The Shamanistic Storytelling of Alan Garner

Contains spoilers for The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), The Owl Service (1967) and its 1969 Granada Television adaptation, Red Shift (1973) and its 1978 BBC Play for Today adaptation, and Boneland (2012)

 

 

Author Alan Garner

 

It really bugs me that, for the time being, I cannot trace which writer or academic wrote something like – “Alan Garner is a shamanistic storyteller, in that, through his fiction, he communes with deeper layers of the human psyche, the inner and outer spaces”, etc., etc. – or where they wrote it (it might be a misremembered reading of Manda Scott’s piece about Boneland in the Independent, but I’m sure it was in a book that I read it). It bugs me because I agree with this perspective, and would like to re-read this piece for a deeper understanding. You see, there was a time when Garner’s work, particularly the Alderley Edge series, utterly dominated my life. Reading Garner had been like reading a gramarye. It left me not quite the same person as before I picked the books up. It gave me a transcendental experience, a soul quest, a dreamtime vision. Suddenly I was aware of landscapes brought to life in the most profound and sometimes eerie ways, of the folkloric properties of plants and rocks and weather conditions, the minutiae of ‘old straight tracks’, constellations, small bodies of water, and of the devastating pull of history. It sounds mad, you know, I even sat up in bed once, half-asleep, outstretching my hand at some shape in the darkness, and shouting a series of cod-Latin, cod-Saxon words banished what I thought was an approaching evil. For what it’s worth, it seemed to work. It woke up my partner too, she wasn’t fazed (but she wasn’t impressed either, I do these waking nightmare things a lot). In the spirit of Discordianism (or perhaps the petit narrative of postmodernity), my reality became fitted with the Alan Garner lens – for about 6 months, before ebbing into the invisible regions of my soul – and in that time I internalised a great many lessons that shaped the pagan dimensions of my eco-spirituality. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, Alan Garner normalised paganism for me, and finally pulled me in. 

 

Rules

The thing about that waking nightmare I mentioned, was that despite the nonsense incantation I was barking out, the illusion was repelled. This dark cloud, a spreading cover of blackness, balked, contested, then retreated and evaporated. I talked about it with a colleague the next day, and they being an avid reader of fantasy, reminded me that it’s not the words that matter, it’s the intent behind them. Gibberish is as good as any Latin, as though the strength of feeling from the speaker generates a psionic field that repels the evil force (think The Curse of Fenric). In ceremonial ‘high’ magic, it is the dedication and exact detail of effort, coupled with strong vocal will, that commands spirits. Once commanded, they obey. It’s as though the rules of the game have been met. This is a very Jungian idea because it’s the ‘language’ of the collective unconscious, and therefore as a form of active imagination, can be made to work upon and affect the psyche. The Alderley Edge novels, particularly the original two, are full of these rules: do not look behind you as you retreat up the old straight track; wear the bracelet and the palugs cannot harm you; start a fire on this hill to summon the Hunt; search for this flower at this time. All characters, all creatures, obey the commands of the magic, and can be expelled by those commands, but the magic must be invoked strictly according to the rules set down. This is explored to death by Susan Cooper in her Dark Is Rising sequence, but it points to an almost autistic adherence to detail, organisation, ritual, pattern and routine. As an autistic person, I like this very much indeed. In my ‘folk wicca’, I know that adherence to steps, clarity of intention, awareness of space, and properties, and rules, will bring the ‘magic’, and command the unconscious. These steps organise the mind, strengthens the will, and focuses the thinking.

 

The Owl Service adaptation (1969)

 

 
Ignorance of the rules therefore, is detrimental. If the internal, subjective rules that govern your mind, shaped by upbringing and genetics, are not governed, it is easy to fall into disarray with yourself, and the world around you. Your Psyche falls further and further into imbalance, your shadow cannot reintegrate and the individuation process stalls, perhaps even atrophies completely. Symbolically, the same can be said of Garner’s characters. Ignorance of the rules would be catastrophic for the protagonists of Alderley Edge, while being nearly-catastrophic for Alison in The Owl Service, and outright ruinous for Tom in Red Shift. In Alison’s case, the rules were straightforward: she will become owls, or she will become flowers – the difference is determined by Roger and Gwyn. What the rules are not, is obvious and clear. The elder characters, Huw Halfbacon, Gwyn’s mother and Alison’s mother, do not communicate effectively to the younger characters, but instead seek to steer them against the grain (or in Halfbacon’s case, steer them in the right direction, just not with plain-speaking or coherent methods, at least until Gwyn has drawn closer to his heritage). As a result, Alison very nearly succumbs to calamity. In Red Shift, of the three male protagonists in each time zone, it is Tom in the then-present day who comes off worst, as he is the only one who doesn’t give himself over to the axe head when he finds it – he sells it for a train ticket, and thus to emotional turmoil.

The message isn’t OBEY THE RULES. The message is – know the rules, know the effects of working with them, and beware the effects of mismanaging them.  This is much my understanding of the Psyche.

The Mythical Substratum

In The Owl Service, Alison and Roger are English, but are no less susceptible to the mystical forces in the Welsh valley they are holidaying in than Gwyn, the local Welsh boy. Because you see, the forces that govern the universe really, really, really don’t give a shit who we are, where we are from, what blood we have or don’t have, where we live in time, how we talk, how we live, what we do or don’t do. It’s utterly, utterly arrogant of us to assume that because our local, cultural social constructs belong to one group or other, they won’t mimetically, psychologically, and culturally affect others that come into its proximity. The mythical landscape spares no-one. But see how Alison and Roger are brought to heel by the Welsh landscape. As Halfbacon says, the English may own the property he tends to legally, but they are not the hereditary ‘rulers’, they do not have the kinship as he and Gwyn do. By illustrating this, Garner gives the local Welsh their identity, their deep meaningful connection to the locality, but he also tells us that any human who falls into its influence is given identity within the localised framework. Myth and folklore are both unique and inclusive. It’s frankly not in our power to stop it. 

 

Alderley Edge

 

The thing that affects the three teenagers in The Owl Service, and that works its influence in all his works, is what Merlin Coverley, in his brilliant book Hauntology: Ghosts of Future Past, calls the ‘mythical substratum’. Coverley identifies in Garner’s work an ‘impact between topography and chronology’ (p145 of the 2020 paperback edition), and examines how events of the past shape, even scar the landscape, its after-effects influencing the present. He talks about Garner’s concepts of ‘inner time’, where your internal life bears the existence of and is driven by ‘engrams’ (that is, permanently-imprinted memory traces that evoke strong sensory and emotional reaction when triggered, and that through the successive generations populate the Jungian collective unconscious to haunt our descendants),  ‘outer time’, the external world beyond the human being that creates engrams, and ‘mythic time’, where time is the non-linear experience of events and concepts belonging to mythical cycles. For Garner, the resolution of engram ‘attacks’, where the inner time spills into the outer time, and past becomes present, is a traumatic psychological journey into the Dreamtime, a concept he acknowledges adopting from Altjira, an Aborigine practice (do we call this cultural appropriation on Garner’s part? Or do we take a wider view, and suggest there’s a universality among us human beings, and sometimes we’re asked to find the grammar for such experiences from others in order to appreciate better our own cultural folklore). Time in Garner’s stories is a repetition, where successive generations are forced to live them through again and again, reworking them to fit their contemporary circumstances, but always toward the same consequences. Place in these stories, is a nexus of energy that stores itself up and, through people as ‘receivers’, transmits itself. Not unlike the stone tape theory, history (sometimes even future events, as in Red Shift) imprint themselves on the physical environment, and humans (and animals) experience them like recordings, consciously as apparitions or visions, or unconsciously through their behaviours and actions. Place and Time are nebulous, situated in the mythic time, where yesterday is as today, tomorrow is as a thousand years ago, it makes no difference.
Through his Dreamtime work, Garner was able to pull through his engram assault and achieve this place/time unification and experience the mythic time, something he’d previously only ascribed as being reached exclusively by people without formal education (notice this white, Western, Cambridge-educated man romanticising rural working class people and aboriginal cultures – a common concept of Garner’s time, to ascribe insight and mystic awareness to under-privileged, indigenous groups). Interestingly, Garner was only able to achieve this through suffering and visionary work, connecting him to the shamanic tradition. Shaman, in accounts I have read, need to be ‘taken apart’ (spiritual death) in order to access the Dreamtime, or the Spirit World, and this may take the form of physical suffering (such as being stung by a swarm of bees in order to loosen the soul fibres, as in the Saxon tradition) or by mental disintegration. Upon reassembly, the shaman has transitioned to a new consciousness and state of being – they now occupy the mythic time, where the inner and outer are as one. Achieving this, says Garner in a fantastic flurry of New Age 1970s awakening, will allow us to fulfill our evolutionary potential. It correlates with Jesus’s ‘emptying’ (the Greek kenosis) in the Wilderness: the harsh process of individuation in Jungian parlance.

 

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

 

 
In the Alderley Edge novels, the mythic substratum is present in a very visceral way. The children Susan and Colin live it as direct experience. It’s there and immediate. The legends are real, as is the danger they present. The power in Garner’s writing here is to blend it with the everyday world. Although largely hidden from the mainstream human world, the realm of Fundindelve, and the larger fantastic reality it belongs to, is nonetheless in the same world as our own. It is a world where goddesses and evil wizards disguise themselves as ordinary locals or backpacking-wearing tourists, where svarts keep to the disused mines, where golden, expansive localities can arise from much small, more mundane places, before disappearing again. It absolutely infuses our world with magic, and overlays it with a mythical infrastructure by which all its inhabitants interact. 

When the Magic is Gone

But what happens when the magic is gone? Garner talks about his mental health issues, his depression. Many of us know the landscapes of depression: when it arises, all the magic gets sucked out of our world. There’s no wonder, there’s no Light. It’s just the cold concrete of reality, day to day. Even when we are surrounded by people, we are alone. The good times are in the past, your own future is cancelled. In Boneland, Garner presents us an adult Colin from the previous Alderley books, but much like the post-peak world of Prime Suspect 6, or the comedown of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we find ourselves in a world where the adventure is over. There are no alfars, no palugs, no wizards, no Morrigans, and no characters apart from Colin to have survived into the present time from the late 1960s. Alone, amnesiac, autistic, obsessed and adrift, Colin is searching for his missing sister Susan, and seeking to recover his lost memories. He sits in front of the rock that once led to the Sleeping King, but it never opens. He waits in the valley that once held so much magic, but is surrounded by nothing but stones and pebbles. The reader is left with the impression that Colin may have imagined the events of the first two books, that they never happened at all or, they did happen, but were not magical: villainous witch Selina Place could have been just a human child molester, and the whole mythical adventure was an imaginary coping mechanism. This says a lot about my own attraction to spirituality. Do my traumatic childhood experiences and autistic brain force into creation an imaginary, fantastical inner reality, so I can cope? Basically, yes. But then, that’s all religions, right? What’s important is that, Colin’s interactions with the mythic have a healing effect, they make him stable and give him purpose. Although he has no strict answers by the end, he is left with a renewed sense of magic. He has reconciled himself to the knowledge the world has changed, its access to magic and Fundindelve weaker than ever before (as was hinted to be happening in The Moon of Gomrath due to human pollution and activity), and that the physical, familial, social and cultural familiarities of childhood, have gone. It is strongly hinted that agents of Fundindelve have intervened to bring him to this peace and sense of responsibility. Again disguising themselves as ordinary people, the suggestion is that the Morrigan, or some aspect of the Goddess, has steered him where he needs to be. He finds the magic again, in this new world, and on his own terms. 

 

 

So what can we do when the magic is gone?

Go and get it back.

 

Light vs. Dark

As with Susan Cooper, Garner works with the duality of Light and Dark. Not just in his fiction, but in his personal writings. We are in battle both within ourselves (in Garnerian view, to overcome the bad engrams, or what Jung would call complexes and neuroses) and with external forces (that implant bad engrams). For Jung, Light and Dark are not independent, intelligent agencies, but are formed from within us, which then outwardly projected onto people, places and situations. There is no Devil, no Satan, no Absolute Evil but the evil we make. In the Alderley Edge novels, the Light and the Dark are in constant struggle, with representatives on each side. As with Cooper again, the Light never seems to have as many troops, isn’t as coordinated, isn’t as organised, isn’t as influential and far-reaching, as the Dark. And yet, when Light acts, it has only to fulfill a specific and much less sizable effort than the Dark will muster. 

Nastrond from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

 

Consider a match lit in a pitch black room. Immediately the dark retreats as the room becomes filled with light. Only one match is needed. 

 

 

The Shamanism of Alan Garner

In Boneland, he examines the inheritance of shamanistic burden. Starting with a prehistoric shaman in flashbacks that underscore events in the present time, we see a laboured individual working to keep the stars from falling. Eventually he passes the responsibility to a newcomer from a migrating tribe. The suggestion is, these responsibilities to keep the Dark from overcoming the Light, evolve throughout the ages to take on different forms. For the prehistoric shaman, it is his task to make sure day follows night. For Cadellin, epochs later, High Magic is used to prepare the Sleeping King for his last battle. For Colin in the present, it is astronomy and other minute actions (his autistic routines for example) that enables his shamanistic responsibilities to manifest. All three forms are vastly different from each other, and here Garner is telling us that there’s no absolutism in the methods, detail and aesthetics of the shaman’s struggle to keep back the Dark, but an underlying truth that shape-shifts through the countless generations, and across multiple cultural exchanges. It is a simple yet profound message, that wisdom falls back on universality to transmit itself – and from Garner the shaman himself. Consider how his mental anguishes (Attack of the Engrams!) brought him to mythic time. Consider also the fact that when he was a child, he was very ill and bedridden for months on end, year after year, to the point where he entered delirious dreamtimes and neared death. Such trauma is the bedrock of shamanic awakening, and as he reached adulthood and started to publish his books, Alan Garner initiated shamanistic storytelling to awaken his readers, bring them inner, outer and mythic time, and experience the violence of repeated histories. 

 

 

 

Finding Pepperland

OK, big subject this. I’ll lay it on the table: I wish my late teens and early twenties had taken place in the late 60s and early 70s. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that cost of living was fairer, house prices much cheaper, wages higher, more opportunities for the working class and my favourite Doctor Who stories are from this time. The most important one, however, is the culture of this time, and the counterculture. I wish I’d been part of the Summer of Love. I wish I could have gone to the Glastonbury Free Festival, Isle of Wight Festival, Woodstock, lived in Notting Hill Gate or Haight-Ashbury, taken the trail to Kathmandu, and retired to a commune to finish my days. But I was born in the late 80s, when all that was crushed by money money money loads a’money! Even my mother was too young to have been part of that, while her parents had been too old.

 

 

But that being said, the hippies found me anyway. My mother moved in all kinds of circles – one month it’d be bikers, the next Goths, then coppers in the local police station bar, but she’d always circulate back to the type she felt most at home with: New Agers, older men and women who’d been hippies in the 60s. Thinking back, I think she was drawn to them because they were incredibly accepting of her, coupled with the fact she loved 60s music, the freedom of that time, the energy, and, dare I say, because she loved Absolutely Fabulous which featured some aging ‘counterculturalists’ and their reluctance to give up the 60s lifestyle. These experiences as a kid laid the groundwork for me (add the radical left wing indoctrination of the Pertwee era) to be drawn to these types of people as I entered adulthood. Consequently I fell into hippy circles myself, always by chance: neighbours, colleagues, friends of friends. The world comes alive in their company. There’s no pretence, no hiding yourself like there is with more conservative, ‘normal’ social groups. In the company of these people, you can talk about anything, be anything, become anyone you want. They seriously don’t care if you’re an autistic, illegitimate geek with a liking for 70s British science fiction – they like you for who you are. Spend an evening in their company, and they show you a better, more progressive, and more expansive existence, and they get you closer to who you are. My friends throughout the years, you know who you are, have made me a better person. They freed me from my own holdbacks. My friends who go to India on pilgrimages, to free music festivals with their campervans, who live in narrowboats, who keep bees and have thousands of books, who spend time in peace camps and rescue trees and tortoises! You have shaped me, and here’s how...

 

 

Ethos of the Hippies

According to Wikipedia, the values and characteristics of hippies, originating in the 60s, are broadly:

Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly

Freedom from societal restrictions, dogmas, capitalism and consumerism

Environmentalism and anti-industrialisation

Altruism, joy, peace, love and honesty

Inclusiveness and equality; civil rights for disenfranchised groups – feminism and Women’s Lib, black and ethnic rights, Gay Liberation

Free Love – love and sex unshackled from the oppression of religion, traditions, and conservative values; sex outside of marriage, children outside of marriage, mixed race relations, recreational sex, same sex relations etc.

Agrarian, socialist utopian communal living aspirations

Spiritual consciousness – meditation, yoga, Neo-paganism, Eastern philosophies etc.

Comfortable and practical clothes

Longer hair that symbolised freedom of appearance

Social activism

Anti-war, anti-nuclear and non-violence

Exploration of altered states of consciousness; psychedelia

Travel and broadening of experiences

 

Turn on

Tune in

Drop out

 

I share this ethos as default, it hurts to drift from it – I cannot bear conservatism, traditions, dogmas, homogeneities of opinion strictly enforced, I need absolute freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom of ideas, freedom of mind, freedom of soul.

 

 

 

Psychedelia

One of the things I live for is psychedelia, as in psychedelic consciousness raising. I don’t mean just dropping some acid, I mean altered states of consciousness reached by any means, even just being exposed to a work of art or piece of music, meditations, yoga, whatever. The outcome is a change in your perception, and opening of the doors of the mind, transcending to a higher realisation, a distortion of reality, an alchemical mixing of given forms, and a temporary loss of self-identity.

Without it I’d be lost. Doctor Who is a psychedelic show, and I think it lit the fuse on this. It has a psychedelic title sequence and music, a psychedelic hero travelling in a psychedelic time machine. The show mixes genres, styles, tropes, imageries and norms, to achieve brand new vistas.

The counterculture really put this consciousness front and centre. In the WISE Isles, it was maybe less political than it was in the USA, but what the counterculture here lost in activism it gained in fantastical rabbit-hole exploring. Directly inspired by childhood and children’s literature, and intertwined with the rural nature of the Isles, the UK counterculture really was a return to the garden. Psychedelia brought us Sgt Pepper, early prog rock, Pink Floyd, and from the USA The Byrds, and Jefferson Airplane. It blasted open access to true human potential.

I can go to work, can pass off as acceptable, well-behaved, but I live for coming home, relaxing, meditating, listening to psychedelic music and embarking on transcendental experiences.

 

 

The New Age

Now when I was growing up, the ideals and aesthetics of New Age thinking permeated popular culture, and culture in general, everywhere you looked. It really felt like we were heading toward a post-historical golden age where all races, cultures and religions mix and blend into One People of a United Earth. Look at Star Trek: First Contact and the whole “we don’t work for money, we work for the betterment of humankind” stuff, or the remake of The Time Machine with the mixed-raced Eloi. Perhaps the biggest proponent of New Agey-ness-y is The Fifth Element, with its pluralist spirituality. How can I explain it to people who are now too young to have known this world? Differences were falling away, history was just that: history.

 

 

Fast-forward to 2022 and look what’s going in cyberspace. I remember when cyberspace was the New Age ideal, a jack-in paradise, a virtual reality ashram (remember Jenny ‘techno pagan’ Calendar anyone? Neo? Morpheus? Timothy Leary?). Now it’s a place of constant arguing and belittling. In this new cyberspace,  to be New Age is a black mark. The general gist is that New Agers are deluded, idiotic and self-absorbed, vile appropriators of indigenous cultural practices, anti-science, anti-reason, ableist, capitalistic, materialistic and blinded by consumerism, with all their beliefs predicated on theft, misunderstanding or, worse, originates in white supremacy and Nazi-ism. And that's not including what the fundamental Christians have to say about us.

But I’m trying not to be affected by those vibes. The world we are in, it’s just ‘of its time’, and like everything before it, and everything to come, it’s transient and impermanent. The internet once offered freedom, now it’s just Babylon’s amplifier. But that’s fine. None of that matters now. I have got myself to the point where I have simplified my internet use to the minimum, and when the time comes I’ll leave Twitter and say goodbye to social media for the final time.

 

 

What can I say to defend New Age beliefs? First, here’s three articles I think can do a better job of reflecting positively on the New Age Movement than I could, the first is about New Age Travellers, another from Medium and the last from the Patheos website. I’m maybe not quite as involved with the more far-out beliefs that many of my brothers and sisters have, but I am a fairly well-read young buck and approach all claims with a critical, Jungian mind. I recognise my spirituality’s tenet is that all faiths, all cultures past and present, all peoples, are different aspects of one unified human spiritual journey.

That’s the New Age – the current world is dying. A new one will emerge, and all differences will give way to togetherness and the pursuit of enlightenment, reason, wholeness and balance. The New Age embodies total equality, total diversity, a Rainbow of many colours emerging from one Light, to see in an age of learning, love, peace and harmony. That’s not dumb, or misguided. It’s... it’s... well, it’s Sesame Street with added mystic crystal revelations.

The spirituality I have inherited came from the 60s counterculture and it seeks unity and understanding.

To be New Age, is to be free and full of love for others. And if there are New Agers out there who refute autism, who are anti-vaxxers, anti-science woo merchants, then they need to rethink why they’re in this game at all.

 

 

Tomorrow’s People

I used to have long hair, I used to spend all my time with intellectual drop-outs, peace-loving pot smokers, artists, people who lived in shacks or vans or tents, people who went on protests, to the Solstice, went abruptly off-grid never to be seen again. Somewhere along the line, in my late twenties I cut my hair, started wearing more modest, acceptable clothing, got a steady job and began to behave in a filtered, censored version of myself. I never meant for that to happen, it’s just that I realise it now when I look back. Being exposed to the System massively neutralised me, took the light out of my eyes. Last year, I became seriously depressed, but synchronicity suddenly worked to my favour, and I changed my job to something better and more fulfilling, and made interventions to get my house in order. I began reaching out to the Self, reconnecting the threads, exploring the depths of my psyche. My wellbeing is increasing, I generally feel more confident, more relaxed (I’d got very anxious and uptight about everything), more aware, more focused, meaningful, fulfilled, loving to my family and friends and colleagues, open and understanding and tolerant – my bracelets are back on, my pendants are around my neck again and I am unapologetically left-wing, culturally liberal, no matter how much derision I receive. Now, at this age, I am mature enough to recognise the System for what it is: a pile of shit. Capitalist, freedom-sapping, hierarchical, feudal and oppressive.

 

 

 

 

The book that has had a most profound effect on me, and that has offered me the most enduring spark of inspiration to prepare me for the New Age, is Jeremy Sandford’s Tomorrow’s People, published in 1974, which captures recollections and reflections from people who attended various free festivals in Britain in the 60s and 70s, such as Phun City, Glastonbury Fayre, and the Isle of Wight Festival, alongside pages and pages of photography, both in B&W and colour, capturing moments from these festivals. The book’s an inspiring and profound snapshot of Britain’s counterculture movement and its particular strong relationship with the land. Of the many notes I have taken from this book, two really stand out for me: the first is someone talking about the way festivals attendees were camping in the nearby woods, as if it were a rehearsal for the breakdown of society through nuclear war. For me, this is the greatest gift a New Age, hippy outlook on life can give. Not only could it provide us the skills, knowledge and confidence to survive off-grid and without state resources, but it does so by bestowing you the peace of mind that others who have joined you in the creation of this new society will be united in a purpose of love and harmony. The other major note occurs at the end of the book, when someone is recounting how they arrived at a festival, a night looking out over all the lit tents and circles of happy people, contemplating his family’s rejection of him, and how he now felt happier and more free than at any other time in his life. This is something I can relate to. I escaped a very bad, bad home life with the help of my hippie friends, and relocated to another part of the country. Arriving in my new life, without anyone to answer to, no-one trying to control me, blackmailing me, threatening me, I felt true freedom for the first time. I can’t begin to explain the euphoria. No-one, and I mean no-one should have their freedom crushed by someone else. I swore that now I knew what true freedom was, I’d never allow it to be taken away. Even if my body is incarcerated, my soul will always be free.

The book over and over again comes to the assertion that freak culture requires absolute freedom, and that freedom comes in temporary zones around festival events, and those zones must be in rural locations. It asserts that all young people in Britain have a birthright to be out in the country, in tents, in yurts, tipis, treehouses, shelters, or just plain sleeping on the grass under the night sky. But what is this temporary utopia? It’s given as a testbed for a new society, but what does that consist of? Here are some notes and lessons I have picked up from this book, that I take into my heart, soul and practice:

 

To drop out, to be a hippy, to attend festivals and gatherings, is to confront the crisis the planet is heading toward and learn to live together and love together

 

That having this state of mind allows us to be united in action, positive, direct and firm

 

That those who throw themselves into this anarchist utopia are an elite, because they are truly free and truly capable – and that it’s not an exclusive club, everyone is invited. Everyone on Earth can be elite if they let themselves be

 

Communication in these places in on another level, mostly non-verbal

 

Bikers will find their way there too (like they did at the May Day Hastings Jack-in-the-Green procession). It seems there is an odd synchronicity between hippies and bikers

 

The night-time there is one of peace and energy, with the glow of fires and lamps (like the feeling in that old Orange advert about the New York blackouts, you know the one: ‘Svetlana sucks lemons across from me’)

 

There’s an extreme tolerance there and of sharing everything. The only thing that isn’t tolerated are people who are themselves intolerant

 

Police will be there, in plain clothes, infiltrating

 

There will be drums and drumbeats, the primal vibrations of humankind. There will also be guitars, recorders and ocarinas (I love ocarinas!)

 

The Glastonbury ethic is – caring for ourselves in conjunction with the environment, consciousness of our affect on the environment , and its effect on us: we are the earth, the earth is us

 

Glastonbury Fayre was what society could have become – beautiful... too beautiful that people couldn’t easily return to their normal lives

 

Glastonbury is a sacred place, impregnated with quintessence. It’s the very heart of Albion from which a new spirit, the Age of Aquarius, will emerge on the WISE Isles

 

Quote from page 105: ‘The idea of the fayre is to bring together as many people as possible that are involved in living alternative life-styles, in one place, to do their thing. To build an alternative campsite, as far as possible, that is ecologically sound, existing in harmony with the environment’, contacting organisations and charities to bring help and ideas-

1.To utilise natural sources of energy (e.g. windmills, water wheels, solar stills, methane gas from recycled sewage) [bear in mind this is 1974!]

2.To recycle waste products where practical (e.g. sewage paper, grease, glass, etc.)

3.To provide cheap alternative structures for shelter, living, working, etc. (e.g. domes, teepees and other tent forms, paper or card houses, earth structures)

4.To make whole food available in free food kitchens, and for personal preparation (e.g. organically grown vegetables, local market garden produce, bulk whole grains and flour, untreated local milk, scrumpy, and spring water)

With the following sorts of activities-

1.  Music – buskers, minstrels, flamencos, sitar, drummers etc.

2.  Theatre – natural theatre, mime, children’s pantomimes, Cornish folk theatre

3.  Morris dancing

4.  Children’s adventure playground, kites, pot-holing, swimming, walking, exploring

5.  Yoga and metaphysics

6.Environmental experiment, e.g. plant-human, animal-human relationships, monitoring plant and natural cycle reactions

7.    Communications – e.g. free discussion, site news-sheet, information centre [and I’d add – a library], free surplus exchange centres

[8.  And I’d also add – scientific endeavour, labs and scientific research]

At night-time – stage and entertainment, four performances a night, light shows, DJs, films, star-gazing, telescopes and star charting

 

Rent and landlords are a form of feudalism, from the time of William the Conqueror

 

Message from Ron Reid, the photographer –

‘To a million faces I wish to express my gratitude, for you have reflected an image of love and courage. Our fathers’ path has led them to the edge of extinction in a senseless race for material growth; you their children, free from the confines of a confused society, have found a new tranquillity, a togetherness that can be cradled in one everlasting word – ‘love’. The last hours of darkness are the longest and you are the light that creases the dawn of Aquarius.

 

Let Reid’s words be the rallying cry for every generation.