Northern Earth Feature

Earth Energies Eclipse Experiment By Christine Rhone

For a few days during the week of the full solar eclipse on August the 11th 1999, I had the good fortune to be the guest of Hamish Miller, the master dowser of earth energies, at his beautiful home at the foot of Trencrom Hill. This is a few miles from Penzance, a harbour town at the far western end of Cornwall and within the path of totality. On the top of Trencrom Hill are some remains of an ancient hillfort and a fine view of St Michael's Mount. It was here that Margaret Thornley, the great pilgrim of St Michael who worked with Wellesley Tudor Pole, was initiated into the Order of Cornish Druids in the early fifties. Trencrom Hill has also been one of Hamish’s greatest teachers, since it was there that he first began to dowse earth energies many years ago.

A German film crew happened to be camping on Hamish’s property at the same time and were filming a dowsing experiment as part of a pilot project on earth energies and sacred geography. The crew were an interesting bunch of people. In it were not just the typical cameramen and media types, but it included an accomplished stone sculptor, Werner Ratering, who studied at the Institute of Geomancy in Germany, and an intriguing musician, Fredi Alberti, who plays cello and French horn. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that the cello and horns play him, using him as their vehicle as he attunes himself to the spirit of the landscape where he is present.

On an open slope of land not far from his house, Hamish and others have made an installation to enhance and channel the local energy patterns. This consists of a turf cut figure, thirty-two feet in diameter, representing an energy pattern that came to Hamish during the course of his dowsing work. The figure is known as the Seed of Life. It is composed of a set of seven equal circles: one central circle whose centre is intersected by six equidistant circles. The Seed of Life forms the central core of the Flower of Life pattern, a geometric figure that appears on the walls of the ancient Osirion temple in Abydos. The Flower develops from the Seed by the addition of twelve small circles struck equidistantly through the centres of the six and thus contains a total of nineteen equal circles.

Both the Seed and Flower imply the hexagon, which is an image of structure, function, and order, an equation that may be transposed to the level of space, power, and time. The hexad is the foundation for such symbols as the Seal of Solomon, the Shield of David, and the Mark of Vishnu, and it is a basic layout for constructing "hex" signs and meditation diagrams, such as Hindu yantras. In the Flower, the principles of the hexad are extended and refined through its doubling to twelve, a number well-known for its cosmic properties. If we think of the Flower three-dimensionally, with the circles becoming spheres, we may see how twelve equal spheres will enclose a central thirteenth, which represents the resolution of solar and lunar qualities, and the two ways of counting the months of the year. This implies the wholeness of time, the 360 degrees of the compass and of the heavens, and brings us to the realm of the zodiac.

Placed outside the perimeter of the turf cut Seed are a set of rings and pegs that represent the signs of the zodiac and the fifty-six Aubrey holes of Stonehenge. These were laid out by Robin Heath, the landscape geometer and author of Sun, Moon, and Stonehenge. The whole installation may thus be utilized as a solar and lunar calendar and an eclipse predictor. Hamish, who is also a blacksmith, has forged two tall staffs, one for the sun and one for the moon, and these are moved periodically to keep the calendar up-to-date. Yet another thing to remember to do for Ba Russell, Hamish’s best friend and accomplice, who fortunately has a back-up calendar in her diary! The neighbours downhill, who have a pretty good view of all this, really don’t know what to think.

The dowsing patterns as received by Hamish on the day before the eclipse were laid out by means of coloured ropes defining their boundaries. Blue ropes were used to indicate the energy path emanating from the direction of Trencrom Hill down through the Seed of Life and a short distance beyond. Orange ropes were used to show the outlines of the spiral energy vortexing in and out of the centre of the Seed. White ropes showed radials, energies dowsable as straight lines issuing outward from the centre.

On the night before the eclipse, the skies were full of shooting stars, the summer Perseids shower, and the Milky Way arched majestically above my campsite in Hamish's garden, planted with many young pines and interspersed with lavendar tinted hydrangeas. I had a dream of the ancestors and had a brief glimpse of Richard Andrews, the dowser who had passed to the other side only a few days previously. A short conversation followed with one of the departed, which left me with a feeling of healing and a greater understanding. As I awoke from this dream, I poked my head outside the tent and saw that the skies were overcast, covered in that grey cottonwoolly effect in which the Cornish sky is so often painted in winter. Yesterday had been - of course - hot, sunshiny, and brilliant.

I geared up for foul weather and made my way up Trencrom, arriving there in time to watch the steady stream of pilgrims wending their way to the top. One elderly gentleman, dressed in a cream suit, was negotiating the climb while carrying an open picnic basket under one arm, complete with bottles of select wine, but still able to lend a helping hand to his wife. From the summit, the view was wide and far encompassing: a long dip and valley, the shoreline beach of Marazion, the outline of St Michael's Mount, and beyond it the open sea. As the moment of totality came closer, the clouds thickened and darkened, forming a colossal black mass above St Michael's Mount, with a long triangular part pointing downward, looking much like a waterspout or sea tornado, or perhaps the finger of God. The cloud mass then got even blacker, and the light rain changed to a roaring downpour. I glanced over to the elderly gentleman and his wife. Sitting beneath a large umbrella, they were smiling.

The temperature dropped. One could see one's breath in the air. The eclipse shadow flew over the sea, cutting St Michael's Mount in black silhouette. All energies seemed to withdraw within. Plants and shrubs seemed to fall asleep. Streetlights and townlights far below were switched on, their tiny points of light drawing a glimmering line along the curves of the valley. All around, the layers of cloud formations were bizarre and stunning, resembling Gothic animals and gargoyles against the only illumination, a thin band of golden sky in the far horizon beyond the eclipse shadow, a golden light unlike sunrise or sunset, eerie and otherworldly. The feeling of interiorization was intense, as though all celestial influences were severed from us and we were left alone with only the reality of earth itself, our clayey origin. Back to Adam for just two minutes, and then, as totality dimmed up and lifted, great cheers from the crowd at one of the best shows on Earth, and relief and release at the feeling of being reborn. The deluge passed. The elderly couple decanted.

Meanwhile, down at the Seed of Life, Hamish had been dowsing during the minutes of totality, the energy bands from Trencrom having thinned down to only one foot wide. The central vortex had unwound to a very loose spiral. Fredi Alberti, who had just driven all the way from Germany and lost his way several times en route, had somehow managed to arrive and nevertheless play, his cello and him in a oneness with the energies of the moment and the place, including the buckets of rain pelting down. The camera crew were well prepared, their expensive equipment protected and functioning throughout.

The next day was - of course - hot, sunshiny, and brilliant. Hamish dowsed around the Seed of Life for the third time. The energy corridor from Trencrom had widened to larger than on the day before the eclipse, increasing from ten to twelve bands wide. There was an additional corridor of energy, running nearly east to west, five bands wide, and virtually perpendicular to the Trencrom one. The vortex spiral had tightened two and a half times in relation to its pre-eclipse position. The radials from the centre had increased in number from sixteen to forty-four. The reading from Hamish was that the overall energy, which had dramatically contracted during the eclipse, had now greatly expanded in width and number of pathways. This was confirmed to him by a phone call from a fellow dowser who had performed a similar experiment in Liverpool, far away from the path of totality.

Among the many memories of the eclipse - our recordings, our films, our experiments, our notes - is a staff made by one of the crew’s children who spent much of his time practising the boyish art of whittling, working a hollow grip into the wood at a comfortable height for himself. In his love for his eclipse stick, he reminded me to let joy be in the making of things. Our instruments of knowledge are but small handles on something greater. We can only grasp what we are able.

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