Er, that's not really what I said. There's a lot of hoopla over leys, and a lot of inaccurate information, but they're not just science fiction. They've just been overblown to an embarrassing extent.
Leys were discovered in the early 1920s by Alfred Watkins, a British antiquarian. His book The Old Straight Track is very much worth reading. He held that leys were an ancient system of land navigation, from the days when travel was on foot and Britain was mostly trackless wilderness; stone markers and various other guideposts were set up in places where they could be seen from far off, so that people could find their way from one isolated village to another. Over time, that gave rise to a network of more or less straight trackways covering much of Britain.
Many years later, in the 1970s, John Michell and other earth mysteries researchers got into the act. By then people had started noticing that certain spiritual phenomena move in straight lines over the landscape, and in a few cases there seems to be something like an energy current, which can be detected by dowsing and other methods. From that, the modern concept of leys as energy channels was born -- Michell's book The View Over Atlantis is the one to read here.
More recent research has more or less split the difference between those views. The trackways Watkins traced are one part of the picture; then there are natural flows of energy through the landscape, of the sort that feng-shui masters track; then there are traces of ancient technologies of various kinds and dates that made use of these "earth currents" -- my book The Secret of the Temple talks about one of those.
I'm glad your relative is talking about Stone Age technologies -- that's definitely a step in the right direction. The New Age scene for a while was full of claims that leys are everywhere, and all kinds of maps got splashed around, tracing "leys" that were nothing more than somebody's brain farts. There were some very interesting old technologies that worked with the earth currents and have left traces in various parts of the Earth's surface. Like everything else having to do with prehistory, though, they're found in some places and not in others.
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branchandroot
Re: Ley Lines
Date: 2023-01-02 07:52 pm (UTC)Leys were discovered in the early 1920s by Alfred Watkins, a British antiquarian. His book The Old Straight Track is very much worth reading. He held that leys were an ancient system of land navigation, from the days when travel was on foot and Britain was mostly trackless wilderness; stone markers and various other guideposts were set up in places where they could be seen from far off, so that people could find their way from one isolated village to another. Over time, that gave rise to a network of more or less straight trackways covering much of Britain.
Many years later, in the 1970s, John Michell and other earth mysteries researchers got into the act. By then people had started noticing that certain spiritual phenomena move in straight lines over the landscape, and in a few cases there seems to be something like an energy current, which can be detected by dowsing and other methods. From that, the modern concept of leys as energy channels was born -- Michell's book The View Over Atlantis is the one to read here.
More recent research has more or less split the difference between those views. The trackways Watkins traced are one part of the picture; then there are natural flows of energy through the landscape, of the sort that feng-shui masters track; then there are traces of ancient technologies of various kinds and dates that made use of these "earth currents" -- my book The Secret of the Temple talks about one of those.
I'm glad your relative is talking about Stone Age technologies -- that's definitely a step in the right direction. The New Age scene for a while was full of claims that leys are everywhere, and all kinds of maps got splashed around, tracing "leys" that were nothing more than somebody's brain farts. There were some very interesting old technologies that worked with the earth currents and have left traces in various parts of the Earth's surface. Like everything else having to do with prehistory, though, they're found in some places and not in others.