By Margaret Duncan Miller
Talk given at the London Blavatsky Branch 13th November 1999

Many extraordinary myths are associated with Glastonbury Tor. It has been called a Magic Mountain, a faeries' glass hill, a spiral castle, a Grail Castle, the Land of the Dead, Hades, a magnetic power point, a crossroads of leys, a centre for Goddess fertility rituals and celebrations, and a converging point for UFOs.

From the top of the Tor on a clear day, to the north you will see the Mendip Hills and the city of Wells and its cathedral; to the west the Isle of Steepholm in the British Channel; Brent Knole to the north west; the Polden and Quantock Hills to the south west, and the Black Mountains of Wales in the far distance; the Hood monument and Dorset to the south east and to the east Alfred's tower on the borders of Wiltshire and Clayhill, a hill famous for its UFO sightings.

On a misty day, you can experience for yourself what it must have been like when Glastonbury was an island - the Isle of Glass. From the summit of the Tor you will see only the swirling mists of Avalon, with patches of green in between. What is now the flatness of the Somerset Moors and Levels has become watery marshes again.

Pre-History of the Tor:
The mythology of the Tor reaches back into most ancient times - far beyond Christianity and the Druids - to what has been dismissed as Paganism. As each new cult or religion supersedes another, so it tries to blot out what came before. This is what must have happened in the case of Goddess Worship, a way of life that once existed all over the world.

Believers would see her essential nature as harmony and balance of the natural order of ebb and flow, growth and decay - life itself. She was evoked and celebrated on hills and mountains, these being her seats or thrones on earth. Many early images of the Goddess have spirals on her breasts, resembling the spiral on the Tor. Spirals also represented the natural energies of the earth and sky - energies that were co-operated with and revered. Spirals also symbolised the coiled serpent or dragon, both regarded as sacred in the old religion. In the Shakti cults of South East Asia and China dragons were associated with clouds and rain and the Sumerian goddess, Tiamat, was a sea-serpent and Great Water Goddess. The Greek Mother of all things was the serpent Eurynome who laid the world egg. The dragon was also regarded as a manifestation of the psyche in which the real and imaginary are blurred and are, as in nature, only different aspects of life.

The maze pattern on Glastonbury Tor, similar to the Cretan labyrinths, was created for ritual purposes long before the Druids are said to have used it in their rites and initiation ceremonies. The booklet The Glastonbury Maze by Geoffrey Ashe gives the evidence that he found in his long study of the Tor and concludes that the maze is one of the great ritual works of Britain. Therefore if we visualise the Tor as a Dragon, symbol of the Primal Mother, and the place where ceremonies of rebirth and initiation took place, we can imagine a ritual where the participants would come face to face with the Mother, enter into her subterranean darkness, chaos and death, and be reborn again by her life-giving properties - implying that there are tunnels within the Tor. Later the Celts and Druids took over the sacred places and performed their own ceremonies.

There are stories both real and imaginary about a series of tunnels beneath the Tor. Jazz sessions used to take place in one such tunnel in the early 60s, but since then it appears to have been blocked up. The most famous tale is about a tunnel from the nearby Abbey to the Tor. At one time, some thirty monks are rumoured to have entered the Tor via this tunnel, but only three came out - two were struck dumb and one insane. It is also believes that the spiral maze is represented within as well as without. Wherever these entrances begin or end, it is worth noting that many experienced dowsers are convinced of the Tor's underground springs forming a network of hidden subterranean waterways.

There is no mistaking the powerful elemental quality of the Tor. Some would describe it as a whirlwind, a vortex or meeting point of energies in their present and wildest form; others would describe a primordial Dragon, turning and roaring to be let out, but it must also be noted that this Dragon can be calm and serene.

The Abbey:
The size of the Abbey is particularly striking. The distance from the Egar chapel to the west end of St. Mary's Chapel - previously connected with the main church by a porch, is 580ft.

For those interested in geomatia, there is a wealth of symbolism and meaning to be discovered in the measurement of the Abbey and its surroundings. An ancient connection with Stonehenge a few miles away is indicated. It can be shown, with the closest approach to certainty that is possible in these matters, that Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey were both founded on the same pattern. This does not imply that the Glastonbury founders copied the plan of the ancient temple, but rather that the same traditional model was used in both cases. I would point out a very large time difference between the two constructions, as we know from H.B. Blavatsky that the erection of Stonehenge took place some 37, 000 years ago.

In 1935 Catherine Maltwood announced her discovery of the Glastonbury Zodiac. She had been asked to do illustrations for the medieval romance The High History of the Holy Grail reputedly written at Glastonbury Abbey. As she researched her material, she found that the castles and adventures of the knights of the Round Table corresponded to places in the Vale of Avalon. As she read about the knights' encounters with dragons, lions, giants and others, then traced on the map the places where those adventures took place, she began to notice the outline of a huge lion delineated by the river Cary and an ancient road.

Other figures slowly revealed themselves delineated by streams, tracks and boundaries, and before long she had discovered twelve signs of the Zodiac in their correct order, with the thirteenth figure - the great dog of Langport - outside the circle to the south west guarding the winter signs to the north and the summer signs to the south. She called her discovery The Temple of the Stars, because placing a map of the stars over the circle of effigies, the stars and their respective constellations corresponded.

The word Zodiac means simply the way or path which the sun appears to follow among the stars in the course of a year. However, it can also be regarded as the twelve steps in the story of Creation or the twelve steps to awareness and perfection as found in the Labours of Hercules. Yet again it can mean the search for knowledge and enlightenment as told in the stories of The Holy Grail. Each quest can be seen as an initiation.

According to the Norman Quest for the Holy Grail, King Arthur's Round Table means "the round world and round canopy of the planets and the elements in the firmament, where are to be seen stars and many other things." In Celtic society King Arthur took on the role of the sun as it progressed through the twelve signs of the zodiac, and King Arthur's court would preside over meetings, festivals and judgements.

We can well imagine these mythical cycles taking place round the Twelve Hides of Glastonbury for there is such a wealth of Arthurian lore and legend in the landscape. There is a thirteenth Giant - a five mile long figure of a dog standing outside the Zodiac. It is known as the Great Dog of Langport. It is immediately south west of the Zodiac circle and the figure is like the Egyptian dog Anubis, Guardian of the Underworld. Here the dog could be said to be guarding the Zodiac. In The High History of the Holy Grail the dog is female. She is the questing beast who gives birth to twelve hounds who tear her with their teeth but "no power have they to devour her flesh."

Some miles to the east of Glastonbury lies Avebury Henge. It does not seem to be as well known as Stonehenge, possibly because Stonehenge stands out so dramatically on Salisbury Plain and can be viewed from a distance. The Antiquarian John Aubrey, writing around 1665 stated that Avebury "did as much exceed Stonehenge as a cathedral does a parish church". It covers a circular levelled area of about 28.5 acres, with a diameter of over a quarter of a mile, littered with numerous massive iron sarson stones weighing over ninety tons. Sarson is a type of sandstone occurring as large boulders and blocks on the surface of the Wiltshire downs. Avebury's circles and avenues originally consisted of more than 600 large stones. Few now remain.

There are stone monuments of various kinds the length of the British Isles - on the Western side. Recently a wood henge was found on the seashore of Suffolk - wood, we would suppose, being used on the east side of the country as there was not much natural stone available.

There is a connection between the Avebury circles and Silbury hill. I kept an article from a Sunday Telegraph magazine which I must have had for a good few years - which fell into my hands a I was preparing this talk. A graduate in Geography and British Archaeology from Birmingham University, who is also an artist, named Michael Dames, sees Silbury Hill as the key to understanding "the Neolithic Age". To him it is a great symbol of fertility and central to "Stone Age" life [inverted commas inserted by Margaret Duncan Miller]. He believes "Silbury Hill is the womb of a pregnant woman, seen in profile from above - 140ft from head to thigh. The goddess is squatting in the Neolithic, and many contemporary primitive peoples', birth position as if about to give birth. At Lammas, where the moon rises at a certain point, and the corn stands ready to be cut, the Great Goddess suffers a lunar parturition, or bringing forth. It is this which Michael Dames sees as the treasure of Silbury: a revelation of a prehistoric religion which involved all life, land and nature.

Another professor, Professor Atkinson, who was also researching Silbury Hill, and whose report had not been published, said that "it is just a waste of time talking about "religion" of prehistory because there is simply no documentary evidence, nothing written".

Michael Dames replies to that by saying "If you imagine a society without books, then how, if they had profound thoughts or feelings, did they express them? Ethnologists find increasingly that small-scale art or architecture is a summary of a philosophy - and that is why I believe Silbury is not only a sculpture, but kinetic sculpture, part of life. Silbury shows us a time in European consciousness before the terrible imaginary gap between spirit and flesh, which I consider has been the principle cause of torment in post-neolithic life. When Silbury was built, Britain, in common with the rest of the Neolithic world, worshipped a female divinity".

Evidence for this, Mr Dames believes, lies in thousands of clay, stone and bone effigies of women found all over Europe and the Middle East.