I'm pleased that my article (below) has been published in Coreopsis for the Summer edition. Great magazine.
Numina: Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage
by Lauren Raine MFA
ABSTRACT:
The
importance of Pilgrimage to the formation of mythology may have much to do with
the actual interaction between place and society throughout human history. The
ancient Romans called “spirit of place” the Numina, and this personification of
place is found throughout all early and traditional cultures.
“To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension. In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced: every place had its legend and its own identity….what endured was the mythic landscape.”
R.F. Foster, (2001, p. 130)
The
Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called
Numina, the “genius loci” of a particular place. I personally believe many
mythologies may be rooted in the experience of “spirit of place”, the numinous,
felt presence within a sacred landscape.
To
early and indigenous peoples, nature includes a “mythic conversation”, a
conversation within which human beings participate in various ways. Myth is,
and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant
with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious. Mything place provides a language
wherein the “conversation” can be spoken and interpreted, and personified. Our
experience changes when Place becomes “you” or “Thou” instead of “it”.
In
the past, “Nature” was not just a “resource”; the natural world was a
relationship within which human cultures were profoundly embedded. The gods and
goddesses arose from the powers of place, from the powers of wind, earth, fire
and water, as well as the mysteries of birth and death. In India, virtually all
rivers bear the name of a Goddess. In southwestern U.S., the “mountain gods”
dwell at the tops of mountains like, near Tucson, Arizona, Baboquivari, sacred
mountain to the Tohono O’odam, who still make pilgrimages there and will not
allow visitors without tribal permission. This has been a universal human
quest, whether we speak of the Celtic peoples with their legends of the Fey,
ubiquitous mythologies of the Americas, or the agrarian roots of Rome: the
landscape was once populated with intelligences that became personified through
the evolution of local mythologies.
The
early agrarian Romans called these forces “Numina”. Every river, cave or
mountain had its unique quality and force – its inherent Numen. Cooperation and
respect for the Numina was essential for well-being. And some places were places
of special potency, such as a healing spring or a sacred grove.
As
monotheistic religions developed, divinity was increasingly removed from
nature, and the natural world lost its “personae”. In the wake of renunciate
religions that de-sacralized nature and the body, and then the rapid rise of
industrialization, nature has become viewed as something to use or exploit,
rather than a relationship with powers that require both communion and
reciprocity. Yet early cultures throughout the world believed that nature is
alive, intelligent, and responsive, and they symbolized this through local
mythologies. From Hopi Katchinas to the Orisha of Western Africa, from the
Undines of the Danube to the Songlines of the native Australians, from
Alchemy’s Anima Mundi, every local myth reflects what the Romans knew as the
resident “spirit of place”, the Genius Loci.
Contemporary
Gaia Theory revolutionized earth science in the 1970’s by proposing that the
Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, interdependent and continually
evolving in its diversity. The
Gaia Hypothesis, which is named after the Greek Goddess Gaia, was formulated by
the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn
Margulis in the 1970s. While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized
for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later
refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being
used in subjects such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry,
systems ecology, and climate science. …………….In some versions of Gaia
philosophy, all life forms are considered part of one single living planetary
being called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial
crust would be results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the
coevolving diversity of living organisms.
If
one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, it might follow that everything has the
potential to be responsive in some way, because we inhabit and interact with a
vast living ecological system, whether visible to us or not. Sacred places may
be quite literally places where the potential for “interaction” is more potent.
There is evidence that Delphi was a sacred site to prehistoric peoples prior to
the evolution of Greece. Ancient Greeks built their Temple at Delphi because it
was a site felt to be particularly auspicious for communion with the Goddess
Gaia. Later Gaia was displaced by Apollo, who also became the patron of Delphi
and the prophetic Oracle. Mecca was a pilgrimage site long before the evolution
of Islam, and it is well known that early Christians built churches on existing
pagan sacred sites.
There
is a geo-magnetic energy felt at special places that can change consciousness.
Before they became contained by churches, standing stones, or religious
symbolism, these “vortexes” were intrinsically places of numinous power and
presence in their own right.
Roman philosopher Annaeus Seneca
junior commented that:
"If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numen."
Personal Encounters
Many
years ago I lived in Vermont, and one morning I went down to the local Inn for
a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont’s
mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain, the subject of a popular book by
Barry Fell, a Harvard researcher, and under continual exploration by the New
England Archeological Research Association (NEARA). I had stumbled upon their
yearly Conference. Among them was Sig Lonegren , a well-known dowser and
researcher of earth mysteries who now lives in Glastonbury, England and was
then teaching at Goddard College in Vermont. Through his spontaneous
generosity, I found myself on a bus that took us to a chamber constructed of
huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly
framing the Summer Solstice.
Fell
and others suggest that Celtic colonists built these structures, which are very
similar to cairns and Calendar sites found in Britain and Ireland; others
maintain they were created by a prehistoric Native American civilization, but
no one knows for sure who built them. They occur by the hundreds up and down
the Connecticut River. Approaching the site on the side of Putney Mountain, I
felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away. I was stunned when Sig
placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as we traced the “ley
lines” that ran into this site. Standing on the huge top stone of that
submerged chamber, my divining rod “helicoptered”, letting me know, according
to Sig, that this was the “crossing of two leys”; a potent place geomantically.
According
to many contemporary dowsers, telluric energy moves through stone and soil,
strongest where water flows beneath the earth, such as in springs, and also
where there is dense green life, such as an old growth forest. Telluric force
is affected by planetary cycles, season, the moon, the sun, and the underground
landscape of water, soil and stone. Symbolically this “serpentine energy” has
often been represented by snakes or dragons. “Leys” are believed to be lines of
energy, not unlike Terrestrial acupuncture lines and nodes, that are especially
potent where they intersect, hence dowsers in Southern England, for example,
talk about the “Michael Line” and the “Mary Line”, which intersect at the sites
of many prehistoric megaliths, as well as where a number of Cathedrals were
built.
At
the time I knew little about dowsing, but I was so impressed with my experience
that months later I gathered with friends to sit in the dark in that chamber,
while we watched the summer Solstice sun rise through its entrance. We all felt
the deep, vibrant energy there, and awe as the sun rose to illuminate the
chamber, we all left in a heightened state of awareness and empathy.
Earth
mysteries researcher John Steele wrote in EARTHMIND, a 1989 book written in
collaboration with Paul Deveraux and David Kubrin, that we suffer from what he
called “geomantic amnesia”. We have forgotten how to “listen to the Earth”,
lost the capacity to engage in what he termed “geomantic reciprocity”.
Instinctively, mythically, and practically, we have lost the sensory and
imaginative communion with place and nature that informed our ancestors
spiritual and practical lives, to our great loss.
We
diminish or destroy, for money, places of power long revered by generations
past, oblivious to the unique properties it may have, and conversely, build
homes, even hospitals, on places that are geomagnetically toxic instead of
intrinsically auspicious. Our culture, versed in a “dominator” and economic
value system, is utterly ignorant of the significance of place that was of
vital importance to peoples of the past. Re-discovering what it was that
inspired traditional peoples to decide on a particular place for healing or
worship may be important not only to contemporary pilgrims, but to a way of
seeing the world we need to regain if we are to continue into the future as
human culture at all.
Making
a pilgrimage to commune in some way with a sacred place is a something human
beings have been doing since the most primal times. Recently unearthed temples
in Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe reveal a vast ceremonial pilgrimage site that may be
12,000 years old. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece combined spirit of place
and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for over two millennia.
One
of the most famous contemporary pilgrimages is the “Camino” throughout Spain,
which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella. Compostella comes
from the same linguistic root as “compost”, the fertile soil created from
rotting organic matter – the “dark matter” to which everything living returns,
and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new
form. Pilgrims arriving after their long journey are being metaphorically ‘composted’,
made new again. When they emerge from the darkness of the medieval cathedral in
Compostella, and from the mythos of their journey, they were ready to return
home with their spirits reborn.
In
2011 I visited the ancient pilgrimage site of Glastonbury, England.
Glastonbury’s ruined Cathedral once drew thousands of Catholic pilgrims, and
Glastonbury is also Avalon, the origin of the Arthurian legends, a prehistoric
pilgrimage site. To this day thousands still travel to Glastonbury for the
festivals held there, and for numerous metaphysical conferences, including the
Goddess Conference I attended. The sacred springs of the Chalice Well and the
White Spring have been drawing pilgrims since long before recorded history, and
many people come still to drink their waters.
Making
this intentional Pilgrimage left me with a profound, very personal sense of the
“Spirit of Place”, what some call the “Lady of Avalon” and taking some of the
waters from the Holy Springs back with is ever a reminder of the dreams, synchronicities
and insights I had there.
Sacred
Sites are able to raise energy because they are geomantically potent, and they
also become potent because of human interaction. “Mythic mind”, the capacity to
interpret and interact with self, others and place in symbolic terms (as, for
example, the way the Lakota interpret “vision quest” experiences) further
facilitates the communion.
Sig Lonegren, who is one of the Trustees of the
Chalice Well in Glastonbury, and a famous dowser, has speculated that as human
culture and language became increasingly complex, verbal, and abstract, we
began to lose mediumistic, empathic consciousness, a daily intuitive gnosis
with the “subtle realms” that was further facilitated by ritual. Dowsing is a
good example of daily gnosis. “Knowing” where water is something many people
can do without having any idea of how they do it. Sometimes, beginning dowsers
don’t even need to “believe” in dowsing in order to, nevertheless, locate water
with a divining rod.
With
the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning, and with the development of
patriarchal religions, he suggests that tribal and individual gnosis was
gradually replaced by complex institutions that rendered spiritual authority to
priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of God. The “conversation”
stopped, and the language to continue became obscured or lost.
Perhaps
this empathic, symbolic, mediumistic capacity is returning to us now as a new
evolutionary balance, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering mythic
pathways to the Numina.
References:
Foster, R.F.(2001) , The Irish
Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen
Lane/Penguin Press), page 130.
Lane/Penguin Press), page 130.
Lovelock, J. and Margulis, L.,
(1970) The Gaia Hypothesis, quote is from Wikipedia
Retrieved on: May 11, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
Retrieved on: May 11, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
Seneca, L. Annaeus junior (65 A.D.)
Epistulae Morales at Lucilium, 41.3.
Retrieved on: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium
Retrieved on: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium
Fell, B. (1976, 2013). America B.C.:
Ancient Settlers in the New World, Artisan Publishers, N.Y.
Lonegren, S. (2013) Mid Atlantic
Geomancy, Blog. Retrieved on: http://www.geomancy.org/
Steele, J. (1989). Earthmind:
Communicating with the living world of Gaia, with Paul Devereaux
and David Kubrin. Harper & Row: N.Y. Page 157.
and David Kubrin. Harper & Row: N.Y. Page 157.
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