I never know where to put things.  I could have put this under people but have now decided places would be a better place and calling it Leys might have invited derision.  So it is Hereford.


I have been reading what I expected to be a light crime book – The Remains of an Altar by Phil Rickman.  He writes about a woman Deliverance vicar, Merrily Watkins who reminded me a bit of how I imagine you, Temperance (which you may take as an insult, I don’t know). 
It is mostly about Alfred Watkins and Edward Elgar and the former’s idea of lines made by former residents of England which he called “leys” and the latter’s music and life as a rather tortured soul.  The denouement turned out to have very little to do with either of these things, but I found his research impressive, though I was uncertain about the conclusions reached by at least one of his characters.


Is Hereford known for its connecting lines and hidden roads?  Hill forts, even?  And is it considered likely that Elgar and Watkins knew each other?  I don’t know Hereford much at all – it seems to be one of those areas of Britain we haven’t really been to.  We’ve been to Ludlow and Hay-on Wye and Cirencester, but not Hereford. 
I gather that Watkins’ ideas weren’t particularly out there or New Agey – he was just putting forth a theory that ancient peoples may have had straight roads going from place to place.  At least that’s what I think he was proposing.  I hadn’t heard of The Old Straight Track and I am very unfamiliar with classical music generally, at least in the sense that musicians know it (despite having learnt the piano for ten years and taken numerous exams though not quite to letters stage).  Obviously some of Elgar’s music is familiar to me, but the Gerontius one isn’t, and when I listened to it, the sublimity of it passed me by.

Caro wrote:

And is it considered likely that Elgar and Watkins knew each other? 

They were both from the same part of the country, Hereford (Watkins) and Worcester (Elgar) are adjacent counties and indeed were for a while merged as one county. I'm pretty sure that I've read that Elgar was in the same amateur naturalists club* as Watkins (and also I think George Bernard Shaw was a member). They were both keen photographers too.

EDIT

* Yes, the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club - and while ostensibly a local amateur society (based in Hereford) it counted numerous eminent geologists and biologists among its members, including Sir Charles Lyell, Sir Roderick Murchison, Prof. Adam Sedgwick, Sir William Jardine ... as well as several well-known society figures such as the wealthy politician Sir James Rankin.

From the Club's website both Alfred Watkins and Edward Elgar were members (although Elgar was only a member between 1903 and 1906).

A 'Deliverance' vicar - does that mean she plays the banjo?

Ah, ley lines, they can be a great source of fun and some good walks but when assessing if there's anything to Watkins' ideas it's worth remembering that 'between any two points it is possible to draw a straight line' (Euclid) and that the old trackways were not straight but reeling and rolling and rambling around the shire.

Caro wrote:

I gather that Watkins’ ideas weren’t particularly out there or New Agey – he was just putting forth a theory that ancient peoples may have had straight roads going from place to place.

As ferval has said the idea of ancient (pre-Roman) people having strait(ish) roads is not that strange. And since the shortest way to get between two places is via a strait line then not to have a strait road is actually strange when one thinks about it.

What were New Agey were some of the whacky pamphlets which used to be put out (and probably still are) about random places being linked in a strait line. I seem to remember one from years back which claimed that Mont St Michel off the coast of Normandy and St Michael's Mount off the coast of Cornwall and Sceilig Mhichil off the coast of Kerry are all linked in a strait line. And not only that but if you followed the line back from Mont St Michel then it also lines up with Rome and Jerusalem (yawn).

A cursory glance at a map might convince one that that were true until one takes a closer look and finds that it's way out and that's not even factoring in the curvature of the planet's surface which would make the claim even further out. I suppose one could place a ruler on a map and line up any number of places and then come up with a theory about how those places are somehow linked together.

Caro wrote:

 He writes about a woman Deliverance vicar, Merrily Watkins who reminded me a bit of how I imagine you, Temperance (which you may take as an insult, I don’t know).

Caro, this is not about the Hereford ley lines etc., but about the books by Phil Rickman that you mention - and the character of Merrily. I have not read any of Rickman's books, but, because I was curious about what you said, I ordered the DVD of Midwinter of the Spirit starring Anna Maxwell Martin as Merrily. I do not know how true the adaptation is to this particular book (which I know is not the one you mention), but no, I'm not at all insulted - quite the reverse. Merrily - her character that is, not her appearance, although thirty years ago I did look a bit like her! - is very much how I would like to come across. She may be a "Deliverance Vicar", but she is in no way a crazy woman - quite the opposite. As her mentor, Rev. Huw Owen, observes when Merrily is sent to him for training: You're not fundamentalist; you're not happy-clappy; you don't have an axe to grind." In other words, you are OK. And I did like his comment that the work of opposing the forces of evil is "metaphysical trench warfare"!

I see why you feared derision here!

OK, back to the topic. Alas, I fear I cannot contribute anything useful because I know nothing about Elgar. However, another expression I have heard for areas of ley lines is "thin places". I find it all very interesting, although others of course consider it to be a lot of mumbo-jumbo nonsense.






PS Have now ordered Midwinter of the Spirit and the book mentioned in the OP - The Remains of an Altar.

Interesting travel article here about thin places:


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/travel/thin-places-where-we-are-jolted-out-of-old-ways-of-seeing-the-world.html



A bar can be a thin place, too. A while ago, I stumbled across a very thin bar, tucked away in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo. Like many such establishments, this one was tiny — with only four seats and about as big as a large bathroom — but it inspired cathedral awe. The polished wood was dark and smooth; the row of single malts were illuminated in such a way that they glowed. Using a chisel, the bartender manifested — there is no other word for it — ice cubes that rose to the level of art. The place was so comfortable in its own skin, so at home with its own nature — its “suchness,” the Buddhists would put it — that I couldn’t help but feel the same way.

Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar, would understand what I experienced in that Tokyo bar. Writing in his classic work “The Sacred and the Profane,” he observed that “some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” An Apache proverb takes that idea a step further: “Wisdom sits in places.”

The question, of course, is which places? And how do we get there? You don’t plan a trip to a thin place; you stumble upon one. But there are steps you can take to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness. For starters, have no expectations. Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations, which explains why so many “spiritual journeys” disappoint. And don’t count on guidebooks — or even friends — to pinpoint your thin places. To some extent, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way: One person’s thin place is another’s thick one.

But I'm sure the expression "thick places" will resonate with most posters here,

Caro - just finished the DVD - gosh, it was all a bit over the top, but I do still like Merrily. Sort of Rev. meets The Exorcist.  

The books should arrive tomorrow - I'll have to read Midwinter first, but will then tackle the one you mention in your OP.

But back to what Caro was really asking about - excellent article here:

The Truth Behind Alfred Watkins' Ley-Lines

Watkins had his "revelation" in 1921 several years after the death of Edward Thomas. I wonder if they ever met? The poet also was a great walker, and a lover of roads and of their mysteries. Thomas wrote a lot about them. This from Robert MacFarlenes's article reminds me of Thomas's prose:

I decided to head down towards Llanthony, following a ley. The hillside was thick with fruit trees and I walked slowly, gathering raspberries, bilberries and sour wild cherries. In Hay I’d asked a man if there was a shop in Llanthony where I could buy food. “No,” he answered, “just a priory. Over there, like most places in Wales, they look after your soul before they look after your stomach.”

This Thomas poem contains the line that still causes shivers down the spine - "Now all roads lead to France" - how many English men over the centuries have understood the significance of that?

But apologies - I find a good article and then, as ever, immediately go wandering off down my own road and off-topic - but then is there anyone left here to care? I think not.



Roads


I LOVE roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

On this earth 'tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

From dawn's twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary
As it winds on for ever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods,

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps' press,
As Helen's own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.


Edward Thomas

One problem with the idea of dead straight ley tracks is that people, even when unencumbered by any obstacles, or encouraged to stick to a ready made path, do not generally take the shortest, straightline, route between points. This is well-known to urban planners. You only have to look at a grassy park or field to see that the worn routes that mark how people actually traverse the space do not link the clearly visible entrances and exits in straight lines but rather tend to bow or form an S. And that's over relatively short distances, on a flat level surface, between points that are clearly visible from all positions from entry to exit. Once one is in a more natural environment of forest, hillside, or a rocky terrain crossed by streams, and where you cannot actually see the end from the beginning ... people naturally choose an even more winding path in part to accommodate obstacles on the ground but also probably in over-estimating how much to veer to left or right when you can't see your destination. I never did understand why anyone would think that the ancient inhabitants of Britain would walk, pig-headedly and Roman-like in arrow straight lines over hill, through dale, and over bogs, rather than following the contours around hills and the regular slopes of watercourses, which is what any hillwalker does and what most animals naturally do.

Cross posted, MM.

I'm still here Temp, so shall we have something completely irrelevant but entertaining? Yes? Good.





Has anyone ever compiled an anthology of Road poems? There are so many from the rolling English ones through golden ones to those less travelled and lots more.

To return to Watkins though, his ideas do not stand up to any kind of scrutiny, not least because he is imposing an idea on a landscape that has changed utterly as have modes of travel and a quick look at ancient trackways shows that contours and ground conditions are what mattered, and then the overlay of New Agey notions of lines of spiritual power and nodes and stuff is just daft. That's not to say that some of the things he recorded were not used as navigation points.  This can tie into what is more interesting, although not uncontested and also requiring consideration of landscape and vegetation changes, is intervisibility: sight lines and viewscapes. These are of course straight lines and mapping these between ancient monuments, buildings, natural features and so on is a worthwhile exercise and can suggest reasons for the siting of structures in terms of what can loosely be called religious concepts, cairns, cursuses and natural mountain tops, as well as status and territorial markers like hill forts (or defended hilltop settlements!), no point showing off if the neighbours can't see you, and even your posh house having a nice view.

With reference to mountain tops and commanding views, I visited the Sacra above Chiusa di San Michele in Piedmont in 1983. Its spectacular setting affords the visitor sublime views up and down the Val di Susa. The strategic location of the monastery there draws comparisons with Monte Cassino in southern Italy and it is sometimes referred to as being the northern Italian equivalent:



I hadn't given much thought to the place in the intervening years only to discover now that the Sacra di San Michele is one of the places listed on the aforementioned Apollo / St Michael Axis. In trying to find out more about this alignment I see that a New Agey pamphlet from, say, 1977 is now, of course, a New Agey website in 2017. (In the era of the internet do people still produce pamphlets anymore?) Anyway here is a New Agey website on St Michael's Ley (across southern Britain) and also the Apollo / St Michael Axis (across Europe and the Levant):

St Michael's Ley

And here's a sceptical website on the same topic:

St Michael's Alignment

Check out the bit about the 'Woolworth's Stores Alignment'.

Jane Austen once wrote: “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”  She also considered how one half of the world cannot understand the sensibilities of the other. How well we see that in the responses here - and how sensible you all are! How down-to-earth! But could you be missing something? Nah!  

I'm going to quote Edward Thomas again - not poetry this time, but from his lovely The Icknield Way (published 1913) in which his road-worship reaches its prose apotheosis:

Today I know there is nothing beyond the farthest of far ridges except a signpost to unknown places. The end is in the means - in the sight of that beautiful long straight line of the Downs in which a curve is latent - in the houses we shall never enter, with their dark secret windows and quiet hearth smoke, or their ruins friendly only to elders and nettles...I could not find a beginning or end of the Icknield Way. It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness...

...Much has been written of travel, far less of the road. Writers have treated the road as a passive means to an end, and honoured it most when it has been an obstacle; they leave the impression that the road is a connection between two points which only exist when the traveller is upon it...Yet to a nomadic people the road was important as anything upon it...We still say that a road "goes" to London, as we "go" ourselves... We may go or stay, but the road will go up over the mountains to Llandovery, and then go up again over Tregaron. It is a silent companion always ready for us, whether it is night or day, wet or fine, whether we are calm or deasperate, well or sick. It is always going; it has never gone right away, and no man is too late...old roads will endure as long as Roman streets, though great is the difference between the unraised trackway, as dim as a wind-path on the sea, and the straight embanked Roman highway...The making of such roads seems one of the most natural operations of man, one in which he least conflicts with nature and the animals...

Alas, that last sentence is no longer true.  I once quoted a passage from Hilary Mantel - a superb description of the bleakness and alienation one can feel when travelling along the nightmarish M25 - and got well mocked for my trouble. Folk didn't seem to get what she was on about. And there is surely no place more depressing, certainly in England, than a motorway bridge - staring down at the strangers speeding along to God knows where. Thomas goes on in The Icknield Way  to consider Bunyan - what on earth would he - and Hopeful and Christian - make of our hellish highways - our very own versions of  "the way called Danger"?

But I ramble. Just popped in really to say how much I'm enjoying the Rickman novels. And apparently we should say leys, not ley-lines.


Didn't Chris Rea dedicate The Road to Hell to the M25?

Temperance wrote:

How well we see that in the responses here - and how sensible you all are! How down-to-earth! 

But Temp, 'sensible', in both modern French and in the etymology of the word in English, means simply 'sensitive', as in susceptible to, or liable to be affected by, or even atuned to ... the influence of something.

Are not we 'sensible' people just the sort who do actually understand the concept of 'thin places' ?

It was a play on words, so don't you wave your dictionary at me, MM.  

adjective: sensible
1.
synonyms: practical, realistic, responsible, full of common sense, reasonable, rational, logical, sound, circumspect, balanced, sober, no-nonsense, pragmatic, level-headed, serious-minded, thoughtful, commonsensical, down-to-earth, wise, prudent, mature.

(of a person) possessing or displaying prudence.
judicious, sagacious, sharp, shrewd, far-sighted, intelligent, clever.

That's you lot talking history.

Unfortunately, I'm sensible too and I admit I do get a bit carried away at times. Here's a sensible Austen girl contemplating the mystery of the leys.

This discussion has been so interesting that I hadn't realised I hadn't added anything since my first post, not even thanks.  But to some irrelevancies:  no doubt the most famous poem about roads is The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, who I think was my favourite poet of those we studied at university. 

I also looked up Hone Tuwhare (pronouced more or less Honn-ay Toofaaray), who lived near me and was our poet laureate at one time, feeling sure he would have written about roads and found this on a blog:

Roads - Hone Tuwhare

I turn away from roads,
sign posted hot macadams:
roads on smooth roads curving
looping under, up and yonder
going leading nowhere.

I dream of roads
but seek instead a tumble
stumble-footed course I know
will earn me sad wounds
cutting deep to bone.

I have learned to love
too much perhaps
rough tracks hard of going
poorly lit by stars.

Night-long voyagings
have found no easy path
to the silent gate
that is the dawn -
that truth beyond
that is the banished city.

Hearing only the night-birds
booming ancient blasphemies:
moon-dark ease reflection
in the knocking stones
the river chortling.

He was a down-to-earth Maori writer with, when I knew him, a rather coarse sense of humour and something of a drinker.  He had worked in all sorts of manual labouring jobs, so his sensitive writing seemed at odds a bit with his personality. 

Re pamphlets: I am not sure what exactly constitutes a pamphlet but we regularly get in our mail written material telling us what is on in the community, and though the school has an on-line version of its newsletter, many people still just pick up a written copy from the check-out at our local supermarket. 

We don't have any talk of leys in NZ.  I suppose Maori didn't go in straight lines, and NZ is a very mountainous country so you can't go anywhere in a straight line, except some of State Highway One (which goes the full length of the country)  and that has been forcibly engineered through the countryside.

Caro wrote:

 But to some irrelevancies:  no doubt the most famous poem about roads is The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, who I think was my favourite poet of those we studied at university.

But "irrelevancies" must not always be dismissed as irrelevant: one of the joys of Res His - and they have been many - for me has been how threads have meandered, often wandering away from the set path, but offering nevertheless so many startling and interesting vistas...

So, that said, you mention, Caro, that most famous of "road" writings, The Road Not Taken - which of course was written for none other but Edward Thomas and sent to him by his "blood-brother" (Eleanor Farjeon's description of the relationship between Frost and Thomas), Robert Frost. Thomas was possibly the first person ever to read the final draft of Frost's great poem - it arrived, without a covering letter, as Thomas was agonising over his choices: go to America (without his family), or enlist. Hollis, Thomas's biographer, has some interesting things to say about Frost's Road - which so many of us have understood to be an emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes responsibility for his or her own destiny. But it is, as Frost himself declared, a "tricky poem - very tricky". There are traps set for the reader, not least of which is the fact that the grass of both paths is, we are told, "worn...about the same". People usually miss that ironic little detail. But for Thomas - for whom the poem was written, "about a friend who had gone off to war", as Frost himself later said - there was a difference - the difference between life and death. But then, as Frost also later recalled it, the poem was written "about a friend who, which ever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other".

That, of course, applies to all of us, which is why the poem is so great - and why it has lasted.

Frost conceived the poem, by the way, in late autumn 1914 as he and his blackly depressed friend walked together around the woods of Dymock.

Had they lived a hundred years later, perhaps Frost and Thomas - two men whose souls were so in tune and whose married lives were so difficult - could have found real happiness together.

But that's a very slippery path to go down...


EDIT:

The Road Not Taken

 
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;



Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,



And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

"Ley lines" do not exist.

Students of geometry and cartography will readily understand the process of "normalising points" required to map a sphere to a flat surface. A line represented as straight on a map will therefore have an implied curve. While this curve can be safely assumed to map to a spherical contour and still therefore represent the most direct route along the surface from A to B, once the line is intersected with another at an apparent angle to it the "sphere" to which they both map are geometrically asynchronous. The more "lines" that intersect (as "ley line" maps have a tendency to portray) the more individual spheres are geometrically represented and the more definite one can be in adducing that only one of the lines can be deemed "true". Only one point can be normalised to make a map projection which includes no gaps, true linearity being what is sacrificed in the process. Mercator devised a way to include several normalised points from which to project, but ended up with gaps where mathematics decrees that no area of the surface of the original sphere can be represented at all.

Watkins was by all accounts a good amateur archaeologist, and also a very good photographer. A mathematician he most certainly wasn't.

Watkins was also incredibly loose in what he decided was "straight". This is one of his own photographs - a valley near Llanthony in Wales - of a feature he used to bolster his misguided theory regarding ancient trackways and their linearity. He got not only the "straight" bit wrong, but also the antiquity of what he was looking at (by a mere 5,000 years or so) as well as the very non-human forces which actually caused it to come into being.



Watkins' "theory" was, by the late 1960s, fading into well deserved obscurity when it was resurrected by woo-woo merchants. While they have taken the study to new (age) levels of stupidity with which Watkins himself would have been horrified to be associated, what they share with Watkins - through necessity as well as stupidity - is a failure to appreciate basic geometry. They are basically discussing something that only exists in one type of cartographical projection, which by definition is a distortion of reality.

All this has nothing whatsoever to do with "thin places" and a quite separate theory of places having unique characteristics which affect people's moods and thought processes - be it in a nice or a discomfiting way. Peter Ackroyd in his "London: A Biography" addresses this phenomenon in relation to areas of London in a convincing way - demonstrating through anecdotal evidence a seemingly mysterious quality pertaining to a particular place through generations of human existence up to the present day. The "mystery" however may become less so when the phenomenon is judged in the light of how humans have been programmed over millennia to interpret their environment, especially with a view to anticipating what makes one area "safe" and another potentially "dangerous". This, I imagine, is quite a complex affair involving both experiential and communicated attributes, not always expressed blatantly, and which combine to ascribe a general attribution with which the majority of people would instinctively agree. The woo-woo brigade might recognise this phenomenon as "good energy" and "bad energy" places, and in a sense they are actually right in their adjectival use at least, as this is exactly the subjective attribution instinct will tend to engender before it engenders actual comprehension of the experience.

Long before Watkins the Chinese also came up with a "ley lines" theory, and one in which in fact "good energy" places and "bad energy" places were deemed to be in alignment. They called them "dragon tracks" and used them primarily to predict the weather (which is as good a use as any, given the flaw on which it is based). A better understanding of geometry and later a better way of collating meteorological records effectively killed off that particularly ignorant practice. But then, medieval China did not have a multi-million dollar market for books which play on people's superstitious ignorance by perpetuating discredited theories regarding alleged phenomena which, like "ley lines", never actually existed anyway.

PS. I have a copy of Watkins' original book on the matter and he uses the term "ley lines" with great frequency throughout. Given that he coined the term I can only assume that whoever has subsequently decreed the term to be "wrong" and has replaced it with "leys" is simply compounding their obvious ignorance with a remarkable layer of arrogance too.

Dear Jesus Christ give me patience.

I blame Merrily.

Appealing to a mythical being will not help you, I fear. If it is patience you seek I suggest you join the ranks of the weary sceptics - we exude it by the ton through necessity.

I have, as usual, deleted inappropriate ramblings here and elsewhere. I apologise if I was rude.

Your post above, with its air of finality and contempt, unfortunately seems to end the discussion. That would be a shame as this is such an interesting topic - or topics rather - and there is possibly much more to say about ley lines, roads and "thin" places. Ackroyd's comments are indeed useful in any exchange of views about places with strange atmospheres. But who dares argue here?

nordmann wrote:

Given that he coined the term I can only assume that whoever has subsequently decreed the term to be "wrong" and has replaced it with "leys" is simply compounding their obvious ignorance with a remarkable layer of arrogance too.

Re ignorance and arrogance - my source for that comment was indeed unreliable: a seventeen-year-old fictitious character in the book mentioned by Caro in her OP, The Remains of an Altar. Here is the relevant but unfortunate quotation - from Jane, Merrily's daughter, who has been immersing herself in Watkins' writings. When this exchange takes place she and her companion are standing on the top of Cole Hill and the girl has excitedly pointed out what she believes to be a ley line:

"Well, congratulations," Lol said. "You've found a new ley line."

"Ley," Jane snapped. "Alfred Watkins called them leys. Ley lines - that's just a term that's been adopted in almost a disparaging way by so-called experts who say they don't exist."

The Remains of an Altar: Chapter 5 Between the Lines

Ignorance and arrogance may be forgiven in an enthusiastic teenager, but I really should have known better than to quote from a character in a novel, even a good, obviously well-researched one. And the Rickman books are excellent reads - first class thrillers, but hardly historical sources I admit. I haven't finished Altar yet - still reading The Midwinter of the Spirit. Thanks again to Caro for alerting me to the Merrily series.

If, rather the Ley lines, we were talking about Lay lines, that is songlines the dreaming tracks of the Aboriginals, then we would be addressing something that I find really interesting.  Indigenous songlines: a beautiful way to think about the confluence of story and time

These have resonances with Tim Ingold's ideas about wayfinding in the past; the understanding of landscape and navigating around it conditioned by the experience of dwelling in it and how memory and story as well as practicality coalesce to create the mental maps which allow people to find their way across the land as opposed to the process of map making, capturing the topography and structures in 2D with its straight lines and artificially imposed routes and boundaries.

Straight lines on maps, old men with rulers  - what trouble they have caused as we still know to our cost.

Thank you for deleting those posts, Temperance. They were immensely offensive with no redeeming wit or mitigating presence of a counter-argument. Unworthy of you, I thought.

I have no contempt, by the way, for the superstitious or the beliefs they choose to hold. And with reference to one of your earlier deleted posts, nor do I see a direct correlation between the "new age" interpretation of Watkins' misguided theory and religion per se. One would have to relax the definitions of both "theory" and "religion" to a point of total absurdity before the concept even makes sense, at least to me.

If this thread's topic veers to cartography, be it in the accepted definition of a scientifically rigorous discipline or through ferval's reference to the peculiarly personal "mental maps" by which we all navigate and interpret our spatial environment, then I for one would be delighted. You may even hear me use the word "spirituality" in that context with anything but contempt!

nordmann wrote:

Thank you for deleting those posts, Temperance. They were immensely offensive with no redeeming wit or mitigating presence of a counter-argument. Unworthy of you, I thought.

Crikey - everyone who didn't see the posts will now be wondering what on earth did she say that was so "immensely offensive" to poor nordmann? I admit I was silly and rude, and that's why I deleted and then apologised. But you must admit it could have been worse: I only used the word "bollocks" and did not call you anything awful (at least I hope I didn't - I was a bit drunk). Anyway I'm sorry - rudeness and nastiness is never a good idea. But you do sound dismissive and contemptuous at times, you know, but perhaps that's just me being super-sensitive.

Merrily Watkins says far worse things than bollocks and she's a vicar.

I shall send myself to the naughty pillar for the afternoon.

In peace - consider yourself bashed over the head with this here olive branch.

I have just been told of something else I put in my unfortunate post - something I had genuinely forgotten.

I did not mean to be hurtful - really; I never do. That said, I can well see in the cold and sober light of day how that careless comment could indeed have seemed immensely offensive to you. Sincere, unqualified apology. I was thinking of savage indoctrination, nothing else.

Best I  bow out here - for a while at least.

I now have enough olive branches from exchanges with you and the Queen of the Desert to make my own version of Eeyore's abode. Eeyore is also rather surprisingly, according to Milne's books, the best in the area at playing Pooh Sticks - so there's another useful aim regarding my collection.

Back to cartography. Besides being the "ultimate crossroads between truth and beauty" a map can be seen as a pictorial representation of the three epistemological challenges to how we define and relate to truth at all in our modern age - our reliance on either positivism/empiricism, neopositivism (logical positivism), or postmodernism (poststructuralism) to frame the language we use to communicate that which we have experienced but which also requires a common frame of reference to impart. What maps expose is our reliance on accepting truth at face value in the pursuit of that aim, what we also refer to as received knowledge (as Shaw remarked "common sense without the sense part and all too common "), something each of these mutually exclusive world views requires us to do, even though the truths we accept in each case could not be more radically opposed to each other.

Watkins and his inferior understanding of projection as used in cartography fell into the first category, as do most people who have no reason to distrust what they see before them when it apparently makes sense. Given his undoubted intelligence a friendly nudge from a mathematician may have in fact cured him immediately of his "theory" and thereby saved him what must have been large chunks of his remaining life wasting time pursuing it.

The neopositivist, this being my own admitted failing and that of all curious people, will use a map as a challenge to how we evidently presume what to include and what to omit from our personal interpretation of the spatial environment in which we each live quite separate and unique existences. If we do it in relation to the easily observable aspects to our environment then we can be sure we do it in all other aspects of interpretation too. For a neopositivist "ley lines" don't even get past the definition stage unless as avenues of inquiry into why Watkins and others wished to believe in them as true at all.

The "poststructuralist", not so much a modern phenomenon as an ancient one which keeps reappearing and is presently in full swing apparently, sees maps as suspect in every respect, and dangerously jettisons truth of any description from their interpretative process (they believe one can in fact be "overloaded" with truths so it is best just to ignore them altogether). This allows the poststructuralist some very handy shortcuts to decisions of interpretation, and though they largely tolerate the inconvenience they are invariably challenged by logic at every turn and are obliged to respond to this perceived threat - be they "new age" woo-woo merchants or Donald Trump their response is to largely in fact to ignore or even deride that which conveyed such logic to them. A respect for truth is therefore by default seriously missing in every case, and while "ley lines", for example, might appeal to them, so too will just about anything a map apparently portrays except its actual information, and most definitely understanding of its actual structure and purpose.

It is dangerous to assume, like Watkins, that "everyone in the neolithic" thought the same with regard to how they internally or physically mapped their environment. However that which can be said with certainty is that they faced the same challenges to their interpretations as we do now ourselves. Watkins' crude attribution of an intelligence to these people on the basis of straight lines on an ordnance survey map is all the more insulting to the memory of these same people when one investigates and tries to imagine just how they really negotiated their way through understanding of the physical landscapes in which they found themselves, employing as varied techniques and languages as there were landscapes and peoples, circumventing all the same interpretative traps in doing so, and producing along the way extant landmarks as monuments to this difficult endeavour at which we can still marvel. Much more intelligent, in fact, than any mere ability to follow a straight line insinuates.

I do not know whether you have seen my last post - possibly not, as it may have crossed with yours above - but may I assure you, if that post does/has not, that the proffered olive branch is genuine? It is not a Pooh stick and should not be regarded as such.

The rest of your post is detailed and interesting, but very difficult. I am suitably put in my place.

I do not know what "place" that might be (though in a discussion about interpretation of one's relationship spatially with life an interesting metaphor in its own right), and besides answering the previous point ferval made about cartography and personal navigation techniques I had no other intention regarding what I posted. Apologies if it has caused you confusion - alas also an occupational hazard when neopositivists attempt to communicate their thoughts.

Gosh, I do so often feel like a fly that's been swatted.

I didn't for one minute think that in composing your erudite post you had set out to confuse me personally - I know my place. It's simply I found what you said very difficult because all these dead hard philosophical terms confuse me, as they do a lot of people - when they are being honest that is. I had to look up neopositivist (hope I've typed that correctly) and got redirected by Wiki (which is humiliating enough in itself) to this:

logical positivism

n.
A philosophy asserting the primacy of observation in assessing the truth of statements of fact and holding that metaphysical and subjective arguments not based on observable data are meaningless. Also called logical empiricism.

So there we have it: nothing much else to say really. Clearly, I'm the one who can be relied on to post b*llocks, not you.

But kind regards, just the same. You win at Poohsticks hands down.

Wikipedia has led you into category one as stated above. But it has a tendency to do that.

We neopositivists regard Wikipedia only as a necessary evil. Empiricism is alright in its place (there we go again) but can be a terrible impediment to comprehension if it becomes a slave to logic (a means to an end, not an end in itself).

What we obviously need here is a map.

nordmann wrote:

"Ley lines" do not exist.

Students of geometry and cartography will readily understand the process of "normalising points" required to map a sphere to a flat surface. A line represented as straight on a map will therefore have an implied curve. While this curve can be safely assumed to map to a spherical contour and still therefore represent the most direct route along the surface from A to B, once the line is intersected with another at an apparent angle to it the "sphere" to which they both map are geometrically asynchronous. The more "lines" that intersect (as "ley line" maps have a tendency to portray) the more individual spheres are geometrically represented and the more definite one can be in adducing that only one of the lines can be deemed "true". Only one point can be normalised to make a map projection which includes no gaps, true linearity being what is sacrificed in the process. Mercator devised a way to include several normalised points from which to project, but ended up with gaps where mathematics decrees that no area of the surface of the original sphere can be represented at all.

Watkins was by all accounts a good amateur archaeologist, and also a very good photographer. A mathematician he most certainly wasn't.

Watkins was also incredibly loose in what he decided was "straight". This is one of his own photographs - a valley near Llanthony in Wales - of a feature he used to bolster his misguided theory regarding ancient trackways and their linearity. He got not only the "straight" bit wrong, but also the antiquity of what he was looking at (by a mere 5,000 years or so) as well as the very non-human forces which actually caused it to come into being.



Watkins' "theory" was, by the late 1960s, fading into well deserved obscurity when it was resurrected by woo-woo merchants. While they have taken the study to new (age) levels of stupidity with which Watkins himself would have been horrified to be associated, what they share with Watkins - through necessity as well as stupidity - is a failure to appreciate basic geometry. They are basically discussing something that only exists in one type of cartographical projection, which by definition is a distortion of reality.

All this has nothing whatsoever to do with "thin places" and a quite separate theory of places having unique characteristics which affect people's moods and thought processes - be it in a nice or a discomfiting way. Peter Ackroyd in his "London: A Biography" addresses this phenomenon in relation to areas of London in a convincing way - demonstrating through anecdotal evidence a seemingly mysterious quality pertaining to a particular place through generations of human existence up to the present day. The "mystery" however may become less so when the phenomenon is judged in the light of how humans have been programmed over millennia to interpret their environment, especially with a view to anticipating what makes one area "safe" and another potentially "dangerous". This, I imagine, is quite a complex affair involving both experiential and communicated attributes, not always expressed blatantly, and which combine to ascribe a general attribution with which the majority of people would instinctively agree. The woo-woo brigade might recognise this phenomenon as "good energy" and "bad energy" places, and in a sense they are actually right in their adjectival use at least, as this is exactly the subjective attribution instinct will tend to engender before it engenders actual comprehension of the experience.

Long before Watkins the Chinese also came up with a "ley lines" theory, and one in which in fact "good energy" places and "bad energy" places were deemed to be in alignment. They called them "dragon tracks" and used them primarily to predict the weather (which is as good a use as any, given the flaw on which it is based). A better understanding of geometry and later a better way of collating meteorological records effectively killed off that particularly ignorant practice. But then, medieval China did not have a multi-million dollar market for books which play on people's superstitious ignorance by perpetuating discredited theories regarding alleged phenomena which, like "ley lines", never actually existed anyway.

PS. I have a copy of Watkins' original book on the matter and he uses the term "ley lines" with great frequency throughout. Given that he coined the term I can only assume that whoever has subsequently decreed the term to be "wrong" and has replaced it with "leys" is simply compounding their obvious ignorance with a remarkable layer of arrogance too.

Thank you very much for this message, Nordmann...I was waiting for such a "rectifcation". And in your usual style... in admiration....
I am always annoyed by such subjects...von Däniken and all...its more than 50 years now...as the Gavin Menzies I just mentioned on Triceratops' "maps" thread...
In the factory some engineer (and although having done "studies") putting "pyramids under his bed..."good" and "bad" points in his house ...and his brother was worser...being in the time "senator" in the Belgian Senate....it isn't because you are a "politician" that you can't be stupid on that side...but that about the intellectual level of the "politicians" we knew already I suppose 

Kind regards and with respect, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

I was waiting for such a "rectification". And in your usual style... in admiration....

Oh, Paul, Paul - with the greatest respect, how I fumed when I saw that word "rectification".  Rectification! Could it be that you are sometimes deceived by nordmann's fluent and brilliant prose? He dazzles, does he not? It all sounds so good, therefore it must all be good - must be right? Here we have a remarkable intelligence displayed, a calm and apparently rational approach to life, the universe and everything, plus a devastating - and terrifying - ability to wipe out the feeble arguments of anyone who might have the temerity, even when sober, to ask: "But hold on -  could there be another way of looking at things?"

I, like Ian McGilchrist, would like to put in a word for uncertainty, whether we are talking about the so-called ley lines of this topic, maps of the soul, or anything else. As that writer (and McGilchrist is not a "woo woo merchant", by the way, but a rather well-qualified man whom Professor Mary Midgley in the Guardian described as "an experienced psychiatrist and shrewd philosopher") has commented, there are dogmatists of no-faith as there are of faith, and both seem to me closer to one another than those who try to keep the door open to the possibility of something beyond the customary ways in which we think, but which we have to find, painstakingly, for ourselves. Here is Gilchrist:

"...as regards science, there are those who are certain, God knows how, of what it is that patient attention to the world reveals, and those who do not care, because their minds are already made up that science cannot tell them anything profound. Both seem to me to be profoundly mistaken. Though we cannot be certain what our knowledge reveals, this is in fact a more fruitful position - in fact the only one that permits the possibility of belief. And what has limited the power of art and science in our time has been the absence of belief in anything except the most diminished version of the world and our selves. Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris."

I do so agree with that final sentence. The only kind of certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are right are certainly wrong. And in saying that I am aware I lay myself open to the great postmodern (not poststructuralist!) paradox...

This may seem to be me rambling again - no doubt is - what has this to do with Caro's topic, you may well ask? But perhaps we should admit that neither science - nor logic - can solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve. Not an original observation that, but one worth considering.

Worth remembering Faust here too, I think.

But Lord, how I do ramble even though it is just gone eight on a Saturday morning and I am quite, quite sober.

Finished both books by the author Caro mentioned in her OP - thoroughly recommend Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series. I am very flattered that Caro said she thought I was like Merrily: Barbara Nadel was asked (Open Book, BBC Radio 4) who was her favourite detective character and she named the Reverend Merrily Watkins: "I like Merrily because she's got vices - she likes a smoke, she swears when she gets upset...a very rounded character...not easily fooled; she has a gentle manner, but she's nobody's pushover."

She likes red wine, too.

Right, going to begin the rectification of the weeds in my garden now. Rectification is definitely going to be word of the week.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.

(Sir Richard Francis Burton)

Now it's my turn to fume.

"...as regards science, there are those who are certain, God knows how, of what it is that patient attention to the world reveals, and those who do not care, because their minds are already made up that science cannot tell them anything profound. Both seem to me to be profoundly mistaken. Though we cannot be certain what our knowledge reveals, this is in fact a more fruitful position - in fact the only one that permits the possibility of belief. And what has limited the power of art and science in our time has been the absence of belief in anything except the most diminished version of the world and our selves. Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris."

What utter piffle - the rantings of someone who fails completely to understand the concept of 'Science'. If anything constantly teeters on the edge of uncertainty it's science which understands that one observation, one hypothesis that is predictive and replicable, will bring the whole temple down and force a total rethink of what were, up to that point, the current best explanations of that aspect of the world.
It's only those who profess to belief in one or other supernatural system that propose any eternal and unshakeable truths, science does no such thing and even some of its greatest achievements like Newton's Laws and the Standard Model which 'work' in an everyday sense, have their coats on a shoogly peg as being in some ways inadequate and incomplete and may have to be at least updated and perhaps discarded. It's in the 'other ways of thinking about it' and so challenging the old certainties that science advances. And do read up on uncertainty in the Heisenbergian sense, and the Copenhagen Interpretation, it's fundamental and influential way beyond physics.

In a funny way old Watkins' ideas about Leys was a crypto-scientific endeavour - making observations, proposing a hypothesis and then looking for other examples - but like all such hypotheses his has been  subject to critique and failed. Saying 'But you don't get it and it's a mystery' and such is just not good enough.

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, doctor, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of his book "The Master and His Emissary", subtitled "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World".

McGilchrist read English at New College, Oxford, but having published Against Criticism in 1982, he later retrained in medicine and has been a neuroimaging researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in south London.[2] McGilchrist is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and has three times been elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

I rather think he does understand the concept of science. He does not write "piffle".

I probably do, but you have obviously completely misunderstood what I am trying to say. And before you - or anyone else - jumps down my throat, may I point out that neither I nor McGilchrist was saying, "But you don't get it and it's a mystery" - quite the opposite, in fact. Nobody "gets" it. Knowing we actually know nothing is the first step to wisdom... Didn't someone else say that?

Ah - Heisenberg - yes, I have heard of him - not just the Walter White character either.

PS Here's a nice bit of Greek - got it off Wiki:



τούτου μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐγὼ σοφώτερός εἰμι· κινδυνεύει μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὗτος μὲν οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οἴομαι· ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.


I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.

That said - or quoted rather - I do think McGilchrist knows summat about summat - leastways I think he does, but I may be wrong.

Temperance wrote:

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, doctor, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar...

I rather think he does understand the concept of science.

Maybe ... but there are of course many who would say that both psychiatry and medicine have only a passing acquaintance with science.

And as for them wot's done that awful English Literature stuff...  

I passed O-level Chemistry and I grew the biggest copper sulphate crystal ever when I was in the Upper Third. So there.



Sorry, am I posting "unworthy" stuff again?

Well at least everyone has come back out from under their respective stones if only to rectify some rectifications.

If the parties agree to rectification, they may correct the mistake by entering into a deed of rectification. It is necessary to apply to court for an order for rectification if either there is a dispute or the parties wish to ensure that rectification has retrospective effect. The burden of proof is on the party seeking rectification who must be able to produce convincing proof that the agreement does not reflect the intentions of the parties and the agreement as rectified will reflect those intentions.

Right?

Rectification is a maths thing as well as a legal thing isn't it (passed my O-level maths too - see I'm no dummy)?

" The determination of a straight line whose length is equal to a portion of a curve. " Is that a useful thing to know? Will it help me with the agonies of life?

Is rectification the same as justification (theology), as in that there Saint Paul's epistle to someone? Epistle sounds so much more impressive than email. Saint Paul's email to the Romans just doesn't sound the same somehow.

Words are such confusing things, aren't they? Signs and signifiers and the signified slipping under the sign and all that. I suppose that's why maths is less complicated. A sign means what it says, if you see what I mean. No messy slippage. Or is there?

Temperance wrote:

Words are such confusing things, aren't they? Signs and signifiers and the signified slipping under the sign and all that. I suppose that's why maths is less complicated. A sign means what it says, if you see what I mean. No messy slippage. Or is there?

Mathematics can be viewed as just a language used to describe things, but it is also generally taken to be a universally "true" language (that 2 plus 3 makes 5 is thought to be universally true, whether one is on Earth or on an undiscovered planet orbiting a distant sun in a remote galaxy, or indeed in the depths of a black hole).

"Philosophy is written in this grand book, I mean the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth."

... or more succintly, "Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe."

Galileo Galilei


I loved doing pure mathematics A level (and then on further at degree level). I always thought it was so beautifully elegant. A simple sine curve which depicts a wave in the sea or along a piece of shaken rope, or equally a ball moving around a circle, yes really, ... can be described mathematically using the trigonometry of angles and areas; or by calculus; or by hyperbolic functions using imaginary numbers; or graphically on a piece of graph paper; using matrices; or even in different number-base systems ... but always getting the same succinct answer with no ifs, no buts, no exclusions, nor interpretations. Beautiful, elegant and universal.

But as I say at school I was a rather geeky teenager who loved mathematics and science ... but failed to get a girlfriend.

Well, if Saint Peter starts starts waving a Maths text book at me when I get to the Gates of Heaven, I shall turn right round and go the other way.

But I bet they are all mathematicians down there, too.

Quo vadis? In this world and the next seems there's no hope - or rest - for us woolly ones. Wandering about in a dark labyrinth is clearly my fate now and for all eternity. But at least I can admit I'm in the labyrinth - no one else does. I think I'll vadis off to Morrison's and buy a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape from their Fine Wines (if that isn't an oxymoron) selection.

I just felt upset that I'm always being "rectified" - it would be so nice to be right once in a while.

But - never complain, never explain...



He was obviously a bit of a poet on the quiet, and if I'm honest I thought GG's words which you quoted were rather good.


EDIT: You've added a bit to your post: yes, I can see that pure maths is elegant. I'm just jealous really because never got beyond "O" level. Greek and Maths - people who can understand either have my complete admiration - honestly.

Temperance wrote:

I just felt upset that I'm always being "rectified" - it would be so nice to be right once in a while.

"Rectification" is also the process by which a photo of a landscape or a building taken obliquely is translated into a plan drawing but I don't know if it works for photos of people. If you post a picture of yourself Temp, we might see if we could rectify you. Actually, I say 'we', I don't really mean that. I've had to do it and I'm not very good at it so maybe MM if he has the right software and equipment could help.

I wish I had been taught more pure maths when my brain was young and receptive, I did get a Higher way back then but I have to admit to having started losing my way somewhere mid-calculus. Despite some pretty uninspiring teaching in the subject, I always found it very satisfying to prove a theorem or resolve an equation and indeed appreciated the elegance of the fairly basic stuff I did do. My desert island book would be a great big maths tome. It's such a pity, and in fact dangerous, that so many people who would otherwise consider themselves to be educated find it quite acceptable to confess to knowing little, and not really wishing to know more, about maths and the sciences but would dismiss such an admission regarding literature as unforgivable ignorance and culpable lack of cultural awareness.

ferval wrote:

It's such a pity, and in fact dangerous, that so many people who would otherwise consider themselves to be educated find it quite acceptable to confess to knowing little, and not really wishing to know more, about maths and the sciences but would dismiss such an admission regarding literature as unforgivable ignorance and culpable lack of cultural awareness.

I hope I do not give that impression: "unforgivable" ignorance is usually very forgivable - and understandable - for how can people know if they have not been taught - or have been taught badly? I badly want to know and understand more science stuff, but self tuition is not always easy. I always loved chemistry and biology at school, although physics baffled me because no one seemed to have any real answers: one irritated physics teacher told me to stop questioning everything and simply accept that the laws of his subject "just worked". That wasn't good enough for me, I'm afraid, because I wanted to know why the laws worked - who or what decreed that they should? But I was always suitably squashed, and in the end I stopped questioning. I gave up. I took Latin instead, all of which I've forgotten.

Perhaps we are all on the defensive, one way or another, especially here. I know I am - I feel I'm just an old dinosaur (no disrespect to Trike) these days: any information I managed to pick up in my youth is now redundant. It's odd how what was once considered vital knowledge for an "educated" person is now dismissed as being pretty useless. Who these days respects a classics expert, or a theologian who can discuss the finer nuances of the Greek of the New Testament? No one. The art of rhetoric - which I wish I had studied - is no longer considered to be important, although "visual rhetoric"    is. Poetry is nice enough occasionally - in its place - but not really much use to anyone, is it? More of a nice little hobby for sensitive souls. No, it's the scientists and the mathematicians - and the computer experts, of course - who now reign supreme - also doctors, vets, dentists and engineers. Historians also are considered to be neither use nor ornament (I blame David Starkey), although archaeologists are apparently OK, being more scientific and less waffly than ordinary historians. Any kind of waffle is just out these days. So if the Eng. Lit. brigade seem especially snooty it's not because we are: it's because we are on the run. We are frightened people in an alien world.

Goodness no, Temp, that was not aimed at you but at those for whom a blank look at the mention of, say, a Shakespearean play would prompt horror but who have not even a vague understanding of very basic scientific or mathematical concepts and seem almost pleased to admit it. It's socially fine to say one knows nothing of those but woe betide anyone who hasn't at least a passing knowledge of Austen or Dickens. Those are the ones who can be so easily bamboozled by statistics presented, as they so often are, in a misleading and frankly duplicitous manner and so have their opinions influenced by some nonsense in the tabloids and, unfortunately, sometimes even the TV news. A 100% increase in something, be it incidence of a disease or a crime, is practically meaningless if it means it goes from 2 to 4 in 100000 instances. And don't start me on the graphs that are printed in the papers.
Probability as well, people still worry more about going in a plane than driving to the airport. The radio programme More or Less should be compulsory listening.

This is of course not to say that the philosophers and poets, playwrights and historians, classicists and artists are any less vital, and they do still tend to have a social cachet that beardy geeky physicists and speccy  blue stockinged biologists can only dream of,  for culture is an organic whole and the arts and the sciences are interwoven and sometimes quite hard to distinguish one from the other.  The Greeks knew that.

Rant over.

Temperance wrote:

PaulRyckier wrote:

I was waiting for such a "rectification". And in your usual style... in admiration....

Oh, Paul, Paul - with the greatest respect, how I fumed when I saw that word "rectification".  Rectification! Could it be that you are sometimes deceived by nordmann's fluent and brilliant prose? He dazzles, does he not? It all sounds so good, therefore it must all be good - must be right? Here we have a remarkable intelligence displayed, a calm and apparently rational approach to life, the universe and everything, plus a devastating - and terrifying - ability to wipe out the feeble arguments of anyone who might have the temerity, even when sober, to ask: "But hold on -  could there be another way of looking at things?"

I, like Ian McGilchrist, would like to put in a word for uncertainty, whether we are talking about the so-called ley lines of this topic, maps of the soul, or anything else. As that writer (and McGilchrist is not a "woo woo merchant", by the way, but a rather well-qualified man whom Professor Mary Midgley in the Guardian described as "an experienced psychiatrist and shrewd philosopher") has commented, there are dogmatists of no-faith as there are of faith, and both seem to me closer to one another than those who try to keep the door open to the possibility of something beyond the customary ways in which we think, but which we have to find, painstakingly, for ourselves. Here is Gilchrist:

"...as regards science, there are those who are certain, God knows how, of what it is that patient attention to the world reveals, and those who do not care, because their minds are already made up that science cannot tell them anything profound. Both seem to me to be profoundly mistaken. Though we cannot be certain what our knowledge reveals, this is in fact a more fruitful position - in fact the only one that permits the possibility of belief. And what has limited the power of art and science in our time has been the absence of belief in anything except the most diminished version of the world and our selves. Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris."

I do so agree with that final sentence. The only kind of certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are right are certainly wrong. And in saying that I am aware I lay myself open to the great postmodern (not poststructuralist!) paradox...

This may seem to be me rambling again - no doubt is - what has this to do with Caro's topic, you may well ask? But perhaps we should admit that neither science - nor logic - can solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve. Not an original observation that, but one worth considering.

Worth remembering Faust here too, I think.

But Lord, how I do ramble even though it is just gone eight on a Saturday morning and I am quite, quite sober.

Finished both books by the author Caro mentioned in her OP - thoroughly recommend Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series. I am very flattered that Caro said she thought I was like Merrily: Barbara Nadel was asked (Open Book, BBC Radio 4) who was her favourite detective character and she named the Reverend Merrily Watkins: "I like Merrily because she's got vices - she likes a smoke, she swears when she gets upset...a very rounded character...not easily fooled; she has a gentle manner, but she's nobody's pushover."

She likes red wine, too.

Right, going to begin the rectification of the weeds in my garden now. Rectification is definitely going to be word of the week.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.

(Sir Richard Francis Burton)

Temperance, my friend,

"Oh, Paul, Paul - with the greatest respect, how I fumed when I saw that word "rectification".  Rectification! Could it be that you are sometimes deceived by nordmann's fluent and brilliant prose? He dazzles, does he not? It all sounds so good, therefore it must all be good - must be right? Here we have a remarkable intelligence displayed, a calm and apparently rational approach to life, the universe and everything, plus a devastating - and terrifying - ability to wipe out the feeble arguments of anyone who might have the temerity, even when sober, to ask: "But hold on -  could there be another way of looking at things?"

No, no, as I am (perhaps) of the same sceptical behaviour as my colleague Nordmann, I was really happy that someone criticized the crap about the lines...I didn't even bother about the texts and din't read them as I had before on the old Beeb a discussion with an adept which ended nowhere...

As you have perhaps read my further message:

"I am always annoyed by such subjects...von Däniken and all...its more than 50 years now...as the Gavin Menzies I just mentioned on Triceratops' "maps" thread...
In the factory some engineer (and although having done "studies") putting "pyramids under his bed..."good" and "bad" points in his house ...and his brother was worser...being in the time "senator" in the Belgian Senate....it isn't because you are a "politician" that you can't be stupid on that side...but that about the intellectual level of the "politicians" we knew already I suppose  "

"I am always annoyed by such subjects...von Däniken and all...its more than 50 years now..."

Yes from my childhood 60 years ago (let's say from my 14 on) a scepticus, putting everything between question marks...I think I had it from my parents, especially my mother...always looking for the "sources"...and they had both only been at school up to their 14...but they had endured the Nazi occupation and yes the Roman-Catholic church...Always looking if articles wheren't coloured by an agenda, propaganda...so that they didn't get lurred...(in French: roulé dans la farine(rolled into the flour))

No read once about von Däniken and the Gavin Menzies that I mentioned in Triceratop's thread:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies


And Temperance, don't be afraid to say what you want to say. We all (I am nearly sure ) appreciate it.

Kind regards from your friend Paul, who is always happilly surprized by your rich personnality.

Paul, I am not arguing that ley lines exist, that Ezekiel saw spaceships, or that we have been visited by spiders from Mars - I am simply saying that we should keep open minds and not be too ready to dismiss everything we do not understand as foolish "woo woo" stuff. Being a sceptic is healthy, but should we not also be sceptical about our own scepticism? We all have agendas, do we not?

I am not afraid of saying what I want to say: I'd have disappeared years ago were I an intellectual coward. I think I have been very brave at times - me and my sling and a few little pebbles. Trouble is I always miss.

PS I didn't buy a bottle of posh plonk yesterday, so I feel  virtuous and in control at the moment. It won't last.  

PPS

Good article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2012/nov/13/history-science


Scepticism, or skepticism, is neither denialism nor a movement. Based on the Greek skeptomai, which means to think or consider, it usually means doubt or incredulity about particular ideas,or a wider view about the impossibility of having certain knowledge. This uncertainty is a philosophical position, and philosophical scepticism includes attempts to deal with it, through systematic doubt and testing of ideas.

I am not being philosophically sceptical about Ley Lines. I have nothing to doubt at all with respect to them, since whatever woo-woo interpretation may or may not be applied, all such interpretation is based on an incorrect assumption that they are "straight".

It is better to consider all Ley Lines wherever they are depicted cartographically as being arcs rather than lines, and in no way of uniform curvature. Also, given basic geometry, it is important to remember that a map showing several intersecting "Ley Lines" therefore automatically means that the chances of any more than one of them being truly "straight" diminish exponentially. It is also wise to consider the scale of the projection onto which they are being pictorially applied. The higher the scale, the less likely that they can retain the illusion of being pictorially "straight". The lower the scale, the more likely they are to be meaningless.

So sceptical I most definitely am not regarding this issue. Dismissive as utter tosh I most certainly am, and have geometry on my side to prove why I should be.

On the woo-woo side, which presents rather more of a psychological challenge to a sceptic than one involving definitions of rationality or interpretation of actual data, I am actually quite sympathetic to the views of the misguided aficianados regarding their "meaning". There is an inherent comfort in believing that things have supernatural purpose and design which, it would be foolish to deny, seems to be more important to a significant percentage of humanity than that which rational interpretation of perceived patterns might lend them. This however is not so much retaining an "open mind" on their part but in fact one "closed" arbitrarily to alternative explanations, especially ones grounded in fact. I have rarely met a person who has fiercely defended their "open mindedness" who I have not suspected is actually defending - at least in significant areas of interpretation - an "empty mindedness". If, to retain an open mind, one has to divest it of an understanding of basic geometry to the point that this is what ends up as being totally dismissed, then one is left to ponder if the intellectual space management on display is leading to an intelligent conclusion at its end, or simply advertising a rather obvious potential to achieve the opposite, not just with regard to the particular issue in question but, by implication, any other issue which may arise in which they have to choose between factual analysis and imposition of arbitrary supernatural "beliefs".

nordmann wrote:

There is an inherent comfort in believing that things have supernatural purpose and design...

Yes - and there is also an inherent comfort in denying it, isn't there?

I'm sure you could be right about ley lines not being straight, nordmann: to my shame, I simply do not know/understand the geometry involved. Actually I know nothing about ley lines at all and I do not think I have pretended on this thread that I do. But ley lines are not what I have been talking about (apologies to Caro there): I have been wondering about how we think about/investigate all the strange things that we do not - as yet - understand about this world. Is geometry really the only thing we need to discuss here? Perhaps. You see I do not believe that the answers to many of the things that baffle us today - as much as they baffled our ancestors - all that metaphysical stuff that so readily lends itself to the unfortunate woo-woo approach - can be found by simply waving a protractor about. Does holding that opinion make me stupid and "empty-minded"?

I cannot speak for anyone else here, but I do not think I have a mind that is closed to "alternative explanations". I do hope not - that would make me a dogmatic person and dogmatism - in any form - is abhorrent to me. What you say about "empty mindedness" is couched in rather convoluted prose, prose which perhaps I have not fully understood, but you do seem to be saying that belief in the efficacy of "factual analysis" is the only intelligent approach to thinking about the mysteries of life. I disagree.

But what exactly do you mean by "fact", please? And how do we know our analysis of "fact" is actually rational? I have asked you those questions before and I remain a little confused.



In happier times I would have posted this on the Captions thread. I'm sure you could come up with a suitably witty suggestion as to what the mathematical gentlemen in the picture are saying. The dog looks very intelligent and interested in the discussion, but perhaps he just wants his dinner.

"Fact" is something known or proven to be true. This does not absolve "fact" from further scrutiny, but it does have a rather good track record in resisting gainsay.

"Rational" means based on or in accordance with reason, which though a synonym often just for "thought" means thinking in as logical and pursuant a manner as understanding of the facts allows.

Where you personally stand in relation to dogmatism or how you define an "open mind" is probably commensurate with my own position. A mind that is not open to fresh input is one that has basically ceased to function in any intelligent way in my view. Where we seem to part company is how much credence we allow to irrational and non-logical "theories" which themselves owe nothing to fact and exist often purely as proven appeals to emotion and wishful thinking. I am probably as susceptible as the next person to such thinking in particular circumstances and for quite particular reasons now and again, but I would sincerely hope that I never promote anything like that in the form of "personal belief", at least to the extent that the rational and reasonable fact-based alternative is excluded from my contemplations.

This is a thread ostensibly about "Ley Lines" and their historical invention, as well as the dissemination of this quite erroneous belief through literature and so-called "new age spirituality" etc. While the progress of this dissemination is a matter of historical record, and therefore as apt a subject for discussion as any other within the range of topics suitable for this site, it is also necessary - I feel - to point out that it is a "theory" extrapolated completely from one basic premise, and unlike most metaphysical subjects which remain vibrantly discussable because of their oblique but undeniable relationship with actual fact, this one is a non-starter. The premise on which it is based is false, and demonstrably false, so all else attributed to the theory based on that premise is falsely and irrationally constructed.

Temperance wrote:

Paul, I am not arguing that ley lines exist, that Ezekiel saw spaceships, or that we have been visited by spiders from Mars - I am simply saying that we should keep open minds and not be too ready to dismiss everything we do not understand as foolish "woo woo" stuff. Being a sceptic is healthy, but should we not also be sceptical about our own scepticism? We all have agendas, do we not?

I am not afraid of saying what I want to say: I'd have disappeared years ago were I an intellectual coward. I think I have been very brave at times - me and my sling and a few little pebbles. Trouble is I always miss.

PS I didn't buy a bottle of posh plonk yesterday, so I feel  virtuous and in control at the moment. It won't last.  

PPS

Good article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2012/nov/13/history-science


Scepticism, or skepticism, is neither denialism nor a movement. Based on the Greek skeptomai, which means to think or consider, it usually means doubt or incredulity about particular ideas,or a wider view about the impossibility of having certain knowledge. This uncertainty is a philosophical position, and philosophical scepticism includes attempts to deal with it, through systematic doubt and testing of ideas.

Temperance,

"I am simply saying that we should keep open minds and not be too ready to dismiss everything we do not understand as foolish "woo woo" stuff."

Yes "open minded"...I hope I stay open minded...to take now the von Däniken again...I mentioned it already on the old BBC...there are millions of planets as ours in the universe...the scientists have lately discovered some in our immediate neighbourhood...and as the circumstances can be the same...it can be that during evolution through natural selection adapting to the environment of the moment there could exist some "beings", which (who ) have a certain intelligence equal to us or even in a further stadium...that are possibilities...but up to  now, up to my knowledge, I haven't seen some evidence...so until there is evidence....
Or there is influence from some highly intelligent extra terrrestial minds, who determine our thoughts on earth?

I started in April 2002 on the now closed BBC history messageboard with my first thread: "About history". In the mean time I put a lot of messages in threads as: How scientific is historiography? On the Historum forum, also "History and historians". Ferval is my witness, that I contributed in depth to the questions. Even overhere I contributed on the subject with a lot of intelligent respons from Nordmann...

For me historiography has to follow the scientifc lines and be subject to logical scruteny...the same as all the myths à la von Däniken...

The same in Priscilla's thread: "The benefits of..."
I argued there that what I saw as a general trend among religions during history: A desire of the common man to seak comfort for the dangerous and unknown world around them...and that trend was shameless used by some clever "leaders" to gain their power over the others...and from time to time there came a kind of prophet with a "revelation" to give it all a new turn...and for instance an Emperor Constantin sprang on the band waggon...as our Clovis here in our Tournai (Doornik)...

I worked in our factory with common men, hanging components at a conveyor for treatment: degreasing, phosphating and painting, as with higher level among them civil engineers...
That common man had many times a lot of insight even in metaphysical matter...one said to me about afterlife...I have never seen one return to tell us how it is in afterlife...

Temperance I respect every ones belief, because open minded as I am it are indeed all possibilities...but at the same time I am happy that we live in Europe, especially in France where there is since 1905 a separation between Church and State...not in a "Muslim" state, where religion and state are integrated...perhaps when I write this in a muslim state it can be blasphemy...and I can be decapitated...I ask also respect for my way of thinking...

Kind regards from your friend Paul.

Paul wrote:

Or there is influence from some highly intelligent extra terrrestial minds, who determine our thoughts on earth?      

I started in April 2002 on the now closed BBC history messageboard with my first thread: "About history". In the mean time I put a lot of messages in threads as: How scientific is historiography? On the Historum forum, also "History and historians". Ferval is my witness, that I contributed in depth to the questions. Even overhere I contributed on the subject with a lot of intelligent response from Nordmann...

Perhaps nordmann is a highly intelligent extra terrestrial mind who is attempting to influence all our thoughts on earth - you don't think he's actually a sort of Irish Dalek, do you? (Only joking - absolutely no offence intended.)

Seriously, I was not accusing you or anyone else here of having a closed mind. We all enjoy our discussions - or I think we do - and you more than anyone else have set us an example of good manners and friendliness in the most robust of these debates. But even you, like most people here (Priscilla excepted and she, alas, has disappeared - and how much poorer we are for that), do tend to laugh at the likes of me and my childish/childlike belief in God or a Higher Power: I just have to be grateful that the responses to my posts usually display amused, even affectionate, tolerance rather than attracting hurtful, vitriolic sarcasm. But it does get a bit like being patted on the head and being told to run along and play while the grown-ups discuss the serious stuff. But that's OK - I know I'm not as daft as I sometimes sound...

To quote again from your message, this time leaving out all the "winks" and other irritating emoticoms -

Quote :

Or there is influence from some highly intelligent extra terrrestrial minds, who determine our thoughts on earth?

- the only honest answer to this rather interesting question - at the present point in human history - is "We don't know"... And that's before we attempt to define "influence", "extraterrestrial", "minds" and "thoughts". Pesky words again - the signifiers and the signified and the slippage. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven..." - oh dear - that does rather sound like a rather pathetic submission to some sort of extraterrestrial Being, doesn't it? But it's not.

I read von Thingy when I was a teenager. I thought it all was jolly interesting, but I would read anything back then.    He made a fortune, didn't he?