John Frederick Carden Michell (9 February 1933 – 24 April 2009) was an English writer whose key sources of inspiration were Plato and Charles Fort. His 1969 volume The View Over Atlantis has been described as probably the most influential book in the history of the hippy/underground movement and one that had far-reaching effects on the study of strange phenomena: it "put ley lines on the map, re-enchanted the British landscape and made Glastonbury the capital of the New Age."
In some 40-odd titles over five decades he examined, often in pioneering style, such topics as sacred geometry, earth mysteries, geomancy, gematria, archaeoastronomy, metrology, euphonics, simulacra and sacred sites, as well as Fortean phenomena. An abiding preoccupation was the Shakespeare authorship question. His Who Wrote Shakespeare? (1996) was reckoned by The Washington Post "the best overview yet of the authorship question."
Michell was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He did national service in the Royal Navy, during which time he qualified as a Russian translator at the Joint Services School for Linguists. He then worked for a while as an estate agent in London.
His first book, The Flying Saucer Vision, was published in 1967. Gary Lachman states that View Over Atlantis "put Glastonbury on the countercultural map." Ronald Hutton describes it as "almost the founding document of the modern earth mysteries movement". By the late 1960s Michell was closely associated with members of the Rolling Stones. At this time Michell took the view that "an imminent revelation of literally inconceivable scope" was at hand, and that the appearance of UFOs was linked to "the start of a new phase in our history".
In the 1980s Michell was a member of the Lindisfarne Association and a teacher at its School of Sacred Architecture. He lectured at the Kairos Foundation, an "educational charity specifically founded to promote the recovery of traditional values in the Arts and Sciences". He was for some years a visiting lecturer at the Prince of Wales' School of Traditional Arts.
John Michell was the author of over forty books, numerous (sometimes humorous) short treatises, and articles in publications as diverse as International Times, The Temenos Academy Review, the Daily Mirror and The Spectator.
His better known works include The Flying Saucer Vision: the Holy Grail Restored (1967), The View Over Atlantis (1969), later revised as The New View Over Atlantis, (1983), which stimulated renewed interest in ley lines, City of Revelation (1972), which concerns sacred geometry, A Little History of Astro-Archaeology (1977), Phenomena: A Book of Wonders (1977 with R. J. M. Rickard), Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (1984) and The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth: Discovering the Sacred Geometry of the Ancients (2006) with Robin Heath.
Michell's books received a broadly positive reception amongst the "New Age" and "Earth mysteries" movements and he is credited as perhaps being "the most articulate and influential writer on the subject of leys and alternative studies of the past". Ronald Hutton describes his research as part of an alternative archaeology "quite unacceptable to orthodox scholarship."
Bob Rickard, founding editor of Fortean Times, has written that Michell's first three works "provided a synthesis of and a context for all the other weirdness of the era. It’s fair to say that it played a big part in the foundation of Fortean Times itself by helping create a readership that wanted more things to think about and a place to discuss them. The overall effect was to help the burgeoning interest in strange phenomena spread out into mainstream culture."His 1984 volume Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions covered such figures as Comyns Beaumont and Julius Evola, as well as eccentric, not to say egregious, behaviour such as self-administered trepanning.
From 1997 he wrote a monthly column of humour, philosophy and social commentary in The Oldie magazine, an anthology of which was published in 2005 as Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist.
Metrology, numerology & cosmology
A recurring theme in Michell's work, from Living Wonders to Twelve Tribe Nations and The Measure of Albion, is of universal truths codified in nature and continually, if intermittently, rediscovered from ancient times up to the present day.
Ioan Culianu, a specialist in gnosticism and Renaissance esoteric studies, in a review in 1991 of The Dimensions of Paradise: The Proportions and Symbolic Numbers in Ancient Cosmology, expressed the view that, "After some deliberation the reader of this book will oscillate between two hypotheses: either that many mysteries of the universe are based on numbers, or that the book's author is a fairly learned crank obsessed with numbers."
Michell, like Fort, maintained a thoroughgoing scepticism towards most of the theoretical tenets of contemporary science. "How did the world begin?" he enquired of the Daily Mirror's readers on one occasion. "The correct answer is . . . it is a total mystery. That is also the proper answer to the other big questions about our existence—the ones that children ask but adults hate to answer. Questions like: 'How did life begin?' or 'Where does human intelligence come from?' or 'How did language develop?' Everyone has ideas about these things, but no one really knows. If they did know there would not be all those different theories.
"We have all, for example, heard of the 'Big Bang.' According to this explanation, everything in the cosmos developed from a tiny package of incredibly dense matter that exploded. One day, somehow, it exploded and our world began. Adults are quite happy to accept this idea but it does not satisfy children. The next thing they ask, quite rightly, is: How did that suspicious package get there in the first place?"
He went on: "Most writers have their thing or main theme that runs throughout all their work. My thing for over 35 years, in books, articles, and lectures, has been the mystery of existence. Within this unexplained universe is an infinity of mysteries. Wherever you look, in archaeology and ancient history or in the modern records of parapsychology and strange phenomena, you find evidence to contradict every theory and 'certainty' of official science. The real world is quite different from the way our teachers describe it, and it is a great deal more interesting."
City of Revelation
Michell claimed that the Biblical miracle of the catch of 153 fish is based on geometry. David Fideler noted that "John Michell was the first to show how this story was intentionally constructed upon an underlying geometry."
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
In 1996 Michell published on the question of Shakespeare authorship. In surveying the arguments for and against the various candidates, he did not expressly favour any single one of the surprisingly many, but judged certain hypotheses more plausible than others, particularly the Oxfordian theory. Who Wrote Shakespeare? received mixed reviews: Publishers Weekly was critical, while The Washington Post and The Independent praised his treatment of the subject.
1967 The Flying Saucer Vision: the Holy Grail Restored, Sidgwick & Jackson, Abacus Books, Ace 441-24415-060 (mass market paperback)
1969 The View Over Atlantis, HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-250578-1; first published by Sago Press in Great Britain in 1969; new edition published in Great Britain by Garnstone Press in 1972 and Abacus in 1973, and in the United States by Ballantine Books in 1972
1972 City of Revelation: On the Proportions and Symbolic Numbers of the Cosmic Temple, Garnstone Press, ISBN 978-0-85511-040-6, ISBN 0-85511-040-6
1974 The Old Stones of Land's End, Garnstone Press Ltd, ISBN 978-0-85511-370-4
1975 "The Earth Spirit: Its Ways, Shrines, and Mysteries (The Art and Cosmos Series), Avon, ISBN 0-380-26880-9
1977 with R. J. M. Rickard, Phenomena: A Book of Wonders Thames & Hudson Ltd, ISBN 0-500-01182-6
1979 Natural Likeness: Faces and Figures in Nature Thames and Hudson Ltd, ISBN 0-525-47584-2
1979 with Plinius Scundus C., "Inventorum Natura", Harper Collins, English Latin, D. MacSweeney (translator), ISBN 0-06-014726-1
1981 "Ancient Metrology: the Dimensions of Stonehenge and of the Whole World as Therein Symbolized", Pentacle Books, ISBN 0-906850-05-3
1982 Megalithomania: Artists, Antiquarians & Archaeologists at the Old Stone Monuments, Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0-500-27235-2: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0-8014-1479-2
1983 The New View Over Atlantis, Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0 500 01302 0, ISBN 0-500-27312-X, ISBN 978-0-500-27312-8 (Fully revised and reset edition of The View Over Atlantis "with much new material")
1984 Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions Thames and Hudson Ltd, reissued Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ISBN 0-15-127358-8
1985 Stonehenge - Its Druids, Custodians, Festival and Future , Richard Adams Associates (June 1985), ISBN 0-948508-00-0 ISBN 978-0-948508-00-4
1988 "Geosophy - An Overview of Earth Mysteries" with Paul Devereux, John Steele, John Michell, Nigel Pennick, Martin Brennan, Harry Oldfield and more, a Mystic Fire Video from Trigon Communications, Inc, New York, 1988 (reissued 1990), also by EMPRESS, Wales, UK, 95 minutes, VHS.
1986 "Feng-Shui: The Science of Sacred Landscape in Old China", with Ernest J. Eitel, Syngergetic Press, ISBN 0-907791-09-3
1989 The Traveller's Key to Sacred England , reissued 2006, Gothic Image ISBN 0 906362 63 6
1989 Secrets of the Stones: New Revelations of Astro-Archaeology and the Mystical Sciences of Antiquity, Destiny Books, ISBN 0-89281-337-7
1989 Earth Spirit: Its Ways, Shrines and Mysteries , Thames and Hudson, Ltd., ISBN 0-500-81011-7
1990 New Light on the Ancient Mystery of Glastonbury, Gothic Image Publications, ISBN 0 906362 15 6 (pb), ISBN 0 906362 14 8 (hb)
1991 Dowsing the Crop Circles (Editor/Contributor), Gothic Image Publications, ISBN 0 906362 17 2
1991 Twelve Tribe Nations and the Science of Enchanting the Landscape, with Christine Rhone, Thames and Hudson, Ltd.: Phanes Press, paper, ISBN 0-933999-49-6
1994 At the Center of the World: Polar Symbolism Discovered in Celtic, Norse and Other Ritualized Landscapes, Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0-500-01607-0
1996 Who Wrote Shakespeare?, Thames and Hudson Ltd, ISBN 0-500-01700-X
2000, with Bob Rickard, Unexplained Phenomena: Mysteries and Curiosities of Science, Folklore and Superstition, Rough Guides, ISBN 1-85828-589-5
2000 The Temple at Jerusalem: A Relevation, Samuel Weiser, Inc, ISBN 1-57863-199-8, ISBN 978-1-57863-199-5
2001 The Dimensions of Paradise: The Proportions and Symbolic Numbers of Ancient Cosmology Adventures Unlimited, ISBN 0-932813-89-5
2001 A Little History of Astro-Archaeology, Thames and Hudson, SBN-10: 0500275572 SBN-10: 0500275572, ISBN 978-0-500-27557-3
2003 "Traveler's Guide to Sacred England, The: A Guide to the Legends, Lore and Landscapes of England's Sacred Places", Gothic Image Publications, ISBN 978090636263
2003 "Prehistoric Sacred Sites of Cornwall", Wessex Books, ISBN 978-1-903035-18-4
2005 "Esoterická Anglie: pr?vodce po posvátn?ch místech, legendách a pov?stech," with Miloslav Korbelík, Eminent, ISBN 80-7281-234-3
2005 Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist, Dominion Press, ISBN 0-9712044-4-6
2006 "Prehistoric Sacred Sites of Cornwall", Wessex Books, ISBN 9781903035184 48 pp
2006 "Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Sounds", Wooden Books, ISBN 978190426343
2006 The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth: Discovering the Sacred Geometry of the Ancients, with Robin Heath, Adventures Unlimited Press, ISBN 1-931882-50-9
2007 "The Star Temple of Avalon", with Nicholas Mann, Philippa Glasson, Robin Heath, The Temple Publications, ISBN 0-9555970-5-6
2008 "Dimensions of Paradise, The: Sacred Geometry, Ancient Science and the Heavenly Order on Earth", forthcoming from Inner Traditions - Bear & Company
