The ley line myth

The ley line myth

1. THE “LEY LINE” MYTH
The Foundation of New Age belief
The idea of mystical pathways of power traversing the planet has quite an appeal to new age
practitioners, magicians, writers and more ! Exactly what the power source is for these ley lines,
how they are arranged and why they are arranged the way they are is up for some debate,
depending on which group you talk to. Some of the more popular myths include the spirit of Mother
Earth traveling ley lines and interacting with those fated to cross her path all over the planet,
highways and byways for UFOs and other extraterrestrial visitors, random paths of spell energy
pointed to by Chaos magicians as proof of their theories, and the tracks left across the planet by
travelers from other dimensions; as for the writers, they use all of these ideas and plenty of their
own that spring up from the fertile ley line idea.
In 1969, the British author John Michell, who had previously written on the subject of UFOs,
published The View Over Atlantis, in which he revived Watkins' ley line theories and linked them
with the Chinese concept of feng shui. The book, published by Sago Press, proved popular and
was reprinted in Great Britain by Garnstone Press in 1972 and Abacus in 1973, and in the United
States by Ballantine Books in 1972.Gary Lachman states that The View Over Atlantis "put
Glastonbury on the countercultural map."

Ronald Hutton described it as "almost the founding
document of the modern earth mysteries movement".Michell's mingling Watkins' amateur
archaeology with Chinese spiritual concepts of land-forms led to many new theories about the
alignments of monuments and natural landscape features. Writers made use of Watkins'
terminology in service of concepts related to dowsing and New Age occult beliefs, including the
ideas that ley lines have spiritual power or resonate a special psychic or mystical energy. Ascribing
such characteristics to ley lines has led to the term being classified as pseudoscience! New Age
occultists claim ley lines are sources of power or energy. According to Robert T. Carroll, there is
no evidence for this belief save the usual subjective certainty based on uncontrolled observations
by untutored devotees! Nevertheless, advocates claim that the alleged energy may be related
to magnetic fields. None of this has been scientifically verified !
In 2004, John Bruno Hare wrote:
“Watkins never attributed any supernatural significance to leys; he believed that they were simply pathways
that had been used for trade or ceremonial purposes, very ancient in origin, possibly dating back to the
Neolithic, certainly pre-Roman. His obsession with leys was a natural outgrowth of his interest in landscape
photography and love of the British countryside. He was an intensely rational person with an active intellect,
and I think he would be a bit disappointed with some of the fringe aspects of ley lines today".


The subject of leys (or 'ley lines' or 'ley hunting') as we have come to know it is essentially a British
one. Both the good and bad aspects can be blamed on the British! For 20 years I edited the only
journal in the world devoted solely to leys, THE LEY HUNTER, and I think I have come to know the
subject more intimately and in more detail than anyone else alive. The first thing I can assure you is

2. that what is talked about in New Age journals, workshops and groups today about 'leylines' is
mainly a combination of misunderstanding, old falsehoods, wishful thinking and downright fantasy
with occult roots! What I am going to tell you now is the true history of ley research. Like most
histories, it is essentially a list of dates and names, but unless we understand the growth of the ley
idea, we will never understand what leys are, and what it is we are dealing with.
Alfred Watkins, pioneer proponent of the ley theory, shown taking photographs along one of his
alignments.
The origin of the Ley theory
In 1921, Englishman Alfred Watkins had a
sudden perception (he called it a 'flood of
ancestral memory'), while looking at a
map of the Herefordshire countryside. He
saw that various prehistoric places, such
as standing stones, earthen burial
mounds, prehistoric earthworked hills, and
other such features fell into straight lines
for miles across country. Watkins spent
many years studying such alignments on
the ground and on maps. He was a
pioneer photographer and he took
photographs of his alignments, wrote
books and gave lectures. In response to his Members of the Straight Track Club
work, especially to his most important book at Stonehenge circa 1930
The Old Straight Track (1925), the Straight Track Club was formed, in which people all over Britain
conducted field research looking for alignments of sites, and perhaps remnants of old straight tracks
lying along them.
In 1921, Englishman Alfred Watkins had a sudden perception (he called it a 'flood of ancestral
memory'), while looking at a map of the Herefordshire countryside. He saw that various prehistoric
places, such as standing stones, earthen burial mounds, prehistoric earthworked hills, and other
such features fell into straight lines for miles across country. Watkins spent many years studying
such alignments on the ground and on maps. He was a pioneer photographer and he took
photographs of his alignments, wrote books and gave lectures. In response to his work, especially
to his most important book, The Old Straight Track (1925), the Straight Track Club was formed, in
which people all over Britain conducted field research looking for alignments of sites, and perhaps
remnants of old straight tracks lying along them.
For about 7 years in the 1920s, Watkins referred to his alignments as 'leys'. This is an Anglo-Saxon
word meaning 'cleared strips of ground' or 'meadows'. Watkins' theory of leys was that they were
old straight traders' tracks laid down by surveyors in the Neolithic period of prehistory. They used
surveying rods, he claimed, and it was this line-of-sight method that led to the straightness of the
old tracks. The tracks ran from hilltop to hilltop, mountain ridge to mountain ridge, like 'a fairy chain'
Watkins suggested. They cut through wild country, and in the valleys there was dense forest. Over
time, this was cleared along the course of the straight tracks, Watkins maintained, and this was the
reason he used the word 'ley' to describe such tracks. However, by 1929, he had discarded the use
of the name 'ley' and referred to his alignments only as 'old straight tracks' or 'archaic tracks'.
Watkins felt that many of the key sighting points along these old straight tracks evolved into sacred
sites, such as standing stones and burial mounds. Watkins felt that eventually the old straight tracks
fell out of use, and so we only have the aligned sites today to indicate their courses or routes. He
also theorised that in the historic, Christian era, some of the prehistoric, pagan sites became
Christianised, and this explained why he found so many ancient churches standing on his
alignments. It is certainly a fact that many such sites did become Christianised throughout Europe.

3. Photo: Paul Devereux.
An old trackway on one of Alfred Watkins' ley alignments
passes through the ruins of Llanthony Abbey in the Black
Mountains, Wales.
Photo: Paul Devereux.
(Watkins was not the first to suggest that ancient sites fell
into straight alignments, there had been a number of
British, American, French and German researchers
making similar suggestions, from at least the 18th
century.)
In 1935, Watkins died. In 1936, the British occultist Dion
Fortune wrote a fictional book, a novel, called The Goat-
Foot God, in which she put forward the notion of 'lines of
force' connecting megalithic sites such as Avebury and
Stonehenge in southern England. In 1938, Arthur Lawton,
a member of the Straight Track Club, wrote a paper in
which he claimed that leys were lines of cosmic force
which could be dowsed. He was a dowser himself, and
was impressed with the German geopathological dowsing
that was then getting under way, and French dowsing
work which claimed that there were lines of force beneath
standing stones. Lawton put all this together in his own
head and came up with his theory about leys.
In 1948, the Straight Track Club was closed down as there were only a few surviving members, and
no new work was being done. The idea of Watkins' leys was kept alive by a few fringe writers and
researchers in Britain during the 1950s. Probably in no other country in the world at this time was
anyone preserving the idea of leys.
Leys for the 1960s
From 1960 the ley theory took on a new lease of life, one that has led to the modern New Age
notion of 'ley lines'. An ex-R.A.F. pilot, Tony Wedd, was very interested in flying saucers, or UFOs.
He had read Watkins' The Old Straight Track and also a French book, Flying Saucers and the
Straight Line Mystery (1958) by Aim=82 Michel, in which it was (falsely) suggested that the
locations where flying saucers landed or hovered very low during the 1954 French flying saucer
outbreak or 'wave' fell into straight lines or 'orthotenies'. Wedd made the excited conclusion that
Watkins' 'leys' and Michel's 'orthotenies' were one and the same phenomenon. He had also read an
American book by Buck Nelson called My Trip to Mars, the Moon and Venus (1956) in which
Rogers claimed to have flown in UFOs, and to have witnessed them picking up energy from
'magnetic currents' flowing through the Earth. In 1961, Wedd published a pamphlet called Skyways
and Landmarks in which he theorised that UFO occupants flew along magnetic lines of force which
linked ancient sites, and that the ancient sites acted as landmarks for UFO pilots. It all relied very
much on the notions and experiences of an old-fashioned terrestrial airplane pilot, rather than
intergalactic extra-terrestrial creatures!
Wedd formed the Star Fellowship, which aimed to contact the Space Brothers. The members of the
club enlisted the aid of a psychic called Mary Long in their ley hunting, and she started referring to
'lines of force' and magnetic nodes in the landscape. She also channelled communications from a
Space Being called 'Attalita'. In 1962 a Ley Hunter's Club was set up with Wedd's encouragement,
and by 1965 it produced the first few copies of THE LEY HUNTER journal.
It was at a conference held by members of Wedd's group in London in 1966 that I first became
introduced to the idea of leys, and it is possible that John Michell also attended that same meeting.
Other pioneers of this new wave of ley hunting also became involved in the subject in the 1960s. In
1967 John Michell wrote his first book, The Flying Saucer Vision, in which he talked about UFOs,
ancient sites, Alfred Watkins and leys. In 1969 he produced his seminal work, The View Over
Atlantis, in which he brought his erudition and insight to bear on the ley theory, and mixed it with
ancient, sacred geometrical and number systems, and much else besides, particularly the Chinese
systemof landscape divination called Feng shui. He also speculated about dowsing. This book had
a profound influence on the new generation of ley hunters. In it, as well as in magazine articles, he

4. put forward his idea of a 'St Michael Line' running for 400 miles across southern England. In that
same year of 1969, THE LEY HUNTER journal came under the editorship of Paul Screeton, and
remained in continuous publication until 1999.
Energy lines
So by the end of the 1960s, the new young generation of ley hunters felt that leys were probably
lines of energy, of magnetism even, and associated the lines with UFOs and psychic experience.
The ley theory had become as brightly coloured as a 1960s psychedelic shirt,and would hardly
have been recognised by Alfred Watkins. All sorts of books, articles in the new 'Underground
Press', and pamphlets appeared enriching and enlarging the ideas of earth energies and leys. In
1972, Janet and Colin Bord published their extremely widely-read book, "Mysterious Britain", in
which they summarised all the New Age thinking about leys and powerfully mixed this with many
photographs of ancient monuments and themes from folklore. In 1974, THE LEY HUNTER editor,
Paul Screeton, published his book, "Quicksilver Heritage", in which he further amplified ideas about
leys, earth energies and mystic, occult themes. Another book came out by John Michell at this
time, as well, called "The Old Stones of Land's End", in which he described alignments of standing
stones in Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England. This was classic Alfred Watkins ley hunting,
and was good fieldwork, standing in quite a contrast to the more New Age 'energy' ideas about
leys being peddled almost everywhere else. In this same year of 1974, the first article on leys was
published in the USA by the then president of the American Society of Dowsers. The author, Terry
Ross, had read the Bords' Mysterious Britain and he talked only about leys as being lines of energy.
This was picked up and amplified by various elements in the New Age movement in America ! In
the USA, leys were energy lines, and there was little or no knowledge of Alfred Watkins, or the
original old straight track theory. Also in 1974, an unknown writer in "The Whole Earth Catalogue"
referred to the whole area of leys, ancient sites and wisdom, occult lore, landscape mysteries,
earth energies and the rest of it by the collective title of 'earth mysteries', and that name of
convenience has stuck ever since.
Parting of the ways
As the 1970s progressed, ley hunting began to divide into two halves. One side treated the subject
as dowsable lines of energy and speculated about supposed alignments hundreds and even
thousands of miles long, and some people, like the Fountain Group in England, started to claim that
mental influence could be transmitted down 'ley lines'. The other, smaller group was more scholarly
and research-oriented, and began studying and trying to understand the nature and meaning of real
landscape lines that real people had really made in the remote past. The trigger for this came in
1978, when British filmaker Tony Morrison came back from Bolivia with news of mysterious old
straight tracks cutting through the altiplano there. Those of us who represented the research-based
school of ley hunting immediately thought of the Nazca lines in Peru, which Erich Von Daniken had
claimed were landing strips for ancient astronauts -- yet another twentieth century notion projected
onto the ancient landscape. We wanted to know what these lines were really all about (see
following excerpt).
In the USA meanwhile, through the 1970s and the 1980s, the idea of energy lines grew and
grew and became a part of the New Age movement there. People started talking about
interplanetary and even intergalactic 'ley lines', lines of yin or yang energy, 'ley lines' that
came down from the sky as columns of force which turned at right angles when they
reached the Earth's surface, and then ran along under the ground! There was no end to the
fantasies. The idea of 'line sof the world' was even included in the bestselling and fictional
books by Carlos Castaneda, and this further cemented the idea of leys as energy lines in the
mind of the New Age audience. By the late 1970s, 'energy line' ideas where mentioned by
many presenters on the international circuit of New Age centres and workshops. The
fantastic notions that had been originally spawned in Britain were magnified in the USA and
then these fantasies were exported back to Europe as part of the New Age movement!
People who had no idea of the origins of the idea of leys, who, in other words, were not grounded in
any real knowledge, started writing books and booklets on their pet theories about ley lines, and
began to run workshops including such ideas. Very soon, the whole New Age version of the subject
became like a corridor of mirrors, with one fantasy piling up on another. To this very day, this false
and time-wasting approach to the mystery of the lines is the most publically known version of the
subject. Germany was particularly vulnerable, for it absorbed all the American New Age ideas,
including energy 'ley lines', knowing little or nothing about the origin of the ley theory in Britain. In

5. addition, ideas of ley energies fitted in very well with Germany's own history of geopathological
dowsing and dowsable energy grids or nets, and the two, completely different subjects became
merged together in the New Age melting pot. (Holland in some ways was worse off, because it
received its information fairly equally from the New Age in Britain, Germany and the USA, and I
have found that it is virtually impossible to talk to anyone in Holland about research- based ley
hunting.)
When ley hunting became popular in the 1960s, mainstream archaeological scholars dismissed it
all and became very angry with ley hunters. This was partly because the professors did not want a
revolution in their thinking; they did not want anything that might threaten their academic positions.
Now, today, I find that New Agers are like the old professors: they resist or dismiss the new
research we have on old straight tracks and landscape lines around the world. This is
because many of them earn their living from writing New Age books, giving New Age
lectures and workshops, and so they feel threatened. Others simply do not want their pet
fantasies disturbed. Yet others are not prepared to admit to past mistakes and misunderstandings.
The New Age is no longer new, vibrant and fresh; it has become old and inflexible. In their
minds, many New Age people are still living about a quarter of a century ago, not aware of
what has been found, discovered and understood in those intervening decades.
Understanding the nature of real straight line markings in archaic landscapes can actually introduce
us to a whole hidden history of human consciousness, a remarkable legacy.
A ley alignment marked out on an airphoto at Saintbury, in the English Cotswold hills. The line
follows the general line of an ancient track, and passes through a medieval cross, a Saxon church,
and prehistoric burial mounds beyond.
Photo: Paul Devereux.
Copyright: © Paul Devereux, 1996.
A significantly-abridged version of article "SPIRIT
WAYS & SHAMANISM", published in the German
journal, "Dao", in 1997 (elements of this text also used
in part in other contexts, such as in The Ley Hunter
journal):
Feng-shui, the ancient Chinese art of landscape
divination, has its ancient roots in ancestor worship and
Taoism, which in turn derived from shamanism. One of
Feng-shui's basic tenets is that houses and tombs
should not be built on straight lines in the landscape.
Such features include roads, ridges, river courses, lines
of trees, fences and such like. They all facilitated the
passage of troublesome spirits, so if a tomb or building
was on the course of such an "arrow" in the land, then
preventative measures had to be taken. These included
the erection of physical barriers to mask the entrance to the building, placing fearsome "door
guardian" effigies either side of the door, or placing a special mirror at the entrance so that any
horrible spirits would scare themselves off by their own reflections.
A Feng shui geomant assessing a site.
This basic idea of spirits traveling in straight lines is found all around the Pacific rim, but the
association of straight ways across the land with the passage of spirits is even wider.
Spirit Lines in the Americas
Archaeological evidence of the ancient practice of building spirit ways has survived best in the
Americas, as it has experienced less cultural upheaval as the Old World. A brief north-to-south
survey shows this. In Ohio, between 150 BC and 500, the Hopewell Indians built geometrical
earthworks covering many acres, along with straight linear features which seem to have been

6. ceremonial roadways. In 1995, archaeolgists announced the discovery of a 60-mile-long, dead
straight Hopewell ritual road connecting earthworks at Newark with the Hopewell necropolis at
Chillicothe.
In the California Sierras, prehistoric Miwok Indians left behind the remains of dead-straight tracks.
Archaeologists in the 1930s described them as "almost airline in their directness, running up hill and
down dale without zigzags or detours". Mysterious prehistoric Indian roads have been found in
Utah, Colorado and Arizona, but the most dramatic examples in the United States as a whole are
those that converge on (or diverge from) Chaco Canyon, a cult centre of the lost Anasazi people, in
the high, arid desert country in northwestern New Mexico. These Chacoan roads stretch for 60
miles beyond the canyon, and possibly much further, linking Anasazi ceremonial "Great Houses", of
which there are many dozens scattered thoughout the desert area surrounding Chaco Canyon.
Where the roads meet the rimrock of the
canyon, stairways were carved out of the
rock walls reaching down to the canyon floor.
Photo: Paul Devereux.
Where the roads meet the rimrock of the
canyon, stairways were carved out of the
rock walls reaching down to the canyon floor.
Photo: Paul Devereux.
These mysterious roads are not mere tracks,
but engineered features. Primary roads are
30 feet wide. They are strikingly straight
("arrow straight" was one description),
changing direction when they do in a
sudden dogleg, not a curve.

There are several archaeological sites in
Mexico containing straight road systems
that are older than those at Chaco.
Sometimes there are altars on these
causeways; often they seem to lead to
strange places, like caves or cliff faces.
Further south in Mexico, in the Yucatán
peninsula, we enter the domain of the
ancient Maya. They built long, straight
roads the Maya today call sacbeob ("white
ways"). These interconnected plazas and
temples within some of the Mayan
ceremonial cities, and also linked cities
themselves. They now exist only in
fragmentary sections, the longest-known
surviving sacbe being the sixty-two-mile-
long section that runs between Coba and
Yaxuna in the northern part of the Yucatán
peninsula. Thomas Gann described it in
the 1920s as "a great elevated road, or
causeway thirty-two-feet wide... This was
one of the most remarkable roads ever
constructed... straight as an arrow, and
almost flat as a rule". Altars, arches and
curious ramps are associated with the sacbeob, and according to local Mayan tradition the physical
network of the sacbeob is augmented at various places by non-material, mythological routes: there
are said to be undergound sacbeob and others than run through the air.
NASA surveys have found paths running through the mountainous rainforest of the Arenal area of
Costa Rica. These paths, which "follow relatively straight lines" despite the difficult terrain, have
been examined at ground level and have been dated to AD500-1200. Investigators discovered that

7. the paths are "death roads", and are still used for carrying corpses to burial, and also for
transporting laja, volcanic stone, used in the construction of tombs and cemetery walls.
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the northern coast of Colombia, South America, is the
territory of the Kogi Indians. Scattered amongst the forests of the Sierra are the remains of the
stone-built cities of the Taironas culture. The cities were linked by paved roads or paths, some of
them straight. (We will return to these features later.)
South and west, along the Andes region of South America, we encounter a number of different
"roads", desert lines and alignments. Peru has several examples. Straight, very ancient roads have
been found and studied in the Moche Valley of northern Peru; further south along the western coast
of Peru, we come to the most famous of the linear markings in the Americas, the "Nazca Lines".
These date to between fifteen hundred and about two thousand years ago, and have had to suffer
the ignominy of being classed as landing strips for ancient astronauts by the mid-twentieth-century
mind, in the person of the fantasy writer, Erich Von Daniken. The lines are to be found on the desert
tablelands or pampas at Cuzco and further afield, where marks made on the ground remain visible
for very long periods of time. The linear markings vary from broad, rectangular and trapezoid areas
to narrow, very straight lines, some of which run parallel to one another. They can run for up to
several miles in length, passing over hills and ridges as if they did not exist.
A map of part of the Nazca lines
complex, Peru.
Five hundred or so miles south of Cuzco, lines criss-cross the altiplano of western Bolivia. These
lines can reach lengths of twenty miles, considerably longer than any found at Nazca. These are
absolutely straight, regardless of the irregularities of the ground, and link shrines of various kinds.
Lines, solitary and in groups, in the form of desert markings or long rows of small stone heaps, have
been seen at other places in the Andean region, at least as far south as the Atacama Desert in
Chile.
Prehistoric roads and rumours of lines occur as well in lowland, rainforest parts of South America,
east of the Andes. Some of these take the form of perfectly straight causways through dense
jungle. The archaeological and ethnological study of these features has only just begun
Shamanic Landscapes
These straight lines, paths and roads are elements in what I call "shamanic landscapes". Other
elements include terrestrial effigies such as ground drawings ("geoglyphs") and effigy mounds. This
realisation was first noticed in 1977 by anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios, and subsequently
developed by myself and colleagues.

8. Some of the ground drawings or geoglyphs at Nazca.
(After Maria Reiche.)Some of the ground drawings or
geoglyphs at Nazca. (After Maria Reiche.)
Dobkin de Rios noted that some of these great ground
markings occurred in areas where shamanic tribal
people lived, and more detailed studies have confirmed
that this was true in all cases. Specifically, shamanism
built on the use of hallucinogenic plants. We have now
been able to tie in all areas of ground markings with local
peoples who used, or still use, native hallucinogenic
drugs in a ritual, shamanistic context. We may note as
just one example, that Chavin de Huantar, a temple in
northern Peru, was the centre of a shamanic cult built
around the psychoactive San Pedro cactus from around
800 BC. The influence of this cult extended form many
hundreds of miles down the western coast of South
America, covering all the Andean areas where we find
straight pampa lines and prehistoric roads.
All these native hallucinogens promote the sensation of
spirit flight - the so-called "out of body experience".
Dobkin de Rios felt that the mystery lines were
associated with this aerial journey, the ecstatic
centrepiece of the shamanic experience.
The Geography of Trance
But why straight lines? Dobkin de Rios suspected that they derived from the entoptic patterning that
occurs in the human cortex early in trance states as a result of poorly-understood
neurophysiological mechanisms. These entoptic ("within vision") images are universal to the whole
human race in all periods of time, and adhere to a specific range of "form constants" - grids, dots,
webs, spirals and tunnel forms, arabesques, nested curves, lines, and so on. They dance before
the closed eyes in trance states (especially in trance states induced by hallucinogens), and form the
basis of vivid geometric patterns that shimmer and move. With open eyes, the images can seem
projected onto surfaces in the physical environment.
Eventually, as trance deepens, the entoptic forms attract representational imagery stored in
memory, so that, for instance, a wavy line might turn into a snake. This produces fully-fledged
hallucinatory or visionary material. This would of course always have been dressed up in the
cultural baggage of particular Native American societies, in just the same way that ayahuasca-
induced entoptic patterns are used to convey cultural ideas within the decorative art of the
Amazonian Tukano Indians even now.In brief, the straight landscape lines were a formalised
expression of shamanic trance, whether occurring as a desert marking or ritual, ceremonial road. It
was, in essence, a specific entoptic pattern, derived, it would seem, from the "tunnel" form constant,
which is an experiential straight line.Coincidentally, as this mystery was being unravelled,
archaeologists were discovering entoptic imagery in prehistoric rock art, much of which is now
realised to be of a shamanic nature. The landscape lines were simply a larger version of such
patterns, deriving from the same shamanic source.
The symbolic interpretation given to such straight lines by the native peoples themselves was
naturally very different to our modern neurophysiological explanations. To them, the original nature
of the straight landscape line appears to have been symbolic of spirit travel, of journeying in the
otherworld of spirits, of the ancestors, which in shamanic terms was simply another level or
dimension of the physical landscape. The line was a sign, or even an actual mapping, of the
shaman's ecstatic, out of body journey.
The shamanic straight lines in many societies developed from direct associations with the spirit
flight of shamans and lines of spiritual power, to lines associated with the dead, as the shaman was
considered temporarily dead while in trance, and the spirit world was inhabited by the ghosts of the
ancestors. From such associations, the idea of the "death road" evolved.
There are numerous ways in which travel in the spirit realm was envisaged, but as indicated above,
spirit flight is the pre-eminent form. It is the one most emphasised throughout shamanism

9. worldwide: the allusions to flight, particularly through the medium of bird imagery, can be found in
rock art, in geoglyphs, in effigy mounds, on a shaman's robes, in ceremonial dancing and costume,
in ritual paraphenalia, in shamanic gestural symbolism (such as the flapping of the arms atop ritual
poles), and in the legends concerning shamans (the exploits of flying shamans are particularly
prominent in Inuit lore, for example). Flight is the very image of ecstasy, of course, and it is the
central experience of shamanic trance.
Within the context of soul flight, straightness lends itself to an extra dimension of symbolism, for
flight is the straight way over the land -- we say "as the crow flies" or "as straight as an arrow", using
the very metaphors used by shamanic tradition itself. The lines, in essence, were the markings of a
spiritual geography - a geography of the mind superimposed on the physical landscape. The
mapping of ecstasy.
Journeying in Aluna
It has recently been ethnologically confirmed that these theories regarding the mysterious straight
lines of the prehistoric Native Americans landscape are accurate. Enquiries among the Kogi Indians
have confirmed that they view some of their straight paved "roads" as physical traces of the spirit
routes they follow in the spirit world they call aluna. The Kogi, who live in remote mountain territory
in northern Colombia., have the most ancient lifeway found surviving amongst any native American
group, retaining many pre-Columbian traditions. Their tribal society is ruled by a shamanic
theocracy formed by mamas, "enlightened ones. They can also see straight paths in aluna,
however, that have never been physically marked on the ground. They have a "map stone" covered
in criss-crossing straight lines that shows a map of these lines of spirit travel.
In 1982, R.T.Zuidema, who is the ranking authority on the Cuzco ceques, equated ancient Native
American lines with the divinatory aspects of shamanic experience. He found that the ceques,
which often can extend over the visible horizon could "tie in to shamans who, on their
hallucinogenic journeys to get knowledge of distant places and times, go 'over the horizon' and then
return". Zuidema had emphasised the nature of ceques as "lines", as non-visible tracings that were,
rather, "straight directions".
Roads of the Dead (a Passage of Spirits)
Signs of old trance tracks can be found in other parts of the world. In Laos, for example, the Hmong
peoples have a rule that a new house in a village should not be built directly in front or directly
behind another house. This is because spirits travel in straight lines, and when corpses are moved
from the house for burial they must go straight out of the house. Again, in the Gilbert Islands, an
archipelago of about fifty islands in the western Pacific, a similar belief prevails, as it does
elsewhere in Oceania and Southeast Asia.
The Native Americans emerged from the palaeo-peoples who migrated from Siberia, the home of
classical shamanism. Very recent ethnological investigation has shown that even today shamanic
Buryat tribespeople bury their deceased shamans in special places in the landscape, so their spirits
can act as guardians of those places. The shamanic spirits are thought to travel back and forth
along specified routes, which the Buryat call goidel, which has the meaning of "animal track". So the
Buryat territory is envisaged as being criss-crossed with invisbile tracks along which the spirits of
dead shamans travel. (Taosim, which gave rise to Feng-shui, also evolved out of these Siberian
shamanic traditions.)
Similar invisible spirit lines occur throughout Europe, with features like fairy passes in Ireland, which
link prehistoric earthworks (and on which one was not supposed to build, similar to Feng-shui
ideas), and Geisterwege in Germany, linking medieval cemeteries.
Archaeologically, there are mysterious physical linear features. These include straight lines of
Bronze Age standing stones in France and Britain which pass through burial cairns, and have
"blocking stones" at their ends, vaguely reminiscent of Feng-shui principles. Even older than these
are the Neolithic earthen avenue lines in Britain, known as a "cursuses". Visible mainly from the air
as crop markings, these can range up to two miles in length, and link burial mounds. Their function
is unknown. Also in Britain, and also 4000-6000 years old, are ancient bog causeways constructed
from timber. One of the oldest of these is the "Sweet Track" in Somerset, southwestern England.
Excavation along this old straight track indicates that at least one of its uses was for transporting
the dead.

10. This concept seems to have survived into medieval times. There is a straight Viking cult or death
road unearthed by archaeologists at Rosaring, in Laassa, Uppland, Sweden, for example. The body
of the dead Viking chieftain was drawn along it in a ceremonial wagon to its rest. Again, in the
Netherlands, there were the Doodwegen, or deathroads (also known as spokenwegen or
"ghostroads"), converging on medieval cemeteries. Some of these survive in fragments to this day,
and are notable for their straightness.
A deathroad or Doodweg near Hilversum, Holland.
Photo: Paul Devereux.
A deathroad or Doodweg near Hilversum, Holland.
Photo: Paul Devereux.


It remains to be seen if ongoing research can relate
such features to shamanic origins in paleo-Eurasia.
The folk logic of straightness versus crooked in spirit
lore is interesting. In Old Europe, "spirit traps"
consisting of webs or nets of threads woven over
hoops or other frameworks, or tangled threads in
bottles, were placed on paths leading to and from
cemeteries, or at the entrances to houses. These can
sometimes still be found in regions such as Bavaria.
The principle behind these was that while straight
lines facilitated the passage of spirits, convoluted or
tangled "lines" of threads or cord could ensnare them.
There is evidence that ancient stone and turf
labyrinths, found in many parts of Europe and
Scandinavia, wer also used for trapping evil spirits.
These ideas are of course very similar to those in
Feng-shui, and the idea of straight lines allowing the passage of spirits and crooked one hindering
spirit movement seems to have been universal.
Ley-lines, The Foundation of New Age occult belief
The seminal work, however, was a book called 'The View
Over Atlantis' by John Michell, which played well into the
Zeitgeist of the era. In it, Michell combined Watkins' ley-
lines, which had no supernatural or astrological element
whatsoever, with the Chinese concept offeng shui, in which
a structure or site is chosen or configured to align with the
spiritual forces that are said to inhabit it.This combination of
a plausible but false theory of archaeology with Chinese
mysticism proved very popular, and 'The View Over
Atlantis' was described by the historian Ronald Hutton as
"almost the founding document of the modern earth
mysteries movement." However, Hutton also describes the
book as being "quite unacceptable to orthodox
scholarship."

Despite the obvious flaws in Michell's methodology, his book had a huge effect, and the cosmic
significance of ley-lines became established within New Age culture. It was quickly linked with the
Nazca lines in South America, which had also been ascribed to alien intervention. Ley-lines were
described as mystical lines of energy that formed a sort of psychic grid throughout the world, which
those attuned, could tap into and use; this was why so many churches were on ley-lines. They
have been linked the Aboriginal Song Lines of Australia, and even represented as lines of
cosmic force that descend from celestial bodies into the earth, and then travel along the
ground. Indeed, an entire culture of so-called New Age thinking grew up based on this!

11. Naturally the academics and scientists who studied the idea, like Hutton, threw it out, since there is
no evidence at all to support it! Watkins' initial revelation referred to Herefordshire in England, an
area which is particularly dense in exactly the type of markers that he suggested were relevant. In
fact it is so dense that if you take a map of reasonable scale and a ruler, and place the ruler
between any two of these markers twenty miles or so apart, you will certainly find several of
these markers either on the line or sufficiently near it to be within a reasonable margin of
error. However, this can be achieved using only the natural markers; so that pure chance could
have established this network of 'lines.' In fact, the number of alignments that can be found doing
this is no more than would be the case if chance were the agent. This has been theoretically
confirmed in several ways; a geometric analysis of 137 random dots on a plane will reveal 80 4-
point alignments, and archaeologist Richard Atkinson mapped the positions of modern telephone
boxes, to reveal similar alignments, which he called 'telephone leys'. His point of course, was that
we know that the boxes were not set up on straight lines, so the fact that alignments do occur must
be sheer chance. Thus there is no reason whatsoever to suppose any agency other than chance in
the alignments between Watkins' 'markers'.Nevertheless, while the use of Occam's razor might be
tempting here, there remains the possibility that, as Watkins proposed, the lines were simply
straight lines of sight between landmarks. Not unnaturally, if people were travelling along them, this
would promote settlement; that is to say that even though the alignments could have happened by
chance anyway, some of the man-made ones, at least, were deliberate.Since the foundation is
invalid, all the later theories are false too; but such is their attraction to belief that many people
refuse to accept this, instead insisting either that the original theory is sound, in the face of all
evidence to the contrary, or that even if Watkins were wrong, the lines of force that were later
proposed, or whatever the viewer 'believes' is there, nevertheless exist.What concerns us here is
the way in which a set of beliefs have grown up, initially surrounding a proposition which we know
the origin of and can easily demonstrate is completely without foundation, that proceed on to
encompass beliefs which had nothing to do with the original, instead being later additions, but which
use the original to support themselves. Consider Wedd's proposition that 'ley-lines' were lines of
energy used for navigation by alien spacecraft, or Michell's weird juxtaposition of unfounded
pseudo-science with Oriental mysticism.So, from an observable phenomenon, that there are lines
of sight between landmarks, and a reasonable proposition, that people use landmarks to navigate,
has developed a hypothesis which seems at first sight plausible but which is false, that straight
roads existed between landmarks, which has further spawned a belief, based in no fact at all, that
aliens navigate the earth along these lines. This then develops, now accelerating away from any
contact with reality, to suggest that in fact these are lines of power in the earth, that they represent
a cosmic connection with celestial bodies, and even a form of vitality within the earth, or
more.Incredible though it may seem, many people believe all this to be true; indeed within sections
of the so-called 'New Age' community, it is taken as proven matter of fact that ley-lines are indeed
lines of cosmic power, and this is in turn taken as proof of celestial connections, earth-deities and
planetary consciousness. And this despite the fact that at every turn, recognised experts in the field
of history, archaeology, and statistics, used to having their work peer-reviewed, have subjected the
original proposition and its successors to scrutiny and have debunked them time and time again!
Let’s jump ahead to the 1950s, and bring in one of the major crazes of the decade: UFOs. A
Frenchman named Aime Michel, writing in his book Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery,
claimed that the reported sightings of UFOs fell into perfectly straight lines, which he was
considerate enough to plot on a map. As it would be difficult to get permission to reprint it here I will
ask you to trust me on this: the alignments are dubious at best. Most are simply a line drawn
between just two sightings, though a few include a third point.
The relationship between Ley lines and UFOs was forged by one Tony Wedd, formerly a pilot in
Britain’s Royal Air Force. In his book Skyways and Landmarks he proposed that UFO pilots used
ancient sites as navigation points. I guess that even with all their technology the idea of tuning in to
navigational aids (like our own radio-based VHF Omnidirectional Rangefinders) had escaped them.
After all, where does one purchase Earth navigational charts and flight supplements since the outlet
on Rigel 7 went out of business?
As you might expect, the New Age movement has seized upon Ley lines. Not only does the belief
seem to be growing, but it has even succeeded in dipping into the public purse. A dowsing
organization called the Geo Group recently received $5,000 (US funds) from the Seattle Arts
Commission to produce a map of Ley lines in the Seattle area. After taking money from the
taxpayers of the city they are now flogging the maps back to them at $7 a pop.

12. Please ,see the important links down below and learn more about the false “New
Age” movement and its relation to the UFO phenomena !
Important links :
The “New Age” agenda exposed :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-8-teAlZsE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSNU-jlHkDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBJftihe1yc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aFtEnSqIOI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIkoeXDc5sE
The truth behind the UFO :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xasWWpai7o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9_PQPbDRlY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRWbmiXQba0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ird-BKuPRlw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y1ucNJFtms