page_title: John Michell (writer)
section_title: Embracing the Earth Mysteries movement
hierarchical_section_title: John Michell (writer) / Biography / Embracing the Earth Mysteries movement
caption_attribution_description: English: Glastonbury Tor from north east showing terraces
context_page_description: John Frederick Carden Michell was an English author and esotericist who was a prominent figure in the development of the Earth mysteries movement. Over the course of his life he published over forty books on an array of different subjects, being a proponent of the Traditionalist school of esoteric thought.
  Born in London to a wealthy family, Michell was educated at Cheam School and Eton College before serving as a Russian translator in the Royal Navy for two years. After failing a degree in Russian and German at Trinity College, Cambridge, he returned to London and worked for his father's property business, there developing his interest in Ufology.
  Embracing the counter-cultural ideas of the Earth mysteries movement during the 1960s, in The Flying Saucer Vision he built on Alfred Watkins' ideas of ley lines by arguing that they represented linear marks created in prehistory to guide extraterrestrial spacecraft. He followed this with his most influential work, The View Over Atlantis, in 1969. His ideas were at odds with those of academic archaeologists, for whom he expressed contempt.
context_section_description: Michell developed an interest in Ufology and Earth mysteries after attending a talk given by Jimmy Goddard at Kensington Central Library on the subject of "Leys and Orthonies" in November 1965. Michell's first publication on the subject of Ufology was the article "Flying Saucers", which appeared in the 30 January 1967 edition of the counter-cultural newspaper International Times. He proceeded to write a book on the subject, but lost the original manuscript after accidentally leaving it in a North London café, at which he had to rewrite it. The book eventually saw publication as The Flying Saucer Vision, published in 1967, when Michell was 35 years old.
  The Flying Saucer Vision took the idea of Tony Wedd that ley lines – alleged trackways across the landscape whose existence was first argued by Alfred Watkins – represented markers for the flight of extraterrestrial spacecraft and built on it, arguing that early human society was aided by alien entities who were understood as gods, but that these extraterrestrials had abandoned humanity because of the latter's greed for material and technological development.
  According to Lachman, at this time Michell took the view that "an imminent revelation of literally inconceivable scope" was at hand, and that the appearance of UFOs was linked to "the start of a new phase in our history". Many fans of Michell's work consider it to be "by far his most impressive book". In their social history of Ufology, David Clarke and Andy Roberts stated that Michell's work was "the catalyst and helmsman" for the growing interest in UFOs among the hippie sector of the counter-culture.
  Subsequently, there was a shift in Michell's emphasis as he became increasingly interested in the landscapes in which he believed that ley lines could be found rather than the UFOs themselves. He wrote an article on "Lung Mei and the Dragon Paths of England" for a September 1967 issue of Image magazine, in which he compared British ley-lines to the Chinese mythological idea of lung mei lines, arguing that this was evidence of a widespread pre-Christian dragon cult in ancient Britain. He built on these ideas for The View Over Atlantis, a book which he privately published in 1969, with a republication following three years later. Believing this earth energy to be a real magnetic phenomenon arising naturally from the ground, Michell argued that an ancient religious-scientific elite had traveled the world constructing the lines and various megalithic monuments in order to channel this energy and direct it for the good of humanity. The tone of his work reflected "a fervent religious feeling", describing the existence of an ancient, universal, and true system of belief that was once spread across the ancient world but which had been lost through the degeneracy of subsequent generations. He added however that this ancient knowledge would be revived with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, allowing for what Michell described as the "rediscovery of access to the divine will".
  The Pagan studies scholar Amy Hale stated that The View Over Atlantis was "a smash countercultural success", while the historian Ronald Hutton described it as "almost the founding document of the modern earth mysteries movement". Fellow ley-hunter and later biographer Paul Screeton considered it to be a "groundbreaking" work which "re-enchanted the British landscape and empowered a generation to seek out and appreciate the spiritual dimension of the countryside, not least attracting them to reawaken the sleepy town of Glastonbury". 
  The book inspired an array of Earth Mysteries publications in the 1970s and 1980s, accompanied by growth in the ley-hunting movement. Among the most prominent works to build on Michell's ideas during this period were Janet and Colin Bord's Mysterious Britain, which used them in its presentation of a gazetteer of ancient sites, and Paul Screeton's Quicksilver Heritage, which argued that the Neolithic had been a time devoted to spiritual endeavours which had been corrupted by the emergence of metal technologies. Michell associate
caption: Michell viewed Glastonbury (pictured) as a place of sacred power
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