ORBS: Interacting with Other Realms will be centered in Glastonbury with the conference presentations taking place in the historic Glastonbury Town Hall. Crop circles, which tend to be abundant this time of year, may appear to us while we commune at these sacred sites.

GLASTONBURY

Glastonbury Abbey - photo by Sarah Boait

Glastonbury, a small town about 125 miles or 220 km west of London, is full of myth and legend. In ancient times, Glastonbury lay in a triangle with the enormous stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury - between them they formed a world energy-point. Great circle lines go from Glastonbury to many sacred centres worldwide.

Glastonbury has long been a pilgrimage place, attracting travelers from far and wide. It was a pilgrimage place in Druidic times (2,000-2,500 years ago) and further back in Megalithic times, 4,000 years ago.

A prominent site in town is the Glastonbury Tor (tor means rocky hill or peak). The Tor has many legends connected to it. One says that it was the location of King Arthur's stronghold. Another legend says that it is the home of the Faery King and that the top of the Tor was a place of fairy visions and magic. A Celtic legend says that the hill is hollow and that the top guards the entrance to the Underworld, as well as being the home of the Lord of the Underworld, Gwyn ap Nudd.

Tor at Glastonbury

Glastonbury is also believed to be the place known in Arthurian lore as the Isle of Avalon. According to the legend, Arthur, after being mortally wounded by Mordred, was taken by a sacred boat to Avalon. And it is in Avalon that Arthur awaits the day when Britain requires his services as the "once and future king".

Chalice Well - photo by Sarah Boait

Perhaps the most intriguing of all Glastonbury's mysteries are the strange balls of colored lights frequently seen spiraling around the Tor. In 1970, a local police officer reported seeing eight egg-shaped objects "dark maroon in color, hovering in formation over the hill" and in 1980 a witness saw "several green and mauve lights hovering around the tower, some smaller than others, about the size of beach balls and footballs.
(Read more on the legends of Glastonbury at Crystalinks)

AVEBURY & SILBURY HILL

Avebury - photo by Margaret McCarthy

Avebury, a World Heritage Site, one of Europe's largest prehistoric stone circles, is one of the finest and largest Neolithic monuments in Europe dating to around 5000 years ago.

Many of the original stones were destroyed from the early 14th century onwards to provide local building materials and to make room for agriculture. The stones were also destroyed due to a fear of the pagan rituals that were associated with the site. Both John Aubrey and later, William Stukeley visited the site and described the destruction. Stukeley spent much of the 1720s recording what remained of Avebury and the surrounding monuments. Without his work we would have a much poorer idea of how the site looked and especially little information on the inner rings.

A great deal of interest surrounds the stones at the monument which people describe often as being in one of two categories; tall and slender, or short and squat. This leads to numerous theories relating to the importance of gender in Neolithic Britain with the taller stones considered 'male' and the shorter ones 'female'. The stones were not dressed in any way and may have been chosen for their pleasing natural forms. Numerous people have identified what they claim are carvings on the stones' surfaces, some carvings being more persuasive than others.

The human bones found point to some form of funerary purpose and have parallels in the disarticulated human bone often found at earlier causewayed enclosure sites. Ancestor worship, although on a huge scale, could have been one of the purposes of the monument and would not be mutually exclusive with any male/female ritual role.

The henge, although clearly forming an imposing boundary to the circle, has no defensive purpose as the ditch is on the inside. Being a henge and stone circle site, astronomical alignments are a common theory to explain the positioning of the stones at Avebury. It has been suggested that the bank of the henge provides a uniform horizon by which to observe the rising and setting of various heavenly bodies. Additionally, less well evidenced theories relating to aliens, ley lines, crop circles and the lost wisdom of the ancients have been suggested.

Silbury Hill, photo courtesy of Crystalinks

Silbury Hill is the biggest man made mound in Europe. It is 130 feet high and 100 feet across its flat top surface, formed with some of the chalk from the great henge at Avebury, and built in a complex lattice structure of in-filled chalk walls.

Silbury Hill has been carbon-dated at 2660 years B.C., the same era as the Giza pyramids. It is part of a sequence of ancient sites in the area that are in alignment. Despite its external appearance, this is actually a step pyramid, consisting of six, six metre high steps. The steps are walled with blocks of chalk, which easily deteriorates when left exposed. Consequently the builders preserved it, by covering it with earth and grass. Excavations have revealed that it is not a burial mound.

Numerous crop circles and orb lights have appeared near Silbury Hill and adjoining Avebury.

You may enjoy reading a full facsimile copy of William Stukeley's book Abury - A Temple of the British Druids published in 1742. Although Stukeley's own exotic and academically inspired theories dominate much of the text, for researchers it remains one of the most important and essential sources of information about Avebury's past.

STONEHENGE

Cody & Robin receiving healing green stones from Hank Wesselman, Ph.D.,
noted research paleoanthropologist and shamanic practitioner.

As our tribe of pilgrims stood within the ancient ritual center of Stonehenge for our private sunset entry, we all felt a power well up within us. As Hank Wesselman, our shamanic facilitator drummed, and as we meditated and joined in ceremony within the prehistoric power place, we each experienced our personal journeys and connections into the grand design.

The great and ancient stone circle of Stonehenge is a landscape filled with prehistoric ceremonial structures.

As Power Places scholar Martin Gray points out, "I interpret Stonehenge to be a structure with multiple purposes. It was a monument, of nearly imperishable quality, erected at a particular site of terrestrial energetic power and celestial significance long known by the peoples of the region. It was an astronomical observation device used to predict, in advance of their occurrence, those particular periods in the annual cycle when the earth energies were most highly influenced and charged by the sun, moon, and stars. It was a temple, built by and for the people, in which festivals of renewal were held at those charged energetic periods determined by astronomical observations. It was a structure built with particular materials (the diorite bluestones brought from 240 miles away and showing evidence of prior use in another sacred structure; the miraculous, green-tinged 'altar' stone of unknown origin; and the great Sarsen stones), positioned in such a way as to create a specific form of sacred enclosure which functions as a sort of battery for gathering, storing, and expressing the earth energies of the site on the festival days."

Feeling the powerful energy - The Prophets Conference 2004

"Besides the periodic yearly times (both day and night) of those festivals, which the mathematics, structural engineering, and ground plans of structures like Stonehenge clearly reveal, prehistory has left us, via the myths and legends of the sacred sites, elegant information concerning the nature of the actual practices the pilgrims performed at the festivals. We are given indications of the powers of the sites by old surviving records of even more ancient folk memories. For example, the legendary Merlin tells King Aurelius, 'Laugh not so lightly, King, for not lightly are these words spoken. For in these stones is a mystery, and a healing virtue against many ailments'."

WHITE HORSE AT UFFINGTON

The White Horse, taken from a glider by Dan Huby

The White Horse is cut out of the turf on the upper slopes of Uffington Castle near the Ridgeway. The mystery of why the horse was created still remains and it is thought to represent a Celtic god or tribal symbol. For centuries, however, local people have maintained that it is a portrait of the dragon slain by St. George on the nearby Dragon Hill. The Horse, 374 feet long, is estimated to be about 3000 years old, from the late Bronze-Age.

Below the horse is the dramatic sweep of a steep sided dry valley, known as the Manger. Ripples in the eastern valley side are known as the Giants Stairs and are a reminder of how the valley was created by scouring melt-water during the retreat of the last Ice Age. A terrace along the lower edge of the western slopes is thought to be the remains of medieval farming practice.

To the east of the Manger lies a small roundish hill with a flattened top. This is Dragon Hill and is said to be the site where St. George, England's patron saint, slew the dragon. The blood from the dying dragon so poisoned the ground beneath that grass never grows there leaving the chalk scar we see today.

Crowning White Horse Hill is the Iron Age hill fort known as Uffington Castle. A simple design of one rampart and ditch the castle at 857ft (262m), it forms the highest point in Oxfordshire. The original west entrance remains, whilst smaller entrances through the south and north-east ramparts were created by the Romano-British during their occupation of the site.

Between the castle and the Horse lie a number of burial mounds, the most obvious being the Pillow Mound. These date from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages and are unusual in that they were reused for Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon burials.

The area around the White Horse seems to attract crop circles.

WAYLAND'S SMITHY

Wayland’s Smithy is an easily recognizable feminine sacred site in the shape of a vagina.

Robin and Cody Johnson of The Prophets Conference tell of one of their visits to the site when scouting out sacred places to take their conference delegates. It was a damp day and the site was completely empty of visitors. They entered the stone opening into the mound and engaged in meditating in the chamber. After they emerged and hiked back to their car, Robin asked, “Do you remember seeing a little girl?”, and immediately Cody recalled seeing a little girl of about five years old in a simple little dress standing with them and watching them in the chamber. At the time for some reason they didn’t think much of it, but on reflection they realized that there were no houses where she could have come from within a couple of miles and that the site was completely empty of other people. They hurriedly hiked back to the site thinking that she might have been a lost or abandoned child. She wasn’t to be found. They rushed to the nearby White Horse Inn and told the barman about the little girl. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry. If she was abandoned it was thousands of years ago. She is a spirit of the place and she must have liked you because she is known to be shy and doesn’t show up very often.”

Wayland's Smithy, beautifully situated in a clump of beech trees, is one of the finest chambered Neolithic long barrows in Britain. Four huge sarsen stone uprights guard the entrance to the chambers and there is also some fine dry stone walling. Excavations in 1962-63 proved that it had been built in two different periods, around 3700 and 3400 B.C..

The name of the site derives from Scandinavian mythology. Wayland was a smith with supernatural powers. Legend has it that if a horse lost its shoe and was left at the barrow along with a coin placed on the stones then the horse would be re-shod and the coin taken in payment.

SALISBURY CATHEDRAL

One of the powerful Earth node points at intersecting magnetic lines is at Salisbury Cathedral where people feel a special healing energy and which has now been added to The Prophets Conference Glastonbury pilgrimage schedule.

Much evidence exists supporting the presence of a grid of energy that criss-crosses the entire globe. This energy is electromagnetic in nature and essentially forms streams of positive or negatively-charged lines that wind their way through the landscape like waves, which from afar appear to be almost linear. These telluric currents (often confused with geometric alignments called ley lines) were known to, and accepted by, ancient cultures: some called them dragon lines, fairy paths, lung mei, etc.

When two currents intersect, a node point is created. At these special points the ancients built oracles, structures of enduring quality marking the place where the earth energy could be used to influence the human body, itself a collection of electromagnetic frequencies. These sacred sites are today called stone circles, tumuli, long barrows, dolmens, menhirs, cairns, temples and pyramids, and they were usually constructed with gigantic slabs of rock, high in quartz, itself also a conductor of energy; later, Christian popes ordered the building of churches upon these 'pagan' sites to utilize the same beneficial effects. Our Gothic cathedrals are one such stunning example, where sacred geometry was coded into the monuments to further amplify the effects of the site.

We now understand that the combination of sacred geometry, stone and their placement over strategic energetically-charged spots is capable of altering brainwave patterns. The purpose, as science now understands, was to lower the brainwave frequency from the regular 33 Hz, the normal waking state, down to 7.5 Hz, the dream state, the very same one generated by psychics during altered states of awareness.

In essence, therefore, these sites were used for people to reach higher states of awareness- a doorway to God, so to speak, hence why these sites were primarily places of invocation and veneration, and why they were later usurped by the controlling fanaticism of organized religion. (For the complete article by Freddy Silva go to: www.cropcirclesecrets.org/healing.html.)

The manificent Salisbury Cathedral stands in the village of Salisbury, within the water mills and meadows, where five rivers meet. The cathedral's library contains the best surviving of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta from 1215 AD. The cathedral tower and spire, rising up to 404 feet, is the tallest in the country.

BATH

The 18th-century Pulteney Bridge by Robert Adam

Bath is considered to be the prettiest city in England. The city was founded, among surrounding hills, in the valley of the River Avon around naturally-occurring hot springs where the Romans built baths and a temple, giving it the name Aquae Sulis. Edgar was crowned king of England at Bath Abbey in 973. Much later, it became popular as a spa resort during the Georgian era, which led to a major expansion that left a heritage of exemplary Georgian architecture crafted from Bath Stone.

The city became a World Heritage Site in 1987, and has a variety of theatres, museums, and other cultural venues. Its hot springs, Roman Baths, splendid Abbey and Georgian stone crescents have attracted visitors for centuries. Set in rolling Somerset countryside it is a beautiful and unforgettable place for us to have free time for a visit on our return to Glastonbury.