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John Michell (writer)
Encyclopedia
John Frederick Carden Michell (9 February 1933 – 24 April 2009) was an English
writer whose key sources of inspiration were Plato
and Charles Fort
. His 1969 volume The View Over Atlantis has been described as probably the most influential book in the history of the hippy/underground
movement and one that had far-reaching effects on the study of strange phenomena: it "put ley lines on the map, re-enchanted the British landscape and made Glastonbury
the capital of the New Age
."
In some 40-odd titles over five decades he examined, often in pioneering style, such topics as sacred geometry
, earth mysteries
, geomancy
, gematria
, archaeoastronomy
, metrology
, euphonics, simulacra and sacred sites, as well as Fortean phenomena. An abiding preoccupation was the Shakespeare authorship question. His Who Wrote Shakespeare? (1996) was reckoned by The Washington Post "the best overview yet of the authorship question."
and Trinity College, Cambridge
. He did national service in the Royal Navy, during which time he qualified as a Russian translator at the Joint Services School for Linguists
. He then worked for a while as an estate agent
in London. In 1966 one of his properties, the basement of his own residence, became the base of the London Free School
. The Black Power activist Michael X
, having previously run a gambling club in the basement, had now become active in the organisation of the LFS and brought Michell into counter-culture activities. Michell began to offer courses in UFOs and ley lines.
His first book, The Flying Saucer Vision, was published in 1967. At this time Michell took the view that "an imminent revelation of literally inconceivable scope" was at hand, and that the appearance of UFOs was linked to "the start of a new phase in our history". In 1969 he published The View Over Atlantis, a book which argued that an ancient system of ley lines linked together megaliths and monuments from the distant past. Gary Lachman
states that the book "put Glastonbury on the countercultural map." Ronald Hutton
describes it as "almost the founding document of the modern earth mysteries
movement". By the late 1960s Michell was closely associated with members of the Rolling Stones.
In the 1980s Michell was a member of the Lindisfarne Association
and a teacher at its School of Sacred Architecture. He lectured at the Kairos Foundation, an "educational charity specifically founded to promote the recovery of traditional values in the Arts and Sciences". He was for some years a visiting lecturer at the Prince of Wales
' School of Traditional Arts
.
From 1997 he wrote a monthly column of humour, philosophy and social commentary in The Oldie
magazine, an anthology of which was published in 2005 as Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist.
In 1964 Michell fathered a son, Jason Goodwin
, who also became a writer. The relationship with Goodwin's mother did not last. His son did not meet his father until 1992, at the age of 28. In 2007 Michell was married to Denise Price, the Archdruidess of the Glastonbury Order of Druids. The marriage was brief.
John Michell was the author of over forty books, numerous (sometimes humorous) short treatises, and articles in publications as diverse as International Times
, The Temenos Academy Review
, the Daily Mirror and The Spectator
.
His better known works include The Flying Saucer Vision: the Holy Grail Restored (1967), The View Over Atlantis (1969), later revised as The New View Over Atlantis, (1983), which stimulated renewed interest in ley lines, City of Revelation (1972), which concerns sacred geometry
, A Little History of Astro-Archaeology (1977), Phenomena: A Book of Wonders (1977 with R. J. M. Rickard), Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (1984) and The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth: Discovering the Sacred Geometry of the Ancients (2006) with Robin Heath.
Michell's books received a broadly positive reception amongst the "New Age" and "Earth mysteries" movements and he is credited as perhaps being "the most articulate and influential writer on the subject of leys and alternative studies of the past". Ronald Hutton
describes his research as part of an alternative archaeology "quite unacceptable to orthodox scholarship."
Bob Rickard
, founding editor of Fortean Times
, has written that Michell's first three works "provided a synthesis of and a context for all the other weirdness of the era. It’s fair to say that it played a big part in the foundation of Fortean Times itself by helping create a readership that wanted more things to think about and a place to discuss them. The overall effect was to help the burgeoning interest in strange phenomena spread out into mainstream culture."
His 1984 volume Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions covered such figures as Comyns Beaumont, Edward Hine
and flat-earth advocate Lady Elizabeth Blount, as well as eccentric
, not to say egregious, behaviour such as self-administered trepanning.
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A recurring theme in Michell's work, from Living Wonders to Twelve Tribe Nations and The Measure of Albion, is of universal truths codified in nature and continually, if intermittently, rediscovered from ancient times up to the present day.
Ioan Culianu
, a specialist in gnosticism
and Renaissance
esoteric studies, in a review in 1991 of The Dimensions of Paradise: The Proportions and Symbolic Numbers in Ancient Cosmology, expressed the view that, "After some deliberation the reader of this book will oscillate between two hypotheses: either that many mysteries of the universe are based on numbers, or that the book's author is a fairly learned crank obsessed with numbers."
Michell, like Fort, maintained a thoroughgoing scepticism towards most of the theoretical tenets of contemporary science. "How did the world begin?" he enquired of the Daily Mirrors readers on one occasion. "The correct answer is . . . it is a total mystery. That is also the proper answer to the other big questions about our existence—the ones that children ask but adults hate to answer. Questions like: 'How did life begin?' or 'Where does human intelligence come from?' or 'How did language develop?' Everyone has ideas about these things, but no one really knows. If they did know there would not be all those different theories.
"We have all, for example, heard of the 'Big Bang.' According to this explanation, everything in the cosmos developed from a tiny package of incredibly dense matter that exploded. One day, somehow, it exploded and our world began. Adults are quite happy to accept this idea but it does not satisfy children. The next thing they ask, quite rightly, is: How did that suspicious package get there in the first place?"
He went on: "Most writers have their thing or main theme that runs throughout all their work. My thing for over 35 years, in books, articles, and lectures, has been the mystery of existence. Within this unexplained universe is an infinity of mysteries. Wherever you look, in archaeology and ancient history or in the modern records of parapsychology and strange phenomena, you find evidence to contradict every theory and 'certainty' of official science. The real world is quite different from the way our teachers describe it, and it is a great deal more interesting."
is based on geometry
. David Fideler noted that "John Michell was the first to show how this story was intentionally constructed upon an underlying geometry." He also noted in this book the relationship between the Egyptian Cubit
, Remen
and Megalithic Yard
, stating that geometrically, if a square has a side that is the Remen then the diagonal will be the Royal Cubit
. Furthermore he noted that if a rectangle measures two by one Remens then the diagonal will be the Megalithic Yard.
. Who Wrote Shakespeare? received mixed reviews: Publishers Weekly
was critical, while The Washington Post and The Independent
praised his treatment of the subject.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
writer whose key sources of inspiration were Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
and Charles Fort
Charles Fort
Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold well and are still in print today.-Biography:Charles Hoy Fort was born in 1874 in Albany, New York, of Dutch...
. His 1969 volume The View Over Atlantis has been described as probably the most influential book in the history of the hippy/underground
UK underground
The Underground was a countercultural movement in the United Kingdom linked to the underground culture in the United States and associated with the hippie phenomenon. Its primary focus was around Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill in London...
movement and one that had far-reaching effects on the study of strange phenomena: it "put ley lines on the map, re-enchanted the British landscape and made Glastonbury
Glastonbury Festival
The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, commonly abbreviated to Glastonbury or even Glasto, is a performing arts festival that takes place near Pilton, Somerset, England, best known for its contemporary music, but also for dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and other arts.The...
the capital of the New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
."
In some 40-odd titles over five decades he examined, often in pioneering style, such topics as sacred geometry
Sacred geometry
Sacred geometry is the geometry used in the planning and construction of religious structures such as churches, temples, mosques, religious monuments, altars, tabernacles; as well as for sacred spaces such as temenoi, sacred groves, village greens and holy wells, and the creation of religious art...
, earth mysteries
Earth mysteries
The term Earth mysteries describes an interest in a wide range of spiritual, quasi-religious and pseudo-scientific ideas focusing on cultural and religious beliefs about the Earth, generally with regard to particular geographical locations of historical significance.The study of ley lines...
, geomancy
Geomancy
Geomancy is a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand...
, gematria
Gematria
Gematria or gimatria is a system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other, or bear some relation to the number itself as it may apply to a person's age, the calendar year, or the like...
, archaeoastronomy
Archaeoastronomy
Archaeoastronomy is the study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky how they used phenomena in the sky and what role the sky played in their cultures." Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern...
, metrology
Pseudoscientific metrology
Some approaches in the branch of historic metrology are highly speculative and can be qualified as pseudoscience. Interest in ancient metrology was triggered by research into the various Megalith building cultures and the Great Pyramid of Giza.-Origins:...
, euphonics, simulacra and sacred sites, as well as Fortean phenomena. An abiding preoccupation was the Shakespeare authorship question. His Who Wrote Shakespeare? (1996) was reckoned by The Washington Post "the best overview yet of the authorship question."
Biography
Michell was educated at EtonEton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
and Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
. He did national service in the Royal Navy, during which time he qualified as a Russian translator at the Joint Services School for Linguists
Joint Services School for Linguists
The Joint Services School for Linguists was founded in 1951 by the British armed services to provide language training, principally in Russian, and largely to selected conscripts undergoing National Service...
. He then worked for a while as an estate agent
Estate agent
An estate agent is a person or business that arranges the selling, renting or management of properties, and other buildings, in the United Kingdom and Ireland. An agent that specialises in renting is often called a letting or management agent...
in London. In 1966 one of his properties, the basement of his own residence, became the base of the London Free School
London Free School
The London Free School was founded 8 March 1966 principally by John 'Hoppy' Hopkins and Rhaune Laslett.The London Free School was a community action adult education project inspired by American free universities...
. The Black Power activist Michael X
Michael X
Michael X , born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad and Tobago to a Portuguese father and a Bajan-born mother, was a self-styled black revolutionary and civil rights activist in 1960s London. He was also known as Michael Abdul Malik and Abdul Malik...
, having previously run a gambling club in the basement, had now become active in the organisation of the LFS and brought Michell into counter-culture activities. Michell began to offer courses in UFOs and ley lines.
His first book, The Flying Saucer Vision, was published in 1967. At this time Michell took the view that "an imminent revelation of literally inconceivable scope" was at hand, and that the appearance of UFOs was linked to "the start of a new phase in our history". In 1969 he published The View Over Atlantis, a book which argued that an ancient system of ley lines linked together megaliths and monuments from the distant past. Gary Lachman
Gary Valentine Lachman
Gary Lachman, born December 24, 1955 in Bayonne, New Jersey, is an American writer and musician. Lachman is best known to readers of mysticism and the occult, in the numerous articles and books he has published...
states that the book "put Glastonbury on the countercultural map." Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
describes it as "almost the founding document of the modern earth mysteries
Earth mysteries
The term Earth mysteries describes an interest in a wide range of spiritual, quasi-religious and pseudo-scientific ideas focusing on cultural and religious beliefs about the Earth, generally with regard to particular geographical locations of historical significance.The study of ley lines...
movement". By the late 1960s Michell was closely associated with members of the Rolling Stones.
In the 1980s Michell was a member of the Lindisfarne Association
Lindisfarne Association
The Lindisfarne Association is a group of intellectuals of diverse interests organized by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson for the "study and realization of a new planetary culture"...
and a teacher at its School of Sacred Architecture. He lectured at the Kairos Foundation, an "educational charity specifically founded to promote the recovery of traditional values in the Arts and Sciences". He was for some years a visiting lecturer at the Prince of Wales
Prince of Wales
Prince of Wales is a title traditionally granted to the heir apparent to the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the 15 other independent Commonwealth realms...
' School of Traditional Arts
The Prince's School of Traditional Arts
The Prince's School of Traditional Arts is a school in London which teaches students at the postgraduate degree level, and short open courses and in the community....
.
From 1997 he wrote a monthly column of humour, philosophy and social commentary in The Oldie
The Oldie
The Oldie is a monthly magazine launched in 1992 by Richard Ingrams, who for 23 years was the editor of Private Eye. It carries general interest articles, humour and cartoons, and has an eclectic list of contributors, including James Le Fanu, John Sweeney, Thomas Stuttaford, Virginia Ironside,...
magazine, an anthology of which was published in 2005 as Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist.
In 1964 Michell fathered a son, Jason Goodwin
Jason Goodwin
Jason Goodwin is a British writer and historian. He studied Byzantine history at Cambridge University. Following the success of A Time For Tea: Travels in China and India in Search of Tea, he walked from Poland to Istanbul, Turkey...
, who also became a writer. The relationship with Goodwin's mother did not last. His son did not meet his father until 1992, at the age of 28. In 2007 Michell was married to Denise Price, the Archdruidess of the Glastonbury Order of Druids. The marriage was brief.
Books
International Times
International Times was an underground newspaper founded in London in 1966. Editors included Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Pete Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGrath...
, The Temenos Academy Review
Temenos
Temenos is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god, a sanctuary, holy grove or holy precinct: The Pythian race-course is called a temenos, the sacred valley of the Nile is the ...
, the Daily Mirror and The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
.
His better known works include The Flying Saucer Vision: the Holy Grail Restored (1967), The View Over Atlantis (1969), later revised as The New View Over Atlantis, (1983), which stimulated renewed interest in ley lines, City of Revelation (1972), which concerns sacred geometry
Sacred geometry
Sacred geometry is the geometry used in the planning and construction of religious structures such as churches, temples, mosques, religious monuments, altars, tabernacles; as well as for sacred spaces such as temenoi, sacred groves, village greens and holy wells, and the creation of religious art...
, A Little History of Astro-Archaeology (1977), Phenomena: A Book of Wonders (1977 with R. J. M. Rickard), Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (1984) and The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth: Discovering the Sacred Geometry of the Ancients (2006) with Robin Heath.
Michell's books received a broadly positive reception amongst the "New Age" and "Earth mysteries" movements and he is credited as perhaps being "the most articulate and influential writer on the subject of leys and alternative studies of the past". Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
describes his research as part of an alternative archaeology "quite unacceptable to orthodox scholarship."
Bob Rickard
Bob Rickard
Robert "Bob" J M Rickard is the founder and editor of the UK magazine Fortean Times: The Journal of Strange Phenomena, which debuted in 1973 under its original title The News. The magazines express purpose is to continue the documentary work of Charles Fort on the strange, anomalous and unexplained...
, founding editor of Fortean Times
Fortean Times
Fortean Times is a British monthly magazine devoted to the anomalous phenomena popularised by Charles Fort. Previously published by John Brown Publishing and then I Feel Good Publishing , it is now published by Dennis Publishing Ltd. As of December 2010, its circulation was approximately 18,000...
, has written that Michell's first three works "provided a synthesis of and a context for all the other weirdness of the era. It’s fair to say that it played a big part in the foundation of Fortean Times itself by helping create a readership that wanted more things to think about and a place to discuss them. The overall effect was to help the burgeoning interest in strange phenomena spread out into mainstream culture."
His 1984 volume Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions covered such figures as Comyns Beaumont, Edward Hine
Edward Hine
Edward Hine was an influential proponent of British Israelism in the 1870s and 1880s, drawing on the earlier work of Richard Brothers and John Wilson . Hine went as far as to conclude that "It is an utter impossibility for England ever to be defeated...
and flat-earth advocate Lady Elizabeth Blount, as well as eccentric
Eccentricity (behavior)
In popular usage, eccentricity refers to unusual or odd behavior on the part of an individual. This behavior would typically be perceived as unusual or unnecessary, without being demonstrably maladaptive...
, not to say egregious, behaviour such as self-administered trepanning.
Metrology, numerology & cosmology
Ioan Culianu
Ioan P. Culianu
Ioan Petru Culianu or Couliano was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer...
, a specialist in gnosticism
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
and Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
esoteric studies, in a review in 1991 of The Dimensions of Paradise: The Proportions and Symbolic Numbers in Ancient Cosmology, expressed the view that, "After some deliberation the reader of this book will oscillate between two hypotheses: either that many mysteries of the universe are based on numbers, or that the book's author is a fairly learned crank obsessed with numbers."
Michell, like Fort, maintained a thoroughgoing scepticism towards most of the theoretical tenets of contemporary science. "How did the world begin?" he enquired of the Daily Mirrors readers on one occasion. "The correct answer is . . . it is a total mystery. That is also the proper answer to the other big questions about our existence—the ones that children ask but adults hate to answer. Questions like: 'How did life begin?' or 'Where does human intelligence come from?' or 'How did language develop?' Everyone has ideas about these things, but no one really knows. If they did know there would not be all those different theories.
"We have all, for example, heard of the 'Big Bang.' According to this explanation, everything in the cosmos developed from a tiny package of incredibly dense matter that exploded. One day, somehow, it exploded and our world began. Adults are quite happy to accept this idea but it does not satisfy children. The next thing they ask, quite rightly, is: How did that suspicious package get there in the first place?"
He went on: "Most writers have their thing or main theme that runs throughout all their work. My thing for over 35 years, in books, articles, and lectures, has been the mystery of existence. Within this unexplained universe is an infinity of mysteries. Wherever you look, in archaeology and ancient history or in the modern records of parapsychology and strange phenomena, you find evidence to contradict every theory and 'certainty' of official science. The real world is quite different from the way our teachers describe it, and it is a great deal more interesting."
City of Revelation
Michell claimed that the Biblical miracle of the catch of 153 fishCatch of 153 fish
The miraculous catch of fish is either of two miracles attributed to Jesus in the early Christian canonical literature known as the Gospels. The miracles are reported as taking place years apart from each other, but in both miracles apostles are fishing unsuccessfully in the Sea of Galilee when...
is based on geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
. David Fideler noted that "John Michell was the first to show how this story was intentionally constructed upon an underlying geometry." He also noted in this book the relationship between the Egyptian Cubit
Cubit
The cubit is a traditional unit of length, based on the length of the forearm. Cubits of various lengths were employed in many parts of the world in Antiquity, in the Middle Ages and into Early Modern Times....
, Remen
Ancient Egyptian units of measurement
-Length:Units of length date back to at least the early dynastic period. In the Palermo stone for instance the level of the Nile river is recorded. During the reign of Pharaoh Djer the height of the river Nile was given as measuring 6 cubits and 1 palm...
and Megalithic Yard
Megalithic Yard
A Megalithic Yard is a unit of measurement, about , that some researchers believe was used in the construction of megalithic structures. The proposal was made by Alexander Thom as a result of his surveys of 600 megalithic sites in England, Scotland, Wales and Britanny...
, stating that geometrically, if a square has a side that is the Remen then the diagonal will be the Royal Cubit
Cubit
The cubit is a traditional unit of length, based on the length of the forearm. Cubits of various lengths were employed in many parts of the world in Antiquity, in the Middle Ages and into Early Modern Times....
. Furthermore he noted that if a rectangle measures two by one Remens then the diagonal will be the Megalithic Yard.
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
In 1996 Michell published on the question of Shakespeare authorship. In surveying the arguments for and against the various candidates, he did not expressly favour any single one of the surprisingly many, but judged certain hypotheses more plausible than others, particularly the Oxfordian theoryOxfordian theory
The Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship proposes that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford , wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. While a large majority of scholars reject all alternative candidates for authorship, popular...
. Who Wrote Shakespeare? received mixed reviews: Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
was critical, while The Washington Post and The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
praised his treatment of the subject.
Further Reading
- Paul Screeton, John Michell: From Atlantis To Avalon (Heart of Albion Press, 2010). ISBN 190564616X
External links
- The HOPE - John Michell Includes a link to some of Michell's geometric art work
- International Fortean Organisation
- Spectator articles by John Michell
- Michell and the 1971 Glastonbury Festival
- John Michell's wedding to Denise Price, Glastonbury, 2007
- Michell addresses the 1998 FortFest