"Numina" Article Revised

NUMINA:  Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage

By Lauren Raine MFA

"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 1

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 2 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.”2

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.”3

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 4, and under continual exploration by the New England Archeological Research Association (NEARA).  I had stumbled upon their yearly Conference.   Among them was Sig Lonegren 5, 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 5 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 6 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 Composella, 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.

Footnotes:

1  Foster, R.F., The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press 2001)

2   Wikipedia:  The Gaia Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis)

3  L. Annaeus Seneca junior, (Epistulae Morales at Lucilium 41.3]

4  Fell, Barry, PhD., America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World, (1976) Artisan Publishers, 2013 Edition, 352 pages

5 Lonegren, Sig, Mid Atlantic Geomancy, website and blog (http://www.geomancy.org/)

6  Steele, John, Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia, with Paul Devereaux and David Kubrin (Harper and Row, 1989)

7  Curry, Andrew, Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization,  Smithsonian Magazine, 11/2008, ,http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/#4uZO1s0yHlpACGLu.99

Numina.....6 months later......

Numina - Masks for the Elemental Powers from laurenraine

Back in July I wrote of having a "hot springs satori" while ernestly asking the universe, in a hot pool alone at midnight on the 4th of July in a little town called Safford, Arizona....what the Universe thought I should do next.  I have just "retired", and feel sometimes like I'm being put out to pasture, and have a terror that my imminent fate is some kind of elderly senile purgatory with the golf cart crowd. 

Bearing these fatalistic thoughts in mind, I didn't really expect an answer from the Universe.  But a few dips later - wham! -  a very well organized academic paper of a project titled "Numinous" popped into my mind, in three distinct components, and nicely typed on a Word document!  Not the romantic, visionary experience I used to have under similar circumstances.  But there is was, an Answer.  Which I wrote down, dripping, on some soggy paper.

This kind of thing has happened to me before, although in a much more poetic manner. In fact, I believe that when we engage in true creativity, and when we enter the "realm of the Goddesses/Gods", we enter a seamless realm that is liminal, collective, and sacred.  But this time I guess my guides have decided its time for me to become more organized.

I remember a vivid dream I had  in 1998 at Harbin Hot Springs about being given an antique typewriter that was buried in the ground.  As I dusted the dirt off of it it began to type by itself, spewing forth pages and pages of stories about Goddesses. Then the pages turned into pictures, and the pictures turned into a long line of women, dressed in beautiful costumes.  Women of all colors, black, blue, white, red, and yellow, stood before me like a luminous, expectant  rainbow.  Not long after I returned to my studio in Berkeley, I was invited to attend  a meeting to plan the upcoming Spiral Dance in San Francisco. That year the theme was diversity, and the group wanted masks to celebrate the Goddess.  And so I began work that summer on a series of  masks.  At the  Spiral Dance that October my dream came true.  Twenty-five women in a rainbow of colors formed a masked procession.  The dream proceeded the creation and the event.....

I realize now  that "Numina" is similar to what I was proposing with Macha Nightmare for my Kickstarter project last year (unfortunately it failed).   I thought that failure meant that  was done and over, an idea whose time came, and then went.........but surprise!  The masks I had made  were in Marin with Macha, and another colleague, Ann, volunteered to pick them up, to be returned to me when I come to California for a conference in February.  Somewhere along the way, Ann and Mana and Diane, all colleagues who have created rituals and performances with the previous "Masks of the Goddess" collection in the past, decided to create a Solstice event, and then something in March in Willits, California.

So it wasn't over, and inspired, I've been  making new masks.  In fact, they keep arising in my mind, leering at me from the other side of Manifestation, saying "make me, make me!".  I have to trust that there are Dancers, and Stories, also currently behind the Veil, for whom they wish to become manifest.............most recently I added "Dawn", "Drought", "The River Face", "Ocean", and "Tree" to the evolving collection.  Now I'm working on one called "Gather and Offer", "Desolation", "Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors", and "Rainbow Woman".

And much magic and synchronicity has begun to occur, which tells me I'm somehow on the right track.  I want to write about this in future posts, but for now take pleasure in sharing the little slide show about the evolving project above.

Here's what I scratched on to a piece of damp paper.........and I reflect that  it's also a variation on what I've always done since the day I first walked into a stone chamber with a ley crossing in Putney, Vermont, in the summer of  1982, thanks to master dowser Sig Lonegren.  I felt vibrant energy there, I watched my divining rod "helicopter", and I've been asking myself ever since:  "How do we speak to the Earth?  How does the Earth speak to us?" So I make masks, because that's what my particular gift or "offering" is,  with the hope that, finding them useful, we'll receive an answer.

One last thought for myself, since it is the beginning of the 5th World, not to mention New Year 2013 - why do this at all?  Because I believe there is so much wisdom we have lost, that needs to be re-invented for our time, among that "re-discovered, re-invented" lost wisdom, the use of sacred masks, and reverence for a "conversational world", for the many faces of Gaia.  Whether that conversation occurs with a tree, or the great Goddess Pele, or the magic of a sudden butterfly, I do believe that once one has experienced it, one will never be the same.

From Soggy Paper in Journal, July 4th, 2012:

Numinous 

Component 1)  Masks.  In traditional societies masks are "Liminal Tools".  Traditionally they were perceived as being mediation tools between shamanic states, or different dimensions of being.  A mask might allow spirits to participate, communicate, even prophesize and heal.  They can be seen in this respect as a way to permit "numina" or the spirits of place to to communicate through the medium of the mask, and the one who wears the mask.

Component 2) Story.   What might the spirit of a place, the "genius loci"  say?  How would "place" speak to participants?  Perhaps, though visioning exercises, art process, meditation, creating handmade books, masks, or shrines that "engage, invoke and invite the numinous" to "speak"?

Component 3) Vision. How might Numina, Spirit of Place or Elemental Powers,  be  "personified" or "voiced"  in contemporary terms, even as they are now "dis-placed"?

 

 
NUMINA/NUMEN:  What They meant to the Romans

 "If ever 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." [1]

The Romans believed nature was inhabited by elemental forces they called Numina, and many Roman sites  had little shrines dedicated to  the "genius loci" of a particular place.  Being in a reciprocal  relationship with the Numina was important to the health, prosperity, and spiritual well-being of all who lived in any landscape.   How can we regain this sense of  “communion with place” - the healing springs,  mysterious forests, or  generous orchards -  that are the true wellsprings of myth?  Myth making has always been a way for human beings to become intimate with the world.  In the past  "Nature" was not just a "backdrop" or a "resource" – nature was a conversation.  Our experience changes when environment  becomes "you" instead of "it".  

Among the Hopi of Arizona honoring and being in balance with the Katchinas that preside over many aspects of their beloved land,  and bringing them “to earth” with sacred masks and ceremonial dances,  is believed to be essential to their survival.  Masks thus to most indigenous peoples are a liminal, transformation tool, a means for different dimensions of being to interact, communicate, bless and inform.

Most of us cannot live as early Romans, or indigenous people,  but we can re-invent a “mythic dialogue” with the  environment through storytelling, ritual, and with  masks.   My  evolving collection of  "Numina Masks" invite others to “give voice” through prose, dance, and theatre to the numinous intelligence and unique qualities of where we live, to “put on” the elemental forces of nature as they are personified in myth, both ancient and new.  Especially as we face climate change and environmental degredation: what might Pachamama, Earth Mother of South America,  say?  Or the “Spirit of the Redwoods”?  Or the great volcano Kilahua?

"A numen (plural: numina) is a sacred force, an impersonal but divine power. The gods have their numina as their divine power, but the gods themselves have been considered numina. The "divine presence" to which Plinius Caecilius refers is called a "numen." 

"In Roman literature we find that a numen is something 'of the Gods' dependent on the Gods, and not something that is either separate or prior to the Gods......The easiest way I have found to explain a numen is this. When you sit down in a chair and you feel the warmth of a person who has there before you, you sense his energy, his power, his presence having been there. In the same way, when a God or a Goddess have visited a place, Their presence radiates out into that grove, or that pool, energizing it such that it is more lush than the surrounding area, teeming with life, and filled with a certain presence that you can intuit and feel."

"Working alongside and in harmony with a numen benefits a person by making his tasks easier and in accord with the Gods. Horace says that "By Jupiter's benign numina are the shrewd guided in his care and defended."[2] And Servius warns that those who act contrary to the numen of a God act against the will of the Gods and can only expect failure.......Or as Livy put it, "You discover that all events turn out well when we follow the Gods in obedience, and ill when we spurn Them."[4]

"It is not a supernatural power in the sense of divine will overcoming the principles of the cosmos, but a power imbued in nature by the Gods to maintain the natural order of the cosmos. The providence of Ceres is to bear fruit (geres) from the earth and to create a regeneration of life (creare). It is through Her numina that She effects plants to germinate and grow. In a period of mourning for the loss of Her daughter Proserpina, Ceres may temporarily withhold Her numina and cause a barren winter to set in. But She cannot alter the natural order of the earth, nor of a seed to germinate, nor can She alter Her own numina into something different than what it is. She does not make the winter to come by exercising a numen of barrenness that is alien to Her own nature. In that same myth, none of the other Gods and Goddesses can bring about a return of spring. Their powers cannot effect that which the numina of Ceres alone may do. The numina of each God and Goddess are therefore a special power, unique to each of Them alone and not a general divine power that is diffused among the various deities. "

"In practical terms, whenever one invokes the aid of a God or Goddess, what is asked is that the deity will project His or Her special numen so that whatever task is to be attempted shall succeed in accordance with the Gods. The two most basic prayers in the religio Romana are Do ut das, "I give so that You may give," and the formula: bonas preces precor, ut sis volens propitius, "I pray good prayers in order that You may willingly be propitious." (Reciprocity)"

 http://www.novaroma.org/nr/Numen

    ? C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus minor, Epistula 41.3
    ? Carmina IV, 4.76, et benigno numine Iuppiter defendit et curae sagaces
    ? Commentary of Virgil's Aeneid, Book 1.4; quod non suo merito eos insequebantur numina, sed    Iononis inpulsu
    ? Livy 5.51.5-6: Invenietis omnia prospera evenisse sequentibus Deos, adversa spernentibus