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Herma in England July 1-10, 2010
by Geoff Ward
Sitting round the table at the Black Horse, the 18th-century coaching inn at Cherhill, near Avebury, on Sunday evening, at the end of a weekend's intensive filming with the prehistoric geometry expert Tom Brooks, the conversation somehow turned to number symbolism.
Sean Martin, Geoff Ward, Tom Brooks and Herma Koornwinder at the Black Horse Inn
There was me, Herma, Tom and intrepid film-maker Sean Martin: coffee for me, bangers and mash for Sean, and delicious desserts for Tom and Herma. How many documentaries should there be in Herma’s ambitious Lost Science series, we wondered? Should it be seven, twelve - or perhaps two series of five films each? Of course, Herma announced at her convention in Amsterdam in June 2010 that she planned to make a total of ten documentaries; she was now back in England to make the sixth and seventh.
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Crop Circle at Stitchcombe
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Later that evening, checking the Silent Circle and Crop Circle Connector websites, there was a surprise in store. As if answering the question, the latest formation, close to St Martin's Chapel at Chisbury, Wiltshire, included a pentagram, a five-pointed star, as its main motif. The pentagram, the ‘Druid’s foot’ as it came to be known, was the symbol of the Pythagoreans who called it ‘Health’; five was the union of the first female number, two, and the first male number, three.
The number five also leads us to the system of Divine Proportion, for the five isosceles triangles making the ‘points’ of the pentagram are in fact golden triangles – the ratio of the length of the side of the triangle to the base is equal to the Golden Ratio, 1:1.618. The closely related pentagon, meanwhile, is the most direct manifestation of the Golden Ratio. |
Significantly, moreover, for the Pythagoreans, ten was their most revered number because, holistically, it represented the cosmos in its entirety, combining the properties of uniqueness, polarity, harmony, space and matter. So, for them, ten was the number of everything, described by the Pythagorean Philolaus in about 400BC as ‘sublime, potent and all-creating, the beginning and the guide of the divine concerning life on Earth’.
Propitious, indeed, for Herma’s second English film shoot - and not forgetting that isosceles triangles are at the heart of the system of ancient British prehistoric geometry that Tom Brooks is revealing to the world.
I'd collected Herma from Bristol International Airport on the previous Thursday. Her KLM flight from Amsterdam was an hour late, due to technical problems, and then we got lost in the narrow North Somerset lanes looking for her B&B at Compton Dando, a village only 15 minutes away from mine, but which I'd visited only once before.
That evening, my wife Angie prepared a lovely roast lamb dinner, and Herma was suitably fortified for the first full day of her visit, Friday, when we visited the Stoney Littleton long barrow, near Wellow, and the Stanton Drew stone circles, each being only a short drive from my home. Herma was particularly interested in these sites because the long barrow had attracted a crop circle in a field of beans close by a few weeks before, and the Stanton Drew monument is older than the Pyramids and Avebury, and at least as old as Stonehenge. Using her dowsing rods, Herma detected energy at both sites, and decided to film there later, which she did with spectacular results.
At 11pm on Friday, I was back at the airport to meet Sean Martin who, flying in from Edinburgh where he lives, had agreed to be our director of photography at very short notice after Herma's Egyptian crew, with whom she worked on her first five films, became unavailable. I'd recommended Sean to Herma as having the ideal background for her project. |
Crop Circle at Stoney Littleton |
I first met Sean, who is also the author of several books, in 2005 when he was living in Somerset and his fourth book on 'medieval mystery and mayhem', as I termed it, had just been published. This was his study of the Cathars, the religious cult liquidated by the Catholic Church in France and Italy in the 13th century. He had already written books on the Black Death, alchemy and alchemists and the Knights Templar, all for the Pocket Essentials series, plus a biography of the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, and later he wrote a book about the Gnostics, which is now out in a new paperback edition (July 2010).
Gnosticism refers to a number of religious groups from the early centuries of Christianity who emphasised the importance of secret knowledge - gnosis – to escape the trappings of the material world, and also that divinity lay within every human being. Had the Gnostics not been crushed by the established church, Christianity would have been very different today.
‘Far from being the “first Christian heretics”, the Gnostics were almost certainly closer to Jesus’s original teachings than the official church ever was,’ says Sean. ‘The increasingly tolerant West of today is a factor in allowing people of Gnostic inclinations to practise their faith again openly for the first time in nearly 2,000 years. But one is forced to wonder, have the Gnostics come back to us today for a reason?’
Sean’s 2004 film, The Notebooks of Cornelius Crowe, is about a man who uncovers the secret meaning of the geometry of London’s layout and architecture. His next film project was The Gulf Breeze Caravan Park UFO Society, described as a ‘bitter-sweet comic drama’, and based on a real-life UFO fanatic who lived in the Somerset seaside town of Weston-super-Mare in the 1980s. The title is an allusion to a UFO flap at Gulf Breeze, Florida, in the late 1980s.
Having accidentally captured a UFO on film while shooting a documentary in Somerset in 1994, Sean maintains what he describes as a ‘gentlemanly interest’ in the subject.
In 2007, Sean contributed to Super-8 Cities, a collection of short films made by a number of directors about their home towns - in Sean’s case, Weston-super-Mare, focusing on celebrities who had been born there, lived there, or passed through. His latest film, Folie á Deux, a drama based on the true story of two lonely people who meet, with frightening consequences, after making contact on the internet, is being completed in 2010.
It was also in 2005 that I first heard of Tom Brooks. I was books editor at the Western Daily Press at Bristol, and he sent me a review copy of his The Hand of Man, which had been published a few weeks before but which, unfortunately, has since gone out of print. I saw right away that his work was of major importance and I contacted him immediately for an interview. Since then we have become friends and, in my journalistic capacity, I have been happy to help him gain a wider audience for his discoveries.
Put simply, Tom has decoded Britain's prehistory, and proved that Stone Age people, far from being barbaric, were sophisticated engineers and surveyors. He claims amazing proof that 2,000 prehistoric monuments in England and Wales - long barrows, hill camps, mounds, standing stones and stone circles - lie on a vast geometric grid used as a navigational aid by ancient Britons 5,000-6,000 years ago. Tom's achievement comes after decades of meticulous research involving countless mathematical computations based upon the true position of each ancient site relative to all others according to the Ordnance Survey National Grid.
His research suggests the monuments were deliberately built on what we see today as a network of isosceles triangles (those having two sides the same length) and equal distance between sites, providing a simple way for people to get from place to place without maps – which is why the system has been likened in the media to ‘Stone Age sat-nav’. Of course, the prehistoric surveyors may not have set out consciously to create isosceles triangles, but nevertheless did so by making two points equidistant from a third, one for distance and the other for direction.
Tom reveals that the 5,000-year-old Silbury Hill in Wiltshire was the hub of the network, offering a convincing solution to the mystery of the purpose of the largest man-made mound in Europe, but also a challenge to established archaeological thinking. He has launched a small website and a limited edition of a new book, Prehistoric Geometry: the Discoveries of Tom Brooks, which covers his latest findings and includes 18 fold-out charts, put together by hand with his wife Sue at their remote hilltop cottage in Devon.
The first day of filming was on location in North Wiltshire, and the second day indoors - using a room kindly loaned to us by dowser Adrian Incledon-Webber at his home at Lower Farm, Cherhill - to record Tom presenting many of his charts, describing his work in detail, and answering questions.
We met Tom early on Saturday morning at one of his favourite haunts, the Polly Tearooms in Marlborough (once his home town for 12 years) where he had breakfasted earlier - he has a penchant for such quintessentially English establishments.
Leading the way in his little hatchback, he took us first to a housing estate on a hillside in the town from where you can get a clear view of Four Mile Clump, an ancient hill-camp on the Marlborough Downs hidden by a copse, which was to orientate us on our travels that morning. As Sean trained the camera on the distant hilltop so, uncannily, Herma’s dowsing rods also turned to point to it. Immediately, she knew that the points determined by Tom in his geometry were dowsable, and this was swiftly borne out at our next location, deep in Savernake Forest.
Clambering over Lord Cardigan's wire fences, we reached the remains of an ancient trackway lined up with Four Mile Clump to the north and the South Wonston long barrow, Hampshire, to the south, and Herma’s rods reacted strongly to the prehistoric alignment. On Ordnance Survey maps, the track is described as a Roman Road, but Tom knows otherwise, having shown that it is far older than that, forming part of one side of a prehistoric isosceles triangle which has Four Mile Clump, the South Wonston long barrow and Silbury Hill at its corners. Four Mile Clump and Silbury Hill are equidistant from the South Wonston long barrow at 49.242km and 49.341km, respectively.
The track runs along the edge of the field where the little-known Savernake long barrow stands, apparently just a hillock with trees on it to the untutored eye today. Tom revealed the hitherto unimagined importance of this unprepossessing locale through its triangulation with Silbury Hill and Stonehenge. He was amazed to see one of Herma's rods spin furiously as she held it high above her head atop the long barrow.
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Tom Brooks and Herma Koornwinder
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Sean, Herma and Tom Brooks |
Herma and Tom - a gentleman of the old school, and disarmingly self-effacing - seemed to take a mutual delight in one another's knowledge as we went on to film at the West Kennet long barrow, Silbury Hill and the Avebury stone circle where Tom was again able to witness Herma's rods twirling at speed - and try them himself in the shadow of the massive Swindon Stone.
‘I was curious about Tom’s work because I thought our knowledge could go together,’ said Herma afterwards. ‘He could prove my lines and I could prove his lines. He was happy I was able to dowse his tracks and points and I was happy that I could show his lines were dowsable. Our two specialities, or elements, came together. Tom has found the geometry in the earth, and I have found the geometry in space!
The coincidence of financial ‘market navigation’, as in Koornwinder Global Market Navigation (KGMN), Herma’s consultancy, and a system of Stone Age geographical navigation, was not lost on us.
In the evening, Tom wanted to press on to complete the filming, but Herma insisted on a fresh start tomorrow, which was just as well as the next day’s session lasted six hours!
Speaking about the system of prehistoric geometry in England and Wales, Tom said: ‘Created more than 2,000 years before the Greeks were supposed to have discovered such geometry, it remains one of the world's biggest civil engineering projects. It was a breathtaking and complex undertaking by a people of profound industry and vision. We must revise our thinking on what's gone before. So advanced, sophisticated and accurate is the geometrical surveying now discovered that we must review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebears as primitive, or conclude that they received some form of external guidance.’
Herma made a point of going to wave goodbye to Tom from the forecourt of the Black Horse on Sunday evening as he began his 100-mile return journey home. Later, Tom said: ‘It was a privilege to meet Herma and her production team and most flattering that she chose my discoveries and propositions to illustrate the hitherto unknown yet incredibly accurate geometric arrangement of our precious antiquities. I have tried for years to gain publicity in this country for this 5,000-year-old mathematical patterning. I can hardly wait to see the finished production.’
The aim of the next three days' filming was to probe deeper into the issues of crop circles, megaliths and earth energies. Monday morning saw us at Charles Mallet's Silent Circle information centre at Yatesbury, near Avebury, to discuss prospects, and to interview symbologist Francine Blake, of the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group (WCCSG).
The eminently quotable Charles, who appears in the second of Herma's documentaries, Crop Circles, Stock Markets and Megaliths, began to investigate numerous paranormal and metaphysical phenomena as a full-time undertaking in the 1990s. His wide-ranging studies included UFOs, paranormal activity, hidden and/or suppressed history, ancient spiritual traditions and modern subversions of the apparent true nature and history of the human species and our planet.
Herma visits a Crop Circle together with
dowser Adrian Incledon-Webber and
investigator Charles Mallet from the
Silent Circle Information Centre |
In the summer of 1996, he heard about crop circles appearing in fields in southern England.
'The mathematical and precise geometrical nature of these designs left me astounded,' he said. 'It seemed unlikely, if not outright impossible, that this was the work of pranksters or vandals, as one would often read in the news media.' |
He visited Wiltshire the following year to investigate the circles first hand, and decided they represented a truly mysterious phenomenon which was worthy of detailed consideration, eventually concluding that we are dealing with something involving 'direct paranormal intervention into our three-dimensional space'.
In our interview, Francine spoke of the symbolism of crop circles in relation to megalithic and sacred sites, next to which they so often appear, and how it was as if the formations were helping us to get back in touch with our ancestors and tap into their beneficent knowledge and wisdom. I can see a special link here with Tom Brooks' work, in that crop circles appearing next to ancient sites seem to endorse, if not validate, the system of prehistoric geometry, by actually becoming part of it, if only temporarily.
Born in Montreal, Canada, Francine majored in classical studies at college and studied fine art at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts de Montreal. At the end of the 1960s, she went to England on a student’s grant, married and stayed. She spent twenty years studying ancient wisdom in a school of self-development brought to the West in 1917 by George Gurdjieff, the Armenian born mystic and spiritual teacher.
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Introduced to crop circles in 1987, Francine was immediately drawn to them, recognizing many of the symbols she had been studying. She joined the Centre for Crop Circle Studies (CCCS) in 1991, and in 1992 moved to Wiltshire with her family to be closer to the phenomenon.
She started the WCCSG in 1995 and was elected coordinator, a post she still holds. She edits The Spiral, the monthly newsletter for the WCCSG, and designs and produces an annual crop circles calendar.
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Francine Blake and Herma look at the
Crop Cirle Calendar.
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Francine, who lives in the Vale of Pewsey, near Alton Barnes, which has been the most active area for crop circles in the world, also lectures extensively and organises the annual Circles of Knowledge conference held at Marlborough.
Later that afternoon, as Herma wanted to see if crop circles retained energy long after they first appeared, we visited a formation which had been in a field opposite Silbury Hill since May 31. This one was of particular interest because it was in exactly the same place as the impressive 'Aztec head-dress' crop circle of one year before - and there was a surprise waiting.
| Herma spotted a woman dowsing with a pendulum in a part of the formation as two friends looked on, and it turned out the three were from Holland. Offered the pendulum, Herma tried this method of dowsing for the first time and, lo and behold, to everyone's astonishment, it spun almost horizontally over a tuft in the crop, and was caught by Sean on camera. |
Crop Circle close to Silbury Hill |
On Tuesday, we were to meet Adrian Incledon-Webber to discuss how the ancients used the energy of stone circles, and then to film him with Charles Mallet on a joint examination of a recent crop circle, which was expected to produce some unusual results - and it did.
Sean films Herma who is interviewing Adrian Incledon/Webber |
A professional dowser and tutor, Adrian is a vice-president of the well-respected and long-established British Society of Dowsers, and chairman of its earth energies group.
He is also a Reiki master (‘Reiki’ is from the Japanese meaning ‘universal life-force energy’) and a qualified holistic masseur.
Interestingly, he comes from a very practical business background, having owned a busy estate agency in Surrey for almost twenty years - he still works with houses but now clears them of geopathic stress rather than putting them on the market. |
The term geopathic stress means literally ‘illness produced from the earth’. Adrian likens the Earth to a massive electricity generator and capacitor which stores a huge amount of energy which is constantly fluctuating. These distortions produce a natural radiation which, brought to the surface through geological fault lines, underground cavities and subterranean water, create problems for people in their homes. The radiation attacks the natural rhythm and balance of the body, weakening immune systems and reducing the ability to fend off disease, but Adrian’s holistic dowsing approach neutralises its effects.
Dowsing has been with Adrian since he was seven years old when he sent off to a mail-order firm for a metal detector but received a pair of dowsing rods instead! ‘I prefer to use the traditional L-shaped rods when working, but a pendulum comes in handy when you don't want to be noticed, for example, when dowsing energy lines in a church or at a supermarket checking a bottle of wine to make sure it's in good condition!’ he says.
Amid the Avebury stones, Adrian traced energy nodes and lines, including the Michael line which creates a place of strong power at The Cove. Adrian spoke of how fascinating it was to find out what the ancients knew, and what was being rediscovered about them today.
Then, as we stood on the sharp bend in the busy road outside the Red Lion pub, Sean's camera inexplicably failed. He was perplexed by an 'unknown error' message which kept flashing up. Adrian was visibly perturbed by negative energies at the spot which he said was a 'bad area', and the scene of road accidents in the past. 'Strange things happen in stone circles!' he exclaimed. Just as inexplicably, Sean's camera began functioning normally again as we moved across the road to the south-east quadrant of the circle.
The visit by Adrian and Charles to the June 23 formation near Stitchcombe, on the edge of Savernake Forest, could herald a new collaboration between crop circle researchers and dowsers, enabling the scope of analysis to be extended. Charles seemed intrigued by the possibilities as Adrian detected strong energy lines which might have defined the pattern of the formation, and which were perhaps connected to underground water. 'Because dowsing is such an ancient art, you can feed it into many mysteries to try to solve them,' Adrian told me. Charles pointed to typical evidence in the crop – ‘blown nodes’ in the stems, for example - that suggested human origination could be ruled out.
After I had written an article about the Stanton Drew stone circles for the Western Daily Press in 2005, I was contacted by Matthew Holbrook, who told me: ‘Amazing things always happen there.’
Over the years, Matthew, a Druid, bard and Reiki master, has run regular natural healing courses at Stanton Drew, the Stoney Littleton long barrow and other ancient sites including Stonehenge, Avebury and Glastonbury, where he channels energy from ‘spiritual attunements’. |
Druid Matthew in between Herma and Sean
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Matthew seemed the obvious choice for an interview on location at Stoney Littleton next day, not least because he is the first person to have photographed the midwinter solstice sunrise - to which the entrance of the long barrow is orientated – from inside the chamber, as well as the midsummer solstice sunset behind the monument, in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Recalling his visit to photograph the midwinter solstice sunrise, and reflecting how the little-known long barrow was a ‘best-kept secret’, he said: ‘I thought there would be a festival up there, but there was only me!’
After demonstrating a Tibetan singing bowl inside the long barrow, Matthew changed into his Druid robes to recite his solstice poem outside, and later accompanied Herma into the nearby crop circle – just before the arrival of a large group of Canadian tourists who were lucky to have Matthew show them his solstice photos and Palden Jenkins’ famous energy-line map which, centred on Glastonbury, extends to cover Stoney Littleton. Matthew always seems well-prepared for such serendipity!
Author Gordon Strong arrived for his afternoon interview at Stanton Drew in his usual breezy and expansive fashion, clutching a mauve hydrangea which he placed on his ‘favourite’ stone in the north-east circle. ‘We take from the stones so we should give something back,’ he told us.
 
Two pictures of Sean and Herma together with Gordon Strong at Stanton Drew
Stanton Drew comprises three circles, the Great, the South West and the North East, plus the Cove, a group of three massive stones in the garden of the Druid’s Arms pub. They made national news in 1997 when evidence of a 5,000-year-old neolithic temple, twice the size of Stonehenge and probably 500 years older, was discovered there. A geophysical survey by English Heritage uncovered nine concentric circles which, researchers thought, indicated the foundations of a wooden temple, suggesting the site was more significant than had been believed previously.
First-time visitors are astonished by the scale of the megalithic spectacle that greets them on the banks of the River Chew. It’s the second biggest stone circle in the UK after Avebury. There are three documented alignments from the time the circles were built: to the midsummer sunrise, the midwinter sunset, and the southernmost moonset.
It was in 2006 that I came across Gordon’s self-produced book, The Sacred Stone Circles of Stanton Drew, which places the site in both a magical and historical context, in the Labyrinth Bookshop in Glastonbury. The stone circles have fascinated Gordon, who is also a teacher, musician, poet and Tarot reader, for 40 years. He’s visited the site hundreds of times, in the company of dowsers, psychics, Druids, clairvoyants and the plain curious and he always makes special pilgrimages to the circles on the old Celtic quarter days.
He told us about the origins, alignments and energies of the site, how going there both inspired and relaxed him, and how he had become sensitive to its changing moods in different seasons and weathers. As if to demonstrate this, while he was talking, sunshine suddenly gave way to louring skies and a heavy shower of rain which electrified the atmosphere of the field.
Gordon’s theory is that the stones were a place of initiation and that their orientations to moon risings and settings provided a lunar calendar. ‘Natural magic and a spiritual atmosphere would have been a daily occurrence here in 3,000BC, because everything was tuned to nature,’ he says. ‘Building something like this would have been a big event, and a magical experience.
‘Born a mere 20 miles from the stones, at Burnham-on-Sea, I love and cherish many different parts of Somerset but for me these few acres in the Chew Valley have an overwhelming magic. In the 21st century we should mark the wisdom of those who built such monuments and respond to the challenge of attempting to understand their purpose.’
A few years ago, Gordon witnessed the location of an ‘active’ stone by earth-energy dowsers, when people who leaned on it were flung away by some inexplicable force. This stone, on the eastern edge of the site, came to be known as Sig’s Stone, after the Glastonbury dowser Sig Lonegren who discovered its powers. Women, particularly, are supposed to be repulsed by this stone but Herma, who tested it while we were filming, was unaffected. Perhaps another time…
Back in the early 1980s, it was reported that a woman touching one of the Stanton Drew stones felt a force compelling her to move to one side, while a man who stroked another stone experienced a strong sensation of lightness, of floating upwards and being outside his body. Neither of them told others in their group what had happened but a boy who touched a stone said a strong electrical current went through him and he felt sick.
In 2008, Sean Martin filmed Gordon for The Citizens, an international project in which film-makers contributed footage on the theme of citizenship. Gordon was filmed carrying our Tarot readings, giving a talk, and joining a Druid ceremony at Stanton Drew. In the same year, Gordon’s Stanton Drew and its Ancient Stone Circles was published by Wooden Books. Gordon also appears in Sean Martin’s latest documentary, completed this year (2010), which is about the Druids and features Stanton Drew as a key location.
After filming had finished with Gordon, we whisked Sean straight to the airport for his flight back to Edinburgh. Within a few days he was off to the USA for three weeks where a new documentary of his, about the Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas, was to be premiered at the Maine Film Festival.
These had been a hectic five days for Herma: 12-hour days and four 100-mile round trips to the Avebury area because Sean was staying with me at High Littleton and Herma in a rustic B&B nearby. Meal breaks - bread, cheese, ham and fruit - were taken on the move, the sandwiches made daily by Herma being eagerly consumed out of the boot of the car between takes. No wonder Herma was glad when Friday came round and she was able to enjoy her first proper meal that week at a popular Indian restaurant at Farrington Gurney.
No time is wasted, and no stone left unturned, if you’ll pardon the pun, on Herma’s field trips. After the July filming, she said: ‘I have so many more questions now, and it was all so overwhelming again - I am now even more fascinated by the phenomenon of crop circles.’ It was her plan to return to England at the end of August for further filming and detailed investigations.
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The extraordinary thing about the Koornwinder Conventions is that their origins lie in Herma's amazing discovery, when she was a global markets analyst, that there was an order to the movements of share prices when everyone in the investments industry believed them to be random.
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