Something fishy in Glastonbury…

*

‘It doesn’t feel like we’re in England. It feels like we’re in France or something.’

No idea why France in particular except, perhaps, that my memories of that country shimmer with light and heat, and the sun was beating down that day.

Such days, in an English summer, are still rare and may be that, to my mind, made the place suitably ‘other’?

How habitual it is to rationalise.

Almost second nature, as if one nature were not more than enough!

We were in Glastonbury for a symposium, a weekend of alternative lectures and radical thinking…

We ‘knew nothing’ of the vesica then even though we had read Michell’s ‘…View…’ some years before.

‘It’s like any book. Some things stick. Some things don’t.’

We knew, though, that we would be returning to Glastonbury and there was no rationalising that away.

*

‘In the landscape round Glastonbury Abbey can be found a clear exposition of the former practice of sacred geometry…

A circle with radius one furlong passes through the Old Market Cross, the Abbey fish pond and the town’s Catholic church and defines with its circumference the outer limits of St John’s church and the old Abbey house.

Another similar circle centred on the Catholic church encloses the church of St Benedict and also passes through the Market Cross and the fish pond.

The two parish churches, 1000 feet apart, are now placed symmetrically within the two circles. The centre of the vesica thus formed by these two circles falls on the Abbey Almonry, the centre of charity, and one of its sides can be seen to mark the building line of houses in Magdalene Street.

Thus, the town of Glastonbury lies below the interlinked circles of a vesica piscis, the basic figure of sacred geometry.’

John Michell – The View over Atlantis