🔻
Surprisingly little of this book is actually about leys as we know and love them. It is a detailed exposition of the variety of large-scale linear constructions, accepted by establishment archaeologists and produced by many societies across the world. English cursuses, Roman roads, the Nazca and other Andean lines, the Bolivian sacred paths. The story is brought up to date with a study of the continuing fascination with alignments as revealed by medieval and renaissance urban planning to such unlikely 20th century manifestations as Milton Keyes shopping centre!
A chapter looks at the development of modern ley hunting, and here one of the main purposes for this book emerges. It is attempting to wrest ley-hunting from the hands of the mystics, cut through the blatherings about energy lines and return the subject to rational discussion. The authors draw a clear distinction between 'research-based ley hunting' and what, borrowing a phrase from elsewhere, we might call 'belief-oriented' ley hunting, and are devastating in their attack on the latter: “The excesses of modern ley work, usually dowsing, are often a mish-mash of personal belief systems masquerading as objective facts. The dowsing rod has become an implement to authorise the acceptance of subjective ideas as factual statements”. Such iconoclasm “can readily lead to accusations of being materialist, 'scientific', reductionist...” which are already emerging in the 'earth mysteries' press.
The authors present us with a clear summary of a wealth of indisputable, but still mysterious, linear landscape features. They have also made the strongest case yet that the remnants of such features exist in Britain as leys. Anyone wishing to challenge this thesis will now have to do so without the aid of the 'lunatic fringe' who have previously helped scupper the ley-hunters' case.
- John Rimmer, from Magonia 34, 1989.
No comments:
Post a Comment