Table Of ContentCoyer and Frontispiece Photograph
Hip it Julia Set discovered July 29, 1996, at Windmill Hill, Wiltshire,
England near Avebury, the largest circle and avenue of standing sarsen
stones in the British Isles. constructed around 3700 B.C. for spiritual rituals.
This fractal formation of 194 circles spiraled for 1,000feet in diameter and.
is discussed further in Chapter 2. Photograph © 1996 by Steve Alexander.
O ther Books by A uthor
An Alien Harvest
Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. I: Facts & Eyewitnesses
Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. II: High Strangeness
Back Cover Photograph
“Basket” wheat formation August 6, 1999, at Bishops Cannings,
Wiltshire, England. Aerial photograph © 1999 by Ulrich Kox. .
Whatever is doing these formations
affecting the fundamental biochemistry
and biophysics of the plants.
— W. C. Levengood, Biophysicist
First published 2000
^ Linda Moulton Howe 2000 and 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or other
wise. without the prior permission of Linda Moulton Howe.
First Edition, First Printing, December 2000
Second Printing, March 2001
Second Edition, First Printing, September 2002
Published in the United States of America by
Pioneer Printing
514 West 19th Street
Cheyenne, Wyoming 82001
Maps by Tim Bauer, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:
2002107978
ISBN 0-9620570-6-1
PRODUCTIONS
Contents
Foreword
By John Anthony West......................
vi
Chapter i
The Haunted Fields of Wiltshire ..................................................1
Chapter i
Strange Sounds and Flickering Brightness...............................24
chapter
3
The Barge......................................................................................102
chapter
4
Roundway and Beyond...............................................................128
chapter
5
Vesica Piscis....................................................................................178
Ghostly Images
200
Clouds of Light 215
What Scientists Say......................................................................248
chapter
9
1999 Crop Surveys by Andreas Mueller....................................282
chapter
10
Before September 11, 2001........................................................318
Acknowledgements . 348
350
Contact Information
354
Bibliography...........
357
Index .......................
v
Foreword
It you have bought, or even opened this excellent book, and find
yourself reading its foreword, the chances are you do not have to be con
duced that crop circles are mysterious, inexplicable and real. That is to
mv. thee are not. for the most part, hoaxes — although the scientific community
and the media seem committed to convincing the public that they
are. Linda Moulton Howe wastes no time recapitulating the notorious
Doug and Dave episode. She dismisses it in a single paragraph and gets
on with exploring the complex, ongoing aftermath. And what she finds is
a common thematic and symbolic thread, plus empirical evidence from
scientific research that cannot be hoaxed.
If you did not know crop circles were glyphs incised into fields of
grain and knew them only as photographs, you might think they were
paintings produced by a genius abstract artist educated in some universal
mystery religion or esoteric school. The figures speak directly to our
human aesthetic/spiritual faculty, as does all art. The language spoken is
at once familiar and strange. The crop circles resonate within, summon
ing up echoes of the philosophical/metaphysical/religious symbols used
around the world since history began. Yet, rarely are they identical to
what is known. Moreover, during the crop circle decades of the 1980s and
1990s, mysterious balls of light or light forms have been seen hover
ing about the formations, sometimes appearing on photographs and
videotapes. Even lights and spheres invisible to the naked eye turn
up on film and tape.
It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that the circles and the circle mak
ers, whoever or whatever they might be, are going to great lengths trying
to tell us something. Possibly something important, and the inference is
that the message must be positive since it runs counter-intuitive to associ
ate so much beauty and harmony with negation. But what might that mes
sage be? And to what end? It is this positive aspect of the crop circle mys
tery that Linda Moulton Howe stresses while raising an important ques
tion about point and counter-point. The symbol glyphs often have penta-
cles or geometries inside circles that suggest black and white magical
rites. Could at least two players with different intents be competing on the
chessboards of the fields? Thoroughly, thoughtfully, sensitively, she
vi
explores the innumerable resonances the circles set up with symbols we
already know from the ancient traditions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Islam,
Christianity, Judaism, the Far East, and shamanic societies. Symbols spe
cific to none, reminiscent of all. Remarkable! And then there are those
lights! The book is gorgeously and richly illustrated.
As she weaves the symbols throughout the book with occasional near
matches in ancient texts, a central theme emerges: that there is no posi
tive force or phenomenon without its negative counterpart: matter/anti-
matter, active/passive, initiating/resisting. There is no Horus without
Seth. That is a cosmological/psychological/physical and strictly practical
truth. In ancient Egypt, Seth (Setekh) was Ego, principle of materializa
tion and opposition, of negation, of matter forever at war with Spirit. Seth
is the Dark Force that does not want to return to the Source. Seth is also
a great god. After prodigious contentions with Horus, Seth is eventually
conquered and reconciled, not killed or even banished. Both Seth and
Horus bless and empower Pharaoh, the Divinity incarnated upon earth.
An alchemical text captures the final stage of that process: “The fire goes
out only when the work is complete and the whole tinctorial mass fuses
with the glass and becomes luminous like the sun.”
Without Seth in opposition, nothing happens or can happen. Seth
is easily understood, so it is odd that everywhere he is so grievously mis
understood. When I turn on my computer in the morning, that blank
screen is Seth, the Opposition, defying me to write words on it. We learn,
all of us, mainly through negation. Praise is comforting. It’s nice to be
told that your work is admired. But the work is taken further largely
through a recognition of the negative. If I do not know what’s wrong, or
what is inadequate, I cannot improve it, fix it, surmount it. Seth is always
present — as he must be, should be — at least until the work is com
plete and that “tinctorial mass fuses with the glass and becomes lumi
nous like the sun....”
In the myth, Horus always conquers. In real life, it’s not always like
that. In fact, for roughly the last four thousand years, the world has seen
little of Horus, but a surfeit of Seth. In the myth, Seth takes many forms
that have negative associations: scorpion, viper, crocodile, rampaging
male hippo, jackass. Seth is also master of confusion, camouflage, decep
tion. So, it comes as no surprise when, in modern time, he dons Horus’s
own falcon mask of Resurrection and Return and poses as today’s
Messiah preaching his own gospel of Materialism and
Meaninglessness. Then there’s that Church of glitzy barbarism he calls
vii
Progress" whose Jesuits are Science. Education and the Media. Its job:
to defend the Unfaith.
Soon as a manifestation of' the Sethian force, the otherwise puzzling
opposition to crop circles and, indeed, to any of the subjects directly, tan-
gentually or indirectly associated with crop circles becomes not only
understandable, but inevitable. Unidentified flying objects, ESP in its
mam forms, “lost" civilizations, astrology, zero-point energy, homeopathy
and other alternative therapies, reincarnation, higher consciousness and
the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul — all, in one way or another,
threaten the authority of the Church of Progress and must be disavowed,
discredited and disempowered.
And amid the mysterious crop circle messages to humanity that
many sense come from positive intelligence, why has the Anti-Crop Circle
campaign to conceal, obfuscate and discredit been so successful? They
are so very beautiful, moving, and seemingly harmless. Yet, they were triv
ialized when an uninformed public bought the Doug and Dave scenario
wholesale. Strange! Dave even died in 1996. But back in 1991, those two
elderly drinking buddies told a tabloid television reporter they had been
using boards and ropes to produce crude patterns in two southern coun
ties of England. The world press and media heaved a huge sigh of coor
dinated relief to have an easy answer for an awkward story that did not fit
neatly into politically acceptable boxes. Enthusiastically, they publicized
the hoaxers in headline banners and prime time news. So that was it! No
angelic forces, no UFOs, no earth spirits, not even whirlwinds. It was all
Doug & Dave. Why, the logic went, if Doug and Dave could produce one
hoax, then by extension, all the other several thousand crop circles all
around the world over the past two decades must also be hoaxes.
It hardly mattered that no hoaxer had ever come forward before to
claim responsibility, raising great suspicions among more knowledgeable
researchers that someone with vested interests in maintaining a status
quo without crop formations had maybe paid off the two gents to float a
lie just like weather balloons and swamp gas. Journalists, whose job it is to
check data and to look into all aspects of any given story before ratifying
its veracity, were suddenly, as if by undivine decree, relieved of their cus
tomary responsibilities. What did it matter that thousands of hostile farm
ers in two dozen countries did not want their crops flattened, period), by
whatever agency and had never, ever caught a hoaxer in the act? Nor did
it matter that laboratory tests by highly credentialed scientists had found
that the grain within the formations had undergone inexplicable bio
viii
physical and biochemical changes; nor that the complexity of new geom
etry theorems stunned professional mathematicians. Ah, yes! The mathe
maticians didn’t know. But Doug and Dave knew. “Those studying the
facts,” writes Linda Moulton Howe, “knew the tabloid story was not true
and were frustrated that the global media would so easily produce false
headlines without investigation.”
All attempts at counter-argument were ignored. The press did not
want to hear that Doug and Dave were not and could not have been
responsible for all those thousands of far flung crop circles appearing all
over the world for at least two decades. To put the matter into perspec
tive: to accept that Doug & Dave produced all those crop circles is equiv
alent to finding a couple of counterfeit $20 bills and concluding from this
that all $20 bills are counterfeit and have always been counterfeit. Yet,
Doug & Dave set the stage for the next ten deeply polarized years of crop
circle study up to and including the present.
Maybe this book will help reverse the process? I hope so, and for two
good reasons. First, anything that embarrasses and infuriates the priest
hood of the Church of Progress has, by definition, a positive value — it’s
a gauntlet thrown at Seth’s feet. Second, I am one of those who feels that
some conscious and benign force is attempting to communicate some
thing of consequence to us through these amazing formations — if only
we could learn its language. And Linda Howe’s book is certainly a valu
able step in systematically approaching that problem.
There is some reason for optimism. Despite the willful and deliber
ate media dismissal, the crop circles continue to show up regularly and on
schedule every summer. So, whoever or whatever may be responsible for
them is not discouraged. Maybe one lesson is that we shouldn’t be dis
couraged either by the perfectly predictable opposition of the media and
the scientific community, nor by our present inability to understand the
origins and significance of the crop circles. Sooner, or later, if we persist,
Seth will be brought to his knees. Sooner or later, if the crop circles real
ly are talking a sacred language to us, we will learn it. And it might be that
we have to learn the language first if we are to disempower Seth — espe
cially in his ubiquitous jackass and scorpion forms.
John Anthony West
Author, Serpent In The Sky
Athens, New York
June 21, 2000
ix
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