The Koornwinder Chronicles

Herma raises her dowsing rods towards Giza from the Djedefre ruined pyramid site at Abu Rawash, Egypt

Herma Koornwinder: the journey so far

A sudden ‘moment of vision’ in a papyrus shop on Egypt’s Red Sea coast set Herma Koornwinder on a journey of historical and scientific discovery which, two decades later, has resulted in an epic series of film documentaries on the lost knowledge and wisdom of the ancients.

How did Herma, from Heeze in the Brabant region of the Netherlands, turn from being a high-flying global market analyst into a passionate exponent of dowsing and ancient science and philosophy, as well as a ground-breaking film producer? It is a remarkable story.

In 1999, Herma was in the Egyptian tourist resort of Hurghada on a diving holiday, and ancient civilizations were the last thing on her mind. But a kind of epiphany in that shop, attached to the hotel where she was staying, was like a powerful wind blowing from the future.

As she became transfixed by the beauty of the shop’s stock of hieroglyphs, time seemed to stand still and, inexplicably, she felt an urge to study the Ancient Egyptian civilization. For, in a single hieroglyph, as she puts it, she had seen ‘a world of wisdom’.

The moment would change Herma’s life utterly. Armed with new knowledge gained from the wide-ranging research she came to undertake - and with a pair of copper divining rods - she embarked ultimately on a whirlwind mission across three continents in a bid to unravel the great mysteries of past millennia.

Recalling the Hurghada trip, Herma said: ‘I just went there to dive and didn’t have any interest in anything else. One day I had to sit in the hotel because, after two dives a day, you must rest for a day. I was with a friend and, after breakfast, we saw a little shop with hieroglyphs on display. A man came out and asked us to go in. I said we were just looking and not going to buy anything. I didn’t realize it at that moment, but it was to be a very important day. We stayed in the shop, without having any lunch or anything, until it got dark. Afterwards, I realized that that day was a turning point for me, and for my friend. When we got home to Holland we took a course on Ancient Egypt.’

It was in 2000 that Herma began to pursue her own researches into the ancient wisdom which would lead her to an investigation of a hidden order or structure to the universe based on number, geometry and proportion - if she could seek out its nature, she felt, and prove its existence, it would be a discovery of immense importance for humankind. Intuitively, within the expanding cosmos of her consciousness, Herma seemed to have tapped into the new concept, entering scientific and theological thinking, of a creative universe which promises a holistic and teleological understanding of reality, and envisages a cosmic ‘blueprint’ which the universe is self-fulfilling as it develops.

This was not quite as extreme as it sounds for a hard-headed investments adviser because, most pertinently, Herma had already detected meaningful patterns underlying the performance of financial markets - a kind of ‘intelligent design’, as she described it - which had enabled her to predict the Black Monday crash of October 1987 using her own system of stock price analysis, as well as to make money for the investors she advised.

To the amazement and disbelief of her peers in Holland, Herma - entirely self-taught in stock market analysis and information technology - also anticipated correctly the rise of share prices in 1988, the drop preceding the 1990 Gulf crisis, the recovery of prices in January 1991, and the 1993 rise in prices and the stock market correction in 1994. She had discovered a ‘forcefield’ invisibly underlying global financial markets and she went on to test its laws and rules with a scientific ‘laboratory’ approach.

Until now, it has never been made public in any detail how and why Herma was able to perform so overwhelmingly and consistently better than others in her field of stock market analysis. Her success was founded on the rediscovery of what she describes as an ‘ancient language’ and its interpretation. And now, as well as her ongoing documentaries project - carried out with her Egyptian film crew - a symposium has been held, a website has been launched, and later there will be a book, all aimed at explaining how the rediscovered language and the systems that reflect it, can be used to contribute to positive change in global economy and society.

Interested in socio-financial economics

To understand how all this came about we must go back as far as 1969 when it fell to Herma to keep track of some family investments. She became interested in socio-financial economics, studying the financial pages of newspapers and their reports on companies, markets and market developments, visiting companies and their managers, and poring over trade and investment journals.

Often, she noticed how analysts predicted the rise of stocks which slumped instead. She studied how markets developed and which factors appeared to be important in determining changes, as well as theories of economics, market developments and other related information.

‘My interest in finding and putting together the pieces of the puzzle increased strongly,’ she said. ‘As a consequence, I decided to go it alone in my study of the financial markets. This meant studying the underlying factors and dynamics that influenced developments.’

Bringing up her three children had intervened, so it wasn’t until 1984 that Herma began analyzing in detail the nature of stock exchanges in Amsterdam, the USA and Germany. She converted a room at her home into an office with a computer, a telephone connection to Stockdata, a printer and a TV with teletext, and she studied there every day. She didn’t realise at the time that this interest would become a business within a few years.

It dawned on her that there was more to it than the elements of the standard investment models which were said to determine change, and gradually she developed a predictive model – the workings of which she was to keep a closely guarded secret - under the aegis of her company, Koornwinder Global Market Navigation (KGMN). During her long-term research, Herma had questioned many accepted ‘truths’, and she suddenly saw a complex network of relations between the different parts of the world financial market as a whole.

She launched KGMN in 1990 to promote her vision while she worked as an advisor for several retirement funds of companies such as Shell and Brenca, and insurance company Zwitserleven. Soon, KGMN - one of the first ventures in the area of investment innovation on the electronic highway – was, in Herma’s scientific simile, examining the financial world ‘like a super-telescope in search of possibilities and impossibilities’.

To prove that her model was able consistently to achieve better results than others, Herma acted on the advice of Rotterdam University and called in the independent accountancy firm Deloitte & Touche for the period 1989 to 1994, and their answer was unequivocal. Out of 23 trend predictions on various stock markets delivered by KGMN in those years, 22 were confirmed by later events. Of seven model portfolios put together by KGMN, six managed to get a better result than the stock index in question, and the result of the seventh matched the index. On average, the score was ten per cent higher in absolute terms.

This allowed for only one conclusion: it was indeed possible to beat performance being achieved elsewhere.

‘Everything happening on the financial markets is actually one single process,’ Herma said, ‘because there is only one single financial market, the financial world market. Any changes in one part of it will consequently lead to some kind of change in other parts of it, and conventional methods are not designed to show this.

‘However, modern knowledge technology - artificial intelligence - provides the tools and possibilities to look at the incredible amount of data to be handled, to ask the relevant questions and give the right answers, all of which was not possible before without computer technology.’

By using this technology and following her research over several years, combining pattern- reading with geometry and that all-important feminine intuition, Herma had gained an insight into, and an understanding of, the network of relationships within the one market, the world market. As a variety of studies, publications and reports prove, Herma was one of the analysts with the consistently highest returns during her eight years as a professional analyst at the Dutch stock exchange from 1989-1997 where she was able to sell at high prices and buy at low ones.

Talks she gave were highly acclaimed

Talks she gave for different banks, databanks (such as DataStream and Stockdata), at universities (Rotterdam, Maastricht, Utrecht, Eindhoven), to business people and to service and investment study groups were highly acclaimed. She appeared on radio and television, and many articles appeared about her in newspapers and trade journals. Yet, on many occasions, despite her high profile, and having given talks or been interviewed by the media, Herma still felt ‘like an alien’ - there was much ado about one single sector or a single share price, while her terrain covered the whole world.

‘I am just like the surfer looking for the crests of waves and after every wave that is gone there comes another one,’ she said in interview in 2003 in Holland’s leading financial journal Het Financieele Dagblad. ‘Investments are about recognizing trends and getting out in time.’ Herma had discovered that worldwide patterns determined price developments when the financial world at large assumed they occurred randomly - and she had noticed that these price developments were subject to a specific order.

Her life took an important turn in 2000 when she decided to dedicate all her time to her own research. ‘Through the shapes and patterns that determine the behaviour of financial markets, I discovered an underlying order of universal magnitude for which I had no logical explanation,’ she said. ‘The impact of this finding was so great that I felt the need for further study of this phenomenon and to dedicate myself entirely to the study of comparative religion, different cultures, economics, philosophy, psychology, ancient texts, and so on, and I read many hundreds of books on these subjects.

‘There was a special attraction that I neither understood nor was able to describe. I read some of these books over and over, making notes of passages that caught my attention. It felt like an exciting discovery tour.’

Indeed it was, and the tour was to extend far into the future.

As her researches got under way, Herma came across references to an ancient language, based on number, which had been made by thinkers as diverse as Pythagoras, Plato, Einstein and Madam Blavatsky and, at the same time, she identified certain patterns, or ‘codes’ as she called them, in number sequences which, she realised, she had been working with for many years as a stock market analyst. Herma detected synchronicities in these market patterns which crossed international frontiers, and saw that here was a ‘universal language’.

‘Whenever I noticed a development in a market fund I recognized symbols or signs - I received signs with a message about the future,’ she said. ‘One could compare it to impulses which we received in the past which are now creating a pattern from which we can read future developments. This actually means that we have, at this very moment, created our future. This is a moving and deeply touching experience.’

Herma dealt with vast amounts of information in the form of number sequences which reflected the behaviour of stock prices and indices worldwide. Once these number sequences were put together graphically, they revealed, to the trained eye, certain lines, patterns and symbols, ‘causing synchronicity, symmetry and parallelism’. These behavioural patterns signalled forces and rejection or support lines of the stock prices, and these effects could be seen not only in one market but worldwide, at the same time. Once Herma understood the patterns and signals, she had the tools to outperform index investments, to sell stocks when they were high and buy again when low.

Informed and intuitive judgement

‘Contrary to the general assumption in the financial world that price developments are random, I realized that the underlying system showed price developments in a clear structure,’ she said. ‘As I followed the signals from my number sequences, I also followed my informed and intuitive judgement. However, private investors, retirement funds, insurance companies and indeed banks neither understood the signals nor did they bother to ask the right questions, which had disastrous consequences, as we all know now.’

Although she had a strictly Catholic upbringing, Herma stopped going to church when she was 15, and had never thought about intelligent design, or a divine creative principle. Yet she now realised that, in all these years working with financial markets, she had been busy with just that – a form of intelligent design governing the universe, from galaxies, stars and planetary systems to life on Earth and man-made networks and systems.

‘Intuitively, I understood that there must be some extraterrestrial forces behind all this,’ said Herma. ‘What a realization! It was in this unity that I was able to see parallels with the material I was studying - a very moving moment indeed! I have discovered fragments of the ancient language, but this is only the beginning and much more research is still needed.

‘For people who do not dare to look further afield it might seem somewhat drifty. Yet this is really not the case. It is as concrete as can be. I compare my deciphering of pattern codes with the deciphering of the old Egyptian hieroglyphics. Once the French scientist Jean-Francois Champollion knew which signs meant Cleopatra and Ptolemaeus, he had the key for deciphering the scripts completely.’

In 2005, Herma decided to return to Egypt as a member of a small group visiting Luxor and Aswan. The friend of the 1999 trip had been unavailable and, previously, Herma had felt it would not be right to travel without her. Before joining the group in Luxor, Herma opted for a week by herself in Cairo and Giza and as soon as she arrived at her hotel she wanted to walk from her hotel to encounter the Pyramids nearby.

A local guide at the hotel offered to drive Herma and, at first, she refused as this was her first visit to the Pyramids and she wanted to be alone there for some quiet contemplation. The man pointed out that it would soon be dark and, kindly, he said he would sit and wait for her at the Pyramids until she was ready to return to the hotel. Herma relented, and so began what was to become a great friendship with the charismatic Sufi healer, Mahmoud Eissa (in Arabic, Eissa means ‘Jesus’), whose family home lies just a hundred metres from the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx. Through a mutual exchange of knowledge, Mahmoud was destined to become the spiritual mentor and co-producer of Herma’s film project.

In 2008 came another fortuitous and highly significant encounter - with the Dutch crop circles researcher Janet Ossebaard, who has been studying the phenomenon since the mid-1990s and firmly believes that the vast majority of these mysterious formations are not man-made.

Decided to visit England

Herma had heard about crop circles but had no interest in the subject whatsoever – ‘it just went in one ear and out the other,’ she remarked. She and a friend were at one of a series of monthly talks being given in Veldhoven, a town in the south of Holland near Heeze, when they noticed that the next month’s speaker was to be Janet, who was replacing a speaker who had become ill. Herma didn’t plan to go but on the spur of the moment, on the very evening of Janet’s talk, she went, without really knowing why. She was impressed by Janet’s talk, bought a book and two DVDs from her and, after attending a second talk by Janet in The Hague six months later, she decided to visit England to see crop circles for herself, as well as famous megalithic sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury.

And so was to follow another revelation in Herma’s increasingly unpredictable lifestyle, a further example of consciousness working through chance, as in that first meeting with Janet. Now came her first encounter with the strange energies associated with the age-old art of dowsing - a skill she never knew she had until she visited the fields of Wiltshire that summer in 2008, but which was to become so important in her life. By an odd coincidence, Herma was introduced to the use of dowsing rods by a Dutch woman also with the unusual name of Herma who was in the same group visiting the crop circles.

Walking across a field to reach one of the formations, Herma noticed that her new friend was holding two sticks, and she asked what they were. Herma was offered the dowsing rods to try for herself and, lo and behold, as she entered the crop circle they suddenly opened out and then, shortly after, closed together.

She said: ‘Despite my initial reluctance, I tried out the rods and was flabbergasted when I recognized that the movement of the rods was the same as I had noticed in my work with number sequences which gave the spark for my search for an underlying system of order. And who could have expected me to find it in the crop circles? I felt the same force in crop circles that I had seen in the sequences of numbers and the patterns they made. The whole day I was walking with these sticks, and people let me because they could see I was fascinated.’

Before long, Herma understood that the rods were responding to lines of energy, an experience which was to repeat itself spectacularly in other places around the world. She remembered that, on her visit to Luxor in 2005, she had seen a man holding two sticks, which she later found out were dowsing rods, at the Hatshepsut Temple, and had been told that he was tracing energy lines.

Returning to her hotel after that day in the fields, Herma suddenly felt sick and was unable to eat dinner. Feeling that she might vomit, she had to go to her room and lie down. Bizarrely, as she did so, her mind’s eye was taken over by swirling geometric patterns, ‘as if I was within a crop circle as it was being made’, she said.

Bearing in mind Herma’s experiences that day, amid the alluring curves and rondures of the crop formations, it is nothing short of amazing that her family name, Koornwinder, itself rare in Holland, translates into English as ‘corn-swirler’.

Through a series of happy synchronicites, Herma had discovered the practice of dowsing for earth energies which, at least in the UK, has been growing steadily in popularity in recent years, and which in modern times can be traced back to the work of pioneering British dowsers such as Guy Underwood and Tom Lethbridge in the mid-20^th century.

Indeed, the British Society of Dowsers has an Earth Energies Group which is concerned with earth mysteries and earth healing, the study of ancient secular and sacred sites, and the practice of geomancy, as well as with technological and scientific research into geopathic and

electromagnetic stress and its effect on biological systems. The group also offers beginners and advanced courses in dowsing for earth energies.

Dowsing, the art of discovering the presence of such energies, as well as substances and objects not apparent to the senses - even buried treasure and missing persons - by using rods, pendulums, or forked branches of the hazel or willow tree, is usually divided into three categories: physical or site dowsing (originally for water), map or distance dowsing, and information dowsing.

The word itself comes from the medieval German, da sein, meaning ‘it is there’, and the first recorded use of dowsing in England was by John Locke in 1692, although worldwide, the practice may go back 10,000 years or more with seeming representations of it in palaeolithic cave art. Depictions on Ancient Egyptian temple walls dating from 4,000 years ago show pharaohs with what look like dowsing tools, and the Cairo Museum has ceramic pendulums more than a thousand years old. Moses and his son Aaron are said to have used a rod to find water, in Ancient Greece, Homer referred to dowsing as ‘rhabdomancy’, meaning ‘divining rod’, and it is know the art was practised widely in Crete in the fourth century BC.

Ancient records of dowsing

There are also ancient records of dowsing in China, Persia and India. One of the oldest known forms of divining rod, the lituus, a straight twig twisted into a spiral shape, is said to have been used by Romulus to lay out the boundaries of Ancient Rome. It came to be the badge of office of the Roman pontiffs, or high priests whose job it was to fix the calendar and arrange religious ceremonies.
Earth energies, suggesting invisible forcefields unknown to science, are regarded by dowsers as all energies that can be dowsed on the surface of the Earth. The source of these energies may be in the earth – perhaps from magnetic currents arising from underground water, geological faults or deep movements of molten iron - or outside it, for example, from solar, lunar, planetary or other cosmic sources.

Energy lines can be straight or curved, and it is believed that they can be constituted of one or more different kinds of energy, for example, positive, negative or neutral. They are well known for being found at megalithic and other ancient sacred sites, but feature in all energy fields. The idea of energy leys – dowsable lines two or three metres wide that run straight over considerable distances – is drawn from the work of Alfred Watkins, the English visionary, inventor and, some say, suppressed psychic, who discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) a system of ‘old straight tracks’, or leys as he termed them, in his native Herefordshire a hundred years ago.
Dowsing is absolutely crucial in the trajectory of Herma’s story. It has been seen as powerful magic for millennia; in ancient times dowsers who had the ability to locate precious water supplies hidden underground would have been regarded as sorcerers, and the magician’s wand probably originated in the dowser’s twig or rod. Herma points out that lines of earth energy have been known the world over under different names: Australian Aborigines called them arunquiltha, in China they were known as qi, in Egypt as aukh, in Greece as pneuma, in India as prana, in Japan as ki and in Polynesia as mana.

‘There was a deep and intuitive understanding of power lines in ancient civilizations around the world, which not only influenced but actually guided their lives,’ she said. ‘They were used as orientation for the location of holy or important cultural sites and also for the construction of important religious and cultural buildings such as stone circles, pyramids, temples, mosques, churches, tombs and so on. The realisation that the sites of Egyptian pyramids were chosen according to energy lines in the landscape may be a step towards explaining how they were built, which is still a mystery to us.’

It was when Herma found herself dowsing in the crop circles of Wiltshire in 2008 that the idea of making a film first came to her. She felt strongly that she must have a record of her powerful and extraordinary experiences for her children and grandchildren. Initially, a film was envisaged to be for them alone, a private family document.

But little did Herma know that, in the following year, she was to become a dowsing ‘magician’ herself, and that her plans for filming would escalate to a grand level with aspirations for an audience worldwide.

In January 2009, Herma took her eldest daughter to Egypt for a holiday as a gift for her 40^th birthday and, over ten days, they visited Cairo, Giza and Aswan. Herma, who had taken a pair of copper dowsing rods with her, found that her daughter was very sympathetic to the idea of dowsing, and even practised a version of it herself, using her fingers, unknown to her mother! Herma stayed on in Egypt after her daughter flew home, and went to Luxor, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings and the nearby Hatshepsut temple, accompanied by Mahmoud, who took photos of her using the rods at these locations. This was when the idea of making a professional film documentary in Egypt first occurred to them.

Mahmoud contacted the Giza-based film-maker Mostafa Youseff to form a crew with cameraman Mohamed Abdul Raouf, all of whom, in Herma’s words, became ‘spiritually interested’ in the project. Ideas were developed and the group became excited about the possibilities. Filming for a documentary - to become the firstin a projected Lost Science series - took place in April and May 2009 with Mahmoud as executive producer, Mostafa as director, Mohamed as director of photography, and Herma in the role of chief researcher and inspiratrix.

The aim was to record Herma dowsing leys and ‘power points’ of energy at the places she had visited in January – Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, the Hatshepsut temple and Karnak – and this was achieved spectacularly. Filming also took place at Sakkara, the Bahariya Oasis, Abu Ghurab, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and in the White Desert.

The Egyptians in Herma’s circle were amazed by the dramatic swinging and spinning of the dowsing rods, which Herma holds in small tubes to prevent her hands having direct contact with them, thus deflecting any suggestion that she is moving the rods herself. It quickly became apparent that another of the goals of the project, which from now on was to grow on an unfolding series of discoveries, would be to provide empirical proof of dowsing as a bridge to ancient knowledge of earth and spiritual energies in different parts of the world.

‘In Egypt, my dowsing rods identified not only contours but, most important, the corners of pyramids and temples,’ said Herma, by now becoming a veritable doyenne of dowsers. ‘In the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, while walking on a regular path, they suddenly pointed left or right and, on further investigation, there appeared to be sites of tombs there; entrances to tombs must therefore be built on ley lines, and the tombs themselves on points of power. When approaching the entrances of tombs, the rods immediately pointed directly to the centre of the tomb; walking around the tomb they continued pointing exactly to the tomb, and when held above a tomb they furiously spun around. This phenomenon could be seen everywhere.’

Mahmoud, a local guide to Egypt’s ancient heritage sites and a herbalist as well as a natural healer, said: ‘We know there is a gift in the universe for special people to discover the relationship between ancient knowledge and that we learn today. There is a link between everything. In ancient times, when a king decided to build a pyramid on a point on Mother Earth, he knew this point because of this gift he had received from the universe. With her sticks, my researcher friend Herma has found plenty of different power points in Mother Earth and that they are all related to each other, and let us feel a part of Mother Earth’s power. This makes me think about the ancient times, about the way the great people received the ancient gift to show us and let us learn.’

Energies accounted for strange sensations

Mahmoud’s cousin Ahmed Mahmoud, a tour guide who joined Herma’s team, said that the energies dowsed by Herma accounted for strange sensations he experienced at ancient sites which, previously, he had been unable to explain. ‘I used to go with the tourists as a guide and there was no explaining it until I met Herma,’ he said. ‘I understood from Herma that our Mother Earth is full of points of energy and natural power. This power affects Herma’s sticks and even sometimes affects us.’

It was in the Cairo Museum that Ahmed had first seen Herma using the dowsing rods. At first he was extremely sceptical about the practice, but he came to be astonished. In the room of the Tutankhamen exhibition, Ahmed underwent ‘the strangest moment in my life’ as he watched the rods rotate at great speed in Herma’s hands above the pharaoh’s sarcophagus. Ahmed witnessed similar scenes with the rods at the Giza Pyramids and at the funerary temple of Khofo.

In the summer of 2009, Herma returned to the UK to make a separate documentary about the crop circle phenomenon, so inspired had she been by her visit the year before. She was joined in England by the Egyptian team comprising Mahmoud, Mostafa, co-director Khaled El Fares and Refaat Abdelwahab, a desert safari guide from the Bahariya Oasis. As well as visiting crop circles, the party also made discovery trips to famous prehistoric monuments, including Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill, and to mystical Glastonbury.

While capturing the beauty and mystery of crop circles, this second film in the series also delves into the scientific research of recent years which has uncovered a range of striking physical anomalies in affected crops and soils, and includes interviews with prominent researchers Michael Glickman, author, geometer and architect, Charles Mallett, of the Silent

Circle crop circle information centre, and Bert Janssen, the world mysteries investigator.

There was one particularly strange and exciting incident during the trip. Herma was aware of evidence that people, sometimes with the aid of meditation, seemed able to influence the appearance and design of crop formations in advance and, in casual conversation with Bert Janssen, she remarked that it would be wonderful for her Egyptian friends if a crop circle appeared in the pattern of a pyramid. ‘You think I could ask something like this?’ she asked. Knowingly, Bert replied: ‘You don’t need to ask – you did already! But just don’t think about it any more.’

And a couple of days later, on July 9 - on the very day the group arrived at the Silent Circle resource centre, then at Compton Bassett, Wiltshire - Herma was astonished to learn that a crop circle containing a pyramid pattern had just appeared near Harbury in Warwickshire, with one of its corners pointing directly at the 17^th-century Chesterton Windmill: symbols, respectively, of Egypt and Holland!

The hilltop Chesterton Windmill was built in 1632 by the local squire Sir Edward Peyto, an astronomer and mathematician, and it has been speculated that the structure was first used by him as an observatory with a rotating top for a telescope, and converted to a windmill later.

‘In crop circles we experience energies of a universal order and they can give you a feeling of absolute well-being: physical along with total inner harmony,’ said Herma. ‘Mind, body and soul, and the external material world, are all moved by the same underlying forces.’

It was around this time that Herma came across a copy of my book, Spirals: the Pattern of Existence, which was on sale at Silent Circle. I first heard of Herma when, in August, an email arrived from my publisher, Green Magic, saying she wanted to get in touch with me. I sent my email address back, and she wrote to say how my book had ‘hit a special nerve’ in her. ‘Chapter by chapter, my fascination grew as I realized that we share an interest in the same subject,’ she said, inviting me to go to Egypt in the autumn to take part in the next stage of filming which, intrigued by what she told me of her project, I did.

As my book embraces sacred geometry and divine proportion, anthropology, molecular biology, zoology, astronomy, quantum physics, psychology, religion, philosophy, earth mysteries and the wisdom of the ancients, I saw rapidly how well it chimed with Herma’s own wide reading in these very areas and her own perception of a cosmological organising principle - indeed, a ‘pattern of existence’ - and this connection is established in the third documentary in the series.

The aim of my book is to show the universality of spiral energy fields, that they are all around us and within us, and how they shape our existence, from microcosm to macrocosm, and determine structures from the tiny vortices of sub-atomic particles to the awesome ‘island universes’ of galaxies where stars are born and the conditions for life created.

Identity with the universe

Nature's most favoured pattern of growth, the protean spiral is also the most efficacious deployer of nature’s energy - life-inducing, life-protecting and life-supporting: from the DNA molecule to the human heart where crucial fibres in the ventricles run in spiral lines, to give just two of myriad examples. The spiral is also the age-old intuitive symbol of spiritual development and our identity with the universe found in societies the world over and reflected in serpent cults, dragon lore, shamanism, geomancy and ritual art and magic throughout history.

By the time I flew into Cairo early in November, Herma and her crew had completed filming at Abu Simbel, in the remote desert at Nabta Playa in southern Egypt, and in the western desert, during the weeks immediately prior to my arrival.

At Abu Simbel, where two huge rock temples built by Pharoah Rameses II were moved in the 1960s to escape the formation of Lake Nasser by the Aswan Dam, Herma found that, tellingly, her dowsing rods were attracted to the old site, now under water, and not to the new locations on an artificial hill above the dam reservoir. It had been a similar story at the Temple of Amun-Re, Karnak, where certain statues have been relocated: Herma divined energies at their original sites, not the new ones.

Nabta Playa, lying about 100km west of Abu Simbel near the Egyptian-Sudanese border, is a prehistoric ceremonial centre whose stone monuments are among the world’s earliest known archaeo-astronomical constructions, far older than Stonehenge, and they struck a particularly deep chord with Herma. In fact, she and her team, realising they were on sacred ground, did not move or take even so much as a pebble, and even brushed away their footprints in the sand as they left. Herma considers it a place of extraordinary spiritual and historical significance, and of further discovery, for she now knows that ancient peoples organised their lives according to a system of earth energies.

In a convoy of three 4x4 vehicles, the team drove deep into the desert in scorching temperatures and over rough terrain where there were no roads. The landscape was as beautiful as it was desolate. Spotting the first of many stone circles she was to discover in the region, Herma demanded the convoy come to a halt. She leapt from the vehicle, ran to the site, and wasoverjoyed to find that the energies were present there. ‘They knew!’ she exclaimed.

Later, as she walked randomly in the absolute peace and stillness of the desert, sudden movements of her dowsing rods would take her in one direction, and then another, leading her always to more stone monuments.

‘From the moment I saw the Nabta Playa desert dotted with stone circles and little hills with stone patterns, I realized that that was how the ancients mirrored heaven in the desert,’ saidHerma. ‘That was their art, like stone circles, rock carvings, and building pyramids and temples, and so on. I think that was their most important art.’

These megaliths have baffled archaeologists, but former NASA physicist Thomas Brophy claims they constitute an astrophysical map of amazing accuracy, with breathtaking implications for modern science. Brophy presented his findings of an astronomical study of Nabta Playa in his 2002 book The Origin Map: Discovery of a Prehistoric, Megalithic, Astrophysical Map and Sculpture of the Universe. In it, he links the movements of stars to the desert megaliths, dated to at least 7,000 years ago, and it was after reading this book that Herma knew she had to go there.

Brophy believes one complex of stones at Nabta Playa is a map of the Milky Way galaxy as seen from the standpoint of the northern galactic pole, and that another may be a map of the Andromeda galaxy. One ‘calendar circle’ he deemed to be a star-viewing platform, the viewer’s position guided by three stones laid out in the exact pattern of the stars of Orion’s Belt, a pattern which the Giza Pyramids also mirror, according to Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert in their 1992 book, The Orion Mystery. There are at least thirty other stone complexes at Nabta Playa waiting to be studied.

After Nabta Playa, the team returned to base at Giza for a final sequence of filming - in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid where they were admitted for an hour by permission of Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Supreme Copuncil of Antinquties. Here, in the heart of this mysterious monument, Herma’s dowsing rods again whirled spectacularly like the rotor-blades of a helicopter, driven by that same unseen force she had encountered at other places of power - at Karnak, Niuserre’s sun temple at Abu Ghurab, amid the megaliths of Nabta Playa and the stone circles of the western desert, and in the crop circles and stone circles of England.

Veil between this world and the Otherworld

It’s no coincidence that all of these places are temples of one kind or another - the crop circles albeit ephemeral ones - where the numinous intersects with the quotidian, where the veil between this world and the Otherworld might be lifted momentarily.

In March 2010, Herma travelled with her team to Washington DC to shoot the fourth in the series of documentaries, hoping that her intense but joyful dowsing experiences in Egypt and England would be repeated in the US capital, where the city centre can itself be likened to a temple to the ‘sacred geometry’ believed to lie behind its foundation and planning.

Herma was not disappointed. Less than two days after her arrival, she emailed me to say that, already, the results were ‘spectacular’. With her dowsing rods, she located the same lines and nodes of energy that she had found at historic sites in England and Egypt and in crop circles. She felt that the architect and civil engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant, appointed by George Washington in 1791 to design the layout of the capital city, must have known about the principles of sacred geometry, despite his denials.

Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, co-authors of Before the Pyramids, Civilisation One and Who Built the Moon?, joined Herma in Washington DC to give important interviews for the film about the city’s connections with the Freemasons and the ancient sources of its geometrical underpinning.

From Washington, Herma returned immediately to Egypt at the end of March for the making of a fifth film and a key interview with the best-selling author Robert Bauval who was in Cairo leading a tour of the Pyramids. His latest book, Black Genesis - writtenwith Thomas Brophy - is about a black pre-pharaonic civilisation centred on Nabta Playa.

At Hellenic Alexandria Herma recorded a miracle of dowsing. She found that her rods worked not only over land but also while diving to the 2,000-year-old ruins of Cleopatra’s palace and temple complex and Pharos city, one of the richest underwater archaeological sites in the world.

Herma Koornwinder’s story is extraordinary. Now aged 71 and a grandmother, she is living proof that, whatever your age, life can turn out to be a thrilling journey of discovery, not only of the world but of oneself. With that down-to-earth pragmatism typical of the Dutch, Herma is focused firmly on her ambitions but she is always open to new ideas; she has absorbed much new knowledge in recent years, and doubtless has become aware of its occult causes and psychic repercussions, but she wears her learning lightly, and there is a great generosity of spirit behind her unique project and in her dealings with people, even with newcomers to her circle, such as myself.

The memorable images of Herma’s spinning rods encapsulate and celebrate the central theme of her films, that ancient peoples perfected the geomantic art of detecting and using natural energies for the spiritual enhancement of their world, that they were integrated with the cosmos - and that our urgent task today is to re-integrate for the welfare, if not the survival, of our species.

June 2010 saw Herma’s international convention in Amsterdam, the unveiling of trailers for her documentaries, and the launch of a website which will continue to be updated with news and articles. The journey continues…

►Pictures, from top of article: Herma and Mahmoud Eissa approach the Great Pyramid; Herma at the Temple of Niuserre, Abu Ghurab; Geoff Ward, Mahmoud and Herma at the Djedefre ruined pyramid, Abu Rawash; the Sphinx and Pyramids at Giza; Herma and her friend Herma, with whom she first tried dowsing rods, in Wiltshire, England; Herma at Luxor; the Chesterton Windmill crop circle in Warwickshire of July 9, 2009.

Herma at the statue of Major General John A Logan, Logan Circle, Washington DC, March, 2010