from IshtarsGate.wordpress.com: The Somerset town of Glastonbury has, quite rightly, a very high reputation the world over for being a thriving and vibrant spiritual centre, where many conferences, workshops and ceremonies take place to honour and celebrate the spirit of humanity and its fundamental unity of purpose which is beyond religious or dogmatic faiths.

Its famous natural world pyramid, the towering green Tor, has stood sentinel for millennia to these visions and values that we’ve inherited from the indigenous tribes of old, and which were observed by our early ancestors long before the incursion of the arid and blood thirsty Abrahamic religions, under the Eagle banner, into these green and pleasant lands. Some even call Glastonbury ‘the heart chakra of the world’ because of its position on a sacred geometrical arrangement of leylines going out worldwide. It’s certainly true that often when people want to launch a new spiritual movement or technique, they launch it in Glastonbury, to gain potency from the lift off from the natural energies here. However, almost as a shadow to its palpable brightness, visitors sometimes comment on another characteristic of Glastonbury that is not so savoury or enlightening, known here as ‘the dark side of Glastonbury’.


The Low or Black Magic of certain magicians and wizards can be viscerally felt at times, at certain locations in particular. It’s this aspect that I want to highlight in this article and to show how even Glastonbury’s Town Council and Corporation are, wittingly or unwittingly, conspiring to endorse and continue it.

But first of all, please allow me to explain a little about magic. Just as you can use a knife to peel the vegetables or to stab someone to death, so with magic: it is just a tool and it can be used for good or ill. There is High Magic, which acts for the greater good of all while bringing harm to none; and then there is Low Magic, which solely serves the needs of the practitioner, or of a favoured few.
The Dark Side of Glastonbury is about the practice of Low Magic which serves the needs and desires of a favoured few above that of the majority, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the symbols of the town’s Coat of Arms and Shield.



Now please don’t get me wrong; there is a lot of good here in Glastonbury, and the good more than overwhelms the bad. Those who come here with an open heart and pure intentions will always be looked after and protected by the Spirit of the Place. But there is a bit of sticking point with the town’s Shield, and because a town’s Shield is pivotal and axiomatic to its identity … it signals the intention about who and what it wants to be … I want to bring this issue to wider attention.
In order to understand how the occult symbols on the Shield of Glastonbury work to underpin the Low Magic which favours the few, we have to go back in time, to 1539 and the reign of King Henry VIII.

To quote local researcher and tour guide, Tor Webster:

“In 1539, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, Blessed Richard Whiting, was ritually murdered on top of the Tor as one of the final, horrific acts of the Dissolution. It appears that King Henry VIII and Vicar General Thomas Cromwell believed Glastonbury had to be destroyed for their new Church of England to flourish. There could be no new Church of England with Glastonbury Abbey standing, because it had been acknowledged by our forebears as the birthplace of true Christianity, founded by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene in AD62 (535 years before the arrival of the Catholic Church to these shores).

“As such, Glastonbury was the home of the world’s oldest Christian church – at its heart, a loving order dedicated to Our Lady of Glastonbury, which took as their standard the equidistant cross known as King Arthur’s shield, representing the union of Heaven and Earth in Glastonbury.

“In 1705, after years of continued destruction and decay following the horrific murder on the Tor, the Corporation of Glastonbury unofficially changed Glastonbury’s coat-of-arms to this… the Mitre and Crosiers of the last Abbot, displayed to look like the Skull and Crossbones; symbolising the decapitated head and quartered body of Blessed Richard Whiting, with a red background representing his blood, and a motto May the Church of England Flourish.”



When a political act is also magical

As local historian Geoffrey Ashe points out,  it might be a natural assumption to make that Abbot Whiting’s murder, along with that of the other two monks, was just part of the general mayhem which took place during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. But I think that this would be a post-hoc, anachronistic view.

In 1539, the wilder, violent excesses which accompanied the destruction of the monasteries were yet to come. Besides, Sir Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s henchman in such matters, had no excuse to take Glastonbury Abbey, let alone the lives of these three august monks, because they had all, to a man, signed their obedience to the Acts of Supremacy, granting Henry VIII the right to divorce himself from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the Church of Rome, and to establish the Church of England.
So this gruesome assassination was no ordinary act of political suppression. In fact, according to Geoffrey Ashe, it was ‘an act of madmen or mystics’.

The murder of Abbot Richard Whiting was an occult act of the lowest kind of magic. It was a ritual murder, very obviously, in the way that the venerable Abbot was hung on the Tor, with two monks either side of him, in a mocking pastiche of the crucifixion.

This cruel and callous lynching was carried out on a very important energetic node, where the Michael and Mary leylines cross, and Abbot Whiting’s body was dismembered in the waters of the White Spring, the red and white of Whiting mingled to create a strong alchemical message designed to penetrate the astral dimensions. His genitals were then stuffed into the mouth of his decapitated head, which was hung on the Abbey gate as a warning for all to see.

In other words, this was a ritual, magical act of the most disgusting kind, with the deaths by hanging and dismemberment representing the Black and White stages of the alchemical process, where the various elements are separated and isolated one from another. The third Red stage was represented by the commingling of the red blood with the White Spring.

It is my view that this was the occult act that triggered the success of the Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in other words, the end of the Roman Catholic Church in this country, while establishing the dominance of Henry’s new Church of England. The barely disguised skull and crossbones of the Glastonbury Shield, within the bishop’s mitre and crossed crosiers, and the motto under it, Floreat Ecclesia Anglicana, which means, May The Church of England Flourish, leaves us in no doubt as to its intended meaning and purpose.

So all the more surprising that, despite copious research and resources being devoted to studying its antecedents, a Working Group being convened to look into the possibilities of changing it, and a letter from the official College of Arms confirming that the present Shield is unlawful, and is unrepresentative of almost half the people in the town, thus breaking equality legislation… that Glastonbury Town Council, in recent weeks, has decided that the existing Shield and Motto should be registered with the College of Arms in order to remain as it is into perpetuity, but with just a change of the colour of the background from red to blue.

You’d think that members of a town council would understand that they had been elected to represent the good of the town, and not just the good of their own pet project. But therein lies the difference between High and Low Magic. It will cost in the region of £6,500 of tax payers money to effect this change, establishing the dominance of the Church of the England in a town in which more than half the residents follow a different religion or spiritual path. According to the 2011 census – 47.1 per cent of Glastonbury’s Community are not Christian; and the 52.9 per cent who are Christian includes the members of all the Christian denominations, not just the Church of England.

I was on the Working Group which had been set up, late last year, to look into changing the Coat of Arms and Shield. After several lengthy meetings in which we examined all the pros and cons of the issue, we produced a report for the Council, laying out our findings. It was obvious at the next meeting of the Council, in which this subject was to be discussed, and decided upon, that a significant number of the councillors had not read the report, and that they were on a three line whip to reject our recommendations for change, which they duly did. Some of these same councillors are among the masons of the town.

The power of magical symbols

The Skull and Crossbones is a favourite symbol of secret societies, like masons, and to those who can read the meanings of symbols, the message is clear: it is a warning of death to those who cross them. Perhaps the most famous example is the Skull and Bones society, a secret society at Yale University which has many former presidents among its members. The Skull and Crossbones is also used by the Knights of Columbus as well as the Knights Templar degree of Freemasonry.

Of course, these days, we are no longer so “symbol literate”, in the conscious sense, and don’t understand and recognise the power of magical symbols. However, the subconscious does and still can read symbols… and this is possibly why the masons are fighting to keep their Skull and Crossbones of the ritually slaughtered and dismembered Abbot Whiting in place, thus maintaining the dominance of the Church of England over all the other religions and spiritual paths in the town in the subconscious of the general populace.

At the last council meeting, which was held this Tuesday, a few of the townsfolk stood up to raise their objections – including a follower of Brigit, a Buddhist and a pagan – but their views were ignored. As it was, even with all the masons on a three-line whip, the vote ‘for’ the existing Shield only just scraped through. A wiser Mayor would have had the intelligence and discrimination to realise that he didn’t have a large enough majority to continue and, at the very least, that the subject should be revisited at a later date, and perhaps the motion changed. Unfortunately, though, we don’t have a Mayor like that.

And so we are asking people around the world, who care about Glastonbury as a spiritual centre, to write in and register their protests to the heart chakra of Mother Earth being so dominated by the views of one small and waning religion, the Church of England, and the dark magical influence of the secret society which dominates the town council. So long as these people are allowed to hold sway here, to use this magical device to pursue their own self interest, there will always be a dark side to Glastonbury.

We’re hoping that enough people will understand the importance of this issue sufficiently to put pen to paper to the Town Council, to ask them to register a motto that represents the true spirit of the place. We’ve already suggested May Glastonbury Flourish because this includes everyone. And please would you ask them to register a Shield or emblem that represents all of the town’s community, including those who follow no religion, as well as the members of the 70+ faiths and traditions currently active here. We need to act now so that Glastonbury may flourish!