If ever there was a place possessed of agency, it is Glastonbury. Of the thousands of pilgrims who visit the Holy Island, very few respond to it with indifference. Look at the many forums, Facebook groups, blogs and videos exploring it, and the messages are all in a similar vein: Glastonbury is a spiritual home; a place of healing and guidance; of powerful and positive energies, peace and tranquility; a numinous, magickal or liminal place where the veils are thin; a sanctuary provoking outpourings of intense feeling and emotion; a sacred land with an intoxicating, psychedelic atmosphere. Some point to the rich weave of legends and folklore, intrinsic to its identity, as a source of mystique; others to its geomantic composition: a nexus of myriad leys and energy lines, girdled by a great terrestrial zodiac. Yet others revel in its alternative and counter-cultural legacy; its tolerance for any and every hue of belief-system, and its conspicuous promotion of individualism and personal freedom.
But alongside the light is darkness. Occasionally, pilgrims find the Avalonian atmosphere ominous and unsettling. Vulnerable and unsupported people, damaged by the modern world, come to Glastonbury seeking solace. Some are from the margins of society and bring complex needs. Crime is a problem, the town being significantly more dangerous than the Somerset average. Tourism has led some to bemoan Glastonbury’s transformation into a New Age theme park for weekend pagans, exploited by those who would trivialise the sacred for monetary gain.
Scratch at this veneer however, and something genuinely profound lies beneath and behind: a deep magick; an otherness; a tutelary intelligence exerting its will and imparting an inscrutable telesis to the Holy Island’s destiny. This is the sensation experienced by many: that there is an embodied sentience to the land; an uncanny but persistent presence. In animistic terms, the Holy Island exhibits personhood. In magicko-mythical terms, this immanence is anthropomorphised as the Angel or the Goddess of Avalon, being a localised expression of the Magna Mater, mighty Gaia.
Beyond the generalised feelings of peace and numinosity experienced by pilgrims, this entity or deity is capable of effecting profound change on those she deems in need of transformation. Many have reported it as something approaching a spiritual crisis, manifesting as severe personal trauma, a sundering; disharmony and dissipation leading to spiritual breakdown and a total reconstitution of the self.
While my own encounters with Avalonian otherness were nowhere near as extreme, I have been ineluctably drawn back to this place of uncanny atmospheres and manifold energies again and again for over thirty years, studying and learning its secrets in tandem with my own evolving practice, becoming absorbed in the Avalonian current.
It was the mid 1980s when I first visited, with my parents, as part of a tour of the west country, encompassing Stonehenge, Avebury and other sites. At that time, as a young teenager, I was not interested in what I perceived to be dead monuments; places once important and treated with reverence, but whose purpose was long extinguished. To me, they were the excarnated bones of a barely understood age, relics without a destiny. Upon arrival at Glastonbury however, I experienced a revelation of sorts. Exploring the Tor and the surrounding area, I had a strong sense of crossing a threshold, of moving from the normal or profane world to a place where different rules applied, as though it existed outside linear time. No doubt I was also seduced by the libertine and faintly anarchic atmosphere, but the over-riding impression was that this place was alive; that its destiny was still unfolding and yet to be resolved. Glastonbury was part of a mythic continuum, a cycle that, in its turning, ensured its myths were forever coming-into-being.
The next time I returned, it was with my then girlfriend. Ignorant of most things magickal, I performed a ritual at the foot of the Tor involving some minor bloodletting. I still have the words to that rite, an argot of Crowleyan verse and confected exhortations. But the ritual worked, and its effects are still felt to this day. I attribute this not at all to my intuitive abilities, and wholly to Glastonbury’s status as a fountainhead of extraordinary magickal power. The dictum ‘simple magick in powerful places’ has been my guiding principle ever since.
I have returned to Glastonbury repeatedly in those intervening decades, working with and learning from its powers: its deities, ancestors, genii locorum and other spirits. My practice is largely devotional and solitary, oriented around an evolving liturgy. Much of this is transmitted in the book Avalon Working, including details of various encounters.
Of the insights and revelations I have gained over time, I use the book to focus on one in particular: that Glastonbury is an initiatic landscape where the presiding deity guides the catechumen into her Mysteries. This is not the passive receipt of personal transmutation received by some, as described above, but an active process of co-creation, through her exercising of agency and through the magician’s directed engagement with her arcana.
In turn this is made possible because Glastonbury is also both a sorcerous landscape and a ritual landscape. Sorcerous, because the Terra Mater is immanent, not transcendent; she is present in the land. She does not merely preside over the Island; she is the Island. Thus, right relation with the land equates to congress with deity. And ritual because the Holy Island is uniquely configured for the enactment of ceremony and rite, the Tor functioning as a central place and axis mundi. This is borne out by archaeology, which shows very little evidence of human occupation, but certainly evidence of cult. That Glastonbury was once a near-island, connected to the world-at-large by a narrow neck of land bisected by a linear earthwork, is indicative of its status as a sanctuary closed to the profane world.
It might thus be argued that Glastonbury’s explicit purpose is to invite personal transmutation, to evolve the self through an initiatory process. This is articulated in Arthurian legend, in tales of the founding of British alchemy, in allegory, in Avalonian symbolism, and in the esoteric cosmology of which Glastonbury is a part.
Glastonbury has strong associations with the New Age movement, and this is right and proper for the reasons outlined above; it is an engine of esoteric rebirth and renewal, and is therefore linked with apocalyptic shifts in consciousness such as the Age of Aquarius and the Aeon of Horus. The initiatory cycle outlined in Avalon Working is rooted in magicko-religious acts as old as civilization, where the karcist assumes the role of a solar hypostasis, engaging in an hieros gamos with the Terra Mater and descending into the body of the earth to become enlightened and renewed. These archaic rites of sacred directionality, sovereignty and cosmic order, presaging even the Mysteries, were once enacted by priests and regents. I make it clear in the book that, for thousands of years, our so-called leaders have failed in the fulfilment of their sacral contract. Therefore, as befits the incoming Age – characterised by collective spiritual awareness, individualism and personal freedom, and liberation from societal norms – its falls to us to collectively fulfil these sacral obligations; to re-enchant the land, maintain cosmic conformity and heal the inner and outer wasteland.
Superficially at least, Glastonbury satisfies an age-old desiderium concerning England as an Arcadian realm, a sacred land. But it has also been regarded as Albion’s indisputable spiritual omphalos for hundreds of years. From William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, John Dee and Edward Kelley, and Elias Ashmole to, more recently, Dion Fortune, Frederick Bligh Bond, Katherine Maltwood, John Cowper Powys, Gareth Knight, William Grey, Kenneth Grant, John Michell, and many others, all have acknowledged the central role of Avalon – the Holy Island’s inner, eternal and otherworldy aspect, and its denizens – in Albion’s spiritual composition and its wider destiny.
If Glastonbury has fallen from favour amidst the modern occult revival, my immodest goal is to once again rehabilitate it as Albion’s preeminent magickal locus and centre of the Western Mystery Tradition. Avalon Working is not a typical book about Glastonbury however, being shorn New Age trappings and presented squarely for the consumption of the serious magickal practitioner. It is an expansive subject and there is still much to discuss, so I will be exploring a range of related topics in more detail on Substack shortly.