Introduction

The earth is alive: living, breathing, pulsing.

It lives, but sleeps, stirring at times: and the people of the cities try to ignore it, hoping it will stay asleep.

It breathes: and the wind batters the grimy arrogance of the townsman, who dreams of ‘Man’s increasing control over the blind forces of nature’.

It pulses, its seasons and cycles turning in all their subtleties: and those pulses are accepted and realised in the lives of everyone and everything in the countryside.

Our problem is that we’ve become too civilised to accept that the earth is alive. Our whole way of life is civilised, ‘citified’: we think of cities and towns as the normal places to be, to work and to live. To our culture, the countryside is a sort of inter-urban space, partly just ‘pretty’ landscapes and partly areas where food-production for our cities goes on, now greatly improved by the resourcefulness of modern science, technology and economics. The country is a place to get away from the cares of the city when we want to: just for a drive, perhaps, or - if we’re wealthy enough - to our nicely modernised country cottages for the weekend. Apart from some minor problems - soon, no doubt, to be solved by the constant progress of science, technology and economics - our world, and our view of the world, is secure: nature is tamed, and does what it is told by us to do. The old, near-forgotten war between civis and pagus, the world-views of the city and of the village, seems indisputably to have been settled in favour of the city and its Law and Order: and the victory is symbolised by the power in our culture of the schoolroom, the law-court, the laboratory and the bank.

But for all the apparent power of that image of Order, it is only an image: and a very tenuous one at that. Even in our culture, the veneer of ‘civilisation’ is thin: behind it, the real forces represented by the religio paganorum, the religion of the villagers, are still at work, no matter how hard we may try to deny their existence. Those forces are the subtle and not-so-subtle forces of nature: pagan cultures were based on an acceptance of those forces, while our civilisation is based on an artificial separation from nature, based on the belief that we can be ‘above’ or beyond those forces and can control them to suit our whims. In some ways that belief is correct, for compared to the old pagans our material living standards are remarkably high - but so is the level of misery in our civilisation. The richnesses of the quality of life, the dignity and wisdom that are such a characteristic of the great pagan cultures,¹ are conspicuously lacking in ours. Despite our centuries of mocking and despising them, the pagans still have much to teach us about living with the reality of the forces of nature.

This is hardly news: the cry of ‘Back to the land!’ has been a recurrent one throughout the centuries, and its present forms can be seen in the increasing number of weekend country cottages and self-sufficiency communes, and the increasing use of the ‘fresh from the country’ theme in advertising. This idyllic view of nature and the countryside is a false one: it’s a civilised image far removed from reality. The country-cottage boom has pushed the prices of country properties way above the level that those who have to work in the country can afford: the country idyll meets with the ‘market forces’ of civilised greed. The average life of a supposedly ‘self-sufficient’ commune is apparently around six weeks: few civilised people appreciate the sheer hard work needed to survive in the country at all, let alone to pay off the bank-loan and taxes as well. Few would-be communards appreciate the reality of human nature, and those communes that do survive do so either through strict self-discipline, through falling back on the civilised safety-net of Social Security payments, or both. The food advertised as ‘fresh from the country’ is, more often than not, just another variety of factory-processed pap, carelessly grown to produce maximum profit regardless of real quality, and carefully selected and scrubbed to remove any uncivilised irregularities and dirt. In looking to the countryside to provide the quality of life that our civilisation lacks, we take our civilised ideas along with us, and are then surprised that the expected, demanded miracles don’t happen. If we are to ‘go back to nature’ in a realistic way, we have to deal with nature as it is, not how we assume it to be.

The trap is our belief that we can be ‘above’ nature, for we can only understand nature if we accept that we under-stand it, literally ‘stand-under’ it. That is what the pagans did. It’s clear that people in pagan cultures never saw themselves merely as being ‘close to the land’, but as an inseparable part of it: they accepted they were part of nature, and could live best by working with it instead of trying to fight against it. They realised that to fight nature was to fight human nature too. For all its irrationality, paganism was a way of working with nature, a way that worked so well that even in Britain it flourished in most country areas until well into the middle of the 20th century, and still continues as the basis of most local traditions and religious festivals.² Paganism was a way of working with nature to provide quality, meaning and hope in life.

But if we are to look to paganism to help us balance out some of the excesses of civilisation, and to restore some quality, meaning and hope into civilised life, we have a real difficulty in knowing where to start. The old pagan gods just seem ridiculous in a city context, and the ‘country bumpkin’ and ‘ignorant peasant’ images of paganism that civilisation has so carefully nurtured don’t help. Without a pagan awareness of nature, the old techniques of paganism can be terrifyingly destructive, particularly on an emotional level, as many civilised fools who have played with witchcraft have found out: the civilised Church, which still denies the existence of many aspects of nature, was right at least in that respect. The whole pagan worldview is different from our civilised one: it has a totally different definition of reality, one that makes little or no sense in terms of our religion of ‘science’. If we are to make use of the pagan world-view to help us understand nature, and thus understand ourselves, we have to find some key point around which the pagan world-view and our civilised one can be made to make sense.

That key point seems to be the pagan view of the ‘spirit’ of a place, the genius loci. To our civilised view, places are just commodities, to be bought and sold like any other commodity; but in the pagan view, probably best typified by that of the American Indians,³ places can have a sacredness, a spiritual importance, that seems to bear no relation to the more physical characteristics of the place.

We normally look to the past to study paganism, since civilisation has made sure that very few pagan cultures survive intact; but the procedures of conventional archaeology are of little use for studying ‘sacredness’, for they are only suited to finding and studying objects, not beliefs or forces. As far as conventional archaeology is concerned, our knowledge of why sacred sites and structures are where they are has progressed little further than Defoe’s comment about Boscawen-un stone circle in the seventeenth century: ‘that all that can be learn’d of them is, That here they are’.⁴

But if conventional archaeology cannot help us in our search for a new understanding of nature, the work of researchers like Guy Underwood, Alfred Watkins, Tom Lethbridge and Alexander Thom, on the less conventional fringes of archaeology, can. Looking at their work, it becomes clear that the pagan sacred sites are not as randomly placed as they at first appear to be: there are definite if subtle characteristics, apparently natural characteristics in some cases, that go together to make up the ‘sacredness’ of a site.

In looking at the past in this study, we have to remember why we’re doing so. We’re not looking at the past for its own sake: the past is gone. Our aim should be to learn from the past, to put our studies to practical use, to understand the pagan world-view in terms of its practical relationship with nature. We have to remember that paganism worked, in areas where our civilisation so obviously does not.

So a good starting point for our study, our search for a new understanding of nature, would be an aspect of old pagan practice that still produces real and measurable results, but which clashes with our assumptions about reality. The dowser’s art provides us with such a starting point, and if we combine dowsing with archaeology, some interesting things start to happen - not just to our view of the past, but to our view of reality as well.