The Symbolism of Chartres
Edge of World retreats offers guided sacred site and power place adventure tours for groups or individuals to some of the most amazing and mysterious places on Earth. This tour offers the magnificent, gothic Chartres cathedral and the awesome megaliths of Carnac. Powerful, mysterious locations abound on this glorious planet. They are a testament to man’s quest for the divine and unity with the cosmos. These sacred sites and power places should not be missed.

The symbolism of Chartres & the Megaliths of Carnac.
Dates: Aug 28-Sept 4, 2007
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Chartres is one of 80 huge, Gothic monuments built in France in the hundred years after the Knights Templar returned from the Holy Land in 1128. It is also one of several cathedrals of that period dedicated to the Virgin and bearing the name, Notre Dame. The cathedral is a place of spiritual action. It is said to possess the power to transform men, to transmute them into a higher spiritual state, just as the alchemists would transmute base metal into gold. Pilgrims arriving at the Great West Door, the threshold of the Cathedral, found they stood more upright with their heads upraised. For the interior design of the cathedral seems to create a definite uplifting effect on the body, as if to prepare it for the telluric emanations from below and divine inspiration from above.

As Louis Charpentier, the French investigator of Chartres’ mysteries says: ‘physiologically, telluric and other currents can only enter man via a vertebral column that is straight and vertical. Man can only move to a higher state by standing upright.’

The pilgrim would progress shoeless up the nave to the labyrinth, a maze 13m (42.5ft) across and set out in the flagstones of the floor. Dancing around and around until reaching the center, a ritual commonly seen at each of the four annual Virgin fairs, the pilgrim became more and more sensitive to the power accumulated in the vast cathedral chamber.

Moving to the middle point where the transepts cross the nave, the pilgrim was supposed to receive the full alchemical force from the luminous light emanating from the three stained glass rose windows. If the pilgrim experienced the entire sensuousness of the cathedral, it would be because the body’s senses had apprehended all the musical and geometrical proportions, and all the numbers and lines expressed in the building’s interior. For the pilgrim came not to worship Our Lady the Virgin, nor to kneel in obedience, but rather to find awareness through her, to replenish spiritual energy and refresh the soul.

The Megalithic Avenues of Carnac
Around 3,000 standing stones arranged into avenues represent the most extraordinary megalithic monument in Europe. When were they erected? Was their purpose astronomical or religious or both?
Huge standing stones and earth mounds erected in prehistory bear witness to the great sanctity of the area around Carnac in France. Some of the world’s oldest manmade structures are to be found here, at the greatest of all megalithic centers, in the countryside of Brittany.

The large number of artificial mounds, stone avenues, dolmens, circles and standing stones located around Carnac make it the world’s center of megalithic monuments. Several of them make significant astronomical alignments with each other, while the purpose of the rest remains a mystery.

The stunning sight of these avenues was aptly described in 1827 by a French antiquary, the Chevalier de Freminville, when he called them ‘the regiment of stones, the startling array of shapeless rocks aligned so symmetrically’. Like any unsuspecting visitor, de Freminville had been filled with astonishment. The number of these bizarre arrangements, the height reached by their long, grey mossy outlines rising from the black heather in which they are rooted, and finally the total stillness that surrounds them, all astound the imagination and fill the soul with a melancholy veneration for the ancient witnesses to so many centuries.