Ancient Mysteries by Peter James

Author:Peter James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307414601
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Church ley lines in Oxford, as envisaged by Alfred Watkins.

While he has collected some intriguing snippets of British folklore in support of his theory, Devereux has yet to prove his case about “spirit lines.” It is easy to imagine that if people believed spirits moved in straight lines, then tracks might be marked out in order to guide ghosts safely from a given village to a graveyard. And one can see how that idea may have evolved into customs of carrying actual corpses along the same routes. But why should graveyards themselves be connected? To facilitate communication or gatherings between the dead? German “ley hunter” Ulrich Magin has taken a completely different approach to church alignments. Researching those in his homeland, he argues that many may have arisen from a deliberate practice, in early medieval times, of positioning churches at cardinal points with respect to a cathedral. Thus churches might be built respectively to the north, south, east, and west of a cathedral, creating a “cathedral cross.” As time went on the alignments might multiply. Magin claims to have found seven churches at Worms on a line only two miles long, one-third of which follows the course of a road. The practice, he stresses, is strictly medieval, and has nothing to do with Watkins’s idea of how special sites “evolved” or changed their purpose from prehistoric times onward. He also distinguishes these alignments from Devereux’s theory of cemetery lines: “These church lines were not for the dead, but for the holy spirit, enhancing the power of the cathedral.”

Speculative though they are, the new approaches taken by Devereux and others are surely worth investigating—and this the ley hunters can be relied on to do. There may have been, and there still will be, many false leads and false trails, but intense fieldwork is the best way to include every relevant monument or local tradition.

It would be pure arrogance to imagine that there is nothing more to be discovered about the ways that ancient people—whether in the Neolithic or the Middle Ages—arranged their sacred monuments. Here old-fashioned ley hunting may still come into its own, as few people have so dedicatedly tramped through the muddy fields of Britain and continental Europe as the disciples of Watkins, or know every bump and stone on the landscape so intimately. Perhaps it is time for archaeologists and ley hunters to bury the hatchet and start pooling their resources and knowledge. The results may be interesting.

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