NUMINA: Communion with Spirit of Place
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
The
Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called
Numina, or the "genius loci" of a particular place. Often a Shrine to
the Numen of a place, like an orchard for example, would be placed so offerings
could be left to ensure the goodwill of the numina. The Goddess Pomona, who
later became the Roman Goddess of agriculture , was originally a spirit of
place, a Numen. This process of personification in art and story is found
throughout the world.
Myth is a way for human beings to become intimate with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious. Modernism has continually “de-enchanted” or “un-mythed” our world, ending the Conversation as place becomes commodity. And yet many have a deep longing for a magical and sacred experience of place, without being able to articulate it. And I personally would like to propose that some stories, identified with special places or nature, may be rooted in actual transpersonal visionary experiences.
For example, here
in Southern Arizona, the Tohono O’dum view Baboquivari as their sacred
mountain, inhabited and protected by
their creator God I'itoi. According to
legend, I'itoi inhabits a cave below the mountain, which is “the navel of the
world – a place where the earth opened, and the people emerged after the great
flood. According to local legend, at the beginning of the Spanish conquest of
what is present day Arizona, a Spanish officer and his men tried to dig their
way into the mountain. Suddenly, the ground under them opened and Baboquivari
swallowed them. The O'odham believe that I'itoi continues to watch over them to
this day, and they make pilgrimages to their sacred mountain.
In the UK, when the Romans occupied the hot springs of Bath, they retained the name of the Numen honored there, Sulis, for fear of offending Her. The Baths became dedicated to both Sulis and Minerva.
In recent times a famous experiment in working with the Numina to create a mind-boggling Garden and spiritual Center occurred at Findhorn in rocky Northern Scotland. In the words of one of the founders, Peter Caddy, “The garden clearly had become the focal point for an experiment in the cooperation of three kingdoms: the devic, the elemental, and the human. Each of us at Findhorn was playing a distinct role in the experiment. The ancients, of course, accepted nature spirits without question as a fact of direct vision actual experience.”
Human
experience changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou"
instead of "it". From selkies to Lorelei, naiads to dryads, Islamic
Djinn or Hopi Kachinas, local myths
abound with the numinous residents of
special places. Sacred places were especially revered because they had the potency
for revelation through dreams or prophecy, for healing or fertility, and for
shamanic or transpersonal experiences important to the individual or to the
tribe.
Early
Christians knew this when they built churches on earlier pagan sacred sites.
Many Catholic shrines exist where earlier goddesses associated with a holy
spring or well were revered, such as the
ubiquitous Bridgit’s wells throughout Ireland,
or the sacred caves dedicated to Black Madonnas in Europe.
There is a geo-magnetic energy concentrated at certain places that have been visited throughout the millennia because they catalyze visionary experience, even prophecy. Before they became identified by religions or designated, even enhanced, by monuments, sacred geometry, and the accumulation of human interaction, these sites were still, in their essence, places of intrinsic numinous power.
Like acupressure points upon the earth, such places speak to those who visit, and sometimes no religious practice or belief system is necessary for them to have a transformative effect on those who visit.
Roman philosopher Plinius Caecilius 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 Numina."
Many
years ago I lived in Vermont, and one fall morning I stumbled 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. Among the researchers was
Sig Lonegren, a well-known researcher of earth mysteries. I went with them to a
chamber in the woods, constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant
foliage, with an entranceway that would perfectly frame the Summer Solstice.
Long investigated by the New England Archeological Research Society (NEARA),
theories abound but no one knows who built these structures. There are many
cairns, and some calendar sites, up and down the Connecticut River area that
are very reminiscent of the same structures in Ireland.
Approaching
the site, I was stunned when Sig placed
divining rods in our hands, and I watched them open and close as we traced what he called ley lines that ran into this
site. Standing on the top of the submerged chamber, my divining rod
"helicoptered": Sig explained that this represented the center or
crossing point of two ley lines, a potency for which he believed the site had
intentionally been built.
Months
later people gathered to sit in that chamber as the Summer Solstice sun rose
through its entranceway. We all felt awe as the sun illuminated the chamber.
And for me this was the beginning of a lifelong journey into the mystery of
sacred places, and a quest to find the ancient Earth Mother.
Earth
mysteries researchers like John Steele and Paul Deveraux in their book
EARTHMIND have written that we suffer from "geomantic amnesia". We have forgotten how to listen to the Earth,
to engage in "geomantic reciprocity", instinctually, mythically, and
practically - to our great loss.
The
act of making a pilgrimage is among the oldest of human spiritual endeavors.
The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece apparently combined sacred place with mythic
enactment to transform pilgrims for many years. The ancient Greeks built their
Temple for Gaia at Delphi because the
unique personality, or Numina, of that
place was divined to be especially suited to the Goddess and to the Oracles of
Delphi that would reside there. They also sited their healing Dream Temples
according to the particular auspiciousness of place. Respecting what inspired
the early Greeks to decide on a particular place may be important not only to
pilgrims, but to creating future sustainable human societies.
I’d
like to share a quote by a Mentor of mine,
Gloria Ornstein, one of the founders of Eco-Feminism:
“The ecofeminist arts do not maintain that
analytical, rational knowledge is superior to other forms of knowing. They
honor Gaia’s Earth intelligence and the stored memories of her plants, rocks,
soil, and creatures. Through nonverbal communion with the energies of sacred
sites in nature, ecofeminist artists obtain important knowledge about the
spirit of the land, which they can then honor through creative rituals and
environmental pieces”
Gloria
Orenstein, The Re-Flowering of the Goddess
In 1999 I went to Harbin Hot Springs in California,
where I had an extraordinarily vivid dream. I dreamed I was given an antique
typewriter. When I set it on my desk I saw that it was covered with fine loamy
dirt, like potting soil, as if it had come out of the Earth. As I watched, the typewriter began to type by
itself, and soon sheaf after sheaf of stories about Goddesses flew from
it. Soon the papers became color photos
of Goddesses……….and then they became actual women, all colors, white, black,
brown, yellow, even blue. The dream concluded with a long line of Goddesses
standing in a procession………all looking at me!
Two months after that I received a commission to make masks for the Invocation of the Goddess at the 20th Anniversary of the Spiral Dance in San Francisco, and I spent that summer making multi-cultural masks of 25 Goddesses for the Procession. And that was the beginning of my longest collaborative work with women, performance, and masks.
One of the most famous pilgrimages is the "Camino" of Spain, which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella.
Some believe the pilgrimage was earlier made to the original
“Black Madonna of Compostella", a very
ancient effigy.
Many of the Black Madonnas may originate prior to the advent of Christianity, and, because so many of them occur in numinous caves or near springs, I suggest they also represent the Earth Mother, She who brings forth life and takes it back in an unending cycle, within the Womb of the Earth.
Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost", the alchemical soup to which everything living returns, and is resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form. When pilgrims came to Compostella they were 'composted' in a sense, cleansed and renewed.
In 2011 and 2018 I visited the Chalice Well, and the White and Red springs of Glastonbury. The mythic Goddess there is the Lady of Avalon, who appears in the Arthurian stories, and whose origins are pre-Christian. More than a myth, She is a presence I and many others experienced personally.
In
2013 it was my privilege to create a series of masks for a play by Anne Waters
she called “Numina: the Awakening”,
which was produced in Willits, California. She and her collaborators imagined
what it would be like to give voice to the Powers of the elements and of nature
in this time of climate change. To hear what they might have to say. Her
community was even invited to meditate together
to “listen” prior to rehearsals.
Among those voices was a prayer to “Our Lady of the Desert Spring” (read in both English and Spanish), Glacier or Ice, and Dawn, a hopeful voice for a New Age .
Sig Lonegren has spent many years exploring sacred places, and commented that possibly, as human culture changed, we began to lose a mediumistic form of consciousness, a daily gnosis with the “subtle realms.” Perhaps this empathic capacity can return to us again, within a new evolutionary process, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering mythic pathways to the Numina.
Job 12:8 "Speak to the earth, and it will teach you"
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