Hierophantic Landscapes: Lighting up Chalice Well, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, the Rondanes, and Oaxaca

By Richard Leviton

The Earth is poised to make a great disclosure. Its a hierophant.


But whats a hierophant? A person who reveals the holy light. But it can also be a landscape or a planet. And whats the holy light? It is the structure of reality and consciousness, a map of the heavenly realms, the engineering blueprint of Creation.

Some people call this imminent disclosure the Apocalypse and run for cover. But that is mistaken. Apocalypse means the revelation of the divine revelation. It means the end of our picture of the world as we know it. The world itself will be fine, even better than fine. Splendid. Illumined. The Architect of reality lays down His cards, face up, and you see the whole deck. Here is the truth of yourself and the Earth.

How will this disclosure work? What we call sacred sites and holy landscapes will start revealing themselves in full to us in all their geomantic and visionary richness. Thats the inner patterning of their design, their arrays of Light temples and subtle palaces primed for our visionary adventures and edification. The Earth needs us to have these adventures and visions because thats how we keep the planet healthy.

Hierophantic Landscapes visits five landscapes from Norway and England to California and Mexico, providing firsthand reports on the visions and adventures of a small band of geomancers as they seek to unravel the mysteries of the Earth. Maybe not such a small band, because along the way we encounter angels, landscape devas, Nature Spirits, and otherworldly mentors, and revel in vistas of the ancient past of the Earth when that revelation was as fresh as a sunrise, as it will soon be again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462054152

Richard Leviton

Richard Leviton is the author of 14 books, including many on myths and the global landscape, notably The Galaxy on Earth, The Emerald Modem, Signs on the Earth, and Encyclopedia of Earth Myths. He has been in regular contact with the angelic realm for more than 22 years, and has written about his experiences with them in Looking for Arthur and What's Beyond That Star. He is the director/founder of the Blue Room Consortium, a cosmic mysteries think tank based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

Colluding with Angels: Wellesley Tudor Pole’s Work at Chalice Well

TABLE 1

The Many Guises of the Ofanim

TABLE 2

Glastonbury Four Worlds Template

CHAPTER 2

Meeting Ang at Tahoe, the Lake of the Sky

TABLE 3

Stages of Site Stimulation

TABLE 4

List of Selected Geomantic Features Comprising the Lake Tahoe Landscape Temple

CHAPTER 3

With Yellokin at Ahwahnee: Opening the Range of Light at Yosemite

CHAPTER 4

In the Rond with Ymir: Creation in the Garden of Eden in Norway’s Rondane Mountains

TABLE 5

A Geomantic Inventory of Niflheim, Ginnungagap, and Muspellheim

CHAPTER 5

With Jaguars and Quetzalcoatl at Oaxaca, Mexico

TABLE 6

The Different Cultural Faces and Guises of the Two Lucifers

TABLE 7

Earth and Cultural Changes Between First and Second Lucifer and His Humanity

TABLE 8

Qualities and Ray Master Apparitional Guises of the Pale Orange-Gold Ray

For Judith A. Lewis, Silver Boy, Blaise, the Ray Masters, and particularly Wellesley Tudor Pole and Joseph of Arimathea—can you two guys get books where you are now?—and of course the Supreme Being, for putting up with things, and for putting them up in the first place, and liking it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Lots of gratitude to Karina Porter and Judy Edinburg for their invaluable and copious tape transcriptions; nothing tops an accurate record of events and what people actually said.

PREFACE

A hierophant is someone who reveals the holy Light. A hierophantic landscape is a specially prepared terrain that reveals the holy Light. This book explains how.

When I use the word hierophant, a nicely serviceable word from Greek, I have in mind the traditional Tarot image called the Hierophant. Usually this card depicts an elderly male, the archetype of the wise elder, a Gandalf or Dumbledore figure, holding a lantern and a staff. Sometimes he wears an elaborate crown and sits on a throne; sometimes he’s shown standing up, or the staff is a scepter. It doesn’t have to be a man of course. The hierophant is more a function, a process, a continuous revelation, a showing forth. He is not a priest or guru, but a revealer, a pointer. There is the Light, his gesture says. The hierophant is more magician than pontiff. His act of revealing the sacred Light is also an activation and amplification of that Light.

Why is this important or worth knowing about? Because increasingly our planet is becoming a hierophantic Earth. It is, it wants to, it will continue to show us truths about its composition and purpose. That is the literal and correct meaning of Apocalypse, a word that has become scary, a real bête noire of our culture now. The hierophantic Earth will show us the holy Light. The hierophantic Earth is apocalyptic because it will reveal the celestial revelation, which means, its original design. If the word Apocalypse unsettles you think of it as the architect unrolling the blueprints of your house, complete with specifications, building materials, square footage, all that.

Just one problem with the Apocalypse. As I said, it is the revelation of the revelation, the showing forth of the plan and structure of reality, but that is a disclosure of the unconscious. The unconscious by definition is that which we are unaware of or what has been suppressed. Both are being revealed. That can be unsettling. The pressure of fundamental changes in the Earth’s Light grid (the geometrical field of energy structuring physical reality on our planet) is precipitating the contents of this unconscious layer, on individual and collective levels. The interaction between precipitation and Light grid pressure creates Earth Changes, as they’re now called, and these manifest in a variety of symptoms, including storms, fires, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, and a host of sociological perturbations. But Earth Changes, not signs of the end of the Earth, are symptoms of the revelation.

The Light grid, or structured energy body of the planet, is what gives us traction to effect the planet, to download or plug in consciousness to stabilize the interaction of the physical Earth with the Light grid changes and pressures. Then the sacred sites, or geomantic nodes, so plugged can better match the new energy settings and a precedent is set for human consciousness to match them also.

Why is the Light holy? That can be a bit of a pompous word. Substitute numinous then. The hierophant shows the numinous. The hierophant conducts us into the realm of the numinous which is holy because it is epiphanous. But numinous is only the aura or leading edge of a spiritual presence, a Light. This Light is structured. It is ensouled. We have to look further than the numinous aura or light of it. This Light shows us the structure of reality, consciousness, and the human being. It’s numinous because it vibrates faster and more purely than terrestrial things. It hasn’t lost its original spiritual potency even though our physical world has lost a fair bit.

The point of this book is to show how people and landscapes can be hierophants. The Earth is a hierophantic planet; we just haven’t realized that yet. You occupy a hierophantic body; you just haven’t realized that yet. Both are hierophantic landscapes.

Hierophantic activity is the same as geomantic interaction and this is identical with spiritual development and waking up, however incrementally that goes. Our planet is starting to wake up; a percentage of its humans are too. It can have the same shock impact as Neo in The Matrix waking up to find he was never in his body, that his reality was a false one, a computer simulation, and his real body was in peril. That’s a fair picture of how we tend to relate to our body and the planet. The hierophantic landscape, at whatever scale we see it, unplugs us from the simulation. No, that was a dream, but this is reality, and it happens to be an astounding picture.

I present field reports from five different landscapes, from Europe to the United States to Mexico. Some of these are interconnected in terms of specialized energy functions. All of them have indigenous myths that frame much of the geomantic landscape discovered and aid our interpretation of the landscapes. Why these five? Three of them—Glastonbury, the Rondanes of Norway, Oaxaca in Mexico—function as part of the planet’s heart chakra. The heart chakra, whether in terms of the body or the planet, has three parts or tiers, and they all work together. A fourth site, Lake Tahoe, also has a heart chakra connection but in a different way. The fifth location, Yosemite, presents a root chakra function at a crown chakra level.

That may sound technical. The Earth is a terrifically complex engineered template whose purpose is to support higher consciousness. It operates on many congruent, compatible levels. It is a mirror image of the fully expressed human being, with all our subtle bodies, channels, and centers. It is also a hologram of selected features in the spiritual world, the various Heavens or realms. Chakras are one of hundreds of various features in this engineered template.

Humans have them, the Earth has them, the cosmos has them; they express a fundamental hierarchy of energy and consciousness states, like a cascading fountain. In the body they organize our awareness, emotions, and life processes; they do the same on the Earth, but at a level appropriate to a physical planetary body that has subtle bodies too. At any level, the chakras can get clogged up and work less optimally; on the other hand, when they are in good working order they can produce strong visions. They become platforms for potentially experiencing greater understanding of reality. For various reasons these five locations are among many recently highlighted by the spiritual agencies that oversee developments on Earth that needed some interaction.

The reports I offer are based on field research and experience; this is an empirical field. The five chapters report some of the details of these interactions. Experience drives the interpretations which are clarified through clairvoyance and scholarship. It’s a lot like detective work: what happened, who did it, when, and why?

The fun part is there is more than one detective on the job. I report on the firsthand field experiences of several small groups interacting at these five landscapes. Visions and clairvoyant perceptions are integral to these experiences. How could they not be? The place of the Mysteries is in the spiritual world or finer frequency levels of our Earth reality; you need clairvoyance to get there, see them, and understand them.

The benefit of having multiple psychic eyes exploring these subtle terrains is that no one person will ever see all of it; that numinous elephant is too big and multidimensional for one person to decode. Get a handful of trained clairvoyants to look at something, then compare notes, you put together a richer picture of what it is. It’s not only about visionary experience though arguably it’s easier, don’t you think, to work with the lights on than to fumble around in the dark, not seeing anything clearly. The work is also about stimulating the hierophantic landscapes; hooking them up to larger energy sources, plugging them in, reconnecting them to their Source. It’s about helping the planet’s biosphere at the formative level, where its life patterns are.

You could put this many ways. The point is that to see is to effect, to discern is to stimulate. And, because the Earth’s geomantic system is wonderfully reciprocal, when you do this, the holy Light revealed feeds into the planet and feeds into you the viewer. You start to wake up, remember, put yourself back together again, resurrect. Yes, that’s an expensive word, usually reserved for special if not unique cases, but it is applicable. All of us are like the dismembered Osiris, once King of Egypt, until his body got sliced up into 14 parts, all of these flung across the deserts of Egypt long ago.

We are disconnected in multiple ways: from our complementary human part, either inner masculine or inner feminine; from our Higher Self or Watcher-Angel; from the Earth as our host context; from Nature and its intelligent spirits; from the spiritual world, that congeries of angels and ascended humans; from the true story of the history of planet and humanity; from the Christ, not the dogmatic simulacrum of religion but the real thing, bright and scary.

Scary? Most definitely. The Christ is like the Lightning-Struck Tower Tarot card. The lightning bolt sears through the brick tower, people frantically jump out the windows for safety. At times we all want to jump. The authentic Christ vibration is a powerful, catalytic, transformative energy; it’s a live wire with 100,000 volts in it. You could say it is one of the chief Mysteries our hierophantic landscapes will show us.

CHAPTER 1

Colluding with Angels: Wellesley Tudor Pole’s Work at Chalice Well

To see me, you’d probably think I’m not old enough to have met him, but I did. Here’s how it happened.

It was 1963. I was 13. It was January in Massachusetts, and I was playing basketball outside on a court paved in ice and I was wearing sneakers. I went in for a lay-up and instead got laid out, knocked unconscious for about six hours. Teenagers! They’re supposed to do stupid things; it’s their job description, so why worry. That summer I did a forward flip at summer camp and landed wrong. Knocked out again. When I woke up a handful of hours later in the infirmary I had no idea what had happened. Later, back home, the family doctor, who lived across the street, whispered to my parents, but I overheard him, if he gets another concussion, because my head knocks were, medically speaking, concussions, he may become crazy. In retrospect, at least for my critics, that likelihood might go a long way as an explanation.

When I was 34, I got my first inkling of what had happened when I was out. Just because you are unconscious, it doesn’t mean you’re inert, as near-death studies show. Consciousness is a lot bigger and more ambitious than what we take it for during the business hours of our normal daytime. I remembered. The occasion of my partial recall was a visit to Glastonbury and, especially, to Chalice Well gardens. I saw myself launched like a missile out of my supine body, saw myself streaking across the Atlantic Ocean, saw myself landing at Glastonbury, then saw myself on the third floor of Little St. Michaels. I do not believe I had at age 13 ever consciously heard of Glastonbury. Nor of course had I any notion of Wellesley Tudor Pole whom I had gone to visit.

However, at the time of this surprising recall, I was living in Glastonbury. It’s an odd, enigmatic, boisterous, inflated little market town in Somerset, a fairly low-lying farming shire less than 100 miles due west of London in England. It is a new-age mecca, watering hole, pilgrimage site, myth-laden sacred site; it still draws, as it has for millennia, thousands of people every year to its Mystery hoard.

My hosts were a family of angels I had recently begun consorting with and who had recently begun offering a wild tour of not only esoteric Glastonbury but the arcane Earth as a whole. The Ofanim. They helped me remember—to see—where I’d gone when unconscious. I’d gone right here, to Chalice Well—a small, cloistered, lushly equipped garden, just a few acres in size, with flowing water, loads of flowers and flowering bushes and trees, and an old stone-lined covered well, all of it close to downtown Glastonbury and energetically its heart and magnetic center—and once here to the top floor of Little St. Michaels, known to Wellesley Tudor Pole, who created it, as the Upper Room, an architectural mnemonic and simulation of how he remembered the actual room of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples.

I had gone to visit him both times I was knocked out, straight and nonstop from early 1960’s Massachusetts. That was a fairly remote world from ethereal, lushly green, mystical England, although England was then courting American adolescents through the guise of the Beatles and I had heard of Stonehenge and been excited about the revelations that its design had archeoastronomical aspects. We had nothing like that, that I knew of, in America. But Glastonbury? Never heard of it.

Another 25 years passed and I returned to those two visits to get a better view. Over the years I had trained my clairvoyance to be a precision research instrument, and I read the Upper Room visitation like a living picture. (Actually, first I had experienced its re-awakening after a long slumber since early childhood; then I got it fine-tuned to become a useful tool.) Here’s what I saw: an American teenager in glasses, curly hair, and sneakers in his astral body standing with Pole on a massive and brilliantly bright diamond carpet comprised of thousands of equal-sized glittering facets, all of this girted by ten-foot tall silver-haired angels. Several Ray Masters, specifically Saint Germain, Lord of the Lilac Robe, and Portia, Lord of the Orange-Gold Robe, were present in shifting form, both human-like and as fire-pillars; also present was Joseph of Arimathea, Ascended Master, director of the Grail Mysteries, and patron of all Grail Knights throughout time, not to mention a top-notch geomancer who primed many geomantic landscapes with the Christ Light, including Glastonbury’s some 2,000 years earlier, right after the Event at Golgotha.

Joseph held a copy of the Holy Grail, a refulgent golden chalice, as token of his responsibility. The master landscape angel of the Earth, popularly known as Gaia, but to American Indians as Changing Woman, rose up from inside the Earth to be just underneath or maybe she was interpenetrating the diamond vortex floor, and all of this was inside the adamant Light sword of the Archangel Michael who had inserted his sword into the ground, presumably from the Tor, which is next door, to include the Upper Room and all spirits and states of awareness inside it. That meant we had this meeting inside the sword of the Archangel Michael. The more I looked at that diamond carpet, the more facets it seemed to have, as if it grew from the very act of my perceiving it. Later I’d learn it had in total 40.3 million facets and was in fact the key to Pole’s collusion with angels as well as the Glastonbury terrain.

I saw also that thousands, maybe millions, of crystalline angelic hands, long, slender, piano-playing delicate hands, underlay the Glastonbury landscape—flat land, at and even, in some places, below sea level, pimpled by four rounded hills, green in the summer, short and grudging as it usually is—as if bearing it reverently and gently forth, as a presentation, or maybe it was like carrying a new baby, with respect to its fragility yet acknowledging its cosmic antiquity as a soul. I saw a wide circle of hierophants in brilliant, long robes of scarlet-gold, and with headpieces, staffs, and lanterns surrounding Chalice Well. These are the way-showers, the Light-revealers, the gate-openers, the sanctuary guardians, here and around the Earth. In fact, all the spirits assembled here would be my hierophants, would reveal the Light and the patterns it took and the architectural forms it created across the Earth.

I looked from behind Pole to see how he might be seeing the angels. He saw them as several circles of benevolent, majestic, serene angels appearing in both genders. As for the apparition in the Upper Room, it was nothing new to him. He wrote in a letter, on December 12, 1965, to Rosamond Lehmann, The Upper Room here was thronged by friends and visitors from far and wide in unseen realms. Some of those visitors from far-away, unseen realms were the benevolent, majestic angels Judaic angelology calls the Ofanim, the Wheels, as in the wheels of the Merkabah. Another was that teenager Leviton from Massachusetts.

I’ll come back to whose those guys are in a moment. That was the set-up, but what were we doing in the Upper Room? We were examining models of the Light grid, design features of the geomantic landscape or visionary geography of Glastonbury, England, and the planet as a whole. Pole showed me some of the landscape zodiac figures (known popularly or exoterically there as Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars, a big circular pattern of constellations etched onto the landscape) in their Light bodies, and he showed me aspects of Glastonbury in its Dreamtime form, as a landscape of Light temples and deities, their processes and activities, what they were doing to sustain our physical reality from their reality of Light. It was a dynamic picture, full of reality. Features made of Light and only suspected during the daytime (i.e., ordinary consciousness), or only rumored in myth or allegation, were now revealed vividly as elements in a terrific lucid dream.

It was as much a refresher tutorial for me as it was, I gathered, a planning session for future field work. Age 13 is a deal-breaker age for a teenager: here is the crossing of roads where you may set out in the direction of your destiny or set out to enjoy a myriad of distractions and false starts. The mid-1960s were already promising to be an electrifying decade, radical, rebellious, iconoclastic, hallucinatory, amply spiced with sex, drugs, rock music, riots, assassinations, city burnings, protests, long hair, so the Higher Powers evidently thought a few words to the astral body—that formidable fomentor of no end of problems, emotional upheaval to illness, as Rudolf Steiner characterized it, every teenager’s best and worst friend—might be in order.

Pole (1884-1968), then 79, at the opposite end of his life to me and who would pass over in about five years from my visit, embodied the Blazing Star and found the Ofanim congenial companions and way-showers, as the Ofanim told me. He presented a well-honed model of how to do it—work collegially and cooperatively with higher spiritual intelligences to help the Earth. He gave me a living model—an information seed—of how to do this work with angels. Later, I’d be a grown-up, he’d be on the Other Side, and the Ofanim would show up hoping I was ready, would remember quickly, and be open for business and adventure, maybe fill in for Pole with them on occasion. Pole was a writer, tea merchant, clairvoyant, initiate, Mystery worker, angel collaborator, backroom associate of world leaders, such as Winston Churchill, and founder, designer, and occasionally a resident of Chalice Well.

Back in 1963, I met Pole with the Ofanim inside a Light pillar. They showed me that Chalice Well is a training ground for interacting with the Glastonbury landscape, vast in scope and complexity, and in the protocols of blending human, Earth, celestial, and elemental energies. When I was 13, Pole showed me how to hammer a nail into the heart of the world. If you’ll permit the analogy, this was like a geomantic bar mitzvah introducing me to the Earth’s Talmud and Torah mysteries. The Nail is the Ofanim extended as a Light pillar and umbilicus through the diamond, meeting at the heart of the world, the Palace of Zavul, within the Earth’s primary heart chakra. Don’t worry: I’ll explain all this as we proceed with the story.

Pole and the Ofanim reminded me I was on Odysseus’s boat, not an enchanted pig beguiled by Circe. In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men arrive on the island of Circe, the witch or ill-intentioned daughter of the Sun; she turns all his men into pigs. They lose their human footing and identity. A few stay on the boat, pig-free. It’s a powerful teaching metaphor for how easy it is to sink into our lower animal self and forget the finer human aspects. More than that, the pig might represent humanity itself, its undeveloped condition; the guys on the boat stand for our celestial nature.

The Ofanim gave me a tutorial on taking responsibility for a Landscape of Light; they showed me the Nail, or the extended Ofanim diamond umbilicus, at Chalice Well, as a reminder and information download to be activated later in my life, around age 34, when they re-introduced the Light pattern of the Earth to me in my daytime physical self. Daytime helps; it makes a difference; things revealed become real to the body in daylight. I sometimes wonder why I was strangely unsurprised by this revelation and took to it immediately. I wondered why it all came so easily. It’s because I had been prepared with this information implant at age 13. Good planning. In retrospect, I see the hierophany was scheduled to start when I hit age 34.

In addition to my tutorial and our planning of future Light grid work (a term designating the energy aspects or geometrical configuration of the Earth as a body of Light), a third element was that we got a briefing on our assignments from the higher authorities, those who see around far more corners than we can even conceive exist.

The Earth’s Light grid, its master design template and array of sacred sites and their subtle Light temples, needs regular maintenance to keep the planet healthy, but since it’s a huge planet with, no exaggeration, millions of Light temples or copies of heavenly palaces, responsibilities get doled out regionally. The Ofanim, in conjunction with the Great White Brotherhood, represented by the three Masters present, and Archangel Michael, chief among the 18 archangels for our time period and thus in charge of the grounding of the supramundane Light into Earth and its ramifications through the subtle geomantic terrain and human consciousness, were explaining the assignments and requesting our participation. Who would say no thanks to something as fun and apparitionally stimulating as this? I couldn’t. I signed up. Let me at those temples.

What happened to the vision? It went into dormancy for about 20 years, in accordance with the wishes of consensus reality, as happens with most childhood visions in America. Yet it cropped up in an odd but repeated manner. In the summer I earned money for college by mowing lawns. I lived in a small college town in Western Massachusetts and everybody had ample lawns that needed a haircut once a week. There was one lawn I always mowed Sunday morning, when most people were at home reading The New York Times, in church, or just sleeping in, when I easily slipped into a contemplative mood. I suppose you’d call it a daydream or an imagination.

A UFO was parked in the backyard of this property. It wasn’t too big, maybe 25 feet wide, spherical, grayish-silver, and the front door was open, invitingly, for me. I entered, sat down, and per the request of its occupants, explained in great detail all I knew about the human race, contemporary culture, Freud, the Beatles, Kazantzakis, the Boston Red Sox, what was wrong with my high school, and other matters. Everything I could think of, a one-boy encyclopedia, I thought. I was probably 15. I thought I did a good job. So did they. They thanked me for my briefing and mentioned it was of such caliber it would no doubt get me a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show, then America’s most popular entertainment television program on Sunday nights. The Beatles first stormed the U. S. by appearing several times on this show. At the time, in case you’re too young to remember, it had the status of the Oprah! show.

Do you know the word neophyte? Ah, the charming neophyte teenager! Of course, I had the vision backwards, as I later understood. They were giving me a briefing, a reminder. It wasn’t a spaceship. It was their Rotunda. Why would I have thought it a spaceship anyway? UFOs were not that popular a public image then. And I was mentally prepped for angels, in some manner, from having read The Pilgrim’s Progress. That has a nice angel scene where Pilgrim walks a razor’s edge assisted by angels. I had read that when I was young. I am grateful I was cautious enough to never tell anybody anything at all about this recurrent and quite pleasant fantasy. I don’t recall ever telling any grown-up or even peer any of my childhood visions thereby exempting me from the inevitable whack of invalidation and disbelief. Like a good spy, I didn’t even commit it to paper, not a whisper, but I remembered.

The picture went dormant for 20 years, as I mentioned, then it resurfaced. I first visited Glastonbury in 1983, though I had made an earlier reconnaissance to Tintagel in 1972 as part of the obligatory post-college European tour for unsettled young Americans. In 1983 I was smitten. Then I rearrived in Glastonbury on Easter in 1984 to deepen the infatuation, not knowing it was archetypal, or perhaps I should say chronic, like a rash nearly everybody gets who comes to crazy-spiritual Avalon. But let’s stop for a moment and post some facts about Glastonbury, a psychic’s Disney World, a waking dream laced with fantasy, illusion, glamour, and riveting truth.

It’s a small market town of about 9,000 people located 30 miles south of Bristol in Somerset and about 100 miles west of London. The town is a dry point, barely above sea level, in a marshy region called the Somerset Levels, as in sea level. In the winter, sometimes, the Levels, or the flat open fields around the town, can flood, or once flooded, leave the four prominent hills of Glastonbury rising above them as islands. The town doesn’t produce much in terms of commodities, but the tourist industry is booming. Flocks of people come here for the myths, the new-age ambiance, the various Christian festivals, the quirky hills, the astral insinuations.

Here are a few of the reasons: Glastonbury is reputed to be the doorway to the legendary Avalon or Summer Country; King Arthur and his Knights of the Holy Grail conducted their deeds, jousts, and activities here and in the surrounding landscape; Joseph of Arimathea brought a chalice from the Last Supper here to bury; he founded one of Britain’s first Christian establishments; the landscape is numinous, spectral, feral, outré, engaging, off-putting, and deeply enigmatic with strange hills; the place is both modern and medieval, in current time and locked into the 1960s with its annual rock festival, people living off the energy grid in caravans (i.e., mobile homes), prophets manqué extolling the new Rastafarianism, UFOs, millennialism, paganism, Druidry, Wicca, radical feminism, Goddess adoration, drugs, and alcohol.

Still, when I first came here, I got seduced big time like just about everybody else. I loved the place, couldn’t get enough of it, wanted to plumb its mysteries. I eventually got over the psychic infection, but it was heady, delirious, for a time. Soon I heard of this old psychic gentleman named Wellesley Tudor Pole who had created Chalice Well, found an enigmatic blue sapphire bowl, and had already died. My Pole gatekeeper was an old polymath and intellectual adventurer named Stanley Messenger, a bit of a local legend for opening doors for many neophytes. I once asked him if he had ever heard of the Archangel Michael, and, for that matter, who was he? He was pretty polite about it: he laughed a bit, then said let’s go out for fish and chips. He had been up to his chin for decades with Steiner and his talk of the great archangel; it was if I asked him if, say, Winston Churchill was English or plump.

Stanley told me about Pole, showed me his books, told me how important this guy was, and he talked a lot about hierophants and Parsifalian emissaries of Light. I took to Pole immediately. I didn’t know why. Maybe I liked the way he looked. He seemed familiar. He intrigued me. He told me things, in his books, I enjoyed hearing. Naturally I did not know or remember I had met him years earlier. I now have a better grasp of why I liked him: he was grounded, humble, uninflated, lucid, sharp, incisive, competent, iconoclastic, spiritual but not pious, and, as I learned in the next year, he had worked with the Ofanim and thus, for me, he had their imprimatur. You can trust good friends of your own good friends. The Ofanim told me they had worked with Pole throughout his life and on many geomantic jobs. They had given him the designs for Chalice Well. They probably inspired him to buy the place.

They also told me that often it’s the quiet ones in the back of the pool hall who are the best pool players or teachers, not the loud, boisterous ones out in the open. I had never heard of Pole, and I could tell from his books that was just fine with him. In other words, he didn’t mind working in the background of public spotlights. He didn’t mind anonymity; he saw it as a requisite for success in his inner work. As for his iconoclasm, here are just a few examples: he thought Jehovah was a jerk, he was allergic to the Vatican, and he regarded Lucifer as a good guy. As for his anonymity, that was relative: he was certainly known in high circles, from the Ofanim and Archangel Michael to Winston Churchill during the war years. He had the ear of those who counted, and no doubt he was delighted the tabloids never heard of him.

Let’s pause for a moment to fill in the biographical picture of Pole and Chalice Well. He was born on Saint George’s Day, April 23, in 1884 in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset. Saint George is England’s patron saint, famous for dragon-slaying in the style of Archangel Michael. I suspect that was a public guise for the Ray Master Portia, England’s official designated Ray Master. His family, on his mother’s side, had Welsh ancestry, and as a child he was psychic, seeing, for example, the color of prayers rising up in churches. Around 1902 he started having revelatory dreams about Glastonbury and the mysteries of Avalon, and when he began visiting the place regularly, he found its landscape and atmosphere corresponded to what his dreams had earlier revealed. His whole family, in fact, had aptitude and affinity for spiritual matters; his sister Katherine became the keeper of the Glastonbury Cup (see below); his other sister Mary was a visionary, even a channel of sorts (sometimes for him); both parents had a long-term interest in psychic matters; and his brother Alex followed Theosophy.

Up until World War I Pole had been managing the family business, Chamberlain, Pole & Company, Ltd., importers of flour, grain, and cereal, and its offshoot, the Nutrex Biscuit Factory which supplied ration biscuits to the British Army. He became a Major in the British Army in World War I, fighting in Jerusalem, and later wrote that for seven years before the start of the war he had foreseen the conflict in the planet’s astral realm, watching a conflict in the Air approaching.

In 1919, he made the Birthday Honours List and was awarded an O.B.E. In 1940, he devised the Big Ben Dedicated Silent Minute with the support of King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Every evening at nine p.m. when Big Ben struck the hour in London, people across England would be silent, prayerful, asking for peace, and helping to open a channel between the spiritual and human worlds. The Nazis later confessed this had proved to be a formidable, insuperable occult and secret weapon for which they had no counter-measure and which they could not understand. The B.B.C. broadcast, which framed the Silent Minute, was so popular throughout England it continued for 7,700 successive nights, or 21 years, ending in August 1961. Hardly anyone knew it had been Pole’s idea, or who he was.

Pole traveled a lot, visiting what he called Michael centers—he didn’t have to ask Stanley Messenger who this Archangel Michael was or what he wanted—including the Scottish island of Iona and Devenish off the coast of Northern Ireland, linking them energetically with Glastonbury and helping to rekindle and reconsecrate them for their holy mission in the New Time, though it might take centuries for this fulfillment to manifest widely and leaven the thought of humanity, he wrote. ¹

Their mission? Presumably to hold and transmit this specialized Michaelic Light which would have a favorable impact on human consciousness and the Earth. He worked to rekindle what he called beacons, power centers, and spiritual lighthouses, many of these once sites of pre-Christian Mysteries but now eclipsed or forgotten. Some are still not well known, such as a vast nature power house on the slopes of the Elburz Mountains in Iran, one of seven such centers on the planet that keep the Earth energized, on course, and presumably from toppling off its intended axis.

In his letters, he explained to a colleague that the great benefit of human pilgrimage to and prayer at the old Light centers was to help the site guardians do their work better. Avoid self-inflation, he counseled, but come equipped with simplicity, faith, and purity of purpose. Then you will be immune from astral distortion and misperception. Pole spoke of his geomantic work in terms of prayer, but as he was a working colleague of the Ofanim, as they tell me, I suspect his geomantic protocols were sophisticated. What they were specifically, he kept to himself.

He had lots of influential friends, and with some of them he maintained a fruitful correspondence on metaphysical matters, and he appears to have remained well connected through back channels with the British government, following the success of his Silent Minute initiative. After a meeting with Churchill in the early 1940s, he wrote to a friend he had seen in the celestial regions numbers of radiant little angels carrying cornucopiae filled with myriads of multicoloured and flashing stars. They were emptying these phials into the dark firmament, or planetary astral plane, to revitalize lines of light and to start spreading into the human world.²

But his Dharma kicked in starting in 1904 when he first visited Chalice Well, then owned by the Belgian Order of the Sacred Heart. At the time Glastonbury felt inert to him, as if in a coma, spiritually asleep. He roamed the gardens, drank the water, and found himself overwhelmed by the inherent sanctity of the place. It was there, but it needed to be brought to the surface, made explicit, offered to the public. The firm conviction arose in him that one day he would own this holy place, that it had a destiny to fulfill with regard to the Christ and the Mysteries. It was less about personal ownership, though, but rather a vista of stewardship and responsibility.

I was left with a feeling of sanctity and inspiration, which has never left me, he commented in 1960. He had the strong premonition that one day he would come into possession of this truly wonderful place, so that it might be thrown open to all who believe in the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God. In 1960, finally in possession of Chalice Well, Pole hoped it would once again fulfill its intended inspiring mission of acting as a gateway through which revelation for coming times may flow, that these revelations would radiate across Britain and the whole world.³

The place had a destiny to fulfill. It took 55 years, but in 1959, he purchased the well and its gardens and set up the Chalice Well Trust to administer and preserve its total of 12.5 acres, which includes orchards on Chalice Hill and a portion of the lower slopes of the Tor, and elegant terraced gardens in four distinct zones threaded with a stream of red or chalybeate spring water. That’s when Pole stepped into his function as hierophant of Chalice Well, the revealer and preserver and even, as Chalice Well co-designer with the Ofanim, engineer of the holy light templated in this numinous landscape.

We showed him some temple structures, both achieved as with what you call Light temples, and some in the design stage and to be manifested at some time by those open to his guidance, the Ofanim told me. "He designed Chalice Well to be a seed for the Christed Initiation in the Buddha Body, a catalyst, and a practice ground, a ‘homeopathic’ Light temple, like a concentrated microcosm, where the celestial landscape and Earth landscape could share experiences and be joined by the Grail Knight and be illuminated vertically and laterally by the Christ Light—a miniature but perpetual Epiphany."

The Ofanim showed me, rather than telling me, how all Chalice Well and its geomantic features sit upon their glittering Nimitta diamond carpet, how it even forms walls around the boundary of the grounds. They showed me Glastonbury as a Land of Light, its Dreamtime form, its original and now implicit visionary geography design and layout, its Light grid pattern and how the interactive work with them is about grounding the Blazing Star throughout this nexus. The Blazing Star is one of the Ofanim’s prime manifestation forms; it’s also found in every human, and is capable of expanding to any size, including the Nimitta diamond. I’ll go more into this subject as the book progresses, but for now, for clarification, the Ofanim as an angelic order manifests as a pinprick of Light within the human, and also as angels, when they feel like looking that way, and also as a diamond with many identical facets. They call this aspect of themselves the Nimitta, a Sanskrit word meaning a refined point in consciousness. Other angelic orders often refer to the Ofanim as the Nimitta.

As for the terraced gardens, on a physical level they consist of walkways, benches, lots of flowers and shrubs and trees, some orchards and fields, a covered well, and several buildings, but the core of the place is a series of four distinct sections through which runs a water channel. The water is chalybeate, meaning reddish, filled with iron, and flows at the prodigious, measured rate of 25,000 gallons every day. At one end is the well and the water flows underground, then it emerges through a sculpted lion’s head, spills over a modest waterfall of a few feet, runs through an open channel, and flows through a vesica piscis spillpond at the other end. Each of the four sections has a distinct atmosphere and architectural and botanical features. The well, built of large, shaped, finished stones, has two chambers, one pentagonal, both large enough for a person to stand in, and historians believe it was originally used for baptism and initiation, probably long before the Christian advent in Glastonbury.

You’d climb down there, maybe they’d put the lid on over your head, the water would flow and trickle around you, and you’d have a baptism experience. Now they hardly let anyone in there, presumably for safety or health reasons, and usually the lid is set in place so you can’t see the ancient stone geometry inside it. The acreage was originally known as Chalcwelle, but after 1306 it became Chalice Well, and during the 18th and 19th centuries it acted as a mini-Lourdes, as many people came here for physical and spiritual healings, immersing themselves in the bloodred waters. That took place in the division called Arthur’s Courtyard, the second zoned section.

When I first used the gardens as a training facility in 1984 under the guidance of the Ofanim, for the most part only this core four-fold section was available for public use, but that seemed sufficient, ample, even more than I could encompass in my understanding. The place looked small, but it was much larger on the inside, like Dr. Who’s Tardis. Each of the four garden sections was a psychic, numinous world in itself. Maybe the whole thing measures about 110 yards from entry to wellhead; it is quite compact, with two sections not more than 15 to 20 yards long, the biggest maybe 40.

Amplifying the impact of the gardens is their proximity: they are nestled like a green, angelically tinted sliver of paradise between the Tor and Chalice Hill. The place invites contemplation and meditation, and its combination of physical features and lush, well-tended plant life richly supports any tune-ins you might make. Sometimes it seems you need not even tune in, in any active sense, but that the place starts tuning in to you, observing you, validating your presence, illuminating you. The first time I ever sat here, on a summer’s morning, I felt sure the flowers wanted to talk to me, had things to say, good things, things worth writing down. It’s not a place that inspires inflation or psychic grandiosity, just honest, clean mysticism and immersion in Light. Pole was a lot like that, as I gather from his writings.

I find Pole sets an excellent and emulable example for spiritual-psychic work. He described his work as rekindling Michael centers, that is, working with the Archangel Michael to energetically cleanse and refurbish sacred sites that had once been numinous. This archangel is of foremost importance in our time, he explained, the standard bearer of the Christ. Many dozens of churches and hills throughout England had been dedicated to him in his guise as St. Michael, and all of those dedicated sites mark geomantic and numinous highpoints in the landscape. Kindling also means, I believe, adjusting them to be suitably receptive templates for the new Michaelic consciousness, as Rudolf Steiner called it, that emphasizes human spiritual freedom and an enhanced level of clairvoyance. These adjustments are particularly relevant for the 260-year period of Michael’s regency, now in progress.

Pole wrote that to do this, or any other kind of geomantic work, you need knowledge, selfless dedication, with complete immunity from attendant astral influences. That sentence is rich in nuances and mature, well-considered advice.

How exacting is that statement by Pole. Knowledge means a working map of the geomantic system and the technical, effective protocols enabling you to interact with it. It’s empirical knowledge such as you’d expect in an electrician or plumber. Dedication means you are free of the lure and seductions of glamour, the drive for notoriety, gratification, celebrity status, or recognition, even acknowledgement, able to perform the work because it needs doing, knowing the effects will be subtle, diffused, or even delayed, because that’s how the Light grid works, indirectly and quietly. We are dealing with an intricately engineered spiritual template. You have to know how it works to interact with it effectively or without damaging or distorting it. It is not a theater for sensational effects; what good would they serve if many people living in their vicinity could not psychologically survive the Light upgrades? Dedication means you’re okay with that. American popular culture is obsessed with celebrities and the oddly democratic possibility that virtually anybody could become one; it’s egalitarian, yes, yet terribly seductive and distorting and can sidetrack you.

The bit about immunity from astral influences is acute. A zone of distortionary and inflationary energies and spirits lies between human consciousness and the higher spiritual world; a lot of untrained psychics mistake it for the good stuff, but it is the layer of what I call astral juvenilia: misperceptions, distractions, misattributions, psychic inflation, mediumistic effects, and cognitive error. It’s dangerous, alluring, easy, solipsistic, and meretricious. Glastonbury, like many new-age centers, is packed solid with the stuff, has it wholesale, can give you a bulk discount on glamour. It’s like the poppy field that put everyone deliciously, irresistibly to sleep in The Wizard of Oz, except here your dreams can be full of grandiose perceptions and revelations.

Pole understood the grounded clairvoyant must be senior to this zone of wayward astral influence, be transparent, neutral, unaffected by its lures or confusions to be effective. He called the condition of being porous to its lures astralitis, and he noted that mediums tend to attracts lots of low-level spirits, who often are of an ambivalent nature, and all kinds of astral currents, astral shells, astral attacks, and floating karmic debris, which is especially problematic in people who are emotionally unstable or easily excitable; overall, he preferred communion to communication. Today in professional clairvoyant work we call astralitis trance-medium energy, but it’s the same old distortionary zone, likely to confuse you or lure you out of your body. Classically, this was known in magic as glamour, a morass of illusions and delusions, a confusion of semblances and seemings which could easily befuddle most people.

These are my roots, my college campus, this crazy-spiritual training temple with layers of astralitis and outwardly preserved reminders of the visionary geography and shreds of old myth and heaps of ungrounded attributions, enticing tags fluttering in the numinous realm, lures to draw us in, as alluring as the Sirens. First I loved the place; then I hated it, resisted it, avoided it; now I’ll be neutral, maybe see it. This time I will not flail against Glastonbury for its negative Netzach qualities, its unpurified heart vibration, and enjoy the grounded version of the town instead. Yes, the psychic inflation, ungrounded psychism, and car exhaust from transiting low-level astral spirits is still here as before, but I understand it better now, how it works, what it does. It is a normal condition of the planet in these days, though amplified at sacred sites.

The new-age shamanic appropriation of the Glastonbury mysteries makes sense: people are touched by the numinous and want to ground that experience in some container. It comes as a feeling, a quickening, a touch on the shoulder, a flutter, a vague shape from the next dimension, not quite seeable, but you know it’s there. They reach for old forms and fill them with their numinous sensings, but fail to get the traction they want and need, and get distorted, deluded, or lost. The Glastonbury silliness, inflation, and astral juvenilia come from a failure to cognitively ground the numinous impact, to find suitable anchored forms that work to move one forward. People get no traction on their initial psychic contacts or numinous exposures because they lack empirical knowledge of how the geomantic system works and fall back on outmoded modes of approach that lead them into pull-outs from the expressway. Then they pollute the psychic atmosphere from using primitive or nonresonant approaches.

Still, it’s hard not to be lured into the threshold of the astral plane here: how feminine, etheric, soft, recessive, receptive, how yin is this psychic atmosphere and soul mood of Somerset or perhaps all of England. Here the veil that hides the Unseen is thin, wrote Dion Fortune. She was a Qabalist, writer, and mystic living on the slopes of Glastonbury Tor in the 1930s. She felt it, the touch. Here the invisible tides flow strongly… Glastonbury is a gateway to the Unseen… and to this day it sends its ancient call into the heart of the race it guards, and still we answer to the inner voice.⁴

Pole would have had to contend with this layer of psychic distortion. It is probably a perennial fixture of the planet’s psychic atmosphere in which untrained, unpurified psychism meets and is defeated or seduced by alluring psychic glamours. Here the geomantic landscape, ironically, acts as a collaborator, because, as Glastonbury savant Fortune said, the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds in thin and porous here, and as I discovered in my long-term tutorial in Glastonbury’s geomantic endowment, these Earth energy features make it easier for people to make the initial psychic contact but provide no assurance for the quality or epistemological accuracy of those contacts. It doesn’t help one’s clairvoyant rigor that Glastonbury sits a little below sea level; all those confusing swamp-like ethers and centuries of human thoughtforms accumulate here. Pole was assiduous about avoiding grandiosity or even its suggestion in manner or behavior. No doubt he was aware of the subliminal encouragement Glastonbury gives to both.

During my first few years of living within the Glastonbury milieu, I experienced a waking-world continuity in my Pole influence, as I’ll call it. I had come to Glastonbury to write a book about the Arthurian and Grail mythos; at least that was my cover story, or as spies call it, my legend. I was a legend seeking the truth of a legend: who is King Arthur? I mean, really. Not the outer historical persona. Unlike with Archangel Michael, I was well briefed, as a scholar, on this one. I just didn’t buy the legend. I wanted to see what lay behind it, the metaphysical truth.

Elements of the story assumed a real-life presence and immediacy, and I had impressions of what I started to call my Inner Round Table, a kind of peripatetic assembly of guides, experts, and colleagues. I wasn’t psychic when I got there, but I sure became psychic pretty fast from living there; and I found myself launched into an adventure I called myth-living, walking inside myths, finding the old myths were props or costumes or wave-guides for revelation. Take them seriously, though with a light hand, and they might lead you into their world, much like Tolkien wrote about how legends of Middle-Earth became real, as if the figures of the old stories suddenly sprang up before you out of the long grasses. But you may have to keep sweeping aside the sticky cobwebs and seeing through the glamours and false leads.

Its members comprised several gnomes, a sylph, Pan (chief of the Nature Spirits), the Ofanim, my brother, who had died 11 years earlier, Joseph of Arimathea, and Pole. Fortunately 18 years of Buddhist training and stout knees fortified me for the most part against the worry (and, I hope, the fact) of psychic inflation; as a fallback, I could always call this stuff makyo and hit myself with the Zen stick for hallucinating. What did this specially nuanced Round Table do? Its members appeared to accompany me to various hills and gardens and woods to participate in Grail visions. Maybe they were my Greek chorus, commenting on, correcting, or complaining about my inner activities. Maybe they liked hanging out with angels. About 25 years later I discovered clairvoyants call this gathering one’s spirit council.

Who were these angels anyway? Ofanim is a Hebrew word that means wheels. All the angelic families get a complimentary im at the end of their names. The Greeks called this family the Thrones, and they have acquired many other names from different cultures to describe their protean guises, which I’ll get to in a moment. They are called the wheels because they are the wheels of the Merkabah, the formal name for the Throne of Glory, the mobile Chariot of the Ancient of Days. Jewish folklore refers to them, when they’re mentioned at all, as the Holy Wheels, and Qabalists sometimes call them the Galgalim, from galgal, denoting a circle or wheel. Abstractly, this tells us they are the means by which the Supreme Being’s energy moves dynamically, like a turning wheel, through all the created worlds. How many? They once told me they service about 18,933,488,640 galaxies.

Angelologies describe them as having multiple eyes and wings. I asked them about that bit. They said they have 8,466 eyes, meaning for each angel manifestation they generate. That’s about 341,179,000,000 eyes for the whole family. The original Nosey Parker. That enables them to see every possible angle of a given problem or situation at once. They have crowns bearing 14 emeralds; their robes feature 72 large sapphires, each surrounded by 48 smaller sapphires: that’s 3,456 sapphires per angel.

That comes to roughly 13,927,600,000 sapphires for the whole mob of them. They are capable of a total manifestation array of 40.3 million angels, more or less identical, though I have noticed a tendency among them to occasionally put forth little variations, most likely out of amusement or to see if I’ll notice. I sometimes suspect they use mirrors to multiply their permitted number of copies. Maybe that’s how they get around the ratio of small numbers to large responsibility. How can a mere 40.3 million angels efficiently service 18 billion galaxies? Maybe with the 341 billion eyes. I wonder if for them one eye equals one angelic presence as far as our experience goes.

They’re quite old too. Formally, they say their age is a Week of Brahma; that comes to 60 billion years. You have to count the Nights of Brahma in calculating their age. My impression is that of the 40 angelic orders, the Ofanim are the second oldest and occupy a position in the angelic array (it’s a hierarchy more like the array of rose petals) second from the top, with only the Hayyoth ha-Chodesh closer to God. These are the famous if odd four-headed Holy Beasts, Holy Lives, or Holy Living Creatures Ezekiel saw by the thousands as glowing coals and torches embedded between the wheel-spokes (i.e., Holy Wheels or Ofanim) of the Merkabah, with heads resembling human, bull, lion, and eagle forms. They’re the origins of Blake’s Four Zoas. The brightness of their fire flashed like lightning and the sound of their wings was like the noise of great waters, Ezekiel reported.

As long as I’m into gossip, I will mention the Ofanim once told me Ezekiel is an old pal of theirs. I saw him once. Very tall guy. Towering over an old church site in Somerset, a place called Muchelney, as in Much El Nigh. Angels. The faces of the Hayyoth are the personifications of the four original, fundamental etheric elements, what Rudolf Steiner called the four ethers and the Hindus the tattvas, the building blocks of reality and matter, fire, earth, air, and water, but at the formative level.

Part of the fun in angel sighting is that they don’t always look like angels. It’s just one of many possible forms they can assume. It’s not just the Ofanim, but other families, such as the Serafim and Elohim, and many of the archangels, don’t mind tarting themselves up in other guises that seem negotiated by cultural preferences for visual metaphors and the arcane necessities of their work. Early on in my work with them, I got the impression that the visuals are negotiable, as if they were an accommodating tailor. You want bodhisattvas? We can do bodhisattvas, no problem! Like big birds? Check this out. Jolly elephants who are clearly over-fed? Hello!

The Ofanim have marked preferences, notably for bird and elephant guises. They’re partial to eagles, but they do have some really dressy cloaks. Among the bird metaphorical guises, they are Garuda, Phoenix, Simurgh, Black Eagle, Thunderbird, the Mayan Vocub-Caquix, and many other similar big-bird forms. See Table 1 for a selected list of their apparitional guises. They are a hierophany all to themselves.

TABLE 1

The Many Guises of the Ofanim