Ley Line (Civ6)/Civilopedia

It is a geometrical truth that between two points exist a straight line. This, plus a map of the English countryside, gave rise to the notion of ley lines crisscrossing England in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A British antiquarian, Alfred Watkins, proposed that dead-straight ancient highways linking sacred sites in the British countryside could be found if one looked hard enough. While his theory was dismissed by archaeologists, who noted that true ancient highways were often rambling, it was taken up again by New Age devotees in the 1960s. Instead of ancient highways, these “ley lines” that linked sacred sites were veins in which the Earth’s mystical energies flowed. Where lines crossed would be sites of great spiritual and chthonic power, places that, if harnessed, could unleash the potential in the landscape and in the individual. There was never any evidence for ley lines’ reality, either as an archaeological feature or as a mystical energy source, and the theory slowly died out as new trends in New Age and mystical belief took over.