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Leylines: From the old straight track to the Ghostbusters vortex
Leylines: From the old straight track to the Ghostbusters vortex
A few years ago, a paranormal investigator acquaintance who knew I was a geologist asked me what I thought about ley lines related to paranormal phenomena. I wasn't familiar with this association or the history of ley lines then. After consulting several references and poking around the Web, I am now!
spookygeology.com
Fascinating sci-comm article about the history and "science" of leylines, from hobbyists in the early 19th century to a New Age belief to a pivotal plot point in Ghostbusters.




It's interesting to learn that ley lines were originally (and usually) conceived of as straight! I first heard about them in the context of dowsing, and I seem to recall them as being large "C" or "S" shapes, with the tips of the form ending in spirals. A very pleasing shape. That better fits a cosmology of the natural world, which less often moves in straight lines, than one of the movements of long-ago peoples. However, I can't seem to find any references to these shapes online -- I suspect that what I encountered was not the common understanding. Note that the author here does not go into the intersection of ley lines and dowsing, which is what I'm remembering.
By the way, while I don't have any particular reason to think ley lines exist, I remain uncomfortably unsure about dowsing. I've had too many personal experiences (and heard about ones directly from trustworthy sources) to think that "dowsing" (which I would like to point out is a very large umbrella of a term) does not consist of at least a few surprising psychological phenomena that we could suss out with the right experiments. My money's on it simply being a way of getting into a headspace where you can take in and process sensory information differently, or allowing your intuition to flow a little more freely, which frustratingly is pretty hard to design an experiment for.