us the emotive concept of the Company of Avalon collective memory bank of the monks of old and the significance of sacred geometry. To Bond, a thousand years of devotion left a potent psychosphere in place that may be accessible to those of an appropriate temperament. What an astonishing way for the new chapter of the life of the Abbey to begin. Its mood has influenced so much of everything that a pilgrim visitor might experience ever since. Bond was a prepared vehicle. The ideal person for the job. I will present a number of similarly suitable types here.

 

 

 

The even more contentious Glastonbury Zodiac concept suggests something that has been present in the landscape since time immemorial that somehow became visible to us through the sensibilities of a remarkable artist mystic, Katharine Maltwood, thereby allowing us access to an archaic gnosis in the modern world. Mary Caine championed the concept during the seventies and eighties. I fully accept the total absence of any conventional history or archaeology to back this up but the concept has triggered some remarkable processes in a number of notable people.

 

 

 

 

And we have the disputed labyrinthine path around the Tor, our potential caer sidi spiral castle. This patterning became visible in the twentieth century, again thanks to a mystic, Geoffrey Russell, having been occluded for however long. Critics can say it isn’t an archaeological artefact if you like and I accept their reasoning  but it the path can be walked. It was Geoffrey Ashe, living at the foot of the Tor, who determined this by spending a long time in 1979 investigating it. A unique 3D form of the famous design on Glastonbury Tor of all places! Hardcore cynics will say stuff and nonsense about all of this but I find the time-release process on these ideas remarkable and how they relate to the landscape, suggesting something arising within it to communicate in a most extraordinary manner.

The deep power and mutability at work here through this landscape-psyche interface has been further demonstrated in this year’s remarkable Chalice Well drama. Firstly, the place in its current form bears little resemblance to how it would have looked a few thousand years ago. The best example of the continual change at work can be seen at the well-head area that has become the focus of seasonal meditational gatherings. The stone construction we think of as the well chamber, now beneath ground level, was once above it until gradual land subsidence from the Tor completely changed that. There was of course no distinction between the area of the Tor and the springs.

 

 

 

 

Once again, we have a visionary strongly involved in the modern form of the site. Wellesley Tudor Pole, of whom I had plenty to say in my The Occult Battle of Britain, secured the gardens as a charitable foundation. His nature mystic sensibilities infuse the place as does his distinctive Christianity. Alice Buckton had prepared the ground as it were with her own residency there. In 2024 we came to appreciate just how much the Ganesh Bhat Madonna and Child had become an integral part of what the place, the sacred site, uniquely communicates.

 

 

The White Spring, or mystery cult grotto as I tend to think of it, has come into being from the shell of a short-lived nineteenth century water pumping station created in the midst of a typhoid outbreak. It was a considerably unpopular venture, messing with possible archaeology and the general natural beauty of the locale. It has now been astonishingly repurposed and emanates a unique potency. In its current form, it has barely existed for a few decades but feels like an ancient part of the landscape. How did that happen? Through the inspiration and hard work of people who were clearly deeply in tune with the locale. I think it’s fairly obvious that the emergence of the new White Spring has somehow impacted on the adjacent Chalice Well and might be an inscrutable factor in what plays out there.

Another example presents real history, real archaeology. There’s undoubtedly a lot to be said against the validity of the bones displayed in Glastonbury Abbey really being those of Arthur and Guenevere. The cynical detect a prestige and revenue-raising con-job. There are other ways of looking at it. The male skeleton claimed to be Arthur was buried in a hollowed tree. It’s a strange detail to use to try and increase the credibility of a medieval forgery though. A standard coffin would make more sense. Tree burial was an ancient custom known to the modern world through archaeology but not necessarily to twelfth century monks. The bones were those of a man of impressively large stature. It still doesn’t mean that the body was Arthur’s. It does lend credibility to the idea that the place was an isle of the dead where warriors may have been interred. The fact that the monks did find such an Arthur-like person seems at least a little enigmatic.

 

 

The genius loci has demonstrated a trickster-like mercurial mutability in recent times concerning this perennial issue. In 1998, there was a most suggestive archaeological find at Cadbury Castle. It was a Bronze Age era burial. A male in a coffin, over eight feet in length, made of pieces of wood bound at the ends to look like a boat. He was laid out in such a manner as to be clearly pointing towards the distant Tor. Richard Tabor’s book gives an account of the discovery but does not  make any of the inferences that seem fairly obvious to me. For starters, to suggest that the Tor was seen as an Avalon-type Isle of the Dead. There’s an obvious similarity to Arthur’s famous last journey. The medieval romances somehow contain millennia old motifs that were present long before the Dark Age warlord. None of the writers would have known of such history. Many of them were situated in France. It’s a marvellous mystery. As Geoffrey Ashe observed, Glastonbury often throws up some little detail to confound the sceptics.

 

 

In The Goddess in Glastonbury, Kathy Jones presented the mutable forms of the Great Goddess, Maiden, Mother, Crone, around the wheel of the year with its ancient festivals, expressed through the Glastonbury landscape itself. At Samhain, ‘In the landscape of Glastonbury the Crone Goddess rides on the back of a Swan flying to the South West. Wearyall Hill is the Swan’s outstretched neck and head, while the town and the lower slopes of the island form Her Body.’ The Glastonbury matriarchal mythology espoused by Jones has come in for some criticism but there has been a notable affirmation of a deep level of some of its broad veracity.

 

 

 

Andrew Collins 2006 The Cygnus Mystery looked at the widespread significance of the swan constellation in many ancient cultures across the world. This included the Avebury landscape and Newgrange. A few years later he turned his attention to Glastonbury, producing the article Glastonbury’s Landscape Swan and the Mysteries of Cygnus: the Key to 2012 for the Avalon magazine.

The apparently outlandish landscape swan proved to be redolent with archaic mysteries. Swans have a strong association with Brigid, the Irish saint with more than a hint of goddess about her, who was believed to have visited Glastonbury and has become strongly venerated here, particularly at the time of her big feast day commemoration at the start of February. Bride’s Mound, on the outskirts of town, was the site of an early Christian settlement where Brigid, in some versions, lived for a few years. Swans have been thought to help escort the souls of the dead to the afterlife

I consider Collins to be worth quoting extensively here.

‘One matter remains to be considered with respect to Glastonbury’s landscape swan – its orientation towards the horizon. It flies south-west at an azimuth bearing of approximately 245 degrees east of north. This aims it towards the setting sun on two specific days in the year. The first is 8 February, which is just three days adrift from the cross-quarter day that falls exactly half-way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox – 5 February in the modern calendar. Thus the terrestrial swan targets very closely the point in the year marked by the feast of Brigid, as well as the time when migrating swans begin to return to their breeding grounds in the north.’

‘The other sunset to which the Glastonbury swan targets is 4 November, just one day adrift from the ancient cross-quarter day that falls between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice – 5 November in the modern calendar. This was the original date of what became the Celtic festival of the dead, known as Samhain, remembered today as Hallowe’en, 31 October; All Saints Day, 1 November; All Soul’s Day or the Day of the Dead, 2 November, as well as Guy Fawkes’ Night, 5 November. It was at this time that the veils dividing the worlds were said to be thin, allowing the souls of the dead can return to the land of the living. What is more, the nights were said to be alive with witches, demons and spirits, who rode invisibly on the winds.

More significant to this debate is that the November cross-quarter day marks the time when migrating swans, as well as greylag geese, return from their breeding grounds in the north. Were these birds seen as bringing souls back to the world of the living? Of interest here is that in the Baltic countries it was the swan and not the stork that brought babies into the world. Another possibility is that the swans’ return marked a time when the living were once again vulnerable to unexpected death, since the birds were now present to take away the souls of the departed, the reason why lanterns were lit at this time to ward off evil spirits.’ 

‘Stand on Glastonbury’s Wearyall Hill, the swan’s effigy serpentine neck and head, after sunset on the eve of the November cross-quarter day and you will see something quite spectacular indeed. For at around eight o’clock the Milky Way stands erect on the south-western horizon, exactly where the sun has set three and a half hours beforehand.  If we were better able to see this splendour above the constant glow of modern street lighting we would see the Great Rift cutting a swathe through the centre of the Milky Way and opening out just above the horizon. Follow the line of the Great Rift and it takes you straight to Cygnus, the sign of the celestial soul-bird and vulva of the Cosmic Mother, its brightest star Deneb visible in the eastern sky at an elevation of around 68 degrees. This beautiful image in the night sky confirms that in Britain and Ireland at least, the pathway to the stars was accessible at the time of the November cross-quarter day from a position on the horizon where the sun had earlier set. In Glastonbury this access point to the sky-world, where the souls of the deceased live in eternal bliss, is emphasized by the precise orientation of the great swan effigy.’  

That mysterious timing was at work again in the noughties. Andrew Collins found something ancient and verifiable in the Glastonbury landscape. He wasn’t the only one. Nick Mann had close connections with Glastonbury over a period of decades. It’s interesting to see both him and Andy twenty years earlier in the mid-eighties BBC Strange Affair of the Glastonbury Legends. He periodically lived here. Two books of his, The Isle of Avalon and Energy Secrets of Glastonbury Tor, can be considered to be classics that deal deeply with the configuration of the landscape. He wrapped the archetypal mantle of Druid around himself to co-author Druid Magic: the Practice of Celtic Wisdom with Maya Magee Sutton in 2000. This all rather seems in retrospect to represent the process of him becoming another prepared vehicle for his most important work.

The 2007 Star Temple of Avalon, written with Philippa Glasson, was, to me and many others, a remarkable revelation that was all the more noteworthy for being rooted in verifiable information. From the vantage point of a mound atop St Edmund’s Hill, the winter solstice sunrise appears to roll up the northern slope of Glastonbury Tor. This lasts about half an hour. From that starting point, the potency of the mound as an astronomical observatory for the sun, moon, and stars, gets investigated in detail and the whole Glastonbury landscape during a period of a few thousand years BCE yields remarkable data and fruit for speculation.

They state that

‘Encouragingly, the summit of St Edmund’s Hill must have appeared to already encode a wealth of astronomical knowledge, naturally aligning not only with the rising and setting of Sirius on the Winter Solstice alignments, but also with the other extremes of Sun and Moon—including the Summer Solstice alignment from Wearyall Hill, the Equinoxes and the nineteen-year Lunar Standstill cycle—as well as with the ascension of the beneficent mandorla of the Southern Cross over Chalice Hill. The location of the summit of the hill and its alignments must have been painstakingly defined by posts and possibly even stones over many hundreds of years.’

Perhaps the best example of the additional alignments concerns the three stars of the Belt of Orion which, from the mound vantage point, also rose up the Tor slope at sunset way back in 4100-4000BCE. Orion has been associated with Gwyn, who in folklore resides in the inner Tor as fairy king and leads the Wild Hunt. This lord of the winter sky features strongly in Star Temple and was clearly in the Glastonbury airwaves then as the Yuri Leitch Gwyn was published in the same year. Both works cross-reference each other. Primarily thanks to Yuri, an ongoing Gwyn revival has become part of Glastonbury’s modern culture.

 

 

Andrew Collins’ Cygnus Mystery gets acknowledged and Mann and Glasson find indications of the importance of the constellation in the Glastonbury landscape but interestingly didn’t spot what would later be discussed concerning the Wearyall Hill-Brides Mound Samhain-Imbolc alignments.

I was fortunate to be present for the long-anticipated winter solstice sunrise in 2012 on St Edmund’s Hill. We were blessed with perfect weather conditions to see the sun rolling up the side of the Tor.

To summarise: we have a most inspirational cast of specially prepared characters playing a vital role in expressing the Deep Glastonbury Genius Loci in accordance with a mysterious timescale.

Frederick Bligh Bond. Glastonbury Abbey

Wellesley Tudor Pole, Alice Buckton, Ganesh Bhat. Chalice Well.

Katharine Maltwood and Mary Caine. The Glastonbury Zodiac.

Geoffrey Russell and Geoffrey Ashe. The Tor labyrinth.

Kathy Jones, Andrew Collins. The landscape swan.

Nick Mann, Philippa Glasson. The St Edmund’s Hill mound star temple.

Yuri Leitch, Gwyn.

And an honourable mention for a slightly different but not exactly separate example –

John Goodchild, Wellesley Tudor Pole, and the Triad of Maidens. Bride’s Mound and the Blue Glass Bowl.

As for those who might say that some of this represents a catalogue of delusion, I nonetheless consider it to be a very potent catalogue! What might be termed the imaginal realm breaks through from occlusion. Call it art if that makes you more comfortable. I will remind my readers of one of my oft-stated quotes from the first page of Dion Fortune’s Avalon of the Heart. “The poetry of the soul writes itself at Glastonbury”. It might not be archaeology but it can be considered soul poetry and that feels important to me.

I have to keep on trying to abide in such higher-level perspectives and not take this ongoing miracle for granted. We have a comprehensively unique process in motion here. It’s a mind-shatteringly profound extensive gnosis. It’s why Glastonbury can already be seens as a global beacon sacred site that exerts a potent pull across the world. People are having dreams and visions on other continents about us. This mystery seems to express itself in its own terms.

We recently had a presentation from some representatives of the World Heritage site organisation. I don’t want to be too unkind to them but the general impression was that they were a tad underwhelming. A questionnaire they distributed was excruciatingly embarrassing in its imbecility.

 

 

I’ll wager they haven’t the faintest notion concerning the genius loci and its human agents. Although they were both people of some long-term experience concerning World Heritage, I would also doubt that any of the locations they have knowledge of are remotely comparable to Glastonbury in terms of the complexity of their spiritual-sociological eco-system. That matters and says plenty about the level of the game that they are playing on. What do they think sacred site actually means? The fact that they are getting paid for their efforts hasn’t exactly been a public-relations triumph for the Town Council.

1539 lingers. Anyone who has given attention to the Abbey knows this. We still have no proper memorial to Abbot Whiting. Jon Cousins also wrote very eloquently about the mysterious ongoing dissolution and dispersal effect here. I have been increasingly conscious in recent years not just of the 1539 climax but a long process of demoralisation and psychological warfare that we suffered from 1534 onwards. It was made increasingly difficult for the Abbey infrastructure to function. Different departments struggled for funding. People were manoeuvred against each other thereby. The best example concerns the process of making a complaint against the Abbot. A monk wishing to do so would have to travel to Oxford to present his case and the Abbot had to pay for such an excursion. Needless to say, it seemed like a decent 1530s road trip and encouraged dissent.

The parallels and analogies are not exact but I detect a strange hangover whereby such separation and contention amidst malfunctioning communication and lack of resources increasingly poisons the life of the town. And some are going out of their way to ensure division and hostility, and the breakdown of democratic life in the town being cultivated to the max.

All of the arguments for and against World Heritage Site status, whether we want to investigate it, whether it would work for or against us, are getting a massive airing so I am not going to repeat them. My purpose here has been to provide a different perspective and a warning. The Glastonbury experience cannot be curated and commodified although the New Age marketplace and various entrepreneurs have been attempting to do so for a long time but involving World Heritage brings it to a new level.

As we approach the big five-hundred-year anniversaries, it could be suggested that WH status would so thoroughly consolidate our sacred site aspect that the trauma of 1539 and what followed would be finally transcended. We wouldn’t just be an industrious market town anymore and the grubby greedy blood-stained fingers of the Jack Horners who helped create its identity as such would be thoroughly consigned to a now irrelevant history. If the WH process goes through, it would be fully operational during our 2034-39 period.

That would be great but I’m very doubtful things would work out that way. I intuit the possibilities of a far more insidious process occurring. The big 1539 anniversary might actually serve to reinforce that terrible process again and in a hideously ironic manner. I am concerned that the same dynamic that infused the desacralisation after the Abbey as the industrious market town came into being can come back in and ride on the back of the World Heritage site designation and assert its agenda again. We’ve held back the identikit global brands fairly successfully. The mysterious 1996 McDonalds fire seems to have delivered a strong message. The Town Council has kept 5G at bay. If the big coaches start increasingly rumbling through then their passengers are fairly likely to want their consensus reality comforts as well as indulging in our quaint eccentricities. There will be ongoing pressures to meet their requirements. Money talks. People of a certain temperament will be readily on hand to try and get results from that. The sacred site might be subsumed into a rebranded Industrious Market Town Mark 2 because that might be what Glastonbury World Heritage Site could amount to. The density of Airbnbs would increase. The kind of people who have been the prepared vehicles to express the genius loci might find it increasingly difficult to live here.

The process would perhaps not be that noticeable to some. What would that mean for the incredible inner dynamic that has been at work for the last century here and has been responsible for our already established status as unquestionable world sacred site? Would the Glastonbury mystery prevail or be compromised? It should be obvious what I think about that.

Postscript.

I started writing this on the day of a public meeting-debate in Glastonbury on the World Heritage site issue. This was on December 6th, which I am always conscious of being Dion Fortune’s birthday. It was a very stormy weekend here. The writing carried on periodically throughout the Christmas New Year period and it seems interesting that I finally complete and publish it on January 8th, the date of her death.