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Energy, Aura and Consciousness |
Filming with Herma in Holland and Wiltshire May 25-June 6, 2011
by Geoff Ward
From mist-shrouded Cork to sunny Bristol and Amsterdam, tailwinds sped my flights eastward. Changing airlines at Bristol, I met Tim Walter, our new director of photography, who was joining me on the flight to Holland where we would meet Herma on the first leg of the 2011 filming schedule. Our brief was to investigate the latest research into the hidden energies of the earth, megaliths and the human organism, and into the nature of consciousness which is often remarked upon as ‘the last great mystery of science’.
I’d met Tim through Adrian Incledon-Webber who told me about the films Tim had made with the late Hamish Miller, a series of documentaries now integral to the legacy of Miller, a true polymath – he was a dowser, healer, author, blacksmith, engineer, sailor, sculptor and social activist. Tim, a dowser himself, is the founder of Knights Rose, which started out as a video and TV production company formed to make the first of the three Miller films, The Spirit and the Serpent, in 2003 but which, with more DVD titles, books and courses on offer, developed into a resource and information centre to help people explore their spiritual nature from a balanced perspective. Its credo, which I wholeheartedly support, is that all metaphysical phenomena should be considered ‘hand in hand with a grounding in good old-fashioned common-sense and an understanding of some basic science’. As a dowser, Tim says he is fascinated by the power of sacred landscape and stone circles in particular, to which he was introduced by Miller. Tim has been making TV programmes and videos since the early 1980s and also runs a separate production company, TWA Productions. All this made him the ideal choice for Herma, and Tim, for his part, having been involved in much corporate film-making in recent years, just happened to be looking for more meaningful projects in which to invest his talents.
Dr. Korotkov
In Holland, we would be staying at Amersfoort, the second largest city in the province of Utrecht in the central Netherlands, and filming at a two-day seminar at nearby Soesterberg on the revolutionary aura camera invented by the Russian physicist Konstantin Korotkov. Herma had already filmed an interview with Professor Korotkov at a previous seminar in Holland in mid-April, and now she expected to find out more about the device and its uses. Both seminars were organised by Holland’s New Health Academy and Martin Möhrke, of Energetic Health Systems.
Prof Korotkov, of St Petersburg State Technical University, whose research career over three decades has combined a rigorous scientific method with a deep curiosity about matters of the spirit and the soul, launched the first of his cameras in 1996, following his development of gas discharge visualization technology (GDV), a breakthrough beyond Kirlian photography, on which it is based. Semyon Kirlian (1898-1978) was a Russian inventor and researcher who, with his wife Valentina, in 1939 accidentally discovered that if an object was placed on a photographic plate, and connected to an electrical source, an image appeared on the plate. Experimenting on themselves, the couple came to believe this form of photography revealed the status of a person's physical health, the results being identified with the human aura.
The GDV camera, using electro-photonic imaging (EPI), captures patterns of light energy from living things, including humans, animals and plants, as well as from crystals or inanimate matter, for direct, real-time viewing of the aura. The device also records the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy emanating to and from an individual, and displays it as a computerized model, allowing imbalances to be seen that may be influencing well-being, and facilitating diagnosis of their causes, indicating the area of the body and organs involved. GDV has been accepted by the Russian Ministry of Health as a medical technology and is now in use in 65 countries. It works by placing an object in an electromagnetic field where its air molecular glow caused by the emission of electrons and photons can be photographed. To produce the human aura, each fingertip is placed in the camera in turn, and each aura recorded; the fingertips are used because they have the body’s highest concentration of blood vessels, allowing the state of the body to be indicated rapidly. Blood pressure and nervous activity at the fingertips are measured, and both the physical and psycho-emotional states of the person registered.
This ‘diagnosis at your fingertips’ system takes its cue from traditional Chinese medicine and the connection, by a meridian, between each finger and a different region of the body, for example, the respiratory system, the heart, or the kidneys. In turn, the readings can be interpreted by a software program that relates the information obtained to the seven chakras of Tantric yoga – kundalini, from the Sanskrit suggesting ‘serpent power’, rises through the body through this series of energy vortices, the aim being to activate spiritual and psychic energy by using various yogic techniques, raising it from the lowest to the highest chakra (kundalini is often depicted as a coiled serpent). Providing a holistic approach to medical diagnosis and the effects of treatment, Prof Korotkov’s EPI system thus acts as a bridge between Chinese, Indian and Western approaches. At the April seminar, Herma had been able to test a GDV camera for herself by having her aura produced; onlookers were surprised by the strength of it. She was also fascinated to be told that the position of her throat chakra indicated that she had ‘a message for the world’.
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Dmitry Orlov |
In recent years, a range of aura cameras has been produced for different tasks, including the Eco-Tester, invented by Prof Korotkov and research worker Dmitry Orlov, which can measure technopathic and geopathic effects in a space, such as a concert hall, church or ashram, and the state of the emotions of the people there.
One saw immediately how such equipment could play an important role in Herma’s project, if it could be used to measure energy fields in crop circles, stone circles, churches or cathedrals.
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Naturally, Prof Korotkov has seen the potential here: in his book Spiral Traverse (2006), he envisages research into the beneficial positioning of buildings, as well as the study of sacred sites and geo-active zones.
Indeed, Lucy Pringle and Konstantin Pavlidis, a science educator, artist and ‘metaphysicist’ working in the fields of therapy, traditional medicine and healing, had collaborated on the use of a GDV camera in 2008. Energy values in a group of people tested inside a crop circle showed an increase of 200 per cent compared to readings taken with the camera outside the formation half an hour earlier. This was why Herma was so interested in the seminars, and perhaps obtaining one of the cameras for herself.
The seminar, held at Soesterberg’s Kontakt der Kontinenten conference hotel, was attended by a diverse group: medical doctors, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, energy healers and alternative medicine practitioners, even cell-phone radiation specialists – plus Herma’s daughter Nancy, an interior designer and colour therapist. Conducting the event was the aforementioned Dmitry Orlov, a dapper young scientist, whose memorable remark about the GDV camera was: ‘You need only hands. You place your fingers and you know everything.’ So it seemed. On the second day, Herma’s chakras amazed everyone by being shown lined up perfectly in the ideal median position, large in size and glowing intensely on the computer screen, indicating optimum balance and harmony.
As so often happens on Herma’s film-making adventures, synchronicity and serendipity come into play. By chance, at the close of the seminar, she got talking to spiritual healer Jan Hoogers, who had travelled all the way from Lomm, a small village in Limburg province in the far south-east of Holland.
He told Herma about the Op Hodenpijl holistic living and arts centre at Schipluiden, less than an hour’s drive away, which, housed in a former Catholic church, was a centre of powerful healing energies.
Herma, ever the intuitive one, seized the opportunity to arrange with Dmitry and Martin to film a GDV and dowsing experiment there the next day, Saturday, which turned out to be a highlight of our 11-day shoot. |
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Jan Hoogers |
That evening Jan, silver-haired and with an intense gaze, joined us for dinner at our hotel at Amersfoort where he regaled us with stories of remarkable instances of healing in which he had been involved, at times seemingly overcome by emotion at the recall. Dmitry, whose flight home to Russia was at noon next day, had gone out of his way to help, agreeing to meet us at Schipluiden at 8am, allowing just enough time for the tests to be carried out before he had to leave for the airport.
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The 'Op Hodenpijl' Church |
Certainly, Op Hodenpijl is a special place. The church was built in 1840 to replace a 17th-century one nearby which was destroyed in a fire; significantly, the older church was dedicated to St Michael – the christianised equivalent of Hermes, the deity of earth energies – and the site for the new church chosen for its energetic location. |
It was deconsecrated in 1963 and became a pharmaceutical store until 2004 when it was bought by local businessman Dirk Post and his wife Tilly who restored it in a multi-million-euro project which was opened to the public in 2007. ‘Hodenpijl’ refers to the name of the German family who once owned the surrounding farms and estates, and ‘Op’ means simply ‘to’.
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Martin Möhrke, Dmitry Olov, Tim Walter and Dirk Post
The building is used as a centre for conferences, workshops and therapies including acupuncture and osteopathy, as well as for spiritual healing sessions and courses in clairvoyance and meditation, and in music and other arts, and there’s an organic restaurant and a shop. Martin remarked that the building stood on the crossing point of no fewer than five leys, but the actual location of the node was kept from Herma who was challenged to find it – needless to say, it didn’t take much effort for her to do this, her dowsing rods beginning to spin furiously on the exact spot to one side of where the altar of the church had once stood. Indeed, the whole building seemed full of a vital energy which spun Herma’s pendulum, too – even my own dowsing rod rotated which it had never done anywhere else before.
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Herma in 'Op Hodenpijl' |
The aim of the GDV experiment was to take three readings in the building: the camera with special antennae attached would be placed first at a ‘control point’ against an outside wall, then in the centre of the former nave, and finally at the crossing point of the leys, to see if there was a difference in the energy levels. |
‘We are discovering invisible energies,’ Dmitry told me. ‘It doesn’t matter what you feel, you must see what the device measures. We are measuring the electrical capacity of the place, the changes between the GDV device and the earth.’ Results showed a 10-15 per cent energy shift as the camera was moved across the floor, suggesting that the whole area was ‘active’, and that perhaps such an increase in energy was enough to spin the rods of a sensitive dowser such as Herma.
Measuring the energy levels of the space was only the first part of the exercise; next, the effects on a human subject had to be obtained, and so it was time for another fingertip test for Herma. She sat down on a chair in the centre of the floor and kicked off her shoes; one hand was at the camera and the other held a dowsing rod. The idea was to compare the measurements with those taken the day before at the seminar and, lo and behold, Herma’s energy field had increased by 15 per cent, and her chakra reading again showed complete balance with higher energy levels than previously and only a tiny deviation from the absolute ideal. Dmitry was somewhat taken aback, saying he had never seen such a ‘perfect result’. Herma shook Dmitry by the shoulders in excitement. ‘This is what I wanted to hear!’ she exclaimed. It seemed to me that Herma’s pronounced ‘feelgood factor’ and sensitivity had played no small part in the outcome. Through Martin and Dmitry, she now completed purchase of an aura camera for her own use – Nancy was given the job of learning how to operate it.
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Dmitry explains the experiment to Herma and Jan while Tim films
The two GDV seminars firmly brought home to Herma the importance of understanding and working with the natural energies of the Earth and the human metabolism. She had more than an inkling of this after attending the British Society of Dowsers conference the previous September. Now she saw it as an ‘injustice’ how the ancient knowledge had been lost and that the population at large had no access to it any more.
Sunday afternoon saw me at the Meander medical centre in Amersfoort for a couple of hours with what appeared to be an insect bite on my shin which had been bothering me for several days. It was Herma’s idea to take me to the local hospital, but the check-up found nothing wrong with me, although I’d been feeling nauseous. While I was in the hands of the medics, Herma and Tim went to explore the medieval centre of Amersfoort, including the old city wall.
Amersfoort is nicknamed Keistad, or Boulder City, because, in 1661, a rock weighing nine tons was dragged in from the Soest moors by 400 townspeople following a wager between two landowners. Surrounding towns dubbed Amersfoort people ‘keientrekkers’, or ‘boulder-pullers’, which caused so much embarrassment that, a decade or so after the bet, the rock was buried. It wasn’t found until 1903 when it was dug up and made a monument and, since then, well-wishing towns in Europe have sent boulders to Amersfoort where they are displayed in a park – well, there aren’t that many boulders in Holland! Herma dowsed among the rocks, locating energy spirals, while Tim shot some footage. Later, we paid a visit to Herma’s younger daughter Tanya who was hosting a party at her home on the outskirts of Amersfoort and partook of some welcome refreshments.
Next day, the three of us flew from Schipol back to Bristol. Tim went home to Gloucestershire for the night, while Herma and I drove down to Marlborough, arriving at the Ivy House Hotel, our base for the coming week, just before 5pm. There was an amusing exchange with the receptionist when Herma remarked upon the thousands of people who came to Wiltshire every year to visit the crop circles. ‘Hundreds of thousands,’ the receptionist opined – but, ah, she knew who made the formations. Could we interview these elusive circle-makers then? Herma asked. No, came the not-unexpected reply, they wouldn’t want to identify themselves. Well, they wouldn’t, would they?
Hackpen Hill |
Just that day, a new crop circle had been reported, below Hackpen Hill, north of Marlborough.
However, like nearly all of the formations which had appeared since the beginning of April, it was not particularly impressive – further evidence of amateurs at work, I thought.
It was possible that the slow start to the crop circle season was due to a dry winter and spring which had delayed growth – or that, as in 2010, more farmers were employing security patrols to guard their fields. |
Only one of the nine formations so far, at Hannington near Cricklade, reported on May 7, had anything going for it – and this mainly because its precise trefoil design was the same as one which had decorated Herma’s bathroom mirror at home for years! More on the Hannington event later.
The next two days were to be taken up with filming with Adrian Incledon-Webber, Hugo Jenks and Giovanni Orlando, the trio of dowsers who, at the 2010 BSD conference, it will be remembered, had proposed a scientific study of dowsing to ascertain how the age-old art actually worked and bring it to the notice of a wider public. Adrian was taking part despite being in the middle of moving home; we met at Cherhill, as we had the previous summer, at the house that Adrian and his wife Allyson were leaving for a new home at Bradford-on Avon, near Bath. Our shoot was to centre on Hugo and his invention – the computer-aided dowsing device (CADD) – which links the rod held by a dowser to a laptop computer and a GPS receiver so that the patterns of energy lines detected can be shown on-screen as the dowser moves about. CADD is a world first (and Herma was the first to film it) which, like Korotkov’s aura camera, provides scientific proof of the existence of earth energies, although it cannot explain how the dowsing rod detects them in the first place. But it’s thought the equipment, which won Hugo the BSD’s special achievement award for 2010, will be integral to further research into how dowsing works. Both Hugo and Giovanni are electronics engineers by profession.
It was Hugo’s interest in archaeology, and the use of equipment such as magnetometers to examine ancient sites without disturbing the ground, that led him to dowsing in 2009 and the development of his prototype. A member of the BSD’s archaeological group had asked him if he could come up with something like a magnetometer which a dowser could use, and this planted the seed of an idea. CADD enables the continuous movement of a dowser over the ground to be tracked, measuring and depicting very small responses which could otherwise be missed. The next stage is for Hugo to develop a more accurate version of GPS to achieve pinpoint accuracy down to a few centimetres, allowing reliable repeatability of use – in other words, making it possible for subsequent use of CADD to produce the same results at the same location. In particular, Hugo is interested in tracing energy lines at ancient monuments with a view to gaining a better understanding of the sites.
‘My approach is from the scientific perspective,’ he said in our interview. ‘Nobody knows how dowsing works. It would be very interesting to answer that question, at least from the archaeological side. It seems contrary to my scientific background how it is that something you are holding responds to a very weak signal coming from the ground. It aroused my curiosity – how can this possibly work? Is it some kind of antenna picking this up, or the physical characteristics of a site? There are so many questions I’m interested in trying to answer in a repeatable way. If I can prove the response is repeatable it would give a strong indication that it isn’t my imagination and that there’s something real there. I’m hoping to see some sort of proof. I’m interested in working out what the mechanism of this is. It’s really the beginning of a bigger process to get to the bottom of what dowsing is about, at least for a physical site.’
Our intention was to film Hugo operating CADD in crop circles and at prehistoric sites which, we decided, would be the nearby Devil’s Den dolmen and the West Kennet long barrow.
So, in a convoy of three vehicles, we set out for the crop circle at Hackpen Hill, stopping off on the way at the Silent Circle resource centre at Yatesbury to say hello to Charles Mallett and pick up on the latest information. |
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Tim films Herma in the Hackenpen Hill formation |
As half-expected, the crop circle turned out to be a disappointment; Herma, after dowsing, pronounced it ‘dead’, and Hugo also found the site unresponsive. It was not the genuine article. We decamped to Devil’s Den which, despite its name, lies in a beautiful vale near Fyfield; on previous visits, Adrian had detected a prominent energy band running through the area. Hugo was filmed walking the environs, and Herma dowsing, although she felt it was a weak site energetically. Giovanni, with typical Italian effusiveness, explained in an interview next to the megaliths how CADD could help investigators understand the mechanics of dowsing by its registering of the dowsing response, and making possible the comparison of results from a series of site surveys, as well as from physiological tests on dowsers. By recording CADD results on maps, a database could be built up allowing dowsers to return to sites to check the previous read-outs. ‘They could report to a centre for the findings to correlate the information and understand how energy lines evolve through the seasons, or weather, and so on,’ said Giovanni. After this mention of the weather, our visit was marked by a gentle shower of rain as if there was an acknowledgement, between stones and sky, of our inquiring presence – just as had happened during the interview with the author Gordon Strong at the Stanton Drew stone circles the previous July. Less welcoming was the attitude of the local farmer who arrived on the scene to complain about our filming at Devil’s Den without permission, although there was nothing at the site to suggest any such authority had to be obtained. Herma, always the diplomat, talked him round and we parted on friendly terms. Back at Cherhill, we were able to examine Hugo’s mapping which he was later to overprint on Google Earth images of the sites surveyed.
For the evening, Hugo loaned me his copy of Hidden Nature: The Startling Insights of Viktor Schauberger (2003), by Alick Bartholomew, which was a particularly appropriate and synchronistic gesture in the light of Herma’s project overall. Bartholomew points out how Schauberger (1885-1958), an Austrian naturalist, philosopher and inventor who remains an inspiration to environmentalists today, was frustrated that conventional science rejected the idea of a cosmic order affecting the Earth and human beings at a subtle energy level, and believed that a new science that had more in common with ancient wisdom would show how the world was governed by cosmic laws which created ‘correspondences’ between macrocosm and microcosm, these correspondences being illustrated by sacred numbers and sacred geometry; of particular interest to me in my studies in this field is that Schauberger drew attention to the spiral form or pattern as the most common vehicle for these correspondences. It was only in relatively recent times that scientists and philosophers abandoned the idea of the sacredness of a creative energy in nature, of how nature’s patterns and complex interactions were expressed in certain shapes and numbers which ‘proved’ that God was at work behind the scenes. Indeed, it is hard to dismiss the mathematical and symbolic patterns in nature as merely accidental or happening by a lucky chance. Schauberger understood how the creative processes of nature were consistently to refine, diversify and produce higher forms of organic systems so as to raise consciousness – consciousness being regarded as the integration of higher levels of connectedness.
Crop Circle at East Kennett |
Next day, we met Adrian and Hugo at Cherhill prior to the excursion to the West Kennet long barrow, from which vantage point we could see a crop circle on a hillside at East Kennet which we were to visit that evening.
This was an ‘old school’ formation of concentric circles with a stippled inner area and where, two days after it was reported on May 17, ‘curious aerial phenomena’ were seen, according to Charles Mallett.
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While filming Hugo and Herma inside and outside the long barrow, a young man in T-shirt and shorts came up to Adrian and me, exclaiming jovially: ‘Dowsing doesn’t work, does it?’ This was more evidence, as if we needed it, of the closed minds of most academics, for he said he was an archaeologist on his first visit to West Kennet and Avebury. Nevertheless, he seemed quite happy to accept Adrian’s contact details should he make future visits to the area. We thought it would be interesting to see if he ever got in touch, although we weren’t going to hold our breath.
From West Kennet, it was back to Silent Circle for tea and cakes and an interview with Adrian about research on dowsing: how the psychic and physiological responses could be tested in the field, for example. Such research was ‘trying to make a big leap into the 21st century’ by beginning to use computers to map earth energies and attract greater public interest in dowsing. Our ancestors could feel these energies and they positioned their sacred places according to them, he said; today people would respond to a computer or mobile phone image of a dowsing map revealing the energy ‘signature’ of a place, and even show the most energetically beneficial sites to build homes for people. In this, CADD could trigger a ‘quantum leap forward’. Adrian added: ‘Earth energies play a big part in how we feel. The more we understand them, the better. We really need to start working with the sixth sense – more open-mindedness is needed.’
After our break, Herma, Hugo, Tim and I set off for the East Kennet formation, which was on a gently sloping hillside opposite the West Kennet long barrow, prominent on the skyline to the west, and the top of Silbury Hill to the north-west. There wasn’t much left of the formation after 16 days on the ground, the crop having begun to recover within a few days of inception. However, ‘I’m getting energy!’ Herma exclaimed, her rods spinning in the centre of the pattern. ‘A real crop circle!’ So there was residual energy after more than a fortnight. Hugo walked the perimeter with CADD and pronounced the formation to be 35 metres in diameter.
A new day dawned, and we had arranged an interview with engineer, mathematician and physicist Jim Lyons because his special research topic is the mechanism of dowsing based on quantum ideas in consciousness studies – in particular, the non-locality of consciousness – and Herma was keen to include the subject of consciousness in the documentary series (after all, everything comes back to that in the end). After many years in the aerospace industry, Jim, who also holds a Fellowship in computer science at the University of Hull, entered academia, filling teaching, research and administrative posts in various institutions. As a member of the British Society of Dowsers, he undertakes research into the geo- and bio-physics of earth energies. He says that emerging new models of consciousness describe an active ‘aether’ which can begin to account for many paranormal phenomena such as healing, synchronicity, psychometry and so on, which are not even considered in mainstream science – returning us to the ideas of Ervin Laszlo, the Hungarian philosopher of science and systems theorist, who was discussed during our interview with Elizabeth Brown at the BSD conference the previous September. Laszlo envisages consciousness as an informational field which permeates the universe and constitutes a universal memory, a ground of consciousness responsible for artistic visualizations and creative insights as well as distance healing, near-death experiences, after-death communications and past-life recollections. Mystics and sages have long spoken of an interconnecting cosmic field behind reality, known as the Akashic record (after the Sanskrit and Vedic term for space), that conserves and conveys information, and Laszlo calls his informational medium the Akashic field, or A-field.
Jim began by pointing out that, prior to 1900, science had dealt only with matter, not with mind. After 1900, the quantum world opened up and, over the past hundred years, it had become the superior world, describing a universal energy field in which we are all involved. Ancient ideas of spirituality and yogic philosophy were now merging with modern science, in terms of a quantum informational field, or ‘mind of the universe’, and the theory of quantum entanglement under which everything was inter-connected and continuous – the holographic principle. ‘We live in a quantum computer,’ he said. ‘We are constantly putting thoughts into this computer. People are linked because it’s a quantum Googling effect.’ A cosmic internet, no less. Such an analogy, of course, springs right out of the ‘information age’: isn’t the universe always perceived in terms of the zeitgeist?
| Individuals were able to draw down information from the Akashic records, ‘the largest library that has ever existed’, said Jim: ‘People are discovering they can be their own avatars. They can tune in and find whatever they desire.’ |
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Jim Lyons |
The difference between the Akashic realm and our own was that it was not time-dependent. In our world, time was what prevented everything happening at once, said Jim, borrowing the remarks of the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008) – inventor of the term ‘black hole’ – who went on to say: ‘Space is what prevents everything happening to me!’ And this was the point. Mainstream science was unable to explain many things which were important to people, things to do with the mind. Yet the idea of the universal informational field solved so many problems in science, and simplified so much. Mind united cosmos and quantum. This was not new, Jim pointed out, the notion of the ‘aether’ having been around for 2,000 years, but disappearing almost overnight with Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Jim believes that communication in dowsing is not achieved by travelling energy waves but by standing waves that vibrate in sympathy with the messages the dowser transmits and receives. He likens the effect to musical harmony and it is not surprising to him that a major feature of the new-found understanding is the relevance of musical scales which, in turn, leads back to the Golden Ratio and Pythagorean geometry and harmonics found in the patterns of prehistoric monuments, such as the Egyptian pyramids, and of today’s crop circles. Ultimately, everything in the universe came down to mathematics; it was based on number. There was more mind-stretching to come when we went out on location with Jim to the West Kennet Avenue for a live demonstration of some of these principles. There, Jim, using a dowsing rod, showed how energy spiralled up standing stones in seven bands reminiscent of the diatonic scale – certainly, musical octaves can be represented by a spiral, or helix, with each note on the scale repeated on the curve at its higher or lower level. Interestingly, it was Jim’s view that geometry arose out of such energy fields. It was a ‘language of numbers’ used throughout the universe, he said, reminding one immediately of Herma’s own reference to a ‘universal language’, based on number, behind the patterns made by movements of prices on the world’s stock markets. ‘Our ancestors could see the energy of the stones – a cone of energy going up and out of the stone itself,’ Jim claimed. ‘They had a natural affinity with the earth. Banks, ditches and stones were used to control these energies to react directly with consciousness.’ The mathematics underlay what the ancients instinctively knew about the universe; moreover, these people were already using geometry which supposedly was invented by the Greeks more than two millennia later. All of this would come to be accepted by the next generation of scientists, for it was the direction in which, inexorably, science was moving, Jim believed.
While we were filming with Jim, Charles Mallett left a voicemail on my mobile phone to say that a new crop circle in the form of a snake had been reported at Wilton Windmill, near Burbage. It was amazingly apt that this should happen while we were standing in the West Kennet Avenue, the shape of which, together with the Beckhampton Avenue to the west, has been likened to a serpent coiling through the Avebury stone circle and out to the Sanctuary in the south-east. Herma was pleased as this was what she had been waiting for all week – a fresh formation to test.
But first – dinner at our usual haunt, the French restaurant, Brasserie Gerard, in Marlborough High Street, where the cuisine was very much to Herma’s liking. Jim joined us, making it memorably convivial occasion, and our discussion of the serpent as an ancient symbol of earth energies completed the synchronicities.
Wilton Windmill Crop Circle formation |
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Next morning, in bright sunshine and soaring temperatures, we headed out to the ‘crop serpent’ at Wilton Windmill, which lay in a field very close to the spot where a large formation landed in May, 2010. Following tractor tracks out to the snake’s tail, we had been there only a few minutes when, suddenly, a Royal Navy helicopter sprang up from behind trees on the edge of the field and swooped in low and noisy right over our heads, flying off immediately to the south-west. This was momentarily exciting – Tim caught the incident on film – but the serpent was disappointing. Herma’s rods rattled round at one spot at the tail-end of the formation, but elsewhere there was no response. The lay of the crop was fractured and uneven although, admittedly, this was young wheat. But, amateurs again, we felt. The modicum of energy Herma detected could have been from the land itself, or perhaps residual from the circle-makers. Still, the serpent symbolism was interesting. Now it was back to Silent Circle for lunch and a chat about our next moves for the day. It was decided to go to Windmill Hill, where a prehistoric settlement was founded prior to 3,500BC, for an interview with Herma about the research theme of the current film. The afternoon was hot and sultry, and the chalk uplands of Wiltshire formed a beautiful backdrop.
Crop Circle at Hannington |
There had now been 12 crop circles reported, compared to nine during the same period in 2010, but this year’s formations were much less interesting in scope and execution.
Within the 12, however, the one exception appeared to be the May 7 formation which appeared in a field of oilseed rape just north of Ashmead Brake near the village of Hannington, and not far from the ramparts of the Castle Hill Fort hill camp.
Not least because of the pattern on Herma’s bathroom mirror, we set out to find it next day, Saturday, again in glorious weather, but we were unlucky.
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Somehow, on a trek through the countryside, we strayed off a footpath, lost our bearings and then were spotted clambering over a gate by the farmer. Suspicious, he swung his tractor round immediately and came back to interrogate us. Herma’s polite explanation of what we were up to met with a decidedly sceptical response. Our farmer was annoyed about the £1,000 worth of damage that had been caused to his crop, and the further £1,000 it would take to rectify it, with the cost of spraying and so on, and he certainly didn’t want any more visitors tramping through it. The formation had been created by people with quad bikes and rollers, he maintained; the day before it appeared, a quad bike had been seen in an adjacent field which, evidently, had been judged too small for the exercise, causing it to be moved next door overnight. We made up for the setback with lunch at the village pub.
The annual interplay between the circle-makers, whoever or whatever they are, and their avid international audience is always of great interest. It seems to me that they feed off each other, their respective psychological drives – each creative, one in execution and the other in interpretation – being complementary.
Later that day, Herma suddenly realised that a shoulder injury she sustained in a fall in February was no longer troubling her. Doctors had told her it could take a year to get better. But now, the pain had gone and Herma could raise her arm above her head – a feat which not long before had been impossible. For some weeks, she had been carrying a personal therapy device (PTD), which she had bought at the Korotkov seminar in April. About the size of a mobile phone, the PTD is said to aid the body’s self-healing abilities by means of an electromagnetic signal, and it can be programmed to tackle more than 300 different symptoms.
Had the device healed her shoulder, she wondered, or could it have been the mysterious energies of the crop circles?
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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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