daniel
06-24-2004, 04:38 AM
here are nice pics:
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/eastfield/eastfield2004a.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/telegraphhill2004b/telegraphhill2004b.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/nelson/nelson2004a.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/june2004a.html
Here is also the text of my article that just appeared in Planet:
My First Crop Circle
Daniel Pinchbeck
The day after I arrived in Glastonbury in July, 2002, I went on a bus tour to see the new crop circles of the season. Our tour guide, David Jones, a gray-haired man in his sixties, told us that his interest in crop circles began when he worked in British military intelligence. In 1976, he was part of a group investigating UFO activity in Wessex. One night, stationed atop a hill, he watched six or seven "spheres of light" hover in the air, then merge into one long sphere. The long sphere ascended to the height of the stars, and then blinked out. "At daylight, we found a straightforward circle, 30’ in diameter, in wheat," he recalled. He gave a short history of the phenomenon from that time.
Since the 1970s, thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of crop circles have appeared in England and around the world each summer. If the entire phenomenon is a human-made concoction, orchestrated by teams of circle-makers across the globe, then it is the largest-scaled, most virtuososic project of anonymous land art ever known. If it is not entirely created by humans, the formations would be of tremendous significance, compelling a paradigm shift in our understanding of the cosmos.
From the early appearance of simple circles and ringed circles, the patterns have evolved into complex geometric patterns and pictograms. Some of them suggest an unknown alchemical language, with dots and squiggles and symbols spread across hundreds of yards of agricultural land. Some of them are vast fractal designs, "Flowers of Life," and curlicued spirals. They can display recognizable symbols from alchemy, the qaballah, Tibetan Buddhism, or even strange alien faces.
The ridicule that is heaped upon the phenomenon makes it difficult to take it seriously. There are human hoaxers — some of them even have clever websites, such as circlemakers.org — but that does not mean the entire phenomenon is a hoax. Some scientists take the crop circles seriously. Gerald Hawkins, former head of the Astronomy Department at Boston University, found new Euclidean paradigms and secret diatonic ratios hidden in the geometry of seemingly simple crop circles. Eltjo Hasselhof, a Dutch physicist and laser engineer, has published papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals theorizing that the formations are caused by a single-point source of electro-magnetism, descending from above. "Anyone who takes the time to explore and verify all of these findings personally will find that the facts are plain: Something very strange is going on," Hasselhof writes in his book, The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles.
The first crop circle I visited appeared the morning before our tour. A photograph of the formation, taken from a helicopter, was passed around the bus. The glyph was oval-shaped, and the image could be read as a classic "Tree of Life." It showed a tree bearing a large number of round fruit, probably apples, its roots spreading out in a fan shape beneath it.
A student of shamanism, I saw that the image could also be read as a mushroom — not just any mushroom, but the Fly Agaric or Amanita Muscaria, the visionary red-and-white-spotted mushroom used in Siberian shamanism. There were more layers to this glyph as well: When the image was turned upside down, the underside of the "Tree" could also be seen as another mushroom — the roots turned into the small ridges or gills of the classic psilocybe cubensis.
I had read the scholarly dispute over these two species of fungus. They are candidates for the original Soma, the visionary intoxicant described in the Rig Veda as a milky liquid pressed from a plant, that catalyzed the Hindu cosmology. The banker Gordon Wasson proposed that the Fly Agaric was the original inebriant. Terence McKenna thought that psilocybin sparked human language development, and dispensed "vegetable gnosis" in the ancient world.
It is possible that early Christianity concealed a secret mushroom cult. This thesis was developed in John Allegro’s controversial The Mushroom and the Cross. Some early Christian frescoes, dating back to the second or third century A.D., show a plant that could be recognized as a "Tree of Life" by churchgoers, or as an Amanita Muscaria by initiates of the Mystery. An entire lexicon of psychedelic scholarship had been skillfully compressed into a single glyph etched into this English wheatfield by unknown perpetrators.
There also seemed to be a figure in the formation, hanging upside down from the "Tree of Life." As the glyph related to shamanism, this figure suggested the Norse God Odin, or Votan, a prototypical shamanic figure. Odin hung from Yggdrassil, the World Tree, for nine days, in order to achieve knowledge of his own fate and the fate of his fellow Gods. He learned that the gods were going to perish during Ragnarok, a final battle with their titanic enemies.
The "Tree of Life" crop circle was in Adam’s Grave, near Averbury. We parked the bus and walked into it. The wheat was over waist high, and golden-colored. It was a beautiful, sunny day.
The formation was over 300 feet long, and it had been made with exactitude. There was a little pip at the center of each fruit dangling in the Tree’s branches (or each spot on the amanita). In the field, this effect was produced by taking the central clump of standing wheat stalks and twirling them — it was difficult to see how hoaxers would have accomplished this. The crop looked as if it had been downed by a compressed force of some kind, in one fast movement. There was a strong energetic change within the formation, a raising of the psychic amplitude. Many of the people in our tour group quickly sunk to the ground. Falling silent, they assumed meditation postures, or lay flat on the fallen wheat. This reaction is typical in new formations. One woman took out a dowsing pendulum and tested various spots inside the circle. I asked if I could try the pendulum for a moment. Holding it still, I noted that the pendulum pulled at a strong angle to one side, indicating there was some kind of shift in the magnetic field underneath the formation.
The second circle we visited had appeared a few weeks earlier. A short distance from Stonehenge, this pattern was a swooping vine with leaves along it, forming six symmetrical loops. Over 450 feet, the formation was carefully meshed into the landscape. It had been designed to skirt the edges of three Neolithic barrows — earth-covered mounds that may have been burial chambers. The elegance of its design was extraordinary. If this pattern was made by humans, a global positioning system must have been used, or some other accurate surveying technique. But who would put in the time and thought to plan and execute such a thing? And to do it anonymously, for no reward?
I do not know who makes the crop circles, or for what purpose. I do know that the best of them are extraordinary works of art, made with a perfection that indicates a serious intent. The swirling patterns suggest the mandala symbolism used in religious traditions around the world.
Carl Jung thought that mandalas in dreams referred to the hidden source of the individual’s Self — the unknown center of the psyche, distinct from the Ego. "The unconscious process moves spiral-wise around a center, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the center grow more and more distinct," he wrote. Like dream symbols, the crop circles suggest a process of alchemical transformation, perhaps taking place now within the collective human psyche.
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/eastfield/eastfield2004a.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/telegraphhill2004b/telegraphhill2004b.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/nelson/nelson2004a.html
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/june2004a.html
Here is also the text of my article that just appeared in Planet:
My First Crop Circle
Daniel Pinchbeck
The day after I arrived in Glastonbury in July, 2002, I went on a bus tour to see the new crop circles of the season. Our tour guide, David Jones, a gray-haired man in his sixties, told us that his interest in crop circles began when he worked in British military intelligence. In 1976, he was part of a group investigating UFO activity in Wessex. One night, stationed atop a hill, he watched six or seven "spheres of light" hover in the air, then merge into one long sphere. The long sphere ascended to the height of the stars, and then blinked out. "At daylight, we found a straightforward circle, 30’ in diameter, in wheat," he recalled. He gave a short history of the phenomenon from that time.
Since the 1970s, thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of crop circles have appeared in England and around the world each summer. If the entire phenomenon is a human-made concoction, orchestrated by teams of circle-makers across the globe, then it is the largest-scaled, most virtuososic project of anonymous land art ever known. If it is not entirely created by humans, the formations would be of tremendous significance, compelling a paradigm shift in our understanding of the cosmos.
From the early appearance of simple circles and ringed circles, the patterns have evolved into complex geometric patterns and pictograms. Some of them suggest an unknown alchemical language, with dots and squiggles and symbols spread across hundreds of yards of agricultural land. Some of them are vast fractal designs, "Flowers of Life," and curlicued spirals. They can display recognizable symbols from alchemy, the qaballah, Tibetan Buddhism, or even strange alien faces.
The ridicule that is heaped upon the phenomenon makes it difficult to take it seriously. There are human hoaxers — some of them even have clever websites, such as circlemakers.org — but that does not mean the entire phenomenon is a hoax. Some scientists take the crop circles seriously. Gerald Hawkins, former head of the Astronomy Department at Boston University, found new Euclidean paradigms and secret diatonic ratios hidden in the geometry of seemingly simple crop circles. Eltjo Hasselhof, a Dutch physicist and laser engineer, has published papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals theorizing that the formations are caused by a single-point source of electro-magnetism, descending from above. "Anyone who takes the time to explore and verify all of these findings personally will find that the facts are plain: Something very strange is going on," Hasselhof writes in his book, The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles.
The first crop circle I visited appeared the morning before our tour. A photograph of the formation, taken from a helicopter, was passed around the bus. The glyph was oval-shaped, and the image could be read as a classic "Tree of Life." It showed a tree bearing a large number of round fruit, probably apples, its roots spreading out in a fan shape beneath it.
A student of shamanism, I saw that the image could also be read as a mushroom — not just any mushroom, but the Fly Agaric or Amanita Muscaria, the visionary red-and-white-spotted mushroom used in Siberian shamanism. There were more layers to this glyph as well: When the image was turned upside down, the underside of the "Tree" could also be seen as another mushroom — the roots turned into the small ridges or gills of the classic psilocybe cubensis.
I had read the scholarly dispute over these two species of fungus. They are candidates for the original Soma, the visionary intoxicant described in the Rig Veda as a milky liquid pressed from a plant, that catalyzed the Hindu cosmology. The banker Gordon Wasson proposed that the Fly Agaric was the original inebriant. Terence McKenna thought that psilocybin sparked human language development, and dispensed "vegetable gnosis" in the ancient world.
It is possible that early Christianity concealed a secret mushroom cult. This thesis was developed in John Allegro’s controversial The Mushroom and the Cross. Some early Christian frescoes, dating back to the second or third century A.D., show a plant that could be recognized as a "Tree of Life" by churchgoers, or as an Amanita Muscaria by initiates of the Mystery. An entire lexicon of psychedelic scholarship had been skillfully compressed into a single glyph etched into this English wheatfield by unknown perpetrators.
There also seemed to be a figure in the formation, hanging upside down from the "Tree of Life." As the glyph related to shamanism, this figure suggested the Norse God Odin, or Votan, a prototypical shamanic figure. Odin hung from Yggdrassil, the World Tree, for nine days, in order to achieve knowledge of his own fate and the fate of his fellow Gods. He learned that the gods were going to perish during Ragnarok, a final battle with their titanic enemies.
The "Tree of Life" crop circle was in Adam’s Grave, near Averbury. We parked the bus and walked into it. The wheat was over waist high, and golden-colored. It was a beautiful, sunny day.
The formation was over 300 feet long, and it had been made with exactitude. There was a little pip at the center of each fruit dangling in the Tree’s branches (or each spot on the amanita). In the field, this effect was produced by taking the central clump of standing wheat stalks and twirling them — it was difficult to see how hoaxers would have accomplished this. The crop looked as if it had been downed by a compressed force of some kind, in one fast movement. There was a strong energetic change within the formation, a raising of the psychic amplitude. Many of the people in our tour group quickly sunk to the ground. Falling silent, they assumed meditation postures, or lay flat on the fallen wheat. This reaction is typical in new formations. One woman took out a dowsing pendulum and tested various spots inside the circle. I asked if I could try the pendulum for a moment. Holding it still, I noted that the pendulum pulled at a strong angle to one side, indicating there was some kind of shift in the magnetic field underneath the formation.
The second circle we visited had appeared a few weeks earlier. A short distance from Stonehenge, this pattern was a swooping vine with leaves along it, forming six symmetrical loops. Over 450 feet, the formation was carefully meshed into the landscape. It had been designed to skirt the edges of three Neolithic barrows — earth-covered mounds that may have been burial chambers. The elegance of its design was extraordinary. If this pattern was made by humans, a global positioning system must have been used, or some other accurate surveying technique. But who would put in the time and thought to plan and execute such a thing? And to do it anonymously, for no reward?
I do not know who makes the crop circles, or for what purpose. I do know that the best of them are extraordinary works of art, made with a perfection that indicates a serious intent. The swirling patterns suggest the mandala symbolism used in religious traditions around the world.
Carl Jung thought that mandalas in dreams referred to the hidden source of the individual’s Self — the unknown center of the psyche, distinct from the Ego. "The unconscious process moves spiral-wise around a center, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the center grow more and more distinct," he wrote. Like dream symbols, the crop circles suggest a process of alchemical transformation, perhaps taking place now within the collective human psyche.