Introduction “A Prophetic Vision” by Joscelyn Godwin Pa r t I The Good Old Days 1 Why Are We So Short of Time? 2 Fireside Wisdom 3 The Deserted Village 4 Fear and Loathing of the Greens 5 Staying Put and Rushing About 6 Victoria’s Enchanted Realm 7 A Good Protestant? How and Why 8 Kings of Glory 9 Drink, Drugs, and the Art of Conversation 10 Manx Fairies 11 Nothing to Sing About 12 Population Control and Feng Shui, Again P a r t II Albion 13 Albion, the Spirit of the Party 14 A Lost Cause 15 The Re-Conversion of England 16 Anglo-Saxon Attitudes 17 Brassy Britain 18 The Centre of Britain 19 Citizens of Stonehenge 20 Sacred Monarchy 21 Taking the St. Michael 22 A Musical Enchantment 23 A Dream of Old Tracks 24 When Jesus Came to England Pa r t III Phenomena 25 Abductions 26 UFO Abductions and the End of Innocence 27 Bogus Social Workers 28 Just a Coincidence 29 Just Another Coincidence 30 The Persistence of Crop Circles 31 Dreams of Ape-Men 32 Roll Your Own Superstitions 33 Demonic Reality 34 The Demons among Us 35 Lost and Found 36 The Flight from Reason P a r t I V People 37 Beyond the New Age 38 A Man You Can Trust 39 The Philosopher’s Ideal Woman 40 Our Silent Queen 41 Building the Future 42 Enoch Powell and the West Indians 43 Science for Us Simple Folk 44 Sheldrake and the Revolution 45 New Light on Old Stones 46 A Rad-Trad Englishman, and an Italian 47 Bruce Chatwin’s Glimpse of Truth 48 How Can Jesus Be God? P a r t V Sacred Cows 49 Television, Degradation, and the Ideal 50 Cannabis and the Law 51 The Demon of Sex Obsession 52 Down with School 53 A Good Irish Education 54 Outliving the Experts 55 A Rotten Genius 56 Freudian Analysis 57 The Bohemian Myth 58 Art, Money, and Revolution 59 The Art of Going to Hell 60 A Fox’s View of Foxhunting P a r t V I Science 61 The Missing Link Fantasy 62 Darwin and the Damage 63 The State Myth 64 Stopping the Unstoppable 65 Too Noisy and Violent 66 Collisions with God 67 A Shiver of Cold Fusion 68 The Agribusiness Racket 69 How Talking Began 70 Who Settled America? 71 Geller, Adler, and Beyond 72 Don’t Worry, It’s All Taken Care Of P a r t V II Modern Madness 73 Jews, Christians, and the Heavenly Jerusalem 74 The Temple at Jerusalem 75 Two Dogs and a Bone 76 God’s Flower Garden 77 A Multicultural Dream 78 The New Crusaders 79 The Crusade Against Islam 80 The Matter of Ireland 81 The Burning of a Prophet 82 Bringing Light to Europe 83 The Closed Loop 84 Evil Conspiracies Pa r t V III Apocalypsis 85 The Modern Illusion 86 Chasing the Millennium 87 The End Is Nigh-ish 88 What of the Future, My Friend? 89 Millennial Prognostications 90 The Beast in Man 91 Old Boys, New Agers, and Sacred Order 92 The Horror That Spoils Breakfast 93 Horrors and Real Horror 94 After Blair, the Antichrist 95 Six-Six-Six and the Coming of the Beast 96 Prophets, Saviours, and Fanatics P a r t I X Paradise of the Philosophers 97 Turn On and Tune In to God’s Kingdom 98 What Is the Point of Love? 99 What Good Manners! 100 Life, the Universe, and Everything 101 How to Be Lucky 102 Platonic National Service 103 Visions of Heaven and Hell 104 Mirrors of Celestial Harmony 105 Totally Stoned 106 More Tea, Vicar? 107 Buried Treasures 108 Finding Firm Ground Appendix Dynamic Symmetry in the Work of Maxwell Armfield About John Michell

Introduction “A Prophetic Vision” By Joscelyn Godwin It is not too much to say that John Michell was a prophet. Prophets do not foretell the future so much as warn what may come to pass if events continue on their present course. Nowadays this is so blindingly obvious that we hardly need prophets to tell it to us. But there is a rarer prophetic gift, which is the seeing of forms in what Plato called the World of Ideas--not the imaginary ideas of men and women, but the divine or daemonic ideas after which the material world is formed. Ezekiel saw the Chariot of the Most High; John the Divine saw the New Jerusalem; Mohammed in his night-journey passed through the planetary spheres and met the other prophets of his lineage. Such visions may be warnings too, but they also inspire confidence in the meaning and goodness of the cosmos; they enable us to imagine Paradise here and now, and to adjust our lives in harmony with it. John Michell’s other role was that of a guardian of tradition and its defender against the “new men” who mistrust everything ancient, beautiful, or suspect of elitism. These tinpot emperors come in for a sound chastisement in these pages, and it is not sheer malice to enjoy hearing someone shout that they are stark naked. The tradition that Michell defends has always been elitist, but not in the sense of favoring birth, money, or even brains. Instead, it fosters the quality, in every sphere, of being truly and comfortably what one is. In this sense, those who live by cultivating the land or by the careful work of their hands are more deserving of respect than media stars (even royal ones) or socialites. Moreover, Michell has a particular empathy for those at the bottom of the ladder, who might have found their place in a more traditional social order but whom present-day conditions have made outsiders. 5 Staying Put and Rushing About March 2001 My grandmother used to say, “You young people are so restless, always rushing about from here to there. When we were girls it was so lovely at home that we never wanted to leave, even to get married.” It is true that we were always rushing about, in dangerous motor cars, with desperate episodes of drunken driving. I shudder now to think of it. In Granny’s youth there were no motors, so staying put was the normal thing in the country. But later it became a sort of disgrace, and now everyone keeps going away, rushing about in planes and boasting about their constant, far-flung travels as if there were virtue in their restlessness. Americans are at the forefront of this movement--they are said to move house on average every three or four years--but all our colonials are the same. Unable to settle properly in the lands they took from the natives, with no traditional ties to the landscapes they were born in, they are condemned to wander, and that is why we have the pleasure of so many overseas visitors each year. A few generations ago, when the enchantment of old England still lingered in country districts, most villagers had never been farther than the local market town, and many had never set foot outside their own parish. It was like in that Chinese poem about the idyllic community, where nothing unusual ever happened, where it was so quiet that they could hear dogs barking in the next village, which none of them had ever gone to. One of my hobbies is collecting examples of good people who have enjoyed long lives, happy and complete, while scarcely moving an inch from where they were born. It began during the Falklands war, when a reporter said that he had met islanders in the outlying “campo” who had never been to the capital, Port Stanley, in their whole lives. Then, in the way these things happen, I heard from another journalist something even more extraordinary, that on the island of St. Helena, which is only ten miles across at most, there were rustics who had never been to their only town, Jamestown. Best of all was the example of staying put which I came across in a book about the Faroe Islands by two highly informed and entertaining subarctic women, Liv K. Schei and Ounnie Moberg (they also wrote the best modern book on Shetland). On the remotest island of the Faroes, Fugloy, barely two miles long and with two small villages, they heard of a woman who lived in one of the villages and had never bothered to visit the other one. Nor had she ever left the island. On her seventieth birthday the treat she asked for was to be shown the next village. It was a few minutes’ walk and she thoroughly enjoyed the novelty. A traditional view of such lives is that they are compensations for hyperactivity in a previous existence. At the end of Plato’s Republic is a description of souls destined for rebirth, where each was allowed to choose the pattern of its next life. The foolish among them grabbed lives of wealth and power, only to find too late that they ended nastily. Among the last souls to pick a life was Ulysses, whose former career was of constant rushing around. Most of the lives had gone, but thrown away in a corner he found the life of a quiet, retiring country gentleman. That, he said, would have been his choice if he had had first pick. So in one life you rush around and in the next you stay put. That is only a story, but it is the best one you are likely to find that accounts for the coexistence in human nature of those opposite types that you see in children, the one who sits there happily and the one who simply cannot keep still.