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What are leylines?
Ley lines are thought to be alignments of ancient sites stretching
across the landscape. This belief, that ancient sites or holy
places may be situated in a straight line, has never really been
associated with any physical property the earth has or with the
earth being electromagnetic. A Ley in New Age philosophy may be
identified simply as an alignment of holy places or ancient sites
or crossroads etc.
In Wiltshire, UK, a ley line runs
through Old Sarum, Salisbury Cathedral, and Clearbury Ring
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 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.
Alfred Watkins,
pioneer proponent of the ley theory, shown taking photographs
along one of his alignments. Photo: Major Tyler/Northern Earth.
Members of the Straight Track Club at Stonehenge circa 1930.
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.
An old track way 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 system of 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 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 film maker 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 'lines of 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 publicly 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 addition, ideas of ley energies fitted in very well with
Germany's own history of geo-pathological 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.
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 ceremonial
roadways. In 1995, archaeologists 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 throughout 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.
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.
Click to enlarge
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 underground 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 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.
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 emphasized throughout
shamanism 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 g=81idel, which has
the meaning of "animal track". So the Buryat territory is
envisaged as being criss-crossed with invisible 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.
This concept seems to have survived into medieval times. There is
a straight Viking cult or death road unearthed by archaeologists
at R=94saring, 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.
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, were
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.
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