Dragon Paths and Pilgrimages

In 1969 the old-Etonian writer, antiquarian and ley-hunter, John Michell, published The View Over Atlantis, a book that would pretty much invent Earth Mysteries.

The ley-line wasn't new. Alfred Watkins 'discovered' it back in the 1920s when he had a vision of the landscape criss-crossed by ancient trackways. He spent much of his later life searching for straight alignments between the wells, churches, standing stones, nooks in the skyline, and so on that he thought had been waymarks on these prehistoric paths.

Michell went a step further. He took Watkins' alignments and fused them with ideas from Chinese geomancy such that leys were now conduits of earth or dragon energy. Just as acupuncturists redirect chi through the meridians of the body, so Michell thought the ancients channelled dragon energy by erecting stones, building wells and raising mounds at auspicious, sacred sites. These nodes were distributed across the land according to the principles of number, proportion and sacred geometry.

Correct use of dragon energy led to bountiful harvests and harmony between humankind and nature. Indeed, the gradual attrition of this knowledge was what had caused our current ecological crisis: its recovery would enable our salvation.

Michell's most famous discovery was the St Michael line. He noticed that two Somerset churches dedicated to St Michael - Glastonbury Tor and the wonderfully named Burrow Mump - had not only been situated on distinctive conical tors, both of which rise up dramatically from the Somerset levels, but were also aligned precisely to the Mayday sunrise (27 degrees north of East). When he drew a line between them, and extended it in both directions, he found to his astonishment that it passed through sacred sites like Avebury in Wiltshire, the Hurlers and the Cheesewring in Cornwall, and also through a disproportionately high number of churches dedicated to St Michael, including St Michael's Mount.

St Michael is known for his war with satan and is often depicted standing triumphant over a fallen dragon. Could it be that he was a Christianised Sun god and that here was an ancient ley, a dragon path, but one that had been gradually suppressed by a Church hostile to paganism?

Then in the eighties two dowsers, Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst, set out to dowse the currents of dragon energy all the way up the Michael line. They published their results in The Sun and the Serpent. What they found was that the earth energy meandered about Michell's ley-line like a serpent on a Caduceus. Or rather, like two serpents up a Caduceus for they discovered a second energy current that they called the Mary line, the feminine counterpart to the masculine Michael line.

Now it turns out that there's a group working to create a long distance footpath along the Michael and Mary lines, all the way from the tip of Cornwall to the coast of Norfolk. They've already opened a trial section from Brent Tor to Glastonbury, presumably using existing footpaths, and have published two guidebooks. The route passes pretty close to the village where I live.

It's not hard to find fault with the concept of ley-lines. Britain is so pock-marked with ancient sites that if you dropped a line down at random you'd be hard-pressed not to find something of significance along its course. We have what the ancients did not - maps - that afford us a God-like aerial view and allow us to plot lines and angles unappreciated from the ground. And isn't dowsing just a process of wish-fulfilment?

Well, here I'm prepared to keep an open mind. For, if nothing else, I love the idea of dragon energy spiralling through the land as a metaphor for the spirit of place. I prefer my landscape enchanted, thank you very much.

And as I maintain that the best way to know the land is to walk the land, to feel its rising and falling beneath the feet, or as Robin Williamson puts it, to tread 'the hard mile after the easy mile' (assuming of course this option is available to you), I fully support this new venture.

For it doesn't really matter whether earth energy or the Michael line exist or not. Here on Dartmoor there are a number of long distance trails. Some have legendary or semi-historical origins, such as the the Mariner's Way and the Abbot's Way; others like the Two Moors Way, the Dartmoor Way, and the Taw-Teign link are purely modern, secular creations.

But once a route is created it opens not so much a physical connection between places, which was there anyway, but a mental connection. We experience Glastonbury Tor, say, in a different way when we know we could, by simply following a straight line, walk to Avebury in one direction or St Michael's Mount in the other. The landscape becomes not so much a succession of different places but a connected whole.

At a time when many of us experience a profound sense of disconnection or even alienation from the land, we need more modern pilgrimages like this. And if we summon up the dragon as we go, so much the better.

On drones

At Breaking Convention I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a panel on 'the future of psychedelic music', hosted admirably by Matthew Watkins of Canterbury Soundwaves and Secrets of Creation fame. At one point Matt asked me why it is that drones often feature in psychedelic music and I gave a rather hurried and insubstantial answer. Here's my more considered response.

It probably goes without saying but a drone is a constant note used to underpin melody. You can hear the effect of adding a drone in this video, in which I play a snippet of a medieval estampie on a rudimentary homemade double whistle.

I'm not sure when I first encountered drone music - probably when I was an undergraduate - but it immediately spoke to me at a deep level. To modern ears, accustomed as they are to equal temperament and Western harmony, drone music can sound limited and austere. Not to me. I find it positively transcendent.

In popular usage we tend to think of drones as boring. We talk about people droning on monotonously, and if drones consisted of pure sine waves they would, I think, drive us mad. I wonder how much of this you can stand?

But drones, as used in traditional music, are harmonically complex. Compare the irksome sin wave with the rich unfolding timbres of a tampura, used in Indian classical music. No wonder it is called a river of sound.

Furthermore, however much we are taught as, say, bagpipe or hurdy-gurdy players to keep our drones steady, there are always subtle variations in timbre and pitch as the wheel turns or the bag empties and fills. In other words, drones breathe (which is why synth programmers have to add filter sweeps and other harmonic variability to pure sin waves to make them sound more 'organic').

I suspect the origin of the drone, as with all music, is the human voice. By varying the shape of the mouth and by directing sound into the various resonant cavities of the body we can make pleasingly undulating 'wah-wah' sounds that support a second melodic voice. But always there is the problem of having to inhale: the vocal drone is punctuated and interrupted, unless many voices cascade together.

So drones mimic human breathing through their rising and falling but at the same time achieve what the human voice is incapable of: continuous sound. I think this endless unfolding is what gives the drone its alluring pull and is why it is associated in many cultures with trance.

Perhaps by transcending the biological limitation of having to breathe, drones (in combination with certain repetitive rhythms and melodies) have an actual physiological effect upon us, drawing us into a state of intensity or trance. Certainly that sense of continuous unfolding mirrors the internal, unfolding sensorium of the psychedelic experience. The one seems to map the other.

Of course, there's another more prosaic reason why drones have been seized upon by psychedelic musicians from the 1960s onwards. The musical cultures with which they're typically associated - North Africa, the Middle East and India - are also those that are also typically orientalised by the West as exotic, primitive, other, and more innately concerned with spirituality. Thus in the 60s slapping a bit of sitar on your track became the easy, and rather lazy, shorthand for saying - 'hey man, we're freaks too.' In the same way, the didgeridoo served the same function in the 90s.

Nevertheless I think the very nature of drone music (and don't forget, up until the Middle Ages we had it too) invites metaphors that appeal to the psychedelic imagination. The drone provides a ground for the melody. The old word for a drone is burden. It bears the music, in both senses of carrying it and giving birth to it (quite literally, in that all the notes of the scale are present within the harmonics of the drone).

As Pythagoras is said to have discovered, some notes played against a drone form pleasing, or consonant, intervals. They do so because their frequencies form exact harmonic ratios (1:1 unison; 2:1 octave, 3:2 fifth, 4:3 fourth). Others are more dissonant and the human ear 'wants' these notes to resolve up or down to a more stable, consonant note.

To play any scale, mode, rag or maqam against a drone is therefore to negotiate a series of pushes and pulls. The intrinsic consonance and dissonance between note and drone creates narrative, endless variations of home and away, or there and back again. Or even up and down, for there is also a sense of verticality within drone music.

So, when a master bansuri player like Hariprasad Chaurasia, teasingly introducing the notes of this rag, finally arrives at the octave, it is a sublime moment. We have reached a higher place. Then he takes us higher still, before gently wafting us back down to earth again.

And that is why I think drones are so popular in psychedelic music. For if psychedelics aren't about that fundamental yearning for transcendence, what then?

A Field in England

My latest Spiral Earth column, about Ben Wheatley's intriguing film A Field in England, is now up for your general delight and delectation. Do take a look.