Pandora’s Box: Gifts of Midsummer Crop Circles

According to Myth, the gods gave Pandora a jar (Greek, pithos), said to contain all gifts, which she was forbidden to open. When she couldn’t resist temptation, she unleashed the jar’s unexpected contents on the World. In modern tradition, the Pithos is translated as Pandora’s ‘Box’.

...you can't open Pandora's Box just a little bit...

In Greek mythology, transmitted through current received wisdom, Pandora was the first woman on earth, the Greek equivalent of biblical Eve. In the Judao-Christian version, she was fashioned by the Almighty, extracted from the rib of a Man: Adam. Similarly, in the Greek (Hesiod’s) version the gods made her, albeit autonomous, created from clay – a mixture of Earth and Water – with the help of Fire. It is thought the original (pre-Hellenic) version was a primitive survival from the world’s most ancient traditions where she symbolizes the Archaic Mother, provider of all Gifts that make culture and civilization possible. She was the Great Goddess – Sanskrit Mahadevi – the sum of all goddesses. In this context her Pithos, jar, is the primeval cradle or womb. She survives in Britain through Wiccan tradition formerly known as the original pre-Christian Triple Goddess, Brighid, Bride, Celtic Bhrìghde or Roman Brigantia.

It is synchronous at the height of summer, therefore, that several new crop circles should appear – in wildly different locations (not all in the ‘expected’ environs of Wiltshire) – which ask us to reexamine and appreciate our ancestral landscapes, remember our most ancient beliefs.

Diamond-faceted, layered wheat in communion with an ancient chapel at Chisbury

Almost all of the recent crop formations in England have manifested next to prehistoric sacred sites. A beautiful three-dimensional pentagram surrounded by ten crystalline diamonds appeared next to the 13thC Chapel of St Martin at Chisbury, Wiltshire on July 3rd within the enclave of prehistoric Chisbury Camp. Its layered and carefully-folded wheat accentuates this jewel of optical illusion, its crystalline facets, giving an impression of height, width and depth in what is essentially a two-dimensional design.

Olivier Morel's wonderful image of visitors to the Chisbury formation

According to eye-witnesses, the atmosphere within the formation is ‘spiritually uplifting,’ ‘awesome’, ‘transporting’, ‘phenomenal’. Builders of the tiny neighbouring 13thCentury chapel – in use now as a farm store – will have felt the same spiritual quality in the meadow viewed from its unadorned windows.

Savernake Merkabah star tetrahedron on the edge of an ancient Royal hunting forest

Sacred mounds and ancient fortified enclosures of ancestral importance have featured in nearly all the latest crop circle appearances. The ‘Merkabah’ tetrahedron of June 23rd at Savernake Forest near Marlborough, Wiltshire is the exception.

It is, by contrast, a testament not only to the past but the future.

Its situation on the edge of Savernake Forest is significant. Savernake Forest is one of the few remaining ancient stands of Royal Hunting Forest beloved of Norman kings. Now in private hands, no longer part of Crown Lands, here ancient trees have their roots deep in primeval soil, planted, nurtured and preserved within the Forest bounds for over a millennium. Among the Forest’s occupants is the Big Belly Oak, over 1000-years old, where, before Reformation zeal suppressed such activity, one may have been encouraged to ‘summon the Devil’ by dancing naked around its trunk. In another part of the Forest Henry VIII first met Lady Jane Seymour, daughter of the Forest’s Tudor steward, Sir John Seymour.

The Savernake formation itself shows a classic star tetrahedron of interlocking triangles reminiscent of the Merkabah, or ‘Chariot of the Gods’, the vehicle used by Ascended Masters and those advanced in the discipline of meditation and self-mastery to ascend to the next vibrational level of consciousness. The Merkabah is itself a symbol of the Ascension process, which humankind is presently beginning to experience. This ‘chariot’ or device used by the gods is a metaphor for one’s ability to activate within the human mind and energy body a synthesis of mind-body-spirit which transports the soul to higher vibrational states and ‘another’ dimension. It is inkeeping with crop circle design – particularly those of 2010 – that this formation has multiple interpretations: it can also be seen as a solstitial coronal mass ejection (CME) which that day (June 23rd) was already two days into its journey towards earth, having left the solar magnetosphere on solstice, and which hit the telephone and electrical systems of Earth’s northern hemisphere on the same day as the lunar eclipse, June 26th.

White Sheet Hill, a Neolithic sacred stronghold with its crop circle companion below

That weekend (June 26-27) this blogger’s computer, at the very least, suffered hiccups, white-out, black-out and broadband death; realignment with earthly systems was needed, new passwords created and, a little shakily, the process of blogging was allowed to continue. At least we croppies were given three days’ warning! CMEs don’t always leave room for domestic schedules.

June 25th White Sheet Hill crop 'snowflake': circles within crystalline circles

A crop circle at White Sheet Hill, Mere, Wiltshire depicting a dazzling ‘snowflake of light’ appeared June 25th within the sacred precinct of a Neolithic compound and below the Iron Age fortified enclosure of this ancient hilltop. The location is within shouting distance of Warminster, the hub of UFO activity in Britain which was suppressed in the 1960s and 1970s. The Brits have been as close-fisted as the US military-industrial complex on the subject of unidentified flying objects.

U.S. Ex-Military proponent of an ET presence, Robert Dean is convinced that full disclosure of the US Government’s files on UFOs, their research and documentation of ‘unexplained’ phenomena, is not only imminent, but necessary. Unfortunately he says, they’ve held back so long because once you open Pandora’ Box, ‘all hell breaks loose. They know you can’t just open Pandora’s Box a little bit…’

All-seeing Eye crop circle appeared June 28th at Ufton, Warwickshire

So when they disclose their awareness of the presence of technology far beyond the grasp of present humankind, there will be a massive seachange in human perspective. ‘I don’t think we know how much that will affect society. It is huge.’

It may be relevant that the last British crop circle of June was that of an all-seeing eye at Ufton in Warwickshire on the 28th. It might also be seen as a lens from the past into the future perhaps. Or even a telescopic zoom from the future looking at us in the present moment of now. Time, as we know, is an illusion anyway…

Crop circles in the Euro bloc
Several crop circles have appeared in the fields of Europe since mid-June, notably in Italy and in Hessen, and Rheinland-Pfalz.

Berlepsch-Ellerode, Hessen crop circle June 27th

As if trying to catch up with the Continent, there was a rash of appearances in England over the July 4th weekend.

As of 07/07/10 the count is:

33 formations in Italy
21 designs in England
7 Kornkreise in Deutschland, 2 in Belgium and
1 each in Russia, Croatia, Poland, Holland and (in the southern hemisphere) in Argentina and New Zealand.

Unusually, a huge new formation appeared over July 4th weekend, one of two in the fields of the North: this one at Sutton Bank is in North Yorkshire, below Roulston Scar in the Hambleton Hills, in an area known as Happy Valley, near Thirsk. The other – a simple circular design – materialized at Castle Hill near West Yorkshire’s Huddersfield.

The Sutton Bank design displays intertwining yin-yang symbols in a linear group and its position in the Valley, like so many of this year’s new crop circles, seems to have been chosen for its proximity to a sacred Iron Age hill enclosure (‘hillfort’).

The area is rife with legend.

The Devil’s Footprint and the White Mare of Gormire

Happy Valley crop formation appeared at the time of 'Old Style midsummer' when villagers used to hold their July festival in the fields below Roulston Scar

It is said when pagan Druids who held their sacred seasonal ceremonies in Happy Valley were first confronted (AD6thC) by Christian monastics, they had to decide whose faith was superior. As the tradition is told from a Christian perspective, the ‘Devil’ was beaten by the peripatetic monk and had to flee.

Sutton Bank formation below Roulston Scar, N.Yorkshire

It is said he took off ‘on brazen wings’ from Roulston Scar, inadvertently taking with him part of the underlying rock which stuck to his fiery foot. On landing across the Valley on top of Hood Hill, he shed the rock which showed a hole where his hellish fire had melted it in the shape of his foot. A 20-ton erratic boulder on Hood Hill to this day shows the imprint of a foot and is identical to rocks across the valley on Roulston Scar.

The new formation lies in wheat on Sutton Bank farm in the valley between the two. It appeared on the anniversary of the valley’s Olde Midsummer Festival which used to be held during the week of July 6th – ‘Old-Style’ equivalent of solstice night, transposed from the previous Julian calendar when in 1752 country people in Britain rebelled at being deprived of 11 days of their precious time.

‘When Gormire riggs shall be covered with hay,
The white mare of Whitestone Cliff will bear it away’

This local saying has a medieval origin and refers to supposedly apocalyptic extremes of weather, particularly at the height of summer, when Gormire – a permanent and supposedly bottomless pond in Happy Valley – will dry up and hay will be harvested on it. Another medieval legend retold is of a mythical White Mare said to have sprung off Roulston Scar carrying a young maiden whose body was never found. It is interesting to note that the crop formation here is located below a 19thCentury white horse carved into Whitestone Cliff on Roulston Scar.

Solstitial appearance: June 21st crop circle: coded symbolism for Phi spiral, the 'Golden Mean' or Fibonacci sequence at Pewsey

The Phi-coded formation of June 21st at Pewsey which appeared following a massive participatory ‘consciousness experiment’ mentioned in my solstice blog on Wiltshire circles, lies within a stone’s throw of the Pewsey White Horses – hillside carvings based in ancient mythical horse tradition.

Uffington White Horse, Wiltshire: oldest of the sacred ancestral totems: Neolithic stallion etched in the land

If there is a theme to the 2010 crop circles so far, it is connected to our most ancient knowledge, our culture’s most formative period: those centuries before modern machination started to sweep us under the carpet of Time. Our ancestors took time out from busy lives to build stone bulwarks, draw sacred animals in the landscape, create sacred enclosures and fortify mounds with bank-and-ditch in places where the Earth’s energy nodes meet. Here at these crossing points crop circles are picking up the baton and carrying ancestral wisdom one step farther – begging us to follow. These designs would appear to be guiding us to look within, but also outward, upward to the heavens, and through the eyes of our own past, through ancient traditions, archetypal knowledge and especially via our intuitive ‘knowing’, which may be in danger of being forgotten. In that peaceful space between breaths there is a world of another dimension which we are within a hairsbreadth of reaching – if we shall only take the plunge.

The legend of Pandora reminds us what we have in store.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 1869 chalk 'Study for Pandora' perpetuated the Box symbol

The most common mythological tale is the one handed down from the (male-dominant) Hellenist culture: Zeus ordered Hephaestos the Smith, god of craftsmanship, to create her and he fashioned her body from clay, using water and earth. The other gods each added a quality, endowing her with many talents; Athene, goddess of wisdom, breathed life into her; Aphrodite gave her beauty, Apollo music; Hermes taught her the art of persuasion, and to charm and deceive: hence her name: Pandora, “all-gifted”.

The Legend of Pandora
When Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus took vengeance by presenting Pandora to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother. Pandora brought with her a jar which she was not to open under any circumstance. Impelled by her natural curiosity, Pandora opened the jar, and all evil contained escaped and spread over the earth. She hastened to close the lid, but the contents of the jar had spilled out, except for one quality which lay at the bottom – and that was Hope.

In the 16th Century, Erasmus of Rotterdam mistranslated Greek pithos (jar) for Latin pyxis (box) and the Edwardian pre-Raphaelites – and romantics ever since – have perpetuated the tradition.

The latest crop circle of July 6th at Danebury Camp, Nether Wallop, Hampshire, illustrated top, might be seen as Pandora’s Box. We are presented on this planet Earth – our only Home – with the greatest gifts Creation can offer in one blue bundle, to be used wisely or scattered to the winds.

What will we do with these magnificent gifts? squander them like Pandora or, as the crop circles so gently nudge and remind us, shall we use these irreplaceable qualities wisely?

Shall we take that starship – our own systemic Merkabah – and ascend? It’s up to us now.

Explore posts in the same categories: Art, calendar, crop circles, culture, environment, legends, metaphysics, mythology, New Age consciousness, philosphy, quantum physics, ritual, spirituality

Tags: all-gifted, Aphrodite, Apollo, Athene, beauty, Chisbury, crop circle, crop formation, Danebury Camp, Deutschland, Epimetheus, Eve, first-woman-on-Earth, Germany, Happy Valley, Hermes (Mercury), Hessen, Holland, Italy, kornkreise, Mere, Merkabah, midsummer, New Zealand, North Yorkshire, Pandora, persuasion, Pewsey, phi spiral, Prometheus, Roulston Scar, Savernake Forest, solstice, star tetrahedron, Sutton Bank, Uffington, White Horse, Zeus

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.