NUMINA: Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage
"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)
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
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
