The Magic Land Text Excerpt -

I dreamed very restlessly there. My dreams were full of bones and ash and I saw the stones covered with sparkling white quartz at times and the Moon went through endless phases through thousands of years and I got a terrible feeling of a cold dead world, but in one part of my dream I definitely saw something streaming from the dark Moon and I knew these were the souls of new humans. I can’t explain this. It could be I was flipping or it could be I was being affected what the stone circle builders had done there, by what they believed. I don’t know. I can only say what I saw – and this went on happening, souls streaming from the Moon to Earth, repeated through time, every time the Moon swung round to dark. I understood the void dead energy of the eclipses. I understood the truth of death, a bit, and through this, the meaning death gives to life and love. The briefness of the lives enhanced the beauty and the courage. I don’t know what the bones and ashes were. I guess they must have cremated their dead. I tossed and turned and kept waking and falling asleep again and I started coughing fitfully in the drizzle as I saw horrible things like fire burning the skull of a human being, a little child’s foot and her hand that were unburnt, when the rest of her body was burnt. Waves of conquest, peoples lost.

      I got a huge feeling that the plateau the stone circle was built on was like a platform angled out at space, or a radio disk angled to receive from space - a platform, like a stage, wide, wide open to the endless turning of the sun and the moon and the stars. The stone circle in its wide-open space surrounded by trees, was exposed naked to the hugeness of space. And so the birth and death of humans is one with the rising and setting of the Sun and the Moon, their waxing and waning: light and dark.

      And in another of these dreams, round the stone circle sat men, and they were having a good time and were very cheerful and solid characters and around them I saw boys growing and finding women and becoming fathers and hunting and dying and being burnt here – generations after generations, and I felt in some way, one with this endless process, one with these boys and men. It made me cry that they all had come to die, but it was not really so sad in a way, that each one died, because life goes on and what they stood for went on and on, their cheerfulness and their solidity.

      And at one time I saw with certainty I was with those boys. We were coming to the stone circle through trees in bud and lots of May blossom - hawthorn bushes in flower, and I could hear drumming from lots of people gathered there and girls were streaming to the stone circle from the opposite direction and among the girls, I saw with certainty that Becca was there with the girls. There was a ritual led by a shaman and a shamaness in the centre of the Circle itself, where death and sacrifice were central and because of that the power of sex and new life came through like sudden light in the dark, in the ritual of the Great Rite of Beltane and then there was a huge meal of pork  from the pigs they all hunted there as part of the festival, shared by all the families and life was affirmed and the tribe went on, and then when it got dark, the boys and the girls paired off and Becca and I kissed really fiercely for a long time and then made love open to the skies I could feel the cool air on my skin - and then I saw there were nine stones to the stone circle and believed this was the nine months the child took to grow so the stone circle caught the power of both Sun and Moon, because I had been told the stone that stood on its own outside the stone circle of nine, the king stone, was also lined up to the midsummer and midwinter solstice sunrise points of the Sun. I don’t know if this was just my fevered fantasy tossing and turning in snatches of dream, chilled by the rain, or if I was given something of the energy of the remote people who built the stone circle and they let me see a bit of one of their festivals and showed me my link with them; their gift to me. Perhaps the stone circle was pouring its energy into me and Becca, as it could go on doing for ever, as its magic was set up to do, catching up a new boy and a new girl in its endless pattern of love and sex and pleasure, magic and life and death, for ever, standing there for thousands of years like a dynamo emitting its deep magical energy and strength and power to generations of humans.