A City of Pyramids

Part One – Egg Heads: The East Kennet formation 22nd July 2011

The East Kennet formation of 2011 was one of the wonders of the season. A circular design, its perimeter contained 10 thin pyramids and ten fat pyramids. At it’s centre, was the now familiar egg-head shape surrounded by some kind of headdress or crown. To me this was immediately a city of pyramids – a central plaza surrounded by pyramids with a crowned entity of some sort in the centre. There was also a spiders-web spun into the laid crop around the centre of the formation. The magnificence and power of this crop circle was very reminiscent of the Silbury Hill Mayan Headdress of 2009.

The circle married together three major design elements of previous formations – the egg-head, the web and the pyramid. In this blog I want to take a closer look at the ‘egg-head’, then in part two we can look at the pyramid, the web and the how the whole formation fits together.

We had first seen the egg-head during the summer of 2009 where it appeared as a stylised ‘alien-head’ with two slanting eyes swept into the lay of the crop. Two major formations appeared that summer that included this element, one under the White Horse at Alton Barnes and another in South Field, in Alton Priors. As well as containing egg-heads, both of these designs also included seemingly impossibly long strings of indecipherable, incomprehensible hieroglyphs. While both were undoubtedly linked, each seemed to have a slightly different emphasis, on the same theme, or perhaps showed a change or transition in emphasis from the first formation to the second.

Whilst some may have seen the alien-head motif in these formations as ‘corny’, I thought they were particularly intriguing. For those that read this blog regularly, you will know that I rarely take a formation at ‘face-value’, and that I think there are often hidden depths to be teased out of many of their designs. I also believe that most are symbolic, rather than illustrative or code-like (where there is only one easy interpretation). To me, the crop circles operate much more like dreams made manifest in the fields, they are mysterious, coy even, and have to be unravelled, or detangled – like carefully pulling a comb through knotted hair, it requires great patience, gentleness and positive regard.

These formations and their alien-heads tapped into some very popular (and in some quarters) quite deeply held views about the crop circles. The idea that ET creates the crop circles is one that has been around almost since the modern-dawn of the subject. For many, these designs powerfully confirmed those beliefs, made them manifest, gave them a physicality and therefore a reality and veracity that perhaps they had not had before. Here was proof that ET was talking to us through the medium of the crop circles – it said so in the fields! It is hard to overstate the power of these formations, but as obvious as they were to some they were also full of subtlety.

The egg-head alien, with its large slating eyes, is an image that now pervades our culture. It has become a modern icon, a contemporary archetype for the idea of beings or intelligences other than our own. The egg-headed alien has in fact become so integrated into the western psyche that it is almost universally and instantly recognisable to the vast majority of people. What makes it all the more fascinating is that the vast majority of those people do not believe in the reality of extraterrestrial beings in way, shape or form! Yet the ubiquitousness of this image gives it an archetypal presence, or psychic reality, so much so that it has become an integrated part of our collective consciousness.

The egg (or alien) head shape has an important geometry. When I set out to draw the East Kennet formation I started with the central motif. I decided that as the formation was complex I would make a separate drawing of it. From looking at the formation as a whole, it was apparent that the formation was divided into twenty equal segments, these were needed to create the outer pyramid shapes. As it turns out, twenty was an important number to the ancient Maya, their counting system uses base twenty, just as we use base ten in our society. Beginning with a small central circle, a line is drawn at its widest point to denote the diameter. This is most easily done by opening the compass so that each arm touches the widest points of the circle and then drawing in two arcs; these create a Vesica around the original circle, and by connecting the apexes of this Vesica, a line is drawn through the circle to denote the diameter and a central line through it. By outlining the top of the circle and one side of the Vesica, you create an egg-head shape. A surprising amount of crop circle geometry is based on variations of the Vesica and I find this symbolically interesting (the Vesica is the birth channel through which all is created) that so many crop circles also spring from the Vesica gives the designs a congruence with everything else created and birthed in the universe.

In 2010 another similar design appeared at Stanton St Bernard (6), this time the egg-head had no eyes but wore a headdress, or crown. Are the disappearing eyes a movement from entity to pure consciousness? The relationship to the Vesica is much more obvious here. This version also includes a crescent moon as part of the headdress, with a row of fine segments stemming from the top, which looks a little like a tiara. Looking at the central motif of the 2011 East Kennet formation (8), we also see the egg-head, the crescent moon, and rays emanating from the crescent, although this time they look like points of quartz crystal. At first it seemed that these crystal-like points would slot in to the 20-fold division of the outer circle, but looking at the picture it did not fit. In the actual formation seventeen of these points are spread around the top of the crescent, I drew this central motif several times and nothing seemed to fit. In my first attempt I split the top hemisphere of the circle into twenty equal parts (8), but it didn’t look right. I tried again, augmenting the pattern, I found a geometrically satisfactory solution, but it did not marry the original perfectly. I drew twelve standing segments, not seventeen, by splitting the circle into ten; it was an elegant solution to an impossible conundrum (9). I did note however, that in the original formation the centre motif contained twenty standing segments – seventeen points, one crescent and two partial crescents – so there was a kind of numeric symmetry to the original design, if not a geometric one.

I have come to see these egg-heads as being symbolic of an ‘other’ consciousness/es, and the birth of our conscious awareness of them. To me all these designs offer a commentary of the role of the ‘alien/other’ in human consciousness at this time and also our growing awareness of its connection to the human spirit.

The spooky days of the X-Files in the 1990s seemed to be the zenith of our growing awareness of the ‘alien’ in our consciousness. Although the UFO subject had been around since time immemorial in folklore, the 1950s saw the rapid expansion of the subject in our awareness. By the 1990s our media was saturated with the UFO and the paranormal, but ten, or so, years later, it seemed this subject was beginning to touch upon our sense of spirituality.

This deepening of our sense of ‘other’ was beautifully expressed by the two 2009 alien-head formations. The first circle at Milk Hill appeared in three stages (1, 2 & 3), the first stage has an almost mechanical feel to it – an alien head wearing some kind of mechanical-helmet (sexton?) or headdress with what could be curved wires with plugs coming from one side. In stage two, these curved wires are extended and boxes and more circles are added, softening the image – the circle as well as being symbolic of heaven and deity also symbolises the spiritual, or spiritual consciousness. The long threads of glyphs appeared in stage three are perhaps a stream of communication, or an open stream of consciousness.

I admit openly here that I do not take this image too literally, I think the crop circles are much too subtle for that, but I do think that this image resonates very deeply with something that is going on deep within the collective unconscious – it could even be a reflection (or a projection) of an intense desire for, or an actual connection to a stream of consciousness from ‘elsewhere’ of which we are only barely aware. The second formation at South Field, Alton Priors, also had an ‘alien-head’ with long threads of glyphs, but this time they were connected to a bird design. The bird is symbolic of the spirit, the movement through these two circles moves the ‘alien’ away from technology and traditional investigative ufology and moves towards the psycho-spiritual. The crown of the 2010 formation is halo-like connecting the ‘alien’ with higher forms of spirituality, and the body of the formation is more bird-like. Finally in 2011, the ‘alien’ is placed at the centre of a formation for the first time. There is an enormous shift in awareness connected with other forms of consciousness being played out in our fields…

Coming up in Part Two… With the ‘alien/other’ finally arriving at the centre – what else can the East Kennet formation tell us about the state of this shift in consciousness? And what of the pyramids and the spider’s web?

KAREN ALEXANDER – NOVEMBER 1, 2011