This article is an excerpt taken from the book In The Name of the Gods by David Elkington (2001, pp.176-180), with kind permission, submitted for publication in Against the Grain by Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom.
Cereal Graphics
From ancient times, through myth, folk tales and other media, mankind has left us plenty of evidence of the appearance of paranormal happenings, often in association with sacred sites such as ancient tumuli, long barrows and cairns. It is also obvious that in the past, humanity was more than aware of these, by our standards, peculiar events. There was a language for it. In fact, markings at ancient sites, and the designs to be found in churches and cathedrals are part of that language – the language of pictograms. A language of shape, a mathematical language. This language is now returning to us every summer, bringing with it strange lights over the landscape and annoyance to farmers. It comes in the form of crop circles.
It has been maintained in the popular press that crop circles are the result of hoaxers working late at night. The evidence for this is largely contrary; it is quite impossible to reproduce the creations within the time-frame generally agreed, and those circles that are known to be of human provenance are quite different and of a far lower standard than those that appear quickly and mysteriously.
Image courtesy of Stonehenge Dronescapes
The modern crop circle phenomenon began to come to prominence in the 1980s, generally in southern Britain near the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury. The first circles were rudimentary whorls of impressed cereal. By 1997, the complexity of the imprints had excelled all of impressed cereal. By 1997, the complexity of the imprints had excelled all expectations of what was by now a commonly awaited phenomenon. The culmination came in 1991 with a superb Mandelbrot Set in a wheat field at Ickelton, near Cambridge, England. The sheer complexity of this design ruled out any physical human origin, but what really stood out was the fact that a Mandelbrot Set, a complex element of chaos theory discovered by Beniot Mandelbrot (who taught for a number of years at the nearby University of Cambridge) cannot be drawn freehand. It has to be built up, point by careful point, a process that, even when using a computer, can take days if not weeks.
The phenomenon and its following have grown, and aliens are the favoured explanation, that somehow an extraterrestrial intelligence is manipulating the earth’s energies. Strange balls of light have been seen in conjunction with crop circle formations, and some have even been captured on film; sprite-like mercurial and mischievous.
The circles themselves have the appearance of being gigantic hieroglyphs, and in this sense perhaps they are a reference to something deeply unconscious. The twentieth century surrealist painter Rene Magritte used various hieroglyphs in his works to illustrate the dream language of the unconscious mind, a language much commented on by Freud and Jung in their work on psychoanalysis. The hieroglyphic language, I believe, springs from the unconscious and we have already seen the origins of the word ‘Alien’ the hieroglyphic letter, El Ayin. If El Ayin is the ‘third eye’ or inner visionary centre through which, it is said, we can look into other worlds, what really are these things that the see-ers’ look upon and on occasion, interact with? They must be subtle energies, likely to be connected with electric and magnetic fields which penetrate and encompass physical life. Do you recall the traditional fairy tales of old? We have seen that there is more to many old -tales than meets the eye – but perhaps they meet the third eye? Now, in the light of science, let us take these tales seriously for a moment. Perhaps there is a hierarchy of these energies, which follow the traditional family names, dwarfs and gnomes being the energies inside or nearest the earth, elves, pixies and fairies being more airborne, and angels, as messengers from beyond, more associated with the forces of the sun as they enrich the earth’s atmosphere, all of them electromagnetic and all from an alien world, that is, one seen by the El Ayin, the third eye, the perceiver of the subtle, quantum realms. And as these visions move into our consciousness, we clothe them with our preconceptions, as we have seen with the visions of the Queen of Heaven. In this way, one may see an angel where another sees ET or the Devil! (Intriguingly, a 1678 woodcut shows a ‘mowing devil’ in the midst of what looks like a crop circle.) The way we chose to perceive these energies may be due to a process operating at a very deep level.
‘….at the finest level of description of the mind, the swift construction, manipulation and superposition of many images, might require explanation at the quantum level,’ Prof Antonio R. Damasio in Scientific American, December 1999.
But what of the circles themselves? The more serious researchers are convinced that they are created by powerful electrical forces. Massachusetts biologist Dr William Levengood has found that both the plants and the soil within crop circles exhibit very strange structural changes, as if they have been hit by a massive but intense burst of energy: There are chemical changes and bizarre anomalies at a molecular level: the nodes of the plants are swollen to the point where, quite often, they burst or split. They bend at 90° angles and seedlings are stunted. The effects of human hoaxers are quite contrary – smashed stalks, broken off at many heights and many angles, and all too obvious effects of destruction.
In shape, we shall soon see that these crop-glyphs are mathematical, but it has also been pointed out by various researchers that some appear to spell out the names of Sumerian and Egyptian deities. This could be a sign that the Ancients, being more sensitive, could see these energies as a matter of course and even understand their functions – for ancient gods and goddesses invariably were functional, representing attributes of what might be called the Ultimate Creative Force. It is worth mentioning that, in the older religions, the Vedic for example, force is equated with the Divine Mother.
Now it is easier to see the connections between the circles and ideas that Mother Earth is somehow communicating with us, and not just through crop circles. In arctic Canada, ice circles have begun to make their appearance in the midst of thin coats of lake ice. No hoaxers here – the surrounding ice is a clear unbroken sheet with not a footprint in sight. Latterly, circles have also become an ‘underground’ phenomenon, for dust circles of varying complexity have been discovered by commuters on the world’s underground systems.
Cereal Sound
There is something else which is strongly associated with these phenomena, In the middle of summer in 1997, as twilight began to fall, Jack Spooncer was driving home to his farmhouse deep in the heart of west Dorset. The light was fading fast and Jack flicked on his headlights. Turning a corner he came upon an extraordinary sight: there in the corner of one of his fields, amidst the crops, was a dome-shaped object that quite took his breath away. His description is intriguing:
‘It was like a million icy droplets, glistening, like a hologram, shimmering.’
Jack also noticed a high-pitched sound. He hurried home to fetch his wife, but upon their return there was no sign of the strange dome-shaped object. However, there was something of a signature: half a crop circle, incomplete but a circle all the same.
In another of the many incidents where sound has been reported, one night in 1990, a small group of people, George Wingfield, John Haddington and Michael Cox, gathered together at a location near Silbury Hill, Wiltshire. On consecutive evenings they witnessed lights and heard a strange ´trilling’ noise:
‘To the human ear this most musical sound has the most beautiful bell-like quality, really indescribable as it is so high-pitched.’ John Haddington, quoted in Wilson, Alien Dawn, p29, Virgin Publ.,1998
Indeed, the sound was so high pitched that all of them were overtaken by a strange sensation, in one case a feeling of nausea and vomiting, quickly followed by a weakness in the knees.
Strange lights and otherworldly music are a common link between crop circle discoveries and UFO sightings. These sights and sounds also link to visions where the viewer sees, not so much a form, but a ‘large globe of golden light’, as at Knock, Ireland, in 1879, which appeared to the accompaniment of what was described as ‘a heavenly choir’. Significantly, in mythic and other traditions, the otherworldly is associated with music. Pan played his pipes; Orpheus, the harp; there were the sirens of Greek myth; faeries who used music as a means to charm; and the Pied Piper who used his musical magic to lead children into a new world within the rock. There are so many tales bearing the hallmark of music, the gift of the muse.
Music is frequency in harmonic form. The eight notes of our musical scale are familiar to all. Each sound is different because of pitch, the number of vibrations per second, and these in turn are related to each other via a series of fractions or intervals. One might think that the interval between notes is spaced perfectly, but it isn’t. The fractions are one and an eighth, one and two eighths, and so on. It is these fractions that are important, in that the ‘music’ that Jack Spooncer and others have heard at crop circles and during UFO sightings, etc, seems to be expressions of these fractions.
Regarding crop circles, it might be said that it is the music that is laying them down. Crop circles are harmonic patterns. This discovery was made by Gerald Hawkins, author of Stonehenge Decoded and a number of other ground-breaking works. He is a respected astronomer and understands the importance of Euclidean geometry, both in terms of astronomy and latterly, corn circles. In realising that fractions of the musical diatonic scale were appearing in the make-up of corn circles, Hawkins also realised that we are dealing with something intelligent. Furthermore, new evidence has come to light that in crop circle formations, we are dealing with a phenomenon of infinite harmonics, of vibrations within vibrations, of frequencies within frequencies.
The ‘noise’ found at these sites is, in fact, rhythmic vibration, which, to all intents and purposes, is birdsong speeded up. What is extraordinary is that birdsong is symphonic. The work of David Hindley, a Cambridge musician, has shown that the songs of birds relate precisely to the rules and principles of human musical composition. Birdsong is a highly compressed sequence of notes. A 48-second song of a skylark ran to nearly 13 minutes when transcribed to human speed by Hindley. Also, it became apparent that the composing skills of Mozart and Beethoven had found a sparring partner.
This brief journey into the strange world of crop circles should help us to understand that sound, electrical and magnetic forces can be applied together with intelligence to give rise to form — not only in the mind, where the tendency is to mentally clothe the subtle images, but also physically.
Here we approach the ancient dictum that, in truth, name (sound) and form are one. In the ancient traditions, this science of name and form is the realm of the shaman.
Stonehenge image copyright Nick Bull Stonehenge Dronescapes.