Ley line

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Ley lines are hypothetical alignments of a number of places of geographical interest, such as ancient monuments and megaliths. Their existence was suggested in 1921 by the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins, whose book The Old Straight Track brought the alignments to the attention of the wider public.

The existence of alignments between sites is easily demonstrated. However, the causes of these alignments are disputed. There are several major areas of interpretation:

Archaeological: A new area of archaeological study, archaeogeodesy, examines geodesy as practiced in prehistoric time, and as evidenced by archaeological remains. One major aspect of modern geodesy is surveying. As interpreted by geodesy, the so-called ley lines can be the product of ancient surveying, property markings, or commonly travelled pathways. Numerous societies, ancient and modern, employ straight lines between points of use; archaeologists have documented these traditions. Modern surveying also results in placement of constructs in lines on the landscape. It is reasonable to expect human constructs and activity areas to reflect human use of lines.

Cultural: Many cultures use straight lines across the landscape. In South America, such lines often are directed towards mountain peaks; the Nazca lines are a famous example of lengthy lines made by ancient cultures. Straight lines connect ancient pyramids in Mexico; today, modern roads built on the ancient roads deviate around the huge pyramids. The Chaco culture of Northwestern New Mexico cut stairs into sandstone cliffs to facilitate keeping roads straight.

New Age: The ley lines and their intersection points resonate a special psychic or magical energy, often including elements such as geomancy, dowsing or UFOs, stating that, for instance, UFO's travel along ley lines (in the way that one might observe that cars use roads and highways). These points on lines have electrical or magnetic forces associated with them.

Skeptical: Skeptics of the actuality of ley lines often classify them as pseudoscience. Such skeptics tend to doubt that ley lines were planned or made by ancient cultures, and argue that apparent ley lines can be readily explained without resorting to extraordinary or pseudoscientific ideas.

Alfred Watkins and The Old Straight Track

The concept of ley lines was first proposed by Alfred Watkins. On June 30, 1921, Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire, and went riding near some hills in the vicinity of Bredwardine when he noted many of the footpaths therein seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line. He was studying a map when he noticed places in alignment. "The whole thing came to me in a flash," he would later explain to his son. Some people have portrayed this "flash" as being some sort of mystical experience.

However, some time before Watkins, William Henry Black gave a talk titled Boundaries and Landmarks to the British Archaeological Association in Hereford in September 1870. Here he speculated that "Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe." It is possible that Watkins' experience stemmed from some half-recollected memories of an account of that presentation.

Watkins believed that in ancient times, when Britain had been far more densely forested, the country had been crisscrossed by a network of straight-line travel routes, with prominent features of the landscape being used as navigation points. This observation was made public at a meeting of the Woolhope Club of Hereford in September 1921. His work referred back to G. H. Piper's paper presented to the Woolhope Club in 1882 which noted that

"A line drawn from the Skirrid-fawr mountain northwards to Arthur's Stone would pass over the camp and southern most point of Hatterill Hill, Oldcastle, Longtown Castle, and Urishay and Snodhill castles." The ancient surveyors who supposedly made the lines were given the name "dodmen."

Watkins published his ideas in the books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track. Nevertheless, they were generally received with skepticism in the archaeological community. The archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford refused to accept advertisements for the latter book in the journal Antiquity, and most archaeologists since then have continued to be unaccepting of Watkins' ideas.

In 2004, John Bruno Hare wrote, "Watkins never attributed any supernatural significance to leys; he believed that they were simply pathways that had been used for trade or ceremonial purposes, very ancient in origin, possibly dating back to the Neolithic, certainly pre-Roman. His obsession with leys was a natural outgrowth of his interest in landscape photography and love of the British countryside. He was an intensely rational person with an active intellect, and I think he would be a bit disappointed with some of the fringe aspects of ley lines today."

Despite the largely negative reception to his ideas, some experts have made observations similar to Watkins': Megalithic researcher Alexander Thom offered a detailed analysis of megalithic alignments, proposing a standardization of measure by those who built megaliths. However, Thom avoided using the term "ley line" in his discussion of megaliths. The discovery by Europeans of the Nazca lines, man-made lines on desert pavement in southern Peru, prompted study of their astronomical alignments.

The New Age approach: magical and holy lines

Watkins' theories have been adapted by later writers. Some of his ideas were taken up by the occultist Dion Fortune who featured them in her 1936 novel The Goat-footed God. Since then, ley lines have become the subject of a few magical and mystical theories.

Two British dowsers, Captain Robert Boothby and Reginald Smith of the British Museum, have linked the appearance of ley lines with underground streams and magnetic currents. Underwood conducted various investigations and claimed that crossings of 'negative' water lines and positive aquastats explain why certain sites were chosen as holy. He found so many of these 'double lines' on sacred sites that he named them 'holy lines.'

Two German Nazi researchers Wilhelm Teudt and Josef Heinsch have also claimed that ancient Teutonic peoples contributed to the construction of a network of astronomical lines, called “Holy lines” (Heilige Linien), which could be mapped onto the geographical layout of ancient or sacred sites. Teudt located the Teutoburger Wald district in Lower Saxony, centered around the dramatic rock formation called Die Externsteine as the centre of Germany. Nazism often employed ideation of superiority and associated Aryan descent with ancient higher cultures, often without regard for archaeological or historic fact. See Nazi mysticism.

By the 1960s, the ideas of a landscape crossed with straight lines had become conflated with ideas from various geomantic traditions; mapping ley lines, according to New Age geomancers, can foster "harmony with the Earth" or reveal pre-historic trade routes. John Michell's writing can be seen as an example of this. He has referred to the whole face of China being heavily landscaped in accordance with the laws of Feng Shui. Michell has claimed that Neolithic peoples recognised that the harmony of society depended on the harmony of the earth force. And so in China, ancient Greece, Ireland and Scotland men built their temples where the forces of the earth were most powerful.Rosslyn chapel is located on the Roseline which the Knight Templers had the mystical knowledge to tune into the earth energies, they where great navigator,s whom understood the magnetic energy grid, & adopted the compassrose as one of there great allegoric symbols.

Others feel that ley lines are actually lines that carry gaia’s consciousness around the globe and dynamically interact with people it encounters on its path in a give or take. They feel that this is the reason that sacred sites, places of worship have historically been aligned on ley lines. This is not to say that ley lines attract only the spiritual: Far from it, consciousness as the Bhagavad Gita teaches us can run from the divine to the demonic (See Chapter 16) and ley lines do. Ley lines attract and connect like minded people—thoughts, actions and deeds—in a dynamic exchange of consciousness.

A skeptical approach: chance alignments

Some skeptics have suggested that ley lines do not exist, and are a product of human fancy. Watkins' discovery happened at a time when Ordnance Survey maps were being marketed for the leisure market, making them reasonably easy and cheap to obtain; this may have been a contributing factor to the popularity of ley line theories.

One suggestion is that, given the high density of historic and prehistoric sites in Britain and other parts of Europe, finding straight lines that "connect" sites (usually selected to make them "fit") is trivial, and may be easily ascribed to coincidence. The diagram to the right shows an example of lines that pass very near to a set of random points: for all practical purposes, they can be regarded as nearly "exact" alignments. Naturally, it is debated whether all ley lines can be accounted for in this way, or whether there are more such lines than would be expected by chance. (For a mathematical treatment of this topic, see alignments of random points.)

Regarding the trade-route theories, skeptics point out that straight lines do not make ideal roads in all circumstances, particularly where they ignore topography and require users to march up and down hills or mountains, or to cross rivers at points where there is no portage or bridge.

Are alignments and ley lines the same thing?

The existence of the observed alignments is not controversial. Both believers in magical and ancient theories of ley lines and skeptics of these theories agree that these alignments exist between megaliths and ancient sites.

Most skeptics believe that their null hypothesis of ley-line-like alignments as due to random chance is consistent with the evidence. They believe that this consistency removes the need to explain the alignments in any other way. Some Chaos Magicians have views consistent with that approach, claiming it to be in accord with their generative view of chance. Still, others believe that further theories are needed to explain the observed evidence. See hypothesis testing, falsifiability and Occam's razor for more on these topics.

In discussing the arguments for and against the chance presence of ley alignments it is useful to define the term "alignment" precisely enough to reason about it. One precise definition that expresses the generally accepted meaning of Watkins' ley lines defines an alignment as:

a set of points, chosen from a given set of landmark points, all of which lie within at least an arc of 1/4 degree.

Watkins remarked that if this is accepted as the degree of error, then:

"if only three accidentally placed points are on the sheet, the chance of a three point alignment is 1 in 720."

"But this chance by accidental coincidence increases so rapidly in geometric progression with each point added that if ten mark-points are distributed haphazard on a sheet of paper, there is an average probability that there will be one three-point alignment, while if only two more points are added to make twelve points, there is a probability of two three-point alignments."

"It is clear that a three-point alignment must not be accepted as proof of a ley by itself, as a fair number of other eligible points are usually present."

"A ley should not be taken as proved with less than four good mark-points. Three good points with several others of less value like cross roads and coinciding tracks may be sufficient."

The Leyhunter's Manual (page 88), 1927

One should also bear in mind that lines and points on a map cover wide areas on the ground. With 1:63360 (1-inch-to-the-mile) maps a 1/100-inch (1/4 mm) wide line represents a path over 50 feet (15 m) across. And in travelling across a sheet, an angle of 1/4 degree encompasses something like an additional 600 feet (200 m).

Controversy

The demonstration of the plausibility of the current evidence under the null hypothesis is not a formal disproof of ley line claims. However, it does make skeptics likely to consider ley line theories as unsupported by the current evidence.

Most skeptics would be willing to reconsider the hypothesis of ley lines if there were non-anecdotal evidence of physical, geomagnetic or archeological features that actually lie along the lines. Skeptics believe that no such convincing evidence has been presented.

There is a broad range of beliefs about and theories of ley lines, many of which are not falsifiable, and which are thus not generally amenable to the scientific method. Some people find ley lines compatible with a scientific approach, but much of the literature is written by people who are indifferent to or actively oppose such an approach.

Scientific investigation

According to claims by investigators of ley line theories, some points along the lines possess higher magnetic energy than the average geomagnetic intensity. These claims have been published in "Places of Power" (Paul Devereux; Blandford Press, 1990) and "Lodestone Compass: Chinese or Olmec Primacy?" (John B. Carlson; Science, 1975).

Ley lines in fiction

In a number of sword and sorcery universes use ley lines as channels of subtle magical power, the intersections of which are sites of higher than usual magic energy. Examples of this can be seen in the Warcraft series of video games and the Magic: The Gathering card game series.
Alan Garner lists Watkins's The Old Straight Track in the appendix to The Moon of Gomrath, sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, as the principle inspiration for the Old Straight Track which is one of the core motifs of his book.
Pinvin Careless and his Lines of Force, a play by Peter Terson, has as its central character an old man who wanders the country visiting sites on ley lines.
In the Palladium Books universe of role-playing games, ley lines have been depicted by the authors as being normally unseen lines of magical energy. In games (such as Palladium Fantasy, Rifts and most recently Chaos Earth), these lines contain abundant amounts of Potential Psychic Energy (P.P.E.), from which magic and/or psychic-oriented characters can draw power to enhance their own. In addition, at points where two or more ley lines intersect, an interdimensional portal (or rift) may open at the nexus. If a person steps through an open rift, he is essentially crossing through a tear in the space-time continuum. This can result in his ending up at another rift, typically one connected to one of the lines that composed the first rift, miles away from where he started, if not in another dimension entirely. An important fact in the Rifts universe is that when a person dies, all the P.P.E. in their body is doubled, then absorbed by the Ley Lines. In Rifts and Chaos Earth, then entire world is plunged into an apocalypse when a nuclear exchange overloads the Ley Lines, which burn off the excess energy by triggering earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and other natural disasters, causing a cascade effect that wipes out human civilization.
In the anime Outlaw Star, the Galactic Leyline is an ancient artifact said to be able to manipulate causality (via leylines) to generate supernatural effects.
Ley lines appeared in Hellblazer No.15, in which the character Mercury explains to John Constantine that they are walking over a ley line, which will give them a "positive charge".
In the Doctor Strange graphic novel, Into Shambhala, Strange must disrupt the sickened ley lines and restore the flow of arcane energy through the planet.
Robert Holdstock's novel Mythago Wood takes place in a small tract of primal forest (Ryhope Wood) that grows at a major intersection in the ley matrix. It won the World Fantasy Award for best novel.
Newly discovered "ley lines" outside the fictional village of Crybbe set old evils against New Age in Phil Richman's Curfew (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993).
Ley lines are mentioned in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum in the context of telluric currents and ancient sacred sites functioning as transmitters or receivers of this energy. This is developed further to include modern structures such as the Eiffel Tower. The use of this energy network is linked to the overarching "conspiracy" or "The Plan" that threatens the main characters.
Ley lines are also used in the game Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, where a mad recluse and the Knights Templar try to gain power by standing at a convergance of ley lines at the moment of peak power in the lines. The energy would surge through the Earth into an individual standing at that location.
Ley lines are mentioned in the introduction of the game Watchmaker.
In British comedian Bill Bailey's stand up routine "Part Troll" he suggests that Little Chefs were originally built on leylines and then the roads came and connected them up.
In the sprite comic 8-Bit Theater, references are made to leylines, powerful lines of magical energy that span the earth, forming nexus where they intersect. The character Black Mage is said to be such a nexus.
Paragon City in City of Heroes is said to be placed on a convergence of ley lines, explaining the number of paranormal events and fact that there are so many heroes and villains.
In So Weird, Bricriu (inhabiting Jack) tells Fi that "they" are aware of her "sniffing around the ley lines."
In Richard Purtill's mythological fantasy Enchantment at Delphi, certain characters enhance their potential power by traveling along a ley line extending from Apollo's temple.
In Harry Turtledove's Darkness Series, ley lines are used as routes for magical transports analogous to trains and steamships.
In Wild Arms 3, ley lines are the life force of a planet and are compared to the bloodstream in humans. Temples are built over places that have a strong ley line concentration; the human analogy would compare these spots to internal organs.
The ley lines that traverse London feature heavily in the work of Iain Sinclair.
In the Hellboy comics and movie, the East Bromwich church on Tarmagant Island where Hellboy himself is summoned is said to be erected over the intersection of several ley lines.

External links

Data sources:

The Megalithic Map (which does not take a position on this issue, but does illustrate the distribution of major megaliths in the UK)
Megalithia, a similar website with grid references for over 1,400 sites
GENUKI Parish Database, including grid references for over 14,000 UK churches and register offices
The Gazetteer of British Place Names with over 50,000 entries

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