I’m walking north on Broadway in Manhattan, trying to imagine what seems impossible now: that this land was once wild, an island of swamps and forests that had to be navigated around and cut through. I can’t even begin to envision the natural landscape and features that once covered this island, but knowing that at some point there had been swamps and ponds here helps me make sense of the crook in the road that happens at 10th Street, when the street bends westward and begins the long diagonal slant that will take it across Manhattan’s fabled grid until it straightens out again around 78th Street on the Upper West Side.
That stretch of Broadway was once known as the Bloomingdale Road, itself a Lenape pathway that first the Dutch, then the English, and finally New York City’s government gradually expanded and codified, and by the 1860s its meandering kinks and bends had straightened out into the clean diagonal we know today. It’s a simple and straightforward enough story, one that’s easy to grasp even if the original reasons for the directions of these paths—what pond they skirted around, what rock formation caused a change in direction—are long gone and impossible to conceive of now.
The way that our built world is the result of thousands of previous decisions—some known, some unknown—that gradually accrete over the years is something I find perpetually fascinating. You can walk through a place like Manhattan and feel its centuries-long history that includes the Lenape, Dutch and English colonists, and the endless waves of subsequent Americans and immigrants, corrupt politicians and politicians with utopian ideals, each of whom through design and habit put their mark on the landscape. To me, it’s the symphonic level of cacophony that all these decisions represent that makes a city like this so entrancing. There are so many layers of New York that are piled high on each other, some harmonious and some discordant, that it makes walking through it seem wild and strange.
There’s still mystery in this city, of course, but there are times you’re reminded that the streets are among the most over-determined in the world. Which is why perhaps I’m drawn to the idea of ley lines: supposedly supernatural or metaphysical axes of power that run through the landscape, connecting sites of significance in unexpected ways. Their existence is doubtful at best, but taken as fiction, they offer other ways of reading the landscape. I’d had a vague notion of them, but it wasn’t until the ley lines of Manhattan formed a major plot point in 2016’s Ghostbusters reboot that I began to think more seriously about them—not as any kind of metaphysical reality, but possibly as a different kind of way of looking at the world.
In 1925, Alfred Watkins published his book The Old Straight Track, in which he put forward his idea that there were unseen lines that connected pre-Roman archaeological sites in Great Britain. Watkins, a British photographer and amateur archaeologist, had set out to visit the newly excavated Roman settlement Blackwardine a few years earlier when he noticed that a number of archaeological landmarks from various eras all lay along the same straight line—not just Blackwardine, but Croft Ambrey and Risbury Camp, both Iron Age forts in Herefordshire near the border with Wales, as well as Stretton Grandison, another former Roman settlement.
Connecting the dots became his hobby and his passion: Watkins gathered up scores of ancient sites—burial mounds and Roman ruins, footpaths and marker stones—and suggested that one could connect them through straight lines, arguing that these lines were once well-worn paths used by ancient cultures. “My main theme is the alignment across miles of country of a great number of objects, or sites of objects, of prehistoric antiquity. And this not in one or a few instances, but in scores and hundreds,” he wrote.
Watkins himself didn’t attempt to offer much by way of explaining why this was so. His best guess was that these were pre-historical footpaths that had been long forgotten, even as the placement of monuments and settlements revealed their ghostly echoes. Beyond that, however, he felt it was “the task of other branches of archaeology to work out the full chronology of the matter, and I only attempt those few obvious deductions as regards periods which the mechanism of the sighted track reveals.”
But he did offer a name. He called these tracks “leys,” a term that originally signified a pasture or an enclosed field. But Watkins noted that this term had earlier meanings; there is evidence, he wrote, “indicating that ‘ley’ did not always mean pasture or field. Ley Hills and Leys Hills are frequent, and hills are not likely to be named from pastures.” Thus, the term, he argued, had been in use before the rise of agriculture, when there could have been no pastures to speak of, and suggested that it gradually evolved to its current meaning: “The sequence seems clear,” he wrote. “First, the straight sighted track, then a clearing of the woodland, through which it passed, then the fields which evolved in the clearing, the same name ley, lay, lee applying to each stage, a logical sequence.”
From the beginning, archaeologists had called Watkins’s original theory sharply into question: There are simply too many pre-Roman sites throughout England and connecting any three or more of them in a line is remarkably easy. There is nothing statistically noteworthy about these lines, and they don’t suggest occult powers or ancient wisdom so much as the human tendency to find patterns in meaningless noise. One of Watkins’s heroes, Oxford-trained archaeologist Osbert Crawford (who’d been approvingly name-checked repeatedly in The Old Straight Track) spent decades trying to distance himself from Watkins and dissuade the public from embracing his theories, calling The Old Straight Track in 1953 “one of the craziest books ever written about archaelogy.” One of Crawford’s allies, Richard Clay, went further, describing Watkins as being “ignorant of the first principles of the science of archaeology” and accusing him of merely “attempting to startle the world with new theories.”
In this, however, Watkins clearly succeeded. Never taken seriously by mainstream archaeologists as he’d hoped, his ideas instead quickly developed metaphysical overtones. What if, occultists wondered, these lines were not merely paths of convenience and convergence, well-weathered footpaths connecting sacred sites, but lines of power, sacred unto themselves? The idea was first put forward in the 1936 novel The Goat-Foot God, by British occultist Dion Fortune. Old centers of pagan power, the novel’s characters assert, became dominated by Christian churches and other modern structures, exorcising the original pagan influence.
When the novel’s Hugh Pastons sets out to build a house that, he hopes, will “wake the Old Gods” (specifically the eponymous Pan), occultist Mona Wilton advises him to build it anywhere along any line connecting the stone circles at Avebury or Stonehenge to any other remains of pagan worship. Unseen tracks stretch between these places, she claims, demonstrating how Avebury lies on an axis that connects St. Albans and Tintagel, and another connects Dorset and Lindisfarne—which, she claims, were the earlier centers of power before Christianity. Connected with supernatural force, they remain charged: “That’s why we who worship the Old Gods use the lines of force between the power-centres, and not the power-centres themselves because those power-centres have all been exorcised long ago. But they didn’t know enough to know of the lines of force, so they never exorcised them.”
Fortune was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and friend to Aleister Crowley. Her ideas found purchase in the occult circles of her day, but it wasn’t until the postwar era that they began to seep into the wider world of pseudoscience and beyond the confines of Great Britain. Once the idea of ley lines were liberated from Watkins’s original idea of footpaths that endured from one civilization to the next, they could be mapped onto any kind of supernatural phenomenon, and need no longer be tethered to archaeological ruins.
In 1961, the British ex-pilot Tony Wedd, steeped both in Watkins’s book and a 1958 French UFO book, Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery by Aimé Michel, began to assert that ley lines not only had metaphysical properties, but also helped explain the straight paths of the UFO sightings Michel had described. In his book Skyways and Landmarks, Wedd called these lines “orthotenies” and suggested that they contained magnetic currents. Such currents, he contended, not only were harnessed by UFOs for power, but also explained why earlier civilizations had built sacred temples along their routes. These ideas were further amplified by John Michell, who, in The Flying Saucer Vision (1967) and The View Over Atlantis (1969), propelled the idea of ley lines into the pseudoscientific mainstream.
In the 2016 Ghostbusters, the villain “charges” two ley lines that meet like an X over Manhattan (one of which runs roughly along Broadway’s diagonal), converging at a hotel that, Leslie Jones’s character reveals, was built on a location with a dubious history. “All sorts of massacres happened there before the building was built,” she explains. “A peaceful trade with Captain Warren and the Lenape Indians was supposed to take place…and suddenly everyone died.” This is of course nonsense; the violence that happened between the Lenape and the Dutch and English settlers was almost entirely one-sided, and attributing metaphysical causes obscures the genocidal intent of the colonial settlers.
Still, the red leather-bound book that Kate McKinnon retrieves from the shelf, an atlas of Ley Lines of North America, seems tantalizing; I found more than one Redditor lamenting the fact that such a book doesn’t actually exist. In the absence of such reference works, most believers recommend making your own. As to how to locate a ley line: One website suggests starting with local monuments, or really anything with historic significance (every state capital, they say, is on a ley line). From there, add in any known Indigenous landmarks: man-made mounds, burial grounds, caves. On top of this, the writer advises, you should look for haunted houses or other instances of the paranormal. Marking all of these out on a grid should start to reveal lines that you can connect.
As a purely practical matter, this makes sense, in that, if you plot enough points on a plane, you’re bound eventually to be able to find some lines that at least roughly connect three or more points. But on a metaphysical level, the allure of a belief in ley lines is that it takes several layers—naturally occurring geographical features, Native American and other prehistorical cultural civilizations, the paranormal, and more modern landmarks and cultural institutions—and folds them into one. It suggests that some unseen band of energy is behind all of these elements, and that they are merely the visible expression of that unseen energy. Everything you can think of, from Indigenous ways of understanding the land to contemporary urban theory, is all part of the same continuum.
Ley lines don’t quite posit an order where none exists; instead, they posit a single order that unites and supersedes any number of pre-existing orders. They usurp the individual decision to build a house or forge a trail or found a capital—be those decisions carefully calculated or happenstance—and suggest that all such decisions are unconsciously directed. They offer a convenient explanation for fate and randomness; if things don’t seem to make sense at first, it may just be because you haven’t properly mapped out the lines yet. With enough sifting through the noise in search of the signal, believers promise, you can tap into a network of energy that will give you power over the ignorant around you. In a complex and chaotic world, it’s easy to see the allure.
But it turns out that connecting the dots is easier said than done. One map I found of the Northeast U.S., called Gaia Complex: Geometry in the Landscape, lists a series of supposedly resonant towns and geographic features, which are connected via lines to form a tight, geometric shape, suggesting some sort of magnetic ordering that lies beneath our feet. The central vertical axis, according to this chart, runs south from Lake Willoughby in Vermont, through the towns of Topsham and West Fairlee, then to Mount Ascutney, Shelburne Falls in Massachusetts, the Barkhamsted Reservoir and Derby in Connecticut, and, finally, “Wappinger Falls, Massachusetts.” The various justifications for each of these places’ power is nebulous: Topsham, Vermont, for example, is described as containing Burnham Mountain, a vista point, and an art colony; Shelburne Falls also has an art center, and is further noted for its “Peace Treaty Site” and its Bridge of Flowers. But there are larger problems: Attempting to map these on an actual map creates difficulties, as these places are not aligned in a perfect North-South axis; they’re literally all over the map. There is no such place as Wappinger Falls, Massachusetts, and certainly it is not south of Derby, Connecticut; Wappinger Falls, New York, is far to the west, along the Hudson River.
This is just one example, but it’s indicative of the ways in which ley line maps work: There’s a lot of fudging to make them make sense. If you want a clean, aesthetically-pleasing geometric shape formed by your ley lines, you not only have to stretch actual geography, but also stretch what does and does not constitute a data point significant enough to be charted.
Alternately, you can just start connecting lines on the map until you end up with something approaching visual chaos. Many online maps of ley lines more closely resemble a common trope of film and TV: the conspiracy wall. A cliché that’s now descended into parody, the conspiracy wall—where a series of newspaper clippings, photographs, and other ephemera are tacked to a wall and usually connected with bright red string—first started appearing in films like Memento and A Beautiful Mind, where they offered a visual metaphor to reflect the troubled, paranoid minds of the films’ protagonists. They soon found their way to police procedurals like The Wire and True Detective, where often as not they represented actual conspiracies—the idea being that only by spreading out all the data visually and connecting individual pieces via string could the larger picture be understood.
Ley lines offer the same tantalizing possibility: a hidden map that reveals unseen connections and, through them, a larger picture of the truth. They offer the forest for the trees, the puzzle for the pieces. They are a reaction, perhaps, against the seeming chaos of nature itself—why a swamp forms here, why a ridge of mountains pushes up there—along with the cacophony of human decision making (How did Sacramento end up winning out over San Jose in becoming California’s capital?).
But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t drawn to these maps, skeptical as I might be of their veracity. The appeal to me is not as any kind of representation of the real world, but as an aesthetic rendering divorced from the real world—a cartography gone haywire, a new strangeness underfoot. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have a great language for the actual way in which meaning accrues like a palimpsest on the land. Translating all this history, these conflicting layers, into something spurious offers a shape to the world, however illusory.
I’m not the only one. Watkins’s original project quietly became an important—if subtle—influence on the land art movement of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1967, British conceptual artist Richard Long took a photograph titled A Line Made by Walking, which depicts a straight line of trampled and dead grass in an otherwise verdant field: Long walked repeatedly the same route until the path itself was visible, and though he wouldn’t learn of Watkins’s old straight track until 1971, commentators noted the parallels almost immediately. The artist Hamish Fulton was far more explicitly influenced by Watkins; he sought out the first editions of Watkins’s work as inspiration for his 1969 piece Straight Line Walk.
Dubious as archaeology, Watkins’s work offered inspiration for these artists in ways very different than it did for the pseudoscientific community. Art critic Stephen Daniels, tracing the influence of Watkins’s work on the land art movement, notes that his vision of England as connected by ley lines attempts to “articulate a free trade utopia, enabled by an enlightened planning regime, looking back and forward to a liberal landscape without landlordism,” offering a “pre-enclosure vision” of England that cuts “across established propertied interests.” The contemporary world, after all, is already gridded with lines—railway tracks, interstates, property lines, and the boundaries of towns, cities, counties and states—all of which are necessary to keep private property and capitalism functioning and running on schedule. To re-envision the world via ley lines is to argue for an alternative cartography in which these concerns are superseded by something more fundamental.
I began this column by trying to understand and work through Mark Fisher’s definition of “eerie,” which he posits is a feeling that accompanies either “absence where there should be presence,” or “presence where there should be absence.” The inexplicable coordination and seeming group sentience in Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” suggests presence where there should be only the wildness of nature; the unexplained mystery of the Mary Celeste unsettles because where we expect some kind presence, there is only absence.
The metaphysical approach to ley lines, by this logic, attempts to suggest presence where we expect absence: a hidden but durable organizing feature that explains the seemingly random ordering of geography. It seeks to reduce all the cacophonous wonder of the world to something clear and uniform, a secret pattern that is the key to decoding everything.
But the inspiration that land artists took from Watkins, divorced necessarily from any attempt at veracity—and certainly any metaphysical overtones—may be an attempt to wrest absence from presence. To think with ley lines as an aesthetic exercise is to attempt to imagine a world prior to rigorously divided property, and a world without firmly distinct eons and eras—a line that can cut through taxonomy and order and law, and create other kinds of meaning. Or, indeed, even the mere absence of meaning. The ley line–inspired land art I admire most undoes the lines that grid our lives for the purpose of circulating capital by positing alternatives. From Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to the work of Andy Goldsworthy, they involve, in some form or other, creating or establishing lines that cut through nature, that give a shape and order to the freeform chaos of the natural world. These works do not “symbolize” anything, and they don’t substitute a new kind of meaning for an old one. They simply cut through the land, making the natural into the unnatural, undoing whatever we know of the world without seeking to replace that knowledge with anything new.