The Knap of Howar and the Origins of Geometry by Nicholas Cope & Keith Critchlow

Exploring castles, museums and manor houses, megaliths, moors, mountains and lakes, this lavishly illustrated travel guide covers the rich history of magic and the occult in Britain and Northern Ireland and its inextricable bond with the landscape.

Delve into a world of witchcraft, ancient rituals, and occult ceremonies.
From the ancient stone circles of the Cornish moors to the wealthy manor houses of Hampshire, from the windswept headlands of Northumbria to the golden streets of Oxford, from the turbulent Scottish borderlands to the rugged Causeway Coast, this guide ventures into hundreds of locations with magical links, exploring the works of authors and creators inspired by their strange, numinous beauty; the lives of the occultists, witches, and cunning folk who inhabited them; and the legends that persist.

Explore over 500 locations with magical links.

• The Scottish mansion where Aleister Crowley summoned the Lords of Hell
• The Cotswolds town that worshipped Pan
• The desolate moors that inspired Conan Doyle’s ghostly hound
• The library where Elizabethan magus John Dee conjured a demon
• The “evil oratory” where Sir Gawain met the Green Knight
• The gateway to Fairyland in Iona
• The spectral Yorkshire town that inspired Dracula
• The ancient forest where Gerald Gardner’s coven performed a ritual to prevent the German invasion

... and many more.

Includes film, TV, and literary locations of folk horror and occult classics.

Avalon Working is equal parts grimoire and devotional, gazeteer and visionary journey. In a journey to the heart of Albion, the work passionately argues for Glastonbury as a centre of emergence and initiation, a latter-day Eleusis. The work invites readers to actively participate in the Holy Island’s unfolding destiny, in partnership with its guardians and powers, to co-create its mythopoeia and, in doing so, forge a new Avalonian covenant.

Glastonbury’s role and status in the tapestry of Britain’s magickal history is significant and undeniable, from Edward Kelley to Dion Fortune. Yet it has also come to embody the worst traits of the New Age, which commodifies and trivialises the sacred. In Avalon Working, Mark Nemglan restores the Holy Island’s reputation as a locus and fountainhead of extraordinary magickal power for a new generation of practitioners and seekers. Writing in a progressive occult idiom, Nemglan evokes the multiple threads of Celtic, Arthurian, Druidic and Faerie currents and braids these with alchemical, geomantic, witchcraft, Thelemic, Typhonian and Draconian traditions.

In doing so he has created a comprehensive ritual framework, a workable system of operative magick and a language for interfacing with the presiding powers of the Holy Island, its numina and geomythologies. He elucidates parallels between Glastonbury’s sorcerous topography and our wider mythic heritage. As such, the book is a potent key for those seeking to develop or deepen their work in whatever landscape they stand in or make pilgrimage to, and regardless of tradition.

Avalon is ‘a wellspring of deity, a nexus of power, a terrestrial otherworld, and a place of mythopoetic emergence.’ The Tor functions as the axis mundi of this ritual landscape, the land around it quartered by solstice sunrise and sunset, each quadrant ruled by a Queen. The Red and White Springs flowing forth from the base of the Tor are used to lustrate, consecrate and ensorcel, their polarising powers brought into alchemical unity by the practitioner who is sincere in their quest. An initiatory circuit is undertaken through the four realms of the Glastonbury landscape, the practitioner imbibing an elixir from four Graals, transforming his or her self into the four alchemical bodies. The practitioner returns from the initiatory circuit, including a visionary descent to Annwn, the underworld, and is transmuted by the trials undertaken into a lapis exilis or charged Graal.

Avalon Working situates the reader in the history and myths of the land, evokes with immersive photography, and details rituals which conform to the edict ’simple magic in powerful places.’ It offers a return to the haunted island of the ennead and the undertaking of the Great Quest which is coded in the ritual landscape and the coursing of the twin serpent currents that still animate the body of Albion.