Awakening Albion, A Mythic Geography For Our Time

Albion is perhaps the oldest name for Britain, going back to pre-Roman times. In the epic poetry of William Blake (‘Jerusalem’, and others), Albion can be understood both as the spirit of the land itself and also as an Everyman figure. Blake suggests that Albion (Man) has degenerated into the sleep of seeing only with single vision (intellect), which has caused a deep alienation from the rest of life, resulting in the hellish creation of ‘Babylon’, the Wasteland in which we find ourselves. The process of awakening involves a deep need to engage also with our emotional and instinctive responses as well as our creative
and prophetic imagination. The Awakening of Albion may then lead to the processes of social and ecological restoration, which Blake names as building New Jerusalem. This process of awakening can be seen in modern terms as the development of an ecological sense of self, a deep knowing that we are truly connected to all beings, mitakoye oyasin, ‘all my relatives’, as native Americans say.

In his introduction to ‘The Sun and The Serpent’, (the book by Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller in which the discovery and dowsing of the Michael and Mary earth energy Lines is described), the author John Michell relates a tale of a mural he painted in a Glastonbury café. It was of the giant Albion lying across southern England, his feet in Cornwall and his head in East Anglia. The Michael/Mary Lines and their crossing or node points can in this sense be seen as the major meridian lines and chakras of the earth giant Albion. This is the mythological landscape upon which we will be treading during the Walk.

Albion – The Wounded Being We Inhabit:
A Historical Perspective

Blake may have named Albion as a major character in his poetry, but he was far from the first. An understanding of the deep historical roots of the mythological being Albion can be found in a booklet on storytelling and the landscape, ‘The Dreaming of Place’, by Hugh Lupton. The beautiful piece that follows was adapted by Lupton from the 12th century Icelandic ‘Prose Edda’, by Snorri Sturluson:

‘The giant’s flesh became the soil.
The giant’s bones became rocks and stones.
The giant’s blood became the springs and streams and lakes
and the blue waters of the wide sea.
The dome of the giant’s skull became the great dome of the sky
that stretches high above our heads.
The giant’s brains became the white scudding clouds.
One eye became the sun, the other the moon.
The giant’s breath became the wind that lifts the hair from our foreheads.
And we, the people, treading the skin of the world
beneath the vast dome of the sky, we are its dreams.
Some say the wounded sleeping being we inhabit is called Albion.
It is the grandfather of all the grandfathers,
the grandmother of all the grandmothers.
We are its dreaming and its skin holds the memory
of all that it has dreamed in the past.’

Hugh continues, ‘the ancient myth of the land, as embodied by a sleeping, wounded God, (that comes to us through Norse, Graeco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian, Celtic and possibly Neolithic/Palaeolithic sources) has an alarmingly contemporary resonance. The land we inhabit is wounded, it has been desecrated as never before… and it will not recover until it has become, in some way, sacred again… re-storying and re-dreaming the land, using word and song to make numinous once again the mysterious ground that is the grandfather of all the grandfathers, the grandmother of all the grandmothers.’