I wrote a program in the 1980's to find 'ley-lines'. Specifically, it allowed one to input the map references of 'points of interest' on a 1:50000 map and then search then entire entry list for alignments. It took every possible pair or points, plotted a straight line and worked out the perpendicular distance of every other point from the line. More than '3' counted as a 'ley'.
On the other hand, items that appear at first glance to be related, such as "earthworks" may be separated in age by 3,000 years and be from different cultures and belief systems. Of four "ancient earthworks", one may be defensive, one funerary, one agricultural, and one ritual.
Any two points will always be in a straight line relative to each other. The chance that a third random point is within a degree either side of that line is 1/180. That's not rare. if I had a 1/180chance of being knocked off my motorbike every ride, I would not ride it.
The chance of a fourth point being within 1 degree of the same line is also 1/180, so the chance of points 3 and 4 both being within a degree of the line between points 1 and 2 is 1/(180*180) which is 1/32,400 which is a small chance.
However, if you allow yourself the freedom to look for any and all possible alignments, then the more random points you have, the more alignments you will find, because every pair of points is a new line that a third or fourth point may also be on. It's like the thing with birthdays: the chance of a single random stranger having the same birthday as you is around 1/365, but if you have 50 people in the room, it is extremely likely that two of them will have the same birthday as each other.
...I remember falling victim to the ley hunting bug as a teenager and again in my 20s. I was excited to "discover" that Southwell Minster (near to where I live) is "on a ley line"...
...I also recommend Spooky Archaeology by Jeb Card (2018) which includes this subject and TONS more fascinating stuff. That book is gold.
Actually the idea was proposed by Aime Michel in the context of the 1954 wave, although Vallee did the first statistical analysis of the claims. Broadly most of the lines were explicable, but the Bayonne-Vichy line BAVIC was the subject of a very sophisticated analysis by David Saunders, and seemed to be valid. Michel also found some very interesting points on the line, e.g. ancient cave paintings, the birthplace of St Vincent de Paul, etc. I found there to be a lot of writers on esoteric subjects born near BAVIC, also saints, also the Cyclic Cross of Hendaye (said to predict the end of the world) lies very close to it. Coincidence or not? I think these things just hint at possible underlying causes, and it is worth noting that when a couple of dowsers studied the energies associated with the famous St Michael leyline, they found two separate lines of energy moving in serpentine fashion. The ley seems to be an artifact of the fact that a lot of significant neolithic and religious locations were sited on one or both of the lines and as the general trend of the two lines was roughly linear, the chances of a seemingly significant "ley" appearing were higher than normal.Well, Alèse couldn't be a town : it's the name of a cover we use over the bed. Alès is a town in Cevénnes, in Département du Gard, remarkable for being.... unremarkable. There is very few about its history during Roman times (it's considered as an oppidium, so a small town in the main Roman roads) or Middle Ages. It was a Protestant fortress during the Religious Wars and it suffered a siege because of it. Otherwise, nothing that seems specially energetic.
I'm familiar with the Louvre/Tuilleries axe and La Défense and I can attest that the energies there are kinda palpable on this places. But, then again, it is, as much as, on other places in the Parisian region, not necessarily over the same axe.
I suspect that ley lines alone can't be the only source of what "energises" a place, a town, a monument.
By the way, the lines over the map made me think almost immediately of the vintage Orthotenies, proposed by Jacques Valée for proving statistically the reality of UFO sightings. Interesting how some patterns keep coming back...
"energies" - the most overused word by paranormalists.
Energy = the quantitative property that must be transferred to an object in order to perform work on, or to heat, the object.
Has anyone measured these "energies"? Quantitatively? Psychically doesn't count.
Etymologically, the term "energy" has a strange pedigree. When Aristotle used the term (energeia), he used it to convey the idea of being, or the way we now use the term reality. It was the Romans who turned it into meaning "force"(energia), but by way of describing forceful rhetoric, not the force that drives a wheel. The term drifts around in church Latin then moves to French still in the Latin meaning. We owe the term's scientific use, I suspect, to the Royal Society, and probably Sir Isaac Newton's Principia (tho I may well be wrong). As to the adoption of the term by ritual magicians, it occurs as the word gains popularity in science, and is in frequent use in spiritualism and ritualism of the 19th Century.Thank you! Indeed '"energy" is an over-used word by in the psychic field of research by those who don't realise that throwing the word around like they know what it means does not lend credibility to what they are trying to say.
"Energy" is closely followed by "vibration" and "frequency" - both real terms with real meaning which just reveal scientific illiteracy by most users in this field. The trouble is, English doesn't have a suitable substitute that I can think of. "Power" or "force" are equally unsuitable. Maybe we need to look much further afield and look for words used by other cultures, and not translate them back into English.
I'm not really talking about anything mystical, except that energy dowsers (who are "mystical" in name only) have mostly fallen into the trap of New Age thinking and you have to make a real effort to ignore all the "mystic", "profound" "holy" adjectives they attach to everything. I'm assuming that Vincent Reddish and the MoD are right in linking the dowsing energy with Russian work on torsion waves. Reddish in fact confirmed several of the Russian results with a totally different experimental paradigm. Before anyone who hasn't heard about this checks this in Wikipedia, the entry there was written by a person with a scarcely veiled agenda against two of the leading researchers in this field (I have complained to Wikipedia about this with predictable results) and has rubbished the whole field. Having said that torsion energy is a highly controversial area, but it does have geographical correlates with strange events such as time slips, and it can be detected in various ways other than dowsing.Etymologically, the term "energy" has a strange pedigree. When Aristotle used the term (energeia), he used it to convey the idea of being, or the way we now use the term reality. It was the Romans who turned it into meaning "force"(energia), but by way of describing forceful rhetoric, not the force that drives a wheel. The term drifts around in church Latin then moves to French still in the Latin meaning. We owe the term's scientific use, I suspect, to the Royal Society, and probably Sir Isaac Newton's Principia (tho I may well be wrong). As to the adoption of the term by ritual magicians, it occurs as the word gains popularity in science, and is in frequent use in spiritualism and ritualism of the 19th Century.
Agreed. Borrowing terms from science is a bad idea for mystics. It makes them look like word poachers and reveals their ignorance. While the scientific terms often make useful metaphors, a metaphor normally breaks down. I have always preferred the term "signature" to "vibration" as it suggests unique agency, as well as the notion of a disappearing trail left in one's wake. As for "power" and "force", they had multiple meanings before science ever got hold of them, and while science uses those terms admirably precisely, the words pre-exist science and are still in common use.
torsion energy is a highly controversial area, but it does have geographical correlates with strange events such as time slips, and it can be detected in various ways other than dowsing.
Agreed, "energy" is a term that has specific meanings in certain physical contexts, but it is as good as any other in this area even if we can't precisely define it in the same way as we can in more established fields of science.
^this^The problem for me is that I don't think dowsing involves any energy except that attributed to holding a stick and walking. We've never been able to measure ANY energy/force/signal/thing related to dowsing (except expectation). So, I reject the term entirely as applied to dowsing (and other supposed occult forces).
I quite like this idea in general terms. It would be not unlike a mariner's "leading marks" or "leading lights".I've been sitting here, reading, and as one does, little thoughts drop into the 'display' so to speak, and one thought came through - and that was that when you are going cross country walking, or otherwise over some distance, that you need to take a bearing with your compass, or star and then search the horizon for a point to latch onto.
A physicality of nature. A tree, a dip in the horizon, or conversely, a peak.
Then you walk along, noting the lay of the land, what trees are in bloom, or how full the creek/beck is. Every half hour or so, heads are lifted to the familiar horizon to note where your land mark is.
A straight line avoids confusion, and is easier to relay to another person when recounting, rather than describing a none Euclidean meander.
The beauty is that if you do need to sidetrack due to the topography - knowing your distant marker makes it easier to re-establish the required path.
If nothing else, the existence of a well worn path would be noticeable from gaps in tree lines and even notches in ridges as the path wears down. There's a nice example near me, where a lane cuts a ridge and it cuts some 15 feet into the ground, but it is covered by trees, so not that noticeable, but trees are relatively temporary.However, I can accept the basic principle that in some cases, there may have been deliberate alignments of conspicuous landmarks which indicated general direction rather than the specific route.
However, in England, which was largely forested,
Plus there is evidence of a network of roads that is pre-Roman. It's not a big leap to something like 'songlines' to enable one to get about the place.Just like to point out that the spread of agriculture in the Bronze age led to much of the British Isles being cleared of it's forests between 1 - 2,000 BCE.
It's a myth that this was all continuous woodland by the time the Romans arrived, but I get your point and am only being a little pedantic Mike.
There is actually a lot of anecdotal and dowsing evidence that almost all standing stones and more complex structures were sited on areas of high earth energy (torsion waves created by the rotation of earth and sun) modulated by geological strata, and that odd events such as time slips do occur at such locations. There is also evidence of EM and sonic energies generated by some of the stones. Research is in its infancy at the moment, so you won't get clear and repeatable observations yet. The connection with ley lines is almost certainly an artefact -- when a couple of dowsers tried following the famous Michael line they found not one but two separate energy lines that wind back and forth across the ley. The stone circles, churches, etc. that lie on one or other of these lines do create the effect of a ley, but the apparent precision is illusory.I quite like this idea in general terms. It would be not unlike a mariner's "leading marks" or "leading lights".
Where the channel into a harbour is narrow and there are underwater obstructions to each side, it is common to have two marks showing the safe line to take. When the back mark (the higher of the two) is exactly over the fore mark, you are on the safe line. If you move off the line to your left (to port) then the back mark will move to the left of the fore mark.
I can see how this basic idea of aligned landmarks might work in open country. "Keep the lightning blasted tree in line with the distant peak until you see the pile of rocks in line with the notch in the skyline to your right..."
However, in England, which was largely forested, the number of opportunities to see two landmarks in alignment would be quite limited. A far easier system would be cairns, blazes on trees, and short local alignments showing a general direction.
Another thought is that if I were on a long journey across forest, marshland and rocky hillsides, I would be at least as interested in finding the safe route across or around the obstacles as I was in maintaining a general sense of direction.
However, I can accept the basic principle that in some cases, there may have been deliberate alignments of conspicuous landmarks which indicated general direction rather than the specific route.
I can also accept that it is possible, but perhaps not susceptible to proof, that some ancient peoples believed that standing stones had some influence on some sort of force that flowed through the Earth. People believe all sorts of things.
However, I am not going to believe in the literal existence of that force, or the effectiveness of the stones in influencing it, without some clear and repeatable observations.
There is actually a lot of anecdotal and dowsing evidence
that almost all standing stones and more complex structures were sited on areas of high earth energy (torsion waves created by the rotation of earth and sun) modulated by geological strata, and that odd events such as time slips do occur at such locations.
There is also evidence of EM and sonic energies generated by some of the stones.
Just out of interest, the famous 'Michael' line, is that a straight line on a map (as it were) or does it allow for the earth's curvature?Research is in its infancy at the moment, so you won't get clear and repeatable observations yet. The connection with ley lines is almost certainly an artefact -- when a couple of dowsers tried following the famous Michael line they found not one but two separate energy lines that wind back and forth across the ley. The stone circles, churches, etc. that lie on one or other of these lines do create the effect of a ley, but the apparent precision is illusory.
earth energy (torsion waves created by the rotation of earth and sun) modulated by geological strata
Australian song lines.View attachment 16834
Notice the lines out to sea? Their record of the old sea levels maybe?
Australian song lines.View attachment 16834
Notice the lines out to sea? Their record of the old sea levels maybe?
Well, you wouldn't, because dowsing has long been regarded as something dubious by officialdom, despite its obvious utility, and because until some very bright spark in the MoD read Reddish's first book and connected it with the little known Russian research into torsion, nobody had seen the link. Many dowsers had recognised the role of geological faulting in modulating the earth energy but since nobody had any idea what earth energy was, their ideas were neglected in the wider community -- and still are. If, as seems to be the case in some areas, the energy can promote or create time slips and other odd phenomena, we have an explanation too for the well known connection between geology and strange happenings (cf Jenny Randles' book on the Pennines).Never learned this in any geology classes...