Frederick Bligh Bond

Was an architect, illustrator, archaeologist and. His family was related to William Bligh of HMS Bounty. He was educated at home by his father, who was headmaster of the Marlborough Royal Free Grammar School. He practiced as an architect in Bristol from 1888. In 1899 he expressed his belief that the dimensions of the buildings at Glastonbury Abbey were based on gematria, an Assyro-Babylonian-Greek system of alphanumeric code that was later adopted into Jewish culture, and published a number of books on the subject.

In 1908 the Church of England appointed him director of excavations at Glastonbury Abbey. Bond enlisted the help of a retired navy Captain John Allan Bartlett (also known as John Alleyne) as a medium through whom he contacted long-dead monks of the Abbey. who advised him where to excavate. With help of these monks, Bond’s excavations re-discovered the nature and dimensions of a number of buildings that had occupied the site. Bond's work at Glastonbury Abbey is one of the first documented examples of psychic archaeology.

In 1919, he published ‘The Gates of Remembrance’, which revealed that he had employed psychical methods to guide his excavation of the Glastonbury ruins. As a consequence of these revelations his relations with his employers, the Anglican Church, deteriorated and he was sacked in 1921.

Bligh Bond said that in the psychic writings which he had recorded, the monks claimed that one day the great Abbey of Glaston would be rebuilt. The original Abbey had been destroyed because it was imperfect. The new Abbey would be wholly appropriate to its time, would no longer suffer from imperfection and would be a spiritual beacon to the entire world. There is also a legend that Austin Ringwood, one of the last of the Abbey monks, had forecast that:

‘One day the great Abbey of Glaston will be rebuilt –

when this is done, peace will reign upon the earth for a thousand years’

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