This is a technique used by artists to bring order out of randomness. And yet the ‘Glastonbury Zodiac’ is supposed to be the best attested and most convincing of such ‘monuments’.Īnyone can select lines on a map that can be joined to make patterns vaguely resembling meaningful shapes, such as human beings, animals and objects. Some, which she and her followers identified from aerial photographs have turned out to be signs of agricultural activity at the time the photographs were taken (such as the ‘eye’ of Capricorn, which was a haystack)! Even then, the figures do not correspond to the traditional figures of the zodiac as we know it: Cancer, for instance, is not a crab but a ship.
Some of the details are derived from roads and field boundaries that can be demonstrated not to have existed before the nineteenth century. The biggest problem with Katherine Maltwood’s ‘discovery’ is that she used features seen in the present-day landscape. She then assigned astrological meanings to the figures, which she also believed were connected with elements of the Grail romances of Arthurian literature.At the time, no-one really took the idea seriously (least of all, archaeologists and landscape historians!) and it languished almost forgotten until an article by Mary Caine in a 1969 issue of the New Age magazine Gandalf’s Garden popularised it once again. The shapes of the figures are marked by lanes, field boundaries and streams. Using maps and aerial photographs, she was able to recognise vast symbolic figures in outline, located on slight elevations in the landscape. The ‘Temple of the Stars’, as she called it, consists of a circle some 16 km (10 miles) in diameter, around Glastonbury Tor. She may have been guided by hints left by the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee (1527-1609) that such a feature existed. In the 1920s, an artist and antiquarian collector, Katherine Emma Maltwood (1878-1961), generally referred to as ‘Mrs Maltwood’) formulated the idea that a gigantic zodiac exists in the landscape around Glastonbury (UK). The ‘Glastonbury Zodiac’ as depicted by Katherine Maltwood
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