Numina: Spirits of Place in Myth and Nature

Numina: Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage

Blogger is about to change to its new version, which I and many others don't like at all, and because of this I feel obliged to pull up some of my favorite posts, perhaps for fear that they will soon be lost or very hard to find.   I began this Blog in 2007 to document my Aldon B. Dow Fellowship at Northwood  University, where I followed, with art and spoken word, my  trail of the Spider Woman.   Since then there have been  over a thousand posts, and thousands of readers, for  which I am most grateful!  

Like many, our attitude is "if it's not broken, don't fix it".  We love this Blog look and format.  But apparently Google does not.  The "new Blogger" will make it much harder to access older posts, and it is designed for scrolling fast through cell phones, reducing, in my opinion, the average attention span from a minute or so  to a microsecond.   Just what we all need, more speed.

So - here is an article I love, and haven't revisited this subject for quite some time, although I remember to thank the Numina of my garden each morning, and I think of the little offerings of insense and rice and fruit that Balinese women make to the Gods, and to their own versions of the Numina, each and every morning.  

In this article from 2013 I was thinking, based on my own spiritual and mythic experiences, about the importance of Pilgrimage to the formation of mythology.  I was thinking that pilgrimage - going to a special place with receptivity and spiritual intention -  may have much to do with the actual interaction between place and society throughout human history. 

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“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, of which are integral and interdependant.   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 the results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the co-evolving 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, the Lady of the Lake and King Arthur - a prehistoric pilgrimage site with origins that go back to unknown beginnings.

To this day thousands, like myself,  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, like myself,  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 me  is ever a reminder of the dreams, synchronicities and insights I had there.  A trip to the Chalice Well in the winter of 2018 resulted in a profound experience of syncronicity and communion I can only call magical.


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.

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

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

Fell, B. (1976, 2013). America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World, 
Artisan Publishers, N.Y.

Raine, L. , EARTHSPEAK:  Envisioning a Conversant World, Presentation Conference on Current Pagan Studies, Claremont, CA. 2018.   https://threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com/2020/03/earth-speak-envisioning-conversant-world.html

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.

The Sacred Springs of Glastonbury: The Chalice Well

the Chalice Well

Glastonbury is a place of very ancient pilgrimage indeed, long before the coming of Christianity and the great (now ruined thanks to Henry the 8th)  Cathedral of Glastonbury.  There is evidence it was a place of pilgrimage into prehistoric times, perhaps before the coming of the Romand to Great Britain.  It is Avalon,  the source of the Arthurian legends,  the tales of Merlin and the Lady of the Lake.  

Once the Tor was actually surrounded by a lake, and pilgrims visited the sacred springs associated with this highly empowered land, now called the "Red Spring" and the "White Spring" for healing.  The Chalice Well is still greatly revered by pilgrims (like myself) who come here from all over the world to visit the Wells and the Chalice Garden, to drink the water and take some home as a blessing.  The red color is iron oxide being deposited by the springs - the white spring deposits calcium, leaving a white tinge as it passes over.     

"There is an especially strong tradition of sacred wells in the Celtic nations; in Ireland alone, a survey carried out in the 1940's recorded as many as 3,000 of them.  These wells once were thought of as gateways to the Celtic Otherworld......................These springs and wells,  which originated in the Otherworld,  would once have been dedicated to the goddesses  of the land:  in Ireland, to the goddess Brigid, in the north of England, to Coventina."

........Sharon Blackie, "If Women Rose Rooted" (2016)

As when I visited 7 years ago, I made my prayers, and gave my gratitude, to the Lady of Avalon, to the Ancestors, and to the great Numina of this place.  The Garden is lovely, as poignant for me in the winter of 2018  as it was in the summer of 2011.  Here one is infused with the deep life-giving vitality of the land, the plants, and the Waters there, the life running beneath the stones, deeply rooted, the buds on the leafless trees full of dreaming vitality.  

I meditated for a while, then walked around a bit.  What popped into my mind was odd - the words "Covenant Garden".  What could "covenant garden" mean, and why had I thought of it?  Thought of the ancient name of the Goddess of the land, Coventina, from which the word itself may be derived (I should look that up).  I couldn't think of any other reference until much later, until I considered that the word Covenant, like "coven", "convening" etc.  refers to a gathering of people to reach an harmonious agreement, which can include an agreement that is holy or religious in some way.    Such as the famous "Ark of the Covenant", which was supposed to hold sacred writings and objects of veneration, as well as "God's sustanance for man" which was called Manna.   Manna was the food, variously described as different substances, that was provided to feed the people; it has also come to be used to mean a kind of numinous power.   According to Wikipedia:

The Ark of the Covenant (Hebrew: אָרוֹן הַבְּרִית, Modern: Arōn Ha'brēt, Tiberian: ʾĀrôn Habbərîṯ), also known as the Ark of the Testimony, is a gold-covered wooden chest with lid cover described in the Book of Exodus as containing the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. According to various texts within the Hebrew Bible, it also contained Aaron's rod and a pot of manna.^[1] Hebrews 9:4 describes: "The ark of the covenant [was] covered on all sides with gold, in which was a golden jar holding the manna, and Aaron's rod which budded, and the tables of the covenant."^[2]

"ASHARAH" Sculpture by David Hostetler

Interesting.  The Garden of the sacred wells is indeed full of holy things that represent "harmonious agreement" between all aspects of the Earth, including the two-legged beings that come there.  And "Manna" is the food provided by the Garden, by nature, and by Gaia.  A "rod that blooms".............could also be seen as the ancient Hebrew and Middle Eastern  Goddess Asherah, who was represented as a tree, and  often represented in the days of the old testament as a rod,  or "Asherah pole".  The practice of carrying "Asherah poles" was apparently fairly common in the early days of the Semite tribes, although the Patriarchs later eliminated this custom, and the Goddess, from the religion as the Semite deity became exclusively male.  

A Garden represents, truly, a "Covenant", a holy agreement, between all beings of the present, human, animal, plant, soil, air, rain, water.......

A happy and successful garden is a harmonious Ecosystem.  A garden survives and thrives through a network of interdependant and interconnected relationships.  In a healthy garden plants and trees interact with each other and communicate with each other through a vast underground weaving of roots and fungi which connect the members of the garden flora community, and contribute to the lives of the many fauna that participate in the community:  the bees and other pollinators, the worms and other insects that assist in the decay process.  And the birds that assist in distributing seed as well.  Not to mention the humans that may plant, sow, admire, and occasionally eat the stray apple or strawberry as well.

It could be said that a Garden is a "Covenant" achieved by many beings, a divine agreement.

THE GARDEN OF THE COVENANT. 

Below is the Chalice, and the Heart, and what appears to be a Dragon flying as well, carved on a chair there.  

And here is my bit of Magic........... as I was getting ready to leave, I saw this tiny metallic green heart on the ground.  I was going to take it as a "Green Heart" Talisman, to remind me of my moment there in the "Covenant Garden" of the Chalice.  But then I thought, perhaps someone left it as a kind of offering, and it wasn't right for me to take it.  I put it back on the ground and took a picture.  I was amazed to see this light surrounding it in the photo!  So I took two more - they came out the same!  

I left feeling truly moved.  The Earth is Speaking to us, all the time.  

A Green Heart at the Chalice Well

Avalon............

In 2011 I participated in the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury, in the UK, and made my personal pilgrimage to "Avalon".  As I write about  Spirit of Place, I remember my experiences while visiting this site where, for at least a thousand years, people made pilgrimage to the sacred springs and the Tor.  Some quotes that just came to mind when remembering that time...............

"I experienced contact with something or someone sentient and much greater than my individual self. I had experienced contact, even momentary communion, with the "essence" of what could be called a transpersonal presence. Afterwards I was told by the local shaman or caretaker that I had met with the guardian spirit of the place."

Debra D. Carroll "From Huacas to Mesas"

DIALOGUES WITH THE LIVING EARTH, compiled by James and Roberta Swan (1989)



 "There is an earth-based energy available to human beings, concentrated at specific places all across the planet, which catalyzes and increases this eco-spiritual consciousness. These specific places are the sacred sites discussed and illustrated on this web site. Before their prehistoric human use, before their usurpation by different religions, these sites were simply places of power. They continue to radiate their powers, which anyone may access by visiting the sacred sites. No rituals are necessary, no practice of a particular religion, no belief in a certain philosophy; all that is needed is for an individual human to visit a power site and simply be present. As the flavor of herbal tea will steep into warm water, so also will the essence of these power places enter into one’s heart and mind and soul. As each of us awakens to a fuller knowing of the universality of life, we in turn further empower the global field of eco-spiritual consciousness. That is the deeper meaning and purpose of these magical holy places: they are source points of the power of spiritual illumination."

Martin Gray

   "The deepest spiritual energies of the Red Spring relate to the future:  to the emergence of a reborn and rebalanced divine masculine energy that can complement and eventually conjoin with the Goddess energy that is so venerated in Avalon.  This last stage of the alchemical work, involving the balanced union of a rejuvenated solar king-god with a goddess-queen in a symbolic heart centre, such as the pool in King Arthur's court, has long been delayed by our deep neglect of the divine feminine.  Since the recent cleansing of the White Spring, the spiritual and healing powers of the two springs can now manifest in a more balanced way."

Nicholas Mann and Philippa Glasson, "The Red and White Springs of Avalon"

 ***Martin Gray published  his monumental book Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power in 2007 with Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. of London based on his decades of travel to research sacred places throughout the world.   The author spent the last 20 years on a  pilgrimage: he visited 1,000 sacred sites in 80 countries around the world. His journey unfolds in a remarkable compilation of images that reveals just how devoutly pre-industrial cultures everywhere worshipped and respected our Earth. Gray’s stunning photographs and fascinating text provide unique insight into why these powerful holy places are the most venerated and visited sites on the entire planet.

Stonehenge and a Dragonfly

 "We are living IN the Body.  Not ON the Body, but IN the Body." 

Rachel Rosenthal

Soon to return to the States, and the "states of mind" that are part of returning to the familiar world, I decided to visit the Chalice Well a last time.  The sense of elemental Presence, of the Goddess, of countless pilgrims before me, of  genus loci, is so potent there.  I took some water to carry back in a flask, and thanked the Chalice as I drank,  engaged in what I realized was a private Communion ceremony.  Then walking up the hill on the path, I ate an apple of Avalon.

"My Body, My Blood"....... and my body, my blood,  the holy well travels as my own essence, nourishing my body and my thoughts.  How strange, to remember my long, long ago Episcopalian Communion services, here at the Red Spring. But, why not?  I am sure I would offend many Christians for saying it, but isn't this the true source of that communion?  In it's highest meaning, taking in the "blood and body" of Christ means taking in that spiritual essence that is identified as holy, the Light, Christ consciousness.  For me, that gift of wholly light flows from the ground in abundance, hangs round and sweet from the trees, offering, always offering me not "salvation", but a reminder of my  Inclusion in the circle. 

I found a bench to sit on, and a great abundance of apples.  Being blissed out, it took a little while to notice a Dragonfly - just one - that seemed to be buzzing me.  It darted in front of me, then forward, back again, then forward.  After a while, laughing, I said "ok, Dragonfly, let's pretend you want me to follow you."  At which point, darn if it didn't become even more excited, darting down the path, and then back.  So I got up, and followed the Dragonfly down the inlaid stone trail.  At intervals, the stones are inlaid into spirals or stone circles.

Darting ahead, the Dragonfly came to rest in the exact center of the circle in front of me.  And so, amazed, I sat down on the path (fortunately, no one was behind me) and contemplated this lovely encounter.  After about 5 minutes, Dragonfly flew off and disappeared.

"The word Dragonfly has its source in the myth that Dragonflies were once Dragons." 

the Dragonfly Site ***

I've often written about what I like to call the conversant world.....but here was an encounter that left me breathless.  And like all real Communion, there are many layers of meaning.  But what this gift means to me is to always remember, coming from that place of personal pilgrimage and "en-lighten-ment".........to hold to the center,  to re-member.  I'm leaving, returning to my daily life soon.

Detail, mural near Glastonbury Goddess Temple

I think I was given a perfect blessing and a  reminder for the future.  May I always return in spirit to that Holy Well, to remember, to be re-freshed. 

*******************

 Of course, no trip home could be complete without visiting the great stone monuments of the sacred landscape that is the Salisbury Plain.  5,000 year old Stonehenge, mysterious and awe inspiring, surrounded with its huge circle of worshipful, camera snapping tourists, and then the equally amazing, 1,000 year old stone and glass Salisbury Cathedral.

Having spent so many years in Circles, and read so many fantasy books as well that included imagined Pagan rites in places like Stonehenge...........I had to laugh at the intensity of hundreds of  tourists, dashing out of the many nearby thundering  buses, to encircle the mighty circular henge of the stones, worshiping them with snapping cameras and brightly colored umbrellas.  "I'll be darned", I thought.  "Services are still going on here!"

As the tour guide reminded us, Stonehenge sits in the center of a sacred landscape, that includes the many barrows, and not so far away, the henge and avenues of Avebury.  If you include in the picture the idea of energy leys that dowsers and geomancers speak of, tracing the "Dragon lines of ancient wizards" the visible and invisible add greatly to the picture.  Stonehenge is awesome, although I must say Avebury impressed me more with it's sweet sense of the elemental powers, the ancient stones honoring those forces, and somehow including me, and wandering sheep, into the picture. 

Last, just a few pictures of the beautiful Cathedral just 9 miles from Stonehenge, in Salisbury.  I was fortunate to visit while a service was going on, to hear the pipe organs an a choir.  Gorgeous.  I have nothing to add, as the pictures say it all.

Except, right, the bronze "sorrowful Madonna", a contemporary sculpture that greets you on the way to the entrance.  The Madonna's hand has been rubbed to a bright finish, from all the people who touch her in prayer and sympathy........I found that moving.

Salisbury Cathedral

Faces (gargoyals?) on exterior of Cathedral

Archangel Michael, window over memorial for war veterans.

***   For my own insight, I wanted to copy here some interpretation of Dragonfly from "The Dragonfly Site", which I greatly enjoyed reading.  Particularly, I thought of the fact that dragonflies are creatures of water, and also, they were once, mythically speaking, Dragons.  Of course the Dragon is entwined in Arthurian legend, and the stories of the two wells, the red and the white, may well be the source of the tale of Merlin and the two underground Dragons.  Dragons are also  the "dragon lines", the Earth mysteries and ancient Earth Mother.

• "The dragonfly, in almost every part of the world symbolizes change and change in the perspective of self realization; and the kind of change that has its source in mental and emotional maturity and the understanding of the deeper meaning of life.  The traditional association of Dragonflies with water also gives rise to this meaning to this amazing insect. The Dragonfly’s scurrying flight across water represents an act of going beyond what’s on the surface and looking into the deeper implications and aspects of life. 
•  
• Defeat of Self Created Illusions
  The dragonfly exhibits iridescence both on its wings as well as on its body. Iridescence is the property of an object to show itself in different colors depending on the angle and polarization of light falling on it.   This property is seen and believed as the end of one’s self created illusions and a clear vision into the realities of life. The magical property of iridescence is also associated with the discovery of one’s own abilities by unmasking the real self and removing the doubts one casts on his/her own sense of identity. This again indirectly means self discovery and removal of inhibitions.

• Focus on living ‘IN’ the moment
  The dragonfly normally lives most of its life as a nymph or an immature. It flies only for a fraction of its life and usually not more than a few months. This adult dragonfly does it all in these few months and leaves nothing to be desired. This style of life symbolizes and exemplifies the virtue of living IN the moment and living life to the fullest. By living in the moment you are aware of who you are, where you are, what you are doing, what you want, what you don’t and make informed choices on a moment-to-moment basis.
• 
  The opening of one’s eyes
  The eyes of the dragonfly are one of the most amazing and awe inspiring sights. Given almost 80% of the insect’s brain power is dedicated to its sight and the fact that it can see in all 360 degrees around it, it symbolizes the uninhibited vision of the mind and the ability to see beyond the limitations of the human self. It also in a manner of speaking symbolizes a man/woman’s rising from materialism to be able to see beyond the mundane into the vastness that is really our Universe, and our own minds. "                               
  
  
  
   .....from the Dragonfly Site  
     

The Chalice Well

  

Here is one of the most mythic places of Glastonbury, the Chalice Well and Garden.   There are actually two sacred springs, the Red Spring and the White Spring, both of which figured in the ritual cycle of the Goddess Conference.  The energy at these wells is so amazing!  They are, like the Tor, at the heart of the mysteries of Glastonbury, of  this place at the center of the legendary Avalon.  

People have been coming here on pilgrimage for a very long time - the great ruined Cathedral and Abbey of Glastonbury and the Tor bear evidence of it's roots as a pilgrimage center that go back to the middle ages, and it is clear that that the Church was built on much earlier pagan sites.  Many feel that the Springs, which have never failed in recorded history, were at the heart of the sanctity of Glastonbury.  

The wonderful energy of the Well!  I sat by the famous Vesica Piscis symbol of the Well Cover and meditated, and had a vision of the Tree of Life, very vivid.  I later went to the healing pool where you can take off your shoes and sit in the waters.  There was a young pilgrim I noticed who, I felt, had entirely the right idea about how to enjoy sacred waters.

The Chalice Garden is amazing as well - you can really feel the presence of the Devas and the Fey Folk there......such color and vitality! 

Here  below are the "Apples of Avalon" in the Chalice Gardens........just beyond it is possible to see the hill of the Tor, and people walking up it.

Truly, these flowing springs are every bit the "Lady of Avalon".  And the flowers!

And here is the Tor, high atop a  long hill that is no small task to climb, along with the mystical and ubiquitous sheep.  

 

This photo was rather surprising, which I took inside the interior of the Tor - since the Lady of Avalon is associated with violet, and the color is virtually everywhere in Glastonbury, I was surprised to find it showing up in this photo.