Prelude to the Hundredth Monkey - Summer 1995

1995 was for me a truly wonderful year.  I shall be clear from the outset that I cannot separate my own personal experience from the record of the camp.  It would be impossible to attempt and would remove the fire from what happened even if it were.  Everyone who attended the three events, which happened over the years from 1995 to 1997, will have their own stories and will have come to their own understandings as to what happened for them, and what it all meant.  I can only tell it as I saw it myself from my point of view.  There is an objective flow of events which certain people participated in, and they each may have come to take away different meanings into the spheres of their lives.  Despite the radically diverging views which emerged as to what it was all about, I can say without any doubt that the experience was a hinge upon which my life turned, and nothing has been the same since.  It was like a great whirlpool of energy which I willingly allowed myself to be sucked into, without previously realising that I would be disgorged into a universe that had changed beyond all recognition, because I myself had been transformed.

The heatwave and drought had already made 1995 legendary before the camp even happened.  I had felt an increase in my physical energy as a result and after a spring in which I had found the confidence and strength to perform at a town pub’s amateur night on a number of occasions, my physical stamina had improved to the extent that I could feel I was up to coping with the travelling necessary to take a holiday, which I had not done for a very long time.  Specifically to Glastonbury Tor and the Festival nearby.

This tied in well with the approaching camp looming on the horizon since Palden Jenkins lived in Glastonbury and it might be an opportunity to briefly reacquaint with him while I was there.  I had visited the town and sacred sites only once before, when I had taken an afternoon out from the festival to walk to the Tor in 1984.  This time I was able to spend longer there, tuning in to the wonderful vibration of the place.  I briefly met Palden again and did the tourist bit, taking in the detail.

Especially powerful was Midsummer Night when a circle of drummers played in the Tower of St. Michael on the summit of the Tor from dusk to dawn, pausing only once at midnight.  The resonance of the djembe drums was amplified by the acoustic of the hollow tower and could be heard at a great distance from the hill in the still night.  As I ascended the narrow and winding stair that hugs the steep north-easterly face of Glastonbury Tor to join the several hundred people already assembled in the darkness on the flat summit, expectant for the dawn, I could hardly suppress the feeling that the place was like a rave about to be raided at any moment.  The circle of drummers were far too imaginative to be accused of making ‘repetitive beats’, but the whole feeling of the place was bursting with energy.  It has to be said that few of those there were true pagans celebrating in any traditional way.  Most were simply people who had been drawn there by the power of the place at Midsummer and the legend, and we were all transformed by its spirit and the call of the djembe into cosmic beings surfing the solstice.  Some say that the Tor is a dimensional portal.  Perhaps it has just learnt to become that way because of how people have worked with it.  

This tied in well with the approaching camp looming on the horizon since Palden Jenkins lived in Glastonbury and it might be an opportunity to briefly reacquaint with him while I was there.  I had visited the town and sacred sites only once before, when I had taken an afternoon out from the festival to walk to the Tor in 1984.  This time I was able to spend longer there, tuning in to the wonderful vibration of the place.  I briefly met Palden again and did the tourist bit, taking in the detail.

Especially powerful was Midsummer Night when a circle of drummers played in the Tower of St. Michael on the summit of the Tor from dusk to dawn, pausing only once at midnight.  The resonance of the djembe drums was amplified by the acoustic of the hollow tower and could be heard at a great distance from the hill in the still night.  As I ascended the narrow and winding stair that hugs the steep north-easterly face of Glastonbury Tor to join the several hundred people already assembled in the darkness on the flat summit, expectant for the dawn, I could hardly suppress the feeling that the place was like a rave about to be raided at any moment.  The circle of drummers were far too imaginative to be accused of making ‘repetitive beats’, but the whole feeling of the place was bursting with energy.  It has to be said that few of those there were true pagans celebrating in any traditional way.  Most were simply people who had been drawn there by the power of the place at Midsummer and the legend, and we were all transformed by its spirit and the call of the djembe into cosmic beings surfing the solstice.  Some say that the Tor is a dimensional portal.  Perhaps it has just learnt to become that way because of how people have worked with it. 

      We did not see a bright golden sun that morning, but as the white light strengthened in the mist it seemed that we were on an island floating in and on the clouds, like Olympus, or some mythical land suspended beyond time and  space.  People would emerge from the shining greyness like beings appearing from another dimension, becoming more distinct with every step, rising up through the foggy astral planes till they reached the clarity of the summit.  Briefly it felt that we were a ship sailing in eternity, and that we had touched something which was perhaps within us, that high point of awareness we each are searching for.  And when the day fully awoke and it was time to come down we would descend those astral planes, re-enter the veil of the material plane and return to the warmth of homely surroundings on the flat and level in the everyday world. 

    Not that the festival immediately afterwards was exactly everyday and homely, but I was able to take it at a more leisurely pace, visiting the many tented cafes, playing my guitar and meeting people.  The weather was wonderful for my health.  I had taken a bit of a risk going to the festival; if there had been a year of mud similar to the one I had seen in 1985, or  that were to follow in 1997 and 1998, the effect on my health would have been devastating.  But the gods smiled on us all that year it seems, and the climate was positively beneficial and  strengthening for me.

     As I became more attuned to the hum of the great mass of humanity that I was swimming in I began to see the entire event as a giant superconscious entity in which we were the neurones connecting with each other.  It seemed that only some transdimensional reality model like this could account for the incessant waves of synchronous events, as people that I might be thinking of would appear out of the crowd, blurring the boundaries of reality.  I determined that this perception was something I would take with me to the camp.  If the world is to go forward from its present crisis then a degree of intuitive and spontaneous co-operation of this sort is not only a vital quality but one that needs to be recognised in order to be encouraged.
copyright © 2011 Claire Rae Randall