1 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:29,000 Music 2 00:01:29,000 --> 00:01:35,000 One of Christianity's oldest surviving structures, the Great Cathedral at Salisbury in southwest England, 3 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:46,000 was built between 1220 and 1266 A.D. Its 404 foot spire, which remains to this day the tallest in Britain, was added a century later. 4 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:54,000 Old as it is however, the cathedral offers in its environs tantalizing hints of a much older order than medieval Christendom. 5 00:01:54,000 --> 00:02:00,000 A world whose achievements in art and sciences may have reached far beyond the kin of Salisbury's daring steeplejacks, 6 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:05,000 and left its immense signature written directly upon the English landscape. 7 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:12,000 Compare it say with Delphi, which was the Greek centre, and the land around there was sacred. 8 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:16,000 It was farmed only for the priests and for people who came to the festivals. 9 00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:23,000 Indeed there was a tribe, a nation, which was actually responsible for it, and they held the games, and they protected the rights of the sanctuary. 10 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:27,000 Kind of like the tribe of Levi, or the ecclesiastical tribe. 11 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:29,000 Yes, that's right. 12 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:33,000 You think they had that, whatever culture did this have that? 13 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:38,000 I think they did it here, yes. When you look at this land around here, it's all ritualized, it's all full of monuments. 14 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:46,000 And something about it, which suggests there's a light and an atmosphere about the land around here, suggests it was, I know that's tenuous, 15 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:59,000 but by comparing it with other cultures, where the sanctuaries were preserved for the priests and for the high king's table, as they were state lands. 16 00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:05,000 The full reality and scope of that ancient civilization is only beginning to be appreciated. 17 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:22,000 Today the haunting echoes of an almost unspeakable antiquity are sounding in many quarters, especially in southwest England, 18 00:03:22,000 --> 00:03:30,000 and drawing pilgrims from around the world to search for clues to the forgotten origins of humanity and civilization on this planet. 19 00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:47,000 He didn't give opinions, he was speaking the truth. Today we don't like the idea of the truth, do we? Is it your truth or my truth? 20 00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:54,000 We like things relative. But our societies don't last very long, we're always changing. 21 00:03:54,000 --> 00:04:00,000 Under the auspices of Atlanta's Rising magazine, a group gathered recently to study the evidence. 22 00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:04,000 For years it was a fashion for the archaeologists, oh it's all explained, it's all understood. 23 00:04:04,000 --> 00:04:11,000 But that's all come unhinged now because of things which can't be explained very easily. It all is a mystery. 24 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:19,000 Accompanying us was John Michelle, a Cambridge-trained scholar and one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient science and religion. 25 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:26,000 And Busty Taylor, whose intense investigations of English sacred sites and the Crop Circle phenomenon through photography 26 00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:31,000 and the ancient science of dowsing have made him something of an international pundit. 27 00:04:35,000 --> 00:04:43,000 I'm Doug Kenyon, editor and publisher of Atlantis Rising. That's me with the gray beard. And beside me is my wife Patricia. 28 00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:53,000 Join us now on a quest through English sacred sites for clues to a forgotten ancient heritage, what some might call the Atlantis Connection. 29 00:05:56,000 --> 00:06:24,000 Music 30 00:06:25,000 --> 00:06:32,000 On the day we visited Salisbury Cathedral, the official guide was full of fascinating information about the origins of the place. 31 00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:42,000 It would not seem sensible to try and build a structure of this size and weight and height and so on in an area where you're close to a river. 32 00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:48,000 There are two or three rivers all coming together. You have what are essentially water meadows, swampy land. 33 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:53,000 The last possible place in the world you would think would be sensible to build a cathedral. 34 00:06:53,000 --> 00:07:05,000 But it turned out that firstly the site was available because it was actually owned by the bishop, as was the whole of the area which in Salisbury. 35 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:15,000 And secondly because underneath the cathedral here is a bank of gravel which is on average about 18 feet thick. 36 00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:19,000 It's about 25 feet thick where the crossing of the cathedral is. 37 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:23,000 And it's big enough to accommodate the whole length of the cathedral and the whole width of the cathedral. 38 00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:28,000 And also, and that was to some really rather important, it also pointed east and west. 39 00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:41,000 Among the many fascinating facts we learned, the one ton stone blocks of which the cathedral was constructed were hauled to the site from nearby quarries by ox cart, one at a time. 40 00:07:41,000 --> 00:07:55,000 But something is wrong with this picture. If moving one ton blocks and ox carts constituted an engineering high point, what was to be made we wondered of the much older stones at nearby Stonehenge and Avebury. 41 00:07:55,000 --> 00:08:01,000 Most of which weigh many times Salisbury's largest. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. 42 00:08:07,000 --> 00:08:18,000 It's important to note that Salisbury was built to replace the nearby cathedral at Old Serum, which had suffered an unhappy relationship with the adjoining troop garrison and was ultimately burned to the ground. 43 00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:23,000 Tradition has it that the new site was selected by shooting an arrow from the Old City. 44 00:08:23,000 --> 00:08:34,000 That story, however, has been called into question by the more recent discovery that the cathedral is sited on a perfectly straight track, which runs from Stonehenge through Old Serum, Salisbury Cathedral and on to Clearbury Ring. 45 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:44,000 Such straight tracks can be found all over England, joining ancient sites and churches in a vast and mysterious network of what are called glee lines. 46 00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:51,000 Such straight tracks can be found all over England, joining ancient sites and churches in a vast and mysterious network of what are called glee lines. 47 00:08:51,000 --> 00:09:02,000 Such straight tracks can be found all over England, joining ancient sites and churches in a vast and mysterious network of what are called glee lines. 48 00:09:03,000 --> 00:09:14,000 The main axis goes from East Anglia along something called the Ithneel Way, a prehistoric path that falls on the whole axis, which goes right to the west, extreme west of Cornwall. 49 00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:22,000 And all along it there's shrines, and sometimes evidence of tracks, and then other trackways converge upon this place. 50 00:09:22,000 --> 00:09:30,000 Here we are on the west end of Longborough. What I'm asking is the direction of flow to the ley line, and you see it's pointing to the right. 51 00:09:30,000 --> 00:09:39,000 And if we look to the right, the actual axis of this particular monument runs straight through the church that's at least a mile away. 52 00:09:39,000 --> 00:09:50,000 Some researchers, such as Busty Taylor, employ the ancient practice of dowsing, long used by well diggers to find water and others to find other things, to establish the location of ley lines. 53 00:09:52,000 --> 00:10:00,000 As soon as we go over the edge, we get in the middle, and we come over the edge again, it dowses out. 54 00:10:00,000 --> 00:10:09,000 So to me, the ancient sites and all the churches of England are all connected to the same system. 55 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:24,000 And I asked the question just now, is it water? Well I'm asking the question now for water, and it's very lively on that. 56 00:10:24,000 --> 00:10:29,000 So it could be a water flow right through the middle of the church. 57 00:10:29,000 --> 00:10:38,000 Okay, but if we ask for a gas pipe, gas pipe, gas pipe, gas pipe, gas pipe, you get nothing. 58 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:44,000 You see? If you ask for electricity, electricity, electricity, nothing. 59 00:10:44,000 --> 00:10:51,000 But if we come back and we ask for the water again, let's see what happens. 60 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:55,000 If you ask me the question, why does that? I can't answer it. 61 00:10:55,000 --> 00:10:59,000 It's just something, it's a natural thing that anybody can do for the practice. 62 00:10:59,000 --> 00:11:06,000 If I had a hazel twig, it would be very violent here. It would actually rip the bark off the branch. 63 00:11:06,000 --> 00:11:12,000 If I held onto it tight enough, it would tear the bark off, it would even snap the twig, because it would go on down. 64 00:11:12,000 --> 00:11:14,000 Let me try not to stop it. 65 00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:28,000 If you want to find out what happens when you douse around these, as you get level with the stones, you get this type of reaction. 66 00:11:28,000 --> 00:11:36,000 Okay? Where you get gaps, you can get the opposite. 67 00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:43,000 If we walk around the outside, you'll actually get the rods going one way and then the other. 68 00:11:43,000 --> 00:11:54,000 Stonehenge is an important hub in this ancient network, from which major leelines radiate in many directions to many other ancient sites. 69 00:11:54,000 --> 00:12:10,000 It's to do with the stars that play upon them. They're orientated towards certain star rises. 70 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:14,000 They make lines with each other, which you were speaking of. 71 00:12:14,000 --> 00:12:23,000 There are dozens of these places, and they're big. They're all so arranged as to change the skylines. 72 00:12:23,000 --> 00:12:26,000 You can see the rise of one star in one direction, the setting of the other. 73 00:12:26,000 --> 00:12:33,000 All these stars are the ones which folklore and mythology are to do with the progress of the soul. 74 00:12:33,000 --> 00:12:38,000 Of course, people in those days were largely nomadic. 75 00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:43,000 They moved around their territory, not just all over the place, but in a seasonal round. 76 00:12:43,000 --> 00:12:50,000 And then they'd have pilgrimages and journeys to sanctuaries and such. 77 00:12:50,000 --> 00:12:57,000 But they were, you said among the natives of Australia, they repeat the creative round. 78 00:12:58,000 --> 00:13:08,000 They follow the footsteps of the gods who instituted all the landmarks of the landscape and give them all their use. 79 00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:12,000 So people follow this creative passage. 80 00:13:12,000 --> 00:13:22,000 And things like the Arthur legend, which is a Celtic state myth, it goes round the countryside. 81 00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:30,000 So you get episodes of the King Arthur myth, the same episodes, located in many different places, wherever the Celtic culture prevailed. 82 00:13:30,000 --> 00:13:32,000 It's like the stations of the cross? 83 00:13:32,000 --> 00:13:43,000 Indeed. Christianity or a formal religion, they then sort of almost miniaturise the former nomadic round. 84 00:13:43,000 --> 00:13:50,000 And locate them round a church or round a saint, rather than people settled and they miniaturise their round. 85 00:13:50,000 --> 00:14:03,000 I think that, say in the Bronze Age, that people would have settled, but the rulers and judges would keep going on the round, holding court at different places. 86 00:14:03,000 --> 00:14:06,000 And wouldn't regard themselves as settled. 87 00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:17,000 You know, among the 12 tribes of Israel, it wasn't until later that someone, the King David, took Jerusalem and made that into a settled capital. 88 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:23,000 Before that, and even then, he moved round the tribes holding court. 89 00:14:23,000 --> 00:14:30,000 Because it says in the Old Testament that each tribe had to provide for the court for one month of the year, which meant he was travelling around. 90 00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:33,000 Talking about the zodiacal round, actually. 91 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:37,000 Exactly, the zodiacal round, yes. 92 00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:46,000 It's like the king being representative of the sun moving round, moving through the zodiac of Israel. 93 00:14:46,000 --> 00:14:52,000 And that of course, your 12 tribes, your 12 stations, your... 94 00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:59,000 The 12 episodes of the myth, even the 12 notes of religious music. 95 00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:09,000 Busty Taylor is one of those who see a connection between the ancient leeline arrangement and the curious modern phenomenon of crop circles. 96 00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:13,000 If you count them, there are 12 circles. 97 00:15:13,000 --> 00:15:20,000 Word people have brought around and around the formation. They've knocked the corn out and it's re-germinated. 98 00:15:20,000 --> 00:15:25,000 So that's new growth of wheat, which is what that film was all about. 99 00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:35,000 A licensed pilot as well as a photographer, Taylor has made it a personal mission to document the gigantic patterns which appear overnight around the world, and especially in the English countryside. 100 00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:39,000 Some of them are up to 500, 600 feet in length. 101 00:15:39,000 --> 00:15:44,000 Crop circles form from the centre and come out. 102 00:15:44,000 --> 00:15:51,000 Sometimes they start from the outside and go in, in their construction. 103 00:15:51,000 --> 00:15:58,000 And this is some of the things that a lot of people don't mention, especially the people that say, we did it with the board. 104 00:15:58,000 --> 00:16:03,000 You see? Because they can't start from the outside and come in. 105 00:16:03,000 --> 00:16:14,000 Unlike crop circles, the leelines themselves are certainly very old, predating by thousands of years many of the structures which have been carefully placed upon them. 106 00:16:15,000 --> 00:16:28,000 It is clear that the practice of the early Christian church, of placing its churches upon spots revered by the local populace, has served to mark for posterity the existence of a much more ancient local order. 107 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:46,000 The mere existence of such awe-inspiring sites as Stonehenge and Avebury defy explanation as but the superstitious accomplishments of mere primitives. 108 00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:50,000 Yet, such remains the conventional view. 109 00:16:51,000 --> 00:17:08,000 Established academic theory also holds that the original British inhabitants migrated in from the European mainland, notwithstanding the fact that many English megalithic structures such as Stonehenge are older than similar structures near the homes of presumed ancestors. 110 00:17:09,000 --> 00:17:30,000 And then we've got the sort of tradition, say, in Ireland, of a culture which are very deep and beautiful, an oral culture, which dates back a long time, wasn't recorded until sort of the early Christian times. 111 00:17:30,000 --> 00:17:34,000 But the old chronicles are written down from much earlier sources. 112 00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:52,000 Michel has written extensively about the culture which preceded the Christians and even the ancient Celts and their Druid priesthood, and he is sympathetic to the view that England's early heritage was established by people who came from the West, 113 00:17:52,000 --> 00:18:06,000 survivors of the destruction of a once great civilization which existed at some now vanished spot in the Atlantic Ocean, the same one perhaps identified by the Greek philosopher Plato as Atlantis. 114 00:18:38,000 --> 00:18:56,000 The survivors of this thought established a system of megalithic markers throughout England to preserve their social order. 115 00:18:56,000 --> 00:19:04,000 Such views in as much as they challenge conventional views of prehistory remain controversial. 116 00:19:05,000 --> 00:19:13,000 Nevertheless, the eloquent testimony of the stones and the advanced order they imply is difficult to dispute. 117 00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:24,000 The ruined temple of Stonehenge is generally conceded to be the most remarkable prehistoric structure in Europe. 118 00:19:24,000 --> 00:19:32,000 The great circle of precisely cut and placed giant standing stones is eight miles north of Salisbury in Wiltshire. 119 00:19:32,000 --> 00:19:41,000 The entire area, says John Michel, is littered with the marks of ancient sanctity including burial mounds, earthworks and other prehistoric monuments. 120 00:19:52,000 --> 00:19:57,000 What the hell was this thing for? It's a temple, certainly. It's not just a pious temple you go and sort of... 121 00:19:58,000 --> 00:20:08,000 It's something which rarely changed people's lives. To make that credible effort, the whole of society must have been sort of subordinated to building this remarkable structure. 122 00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:14,000 It's not just a physical labor, it's incredibly advanced knowledge portrayed in it. I've studied this thing for years. 123 00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:22,000 And it's part of a tradition which goes back to very ancient times and came into original Christianity. 124 00:20:23,000 --> 00:20:31,000 Research by numerous scholars has established that the alignment of the stones conforms to principles of advanced geometry 125 00:20:31,000 --> 00:20:40,000 and that it once served as some kind of astronomical observatory capable of, at the very least, predicting both lunar and solar eclipses. 126 00:20:40,000 --> 00:20:47,000 Shortly after sunset on a cloudless September day, our little band of pilgrims feels the presence of awesome forces among the stones. 127 00:20:47,000 --> 00:20:55,000 I'm more or less standing in the center of Stonehenge. The summer solstice is through this arch on my right hand side. 128 00:20:55,000 --> 00:20:51,780 The altar is here on my left. What they do is they're going to be a little bit more of a 129 00:20:51,780 --> 00:20:58,780 The center part of Stonehenge, the horseshoe shape, the trinolone. And as you see, a few of them have fallen down. 130 00:20:58,780 --> 00:21:19,660 And the 131 00:21:19,660 --> 00:21:33,660 way if you're here in the summer, on the summer's day, June the 20th, to see the sun come up over that horizon is absolutely magnificent. 132 00:21:33,660 --> 00:21:48,660 What you see here are the blue stones running around on this side. They're the ones that's brought all the way from Wales, some 100 kilometers away to the southwest. 133 00:21:48,660 --> 00:22:10,660 People don't know why they use the stones from Wales on the inner part. We can't at the moment work out how they got the big stones at the top up there, because it's a real interesting engineering feat. 134 00:22:10,660 --> 00:22:18,660 This stone, possibly 30 tons. How did they get it up there? 135 00:22:18,660 --> 00:22:21,660 Just ask the man in Homestead. 136 00:22:21,660 --> 00:22:34,660 All right. Now what you have to look at here is the fact that they have mortise and tenon joints. You can see the high part on the stone there and the recess here. 137 00:22:34,660 --> 00:22:44,660 Who taught them to mortise and tenon and actually get everything so flat that it fits perfectly? 138 00:22:44,660 --> 00:22:54,660 They estimate that it must probably took them five or six years to move it a piece. So it wasn't something that was achieved overnight. 139 00:23:14,660 --> 00:23:41,660 In terms of sheer magnitude and complexity of construction, the greatest stone circle in the British Isles is to be found at Avebury. 140 00:23:41,660 --> 00:23:49,660 Like Stonehenge, it occupies a central position in the system of ancient tracks which crisscross the entire English landscape. 141 00:23:49,660 --> 00:24:07,660 One astonishing, perfectly straight line runs all the way from East Anglia to the Dorset coast, marking the longest continuous stretch of British landmass and the line of the sun's passage at summer solstice, passing through dozens of shrines and sacred sites, including St. Michael's Tor at nearby Glastonbury. 142 00:24:07,660 --> 00:24:12,660 Sitting midpoint on the line, Avebury is at the virtual center of southern England. 143 00:24:12,660 --> 00:24:25,660 The surveying and mathematical skills required to lay out such a vast, yet precise arrangement surpass anything in known human history until recent centuries. 144 00:24:25,660 --> 00:24:34,660 Caesar says himself that the Druids knew the size and shape of the earth and talked about those matters. 145 00:24:34,660 --> 00:24:43,660 And the surveying of land has been an aspect of ancient science which has been very much neglected. 146 00:24:43,660 --> 00:24:47,660 But it's certainly related to astronomy. 147 00:24:47,660 --> 00:25:07,660 And when we talk about ancient astronomy, it wasn't the astronomy we have today. It was to do with, I'm sure, with using the influences of sun, moon and stars in connection with the ceremonies and with the fate of the dead and the progress of the soul. 148 00:25:07,660 --> 00:25:11,660 But their knowledge was precise in these things. 149 00:25:11,660 --> 00:25:19,660 Because their maps weren't general. They were measured down to the nth degree. 150 00:25:19,660 --> 00:25:25,660 I've got examples of island territories where you can tell the boundaries. They're defined by nature. 151 00:25:25,660 --> 00:25:33,660 Where the surveyed center is actually on the main axis of that island, the very center, not an inch off. 152 00:25:38,660 --> 00:25:55,660 But April is just part of the country. And you can see how April was the main gathering, rallying place for the Bronze Age, or even earlier, tribal people who came there from all over the southern part of the country. 153 00:25:55,660 --> 00:25:59,660 And there's many of the roads, ancient roads, lead towards there. 154 00:25:59,660 --> 00:26:03,660 And you see it has all the attributes of a national sanctuary. 155 00:26:03,660 --> 00:26:11,660 It seems to me that all this area is a ritualized area. There's monuments all over the place which are to do with, obviously, with the whole complex. 156 00:26:11,660 --> 00:26:22,660 And almost certainly this land was farmed for the benefit of the priests and the people who came to the festivals. It was a kind of priestly territory. 157 00:26:22,660 --> 00:26:26,660 It wasn't discovered until the 17th century. 158 00:26:26,660 --> 00:26:36,660 Stonehenge was always known. It's always been there. It's obvious. It's a very organized, very civilized, very organized priestly temple standing in the middle of nowhere. 159 00:26:36,660 --> 00:26:46,660 Abrus have integrated, they built a village inside it, the Lower Saxon Village. There's a church and such. It's just lovely, actually. It's a lovely place to visit. 160 00:26:56,660 --> 00:27:13,660 Well, sometimes called the Druid Seat, or the Arch Druid Seat. And there's a kind of like a hole going out of a chimney. 161 00:27:13,660 --> 00:27:18,660 And the story is, if you sit there, you tend to become pregnant. 162 00:27:18,660 --> 00:27:24,660 The beautiful building makes a fine ruin, whereas an ugly one makes an uglier ruin, doesn't it? 163 00:27:24,660 --> 00:27:33,660 When you see these rocks, they're enormous. They're placed. It's been terribly destroyed since then. 164 00:27:48,660 --> 00:28:13,660 Certainly the view from St. Michael's Tor is an exalted one. The highest spot in the Isle of Glastonbury is reached by a laborious climb up the pilgrim's path. 165 00:28:13,660 --> 00:28:27,660 We've got a tower left up there from a church, because the first one fell down in an earthquake. So this has been rebuilt to replace what happened many, many years ago. 166 00:28:27,660 --> 00:28:39,660 In the 14th century, a church was built at the top to replace an earlier one. The Chanting Tower is all that remains. But archaeologists have found evidence of an extensive monastery. 167 00:28:39,660 --> 00:28:48,660 Before Christianity, Celtic hermits maintained cells on the hill, and there's also evidence of prehistoric activity. 168 00:28:48,660 --> 00:29:00,660 Ancient terracing apparently formed a vast labyrinth, which it seems likely served for some kind of spiritual initiation, culminating perhaps in mystic illumination at the summit. 169 00:29:00,660 --> 00:29:08,660 The process for our group may not have been quite so intense, but it was not without its challenges and its rewards. 170 00:29:08,660 --> 00:29:23,660 If there was a clear day, you can actually see the Atlantic from this point here, because you're not that far from the actual coastline whatsoever. 171 00:29:23,660 --> 00:29:34,660 That's to the southwest. To the west is your straight down to Cornwall, the land's end. This is the south coast over here. 172 00:29:34,660 --> 00:29:40,660 Of course, Stonehenge is through here to the east. That's where Stonehenge is. 173 00:29:40,660 --> 00:29:47,660 Isn't that hill over there on the direct line with Stonehenge? 174 00:29:47,660 --> 00:29:49,660 If we check into it, most probably it is. 175 00:29:49,660 --> 00:29:52,660 I'm pretty sure it's one of the leaves that John Shuston has built. 176 00:29:52,660 --> 00:30:01,660 We're looking at essentially an infrastructure where you have essentially the nodes of a communications grid. That's what it suggests more than anything else. 177 00:30:01,660 --> 00:30:05,660 There was certainly some form of communication. If nothing else, it was beacon fires. 178 00:30:05,660 --> 00:30:20,660 But the suggestion is it was really much more sophisticated, much more advanced than that, as evidenced by the precision of the alignments, the size of the stones, the difficulty of the placement, the altitude, all of those. 179 00:30:20,660 --> 00:30:29,660 The logistical challenges so forth indicate that there was something more sophisticated than simply notifying people of impending invasions. 180 00:30:29,660 --> 00:30:37,660 We live in the ruins of a structure so vast that it's hitherto been invisible. 181 00:30:37,660 --> 00:30:43,660 So now we're getting enough altitude that we can start to see where the beams have been buried. 182 00:30:43,660 --> 00:30:55,660 The leeline structure suggests nothing so much to me as a vast ruin or a vast haunted house where maybe the pieces have been knocked out of place or so forth. 183 00:30:55,660 --> 00:31:08,660 But what we're seeing there is we're seeing hidden remains of some pointing us toward the presence of an order. 184 00:31:08,660 --> 00:31:24,660 And it's the order that's important here. What it suggests is a coherent structure vast in its conception and design, which for what purpose remains a mystery. 185 00:31:24,660 --> 00:31:27,660 But nevertheless, you cannot deny the presence of the order. 186 00:31:27,660 --> 00:31:40,660 It's like they come in, they look at the Roman aqueducts, and it's easy to deduce that they had a plan for catching water and transferring it from point to point and preserving it for whatever. 187 00:31:40,660 --> 00:31:47,660 Because we understand the logistics of water transport, so we're able to put this all together. 188 00:31:47,660 --> 00:32:00,660 But we come in and we see a structure just as coherent, just as fully evolved, but because we don't understand the purpose, we have a hard time accepting that it exists. 189 00:32:00,660 --> 00:32:13,660 And I have a feeling that in the future archaeologists will look at us and when they get hold of a CD-ROM, they're going to say, 190 00:32:13,660 --> 00:32:18,660 Well, you know, they made very nice mirrors in that time. 191 00:32:18,660 --> 00:32:25,660 They really had the art of mirror making down to a fine science, and we respect them for that. 192 00:32:25,660 --> 00:32:27,660 They could really polish very well. 193 00:32:27,660 --> 00:32:45,660 In the town below, many believe lies the heart of Christian mysticism. 194 00:32:45,660 --> 00:32:50,660 The legends of King Arthur, the Round Table, the Knights of the Quests, and of course, the Holy Grail. 195 00:32:57,660 --> 00:33:10,660 Today, the Chalice Well and nearby Glastonbury Cathedral remind travelers of the legendary origins of that unique form of English Christianity. 196 00:33:10,660 --> 00:33:15,660 The Celtic church is not that different. They used to have their services in the open air. 197 00:33:15,660 --> 00:33:24,660 They didn't go much on churches and buildings to sit in. They had little hives, little huts for the monks to sleep in bad weather. 198 00:33:24,660 --> 00:33:27,660 If there was anything decent, they'd be out. 199 00:33:27,660 --> 00:33:35,660 This is a Norman Abbey. Nothing to do. This is a Romy's Abbey, not a Celtic Abbey, the one you're looking at. 200 00:33:35,660 --> 00:33:38,660 The Celtic Abbey would have been very much smaller. 201 00:33:38,660 --> 00:33:45,660 It's probably just a little church and a little by building around it, and the rest would have been buildings for the monks to live in and work in. 202 00:33:45,660 --> 00:33:54,660 That little church is there as a symbol. They weren't great big builders of great big... 203 00:33:54,660 --> 00:33:58,660 But you don't have Norman Abbeys before 1066, do you? 204 00:33:58,660 --> 00:34:05,660 No, but this replaced the destroyed ones. The ones that went up in flames. This replaced it. 205 00:34:05,660 --> 00:34:08,660 This is a Norman Abbey. This was rebuilt afterwards. 206 00:34:08,660 --> 00:34:10,660 And when was this destroyed? 207 00:34:10,660 --> 00:34:12,660 In 108. 208 00:34:13,660 --> 00:34:22,660 It is interesting that the reputed site of the first Christian church in England is located with precise reference to the ancient Lee system. 209 00:34:22,660 --> 00:34:30,660 Joseph of Arimathea, the uncle of Jesus, a tin merchant, is said to have traded with Cornish miners. 210 00:34:30,660 --> 00:34:34,660 On one of those trips, the story goes, he was accompanied by his nephew. 211 00:34:34,660 --> 00:34:41,660 Years later, after the crucifixion, Joseph is said to have returned to Glastonbury with the cup which received the blood of Christ, 212 00:34:41,660 --> 00:34:51,660 and to have built a church of wood and wattles on the spot where today can be found the gray stone ruins of what later became the greatest cathedral in England. 213 00:35:34,660 --> 00:36:02,660 The ground plan of St. Mary's Chapel on the site employed geometric principles virtually identical to Stonehenge. 214 00:36:02,660 --> 00:36:23,660 According to tradition, Joseph placed the crucifixion cup in nearby Chalice Well, from where its wondrous radiations have inspired questing nights ever since. 215 00:36:23,660 --> 00:36:32,660 Whatever the historical truth behind the story, it seems clear that, to this day, the area exerts a kind of magical influence over all who approach. 216 00:36:32,660 --> 00:36:52,660 Among mystics, the dreams of Camelot and Avalon seem strangely akin to those of Atlantis, 217 00:36:52,660 --> 00:37:14,660 and Arthurian tales of a lady of the lake suggest some ideal world buried deep beneath the waters of the unconscious. 218 00:37:14,660 --> 00:37:42,660 Whatever may have been forgotten about the origins of civilization on this planet, strange as it sounds, it seems more than possible that many of the clues which will lead us to the truth remain to be discovered in the environs of the spot. It is said was once called Camelot. 219 00:37:44,660 --> 00:38:05,660 It seems clear that orthodox theories of English prehistory are, to put it kindly, lacking in true insight. With every new discovery, the notion that the vast tapestry that we can now see carved upon the English landscape was the work of ignorant primitives becomes less credible. 220 00:38:05,660 --> 00:38:20,660 People were living very close to the sources of life. I think in modern years we lost that. The Celtic people were terrifically genealogical. They were always talking about who their grandfather was, who their great grandfather was and so on. 221 00:38:20,660 --> 00:38:34,660 In the old days, when television was by storytellers going round, what they really told you was about what your ancestors did, how they killed a dragon there and fought a giant there and relating it to the landmarks of the landscape. 222 00:38:34,660 --> 00:38:50,660 You felt very much at home in your own country. You felt that you were part of a long chain, not just living a chance and rather tenuous existence. You were part of a sort of inevitability, a part of law. 223 00:38:55,660 --> 00:39:01,660 As John Michele has said, we find ourselves in the ruins of a structure so vast it's been invisible till now. 224 00:39:05,660 --> 00:39:24,660 Only now, like Salisbury's steeplejacks, are we beginning to attain sufficient altitude to behold the magnitude of the ancient achievement and to find at last the proper attitudes with which to contemplate its majesty, awe and respect, if not reverence. 225 00:39:25,660 --> 00:39:28,660 We have been preceded by giants.