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Full disclosure. I had never even heard of John Michell before the London Fortean Society announced last night's John Michell's Enchanted Landscape Talk at The Bell in Whitechapel (a pub that no longer takes cash but does serve pleasant enough pizza, I had one before the talk began) and I'd not made it a priority to do a great deal of research before I arrived either.
These Michell talks seem to be like buses. It's presumably pure coincidence that the next SELFS talk (a fortnight from today), The Megalithic John Michell, is also (as the name may suggest) about Michell. Then again, as last night's speaker, folklorist and London cemetery expert Rob Stephenson, provided March's SELFS talks about the myths and history of the river Thames who knows?
It didn't matter. As that SELFS event had been superb I was convinced I was in for a good evening. But I still had to find out quite a lot more about who John Michell actually was so it was fortunate that Rob kicked off with something of a dummy's guide to the man born in London in 1933 and variously described as scholar, a polymath, a writer, a Fortean, and someone, who from the late sixties onwards, became the reluctant head of the counter culture.
He wrote thirty-eight books and developed theories on many subjects, particularly UFOs and landscape. The latter, as you may have ascertained from the talk's title, was to be our vague focus last night. I say 'vague' because the talk did jump from Michell to his influences and contemporaries and back again quite often. It was a lot to take in but no less interesting for that.
Stephenson claimed Michell, who died in 2009, as a friend and began his account with a story of being given a lift back to London in Michell's beaten up Morris Minor, you could see the road speeding by beneath the worn away floorboards, back in 1984 and said the last time they spoke was around about 2000 when attending a Megalithomania conference.
In those two brief anecdotes you get a very real sense of Michell's mixture of mysticism and its grounding in day-to-day, even somewhat humdrum, reality. Born in London and raised in Berkshire, Michell became head boy at Cheam School (a prep) and eventually settled in Powis Square in Notting Hill. On its own that sounds like a pleasant, ordinary, life but Michell also believed he was a channel for revelations from the Gods.
It's here you might start scratching your chin but these Fortean events aren't about taking sides, just telling stories and letting the listeners decide. In 1967, aged 35, with a failed career as an estate agent behind him, Michell released his first book - The Flying Saucer Vision - you can probably guess what that one was about. Two years later he followed it with The View Over Atlantis. A tome that, for many, added depth to the British landscape.
By the time Michell released his third book, City of Revelation, about global 'sacred measures' and esoteric numbers that, somehow, the ancient Greeks had managed to forget about some were claiming he was a genius. Others a fraud. Either way, Michell didn't come up with his ideas out of the blue and Rob led us on a whistle stop tour through a fairly comprehensive list of figures who were influential on his thinking and writing. Which meant a whole new load of people I'd never heard of!
Starting with the 'dedicated' Herefordshire antiquarian Alfred Watkins who, after his retirement, between the age of 66 and 76, devoted much of his life to researching why ancient sites appeared to be aligned. Watkins wrote Early British Trackways in 1922 and followed it up three years later with The Old Straight Track. In these books he'd show how the locations of white horses, stone markers, and even Dragon Hill in Uffington (where it is alleged that St George slew the dragon) could, if you drew the right straight line, all be aligned.
Watkins also proposed the theory that early Christian churches had been erected on top of ancient megalithic sites in an attempt, successful it would seem, to entice people into them. As much appropriation as syncretism it seems.
Next up was Tony Wedd, ex-RAF pilot and New Age thinker - which sounds an unlikely combination. Wedd lived near Hampstead Heath and when out walking on the Heath he said he saw UFOs and that they were flying in straight lines (as flying things tend to do, to be fair, or any moving thing trying to get from A to B in the fastest possible time) and that these aliens had been deliberately planted in Scots pine in ancient times. He discovered Boudicca's Mound on the Heath (it's still debated if it's actually the final resting place of the 1c Iceni queen) and found it to align with Westminster Abbey.
Wedd sounds a character! More historical influences include the German born Protestant missionary to China Ernst Johann Eitel who, as well as publishing a Cantonese dictionary, wrote a book about feng shui in 1873 which Michell had republished exactly a century later. Going further back there is evidence that Michell was inspired by the antiquarian William Stukeley (1687-1765) who is buried in Walthamstow and William Blake (1757-1827) who inspired Michell's idea that parts of Britain were in fact a new Jerusalem and that Glastonbury, in which Michell took a special interest, was the sight of Britain's first Christian church and that Jesus Christ himself had visited it. "Did these feet in ancient times" and all that.
It's unclear if Michell's interest in Glastonbury was what inspired local farmer Michael Eavis to hold a festival there but it's firmly believed and oft said that Michell was the man who persuaded Eavis to make the main stage in the shape of a pyramid. Based, apparently, on the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza!
Eavis wasn't Michell's most famous acquaintance either. He knew Mick Jagger (who seems to know pretty much everyone) and Prince Charles (which sounds surprising but remember he talks to his vegetables). Michell also campaigned, both in the UK and in the US, to "stop metric madness" which seems quite reactionary for such a free thinker but imperial measurements were vital to his concept of 'sacred measures'.
Sacred measures, it seems, could be used to draw ley lines between sites of ancient importance globally. Professor Alexander Thom (yep, another one I'd not heard of), in his retirement, surveyed ancient sites both in the UK and France and proposed a 'uniformity of division' between sites and Tony Morrison's 1978 book Pathway to the Gods:The Andes Lines 'proved' that this was not just a quirky European thing but could be observed as far away as South America too.
Michell used the term 'traditional dragon sites' and discovered that the longest line you could draw between two points in the south of England led from St Michael's Mount in Cornwall to St Michael's in Norfolk via Glastonbury and many other ancient sites including Avebury (where, Rob informed us, it is believed that the avenue of the stones forms the shape of a snake!). Obviously this became known as the St Michael's Line or St Michael's Alignment and it certainly sounds a good, if pretty challenging, future walking project!
Michell's books kept coming and Rob had to rush through them so fast that I hardly had time to jot down what they were all about! In 1975 a survey of megaliths, The Old Stones of Land's End, was released as well as The Earth Spirit which took on philosophy, religion, and alchemy among other things. 1977 saw A Little History of Astro-Archaeology (Stonehenge, the summer solstice, and crop circles crop up in the talk, obvs) and a co-write with Bob Rickard called Phenomena:A Book of Wonders that looked at supposedly unexplained weird stuff like fish falling out of the sky and frogs in stones, 1979's Simulacra took a look at things that looked strangely human, in '81 he released Ancient Metrology which drilled down even further on Stonehenge and other ancient monuments of similar design and seems to have inspired his New Jerusalem diagram (below), and 1982's Megalithomnia gave John Michell a chance to show off his skills as an artist too.
So who was this man who looked like Jon Pertwee's Dr Who, drove a beat up Morris Minor, obsessed over megaliths, wrote books about fish falling from the sky, had a hand in starting up the Glastonbury festival, and had Jools Holland play the piano at his funeral? Was he a mad conspiracy theorist? Some kind of Situationist prankster? A serious antiquarian? A great historian? A seer? Or just an absolute huckster?
I think there's an element of truth in most, if not all, of those things. There's also an element of falsehood. Michell loved the company of eccentrics and enjoyed kicking against authority. If you posited one theory, he'd chose the complete opposite. In 1983 he released The New View Over Atlantis so it seems his most lasting, and important, work was in the (quite literally sometimes) field of landscape although next fortnight's SELFS talk may change my mind on that entirely!
Speaker Rob Stephenson said he'd felt the tingle of old stones and a Q&A touched on subjects like the Stone Tape, Nigel Kneale, Dostoevsky, John Wood (the 18c architect responsible for many of Bath's most impressive buildings), and the Ridgeway while the talk itself touched on John Constable's Double Rainbow painting (below), the 'sensitive dowser' Guy Underwood's The Patterns of the Past (about how ancient sites were supposedly sited by water divining), and the 'tortured genius' (both sensitive dowser and tortured genius were Rob's descriptions, not mine) William Stirling whose book, The Canon:An Exposition of the Pagan Mystery Perpetuated in the Cabala as the Rule of all Arts, took the author fifty years to write (five on the title alone by the sounds of it) and, when it was ignored, saw Stirling take his own life.
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