Bligh Bond (Frederick)

Frederick Bligh Bond (30 June 1864 – 8 March 1945) was an English architect, archaeologist, and psychical researcher.

In 1908 the Church of England appointed him as director of excavations at Glastonbury Abbey. His excavations rediscovered the nature and dimensions of a number of buildings that had occupied the site including the Edgar Chapel, the main altar, secret tunnels and many other secrets of the ruins.

He also discovered an egg stone in the grounds, giving credence to the idea that the abbey was built on a former pagan shrine.
As early as 1899 Bligh Bond had expressed his belief that the dimensions of the buildings at Glastonbury Abbey were based on gematria, and in 1917 he published, with Thomas Simcox Lea, Gematria, A Preliminary Investigation of The Cabala contained in the Coptic Gnostic Books and of a similar Gematria in the Greek text of the New Testament, which incorporated his own previously published paper, The Geometric Cubit as a Basis of Proportion in the Plans of Mediaeval Buildings.

After WW1, Bligh Bond presented the wrought iron lid that covers Chalice well, as an offering for peace. The symbol on the lid is a major religious symbol known as the Vesica Piscis – a design used in many significant ancient buildings including the ancient pyramids of Egypt.

In 1919 he published The Gates of Remembrance, which revealed that he had employed psychical methods to guide his excavation of the Glastonbury ruins, using first Captain John Allan Bartlett (‘John Alleyne’) as a medium, and later others. As a consequence of these revelations his relations with his employers, who disapproved of spiritualism, deteriorated, and he was sacked in 1921.


Elisabeth Tham

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