If Canterbury, the locus of pilgrimage, is the official capital of the Church of England, Glastonbury has long been its heathen obverse. The enormous Tor, or earthen mound, that dominates its topography, topped with a lonely ruined tower, has exerted a magnetic pull on alternative pilgrims drawn by the local legends of the first English Christian church, the alleged hiding place of the Holy Grail, secreted somewhere by Joseph of Arimathea, and its supposed conjunction of ley lines and earth energies. The writer and occultist Dion Fortune, a Glastonbury resident in the early 1920s, believed the Tor to be a ‘Hill of Vision’ at the centre of a ‘gateway to the Unseen’ – a spiritual-architectural complex sheltering the slumbering spirit of Albion.
– From Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young
