Endorsement: Dr. Kiran Tanna on The Great Antler Ley
Praise for The Great Antler Ley
This book reveals hidden paths. Paths to be sensed, rediscovered and walked, in the earth, in the bones, and in time.
The Great Antler Ley testifies to the importance of resonance, and to the value in developing deeply intuitive relationships with geographical, temporal and cultural landscapes. Beneath its argument for a new leyline, it is more radical still, positioning history as a matrix of echoes; not to be declared, but experienced as we follow tracks, human and nonhuman alike. Here, the past can be felt in the bones, through our resonance with myth, lore and land.
Combining personal experience with scholarly reflection, Tim Brennan introduces The Great Antler Ley and reveals ways to walk it. Doubtless there are others, walked before it was given this name, and perhaps more ways remain to be made. Inspired by this book, you may develop your own. I know this because, while following Brennan through these pages, I discovered my own complex relationships with the same land, vibrations, and routes he explores.
It was a resonant and revelatory experience. Perhaps it will be for you.
The Great Antler Ley is much more than either guide or introduction; nonetheless, it is everything each should be. It is informative, personal, and much more interested in posing questions about the world than it is in making claims about reality.
This book should be considered a key contribution to occultic ethnography. But above all else, it offers an essential way to reconsider the concept and relevance of the leyline.
A few words on Brennan’s methodology – and his Companions Along the Way
Despite the distance Brennan sometimes puts between this book and the academic institution, The Great Antler Ley is a meticulous work of autoethnography. This is perhaps best demonstrated by one of its central methodological expressions: instead of conventional endnotes, Brennan uses the close of each chapter to discuss his Companions Along the Way. In short paragraphs, he draws attention to a wide range of media that, above all, resonates with his experience as a walker and reflexive practitioner whose work concerns cultural memory.
This is a system of reference well suited to Brennan’s circuitous route through Yorkshire’s lanes, fields and forests, and these short reviews express his deeply informed positionality as someone walking in and at once revealing new approaches to history as a phenomenological field. These moments give rich insight into Brennan’s understanding of a mysterious world that often escapes academic historiography. Thus, he dismantles pervasive boundaries, rewilds human experience and lays out a holistic framework for his conception of the Ley as simultaneously an echo, a path and a praxis.
Dr Kiran Tanna
School of The Arts, Performance Department
York St John University
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