In the spring of 1995, while I was discovering the joys of the emerging web, I came across a curious article from the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) stating that occult groups were trying to seize London's Omphalos. In Greek mythology, Omphalos is – literally – the “navel of the world”. I was not the only one to be intrigued by this article because research on the subject has increased in recent years.
About Leylines
England is dotted with leylines, that is, alignments of ancient sites whose origins date back to the Bronze Age. Thanks to Google's geolocation tools, it is easier than ever to access and visualize them.
According to Alfred Watkins, megaliths, fortresses, burial mounds, and cathedrals are arranged along axes stretching for tens or hundreds of kilometers to mark ancient trade routes.
These alignments are said to be the realization of sight lines between high points. The places mentioned above would therefore be the equivalent of modern geodetic markers.
According to other researchers within the New Age movement, these alignments are linked to tellurism, that is, the influence of the Earth's magnetic field and soil composition on living beings.
To complete these brief definitions, occultism would be equivalent to possessing and keeping secrets in order to derive some power from them. Along those lines, I really enjoyed, when I was a teenager, a film called Young Sherlock Holmes, set in a 19th-century London infiltrated by all sorts of secret societies.
A remarkable alignment in the East End
The LPA article describes an alignment of relatively modern buildings. You can click on the markers, zoom in, or move the map to see for yourself...
The Macrocosm
As seen on the map, the alignment begins at Blackheath in south-east London – at All Saints Anglican Church to be precise – then passes through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich a little further north.
In our Gregorian calendar – for almost a century – the calculation of hours took Greenwich Mean Time as a reference. This portion of the alignment therefore symbolizes religion and the perception of time, which determine our place in the Universe.
Temporal Power
The alignment continues towards the Thames, through the garden separating the two symmetrical buildings of the Old Royal Naval College, not without having crossed the Queen’s House, a Renaissance-style palace.
Since the Queen derives her temporal power from God and the naval might of the Empire derives its power from Her Majesty, the alignment follows an implacable logic.
Canary Wharf
The Royal Navy still needs to be well funded... The Isle of Dogs is a former port area in east London. Bounded by a meander of the Thames, it is home to the Canary Wharf real estate development. London’s second financial center, which in some way supports the City, Canary Wharf was once dominated by the imposing One Canada Square, a skyscraper topped with a perfect pyramid.
The particularity of this pyramid is that its southwest edge joins the alignment if we make an imaginary extension to the ground.
In this same Egyptian vein, it is worth mentioning that Canary Wharf was such a pharaonic real estate project that in 1993 it caused the bankruptcy of the Reichmann brothers’ real estate firm Olympia & York. Like a Phoenix, this firm emerged from these ashes immediately to become a billionaire several times over.
Everything that is bought or sold on this planet is transacted on the stock exchanges, of which London is certainly one of the most important. This portion of the alignment therefore symbolizes control over money.
The Microcosm
Heading northwest, the alignment takes us right into the center of St. Anne’s Limehouse Anglican Church. It extends to the Octagon, the former library of the People’s Palace, intended for the underprivileged classes and built at the end of the 19th century. A bust of Chaucer, father of English poetry, adorns one of the pillars of this remarkable building.
The Octagon and the buildings surrounding it later became Queen Mary College of the University of London, which notably housed a nuclear research center (QMC Nucleonics Laboratory) as well as a nuclear reactor.
Yes! There was indeed a nuclear reactor in the heart of London, dismantled in the mid-1960s.
Let’s recap: one end of the alignment symbolizes the Heavens (All Saints Church). The other end symbolizes the infinitely small – except the Plutonian and infernal energy of scientists working on the Bomb during the Cold War.
The Spiritual Center of the British Empire
Finally, let’s return to the Isle of Dogs. In a less densely built-up area lies Mudchute Park, a former industrial wasteland transformed into a charming urban community farm where sheep graze. A true common, reminiscent of medieval England.
A staircase leads up to a circular paved structure, which is not identified on maps, on-site, or on the Mudchute Park website.
According to psychogeographers, this is the Omphalos, the spiritual center of the British Empire.
They point out that this circle is located on an island, and therefore surrounded by water, which brings us back to a basic concept of medieval strongholds and feng shui (the Forbidden City in Beijing is also surrounded by water).
However, I found no explanation for this unidentified conical monument, now demolished, located at the corner of Mastmaker Road and Marsh Wall South Quay, right on the alignment, exactly one kilometer from the Omphalos. Since when has Great Britain been using the metric system?
A little research reveals that the United Kingdom officially recognized the meter in 1884, but that its implementation was very gradual. France, for its part, had to abandon the Paris Meridian and recognize the universality of the Greenwich Meridian in 1911, after abstaining from voting at the Washington Conference of 1884.
It should be noted that the distance between All Saints Church in Blackheath and the Octagon at QMC is approximately 7 kilometers. The alignment is almost perfect, although some elements appear very slightly off-center.
An Alignment of Unknown Origin
Finally, to whom can we attribute this remarkable alignment, spanning from the infinitely large to the infinitely small, encompassing all aspects of existence on the earthly plane (religion, politics, defense, agriculture, finance, education)?
Theories circulate concerning the astrologer and mathematician John Dee, a close friend of Queen Elizabeth, as well as the playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe—who died under mysterious circumstances after popularizing the Faust myth in England. One could also speculate at length about the involvement of Masonic lodges. But ultimately, it is possible that this alignment was established as early as the Neolithic period.