The Alt-Antiquarian is a series of articles written by the editor, John Billingsley. ‘Alt’, of course, stands for’alternative’. The views expressed often suggest perspectives which run counter to what have become standard (and sometimes mistaken) neo-antiquarian assumptions and tropes.
Looking and seeing are different things, and understanding depends on what we do with them; this is where phenomenological perception is vital to our field Koyaanisqatsi, made 40 years ago, is a movie celebrating the beauties of the Earth, and the impact of modern civilisation upon it; a stream of images upheld by a Philip …
#9: Para leer en forma interrogativa… Everyday Perception Read More »
“We shall not cease from exploration…” Eliot’s advisory for perception. 3 We have been talking of the past, and of the present, and of the hauntological membrane of experience between them. That membrane is of course unanchored, timeless, a hiatus between the twin towers of objective evidence and lived documented experience. Between the two lies …
Paul Screeton asks, quite reasonably, what’s the editor on about? Modern understandings of the past, says the editor… Paul Screeton, Seaton Carew: What to call ourselves collectively is a topic which not only has its peaks of discussion while forever in flux, but also there are also elements of cultural tracking. Neo-antiquarianism distinctly takes inspiration …
#7: What’s the editor on about? Earth mysteries, phenomenology and psychogeography Read More »
(ill. Davina Ware) In 1972, walking up Glastonbury Tor, I was talking with a chap who, like me, had just hitch-hiked into town. As we approached the tower, he started talking about leys, which he’d just read about. For some reason, the topic sparked off something inside me; the next day I headed home …
#6: That obscure object of desire: Leys, Watkins and ‘energies’ Read More »
The last column addressed the commodification of history as Spectacle; well, that’s modern tourism for you, and I’m not innocent of it. But the Society of the Spectacle is also at work in much humbler surroundings. In our last issue, a reader wrote in to lament ” Time was when it was possible to visit …
#5: Spectacle, consumer capitalism and New Age religiosity Read More »
Continuing our editorial musings on modern antiquarian implications Last time, our alt-antiquarian found themself side by side with a psychogeographer, contemplating the landscape and its variant pasts, real and spectral. And, our psychogeographer will point out, some of those pasts we imagine today are well-managed, staged dramas for a populace weaned on screened stories. There …
Places predate monuments; monuments imply a concrete materialisation of narratives that over time becomes more codified – the narratives become myths, become scriptures etched on to place. Journeys between places infused with narratives become less nomadic, more pilgrimages. Dominant cultures are taking shape, and represented on a landscape; alt-antiquarians need to note that the objects …
Cognitive maps and other inherited understandings can illuminate historical landscapes The presence of memory accretes to locations – not for nothing do we describe places as ‘our familiar haunts’, for at any one time a place is composed of layers of itself. It haunts itself… from what we see now, to what we have …
Over the 27 years that I have edited Northern Earth, and the 47 years since I wrote my first article on the subject area, I have become increasingly aware that the topical implications of the field still occasionally known as earth mysteries stretch very much beyond even the broad inquisitorial sweep of its early conception. …