by Signe Pike
We rang the bell and were given the grand tour by a member of the Chalice Well Trust who told us the house rules (no cell phones, no electronics, no shoes, no kidding) and finally showed us to our bedroom. A serene and airy room with three twin beds, sturdy wooden rafters, and a cavernous fireplace, the house was clearly several hundred years old, but its condition was excellent.
We took a few minutes to get settled, before Raven looked at me, wild with anticipation. “Want to go out to the garden?”
Mmm . . . not especially, is what I longed to say. But how could I? This was what I was here for, and night frights or not, I instructed my head to nod. An auto-light went on as we exited, illuminating a paved path that led from the back door up a set of stairs. In the darkness beyond, I could make out a picnic table and an arching trellis. All around us were the shadowy outlines of hedges. As I squinted toward some large trees up ahead, something caught my eye. It almost seemed like the foliage of the tree, maybe two hundred feet away, was sparkling ever so faintly with tiny pinpricks of light. But no sooner had I registered it than it was gone, leaving me wondering if it hadn’t been fireflies. I took a deep breath to relax and found the air was thick with the scent of honey-suckle and rose. As we climbed the stairs, the motion-sensitive light shut off and the only sound was the soft rustling of the wind through the garden foliage.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Raven whispered.
“Very,” I whispered back, noticing the walkway ahead ended in a T.
“If you go to the right,” she explained, her voice low, “that’s the way to the Chalice Well. The well is just above a small waterfall. Heading left just goes to the fence at the edge of the property.”
I studied the path to the well. It was pitch-black and completely enclosed among tall bushes and hedges.There were tall coniferous trees, and I could hear the sound of running water. It almost seemed to beckon. And yet the air around me felt . . . aware somehow. I had the oddest feeling that I was trespassing, unwanted.
“Want to go?” Raven whispered excitedly.
“Uhhh . . . maybe not tonight . . .” Have I mentioned I’m afraid of the dark? Think of an excuse, damn it! “It’s so late already,” I finished lamely. “But tomorrow for sure.”
I could tell Raven was disappointed, so I suggested that we stay out for a few more minutes just to get acquainted with where we were, and that seemed to satiate her need for adventure.
Luckily for me, it seemed the garden of the inn had conspired to break me in slowly. After a moment I could tell that this part of the garden was spacious, open, not at all like I’d feared. I’d been picturing Raven, blithely trying to lead me through Sherwood Forest in the middle of the night—where baaaad things could happen! But as I sank into the grass, I discovered this was the perfect way to unwind. Before us was a small, grassy slope that harbored the trees I’d noticed from the door. Their old branches swept out, the delicate twigs etching themselves against the indigo sky. Were they thorn? Apple? I couldn’t tell. But they seemed to give the back garden its presence. For a few minutes I sat, my head tilted back to take in the night sky, the stars beaming back at me from so many light-years away. Eventually, my exhaustion got the better of me. The morning had structure and excitement—we were meeting with Peter Knight, an author and sacred-sights tour guide, who was going to take us around Glastonbury and hopefully give us some insight into its incredible history. That night we slept with the window open; the breeze off the garden tickling my cheek, I fell utterly and blissfully asleep.
The next morning found us in the garden, eager to see it in broad daylight. I was stunned by the incredible bloom of flowers—a dozen shades each of pinks, purples, reds, blues—and the lush green grass that begged for bare feet. We followed the path uphill where we came to the small waterfall, clear water running over bloodred rock that opened up into a pool marked the Healing Pool. I dipped my fingers in to discover it was freezing! You call it healing; back home we’d call it bracing . . .
The waterfall, dubbed King Arthur’s Court, had a thick foliage of trees above it, and it was cool in the shade. Though there were visitors milling about, people kept their voices hushed in reverence—the well emanated a sense of majesty. The well head, encircled on a raised stone platform, had its ornate wooden cover lifted so visitors could glimpse into the cool dark of the underworld. Peering down, the stones seemed a gateway into the very depths of the earth. People had been drinking these waters for two thousand years? It made me feel, for a moment, entirely insignificant. Lifetime after lifetime, from one religion to the next, this well was a constant, revered by all. I left Raven beside the well and went to explore the nearby Sanctuary—a rounded rock wall with built-in benches. Small tea lights had been lit on shelves hewn in the rock, and I sat down for a moment to let the serenity of the whole place sink in. I was feeling deeply relaxed when I heard a soft fluttering of wings and opened my eyes to see a little robin had landed near my feet. It was far smaller than the robins I’d seen in the States. It looked at me inquisitively and hopped closer to my toes.
“Hello . . .” I said softly. It seemed so tame. The bird came within a few centimeters of my toes and then, cocking its head, flew away.
Traveling up the path past the well head we came to the Lion’s Head Fountain, where spring water spouted from the lion’s mouth into a glass cup. I watched a woman take off her jewelry and dip it into the cup, running it under the water, and recognized that she was cleansing it, charging it with the supposed magic of the water from the spring. From the fountain, the path curved gently uphill until it passed under an arbor covered in masses of green, opening to reveal an expansive meadow. I wanted nothing more than to linger, but our bellies were grumbling, so we reluctantly retreated to the room to prepare for the day.
From the inn, we headed to High Street, Glastonbury’s main shopping area, to rustle up some breakfast and see the town. What an eclectic mix—ancient-looking buildings, animated by the sparkles and organic-dyed hemp of a new generation. The shops of Glastonbury were outrageous. We strolled past store windows with mannequins decked in gauzy fabric complete with huge faery wings of green, red, orange, and gold. Inside nearly every shop were faery figures, wings, wands, wreaths made of silk flowers, ribbon, and fake ivy, and faery oracle cards. In another store, there was an entire rack of Brian Froud’s art printed on every type of T-shirt imaginable. It seemed, judging by retail representation alone, I had hit the faery mother lode.
We met Peter Knight outside St. John’s, a stately twelfth-century church with a massive bell tower on High Street. He was tall and slender, with bookish looks, and yet he radiated a warmth that made me feel instantly at ease.
Inside the church, Peter elaborated on the story of Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus. He emphasized that Jesus, of course, during his time, wasn’t a Christian as of yet. Rather, he was a man (son of God aside) who found the religious practices of his time to be outmoded. He was searching to find something he could subscribe to, and being a free thinker, he began to devise his own practice based on love, kindness, and compassion. It was beautifully expansive—I’d never really thought about Christianity in this light. From the church we walked to Glastonbury Abbey as Peter detailed Glastonbury and the abbey’s connection to the rest of the world, through a series of ley lines.
“If you think of planet Earth as one big, round body,” he explained, “the ley lines would be like the veins. They carry the lifeblood or energy that radiates from within the earth, from one place to another.” People called dowsers could trace these lines using their dowsing rods—L-shaped rods, made of simple metal—which have been used since ancient times for various purposes: to find sources of water, metal ore in the mountains, or even to sort out someone’s guilt or innocence in a trial (yikes!). Dowsing rods were even used in Vietnam by marines in an effort to locate underground tunnels that concealed stores of enemy weapons. The Earth’s electromagnetic energy runs through these veins, and Peter whipped out a map to show us the grid of l
ines that has been constructed through the cooperation of many dowsers over many years. Dowsers in Britain had discovered that ancient sites oddly seemed to be in line with one another. Ancient churches, holy wells (like the Chalice Well), ancient burial sites, and stone circles appear along the same line that can be traced for miles on end. Stonehenge was in line with Avebury, and Glastonbury, Peter pointed out, was a convergence point for ley lines from all over the world. I looked at the map and saw various colored lines drawn from the pyramids in Egypt, from Jerusalem—a dozen or more lines converged in Glastonbury.
“This makes sense to me,” Peter offered. “Here in Glastonbury we have centers for people of every religion: Christians, pagans, Muslims, Jews . . . and somehow they all coexist. Everyone seems to want to claim a part of this place, and it continues to draw people from all over the world.”
Glastonbury Abbey is the site of the first and oldest church in all of England. As I was to learn on my trip across Europe, if I wanted to find an ancient site to conduct field research on faeries, all I had to do was look for the foundations of the oldest church. Ninety percent of the time, churches were built directly on top of sacred pre-Christian sites. The ruins of the old abbey were haunting in their decay, and the grounds were meticulously kept, save the huge, old trees with tall rings of grass around them. Whether it was for lack of a weed whacker or some older, more forgotten reason, the circumferences of grass surrounding the massive trunks had been left wild, and it looked like the perfect habitat for faeries. This was a custom I would notice across much of England.
As we made our way through the Lady Chapel, Peter explained that there was a ley line flowing directly through the space. Ley lines actually move at a rate of a few miles per hour, Peter estimated, so there was, he claimed, an actual current of energy flowing beneath us that radiated up through the ground. When I asked him which direction it was moving, he stepped to the side of the chapel and smiled. “You tell me.”
Out of his bag he pulled a set of dowsing rods, which he placed in my hands.
“State your intention, ‘I’d like to find the Mary line, please,’ and hold them gently, loosely in your fists in front of you.” He demonstrated. “When you hit the Mary line, the rods will move on their own; you don’t have to do a thing.”
I took the rods gently in my hands and walked slowly across the church from west to east, as Peter had indicated. I saw a slight movement, like they really wanted to move, and then they died.
“The trick is you don’t want to exert any pressure on them,” he coached me. “You just need to let them move of their own accord. Try again.”
I did. Nothing.
“Hey, why don’t you give the rods to Raven, and she’ll have a go,” he suggested, giving me a look that radiated pity.
“Oooh, dowsing rods!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never had the chance to try these before.” Grasping them gingerly in her hands, she walked across the church and midway across, the rods swung violently to the left. As she continued on, they obediently swung back to their original state.
“Wonderful!” Peter beamed. “You’ve found it!” Taking the rods in his own hands again, he walked through the current and the rods swung swiftly in the same direction. “The rods are pointing in the direction the current of the ley line is flowing. If we stand right here”—he guided us to the center of the Lady Chapel—“you’re standing right in the middle of the flow. This energy represents the divine feminine, and you can feel it flowing through you if you try.” I stood still, trying to see if I could feel anything. After a moment we walked the length of the chapel to a mortared wall at the north end of the chapel. “This,” he said, “is the reason the Mary line runs through the chapel. Behind this wall—they’ve since closed it off—was where Joseph of Arimathea’s body was enshrined for a time. It’s believed Joseph, along with members of his family and a small contingency of followers, sought refuge here in Britain after the crucifixion of Jesus. In any case, if you ask me, he must have been a very spiritually powerful man.”
I was trying to pay attention, but since we’d arrived at the chapel, my lower stomach was really hurting. Something occurred to me.
“Uh, Peter,” I asked. “When you say people can feel the energy of the Mary line, what does it feel like?”
“Well, it feels like a gentle sort of pulsing to me, and it makes me feel a little woozy. Women, however, say they feel it pulsing right through their gut, you know, right through their womb.”
Yup. That’s what it was, there was no mistaking it. Talk about feminine energy—believe it or not, I had just gotten my long-awaited, um, monthly, that very minute while standing in the Mary line. And, man, was I cramping.
We spent a few hours exploring the abbey grounds before taking Peter to lunch at an organic café, where I finally had the opportunity to quiz him about his views regarding the world of faeries.
“Faeries, I think, are creatures of another world,” he said thoughtfully, putting down his fork. “I think there are unseen realms that occasionally flicker into our reality. Some people say faeries are winged creatures; some people say they are more like some sort of orb. But I think perhaps there are different types of faeries, like there are different types of people and different types of animals here on earth.” He echoed the sentiment that people on virtually every continent have seen them, drawn them, for ages, so in his mind, that indicated that there was something to it.
“I believe as humans,” he concluded, “we’re only seeing a very small part of what actually exists in the universe.”
“But why aren’t we able to see them?” I asked.
“Well, you might as well ask, why can’t we see X-rays? Why can’t we hear a dog whistle? Why can’t we see the rays coming out of our mobile phone? There are lots of things that we know exist in our world, and we can’t see them. Why should faeries be any different?” He smiled.
“So that’s it then? There’s no hope that I’ll ever be able to actually see a faery?”
“I think you can,” he said. “I think if we can change our consciousness, change our state of being, we can catch glimpses of them. I think that’s what people experience. You know, people tend to see bizarre things like UFOs and faeries when they’re not looking for them. It’s times when people are kind of chilled out, drifting off into a bit of an altered state. In other words, is there a faery sitting beside us right now?”
I glanced to my right somewhat hopefully. Nope. Peter laughed.
“The truth is, we wouldn’t know, because we’re focused on having our lunch, aren’t we? Imagine that outside of what we can see, there is a door, and beyond that door exists everything else. Some people say that the faeries have retreated, into the deeper realms, because of what we’re doing to the planet. But perhaps it’s us who have separated ourselves from the faeries. We just don’t see the earth anymore. I think we need to look at the earth again through the eyes of a child if we want to communicate once more with these beings.”
Being awake, seeing the world with the eyes of a child, these were themes that kept recurring. I couldn’t help but bring up some of the darker things I’d read about the faery world, the trickery, death, blindness, the baby snatching. But Peter shrugged off my neurosis.
“Don’t forget that a lot of that is just Christian propaganda. ‘Now the devil lives here . . .’ or ‘the faeries and the witches are carrying your kids off . . .’ It could have all just been Christian propaganda that then worked its way into fiction. But then again, who knows? Could you blame the faery worlds for being upset with humans, what we’re doing to the planet? They had every right to fight back, I suppose. I think there’s a darker side to everything, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. You have to have a balance. I don’t think nature sees good and bad, positive and negative. I think it just does what it does, for the good of the whole.”
Near the end of our tour we ended up in a bookstore on High Street where Peter suggested I buy The Traveller’s Guide to Fairy Sites, b
y Janet Bord. I could hardly believe my luck—you mean they actually made travel guides for people who were looking for faeries? On the front it said, “A guide to 500 places that fairies have actually been seen.” Cha-ching!
“And, Signe, there’s someone else I think you should talk to while you’re here,” he said in parting. He gave me the name and number of a woman who worked and lived in Glastonbury. “She might be a better person to speak with if you want to get behind some of the mystery of the faeries.” I slipped the number into my wallet and we said our goodbyes.
10
Into the Night Garden
If we are to relearn the ways of working with the faeries . . . we must follow the ancient pathways through the forest, where it is sometimes dark, frightening, and perilous . . .
—ANNA FRANKLIN, WORKING WITH FAIRIES
OVER fish and chips that night, Raven described the ceremony she’d devised for us to conduct in the Chalice Well Garden.
“If you want to see the faeries,” she said, “I would be very surprised if this doesn’t do the trick.” The students from her Mystery School, a weekly class that she teaches, had undertaken shamanic journeys on our behalf and created a ceremony for us, for which I was completely game. She and I were to sit back-to-back somewhere outside, bring candles to light, chocolate to leave as a gesture of friendship, and mirrors to lay in the grass so that the faeries could see themselves sparkling in the night. Raven had brought with her only the best chocolate for our soon-to-be faery friends—bars upon bars of Toblerone. And we’d already been partaking, I had to admit. It was all, you know, just practice for the big night. We split a bottle of chardonnay and lingered over our dinner, knowing that the sun wouldn’t set until nine or later that night.