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The Modern Antiquarian Forum » RIP John Michell |
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akhen3sir 1 posts |
Apr 25, 2009, 12:23
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An inspiration to me too, and having had the privilege to talk to him at Megalithomania a few years ago I feel safe in saying we shall not see his like again. Em hotep, John, may you sail the bark of millions of years, ma'at hrw.
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Zariadris 287 posts |
May 04, 2009, 22:04
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/books/03michell.html?hpw May 3, 2009 John Michell, Counterculture Author Who Cherished Idiosyncrasy, Dies at 76 By DOUGLAS MARTIN John Michell, a self-styled Merlin of the 1960s English counterculture who inspired disciples like the Rolling Stones with a deluge of writings about U.F.O.’s, prehistoric architecture and fairies — when he was not describing fascinating eccentrics or the perils of the metric system — died on April 24 in Poole, England. He was 76. The cause was cancer, Jason Goodwin, his son, said. Mr. Michell’s intellectual idiosyncrasies were paralleled by his deep and decidedly nonjudgmental fascination with the quirks of others. His 1984 book, “Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions,” told of one man who devoted his life to proving the world was flat, and another to proving it was concave. He told of a couple who drilled holes in their own heads to feel better, then fought to have the government pay for the operation. In other books he wrote about living frogs found inside lumps of coal and a talking ghost that insisted it was the spirit of a dead mongoose. “My own chosen attitude is total confusion,” he wrote in a book of impressively quirky essays in 2006. Mr. Michell (pronounced like Michelle) gained public notice by suggesting a new way to think about flying saucers, of which he said he had seen plenty when he wrote the first of his 40 books, “The Flying Saucer Vision: The Holy Grail Restored” (1967). His insight was that U.F.O.’s were intimately connected to ancient British myths like those of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, although he never seemed to spell out exactly how. He soon took members of the Rolling Stones to Stonehenge to scan the heavens for saucers. “Anyone who ever dreamed the hippie dream owes him their gratitude for adding the ‘wow’ factor to their view of the cosmos,” Jonathan Cainer, an astrologer, said of Mr. Michell. Mr. Michell — who incessantly rolled his own cigarettes, sometimes using tobacco — led the way in making the small town of Glastonbury, England, an epicenter of New Age curiosities. In an interview in 2007 with Fortean Times, a magazine dedicated to “strange phenomena,” Mr. Michell recalled his first visit to the town in 1966. He told of “strange lights in the sky, new music and our conviction that the world was about to flip over on its axis so that heresy would become orthodoxy and an entirely new world order would shortly be revealed.” In his book “City of Revelation: On the Proportions and Symbolic Numbers of the Cosmic Temple” (1971), Mr. Michell told why. Long ago, higher powers passed on the secrets of the numbers and geometric forms defining the shape of heaven to enlightened humans, he said. These forms supposedly took earthly shape at holy places like Glastonbury, Stonehenge and the pyramids. At these sacred sites, Mr. Michell said, people could “once again commune with natural rhythms, feel the pulsations of the earth force and participate in the rising of Atlantis.” Hippies loved this and descended on Glastonbury, Gary Lachman wrote in “Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.” At the summer solstice of 1971, the precursor of the famous Glastonbury Festivals was held on a pyramidal stage, one-tenth the size of the pyramid of Cheops, built according to the “sacred geometry” Mr. Michell divined from measuring ancient structures. Performers included David Bowie, Traffic and Melanie. Mr. Michell went on to write about many New Age topics, particularly sacred geometry. This referred to the harmonious dimensions and shapes that he said defined paradise and that were passed on to hyper-enlightened humans in neolithic times. In his 1969 book “The View Over Atlantis,” he developed the popular New Age theory that sacred sites were connected by invisible lines of energy. He answered critics of the idea by saying that the system of lines “may actually be invisible to those whose previous knowledge tells them it cannot exist,” an assertion The Manchester Guardian in 1983 called “infuriating.” In a 1994 interview with The Observer, Mr. Michell had a snappy answer for such critics: “I don’t think a thing becomes more true just because a lot of people agree with you.” John Frederick Michell was born on Feb. 9, 1933, in London, graduated from Eton, served in the Royal Navy as a Russian translator and graduated from Cambridge. After trying the real estate business, he immersed himself in the hippie or underground movement and worked for countercultural publications. He founded a magazine on crop circles, those odd patterns created by the mysterious flattening of crops. He was a leader in fighting the metric system in Britain and the United States, where in 1981 he was the keynote speaker at a gala event in Manhattan called the Foot Ball. He favored traditional measurements like pounds and feet because they came from traditional cultures. His literary output included a 1976 book of Hitler’s pithy sayings, which was not widely reviewed, and “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” (1996), which The Washington Post called “the best overview” of the authorship debate. In 2006, Mr. Michell published “Euphonics: A Poet’s Dictionary of Sounds.” It warned of the ghastly glint of “G” and the seductive slipperiness of “S.” In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Michell’s son, said he had been born illegitimately and had not met his father until 1992, when he was 28. They became quite close, Mr. Goodwin said. In addition to his son, Mr. Michell is survived by his brother, Charles, and his sister, Claire Lyon. Three years ago, Mr. Michell surprised friends and family by marrying Denise Price, the Archdruidess of the Glastonbury Order of Druids, after a courtship of less than a month. Mr. Goodwin said that two months later, “she threw him out.” In the Observer interview, Mr. Michell summed up his life: “My pursuits are a joke in that the universe is a joke. One has to reflect the universe faithfully.”
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moss 2899 posts |
May 12, 2009, 08:43
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Another excellent obituary from the Times..... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6268493.ece
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moss 2899 posts |
May 19, 2009, 14:33
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The Guardian today, amongst all the coverage of the government's imminent collapse and certain creatures falling on their swords, is this fascinating letter in the obits, about John Michell in 1968....... leyline haters don't have to read it.... "Joe Boyd writes: One day in 1968, I mentioned to John Michell (obituary, 6 May) that I was driving to Pembrokeshire that weekend with Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band. John asked if he could get a lift as far as the Welsh borders, so four of us set out on a cloudless summer Saturday. John came equipped with a compass and some maps and asked if we would be interested in helping him conduct an experiment. He took a map and drew the most important English ley line, connecting Glastonbury Tor with Bury St Edmunds, which passes through a remarkable number of towns named St Michael or St George. John proposed that we leave the A4 and attempt to follow this trunk route of ley lines across the Wiltshire downs towards Avebury. We followed a dirt road out on to the downs, turning on to smaller and smaller tracks and eventually continuing on foot. Then, from the top of a rise, Avebury lay below us. The line we were following cleaved the stone circle below directly in half. More remarkable still was a long barrow placed at right angles on the crest of the hill. In the centre of the barrow, exactly where the line crossed, stood a stone dolmen. Standing with our backs to the dolmen, we looked west along the line. At 45 degrees to the left, our eyes could follow an absolutely straight road. At 45 degrees right, the same thing was clear: verges of fields, roads and avenues of trees stretching in a die-straight line as far as the eye could see. John's explanations included the prosaic fact that Romans built roads along the existing tracks, and Anglo-Saxon wagons followed suit, as did 19th- and 20th-century road-builders. But, that afternoon, and, I confess, to this day, his explanation for the geometric string of St Michaels and St Georges seemed almost as plausible. Those names indicate "dragon-slayers", John said, and saints often originate in pre-Christian mythology. The ancient Celtic word for dragon, he explained, was derived from root words meaning "fiery, flying, coiled serpent". If you were an ancient Celt, how else would you describe a flying saucer? And how else, he asked, would UFOs travel around our planet except by following magnetic paths?
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Zariadris 287 posts |
May 20, 2009, 02:01
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Man, thanks a lot for posting this. Wonderful stuff.
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Zariadris 287 posts |
May 20, 2009, 08:06
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The following passages from Michell’s “The Earth Spirit” are some of my favorite, and represent how insightful and eloquent a writer he was. They have a special, manifesto-like poignancy for me, and in honor of Michell’s own vital spirit, I thought I’d share them here: “Everywhere that men have been on earth they have discovered aboriginal inhabitants in the form of spirits from whom they have inherited the secrets of the landscape. A dying or departing race has always passed on to its successors the local mystical knowledge, and it is only in modern times that the tradition has been lost by the appearance, as in North America, of a people who did not care to receive it. Violence, restlessness, drink and crank religions are the compensations of the alienated, and the power of the electric generator substitutes for the lost power of natural invocation." “Wherever indigenous culture, which means ultimately knowledge of local spirit, has disappeared, depopulation has followed. People do not mind being poor but they do mind being dispirited. The history of rural decline that followed from the enclosures of common lands in England is well known, and so are the events that led to the depopulation of Scotland and the starvation of Ireland, but the prime cause of these disasters has never been properly recognized. For the process is still continuing in Britain and now all over the world. Everywhere people are drawn from the country to be consumed by urban industrialists, and the reason is that everywhere local culture and independence are under attack, and when they succumb, consciousness of the native spirit goes with them. Without this consciousness life becomes at worst physically unsupportable, at best boring, provincial and second-rate. The cause of rural depopulation is not primarily economic but lies in the fact that if the spirit is destroyed the body disintegrates. It is the relationship between men and spirit that determines whether or not a country is habitable; on which account Plato advised the settlers of his proposed ideal republic that, having chosen their territory, they should first of all discover the local shrines of its spirits and institute festivals there on the appropriate days.”
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tjj 3615 posts |
May 20, 2009, 11:16
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Zariadris wrote: The following passages from Michell’s “The Earth Spirit” are some of my favorite, and represent how insightful and eloquent a writer he was. They have a special, manifesto-like poignancy for me, and in honor of Michell’s own vital spirit, I thought I’d share them here: “Everywhere that men have been on earth they have discovered aboriginal inhabitants in the form of spirits from whom they have inherited the secrets of the landscape. A dying or departing race has always passed on to its successors the local mystical knowledge, and it is only in modern times that the tradition has been lost by the appearance, as in North America, of a people who did not care to receive it. Violence, restlessness, drink and crank religions are the compensations of the alienated, and the power of the electric generator substitutes for the lost power of natural invocation." “Wherever indigenous culture, which means ultimately knowledge of local spirit, has disappeared, depopulation has followed. People do not mind being poor but they do mind being dispirited. The history of rural decline that followed from the enclosures of common lands in England is well known, and so are the events that led to the depopulation of Scotland and the starvation of Ireland, but the prime cause of these disasters has never been properly recognized. For the process is still continuing in Britain and now all over the world. Everywhere people are drawn from the country to be consumed by urban industrialists, and the reason is that everywhere local culture and independence are under attack, and when they succumb, consciousness of the native spirit goes with them. Without this consciousness life becomes at worst physically unsupportable, at best boring, provincial and second-rate. The cause of rural depopulation is not primarily economic but lies in the fact that if the spirit is destroyed the body disintegrates. It is the relationship between men and spirit that determines whether or not a country is habitable; on which account Plato advised the settlers of his proposed ideal republic that, having chosen their territory, they should first of all discover the local shrines of its spirits and institute festivals there on the appropriate days.” Thank you for taking the trouble to reproduce that extract. I regret to say that I missed out on John Michell's work up until now, though I have friends who hold him in the highest regard. "Earth Spirit" has been mentioned as one of his most influential books and I will get hold of a copy as soon as I can.
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Zariadris 287 posts |
Edited May 20, 2009, 17:37
May 20, 2009, 15:11
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tjj wrote: Thank you for taking the trouble to reproduce that extract. I regret to say that I missed out on John Michell's work up until now, though I have friends who hold him in the highest regard. "Earth Spirit" has been mentioned as one of his most influential books and I will get hold of a copy as soon as I can. My pleasure. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think what he’s saying here is something everyone in the head heritage community can relate to. It’s what drives us to explore our roots, wherever they may be, and if we’re moving around in foreign lands, to seek out the shrines of local spirits - as he quotes Plato saying – in order to make our own presence meaningful and real. It’s a worldview, or instinct, that I think we all share and that brings us together here. So, thanks to John Michell for articulating it. I'm sure you'll love "Earth Spirit", and take a look at "Megalithomania" as well, a wonderful book devoted to you-know-what. Peace.
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Zariadris 287 posts |
Edited Jun 01, 2024, 16:30
May 31, 2024, 19:31
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Hey, I just came across this passage in the booklet for the Dead's Europe '72 album: "Guitarist Jerry Garcia, his beloved Mountain Girl, bassist Phil Lesh, and Alan Trist (an old friend and head of the band's publishing company, Ice Nine) rented a car in London and toured the sacred sites of mysterious old England, including Stonehenge, Wells Cathedral, and Solsbury Hill. They hung out with author John Michell, whose book ‘The View Over Atlantis’ impressed them with its meditations on "ley lines," vectors of power running through particular locations on the Earth—a phenomenon they'd noticed themselves, musing on why they seemed to play better in certain places. It must have been a coincidence that an earlier John Michell, an 18th-century geologist, had been the first person to speculate about the existence of black holes in space, or "dark stars," as he called them. "The kind of coincidence any Dead Head is familiar with, that is. Like the moment when the tour buses pulled over to the side of a road to witness a luminous double rainbow, and Steve Parish of the crew noticed that the bridge they'd just crossed was embellished with skeletons - one of several flashes during that tour that told him, he says, "that we were in the right place, and we were there for a reason." (The front cover of Europe '72, designed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, features a hoboesque American foot striding across the ocean, under a rainbow with pots of gold at both ends.)" Written by Steve Silberman
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