South Wales 2011 : Part 4 – Elemental Masters at Tinkinswood

In the final part of my South Wales posts I will be telling you about the amazing chamber of Tinkinswood, and how dowsing revealed some intriguing explanations for the usage of the chamber and how it was powered by Elemental Masters. What are ‘Elemental Masters’? Good question. Read on!

We parked at the entrance to the field with the sign pointing towards the Tinkinswood Chamber [map]. We had only gone slightly out of our way – entering the edge of Cardiff itself – before we realised our mistake and doubled back. Once we had our bearings finding the chamber was relatively easy, with some helpful brown tourist signs along the way near to the village of St Nicholas. Tinkinswood chamber itself was also easy to get to with a short walk down into a shallow valley and back up into the next field. As you rise up into the field the chamber hoves into view like some Neolithic battleship.

The site is beautiful, surrounded by trees (although they had been severely cut back when were visited, which made us wince a little). The only other blight is the nearby electricity pylons, but they don’t seem to be affecting the power and quality of the energies at this site. Possibly they are just far enough away not to affect it. There really does not seem to be any geographical reason why the pylons were brought anywhere near to the site, but that’s the way it is.

The sun was beginning to near the horizon as we arrived, and the early evening light lent the scene a mystical quality that backlit the chamber in a fascinating way, and made the sun twinkle through the trees around the site. As we approached the chamber neither Kal nor I felt any need to go into the chamber itself even though it was incredibly open and inviting. For some reason we both completely avoided going into it throughout the whole visit. Possibly we do not need the initiatory energies that lie inside it?

The Entrance Revealed

I felt the need to find the entrance to the site. I could see the entrance that an initiate would taker to enter the chamber – that was obvious – it was the slit on the right-hand side of the front of the chamber. That wasn’t the entrance I was looking for. I was looking for something else, but I didn’t yet know what. All I knew was that there was another entrance and I had to find it.

I began to dowse from the obvious initiate’s entrance and asked the rods to find me another entrance to the site. They took me around the edge of the chambered cairn to the western edge, and half way along that edge the rods turned in to point to a place where the stones that formed the outer wall were angled. This was clearly a portal or inlet of some variety, even though it had subsequently been filled in with blocks of stone to hide it.

The Masters and the Pit

The information sign at the entrance to the chamber site says that archaeologists have discovered at pit in the chambers’ mound to which they cannot assign any purpose. As I entered through the new-found entrance I found myself inside this pit. The pit is L-shaped, like a square with one corner cut out. The pit is only shallow, and the suggestion is that there was much material above the current level. Having been led to the pit I thought it would be rude of my not to bother trying to find out what this place was used for, even if that was going to be difficult.

I have had some experience of the way that initiation chambers work. When Kal and I went to Newgrange in the Boyne Valley in Ireland we spent quite a lot of the time at the back of the site in a small tower. This proved to be one of the most interesting aspects of the Newgrange site, because there we learned that the initiate – the person who was going to be invested into the shamanic understanding, introduced or induced into the world of magickal thinking – was prepared for this in the outer tower before being allowed into the initiation chamber itself. The procedure was slightly different here at Tinkinswood, but the common factor was that there were several other people involved in this ritual in addition to The Initiate.

What I dowsed was that there were four people who were involved in addition to The Initiate. The student sat in the chamber, at the back of it, in a power centre. There were four other people sitting in the L-shaped pit room. Actually, it turned out that only three of them actually sat IN the room, and one other sat elsewhere, but I’ll come to that in a minute.

There were four “Masters” as I will call them, who would help The Initiate. These Masters were each aligned to, or drew their energy from, one specific element. In other words there was an Air Master, a Fire Master, a Water Master and an Earth Master. Three of the four sat in the pit room. I dowsed that the Water was in the West, Earth to the South, Fire in the East and Air was in the entrance portal in the North. My definition of where these elements are aligned is based upon dowsing for them as they pertain to me as a druid, and so I believed these to be particular to me.

As I stood back to assess this I realised that these associations between elements and cardinal positions was exactly the same as my own particular associations! This made me think that perhaps I was making this up, and that I had simply pulled this association from my subconscious instead of objectively dowsing it. I made a note to ask Kal to check it for me soon. Normally the association is Earth=North, Fire=South, Air=East, Water=West (see the Gardnerian definition here).

I asked Kal to confirm my findings. I told him only that there were four positions to find, and that they were aligned to elements, but that was as much information as I divulged. I even turned away so that my observing him would not influence any of the dowsing that he did. Within two minutes Kal had found every single position I had, and named the same elements in those positions. Yet he was to go one step further. Not only did he identify that the Masters sat in the three corners, but he also got all of the positions correct in terms of the respective elements. As a final confirmation for me he also identified that the Air Master had gone out through the door. He didn’t stop his dowsing there, however, and continued outside and then up onto the mound to what we dowsed later would have been the highest point on the structure. This was the position of the Air Master – outside, in the winds, close to the air!

The Air Master served a dual role in this complex play. He was seemingly an energy generator, as the others were, but he was also the Door Keeper, and from his lofty position he could ensure that none of the other Masters were disturbed during their invocations. That’s all very well, I hear you say, but what exactly were these Four Elemental Masters doing? That is the question to which we turned our attention next.

Vortices and Initiates

I began to ask the rods about the energies that these Masters were generating. I took my cue once more from the information we had learned at Newgrange, where we had discovered that six Masters (three men and three women) all fed energies into The Initiate. Was something similar going on here, I wondered? I asked the rods whether there was any energy being generated by these Masters? YES. Then take me to the place where the energy was being generated, I asked. The rods stayed inside the pit and swirled around indicating a spiral of male energy that went into the ground in the centre of the pit room. Perhaps the room may once have had a corbelled roof to facilitate the formation and shape of this energy vortex – we can’t be sure.

I then traced that the energy that was being directed into the ground in the Pit Room was travelling to the larger Initiate Chamber. It arose exactly at the point where we had identified that The Initiate would sit during their meditation. It was all fitting together nicely. When the energy arose for The Initiate it was coming back up as a female spiral around him or her.

Well, that was so beyond anything that an archaeologist would be prepared to entertain that there isn’t much point in mentioning it to any of them. It goes to add to our understanding of how these chambers were used. It seems as though the exact circumstances of the ceremonies may have been particular to the geography and structure of the site itself, and perhaps also to the people involved at any particular time. Yet there are a great deal of common elements to these rituals that we have identified:-

1. There is a single Initiate, or a person who is going to undergo a spiritual transformation of some kind
2. The Initiate sits in the sensory-deprived chamber after entering it using the official entrance, which is then sealed
3. The Initiate sits on a power centre that has been created within the site, or over which the site has been built
4. The Elemental Masters sit away from The Initiate, in a separate space, and there they generate energy from their respective elements
5. Elemental energy is then fed to The Initiate during the transformation process, possibly to protect or project The Initiate further – we don’t really know
6. Once the transformation process has concluded The Initiate emerges through a V-shaped hole in the opposite end of the chamber to the entrance, and is symbolically “re-born”

The Purple Glow

One final note of interest from this lovely site that I enjoyed hugely. The day before I visited this site my wife had said to me that she could see my aura, and that it was currently a radiant lilac or purple colour. She is not prone to saying these things, by the way, it was an unusual outburst that made me really take notice. I thought nothing more of it, except that it was interesting that it was purple or lilac, and I wondered whether that meant I was particularly spiritual at that time. The next day we visited these South Wales sites, and before we left Tinkinswood I was quite insistent that Kal take my photograph. I don’t normally bother with pictures of myself, but I made him take about ten this day! He complained that he couldn’t really see the outcome of the pictures because the sun was at a funny angle. Keep taking them please, I insisted, not knowing why.

When I got home I downloaded the pictures, expecting them to be all useless because of what Kal had said. Instead, they seem to have produced a strange purple/lilac glow around me! How odd. And they say that such things are artefacts of the photography process and the camera. Hmmm, yes, of course they are.

Gwas.