Why are so many ancient monuments and holy sites all over the world linked by a pattern of straight lines?

Ley Lines Part I

Until the last hundred years, if you asked most experts why ancient peoples built their shrines and holy sites where they were, they would talk about local tribes choosing sites near water or on hilltops, etc.

And if you asked those same experts if there were any links between the sites, they would have laughed. “How could primitive and isolated groups link their monuments to anyone else?”

MONUMENTS ALIGNED TO STARS

But over the past one hundred years, we have become to realise that these ancient peoples were not isolated and although they had few technologies, they were intelligent and thoughtful people who built their monuments on sites they chose specially.

And they aligned their monuments to others and to heavenly bodies too.

The most famous alignments are between monuments and the stars. The pyramids of Egypt have openings that frame certain stars or planets on astrologically important dates. Some people even say the three pyramids at Giza are built in the same alignment as the three stars in the Belt of the constellation Orion.

And Stonehenge in the UK is the most famous of the “megalithic” (Giant stones) monuments in Europe. Stonehenge was built about 5,500 years ago, but it is just one of hundreds of such henges in the UK. Henges can be built with stones, with wood and even with mounds of earth as markers; but they all have one thing in common – their markers are all carefully placed in special alignments. Stonehenge has stones that line up with the sunrise on the longest day of the year – and has stones that line up with the sunrise and sunset on the shortest day of the year. The other monuments in the UK from the same period have the same alignments – and there are also megalithic monuments of similar styles all across western Europe.

WERE MONUMENTS BUILT IN STRAIGHT LINES?

In the early 20th century, historians and archaeologists had finally started working scientifically, and started to produce national lists of monuments and maps of their locations.

When people started to look at those maps, they saw something strange. We mentioned Stonehenge above, and a British historian noticed that the line through Stonehenge that lined up with the midsummer sunrise, also carried on through Stonehenge and across the British countryside through other ancient monuments, including the Cerne Abbas giant, an ancient and huge image of a hunter cut into the grass of a hill to show the image in the white chalk rock under the grass.

But the really great discovery was made by another British man, Alfred Watkins. The Watkins family made their money with flour mills, and Alfred used his money to pursue his historical interests. He spent a lot of time walking through the countryside, and he liked to visit ancient sites. As he planned his walks, he found that he could often just walk in a dead straight line between a group of monuments – and the route he took often had an ancient path or trackway too. It was as if, thousands of years ago, ancient peoples built their monuments and holy sites on straight paths.

And because Watkins also noticed that a lot of the place names on these tracks ended with the letters “ley”, he named the paths “leys” or “ley lines”. Watkins traced hundreds of ley lines across the British countryside.

And later his work was carried over to the rest of Europe. A German preacher made a similar discovery in Germany just a few years later – and without knowing anything about Watkins’ work. He found mysterious lines linking holy sites too.

Then in the 1930s, a French scholar was studying ancient place names and found long lines across France that linked places with the same few names – and he expanded the lines to cover Spain, Italy and even Egypt.

WERE THESE LINES JUST OLD ROADWAYS?

As Watkins noticed, and the German and French experts confirmed, some of these ancient lines were marked by roads or trackways. Indeed, at first Watkins talked about finding ancient pathways. His book on the subject was called “The Old Straight Track” and he did not mention the monuments found on the lines very often.

So many people dismissed the lines as just roads. “The ancient people built the monuments on their trackways,” they said. In other words, the roads came first and then the monuments were built on the tracks.

When archaeologists started to be able to date monuments and roads, they soon found out that the facts contradicted this idea. The monuments were older than the trackways.

In other words, the ancient monuments and holy sites were built along straight lines – and then the tracks between them were built later, presumably to make it easier for people to travel between them.

<picture of a British stone circle like Stonehenge with caption “Ancient British people built their sacred monuments on straight lines in the landscape”>

The other fact that mattered is that the tracks were almost completely straight. If the roads and tracks had been built first, as ways to travel, the ancient peoples did not pick the easy routes. The easiest way to build roads is the way they were built later – following natural contours to avoid steep slopes, diverting around obstacles and crossing rovers at shallow points.

But the ley lines are straight, often climbing over steep hills, crossing swampy ground and rivers at deeper places. If you were just building a trackway for travel, you would not build it the way ley lines were made.

So, ley lines are not just trackways – there is something more to them.

SPIRITUAL LINES OF POWER

So, if ley lines are not just trackways, what are they? It is important to note that not all ancient monuments are linked by ley lines. Many sites seem isolated from the wider network of lines. And the interesting fact is that the monuments on ley lines are often the oldest and usually have evidence of being spiritual or religious sites. The sites not on ley lines are usually domestic or military. Ley lines only link sites of a spiritual nature.

Last issue we told you about dowsing – the art of finding water or metal using metal rods or twigs. Dowsers say that they can find flowing water or metal because of the energy that flows through them.

And when dowsers started searching the tracks of ley lines, they were amazed to discover that their dowsing rods could follow the ley line routes. The dowsers were not finding water or metal – but they were finding a flow of energy along the ley lines.

Dowsers and scientists have checked all the straight lines in Europe now – and most of them have this flow of energy (if a ley line doesn’t have the energy flow, it is removed from the official lists because the line is probably just a coincidence rather than a true ancient alignment).

What is this flow of energy? Europeans say it is a new discovery. What they call “telluric energy” or “Earth energy”. This energy flows through the Earth, giving a special spiritual power along its lines, and ancient people somehow sensed the energy lines and built their monuments along the lines.

Later they built trackways to be able to travel between holy sites and to mark the lines on the ground.

QI AND DRAGON LINES

But while Europeans think this is a new discovery they made in the 20th century, in Asia we have known about these energy flows for many centuries. The Chinese call this energy qi and we call it ki. And we have known about ley lines too – in China they call them dragon lines or dragon veins, and these dragon lines run through the landscape, carrying energy. Where dragon lines cross each other, there are usually energy vortices that give the sites major spiritual power.

And where many dragon lines intercept, there are usually major historical temples.

(The Aborigine peoples of Australia have the same sort of idea as the Chinese, but they think of the lines as being snake or serpent lines instead of dragons).

The Europeans have only just rediscovered what we in Asia have known for millennia – that there are lines of power running through the Earth, and these lines of power are used to site important religious and spiritual sites. Whether they are called dragon lines or ley lines, they are undoubtedly real lines in the landscape.

In part 2 of this article next time, we will tell you more about ley lines and Earth energy – how there seem to be links to earthquakes and strange weather, how these ley lines have links to the ancient gods (alien visitors) and how today we know they are major sites of UFO sightings. Are ley lines marking Earth energy currents that aliens use to fly their UFOs?

Read part two here