In about 1580, Dr John Dee, scholar, astrologer and physician to Queen Elizabeth I, visited Somerset and recorded in drawings and in notes what he called 'Merlin's Secret'. He wrote:
The stares which agree with their reproductions on the ground do lye onlie on the celestial path of the Sonne, moon and planets… all the greater stares of Sagittarius fall in the hinde quarters of the horse, while Altiar, Tarazes and Alsschain from Auilla do fall on its cheste… thus is astrologie and astronomie carefullie and exactly married and measured in a scientific reconstruction of the heavens…
For several centuries no one was quite sure what Dr Dee meant by any of this. He was dismissed as a maverick and a magician. Then in 1929 an artist, Kathryn Maltwood, published A Guide to Glastonbury's Temple of the Stars. While studying the Arthurian legends she was inspired to take the journeys of the knights literally. She took Cadbury to be the site of Camelot for example, and if a legend said to journey west from there on horse-back for a day, that is where she went. As a result of this method and with the aid of the excellent maps of the Ordinance Survey and eventually aerial photographs, she began to notice a pattern of extraordinary figures upon the ground. In her book she described this pattern as a replica of the signs of the Zodiac in the sky.
The terrestrial zodiac around Glastonbury, Ms Maltwood said, was created by the combination of natural features such as rivers, streams, hills, and contours, and intentionally located features such as field and wood boundaries, mounds, banks and causeways. The figure of Aquarius for example, is formed by the natural hills and boundaries of the Isle of Avalon, and perfected by the placement of earthen banks and roads. The twelve signs of the Zodiac cover an area whose circumference is thirty miles. Some figures are many miles in length. Each figure approximates the stellar configuration it represents. Occasionally it differs from the standard pattern, making a ship out of Cancer, a dove out of Libra, while some interpretations say Scorpio is an eagle and Capricorn a unicorn.
In this landscape zodiac, Aquarius is not the familiar figure of the Water Bearer. It is a bird whose form is made by the whole of the Isle of Avalon. The Tor forms the head of the figure. The connection with water is evidently made by the bird's bill reaching westward to where the White Spring and Chalice Well rise. Katherine Maltwood called the bird the Aquarian Phoenix. The phoenix of mythology renews itself through the consuming fire. This seems to perpetuate the death and rebirth themes of the Tor.
Aerial photography opened the way for other zodiacs to be found. Enthusiasts found a zodiac in Carmarthenshire in the late forties. It was centred on the village of Pumsaint. In the seventies investigators of this claim discovered an even larger zodiac in the landscape of Pembrokeshire around the Prescelli Mountains. Both zodiacs repeated the patterns of the Glastonbury Zodiac. Researchers maintained that the artificial features of all of them originated in Neolithic times. Subsequent research has unearthed other places in the British landscape that yielded up zodiacs when the pattern was applied. The most documented of these are the Nuthampstead Zodiac Temple discovered by Nigel Pennick, and the Kingston Zodiac Temple discovered by Mary Caine.
Although these terrestrial zodiacs are indisputably there for the perceiver, the main difficulty with them is intentionality on the part of their alleged creators. Although the symbiosis between the zodiac signs and the landscape exhibits at times an incredible synchronicity, most of the time it is only credible in the mind of the beholder. Like a Rorschach test, Scorpio in the Glastonbury Zodiac differs according to the interpreter. The reflexive landscape happily accommodates all interpretations. Ponter's Ball that makes the horn of Capricorn, yes, can be seen in that light, but it also can have a perfectly mundane explanation as a defensive or boundary-marking earthwork.
But let us look at the 'mind of the beholder'. The mind is very powerful. To deny the existence of something because it is 'only in the mind' is to deny the world-shaping power of the cosmologies that each of us carry in our minds. The mind is not a passive participant in the world. Its views, attitudes, ideas, imagination and beliefs are tremendously powerful and in the case of Britain, have moulded every facet of the landscape into a particular form. The social and religious views of the British have an enormous impact upon the landscape. It would be foolhardy to say that the existence of a social class system, for example, could not be read from the features of the land. Yet the British class system is merely a set of ideas, and rather antiquated ideas at that. Having lived in four different signs of the zodiac for several years, I can only confirm that the profoundly imaginative idea of the Glastonbury Zodiac does exist. It informs and makes sense of the landscape. It makes it alive, intelligent and dynamic.
A very definite sense of place arises from living within a Zodiacal constellation. The quality of each sign begins to permeate actions. Walking, driving, building and naming places achieves resonance within a far greater context. It becomes meaningful to visit Taurus for its earthy qualities, to take a walk to the heart of Leo on a Sunday morning, to stand on the brow of Gemini, to meditate on the eye of Aries, to drink the water that gushes from the mouth of Aquarius, or to discover one's own astrological birth sign on the ground. Even people who normally do not give esoteric matters a second thought find the quality of the zodiacal giant on which they live permeating their thinking and informing their ideas.
The giant pattern of the Zodiac is as though a twelve-fold energy blueprint of the mind in resonance with and inspired by the eternal pattern of the stars is superimposed upon the natural landscape. This is exactly as John Dee described. As a result, the invisible forms of the zodiacal giants inevitably appear, gradually manifesting in the physical world what is being held in the archetypal realm. In this context it becomes superfluous to pin the existence of the terrestrial Zodiac upon the conception and labour of ancient peoples. This is an attempt to achieve a legitimation based upon antiquity for ideas and actions which need no such legitimation. It is not helpful to try to retrofit the Glastonbury Zodiac to a bygone age. It is a choice of reality pertaining to today.
Like the Tor Labyrinth the landscape zodiacs exist to the extent that people are aware of their outlines. They exist to the extent that people make pilgrimages around them, name their houses, fields and children after them, and above all, feel they are important to the general order of things. As their pattern is visible almost every night in the stars, the terrestrial zodiacs are classic examples of a geocentric and holistic worldview rendering meaning, relatedness, congruity, wholeness, intelligence and dynamic order to the physical world. Zodiacs are extremely good to think.
From The Isle of Avalon, copyright 2001 by Nicholas R Mann, published by Green Magic.
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Inspirational features 
