Thursday 23rd September – Moel-Ty-Uchaf stone circle, Llandrillo, Meirionethshire.
Llandrillo was the third site we visited on our Autumn Equinox tour. We had been to Llyn Brenig and then to Llangernyw village, now we travelled over the welsh mountains and down into the valley of the A5 road, heading for the junction just before Corwen that took us to Llandrillo. Having done this journey int he daylight and the darkness I knew the route instinctively, and knew the waymarkers to watch out for. If you’re trying to find this particular stone circle yourself, I recommend a very good OS map and a slow pace unless you want to miss the tiny little road that leads to the circle.
It’s not possible to drive all the way up the hill. In fact, it’s best to park near to the bottom at a perfect lay-by that is big enough to leave your car without it being a nuisance to the local farmers. From there, brace yourself for a long, steep, unrelenting climb. For us the weather was perfect – cool enough to be helpful, warm and clear enough to be a beautiful climb.
Once at the top we rested, as is almost obligatory, admiring the little fluffy clouds and the peaceable rustle of the fir trees, the scuttling squirrels and shy sheep skulking and shuffling away from our blatant intrusion into their upland domain.
Coloured lines and healing forces
I have this new thing: finding coloured energy lines. It’s no longer enough to find male, female and neutral lines, or pools of primal energy with as yet unassigned gender. Now I have to go and look for particular colours of energy too. This just adds to the list of stuff to look for, but it does begin to increase my vocabulary of how to describe the state of sites.
At Moel-Ty-Uchaf we found two sets of lines, one created by Kal and one by me. I had left a gold and violet line that spiralled into the centre of the circle from my power centre. Kal found a mixture of red, gold and violet in a line that extended from the large female stone into the central hole or pit. We remembered then that Kal had helped me to create a balanced and energised energy form on one of our previous visits, and this must have been the result. Now we could dowse for its form and its colour content and see that it was still here, still working, and that it had a form to it. Wondrous!
Another thing we checked was the astrological alignments. We found several: Venus, Uranus, The Sun and The Moon. I confirmed that the circle was built upon the sacred number of five, the pentagram and pentacle, and this is Venus’ influence as it reflects her orbit around the Earth. Next we began to ask about what kind of sentient entities were present in the circle and things began to get interesting!
Watching the Spirit of Place
One of the most interesting aspects of our visit to the stone circle that day was our work dowsing the Spirit of Place. Now, Kal is going to have something to say about this, because he has differentiated between the spirit that is tied to the place, and any passing spirit that takes up residence as a sacred site. We want to call the permanent spirit The Spirit of Place, or Genius Loci. Let’s call the other type The Resident Spirit to denote that it has taken up residence. Our work at Moel Ty Uchaf was with the Spirit of Place.
We found that the Spirit of Place (SOP) moves in a particular way. In the daylight hours it follows a clockwise arc around the power centre nearest the southern entrance. Then, when the light has gone (presumably at dusk) the SOP begins to move in an anti-clockwise arc that sweeps close to the eastern edge of the circle. During the course of a day, therefore, this SOP forms a S-shaped path within the circle. It will be interesting to see, next time we go, whether that same path is being followed, and to the same formula. At the moment, we can only say that this is what we found on this occasion. It demonstrated a perfect balance between light and dark on the Autumn Equinox, a day also of perfect balance between light and dark!
One final thing we discovered is that when we work with entities at sacred sites that we consider to be the Spirits of Place, these are what we are calling the Spirits of Place, not the Resident Spirits. Interesting distinction, there. Spirits of Place seem more amenable to co-operative energy work.
Help in the Underworld
Now I was in pursuit of more pertinent matters. I wanted to find out more about this latest mini-quest that I had been given – the task of descending into the Underworld to wake Merlin (see previous post for details). I wondered if the SOP could help me understand what I would need to do in order to make this task successful, so I decided upon a meditation with Kal perching himself on his power centre at the back of the large square female stone (how ironic!) and keeping quiet.
As I began to relax, my mind focusing on the purpose of the meditation, but loosening any particular thought pattern, I began to move deeper into the swirling energies of the power centre. I was sitting more deeply, external noise had all but vanished or had become integrated into my mind as my own noise. The sky seemed just above my head, and the spirit energies within the circle seemed to move in to be closer to me. I asked my question again, and then I was shown that to pass by the Underworld shades I would need some particular things:-
- To learn how to become invisible
- To be clean because smell attracted them
- To learn to be confident in their presence, because fear would attract them
- To have a friendly shade as a guide through the Underworld
That was going to take me a few weeks to get those things together. I felt like a series of lesser branching quests was about to start – I had to learn to be invisible! Well, I had one method, but perhaps I needed to learn another. Rather ironically, I had tested it to its best effect here at Llandrillo (see this post for details). I would learn how to anoint myself to ritually cleanse in the next week (see upcoming post for new of that).
All that remained was to learn confidence around death energies and to seek the assistance of a friendly shade. Kal immediately suggested the shade of Arthur. Of course! How appropriate that seemed. What had seemed like a daunting list of pre-requisites now seemed quite achievable, even if it was going to require some work to bring it all together.
In the final post of this Autumn Equinox series I will tell you all about Dinas Bran and how the spirit of Bran The Blessed helped me with another part of the quest: how to wake Merlin.
Gwas.
