Message #1195

[Deanna Witmer]

Spiritual significance of ley lines
Watkins's 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.[citation needed]

Two British dowsers, Captain Robert Boothby and Reginald A. Smith, Keeper of the British and Roman Antiquities of the British Museum, have linked the appearance of prehistoric sites such as earthworks, barrows and prehistoric temples, with underground streams and magnetic currents. (Capt Robert Boothby, R.N.: "The Religion of the Stone Age", Journal of the British Society of Dowsers, Vol 2, p135).

Guy 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.'[citation needed] Citation: More accurately, Underwood does not refer to the actual crossings of water lines and aquastats as "holy lines", but as instances in which the two "run together on approximately the same course".(Guy Underwood "The Pattern of the Past" Page 37, Abacus Books, ISBN 349134138).

One of Underwood's major observations obtained through his study of dowsing was that both the siting and entire layout of ancient monuments in Europe, from Stonehenge up to the medieval cathedrals and churches, all appear to be predicated entirely by the geodetic topology, noting that all the major spiritual centers and sites he had studied were built over 'blind springs'; major confluences of lines at specific places, which take a spiral course (blind springs, also referred to as 'knots' by traditional water dowsers, are also where water-wells are typically drilled).

Underwood credits Reginald Allender Smith with both the original discovery of this phenomenon in prehistoric temples and earthworks such as barrows, and also for coining the term "blind spring", in a paper Smith read to the British Society of Dowsers in 1939, which he concluded with the statement: "The constant presence of underground water at the exact centres of these circles and earthworks is a significant feature easily verified by others.If this is allowed to be intentional, then the selection of sites for consecration by the Druids and their predecessors no longer appears arbitrary, but dictated largely by geological conditions" (Journal of the British Society of Dowsers, volume 3, 1939).