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John Michell (1933–2009) lived a life that was richly multifaceted, as we all should but rarely do. He was a sacred geometer, a Platonist, and a fortean; an enthusiast of the delightfully eccentric and of the radic­ally traditional; a prophet of the New Jerusalem, the Holy Grail and UFOs.

Michell was able to reconcile all of his seemingly contradictory pursuits because of the generous breadth of his vision. He saw that the world and its inhabitants are endlessly diverse, and he knew that all human attempts to categorise are absurd and doomed to failure. All we can do is delight in the merry dance of phenomena, and trust that all categorisers will, in the end, come to see the folly of their ways. As such, he was a true fortean.

But as a Platonist, he also saw that, behind the multiple appearances of existence, there is a universal organising principle that is real and true, has always been so, and always will be. Through careful study – particularly of number and of geometry – this ever-present order can be revealed to the human mind. Such revelations are the basis of all happiness, and beauty.

On 22 May 2010, a distinguished group of speakers came together in London to celebrate Michell’s life and works in all their paradoxical splendour. Organiser of the John Michell Day was the Temenos Academy, of which Michell had been a Fellow since its inception in 1990. Professor Grevel Lindop, as the Chairman of the Temenos Academic Board, had participated in many meetings with Michell. In his introduct­ory address to the symposium, he recalled “John’s presence at the Board meetings, that combined humour and great wisdom”. Very sensibly, Michell would periodically absent himself from these discussions to go outside and roll his own – sometimes tobacco, sometimes not.

All of the day’s speakers were lucky enough to have counted themselves among Michell’s friends, and their love for him was evident. Many in the audience, too, had known him, and were more than happy to sit in a darkened room on the first really hot Saturday of the year to pay tribute to him.

The first speaker was Keith Critchlow. Appropriately for the man whom Michell called “our Pythagoras… our master geometer” (and to whom he dedicated his last work How the World is Made: The Story of Creation According to Sacred Geometry), Prof. Critchlow chose to focus on the geometrical and numerological principles underpinning much of his friend’s work. Michell was, he said, “a poet, artist, scientist and philosopher” all at once, and as such the kind of principles he was talking about were not lifeless enumerations of quantity but rather offered, to those able to perceive them correctly, direct access to the timeless truths of the Cosmos. They seem to radiate from the eternal heart of things, and commun­icate immed­iately with our own hearts, establishing a harmony between us and reality in the process.

In his wonderfully rich talk, Prof. Critchlow took us from the geometry of Plato’s Atlantis, as it had been revealed by Michell, to the geometry of the rose windows of Chartres cathedral. Apparently, the people of Atlantis botched their city’s proportions by basing them on tenfold symmetry, dooming it from the outset, a mistake not made by Christian symbolism, which is largely founded on 12-fold symmetry.

I must admit that I lack the Pythag­orean background which would have enabled me to follow the ins and outs of the professor’s arguments, but the reasonableness of what he was saying shone through.

Critchlow was followed by Christ­ine Rhone, who also chaired the event. Rhone was the co-author of Twelve-Tribe Nations and the Science of Enchanting the Landscape (1991) with Michell, a revelatory book describing the foundations of a universal ideal social order. In what was essentially a general introduction to her friend and colleague’s work, I was struck by her characterisation of the role of Charles Fort and Plato in his thinking. If Prof. Critchlow explained how Michell’s exploration of geometry and numer­ology can take us to the heart of things, Rhone showed how his understanding of Fort and Plato could do the same. For Rhone, the pair formed in his mind a kind of cross, with Fort as the horizontal bar, revelling in the dazzling play of the world, and Plato as the vert­ical, leading to the transcendent realm of order and harmony. Michell stood at the intersection of the two bars – at the centre of the cross – putting him at the heart of lived reality.

Another way of putting this, as Rhone pointed out, is to say that Michell was liminal, persistently keeping to the threshold of things. She invited us to look at a photograph of Michell reclining on the grass at Stonehenge, just to the wrong side of a sign proclaiming “No Smoking Beyond this Point”. At first sight, we seemed to be viewing a picture of John the English rebel, asserting his God-given rights against petty legalism. Looking more closely, however, it was clear that he was lying oblique to the notice, half within the forbidden zone and half without. In this position, he was perfectly poised, at ease, belonging wholly to neither realm but vibrantly alive in both.

It also seemed to me that by taking up this position Michell was able to play for us the crucial role of mediator or bridge between worlds.

After some fortifying tea and biscuits, Robert Stephenson took over. Stephenson is the current Chairman of the Research into Lost Knowledge Organisation (RILKO), a group whose pedigree goes back to its foundation in 1969 by Michell and Keith Critchlow. Speaking on the role of Michell’s thinking in the re-enchantment of the English landscape, he explained how Michell took the insights of forerunners such as pioneer ley-hunter Alfred Watkins and engineer and astro-archæologist Alexander Thom, and developed their ideas into a lyrical revelation of earth energies fructifying the land and the imagination, speaking to those who understood the celestial paradise on Earth.

It could equally be said that Michell was primarily interested in re-enchanting the lives of those around him, by opening their eyes and hearts to the perennial philo­sophy engraved by the ancients in the landscape.

After the morning session, we emerged from the day’s venue, the beautiful Art Workers Guild in Bloomsbury, to blink in the bright sunlight of Queens Square, and to take lunch where best we could find it. Pythagoras demanded of his pupils that they be vegetarians, and so to that extent at least I am a good Pythagorean. Tucking into my veggie sandwiches, I hoped that Prof. Critchlow, as the modern Pythagoras, saw fit to carry on this tradition with his students.

The thankless task of giving the postprandial talk fell to Robin Heath, co-author with Michell of The Measure of Albion (2004). Like Michell, Heath is a passionate defender of the achievements of prehistoric peoples and, in particular, ancient metrology. Far from being primitive shaggy-haired cavemen, our forbears were possessed of a highly sophisticated grasp of geometry, as witnessed not only by ancient monuments such as Stonehenge, but also by the way those structures are placed in the landscape in relation to each other. Heath drew out the implications of such know­ledge, particularly in relation to the calculation of time.

Now, it may have been that the hummus wrap was lying heavily on my stomach and brain, but Heath’s learned discourse challenged my not particularly numerate grey matter. It was frustrating to hear the gasps of wonderment and assent from those around me who were better versed, as clearly Heath’s words contained revelations of some importance. What, however, came through clearly to me was the beauty of his vision of an ancient science which reconciled geometry and time, circle and square, Earth and Heaven and much more besides into a unified and elegant whole.

After my digestive organs had again successfully reconciled the contrasting properties of tea and biscuits, it was time for Hugh Lillingstone’s engaging talk on the geometries structuring the Solar System. The polish and flair of the presentation was, in fact, remarkable, when one bears in mind that it was not actually his: John Martineau, author of the talk, had been unable to attend.

Martineau/Lillingstone’s dazzling slides of the extraordinary patterns repeated throughout the Cosmos rounded off the day in a nicely symmetrical fashion. Before our eyes, Venus performed a beautiful celestial dance with the Earth, while rainbows and sundogs showed us the respective orbits of Mercury, Venus and our own globe.

Grevel Lindop, at the start of the day, had referred to Michell’s “huge but little noticed” contribution to knowledge, while Prof. Critchlow remarked that it would be another 100 years before it began to be appreciated. I do not know if we have that long, but let us hope that more will come to know and love Michell’s works. We humans need to relearn the secret of how to live fully, with hearts and eyes open, and John Michell can help us.