Frank's travels around Britain 2007.
Glastonbury, Somerset.
The
epicentre in England for the gullible and those with an alternative lifestyle
... & how!
Glastonbury is a stunningly beautiful Somerset town, known the world over by the picture of it's ruined church on the Tor. It seems to be the headquarters for all free thinking people with any hint of wanting to be different & willing to believe the power of anything you fancy. It's very difference draws you in. You begin to see Avalon. An Ashram below the Tor is normal. A charity shop for the Sufi's on the main road is not strange. Fairies, Dragons, Native American dream catchers, stones of all hues that claim all kinds of properties, is just standard fare. Every one seems to have lost all reason & logic. It looks like facts & proof would just ruin a good story. (there is a suspicion that the reason & logic gene is removed before you enter town). Why live "normally" when you can follow anything you wish for & know its true because you said so! On the other hand, is it that the people here have chosen to believe something different because they don't fancy reality. The entire town is given over to being different. It draws tourists for over the entire world. People seem to be mesmerised. Goods with signs that make claims that would be sued if they were in Tescos. Joss sticks to bring peace & enlightenment, stones to heal you and prices to melt your brain.
Perfectly normal banks, newsagents & Pizza shops rub shoulders with the Stone Age shop, ("to promote the practical use of crystals and gemstones for healing & transformation" that's one hell of a claim!) the Green Man shop and ladies claiming psychic powers. Just as the middle class & life's drop outs mingle with tourists. All nationalities & tongues spoken here. Nothing is too weird or too normal.
Stories, myths & legends all become real here. Joseph of Arimathea, the man
who gave Jesus his tomb, suddenly becomes his Uncle, bringing Jesus to Glastonbury
as a child, according to a Somerset tradition.
A much-loved legend
is that
Christian Glastonbury began with the arrival of Joseph of Arimathea. He figures
in the Gospels as a rich follower who allowed the body of Christ to be laid it in
his tomb. Some say he was an older kinsman and had brought Jesus here as a boy,
perhaps on a trading voyage to Britain. I just love the way Glastonbury sign's &
explanations are covered by the
words "Some say"! (The word "Reputedly" is used a lot) Reputedly
in the years after the Crucifixion, he came to this remote country on a mission
with several companions. They made their home in Avalon and remained there as a
community of hermits. An offshoot of the legend concerns a local variety of
hawthorn known as the Glastonbury Thorn. It is said that Joseph planted his
staff in the ground, and it became a tree that blossomed at Christmas.
Descendants of a medieval hawthorn on Wearyall Hill actually do blossom at
Christmas or thereabouts, while no other English hawthorn does this, there are
some that do in the Middle East, including Palestine.
Even King Arthur
has a marked grave in Glastonbury Abbey. The poor man must have been chopped up into little bits and
buried all over! They certainly claimed to have his body in lots of different
places around England! The first narrative account of Arthur's
reign is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century Latin work Historia
Regum Britanniae ("History of the Kings of Britain"), an imaginative and
fanciful account of British kings from the legendary Trojan exile Brutus to the
7th century Welsh prince Cadwallader. Geoffrey places Arthur in the same
post-Roman period as the Historia Brittonum and Annales Cambriae.
He introduces Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, and his magician advisor Merlin,
and the story of Arthur's conception, in which Uther, disguised as his enemy
Gorlois by Merlin's magic, fathers Arthur on Gorlois' wife Igerna at Tintagel.
On Uther's death, the fifteen-year-old Arthur succeeds him as king and fights a
series of battles, similar to those in the Historia Brittonum,
culminating in the Battle of Bath, and then defeats the Picts and Scots,
conquers Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Gaul, and ushers in a period of
peace and prosperity which lasts until the Roman emperor Lucius Tiberius demands
tribute. Arthur refuses, and war follows. Arthur and his warriors, including
Caius, Bedver and Walganus, defeat Lucius in Gaul, but as he prepares to march
on Rome, Arthur hears news that his nephew Modredus, whom he had left in charge
of Britain, has married his wife Guanhumara and seized the throne. Arthur
returns to Britain and defeats and kills Modredus on the river Camblam in
Cornwall, but is mortally wounded. He hands the crown to his kinsman
Constantine, and is taken to the isle of Avalon to be healed of is wounds, never
to be seen again. The main point being, it's "an imaginative and fanciful
account of British kings". Still, so long as it gets the tourists in, good on
king Arthur.
The
Tor is the teardrop-shaped hill at Glastonbury. Its only standing architectural
feature is the roofless St Michael's Tower of the former church. Tor is a local
word of Celtic origin meaning 'conical hill'. Rising out of the Somerset
levels, it is probably the most dramatic symbol of this very ancient area of
religion. There are many myths and legends associated with the Tor, one is that
it is the home of Gwyn ap Nudd, the Lord of the Underworld and King of the
Fairies, and a place where the fairy folk live. In early-medieval times there
was a small retreat on top of the Tor for monks', founded probably in the time of St
Patrick in the mid-400s. This was followed in the early 1100s by a chapel, St
Michael de Torre. This was destroyed in a powerful earthquake in 1275 and
a second church, built in
the 1360s, survived until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 when the
Tor was the place of execution by hanging of the last Abbot of Glastonbury
Abbey. The tower is all that remains today. The climb to the top of the
Tor is steep &
arduous, the views spectacular and it is the powerful world wide
symbol of Glastonbury & it's eccentricities. As one web site puts it.
"The myths associated with Glastonbury Tor are extraordinary. It has been called
a magic mountain, a faeries' glass hill, a spiral castle, a Grail castle, the
Land of the Dead, Hades, a Druid initiation centre, an Arthurian hill-fort, a
magnetic power-point, a crossroads of leys, a centre for Goddess fertility
rituals and celebrations, a converging point for UFOs".
It is said that there are hundreds
of ley lines and their intersection points that past thru the Tor &
Glastonbury. To the new age people, they resonate a special psychic or
magical energy, often including
elements such as geomancy,
dowsing or UFOs, stating that, for instance, UFO's
travel along ley lines (in the way that one might observe that cars use roads
and highways). These points on lines have electrical or magnetic forces
associated with them. While I was there, I saw a lady with a very small child in
one arm and in the other hand she carried her dowsing rods.
Is this town in the centre of a powerful energy, it attracts millions of visitors like a magnet? It's certainly a lovely English centre for eccentrics, nutters & tourists, a sea of purple & lilac where every truth begins with "legend has it" or "Some people say". It's full of very nice people & stuff you only ever thought you'd read about ... even pure old septic sceptics like me just love the place!
Some people say it's really magic.
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