Alan Richardson, Spirits of the Stones: Visions of Sacred Britain, Virgin Publishing, London, 2001.
What have psychics and sometimes long-time locals as well “seen”, or believed they have seen, at the numerous famed megalithic sites of Britain? Far more, according to Richardson, than most of the rest of us. At times they have seemed to be transported right into a long-lost megalithic “golden age” or “other-dimensional” spirit world. For those able to perceive on levels not usually available to the rest of us, these sites can open doorways beyond the physical. It is the vividness of the encounters he describes that makes Richardson’s accounts so engaging. At these sacred sites, the barriers that usually separate dimensions of space and time can become, Richardson believes, uniquely permeable.
At Silbury Hill, close to Avebury, one of the oldest of such constructions psychic Grace Cooke had a vision distinctly different from the frightening apparitions that had sometimes appeared to other visitors there. Cooke:
“…felt a tremendous heat all around me on the hilltop and saw with amazement an immense altar upon which a great flame arose. It burned quite unlike an ordinary fire, for it seemed to need no replenishment; and I felt that it had been burning there in the etheric world for an unmeasured time. Great beings who seemed to be high priests were serving at this altar…The whole area was one of light and goodness, thronging with happy, gentle, childlike and presumable vegetarian folk who worshipped under the aegis of priests from Egypt, as well as some god-men from a lost continent who looked like Mayans…”
Two members of a Wican coven atop a height in Dorset saw:
“…an intense cobalt blue light around the hill which sort of undulated, like a huge snake. It was unbelievably bright despite the pitch darkness all around…Then as she watched, astonished, it was as though the hill she was on itself started shifting, as if it had become malleable, no longer a solid lump of heavy earth.”
On a subsequent night perched overlooking standing stones at Avebury, one of them witnessed:
“…an energy coming toward me like a huge serpent…then this brilliant blue light washes over you, this ‘serpent energy” which is all about Life, and it’s a very loving thing, a sense of, ‘Oh this is mine, a friend.”
As Richardson writes, “This is powerful imagery: two witches on a sacred height with the rolling hills of Wessex, green as waves, surging before them as they summon the energies of the Great Serpent and watch as it undulates toward them and they merge with it.”
Psychic “Cass” told Richardson:
“Many of the “secrets of the stones can be unlocked by music. You can find the pitch of a stone by harmonic overtone chanting, and you can actually feel the stone vibrate to the touch when the correct pitch is reached…Originally the stones were ‘energized’ by song, dance, and drumming.”
On a level perceptible by those whose senses are exceptionally open, Richardson writes, standing stones can even seem to emit music.
“Time-slips” in the vicinity of megalithic sites have taken some into seeing buildings, people, landscapes, animals, and modes of life that, in ordinary time, had vanished long before. Richardson records how dolmen researcher John Palmer slept in a chamber of the West Kennet Long Barrow and was woken by a mysterious light inside.
“When he went to the entrance and looked out to the moon-bright landscape beyond, he was astonished to find that it was not the same one he had left when he entered the barrow at dusk. Fully awake, fully bewildered, he went back to his sleeping bag and chose not to attempt to explore the new world he found himself in.”
A frequent perception of psychics at such “trans-dimensional” doorways, Richardson writes, is, “that the people of the Neolithic times are somehow, in a strange sense, still there.” He believes this remarkable phenomenon may be linked to the enormous hulking standing stones, mounds, and constructions of the distant past being storehouses of “energies” still containing memories of those locations that, even now, can still be accessed. In those long ago times, he records, such places were sometimes perceived as providing entrances into a kind of “inner world”, within but deeper than the physical realm and down inside the surfaces of our usual awareness, a startling interior realm where even the legendary expanse of the “stars within the earth” could be encountered by those with the keys to open those doors.
Next Section: Egypt and First Civilizations