Helpful Spirits of Glastonbury
Glastonbury is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most sacred places in England. Archaeological finds suggest that it has been a significant religious site since the time of the Druze. Other evidence suggests that before the Celts arrived in England in the 6th or 7th century BC, the mountain was a sacred place. Near the mountain lies Glastonbury Abbey, founded by St. Patrick in the 5th century before his missionary journey to Ireland.
According to Giraldus Cambrensis, King Arthur was buried here. In 1191, a coffin was found with the inscription "Here lies Arthur, king of the past and the future." This contributed to the abbey's rise to become the richest and most powerful monastery in all of England. In 1539, on the orders of King Henry VIII, the abbey was destroyed, and the last superior monk, Richard Whyting, was executed. For 400 years, it lay abandoned. In 1907, the Church of England purchased the land for 36,000 pounds. Time and vandalism took their toll; no one knew exactly where the monks had lived. Excavations were necessary to learn more. This task was assigned to 43-year-old architect Frederic Bligh Bond.
Bond was a consummate expert in Gothic architecture. The people who commissioned him would certainly have been less impressed had they known of Bond's past. Bond possessed knowledge of the occult and the paranormal. As a child, he was a dreamer and a bookworm. After reading Katherine Crowe's "The Night Side of Nature," he became a proponent of parapsychology. By 1907, he was one of England's leading architects, but an encounter with Glastonbury Abbey was to put an end to this.
In the 15th century, Abbot Richart Bere was said to have built two chapels, Loretta and Edgar, which were later demolished by Henry VIII. In the 19th century, the location of these chapels was unknown, so locating them was our architect's responsibility. One problem was that there wasn't enough money to conduct a professional, large-scale archaeological excavation. Bond had to rely on his intuition and luck, and he also had a rival who wanted the ruins to remain ruins and the excavations to be abandoned. Bond knew that to prevent this from happening, he needed quick and good results, so he decided to ask the "spirits.
He didn't say that, of course. He only stated that he planned to conduct a "psychological experiment." He had a friend named John Alleyne Bartlett who was researching so-called "automatic writing," and his results were always very interesting. On the afternoon of November 7, 1907, in Bristol, Bartlett and Bond decided to ask the spirits in his office.
The method was very simple: Bartlett sat at an ordinary wooden table, and his friend opposite him. Bond's fingers touched Bartlett's hand, which held a pencil over a sheet of paper. Bond cleared his throat a few times before asking, "Can you tell us anything about Glastonbury Abbey?" Bartlett's hand began to write. After scribbling a few words, both men read the text: "All knowledge is eternal and available in spiritual unity. I am not in communion with monks, I cannot find any monks." It looked promising. Bond said he knew a few living monks and could bring one to me, and the hand began writing, or rather drawing, again. They guessed it was the outline of the abbey walls, but on the eastern side, a long rectangle appeared, and beneath it was the signature "Gulielmus Monachus"—the monk William. However, the rectangle seemed too large for a chapel, so Bond asked for a more detailed drawing. The hand obeyed and drew a more detailed plan, along with two small chapels on the northern side. Then they asked who built them. The answer came in Latin—"Abbot Bere"—and that it was Edgar's chapel, and that Abbot Whyting had enlarged it, and that during his reign everything had been demolished. Finally, they asked for his name, and with whom he had the pleasure, the pencil wrote: Ego Johannes Bryant, monk and stonemason.
The men were excited and yet disappointed. Someone who knew answered their questions, but the answers were simply too good to be true—could these answers perhaps be coming from their own subconscious? Four days later, they sat down for another séance, their communicator announcing that the monks were ready to speak—they say it's time to lift the curse—then a new writing style appeared, writing, "Go to Glaston soon..."—a moment later, a hand added, "The names of buildings in Latin are very difficult... my son, you won't understand. We will communicate in English... I died in 1533, I was the curator of the chapel."
From then on, Bond and Bartlett attended séances regularly. Finally, 1908 brought good news: funding for excavations was secured, and a few months later, the field was ready to begin.
To Bond's surprise and delight, it turned out the spirits were right. Understandably, he wanted to first know if the chapel had been located east of the church. Johannes Bryant assured him that he would find the remains of two towers at the western end. In May 1909, trial holes were dug. When Bond's rival, Caroe, arrived to inspect the progress, he must have shaken his head in astonishment at the strangely dug holes. The astonishment must have been even greater when the workers stumbled upon a substantial wall running north to south. Elsewhere, the outlines of two unexpected towers were unearthed. Caroe must have thought it was sheer luck that allowed Bond to make such discoveries. He again wondered if he could reveal his informants' secret. His common sense told him to hold off; after all, the church had commissioned the work, and it didn't take kindly to contact with spirits. How was he supposed to explain that he was talking to the Society of Avalon—that's the old name for Glastonbury, and even worse, because the spirits had told him to call themselves "The Watchers from the Other Side?" For now, he acted wisely and kept the news to himself.
The excavations continued, and new discoveries multiplied. Bond's fame grew, and the monks' clues were phenomenal. He was told that there was a door in the eastern wall leading to the street. This was highly unusual; eastern doors were very rare in church buildings, but it was found, and the door was found. They said the chapel was 28 meters long. A 27-meter wall was unearthed, with the plinth taking up another meter. Another piece of information was that he would find blue remnants of window glass. Another surprise, however, was that such remnants were unearthed, even though white and gold glass were generally used in those days. One of the spirits, Abbot Bere, said the roof was painted gold and purple. Excavations revealed gold and purple arches, likely part of the roof.
In 1918, ten years after beginning his work, Bond finally came forward to reveal the truth, thinking his success would allow him to be forgiven for his misdeed. He made some remarkable discoveries, of course. His biographer, William Kenawell, rightly writes that Bond saw conspiracies against him everywhere. His rival, W.D. Caroe, and Dean J.A. Robinson, considered him an eccentric and would have gladly continued without him. They were certainly astonished by Bond's precision in finding remnants of ruins. Another interesting fact was that during the excavations, the body of a two-meter-tall man was discovered, buried without a coffin, with a distal human skull between his legs. The friendly spirits told him who he was and what had happened. Bond decided to check old sources to see if such people even existed. In the chronicle of the author Fabius Ethelwerda, he found indirect evidence that people with these surnames lived at that time. The exact quote from the chronicle reads, "...this year Eanulf, a mighty man of Somerset, died... his body rests in the castle at Glastinhabyrig" (present-day Glastonbury). Everything Bond did was strewn with success; he was doing too well. In one session, he was told that the monastery held a secret, that there was a numerical code there that marked churches and cathedrals. Fascinated by the possibility of uncovering such a secret, he began to delve deeply into gematria.
In 1916, he delivered a lecture to the Somerset Archaeological Society entitled "The Chapel of Our Lady the Virgin at Glastonbury – Studies in Dimensions and Proportions." Among the audience was his boss, Dean Robinson, who was utterly dissatisfied with such discourse. Shortly thereafter, Bond confessed where he had obtained all this information, and the reaction was immediate: the funds for the excavations were cancelled, and a second director was appointed.
By 1921, Bond's work consisted solely of cleaning and cataloging previous finds, for which he was paid £10 a month. In 1922, he received a letter declaring that he was no longer responsible for the excavations and that his committee was being disbanded. The church not only expelled him but also ordered all his books, including those on purely architectural subjects, removed from the Glastonbury Abbey bookstore. Bond traveled to America, where he conducted research on parapsychology, but his heart remained firmly focused on the Glastonbury excavations; he was barred from entering the abbey grounds. In 1937, a group of Bond's friends raised money to conduct further excavations, and permission was granted. However, when the church learned of Bond's involvement, the permission was revoked. He died, forgotten, in 1945.
What happened was absurd and pathetic. Over the course of 11 years, he proved that his extraordinary work yielded excellent results, and who knows what else was hidden there? According to Bond, there were other curiosities to discover, or at least that's what his assistants from the afterlife said. The whole affair is difficult to understand. The automatic writing revealed that the handwriting was different, so the spirits introduced themselves, and it wasn't always the same person. For example, Cellerar Ambrosius liked to tell funny stories about the monks' love of alcohol; Peter Leichtfuss, the clockmaker, who recounted how the monastery clock was built; Johannes Bryant, who loved the abbey gardens; and Abbot Bere. When we read the monks' detailed descriptions of life on the abbey grounds at that time, we wonder where all this information came from? From people's stories and writings? Perhaps Bond's subconscious told him such stories, or perhaps the account of someone who actually lived there?
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