Early life John Frederick Carden Michell was born in London on 9 February 1933. His father, Alfred Henry Michell, was of Cornish & Welsh descent and worked as a property dealer in the capital, while his mother Enid Evelyn (née Carden) was the daughter of
Major Sir Frederick Carden, 3rd Baronet, great-granddaughter of
Sir Robert Carden, 1st Baronet, who served as Lord Mayor of London in 1857, and 3x great-granddaughter of
John Walter, founder of
The Times. The eldest of three children, Michell's siblings were named Charles and Clare. Michell was raised at
Stargroves, his maternal grandfather's Victorian-era estate on the
Berkshire Downs near to
Newbury, and it was here that he developed a love of the countryside, learning about the local flora and fauna from a neighbouring
naturalist. He was raised into the
Anglican denomination of
Christianity, although in later life rejected the religion. Michell was initially educated as a boarder at the preparatory
Cheam School, where he was Head Boy and excelled at the
high jump. From there he went to study at
Eton College, where he was a contemporary of Lord Moyne and Ian Cameron, the father of future Prime Minister
David Cameron. He spent his two years of
national service in the
Royal Navy, during which time he qualified as a Russian
translator at the
School of Slavonic Studies. He then went on to study Russian and German at
Trinity College, Cambridge, although was unable to secure a
third-class degree. He then qualified as a
chartered surveyor at a firm in
Gloucestershire, before moving back to London to work for his father's property business. Commenting on this job, he later stated that it was "quite amusing, but of course I wasn't any good at it", with property speculators eroding much of his fortune. In 1966 one of his properties, the basement of his own residence, became the base of the
London Free School. The Black Power activist
Michael X, having previously run a gambling club in the basement, had now become active in the organisation of the LFS and brought Michell into counter-culture activities. Michell began to offer courses in UFOs and ley lines. In 1964, with
Jocasta Innes, Michell fathered a son,
Jason Goodwin, who also became a writer. The relationship with Innes did not last. Jason Goodwin did not meet his natural father until 1992, at the age of 28, at which point they became quite close.
Embracing the Earth Mysteries movement Michell developed an interest in Ufology and Earth mysteries after attending a talk given by
Jimmy Goddard at
Kensington Central Library on the subject of "Leys and Orthonies" in November 1965. Michell's first publication on the subject of Ufology was the article "Flying Saucers", which appeared in the 30 January 1967 edition of the counter-cultural newspaper
International Times. He proceeded to write a book on the subject, but lost the original manuscript after accidentally leaving it in a North London café, at which he had to rewrite it. The book eventually saw publication as
The Flying Saucer Vision, published in 1967, when Michell was 35 years old.
The Flying Saucer Vision took the idea of
Tony Wedd that
ley lines – alleged trackways across the landscape whose existence was first argued by
Alfred Watkins – represented markers for the flight of extraterrestrial spacecraft and built on it, arguing that early human society was aided by alien entities who were understood as gods, but that these extraterrestrials had abandoned humanity because of the latter's greed for material and technological development. According to Lachman, at this time Michell took the view that "an imminent revelation of literally inconceivable scope" was at hand, and that the appearance of UFOs was linked to "the start of a new phase in our history". Many fans of Michell's work consider it to be "by far his most impressive book". In their social history of Ufology, David Clarke and Andy Roberts stated that Michell's work was "the catalyst and helmsman" for the growing interest in UFOs among the
hippie sector of the counter-culture. Subsequently, there was a shift in Michell's emphasis as he became increasingly interested in the landscapes in which he believed that ley lines could be found rather than the UFOs themselves. He wrote an article on "Lung Mei and the Dragon Paths of England" for a September 1967 issue of
Image magazine, in which he compared British ley-lines to the
Chinese mythological idea of
lung mei lines, arguing that this was evidence of a widespread pre-Christian dragon cult in ancient Britain. He built on these ideas for
The View Over Atlantis, a book which he privately published in 1969, with a republication following three years later. Believing this earth energy to be a real magnetic phenomenon arising naturally from the ground, Michell argued that an ancient religious-scientific elite had traveled the world constructing the lines and various megalithic monuments in order to channel this energy and direct it for the good of humanity. The tone of his work reflected "a fervent religious feeling", describing the existence of an ancient, universal, and true system of belief that was once spread across the ancient world but which had been lost through the degeneracy of subsequent generations. He added however that this ancient knowledge would be revived with the dawning of the
Age of Aquarius, allowing for what Michell described as the "rediscovery of access to the divine will". The
Pagan studies scholar Amy Hale stated that
The View Over Atlantis was "a smash countercultural success", while the historian
Ronald Hutton described it as "almost the founding document of the modern
earth mysteries movement". Fellow ley-hunter and later biographer Paul Screeton considered it to be a "groundbreaking" work which "re-enchanted the British landscape and empowered a generation to seek out and appreciate the spiritual dimension of the countryside, not least attracting them to reawaken the sleepy town of
Glastonbury". The book inspired an array of Earth Mysteries publications in the 1970s and 1980s, accompanied by growth in the ley-hunting movement. Among the most prominent works to build on Michell's ideas during this period were Janet and Colin Bord's
Mysterious Britain, which used them in its presentation of a gazetteer of ancient sites, and
Paul Screeton's
Quicksilver Heritage, which argued that the Neolithic had been a time devoted to spiritual endeavours which had been corrupted by the emergence of metal technologies. Michell associated with many individuals active in this ley-hunting community, and in July 1971 was one of many attendees at a ley-hunters picnic held at
Risbury Camp, the largest outdoor gathering of the movement since 1939. In May 1969 Michell established a group known as the
Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation (RILKO) with his friends Keith Critchlow and Mary Williams. In conjunction with the
Garnstone Press, RILKO founded the Prehistory and Ancient Science Library, a book series that brought out reprints of older works, such as Watkins'
The Old Straight Track and
William Stirling's
The Canon, both of which contained forewords by Michell. Michell also founded a small publishing company of his own, West Country Editions, through which he brought out his own
A Little History of Bladud in 1973 as well as a reprint of
Howard C. Levis's 1919 book
Bladud of Bath. With his friend John "Peewee" Michael, who lived in
Bristol, Michell also established a second small press, Pentacle Books, although it failed to become a commercial success and was short lived. Michell was involved in the summer 1971
Glastonbury Fayre music festival near
Pilton, Somerset, where the pyramid stage was built to Michell's specifications and situated at what he claimed were the apex of two ley lines. Through
Michael Rainey, Michell was introduced to the members of rock band
The Rolling Stones at the Courtfield Road home of band member
Brian Jones. Michell befriended the band's lead singer,
Mick Jagger, and he accompanied the band on a visit to
Stonehenge. Michell then went on a visit to
Woolhope in
Herefordshire with
Keith Richards,
Anita Pallenberg,
Christopher Gibbs, and the filmmaker
Kenneth Anger, where they hunted for ley lines and UFOs.
Marianne Faithfull later recounted that band member Jones was particularly interested in Michell's ideas. He would later meet with the members of
The Grateful Dead on their 1972 European tour; band members
Phil Lesh and
Jerry Garcia expressed an interest in Michell's Earth Mysteries ideas. Michell's impact on the hippie subculture was recognised by mainstream media, and he was invited to submit an article titled "Flying saucers" to
The Listener in May 1968, which was accompanied by a critical piece by editor
Karl Miller, in which Michell was described as "less a hippy, perhaps, than a hippy's counsellor, one of their junior Merlins." Hale noted that Michell promoted the idea of "England as a site of spiritual redemption in the
New Age", bringing together "popular ideas about sacred geometry, Druids, sacred landscapes, earth energies, Atlantis, and UFOs". In 1972 Michell published a sequel to
The View Over Atlantis as
City of Revelation. Shortly after publication he stated that he had written the work in "almost two years of near total solitude and intense study in
Bath." This work was more complex than its predecessor, including chapters on
sacred geometry,
numerology,
gematria, and the esoteric concept of the
New Jerusalem, and required an understanding of mathematics and Classics to follow its arguments.
Bob Rickard, founding editor of
Fortean Times, has written that Michell's first three works "provided a synthesis of and a context for all the other weirdness of the era. It’s fair to say that it played a big part in the foundation of
Fortean Times itself by helping create a readership that wanted more things to think about and a place to discuss them. The overall effect was to help the burgeoning interest in strange phenomena spread out into mainstream culture."
Challenging academic archaeology The work of Michell and others in the ley-hunting and Earth mysteries communities were rejected by the professional archaeological establishment, with the prominent British archaeologist
Glyn Daniel denouncing what he perceived as the "lunatic fringe". In turn, Michell was hostile to professional and academic archaeologists, accusing them of "treasure hunting and grave robbery" and viewing them as representations of what he interpreted as the evils of modernity. In response to the academic archaeological community's refusal to take the idea of ley lines seriously, in 1970 Michell offered a challenge for professional archaeologists to disprove his ideas regarding the West Peninsula leys. He stated that were he to be proved wrong then he would donate a large sum to charity, but at the time no one took up his offer. However, in 1983 his case study was analysed by two archaeologists, Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, as part of their work
Ley Lines in Question, a critical analysis of the evidence for ley-lines. They highlighted that Michell had erroneously included medieval crosses and natural features under his definition of late prehistoric monuments, and that arguments for ley-lines more widely could not be sustained. The impact of their work on the ley-hunting community was substantial, with one section moving in a more fully religious direction by declaring that leys could only be detected by
intuition, and the other renouncing a ley line belief in favour of a more ethnographically rooted analysis of linear connections in the landscape. Responding to their work, Michell said that "I just feel sorry for Williamson and Bellamy that the most exciting thing they can find to do with their youth is to discredit the ley vision." In 1983 Michell published an altered version of his best known work as
The New View Over Atlantis.
Ioan Culianu, a specialist in
gnosticism and
Renaissance esoteric studies, in a review in 1991 of
The Dimensions of Paradise: The Proportions and Symbolic Numbers in Ancient Cosmology, expressed the view that, "After some deliberation the reader of this book will oscillate between two hypotheses: either that many mysteries of the universe are based on numbers, or that the book's author is a fairly learned crank obsessed with numbers." In 1970, Michell founded the Anti-Metrification Board to oppose the adoption of the
metric system of measurement in the United Kingdom. Believing that the established
imperial system of measurement had both ancient and sacred origins, through the Board he brought out a newsletter,
Just Measure. In 1972 he published the first of his "Radical Traditionalist Papers",
A Defence of Sacred Measures, in which he laid out his opposition to the metric system. In his third Radical Traditionalist Paper, published in 1973, he argued against
population control, critiquing the ideas of
Thomas Robert Malthus and arguing that correct use of resources could maintain an ever-growing human population. His fifth Radical Traditionalist Paper,
Concordance to High Monarchists, offered Michell's proposed solution to
The Troubles of Northern Ireland; in his view, Ireland should be divided into four provinces, each administered separately but all ultimately pledging allegiance to a High King, in this way mirroring what Michell believed was the socio-political organisation of prehistoric Ireland.
Other publications Following the 1975 execution of
Michael X for a murder committed in Trinidad, Michell published a souvenir pamphlet to commemorate the execution, claiming that all royalties from its publication would go to Michael X's widow. In 1976 he published
The Hip Pocket Hitler, a book containing those quotations from
Adolf Hitler, the leader of
Nazi Germany, which Michell deemed to be humorous or insightful, thus seeking to portray a side to Hitler that was more favourable than the dominant paradigm. In 1979 he provided an introduction to a translation of
Pliny the Elder's
Inventorum Natura, which had been illustrated by
Una Woodruff. That same year he brought out
Simulcra, a work in which he examined perceived faces in natural forms such as trees. In collaboration with
Bob Rickard, in 1977 Michell published
Phenomena: A Book of Wonders, an encyclopedic work devoted to
paranormal and
fortean phenomena which covered such topics as UFOs,
werewolves,
lake monsters, and
spontaneous human combustion. They followed this with a second encyclopedic volume,
Living Wonders: Mysteries and Curiosities of the Animal World, which appeared in 1982 and was devoted to fortean topics involving animals, with much of it focusing on
cryptozoological topics. In 1984 he published
Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, in which he provided brief biographies of various figures whose ideas had been rejected by mainstream scholarship and society, among them
Nesta Webster,
Iolo Morganwg,
Brinsley Trench, and
Comyns Beaumont. In ''Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Sounds'' he then argued that every name represents a "vocal imitation" of the subject that it describes, for instance arguing that "s" appears in the words "snake" and "serpent" because it resembles the curved movement of the animal. Following the
controversy that erupted around
Salman Rushdie's 1988 book
The Satanic Verses, Michell published a tract condemning Rushdie, accusing him of deliberately and provocatively insulting
Islam. Titled ''Rushdie's Insult'', Michell later withdrew the publication. Michell was keenly interested in the
crop circle phenomenon, and with Christine Rhone and Richard Adams he established a magazine devoted to the subject in 1990. Initially titled
The Cereologist, some issues would be alternately titled
The Cerealogist, and although Michell initially served as the magazine's editor, he stepped down after the ninth issue, although continued to contribute articles to it. In 1991, he published a book on the subject,
Dowsing the Crop Circles, and in 2001 followed this with a booklet titled
The Face and the Message, which was devoted to a circle depicting the face of a
Grey alien which had appeared in
Hampshire in August 2001. Despite the longstanding animosity with which Michell held academic archaeology, in 1991 the peer-reviewed archaeological journal
Antiquity invited him to author a review of a Southbank exhibit, "From Art to Archaeology", which was duly published in the journal. In the 1980s Michell was a member of the
Lindisfarne Association and a teacher at its School of Sacred Architecture. He lectured at the Kairos Foundation, an "educational charity specifically founded to promote the recovery of traditional values in the Arts and Sciences". He was for some years a visiting lecturer at the
Prince of Wales'
School of Traditional Arts, which had been established by his friend
Keith Critchlow. He became a Fellow of the
Temenos Academy, a religious organisation which had Traditionalist underpinnings.
Newspaper columnist: 1992–2009 From January 1992 until his death, Michell published a monthly column, "An Orthodox Voice", in
The Oldie magazine. He primarily used this as an outlet for condemning the modern world and lambasting what he perceived as the stupidity of most contemporary humans. His first article in this outlet contained an attack on
evolution which resulted in a published response from the evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins. He also used his column to encourage the use of mind-altering drugs, in particular
LSD. Two anthologies that collected together some of these
Oldie columns would be published; the first appeared in 1995 as
An Orthodox Voice while the second was published in 2005 as
Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist and contained an introduction from the scholar of esotericism
Joscelyn Godwin. During this period, Michell also authored occasional book reviews for the conservative magazine,
The Spectator. In 1996 Michell published
Who Wrote Shakespeare?, in which he outlined various candidates in the
Shakespeare authorship question.
Who Wrote Shakespeare? received mixed reviews:
Publishers Weekly was critical, while
The Washington Post and
The Independent praised his treatment of the subject. To mark their fiftieth anniversary in 1999, the publisher Thames and Hudson – who had published many of Michell's works – suggested that a biography be written by Michell's friend Paul Screeton. Michell however refused to cooperate with the project, which was abandoned. In 2000, Michell published
The Temple at Jerusalem: A Revelation, in which he outlined his own interpretation of
Jerusalem's Old City. From 2001 to 2004 he contributed several columns to tabloid newspaper
The Mirror as part of an ongoing series run by the
astrologer Jonathan Cainer. Cainer had sought to bring together a range of esotericists to write on related topics, with Michell's fellow contributors including Mark Winter,
Patty Greenall,
Sarah Sirillan, and
Uri Geller. The series came to an end when Cainer left
The Mirror to work for the rival
Daily Mail. A keen painter, in 2003 an exhibit of his works was held at the
Christopher Gibbs Gallery. In April 2007 Michell married Denise Price, the Archdruidess of the Glastonbury Order of Druids, at a ceremony held in Glastonbury's
St Benedict's Church, although their relationship ended several months later. A lifelong smoker, Michell contracted
lung cancer, and in his final days he was nursed at his son's home in
Poole, Dorset, ultimately dying on 24 April 2009, at the age of 76. His body was buried at St Mary's Church in
Stoke Abbott on
May Day. A
high church memorial service was then held at All Saints' Church in Notting Hill, which was attended by around 400 mourners. His work,
How the World is Made – which he regarded as his
magnum opus – was published posthumously. ==Thought==