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Fountains of Hecate
Amy Hale
Here we tell stories of women who wander,
of women encountering the land, creating new narratives of wonder,
curiosity, challenge.
In the Chaldean Oracles, Hecate is the soul of matter, feminine in
essence, infusing the material with the hot breath of life. Sitting
between worlds, Hecate animates dense substance with bristling divine
energy. She is also a Goddess of Witchcraft and the underworld, not to
be trifled with. In her 1957 proto earth mysteries guide to Cornwall,
'The Living Stones; Cornwall', Ithell Colquhoun refers to 'Fountains of
Hecate' as the places where the energies of the earth are most potent,
where humans can respond to them most keenly and cultivate etheric
alignments and interdimensional relationships. Colquhoun and mystical
philosophers like Dion Fortune before her believed that for millennia
humans have been marking these sites in various ways, primarily with
stone monuments, indicating points of subterranean power, enchanted not
only by their proximity to underground currents, but also by the rites
conducted in and near them. These rites are not only an acknowledgement
of their power they are a gift of force in return that refreshes them in
a continual flow. These sacred markers serve as signals to other humans
that in these charged and numinous places one can develop their own
empowered connection to the earth. Fortune and Colquhoun were quite
early in their advancement of these ideas, although today they form a
central doctrine propelling the spiritual movements of the pilgrim, the
psychogeographer, the sacred wanderer. However, when the wander is truly
open to the myriad stories of place, the experiences have the potential
to change them in ways untold.
 THE
MARY LINE
The Michael line, which runs from St. Michael's Mount at the tip of
Cornwall in a line to Hopton in Norfolk has been well known and trodden
by pilgrims for much of the twentieth century, if not longer. In the
1940s and 1950s, the hilltop sites dedicated to St. Michael became a
focus of post war pilgrimage intended to bring renewed light and
spiritual regeneration to a war-torn Britain. In 1989 Earth Mysteries
pioneers Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst undertook their own Michael
journey and through dowsing uncovered/created the Mary line, punctuated
by sacred sites, twisting around the Michael line. Miller and
Broadhurst’s theories elided with Colquhoun’s own, earlier experience of
the Fountains of Hecate in the Cornish landscape. They were in agreement
that these lines and sites marked an ancient and lost technology, one
which Colquhoun believed was Atlantean in origin, connecting humans to
the power of the earth. The Earth Mysteries movement energetically
expanded the original conception of the ley line as expressed by Alfred
Watkins as early as 1922. Initially ley lines were believed to be simply
ancient pathways between important sites, but this idea became
intertwined with a belief already existing in esoteric circles in the
1920s and 1930s that sacred sites marked wells of electromagnetic force
under the earth. By the 1960s, ley lines became equated with lines of
‘dragon energy’ traversing the globe, a pulsing web of electricity
detectable by sensitive humans and dousing instruments, believed to
rejuvenate the soul.
The Michael and Mary lines are frequently undertaken as a single
meandering pilgrimage of sacred sites, and some consider their
entwinement to be symbolic of the union of masculine and feminine
energies in the earth. The Michael line, by its very nature, is defined
by its expressions of bold, fiery visibility. Hilltop monuments and
bonfires, dedicated to a martial figure charged with vanquishing the
enemies of the light, psychically cleansing and purifying the
countryside. However, the Mary line, taken on her own, has a much
quieter reputation. Unlike her more famous big brother, the Mary line
features perhaps less well-known sites not as heavily saturated with the
Celtic imaginary. The Mary line twists and turns, whispering her
revelation to those who wish to attune themselves to this delicate
frequency. The Mary line is an unfolding. Consider the implications for
an intuitive journey of women, seeking the presence of the feminine
marked energies of the earth, in a line symbolizing a bright figure of
divine feminine power. For these seekers, Mary and Hecate conspire in
their weaving of energetic spells in the landscape, inviting
introspection and more broadly chthonic expeditions. Although people
tend to speak of their journeys along these ley lines as pilgrimages
they might be better characterized as an allied form of the Situationist
psychogeographic dérive, an inspired and intuitive wandering where the
journey is driven less by destination and more by communion.
Situationist philosopher Guy Debord’s initial inspiration behind
psychogeography was conceived of as a revolutionary response to the
disenchantment and alienation of modern urban planning which forced
people into proscribed movements and fixed interpretations of the
various spaces within a city. Debord called on people to wander off the
beaten path, and most importantly to cultivate a psychic sensitivity
through which people might come to know different, hidden stories held
within the urban landscape. Although psychogeography was initially a
tactic that was forged within a specifically urban context, modern
psychogeography inspires a variety of intuited reactions to landscapes
and spaces, rural, urban and suburban, with the intent being to
encounter hidden and forgotten tales, and importantly to let places
reveal themselves directly. Pilgrimages often suggest a journey that
ends in a blessing, but the dérive asks us to sense and acknowledge the
murky layers that exist in all spaces and to not be afraid to feel them.
Debord’s exhortation to attune ourselves to the unseen histories of the
places we wander is still radical in that it encourages us to challenge
what is laid out before us, and to be sensitive to the dark, the painful
and the ugly. Spaces and places contain so many layers of history and
story, yet the revelation of a site is necessarily shaped by our own
perceptions and lenses. When we experience the magic of place in and
through our bodies, it feels like the deepest, most undeniable truth,
but we can only understand these events, any of them, through what we
bring to them, our own interpretive framework, our history, our lives.
In our wanderings our stories will intersect with the many layers of
history that are also present, tales we will never know and can never
know, of the joys and sorrows of all who have passed by and all who have
lingered. Only the land itself holds those collective memories, and it
is our charge to be present, and open, and to listen.
THE MANY LAYERS OF CORNWALL
Cornwall has been believed to be a place of exceptional magic and
psychic sensitivity for centuries. In the 1700s the inspired antiquarian
William Borlase imagined the stone monuments of Cornwall as sites for
Druidic sacrifice and suggested that, as Celts, the native Cornish were
the inheritors of Druidic wisdom. In subsequent centuries, antiquarians
and folklorists helped build the perception that Cornwall is a land of
enchantment, and that the numerous sacred sites, monuments and
supernatural stories of place which saturate the built heritage of the
Duchy were testimony to this ancient legacy. Yet the romantic
interpretations of Cornwall do not frequently capture the multifaceted
life of modern Kernow, the industry, the loss, the poverty and the
ghosts. Visitors to Cornwall crave magic and romance, often at the
expense and history of the people who actually live there and the
stories they want to tell about themselves.
The ancient technologies believed to be contained at these sites is
often entangled with the rhetoric of connection to “the ancestors”, but
the question begs whose ancestors? The idea that there was a single
origin story, function and even a sense of ownership for any site forces
a dominant narrative onto both site and visitor. This narrative might
generate a deep affective experience of a relationship that feels like
truth. How does this adoption of a tricky empiricism redacted through
bodily sensation, emotion and longing for cultural continuity serve the
history of the sites themselves, which shine like dark jewels with many
facets? Who and what is erased in the process?
DARK CAVERNS, MILKY WATERS
As Michael is the lord of the fiery hilltops and blazing beacons, what
will Mary tell us about the depths, the hidden and unseen, the broken
and disrupted, that which is not so pristine? What can these sites
reveal about our own concealed and complicated journeys? The Mary line
highlights places in Cornwall that ooze and drip, hidden by moss covered
granite, often unrecognized. Places that are not well known or popularly
associated with the sacred sites of Cornwall because they are entwined
with Cornwall’s industrial heartland and in many cases are proximal to
the economic and social devastation that has emerged from neglect and
lack of development. These are not merely places subject to the tourist
gaze, sitting quietly in depopulated areas. People live and work near
them, they are integrated into the fabric of Cornish life and history.
Consider Menacuddle well. It’s a sweet little well in the middle of St.
Austell, a clay mining town with a rather rough reputation. The well is
fed by the river that served the China clay mining community, which
often ran a milky white. St. Germoe’s well, also close to a mining area,
is an exceptionally modest offering, sitting adjacent to a roadside, not
magically waiting to be revealed in a thick wood. Lostwithiel with its
picturesque Norman castle on the hill, was once a Stannary town,
managing tin coinage, taxes and the legal affairs of tinners. The truly
magnificent sites of The Hurlers and the Cheesewring on windy Bodmin
Moor serve and are served by the village of Minions in the East of
Cornwall. Given the proximity of so many ancient monuments to this town,
strategically developed to have a central role in mining, we might
consider that the sacred sites so often portrayed by antiquarians and
pilgrims as empty, imagined as quiet places of contemplation or ritual,
were once central to busy communities of living, working people.
The aesthetic of the sites we consider to be magical almost demands that
they are portrayed as part of a depeopled ‘natural’ landscape, hard to
access, so that making the modern journey to ‘discover’ them feels even
more profound. Yet these sites were often designed to be accessible and
connected to communities and lives. What are the implications of not
ignoring the communities, settlements, roadways and disagreeable stories
existing in the neighbourhoods of the sacred sites? Can we acknowledge
the industry, the estates, the highways, the beauty and the blight?
Instead of desacralizing the sites which many would hope to keep
pristine, might this, in fact, shine a hallowed light onto a richer
understanding of their persistence?
All the stories are sacred, and the ‘Fountains of Hecate’ are nurtured
by these offerings. Perhaps this revelation of the Mary line,
experienced in the tales of these wandering women, is about reclaiming
the total and chaotic blessedness of the hidden places and of ourselves,
the light of the Gods that lives in all things.
Essay commissioned by Spike
Island, Bristol to accompany Lucy
Stein's 'Wet Room'. Image by Lucy Stein is
'Neolithic Feminism' (2021) courtesy the artist and Gregor Staiger,
Zurich.
https://www.spikeisland.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/lucy-stein
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