Home Diary Events Articles Questions Photos Links
Dowsing Lyonnais
In many ways, the French city of Lyon is comparable to Birmingham, its English twin - but with the classical heart of Bath mysteriously transplanted into the centre of it. Founded around the confluence of the Rivers Rhone and Saone, Lyon has long been a centre of both material wealth and religious devotion. Both are still very evident today.
My wife, Ros, and I were celebrating my coming of age, and I chose an Under-the-Manche railway journey to mark the event. Lyon was just about as far as we could get comfortably in a day - and, that is, still have time for a few glasses of the local elixir before bedtime.
The old city is dominated by two hills - Fourviere (the hill that prays) and Croix Rousse (the hill that works). On Fourviere stands the powerfully imposing and elaborately decorated basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere. Like any sensible pilgrims, we caught the funicular railway up to visit it. As ever, our intuition led us, not directly to the main entrance, but across the back of the building, which overlooks the west of the city way below. The first thing that strikes the dowser about this monolithic structure is the way that earth energy pours out of a portico below the foot of the nave and rushes down towards the much more modest catherdral on the riverbank. Walking across it was like wading through a constant torrent. You could feel it might be quite possible to be swept down to the CÔte de Rhone quicker than you had intended. Indeed, it took so much psychic effort that we couldn’t even work out if the flow was actually beneficial. However, we gave it the benefit of the doubt, and proceeded to the front of the basilica, where coach loads of tourists and supplicants merged together into another steady stream. In the paved area in front of the main door, alternating waves of earth energy flooded across, making it difficult to get to grips with what was going on. This caused poor Ros to loll about in a disorientated fashion. Even when we passed the site again the following day - this time on an open-topped bus - she still had her head in her hands until we had reached the comparative sanctuary of the next street along.
However, the interior of the basilica is quite different. Extensively rebuilt around the turn of the last century, it was calm and stable - but still very energetic. At the centre of the spiral point in front of the alter rails, a deep downshaft encouraged the sensitive to their knees. This site has clearly been a notable earth energy node from the dawn of time. It was known to the Templars, and it is still an important station of the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella. The current incarnation, despite its mélange of architectural styles, ranging from the minimalist to the extreme baroque, merely draws the converted and the curious into its still-beating heart.
Hundreds of feet below, and directly on many of the same energy lines and leys, stands the more comprehendible Cathedral. Dedicated to John the Baptist and containing a large statue unusually showing the Christ child in his father’s arms, rather than his mother’s, this building felt more masculine in character - more ordered and more predictable. Although it was also placed on an ancient site, the flow of energy reaching St Jean’s, after pouring down the cliff face, was healing and harmonious. Interestingly, at some stage a sculptor had been commissioned to install a vast modern water wall about halfway down the escarpment, and I wondered if this feature was - intentionally or otherwise - acting as some kind of etheric filter.
A third religious building in Lyon provided a very different dowsing conundrum. The little 19th century church of St Vincent stands on the riverside amid a terrace of later construction. However, its facade has a different alignment to that of its neighbours. Despite its relatively recent date, it has a couple of strong energy lines running into its portico and, perhaps significantly, a ley pointing straight out of the centre of the front door, at right angles to the front of the building itself. Is this why it was built, or rebuilt, askew to the adjoining properties?
A passing resident stopped to ask me what I was doing outside St Vincent’s, and I attempted to explain the subtleties of dowsing in my best second language to a man who spoke only tourist English. I think I got the message across. He seemed pleased and, anyway, I didn’t get incarcerated.
The other highlight of historical Lyon is the magnificent Roman amphitheatres. Extensively restored, and now operating as real-time outdoor performance venues - complete with lighting-rig scaffolding poles drilled into the third century terracing - these are astonishingly well-preserved cultural assets.
Although the Roman period is better known for the Christian baiting and terrorising by Nero and his cohorts, in fact most of their amphitheatres were used mainly for their intended purpose - the performing arts.
I found quite a few major energy lines converging on the stages, and I even followed a fourth century theatregoer up the still extant access steps and on to his chosen place amongst the posh seats of the middle-distance terracing.
When I visit a site like this, I often seem to be allowed, or presented with, one new piece of information. This time, I was looking to see if there were any pictograms in the arena - and I was pleased to find that there were. I discovered a series of regular shapes across what would have been the performer’s stage. It struck me that these looked like some of the patterns that you sometimes see in museums of Roman mosaics, yet they dowsed as being just images of pure consciousness in the ether - with no substance or energy content at all. Only then did the penny drop. Where I was standing, I would have been in the full glare of hundreds of Gallo-Romani, all looking down at the pattern on the floor beneath my feet. What I was picking up in 21st century Lyon was the thought pattern that those people left as they watched the show - their vision of the mosaic tiles in the floor of the stage, preserved for all time as their enduring collective consciousness.
Nigel Twinn October 2011