John Michell was a scholar and a polymath who had a considerable influence on New Age ideas and in “mind, body and spirit” counter-culture circles in the 1960s and 1970s.

He first attracted notice with his book The Flying Saucer Vision: The Holy Grail Restored (1967), in which he concluded that “it is essential that the true basis of mythology be recognised and the origins of our civilisation examined in the light of what we can now suspect of extra-terrestrial influences in the past.”

More than 40 publications followed on subjects as diverse as alchemy, crop circles, druidism, euphonics, feng shui, Findhorn, geodetics, Glastonbury, kabbalah, ley lines, megaliths, metrication (he was vociferously anti-), Mother Shipton, numerology, paganism, sacred measurements, simulacra, Shakespeare’s identity, Stonehenge and UFOs.

Plato was a beacon in his thinking, and Michell frequently referred to his ideas and beliefs in his monthly column, “An Orthodox View” in The Oldie, which appeared in almost every issue, from the first in February 1992 to the 243rd, published on the day of his funeral.

He found inspiration, always acknowledged, in the writings of John Aubrey, Bligh Bond, William Blake, William Cobbett, Charles Fort, Oliver Goldsmith, Norman Lockyer, William Stukeley, Alexander Thom and many more. Charles Darwin was not among them; he strongly disagreed with his theories about evolution.

Michell enshrined many paradoxes. He had the manners of a gentleman but he enjoyed the company of rogues and rascals. He inherited wealth but seemed not to mind as it ebbed away. He was a beautiful writer but not an impressive public speaker. He chose to live for decades in a small, scruffy, paper-strewn flat in Notting Hill. When asked how things were going, he replied with a quotation from one of his favourite novelists, George Gissing: “Lying low, but still alive.” He loved cricket, a passion he shared with Sir Paul Getty and other friends at Lord’s.

His mathematical theories and interpretations of the cosmos arrived to him mostly at the dead of night, with relaxing substances all around him. He was a scholar of integrity and gifted at languages, but he was always happy to listen to naive enthusiasms and dotty theories from his ever-growing army of followers. His wit was dry but only in the company of fellow cognoscenti. At the start of his Megalithomania (1982), he quoted a sentence by his old adversary Dr Glyn Daniel in the December 1961 issue of Antiquity: “The problem in archaeology is when to stop laughing.”

The book that launched Michell to fame among New Ageists was The View over Atlantis (1969). It was published by Garnstone Press. Michael Balfour, who founded the imprint three years earlier, was a rapid convert, and in 1971 he published Michell’s geometrically challenging The City of Revelation. By then Balfour had published a reprint of The Old Straight Track (1970), the seminal work by Alfred Watkins on leys (or ley lines, as they are now called).

Of The View over Atlantis, Michell wrote: “Clues to the nature of prehistoric science, drawn from archaeology, astronomy, geology, and other studies, confirm that traditional sacred places were centres of natural magic, used by ancient adepts who possessed knowledge, since lost, of the Earth’s vital energies. Current researches point to the rediscovery of a principle in nature which could revolutionise our understanding, and our treatment, of our native planet.”

Garnstone Press published Michell’s The Old Stones of Land’s End in 1974. He dedicated the book to the Prince of Wales, and later took the Prince on a guided tour of Glastonbury. He became a popular lecturer at The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, founded by Michell’s similarly gifted friend, Keith Critchlow.

Along with his self-published Radical Traditionalist Papers, pamphlets on a wide variety of controversial subjects dear to his heart, Thames & Hudson published further books by Michell: Phenomena: A Book of Wonders (1977, with R. J. M. Rickard), Faces and Figures in Nature (1979), Megalithomania (1982), Living Wonders: Mysteries and Curiosities of the Animal World (1982), The New View over Atlantis (1983), Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (1984), The Dimensions of Paradise (1987), Earth Spirit (1989), Twelve Tribe Nations and the Science of Enchanting the Landscape (1991), At the Centre of the World (1994), Who Wrote Shakespeare? (1996) and A Little History of Astro-Archaeology (2001).

John Frederick Carden Michell was born in London in 1933. His father, Alfred, who was of Cornish descent, dealt in London property. His mother, Enid, was the daughter of Sir Frederick Carden Bt, in whose large Victorian house beneath the Wiltshire Downs near Newbury he was brought up, together with his younger siblings, Charles and Clare.

After prep school in Cheam and Eton, he did his National Service in the Royal Navy, attending the School of Slavonic Studies, where he learnt to be a Russian interpreter. After his two years’ service he read Russian and German at Trinity College, Cambridge.

At his father’s urging, Michell went on to qualify as a chartered surveyor with land agents in Gloucestershire. Then came a change in his life. In childhood he had acquired a love of nature, animals, birds, flowers and woodland life at night. His training as a surveyor unveiled in him an innate affinity with country landscapes and their secrets. For a time he lived in London, immersing himself in the pleasures that the capital had to offer in the 1960s, while dealing in property — and being parted from his inheritance by nefarious characters.

From the end of the 1960s he lived in Notting Hill, and began writing in earnest. He often visited Glastonbury to explore its mysteries. To him and many of his friends and fellow-thinkers it was the New Jerusalem, the epicentre of the New Age, an expression first used by William Blake in 1809, and it was such friends who persuaded Michael Eavis to found the Glastonbury Festival on his farm. There Michell met collaborators and commentators on his work, such as Richard Adams, Paul Deveraux, John Nicholson, Nigel Pennick, Christine Rhone, Paul Screeton and others.

Michell did not marry until 2007. He had first met his bride 36 years earlier, but the union lasted only a few months. A real joy in his personal life came in 1992, when he discovered that he had a son, then aged 28, who, with wife and children, became a great joy to him.

Michell was buried on May Day, the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, to which he often referred.

Michell is survived by his son.

John Michell, New Age writer, was born on February 9, 1933. He died of cancer on April 24, 2009, aged 76