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Filming with Herma in England August 4-10, 2011
A ghostly gibbous moon, newly risen, hung in the blue sky of the bright evening as we filed out of the cornfield below Furze Knoll. It symbolised both the end of one phase of Herma’s project – the filming for her documentary series which had been spread over a period of two and a half years – and the promise of phases to come: the editing and packaging of the films, the completion of her biography, and preparations for the 2012 Koornwinder Convention.
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The moon in gibbous phase – midway between half and full – hangs over a golden landscape near Furze Knoll, Wiltshire
In this final hectic week of filming in Wiltshire, Herma had been among the speakers at the Circles of Knowledge conference in Marlborough, staged annually by Francine Blake and the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group, we had fascinating interviews about the advanced technology and consciousness of our distant ancestors with the French explorer and archaeologist Antoine Gigal and the UK’s own ‘megalith maestro’ Hugh Newman; and Herma and Tim took an eventful helicopter flight over ancient sites and the latest crop formations. The week was full of incident, of surprises and fresh insights, not least when we were joined by Lucy Pringle and Dr Roger Taylor on the last day for some further research into crop circle and landscape energies, a day which began and ended in that field near Furze Knoll where an intriguing formation had landed.
Roger, a retired immunologist who had worked with Lucy on crop-circle research on a number of previous occasions, had agreed to bring his GDV aura camera and perform certain chemical experiments, and Lucy saw an opportunity for more water tests. Over years of research, as covered in our interview with her in summer 2010, Lucy has found that bottled water left in crop circles for several hours or longer shows a marked increase in the level of nitrates, which are essential nutrients needed for plants to grow. Once the pair had arrived at our hotel, it was decided by pendulum dowsing (Roger, like Lucy, is a dowser) that the formation at Furze Knoll of August 6, three days before, would be the one for the water tests, and that one near Manton Down, just outside Marlborough and reported on August 7, would be used for the GDV experiments – unfortunately, as far as the aura camera was concerned, it turned out to be a case of, as Robert Burns said, ‘the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry’, as we shall see.
It was a beautiful warm day of wide, breezy horizons, azure skies and fleecy cloudscapes as we set out for Furze Knoll, which lies near Devizes in an area of Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement resplendent with ancestral tumuli, long barrows and earthworks. The crop formation had the appearance of three ‘spheres’– a large central one and a smaller one either side – caught in a narrow trapezoid plane, giving a striking 3D effect, and aligned approximately east-west. Carrying her carefully prepared water bottles in a large red biscuit tin, and filmed by Tim, Lucy buried two outside the formation as control samples, and three inside, marking the spots with small stones so she could find them easily later. Meanwhile Roger, 80, who has been studying subtle energy fields for many years, dowsed the best places to locate two test tubes, control and sample, to see what effect there would be on his special chemical mixture.
A notable feature of the Furze Knoll formation was that, when first discovered and photographed, the eastern ‘sphere’ was surrounded entirely by pristine crop, suggesting the area could have been flattened only from above the ground. Lucy later confirmed that a friend of hers who had taken some of the first visitors to the formation as soon as it was reported could find no way into this area other than by trampling the crop; despite being asked not to, one of the party broke through, creating the path into the area that people used subsequently. The other two ‘spheres’ each had tractor tracks running through them, facilitating access (see photo).
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Tim films Herma in the Furze Knoll formation
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Tim stands at the centre of the
Furze Knoll formation |
Dowsing the formation herself, Herma picked up strong, unidentified energies, implying non-human agency, and I suspect Tim felt there was something strange and special about this formation, too.
Coupled with this, the spiral swirls of the downed crop were magnificent.
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Now, I must say that, having visited very many crop circles since 2005, I have never experienced anything unusual in any of them, except once my mobile phone happened to stop working on the edge of one, which may or may not have had anything to do with unexplained energies. But while Tim was filming Herma and Lucy in the centre of the formation, I experienced an optical anomaly: suddenly, between their feet, and just above the pole of the swirl, I noticed crossed lines of pink and blue light, translucent and shimmering like the colours in a rainbow. This was not in my peripheral vision; I was looking straight at the spot. In disbelief, I looked away and, looking back, they were still there. I blinked, and then the bands of colour had gone. After this disconcerting experience, and equally oddly, I felt light-headed and elated for a couple of hours. Later, when I thought about it, I realised that pink and blue could be seen to represent yin and yang energies, as in Chinese geomancy, because in the western world the colours stood for female and male respectively. Also, as you can see in the photos and film, Lucy was wearing blue jeans and a pink top on the day, which maybe acted as a kind of psycho-kinetic trigger. I have no real explanation for what happened in those moments, standing at the centre of that crop spiral, but I do know I was not imagining things.
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Herma watches Lucy Pringle bury a water bottle in the Furze Knoll formation
This occurrence and Roger’s experiment were further instances of how Herma’s investigations can lead into quite unexpected fields (literally and figuratively). The chemical concoction Roger was using contained magnesium phosphate and ‘ormus’, said to be a combination of precious-metal elements in a different atomic state, unique forms of matter that seem to be closer to a state of pure energy. Apparently found abundantly in sea-water, ormus (a mnemonic derived from Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements) is claimed to have attributes of potential benefit for agriculture and health, in terms of animal and plant growth and alternative remedies. Roger’s aim in his experiment was two-fold: to identify resultant torsion fields, which he believed could be involved in the creation of crop circles, and to transfer what he regarded as healing energies of the crop formation into the chemical compound.
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The sun glints on the majestic swirl of the downed crop at the centre of the Furze Knoll formation
Torsion fields (also called spin fields, or axion fields) are twists, screw or helix-like manifestations of energy which can turn to the left or right and, although early research into them in the Soviet Union was discredited in the 1980s, the Russian Academy of Science continued it well into the 1990s, with military as well as technological applications in mind. Such research, although suggesting a theory for the behaviour of space, remains fringe science, especially because it has been used to propose faster-than-light travel, and to explain extra-sensory perception, levitation and other paranormal phenomena, as well as ‘spiritual healing’. Much more research into torsion fields was needed, said Roger, but according to the Russian and other findings, right torsion was claimed to speed growth and other biological processes, as well as to speed up time, while left torsion had the opposite effect and was associated with increased psychic ability; respectively, left and right torsion corresponded to yin and yang energies. All this adds up to a fascinating subject of inquiry, but there is no space to go into it further here; just Google some of the terms to find out more. Suffice to say, torsion fields were of more than passing interest to me because I had researched right- and left-turning spirals in nature for my book Spirals: the Pattern of Existence, and found that right-turning ones were by far the most prevalent (just as there are far more right-handed people than left-handed), and that the rare left-turning ones were regarded with superstition by early cultures and thought to have supernatural qualities; similarly, the right-turning spiral was seen to represent increasing consciousness and the left-turning one a descent into the unconscious. (Roger’s experiment also reminded me of the theory of the Russian scientist Vladimir Ginzburg that spiral fields are the basic substance of the universe and that, in the shape of a torus, they propagate around all objects). Of course, Herma had often found her dowsing rods spinning to the right and left at the same time, sometimes flying out of their sleeves in spiral trajectories at the most powerful points of energy; we had wondered if perhaps the rods turned in opposite directions in response to yin and yang, or masculine and feminine, energy polarities.
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Roger Taylor dowses in the Manton Down formation watched by Lucy Pringle and filmed by Tim.
As to the successful transference of healing energies to people by means of the chemical compound, Roger admitted he had tried it only with two or three volunteers and results were inconclusive. ‘We don’t know which type of crop circles have healing qualities and which do not,’ he said. ‘Some people feel good in them, and others feel absolutely awful.’ Judging by my mysterious experience at Furze Knoll, that formation might have had some beneficial healing energies, as heady as the result was!
We left Furze Knoll to call in at the Silent Circle resource centre for a spot of lunch, and then drove to the Manton Down formation which Herma, Tim and I had reconnoitered the previous afternoon with Hugh Newman.
We found it amateurish in several respects, despite its design being likened to a depiction of both King Arthur’s Round Table and the Large Hadron Collider! Herma’s rods twirled, but the formation was unimpressive on the ground. |
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To get to it entailed driving a mile or more up narrow lanes and tracks from the outskirts of Marlborough, past Manton House and racing stables training courses, into the farmland beyond.
With Lucy and Roger, we were able to park our vehicles within sight of the circle, as we now knew exactly where it was, next to a field of scattered sarsen stones characteristic of the Marlborough Downs from whence the megaliths of Avebury were drawn. |
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But then, a setback. Roger was aghast to find he had forgotten to bring the USB cable that connected the aura camera to his laptop. Mobile phone calls to two local computer shops, where we hoped we might be able to buy a cable, proved fruitless and the GDV experiment had to be abandoned. We were sure Roger felt bad about this, but there was nothing to be done about it. He repeated his chemical test at the site but with only one test tube as he lost the second one somewhere around the field. (Later that week, he emailed me to say that, having dowsed the samples, as was his practice in concluding the experiment, Furze Knoll exhibited right-torsion and Manton Down left-torsion). Lucy dowsed the latter formation but found only ‘miniscule’ energy and was unimpressed. It did nothing for her. The best crop circles made you want to stay in them, she told me, and this was not one of those. Ironically, however, while not wishing to stay in the formation for any length of time, she didn’t get very far after leaving the field. She had driven only a few yards up the track when she got a puncture!
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Herma with Lucy Pringle and Roger Taylor |
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Geoff and Tim replace Lucy’s punctured
tyre while Roger looks on |
Tim and I replaced the wheel for her and we headed back to Furze Knoll to collect the water bottles buried there earlier, while Roger headed home to Surrey.
Herma happened to ask me: ‘Have you got a title for your report yet?’ I wrote a report of each filming period for her website. ‘A Comedy of Errors,’ I ventured, tongue in cheek.
Lucy collected her samples, which would now be sent off to a laboratory for analysis and, as it was getting late in the day, set off for home.
It was now time for us to do a little research of our own using the New Energy Vision software obtained from Harry Oldfield after our day of filming with him in July. Tim had brought his laptop and webcam into the formation and the idea was to record a view across it in both video and still images. Frustratingly, Tim had forgotten the dongle and had to go back to his car for it, a ten or 15-minute walk each way. While he was gone, Herma and I settled down to wait in the peaceful surroundings; Herma lay in the centre of the formation, watching the clouds and the shapes they made against sky, a circle directly above her, and then a diamond. Tim returned and set up the web-cam on a tripod, pointing over the centre of the formation to the downs in the west, and plugged into the laptop on the ground. Now, the NEV software comes with a wide range of filters that can display a scene in different colour combinations, including the standard PolyCon mode which Harry Oldfield demonstrated to us in July and, for example, black and white for showing up ‘particulate energy’, and green for natural energy geophysical work. It will be remembered that many of the filters were developed by Harry with the help of a group of clairvoyants and mystics so as to simulate the colours they saw in their otherworldly 'visions'. Thus I was surprised to see that the first filter Tim had chosen to use, seemingly unconsciously, was ‘Pink and Blue’, a ‘comparitive palette’, with blue, in Harry’s interpretation, indicating spirit, water – and psychic manifestations. Tim made two other recordings with the PolyCon filter, and then shot the scene in normal video to run through other filters later. Because the sunlight was so strong it was impossible to see the laptop screen clearly and so analysis of the recordings had to be put off until a later date.
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Tim runs the New Energy Vision software in the Furze Knoll formation
We packed up the equipment and began the walk back to the car. Herma heaved a sigh, knowing this was the end of the location filming for the documentaries, but also giving a smile, knowing also that the next phase of her important work was imminent. Glancing up, I realised that the gibbous moon was mirrored exactly in the shapes of the formation we were now leaving: those partially revealed globes seeming, in the 3D pattern, to emerge from the quadrilateral plane. For Herma, this formation had a special meaning: ‘the unknowable becoming known’, she said – the intention behind her project and the hope for its outcome.
Let’s now pause for breath and go back to the beginning of the week’s schedule which, by happenstance, was timed at Lughnasa, the Old Irish name for the harvest festival, known as Lammas in England, and most apt for Herma’s harvesting of information in interviews and experiments in crop circles.
I’d arrived in Marlborough on August 4, having arranged to meet Tom Brooks at the Polly Tearooms in the afternoon to hear about the latest findings of his research into the prehistoric geometry of southern Britain. Tim arrived in time for dinner at Brasserie Gerard, to which Tom and his wife Sue had been invited, and we were also joined by Herma’s friend Monique Klinkenbergh, who was planning to open a crop circle centre at Naarden, near Hilversum in Holland, and Klaas van Egmond, a professor of geosciences at the University of Utrecht, and his wife, who had been interested in the crop circle phenomenon for many years. On the Friday morning, Herma and I went over her script for the Circles of Knowledge conference the next day, and then we went to the venue, the imposing Memorial Hall at nearby Marlborough College, for a meeting about the audio-visual equipment. This turned out to be a waste of time as the set-up was altered before Herma went on stage, leading to a series of technical problems during her talk on Saturday which she could have done without; thankfully, the problems were resolved by the Sunday session of the conference. Later on the Friday afternoon, we had arranged to interview Antoine Gigal, who was speaking at the conference, too, along with Robert Bauval, Francine Blake, Hugh Newman and others. Antoine was lodging at the Sun Inn, a coaching inn dating back to the 15th century, just across the High Street from the Ivy House Hotel where we were staying for the third time this summer, and the interview was to be filmed in the sunny courtyard behind the inn. Herma would be asking her questions in English but Antoine would be responding in French, with her assistant, Antoine André, recording a ‘voice-over’ translation for us afterwards. As requested, Herma had sent a list of questions a couple of weeks before, so Gigal was well prepared.
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Herma with Antoine Gigal at the Sun Inn |
Antoine is founder of the Giza for Humanity organisation which, aiming for more transparency in archaeology and related disciplines, was created to research, preserve and promote the knowledge and wisdom of ancient civilizations.
She is also founding International Women Explorers, a group to be launched in 2013/14, aimed at bringing a female perspective to a model for a future humanity which honours the concepts of balance, dignity and respect for ourselves and our planet, and integrates the values of wisdom and practical knowledge of ancient cultures. |
For more than 20 years, Antoine has lived mainly in Egypt and has explored all the most remote archaeological areas, including many not yet open to the general public. She is the author of The Secret Chronicles of Giza (in French) and has published hundreds of articles internationally about aspects of Egyptian and megalithic civilizations which lie outside mainstream academia. She has lectured and appeared on radio and TV around the world. Being born in Africa, and travelling to South America with her father who selected artefacts for museums, gave Antoine the chance to explore different cultures and civilizations at a young age. She spent seven years at the Sorbonne University in Paris and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations where she graduated in Chinese and Japanese languages and civilizations. She studied archaeology at Tolbiac University, Paris, as well as Sanskrit, Latin and ancient Greek and Arabic, gaining a reputation for translating ancient texts; she also speaks modern Egyptian, Spanish and Italian fluently. She leads several study tours to Egypt every year, and now divides her time between Cairo and Paris.
Antoine, with her red lipstick and impressive mane of blonde hair contrasting with a dark business suit, cut a striking figure. In a two-part interview, she outlined some of her amazing discoveries about Ancient Egypt which chimed happily with Herma’s own – and then led us unexpectedly into prophetic realms. She said her special interest was the Giza pyramids complex because ancient Arabic and Egyptian texts said it was created to protect and preserve the knowledge of Ancient Egypt, as well as to shelter people, in times of cataclysmic events, including a great flood which had been predicted centuries before it happened. Inscriptions on walls in subterranean passages below the Giza plateau explained the purpose of the pyramids. Thousands of pieces of evidence pointed to the same conclusion. ‘My vision of the Giza plateau and its purpose is completely different from other researchers and it is revealed in all those texts,’ she said. A line of pyramids built at special points across the Giza plateau was designed to ‘dampen’ seismic activity and prevent earthquakes by stabilising tectonic plates.
Pyramids were built worldwide in different historical periods, and were still being discovered today in Europe and Asia. They were designed to preserve knowledge of planetary disasters so that future generations could be warned of what might happen again. ‘Nowadays there is a resurgence of ancient knowledge from all round the world which has been left for us so we can be prepared for the next catastrophe,’ she said. Egypt had been the shelter for humanity and knowledge during the flood. The true and most ancient name for Egypt was Tamari, as found in the Pyramid Texts, which were copies of even more ancient pre-dynastic texts. As there were several meanings to individual hieroglyphs, Tamari could mean ‘the measured earth’ or ‘land of pyramids’, but the most common translation was ‘the beloved country’ – beloved because it was a land of shelter and peace; the only time Ancient Egypt was at war was when it was invaded.
The mathematics and geometry, and the extraordinary precision, involved in the construction of the Giza pyramids, built on high ground well above sea level, pointed to great knowledge. Much was now known about the Great Pyramid, but there was still more to be revealed: it was protecting secrets that lay beneath it. It was built on a powerful geological site and acted as a portal to other dimensions: ‘The Ancient Egyptians were specialists in choosing places and building monuments to manipulate geomagnetic lines and energy fields. They could also create places where there was no influence of those geomagnetic forces. They were also specialists in building angles to catalyse the energy of the sun as well as other energies in the shape and form they wished. There was the angle of Osiris, and the angle of Isis. They used these angles to redirect telluric and geomagnetic fields and lines as they pleased.
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Tim, Herma, Antoine Gigal and her assistant Antoine André at the Ivy House Hotel
‘An extraordinary thing is how they built the walls of temples. The part of the stone that was facing the inside of the quarry was the positive pole and the other side facing the exterior of the quarry was the negative pole. They brought the stones to the construction site in the exact same orientation from which they had been carved so that there was a forcefield, an energy field, created by the poles, the negative pole facing the inside of the temple and the positive pole facing the outside. They polarised the stones. Everything was made to control the telluric forces, whether they wanted to enhance them or suppress them. They did this on purpose. They created a telluric canvas to push the telluric lines depending on what purpose the temple or pyramid was built for, whether it was for healing, initiation or protection.
‘They were looking to be in harmony with nature’s energies. ‘Nature’s energies’ was very badly translated into the ‘gods’ concept. The Ancient Egyptians knew how to respect and use these energies with much intelligence and much simplicity as well. Today, people needed dowsing instruments but in ancient times people were much more intuitive.’ Antoine said that when she went to an archaeological site she did not need dowsing rods because she could tell by variations in light where the telluric or geomagnetic lines were. Energies that Herma had detected with her dowsing rods in Egypt were the energies of water because the pyramids were flooded several times, the water escaping through shafts. The rods were sensitive to the presence of water, even if that presence was ancient.
Responding to Herma’s questions about the palimpsest hieroglyphs at Abydos that looked like aircraft, and the ‘wooden bird model’ from Saqqara which was taken off display at the Cairo Museum – mysteries, among others, which Herma had been pondering the previous winter – Antoine said the bird model possibly could have been a plane, and hopefully it would be put on display again. As to whether the Ancient Egyptians could fly, one could speculate, but what was interesting was that they were able to carry out many things on a grand scale, as if they had an extremely good vision of environmental space. ‘The ancients’ way of conceptualising mathematics and geometry was a lot more developed than ours,’ she added. ‘They were able to conceive vast spaces in which to build their stone structures.’
The academics should keep themselves informed of the latest discoveries in Egypt, said Antoine. Hieroglyphs were found in 1999 going back more than 5,200 years. Every day new discoveries were being made that proved the Ancient Egyptians knew a great deal about agriculture, carving techniques, writing, even before the Sumerian civilization. Tribes in southern Egypt as long ago as that had advanced forms of technology.
Ancient Egyptians were in harmony with the divine and nature’s energies, said Antoine. If we today could find this link with the divine, strengthen it, and dedicate a part of our life on Earth to it, then we would be able to live in the ‘consciousness of a golden age’.
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Antoine André, Tim, Antoine Gigal, Herma and Geoff
In a follow-up interview two days later, Antoine, who this time decided to speak in English, revealed how she had been contacted in Egypt by a group she called the ‘guardians of the oral tradition’, purporting also to be the ancient brotherhood of Ta, taken from Ptah, the deity who called the world into being. Apparently, the brotherhood had observed Antoine making repeated visits to historic sites over many years and had chosen her to receive their teachings because they were allowed to teach only women (women could give birth to a new world), because her soul was ‘correct’, and because she ‘had Heka in her voice’. In Egyptian mythology, Heka is the deification of magic, but it also stands for the ‘capacity to gather’, being represented in the crook held as a symbol of power, along with the flail, by pharaohs. The shepherd’s crook was a symbol of gathering, said Antoine, and gathering was the greatest magic of the world; Heka was the power and magic of the earth. The flail, meanwhile, with its three strands, was linked with the sun (three sunrays) and the three levels of consciousness: terrestrial, metaphysical and cosmic. At each ancient site she now visited in Egypt, she was met by a member of the brotherhood who gave her guidance and knowledge.
Today was a time of revelation, she said, now entering prophetess mode: ‘Step by step, the ancient knowledge will come again for everybody. Nowadays we are deep inside materialism but we have reached a turning point. The Elders are coming again to teach and spread their knowledge, but it’s the last chance for this. Their message is a message of harmony because we have lost harmony and the connection with the true divine, which has cost us. We have to find it. We have to regain and communicate joy.’ A change of consciousness was required, and respect given to the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, which were now in conflict, causing earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and so on. ‘The landscape is a living matrix – if you are able to understand the geometry and mathematics in the landscape you will be able to see the different levels and qualities of life,’ she said, reminding us of our conversations with Jim Lyons, Harry Oldfield and Tom Brooks. ‘You will remove the illusion of the density of matter and be able to see the true meaning of the knowledge within.’
The theme of the Circles of Knowledge conference as ‘bringing new and ancient knowledge together’ was ideal for Herma; since it began in 1995, the conference has expanded from the subject of crop circles into overlapping knowledge from ancient traditions. The content of Herma’s talk, described as ‘absolutely staggering’ by Francine Blake in her introduction, was based on the one she gave at her convention in Amsterdam in June 2010 (an outline of which you can find on the Events page of this website), updated to take account of key developments in the film project since then, and angled towards the crop circle community; it was re-titled ‘Wall Street, Crop Circles, Dowsing and the Lost Wisdom of the Ancients’. Attending Korotkov GDV seminars on the GDV aura camera in Holland earlier in the year, and her subsequent discussions with Harry Oldfield and Hugo Jenks, had brought home to Herma the great importance of understanding and working with the natural and subtle energies of the earth and ourselves. ‘I would now describe it as nothing short of an injustice how this knowledge was allowed to be lost in the past and how most people are no longer able to access it,’ she said. It was the language of mathematical shapes and patterns that allowed us to understand and work with the system of order that organized the universe and life on Earth, and perhaps crop circles were showing us this, she added.
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Herma takes the stage at the Circles of Knowledge conference
Many in the audience seemed taken aback, even bemused, by Herma’s singular tale of how she turned from being a global market analyst to a dowser in search of the underlying order of existence, and not least by her dramatic series of graphs showing the decline in stock markets around the world in the 18 months before September 11, 2001, as if they ‘knew’ something disastrous was going to happen. Afterwards, several people approached Herma to compliment her on her talk; someone astonished her by pointing out that ‘Koornwinder Global Market Navigation’ comprised 33 characters – 33 being one of the three master numbers in numerology along with 11 and 22, and the ‘Christ number’ of perfection based on Christ’s supposed age at his death. Moreover, 33 is also the highest degree in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry – one can see a certain irony here, of course, bearing in mind Herma’s interest in the secret knowledge of Freemasonry when all the time, unknown to her, the name of her consultancy had the number of Freemasonry’s highest rank hidden within it!
On the Sunday morning, Herma wanted to dowse the Marlborough Mound, or Merlin’s Mound, as it is also known, which lies in the grounds of Marlborough College. The mound is central in the geometrical network of prehistoric sites discovered by Tom Brooks, in that, with Silbury Hill and Barbury Castle, it forms the innermost isosceles triangle from which the vast navigational system radiates across England and Wales. However, the mound has been badly used: first by William the Conqueror in the 11th century who had a castle keep built on it, and then by Lady Hertford in the 18th century who saw it as a mere garden feature – it was burrowed into to create a shell grotto and a spiral pathway was added with a water feature and viewpoint on the top. Trees were allowed to grow on the mound. In modern times, the college has allowed it to be hemmed in by ugly buildings, and there’s still a water tank on the summit. All this happened evidently without a thought being given to the mound’s antiquity and historical significance. Astonishingly, it was only in spring 2011 that, following analysis of samples of charcoal taken from the core of the hill, archaeologists announced that it was 4,400 years old and a prehistoric monument of international importance! Previously, it was thought to be no more than a thousand years old. So it is now known that Merlin’s Mound is contemporary with Silbury Hill (which is twice the size), adding weight to Tom Brooks’ research which has always regarded it as prehistoric by dint of the geometry. Legend has it that the archetypal wizard Merlin was buried under the mound, and that the name Marlborough was a corruption of ‘Merlin’s barrow’.
Herma pronounced the energies at the mound to be the same as those she had dowsed at Silbury Hill and Barbury Castle. At one point, as if in confirmation, Peter Knight, the author and sacred sites tour guide, who is also a dowser (they crop up everywhere, if you’ll excuse the pun), happened to be passing and told Herma she had found the long-distance Michael and Mary energy line where it came in from the direction of Silbury Hill. While filming Herma at the mound, Tim took it upon himself to advise her on some of the finer points of dowsing, advising her always to ask specific questions of her rods. At first, Herma felt a little daunted by this, but began to get used to the idea. ‘I feel like a proper dowser now,’ she joked over tea later. ‘I feel as if I’ve been awarded a degree!’
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Herma’s aerial photo of Avebury
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The Roundway Hill crop circle of
July 23, 2011
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The Honeystreet crop formation of
July 4, 2011, showing a ‘ghost’ formation
from a previous year in front of it |
Early next morning, Herma and Tim left for Thruxton Airfield in Hampshire where Fast Helicopters had been booked to take them on a flight over Wiltshire’s enchanted landscape.
Fast Helicopters works closely with various crop circle groups and tour operators, and has been flying professional photographers over the formations for many years. It wasn’t just crop circles that Herma wanted to film, however, but also the Marlborough Mound, Barbury Castle, Avebury and Silbury Hill.
There was a bit of a setback, though, when Herma was banned from taking her dowsing rods on the flight. Then she suffered severe admonishment by the pilot for changing seats once airborne because she was extremely cold – she’d been put in a seat in direct line with the icy blast coming through an open hatch through which Tim was filming. Nevertheless, in terms of the aerial images captured, the flight was a success.
Meanwhile, I was meeting Hugh Newman, who we were interviewing that afternoon, and together we went out to the Silent Circle to glean the latest reports.
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Hugh, who had been filming the speakers at the Circles of Knowledge conference, is a prominent earth mysteries researcher, explorer and author who travels the world studying megaliths, lost civilizations and ancient knowledge. He organises the annual Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury, co-edits Avalon Rising magazine, and co-ordinates talks, films and workshops at numerous festivals. He has researched the Indigo child phenomenon and published a book, The Psychic Children: Dolphins, DNA and the Planetary Grid, on the subject. He is also the author of Earth Grids: The Secret Patterns of Gaia’s Saced Sites, published by the award-winning Wooden Books. He is an honorary member of the Antiquarian Society and has spoken at conferences in the UK, Malta, France, Peru and North America. He is currently writing a book about the prehistoric Wandlebury earthworks and megalith complex near Cambridge. We had decided, therefore, that a good location to film him would be the Adam and Eve stones, a pair of giant megaliths at Avebury Trusloe, just to the west of the great circle, also known as the Longstones and the Devil’s Quoits. The larger Adam stone was once part of a cove with three other stones, while the Eve stone was probably part of the Beckhampton Avenue of megaliths that extended south-west from Avebury.
We began by asking Hugh about crop circles appearing so often close to ancient monuments, and the relationship between them. He referred to the 2005 book Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty by John Burke and Kaj Halberg which suggested prehistoric monuments were built to amplify naturally occurring electromagnetic fields in the earth in order to increase crop yields, a technology that only recently has been replicated by modern science. Intriguingly, it was also found that crops on the sites of the previous year’s crop circles grew faster and stronger than in the rest of the field, indicating that these locations had been made subject to a particular energetic effect. Burke and Halberg produced evidence that ordinary crop seeds treated with pulses of electromagnetic energy had a greater resistance to stress, germinated and grew quicker than untreated seeds. The same results were achieved by exposing seeds to concentrated earth energy at ancient sites. ‘It unlocked one of the great ancient mysteries that has been challenging archaeologists and alternative thinkers for decades,’ said Hugh. ‘We are looking at an ancient farming technology that goes back at least 5,000-6,000 years. It seems to have been known all round the world. The more you look at these sites, the more you realise that the designs are the same in almost every country you go to.’
| Tests had been done at Avebury by John Burke, in association with the American BLT crop circle research team, which found many of the stones were highly magnetic and were aligned to one another around the circle, suggesting that its builders were trying to harness and transfer energy. |
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Herma and Hugh Newman by the massive
Adam stone at Avebury Trusloe, near Avebury |
With the Michael and Mary energy current sweeping through Avebury, they could well have been working with earth energies. ‘The fact that these earth energy lines go all across the country and potentially all across the planet really does suggest there was a global understanding of this technology which we are just starting to get our heads round now,’ said Hugh. ‘I get a real sense personally that it could be the answer to our problem of energy. If you just utilise the energy from the local sacred site – they are virtually everywhere on the planet – then you can enhance your seeds, even enhance the landscape, you can direct these energies, the telluric currents. There’s a lot to this technology which has been discovered. It’s taken us this long to detect this but, interestingly, dowsers and geomancers have known it for decades, if not longer. They have known these energies exist and that they have an effect on seeds, and even on consciousness. I’m quite pleased that science is now backing up what the dowsers and geomancers have been saying all along.’
Many ancient sites were aligned astronomically, to the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and Hugh thought this was due partly to the fertility technology and the need for farmers to follow the changing energies of the seasons, and particularly of the sun and moon. This would have been combined with the influence of people working with earth energies, and stimulating them by placing stones in a system of ‘earth acupuncture’ (this idea was originated by Tom Graves, of course. Hugh, like many others nowadays, sees the Earth as a living organism with lines of earth energies and leys corresponding to the acupuncture meridians in our bodies). The astronomical alignments would function as a calendar for successive generations, telling them when to plant their crops, when to ‘charge up’ their seeds, and so on. The history of archaeo-astronomy went back a hundred years and it was now acknowledged that most ancient sites around the world had some astronomical significance.
Ancient cultures, particularly the neolithic which built Avebury, seemed to have had a sophistication about them which was still evident today. One example was the astronomical alignments, but another was the sheer magnitude of the monuments. ‘How on earth would you move a stone like this?’ Hugh asked, indicating the 62-ton Adam stone at his side. ‘Today even it’s a problem. Modern teams of scientists who have tried to build similar sites with the technology they believed the ancients were using found it virtually impossible. You get this all round the world, stones that weight 400 tons, even a thousand tons. If you look at the Pyramids you are talking about thousands if not millions of tons of stone. That shows a very high level of sophistication. To me, it seems like the ancients were showing off. They could do it, so they did do it.’
Where might such technology have come from? ‘It seems to have sprung out of nowhere, that’s the strange thing. You go back into prehistory and suddenly there are advanced cultures. Egypt is a fine example. Similarly, in Peru, these great cultures just appear. Some say it was the lost island of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean, others say it might have been alien technology interacting with humans – there’s a huge amount of evidence for that, incidentally – but others believe it was just through inspiration, a golden age when we were at a very high state of consciousness and intelligence and, with a lot of time on our hands, we just worked it out. I go with that one really, because I think the potential of a human being is remarkable. We are just starting to understand where they were at now, and maybe we are going to move into a similar state of consciousness over the next couple of decades.’
What was the significance of all this today? ‘There seems to be a movement of megalithomania around the planet. People are becoming obsessed by these ancient sites. Thousands of people visit Stonehenge every year, millions possibly. It’s the most popular tourist attraction in Britain. See how many people go to Egypt, Peru and other sites. It seems people are really questioning where we come from. That’s a very deep question that we’re not given the answers to, officially, in the schooling system, on television, in the academic world or the universities, unfortunately. People are realising that and finding out for themselves, and the only way you can do that is by having experiential events and visiting these sites yourself. We are really cut off from our ancestors, partly deliberately, to keep us bogged down in the present day and in the culture and society we have to deal with. People are feeling a bit lost and looking for something more. To connect with your ancestors is one of the most important things there is. Luckily, these sites were built to last. This is one of the reasons people want to visit them. We are not told the truth and we want to tune in to who we once were.’
| It was not just a matter of reconnection with the ancestors, but returning people to connections with the earth and stars, vital links with nature that had been lost. |
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Tim and Herma filming with Hugh Newman at the
Adam and Eve stones at Avebury Trusloe,
near Avebury |
‘Gazing at the stars for a night can be a very profound spiritual experience for people,’ he said.
‘We just don’t do it any more. We are all in our little boxes, our homes, and we don’t get that quality time with the stars and the landscape.
I think this is one of the roles of crop circles. They bring us out into the land, and they test our intellect. They challenge us to study the landscape, the geometry, the mathematics, to stimulate us in many different ways.’
The energies of different geometries themselves could affect consciousness, he believed.
Hugh believes that megalithic sites were created to sustain a certain level of consciousness, to keep people questioning and thinking, the Pyramids being the prime example. They were distributed as geodetic markers around the planet and related to each other in a grid through leys and earth energies and geometrical networks, perhaps as a means of harnessing these energies. It was as if the planet had been surveyed in antiquity, not just for that time, but for future generations also, drawing attention to important places. The Great Pyramid at Giza seemed to be at the centre, or ‘plug point’, of the earth grid as well as of the planet’s land mass, and also the focus of the original north-south meridian. ‘John Michell referred to the enchantment of the landscape. But the ancients had a whole globe of enchantment, scientific enchantment, around the planet. It was like a great landscape machine, but as parts of it got broken the energy dissipated, so it’s not working any more. I think it’s one of the ways they could have moved those great stones.’
Commenting on the question of advanced technology in the ancient world, as we had asked Antoine Gigal to do, Hugh said the Abydos carvings might suggest the Ancient Egyptians had flying machines, perhaps powered by the earth grid; they could be modern hoaxes, although this was highly unlikely, or they had turned up there for some another reason we didn’t yet understand. ‘It’s an interesting example of a potential ancient technology,’ he said. There were many references to flying craft in ancient writings – the vimanas, for example, in the Indian Vedic texts – and in South America ancient gold pendants resembling aircraft had been found. At Dendera there were ancient carvings of what looked like giant light bulbs, and at Baghdad an object resembling a battery, but thousands of years old, was discovered. In northern Scotland and the Orkney Islands, stone spheres, dating to at least 3,000-4,000BC, displayed the Platonic solids and sacred geometry. Then there was the mystery of how the ancients cut and shaped extremely hard rock, such as granite and diorite, for their building blocks. They seemed to have had high-level machining technology, or a technique for softening the stone, or even electricity to power the operation, perhaps derived somehow from the Pyramids and providing a network of energy.
The whole issue of ancient technology should be in the remit of academia, said Hugh, but instead it was being held back, or suppressed, even dismissed, although alternative researchers continued to put it on the map. It often took mainstream science several decades to catch up with alternative thinking. Alexander Thom who, in the 1950s and 1960s, discovered the megalithic yard and the geometrical precision of stone circles, was a good example of this. Only today were some universities taking up his work. Hugh predicted that much of the findings of alternative archaeology would be ‘mainstream’ in the academic world in 20 or 30 years’ time.
In many ways, it was a week of homage to the ancestors. At the Circles of Knowledge conference, Herma had bought a copy of John Michell’s The New View Over Atlantis from Roma Harding’s Spiral of Tranquility bookstall. The book was published in 1983 as a revised edition of the original The View Over Atlantis of 1969, the seminal and founding work of the earth mysteries movement. Although Herma was already familiar with a number of Michell’s other books, it was not surprising that, starting to read The New View Over Atlantis on the plane back to Amsterdam, she immediately realised its special significance in terms of her own studies. In the book, Michell sets out his belief that ancient secrets ‘dissolve into the consciousness of the human race to fertilise the seed of evolutionary growth’; he says people are becoming conscious of the gradual accumulation within each succeeding generation of the total knowledge of the past through the hereditary medium of DNA, and that this realisation ensures the ultimate re-establishment of the former belief in revelation on which the science of the ancient world was founded.
Today, and not before time, we are beginning to hear the haunting song of our ancestors.
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The setting sun casts Geoff’s shadow as he takes a photo of the moon rising over the fields near Furze Knoll, Wiltshire
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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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