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Glastonbury

Snook25

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Aug 19, 2001
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About 2 years ago i visited Glastonbury with my mum and her friend, and had some very strange experiences. Even before we arrived and saw the looming Tor, strange smells wafted through the car - Onions, Perfume, Manure, Incense all in quick succesion, which makes me think that we couldnt have been driving past a farm and the a perfume factory! When we got to the Tor and went up it the place felt very crowded although we were the only people there - it was a strange feeling. I also heard music and the beating of drums when we were up there. It was quite a windy day so i surpose the sound could have carried from somewhere else.

What are other peoples impressions of Glastonbury? Did King Arthur really go there and find the Holy Grail? Has anything wierd happened to you whilst you were there?

Keep me posted my lovelies!!!!

Flower ;)
 
Well, I have visited Glastonbury several times and certainly think it is a very emotive place. It just has a feeling about it. If you go again, visit the Chalice Well where you can drink the water which is supposed to have healing properties. You can even bottle some of it and bring it home. I do believe in the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. Also on one occasion when I was leaning against the Tor admiring the view, I saw a strange light in the sky which I can only describe as being like a bright flare, although it was still daylight (and no, it wasn't the sun!). Other people I have spoken to have said that they always feel strangely drawn to Glastonbury i.e. once they have been there they just can't wait to go again. Does anyone else feel the same about this mystical place?? :) :)
 
I have been there once but I have to say that I got a much less powerful impression from it than from some other places. Of all the ancient sites I have visited Callanais on Lewis is probably the most awesome. I don't know if it is the setting or something else about the stones there but it is truly amazing.
 
Flower said:
Even before we arrived and saw the looming Tor, strange smells wafted through the car - Onions, Perfume, Manure, Incense all in quick succesion, which makes me think that we couldnt have been driving past a farm and the a perfume factory!

I had a similar experience on Bank Holiday Monday, but this was because I had gone to a Thai festival and had been given a piece of the Durian fruit. This beastie, prized as "the King of Fruits", is a strange one, and had a taste like custard with strong overtones of garlic and onions. It can also have a *very* pungent farmyard smell. One writer has described the experience a being like "eating vanilla custard in a sewer." Definitely an acquired taste but I heartily recommend trying it.

Anyhoo, maybe you had stumbled across a secret hoard of these beasties.;)
 
Yuk Durian!!!!

I know what you mean about the Durian fruit!! I had the misfortune to try some on a recent trip to Malaysia. It wasnt the oniony taste that got to me as much as the snotty consistancy of the stuff! Gross, but the Malays love it! In all the hotels we stayed in there were signs saying no Durians allowed kinda thing. Strange stuff, but i doubt there would be any of that stuff hanging about in rural Wiltshire!!!!

:D
 
i've been to glastonbury a few times and it has an atmosphere of calm about it, a very spiritual place. Maybe it just my expectations that made me feel this way as i do kinda believe in the King Arthur legend... i felt the same feeling in Tintagel although that place is far more commercialised which i think is a shame - with Merlins car park etc!!!

Has anyone been to the Witches museum in Boscastle? that place gave me the creeps...
 
As a sprog I did visit the Witches Museum somewhere in the
West Country and it was spooky. Mind you so was the
Smuggling Museum.

Not sure how far it was due to the exhibits and how far it was
the darkness and musty air of a building that is kept closed for more
than half the year.

Don't think either of those Museums were quite as weird as
the one in Minehead - I think. A room full of cabinets I recall.
You opened the draws to find some collection of evil tropical
insects - safely dead and crucified. Just when you were nearly
enjoying the thrill of giant emerald green beetles etc, the focus
changed and the remainder of the cabinets were taken up with
a collection of neatly parcelled slivers of wedding-cake from all
the titled-family weddings in the region. Hundreds of them.
Miss Haversham eat your heart out!
:eek:
 
I've only been there once myself - but had nothing surreal to report ( I was only six at the time).

Though one of my Dad's freaky friends from the sixties ( or should I say still stuck in the sixties ?!?) confessed that he had taken two tabs of acid while spending the night a Glastonbury Tor alone and maintained it was a life altering experience ! (unfortunatley he had no details to report that he could actually express in words !).
 
cyberangel said:
Has anyone been to the Witches museum in Boscastle? that place gave me the creeps...

Actually, the Museum of Witchcraft is now under new management and has been greatly revamped in the last year - the 'Witch's Skeleton' has been given a respectful burial, for instance. So it may not be so gloomy and creepy any more. Have a look at their site: http://www.museumofwitchcraft.com/
 
cyberangel said:
i've been to glastonbury a few times and it has an atmosphere of calm about it, a very spiritual place. Maybe it just my expectations that made me feel this way as i do kinda believe in the King Arthur legend... i felt the same feeling in Tintagel although that place is far more commercialised which i think is a shame - with Merlins car park etc!!!

Has anyone been to the Witches museum in Boscastle? that place gave me the creeps...
:madeyes: I agree with you about the witches museum. I spend a lot of time in bude in Cornwall and have visited Boscastle many times although it also is very comercialised I find the witches museum a little haven of wierdness.
 
Glastonbury zodiac

I remember hearing mention somewhere of a zodiac carved into/formed from the land around Glastonbury. I think there were others around the place as well, possibly one in Yorkshire somewhere? Any ideas where I can find out more about this?
 
The Glastonbury one was mentioned in FT a little while ago. As to ones in Yorkshire, never knew about that.
 
The 'Zodiac' around Glastonbury is supposed to be marked out by all sorts of features - roads, paths, hedges, streams, ditches, fields etc. I've seen maps of it, and they don't convince - not only do the 'zodiac figures' bear little resemblence to the accepted zodiac symbols, but the area is so packed with man-made features that you can really make out any shape that you want. In any case, quite a lot of the defining features, such as roads, were only added within the last century or so, yet the Zodiac is supposed to go back to Roman times!
 
We had one on the Lizard once, now largly a forgoten claim. As the "discoverer's" arguments for it consisted of stairing u straight in the eyes and saying "because it IS"... an argument i didnt feel able to counter at the time but when she wernt nearbye i wasnt conviced by.
 
I'm sure I read about this a long time ago. Some woman had made it her life's work etc. She'd got a lot of aeriel photgraphs to prove her point and I'm pretty sure there was supposed to be an extra sign... or something. It was supposed to be much older than originaly supposed.

Not much help really am I? :rolleyes:
 
Forty2 said:
I'm sure I read about this a long time ago. Some woman had made it her life's work etc. She'd got a lot of aeriel photgraphs to prove her point and I'm pretty sure there was supposed to be an extra sign... or something. It was supposed to be much older than originaly supposed.

Not much help really am I? :rolleyes:

Yeah, now you mention it I remember something about a 13th sign called Ariadne, a sign of a spider?
 
back im the distant parts of me brain...wasnt the spider sign made up as some sort of Folk lore expereiment?...i seem to remeber .......
 
Mrs Katherine Maltwood in 1929, discovered what he interpreted as a prehistoric zodiac. The outlines were composed of lanes, roads field bounderies, water channels, hills & other natural features. While some of the features seem convincing, others such as Aquarius, represented by a phoenix & Cancer by a boat etc are less so. Also, some of the features of the Glastonbury Zodiac, proved to be recent, ie 18th & 19th Century.

In the 1960's there was also supposed to be "part", (whatever that means), of a zodiac at or near Saffron Walden in Essex.

Generally, the claims all seem to die, when examined in depth. Yes there are some very old features on the landscape, but they tend to be simple, ie field boundries, rather than very complex.
 
Re: Glastonbury zodiac

Breakfast said:
possibly one in Yorkshire somewhere? Any ideas where I can find out more about this?

ISTR reading a book many years ago by Janet & Colin Bord (either Mysterious Britain or The Secret Country ) which named my old hometown of Hornsea as the location of a Zodiac.

That's the only reference I've ever come across, though my Dad said he'd heard it referred to as the Holderness Zodiac, though he couldn't remember where. Holderness is the area of East Yorkshire that Hornsea can be found in. Another thing my Dad said is that, due to the phenomenal rate of coastal erosion, the Zodiac had supposedly been partly lost to the North Sea.

If anyone else knows anything about this one, I'd be really grateful.
 
Just remembered something else!

Sometime in the 80s, I saw a TV programme where Robert Symes (genial, mad professoresque Tomorrow's World presenter) debunked the theories about the Glastonbury Zodiac. To prove that the nature of the British landscape makes it easy to make just about any shape out of natural or man-made features, he took an OS map, and proceeded to "discover' a pretty convincing bear's head, using the same criteria as Mrs Maltwood.

I was a bit upset at the time, as I desperately wanted to believe in the Zodiac, 'cos I thought it was such a fantastic concept!
 
The Nazca Lines in Peru also allegedly represent a Zodiac... as least according to the many hawkers trying to sell souveniers to 'gringos'. I'm a llama, which goes well with my Chinese horoscope (sheep) and Western one (Ram).

Baaaahh. Can't I just be a dragon once? :(

J.

(apologies for the spelling & grammar - hard day, a few beers...)
 
The best book I've ever seen on the subject, from a pro-zodiac point of view that is, was "The Glastonbury Zodiac, Key to the Mysteries of Britain" by Mary Caine. I believe it was self-published, or put out by Element Books LTD. in Dorset.
 
The 13th sign of the Zodiac is called Ophiuchus, The Snake Handler.

If accepted it buggers up the whole system, and many people end up moving one start sign backwards, so I become a Virgo.

Theres more info. here
 
There have been two recent attempts to create a 13-sign Zodiac.
One was by a US astrologer called Walter Berg - he proposed a Zodiac that was based on the actual constellations (the usual western 'zodiac' is formed by dividing the 360 degrees of the sky into 12 equal slices that only roughly correspond with the constellations). His 13th sign was Ophiucus the Healer - a constellation recognised as part of the zodiac by astronomers, but not astrologers - which went from the 30th November to 17th December. It never caught on.
The other famous 13-sign Zodiac was actually a hoax, created by SF writer John Sladek. Writing under the name of 'James Vogh', he simply divided the 360 degrees of the heavens by 13 and shoehorned the sign of Ariadne the Spider in between Taurus and Gemini (May 13th-June 10th - I believe his birthday was between those dates). He said it did it simply to make money, and lamented the fact that he didn't make all that much from it. He died a couple of years ago. You can read his obit here.
 
There is talk about a 13th sign in the zodiac. Which would mess up a bit though I expect astrologers will just ignore it. Actually people are already off by one starsign. Due to the movements of the stars and sun and such since astrology was invented, all the signs are one off.
 
Xanatic said:
There is talk about a 13th sign in the zodiac. Which would mess up a bit though I expect astrologers will just ignore it. Actually people are already off by one starsign. Due to the movements of the stars and sun and such since astrology was invented, all the signs are one off.
That's precession, and Western astrologers ignore it. As I said in my post above, Western astrology ignores the actual constellations (unlike Vedic astrology) and works with fixed 30-degrees divisions of the sky, starting at the "0 degrees Aries" point of the Spring equinox sunrise. This used to correspond with the Aries constellation (in Babylonian times, I believe), but is now well into, and nearing the end of, the Pisces constellation. Which is why we have all these fluffy New Agers claiming the the "Age of Aquarius" is nigh. In about 500 years, maybe.
 
From what I remember of the Zodiac at Glastonbury, the thirteenth symbol was a giant hound which was outside of the actual zodiac itself, 'protecting' it as it were. Something about the Girt Dog of Langport, or some such, a creature that symbolicly refers back to many 'Guardian of the Mysteries' legends such as the Norse Garm, the Cerberus myth of Rome, and can even possibly reflect on Cafall [Cabal?] Arthur's dog, and many others, depending on which square peg it is you need to fit into that round hole.

A lot of the symbols of the zodiac itself would not have been recognizable to any modern reader of so called astrology, as they reflected things that were more common to their own mythos and legend cycles. I believe that the symbol for Cancer was represented in the Glastonbury Zodiac as being a ship, and Saggitarius is a figure that is supposed to represent Arthur.
It's all very interesting. Even if not true, the fact that someone could see and recognize these characters in the landscape, these shapes that seem to have some hold on our racial memories, says something interesting about us as humans that is worth studying, or looking into.
 
wulfloki said:
A lot of the symbols of the zodiac itself would not have been recognizable to any modern reader of so called astrology, as they reflected things that were more common to their own mythos and legend cycles. I believe that the symbol for Cancer was represented in the Glastonbury Zodiac as being a ship, and Saggitarius is a figure that is supposed to represent Arthur.
In that case, why relate it to astrology or zodiacs at all? Both Maltwood and Caine maintained that the Glastonbury Zodiac was an actual representation of the zodiac signs, created by 'the ancients'. Although, to be fair to them both, I can't remember what justification they gave for changing the symbolisms so drastically.
It's all very interesting. Even if not true, the fact that someone could see and recognize these characters in the landscape, these shapes that seem to have some hold on our racial memories, says something interesting about us as humans that is worth studying, or looking into.

Yes, it is an interesting insight into psychology and mythos. But, if so, what makes seeing 'Zodiacs' in the landscape all that different from, say, seeing Jesus in the clouds?
 
Seeing pictures in clouds is a pretty good description of most forms
of divination. But astrology, tarot, even tea-leaf reading seem to
become ossified as systems and obviously absurd when they insist
on archaic notions.

It is especially horrible to note that adepts in these arts seem to
wish to satisfy the very unFortean desire of human beings to be
told exactly who and what they are.

Jung thought that the alchemists had projected the contents of the
Unconscious into their alembics. The richness of the symbolism of that
Art seems capable of endless refinements - pardon the pun. But these
days the New Age Vanity Fair seems overrun with pretenders for
systems of spurious authority which tell people whatever they want to hear.
 
Random thought on astrology that just occurred to me now: If we can have effects such as SAD caused, presumably, by some kind of chemical imbalance, then the differing chemistry could affect unborn children and so when and where you are born could have some effect on what you are like.

Actually, now I look at it, that's pretty obvious.
 
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