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You can use this page to email Tom Graves about Needles of Stone.
About the Book
This book is a search for a magical technology: the elusive 'earth energies' connected with standing stones and other sacred sites. As Tom Graves puts it, "it is a study in ideas, an attempt to put some of the ideas that have arisen in the 'earth mysteries' field into a coherent shape or form, to place them in a context that makes practical sense at the present time".
Combining original research in dowsing with a review of many different aspects of the sites - from archaeology to geomancy and magic, from physics to ghost-hunting and parapsychology - the book shows that we need to look at them not so much in terms of the past, but in the effects and reality of those earth-energies _now_. It ends with a call for a re-assessment of the pagan view of reality, to see where its experience can be of value in our present over-civilised world.
First published in 1978, Needles of Stone has long and rightly been considered a classic. With the addition of new chapters, this 30th anniversary edition allowed the author to bring the work more up to date and give an opportunity to reflect on what has happened - what's changed, what's stayed the same, which way the field seems to be going - since the book was first written.
(A paperback edition of Needles of Stone is available from Grey House at http://www.greyhouseinthewoods.org/nest.htm priced at £12.95 / US$24.95.)
About the Author
Tom Graves is probably best-known as a writer on subjects in the 'alternative' domains, such as dowsing (water-divining), earth-mysteries research and the relationship between science, technology and magic. Yet he has also done extensive research and writing on a wide range of other themes, including business-models, personal-development and gender-issues. The common theme in all of his work is explorations of how people learn new skills - the development of sensemaking, decision-making, judgement and awareness in discovering new capabilities for and of themselves.
For more information on Tom and his work, visit his personal website http://tomgraves.org or his more business-oriented weblog at http://weblog.tetradian.com .