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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