"Sedna" and a syncronicity

 

"In the archaic universe all things are signs and signatures of each other. Inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly."

Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill

Every time I sit down to write, I always feel like it entails constructing articles complete with footnotes and addendum.......which is one of the reasons my articles have been not very inventive or prolific lately. Having said that, I'm going to loosen up, maybe make a few subjective statements and meandering surmises, and stop feeling I have to write as if I was defending my ideas at a podium.

Currently I belong to an online group that meets once a month to share and discuss synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences.  Because of that, I've been wanting to collate or review some of the many synchronicities I archived in this Blog.  Below is one from 2012 that involved a good friend of mine, the sculptor Georgia Stacy who lives in Nogal, New Mexico.  

Erica Swadley as "Sedna's Shaman" in Restoring the Balance (2004)

 In 2009 I sent out an email about an article to be published in   Coreopsis : A Journal of Myth and Theatre    for their Summer/Autumn Issue of 2009.  The theme for that edition was  ironically themed "Mask, Mirror, and Muse".  My article was about my ritual theatre event/performance at the former Muse Community Arts Center:  "Restoring the Balance: the Mask of Sedna" .  

I'm proud of that article. Restoring the Balance was the last event I personally directed using the Masks of the Goddess collection, although they did travel to other producers.  It was also an event wholly infused with, for lack of a better word, a kind of numinous presence, and synchronicities abounded in it's production.  I even found myself after the event with spirit photographs!

Katherine Josten as "Sedna" 

I have always felt I had a responsibility to document and share the stories participants created, told, or re-told with the masks.  Not just the ever-evolving myths themselves, such as the "Story of Sedna", Inuit Mother Goddess of the Ocean,  but also the stories of the rituals, the performances, the insights that arose for those who were involved in the productions.  In the hope that those archives may inspire others to carry on the work.  These were collective re-mythings: prayers and celebrations of the multi-cultural Divine Feminine through the medium of story, performed within the liminal landscapes of ritual, theatre and sacred space.

As members of the neo-pagan Collective Reclaiming used to say when a Circle was cast for ritual work: 

"We are between the worlds now, and what happens between the worlds can change the world."  

To be "between the worlds" is to be in that zone between the secular and the sacred, a circular "wholly" place that is fertile and imaginally fluid. ("Imaginal cells" is the actual scientific term for the cells that are responsible for transforming a caterpillar, immersed in its chrysalis, into a butterfly. They are alchemic agents of biological change.)

"I think many artists feel they are weaving some form of energy into their work. It's what psychometrists see when they "read" objects. There is an aesthetic psychometry each person does as they look at a work of art. Artworks are like batteries - if we're receptive, they can charge us. My idea of reality is that there are many, many interpenetrating dimensions." .....Alex Grey

 "What happens between the worlds", fashioned with individual and collective intention, occuring with or without the form of conscious ritual or pilgrimage,  is a generative place, ripe with syncronicities, because therein the  boundaries lessen.

"Wind Borne" by Georgia Stacy

So, what this is leading to is an email I received, after forwarding my article about the Myth of Sedna, to Georgia in New Mexico. Recently, Georgia has begun to include whale flukes instead of wings in her wood sculptures. Here's a new piece from that series and an email she sent me back.

 Lauren, This is more than a coincidence. I was reading the "Inuit Imagination". When I came to the sculpture carved for Sedna, with a whale fluke, I cried for the second time. I cried the first time I heard the story, many years ago. But, the clincher...right before I turned on the computer to find your email, a friend called and wanted to read me the story of Sedna, because I had just finished a sculpture with bones for arms. Life is so interesting.

Georgia

Why this confluence of syncronicities?  I personally, having worked for years with myths as an artist, and with Collaborators who are "activating" the myths through art and drama - I personally believe that the archetypes are alive in our collective consciousness, within the "dream body" of humanity. The story of Sedna is a very important story for our time.  It is about the suffering and sacrifice of the  Sustaining Mother, what happens when Mother Earth is disregarded and abused,  and the rites of at-one-ment the Inuit did to regain balance and good relationship with Her. It recognizes the interdependency of all beings, and the need for honor, and Balance.   It is also about the suffering of women at the hands of men, the imbalance that occurs when the feminine is not honored, and what must arise in order to restore the Balance. 

It's about exactly what we lack in our industrialized, climate imperiled  time: a deep ecological understanding of reciprocity with the living Earth and all the mutually inter-dependant beings we share our lives with.    The "Story of Sedna" is an old myth that belongs to an indigenous people most Americans have never heard of - yet it is a myth that has universal and contemporary significance.  The telling that occured in our event was ripe with synchronicity because it was a story that needed to be told again. 

SEDNA https://terragenesis.fandom.com/wiki/Sedna

 Interestingly (synchronistically)  "Restoring the Balance" was produced at All Nations Hall at the Muse Community Arts Center  on April 9th, 2004.  I did not know it at the time, but just a few weeks before that NASA announced the discovery of a new planet beyond Pluto which astronomers named "Sedna".  *  (I learned about the new planet shortly after the event.  It seemed, to my personal poetics, like a synchronistic and grand metaphor for the concerns of our time, and I thought of my fascination with another indigenous Goddess, the "midwife of the New Era", Spider Woman.**)

When we step inside the magic Circle "between the worlds", when we enter the "fissures", we find we are not alone. Here's another quote from Alex Grey, in an interview I did with him and Allyson in 1989: 

"If you reach down far enough, we're all made up of the same archetypes. Joseph Campbell talked about what he called "core myths". As did Jung. If you go deep enough into yourself, you find yourself in a noisy place with a lot of other people. And if you draw symbols from there, you plug into a collective form of consciousness." 

Well, back to the studio now, and hopefully, the Cracks will continue to open, even if I'll never understand why.

"There's a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in." 

 .....Leonard Cohen

Painting by Tyler Gore

* "March 15, 2004: NASA-funded researchers have discovered the most distant object orbiting the sun. It's a mysterious planet-like body three times farther from Earth than Pluto.

 "The sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Dr. Mike Brown, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, Calif., associate professor of planetary astronomy and leader of the research team. The object, called Sedna for the Inuit goddess of the ocean, is 13 billion kilometers away. Sedna will come closer to Earth in the years ahead, but even at closest approach, about 72 years from now, Sedna is very far away. Then it will begin its 10,500-year trip back to the far reaches of the solar system. "The last time Sedna was this close to the sun, Earth was just coming out of the last ice age. The next time it comes back, the world might again be a completely different place," Brown said.

Mysterious Sedna: Astronomers have discovered a mysterious planet-like body in the distant reaches of the solar system.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/16mar_sedna

** In some Pueblo mythologies Spider Woman (Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman) is a Creatrix Goddess.  She also is a Midwife to each new Age.  

"The end of the Hopi calendar, and entry into the "5th World", is thus also about the "Return of Spider Woman", the cosmic weaver who is also, in the Pueblo mythological universe, the midwife who guides the "new people" through the Sipapu (or birth canal) in the sacred Kiva, offering a thread (or a ladder) to rise up into each "New World"...... I reflect that in the Circles I've participated in, there are 5 directions: North, South, East, West, and Center. The Center is that which unites everything, the breathe, the dark space, ecological interdependency, the Web.  Integral."

The Spiritual Significance of 2012,  12/7/2012

"Every atom of your body is connected to every other atom in the universe, as it exchanges energy and information with the vacuum"...Nassim Haramein

Coreopsis Journal of Myth and Theatre (and Artist in Residence for 2017)

http://societyforritualarts.com/coreopsis/spring-2017/

An Artist’s Statement

By Lauren Raine

“Myth comes alive as it enters the cauldron of evolution, 

drawing energy from the new storytellers who shape it.”

– Elizabeth Fuller, the Independent Eye Theatre

Mythos is the archetypal ground on which cultures are built, the sometimes fluid template of religions, and the means by which we decide what is sacred and what is not.  In other words, as the poet Muriel Rukeyser famously said, “The world is made of stories, not atoms.”  Artists are technicians of story.   So what are the stories that we are telling about our world, and how are they manifesting?  How are we, as artists, acting as myth makers?

Ritual is a way of bringing the storied realm into the physical realm.  There is something incredibly transformative about not simply observing, but becoming part of the story.  By putting on the mask, or passing the magical chalice, or touching the Earth with imagined roots we embody mythos.   Meaningful ritual is by and large lost in the contemporary world – but it’s a potent, creative field that is wide open for artists to re-animate.

When I went to Bali to study temple mask traditions I was fortunate to produce collaborative masks with Balinese mask makers while there. In traditional cultures, such as Bali, sacred masks are regarded as “vessels for the gods” to gain entry into this world, to bless or to instruct.  Their sacred mask traditions inspired me to create the Masks of the Goddess collection, which was devoted to the divine feminine throughout the world.  As the masks were used by dancers, storytellers, and ritualists, I found myself in a grand conversation, and the masks themselves gained energy, story, and “manna” from those who used them.    After 20 years, they are still travelling, most recently to the Parliament of World Religions.

Another series of masks, collectively called Numina after the Roman word for spirits of place, is a celebration of my lifelong conversation with the numinous intelligence in nature, and I offer them to others to give them voice. We have always personified the vast, mysterious and yet intimate forces of nature, as gods and goddesses, as kachinas, as the fey.   What might the Spirit of the River have to say as humans pollute our waters?  What might the Spirit of the Forest speak of?  What knowledge could the the Mountain Gods impart?

How might we use theatre, and participatory ritual, to engage others in the Great Conversation?  How might the renewal of contemporay Ritual Theatre help us to "re-enchant" the world?

Lauren Raine MFA

www.laurenraine.com

Coreopsis Interview revisited........

"Spider Woman" - Ritual Event "Restoring the Balance" at the Muse Community Theatre (2004)

In 2014 I did an interview for Coreopsis Journal of Myth and  Theatre, a wonderful online magazine.  I really enjoyed answering the questions, and ran across it again this week in the course of answering new questions for an interview.  Felt like sharing it again, and especial thanks again to Lezlie A. Kinyon, Ph.D for her faith in me.

Interview questions:

1.  Where can we see your work?

www.laurenraine.com 

www.masksofthegoddess.com.

2. What do you want the world to know about your work?

I guess I would feel that I’ve succeeded if in some small way my work helps in the greater work of bringing reverence to the Earth, and to the arising of the Divine Feminine.

3. Who – or what - do you see as your main influences?

Early on I became influenced by the writings of Kandinsky (“Concerning the Spiritual in Art”) and others, and rejected what I saw as an aesthetic that disregarded spirituality and mysticism as being outside of “high art”. I find it ironic that spirituality was a significant impulse in the early development of Modernism. Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, Anthroposophy, as well as Einstein's new physics, enormously inspired the work of such innovators as Mondrian, Kupka, Kandinsky, Arthur Dove, and others.

Later I discovered Joan Halifax (“Journey of the Wounded Healer”), met Alex and Allyson Grey (“The Sacred Mirrors”) and others, and began to think of art process in new terms. Art for healing, art for transformation of consciousness, art as a bridge between dimensions. During the 80’s I was involved with a group called the Transformative Arts Movement, and I even wrote a book based on interviews I did with visionary artists.

Rachel Rosenthal developed a form of contemporary “shamanic theatre” that I found profound. I saw her perform Pangaian Dreams in 1987, and every hair on my body stood up. Sometimes, like a Sami shaman making the “yoik” she would allow sounds to come through her that were absolutely electric, sounds and words that charged the room. The Earth Spirit Community’s Twilight Covening  introduced me to participatory ritual theatre and I made the “Masks of the Goddess” collection for the Reclaiming Collective’s 20^th Annual Spiral Dance. I have great admiration for what these two groups have developed as ritual process.

3.     Much of what you do seems to tell a story – even the single, stand-alone pieces. Where do you think that comes from?

The poet Muriel Rukeyser famously commented that “the Universe is made of stories, not atoms”.

I believe Native American mythology - and perhaps contemporary quantum physics - would agree with her. My patron Goddess is surely Spider Woman, the ubiquitous Weaver found throughout the Americas in one mysterious manifestation or another.  Among the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest she was also called “Thought Woman” (Tse Che Nako). As a Creatrix she brought the world into being with the stories she told about it. 

Myths and religions are stories, some more glorified, archetypal, literalized or contemporary than others. I think it is so important for artists of all kinds to recognize that we are weavers of the stories of our time, we are holding threads that recede behind us and extend beyond us into the future. We’re never weaving alone. So - what kind of stories are we shaping, collaborating with, how do we understand the gift of “telling the world” that Spider Woman has bestowed on us?  

"Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman Weave the World" (2007)

5. How would you describe your art...? (influences, history, school-of-art, your aesthetic) 

Perhaps “Cross disciplinary”? I seem to jump around a lot, from sculpture to ritual theatre to painting to…………….whatever seems to be the best medium of expression at the time. Different “languages”.  I guess I could say that my art-making is my spiritual practice, whether it is done with community (as in theatre and ritual) or alone in my studio.

6. What did you learn from working in theatre?

Being a visual artist is solitary, and I’ve always wanted art forms that were participatory, collaborative. Masks lead right into theatre, and questions about the traditional uses of masks as well. Masks are such metaphors – you can’t look at a mask, really look, without it suggesting some kind of being that wants to manifest through it.  They are vessels for all kinds of stories.

My colleagues (among them Macha Nightmare, Ann Waters, Mana Youngbear, Diane Darling) and I have developed some wonderful ways of working with masks and community theatre/ritual. In early Greek theatre a performance had three components – the musicians, the narrators or Chorus, and the masked performers, who would pantomime and dance the characters. We’ve often used that approach, particularly with a Theatre in the Round, a Circle.

Because the masks are dedicated to the Goddess, we’ve brought neo-Pagan sensibilities to the ways we designed our performances. This can include creating a ritual entranceway so the audience enters a magical space, adding audience participatory components to the performances, calling the elemental Quarters and/or casting a Circle  in theatrical ways, and concluding all performances with some kind of energy raising activity with the audience. In Wicca that’s called “raising the Cone of Power” and by so doing the blessing or overall intention is “released to do its work”, finishing with “de-vocation”, which is often a great conclusion with humor, or everyone gets up and dances, etc.

It’s actually very effective, and can be integrated as good theatre. For example, in “Restoring the Balance” (2004) we concluded with “Spider Woman”. While the music played and the narrators told the tale, “Spider Woman” wove invisible threads. With a rising crescendo of assistants, she wove a web with the entire audience. And indeed, for  that moment of breathless intensity everyone in the theatre was literally connected, holding onto a thread “from the Great Web” with everyone else. The “Blessing” was  experienced as part of the performance. 

7. What would you like to say to other artists (of any genre)?

"Our job was not to just re-tell the ancient myths,

but to re-invent them for today. Artists are the myth makers."

Katherine Josten, The Global Art Project

I agree entirely with Katherine Josten, who founded the Global Art Project in Tucson, Arizona – we are the myth makers of our time.  So, what kind of myths are we disseminating?  What are the new stories, how are the old stories still important - or not? 

We have become a global society, with a global crisis. I may sound like I’m preaching, but personally, I don’t want to experience any more art forms that are self-indulgent, nihilistic, violent forms that don’t further evolution into empathy in some way.

I’m not entirely comfortable when people speak of contemporary artists as “shamans” as I have too much respect for the long traditions of indigenous shamans, which have evolved within their particular cultures for thousands of years. But I do know artists can participate in healing and vision, and can find new contexts for creating new forms of what might be called contemporary shamanism.

I’d like to quote from a 1989 interview I did with the early performance artist, Rafael Montanez Ortiz. In the 80’s he studied  energy healing , as well as working with some native shamans in the U.S. and South America. Raphael was also a great influence for me. In the conversation I recorded and transcribed, we were talking about what an “art of empathy” might be, and he spoke about his studies in native Shamanism:

“You feel what you do……….Within the participatory traditions found in (indigenous) art, there is no passive audience. That's a recent idea, which is part of the compromise, the tears and breaks from arts original intentions. Ancient art process was a transformative process; it wasn't a show, it wasn't entertainment.

We need to see ourselves again as part of a brilliant, shimmering web of life. An artist at some point has to face that issue. Is the art connecting us and others in some way, or is the art disconnecting us and others? I think it is not enough to just realign ourselves personally either – as we evolve, our art should also do that for others, and further happen outside of the abstract. It must be a process that in its form and content joins us with the life force in ourselves, and in others.”

8. Do you feel that the questions of the spirit influence what you do?

I think Spirit influences much of what I do, and I’m not alone in that by any means!  There’s a many-layered conversation going on all the time when you open creative channels.  

Working in the collective process of ritual theatre is always amazing. When you make a strong, vibrant container with performance that is alive and meaningful for the participants, then dreams and synchronicities abound, the “container” of the developing work becomes charged. “If you build it, they will come””.

I remember in Joseph Campbell’s “Power of Myth” interviews with Bill Moyers, he spoke about “invisible means of support”. I think we’re supported by quite mysterious sources all the time, and when an artist finds her or his “burning point”, or for that matter a group shares it, doors do seem to open where we did not think they would.

9. Would you like to tackle your relationship to the fines artes?

Oh, I get a headache when I think about “the art world”! But I did get an MFA, I have been a part of it, and I’m probably unfair in my allergic reaction. It’s just that I think the premise of the “art world”, as it reflects capitalism, is way off from the original functions of art. 

Of course artists need to be supported by their communities. But when art becomes an “investment” and value is determined as a financial commodity (witness some of those Sotheby Parke Bernet auctions) you enter into a form of  “soul loss”. Within this construct there is no acknowledgement of the transformative dimension of art. The conversation is corrupted. People are taught to appreciate a work of art because it is hanging in a museum, or worse, it is “worth millions”. 

I always cringe inwardly when I hear someone talk about a painting they have in terms of what they paid for it, or what they hope it may be “worth”. The real “worth” should be what pleasure, insight, meaning, and questions they derive from being in the presence of a work of art, from being able to live with it in some way. 

I had a real revelation in Bali, where they really don’t have an understanding of what we call “being an artist” at all, let alone the rather “macho” myth of the alienated “great artist”. When I lived there, I found that virtually everyone made some kind of art, whether dance, offerings, music, etc., and virtually all of it was “dedicated to the Gods”.  It all had a ceremonial/ritual purpose. Art to the Balinese is a way to pray. 

They obviously make many things for money, including masks. But the “special masks”, the sacred masks, are kept in the Temples, commissioned and repaired by traditional Brahman mask makers. They are not made available for tourists except as they may be seen in performances of the traditional dramas such as the battle between light and dark represented by the dragon/lion Barong and the witch Rangda; after such uses they are “purified” with holy water before being returned to the Temple.. 

This revelation became an inspiration to create a contemporary, multi-cultural collection of “Temple Masks”. That’s how I conceived of “The Masks of the Goddess”,  as special masks dedicated to the Divine Feminine throughout world mythologies.  

10. A Couple of technical questions: 

a) what is the process you undergo in creating a mask?

For the face masks I find a person with a face I like. Then I take a plaster impregnated bandage cast that becomes a plaster positive cast, and then I form the mask over that cast with a thin, flexible leather. The technique is very similar to the old Italian “del Arte” mask technique.

b) how did you find *your* media and materials in the very beginning?

I’d like to think the masks found me. But I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that in the very beginning I started making masks because I was broke. I was a jeweler at the Renaissance Faires and business was bad, so I started making masks hoping they would sell better. They did, and very soon they began to introduce me to a whole new world.

11. What do you think the state of visionary art is today? 

There are some great visionary artists out there. Film in particular, with special effects technology, is quite astounding. Think about AVATAR – what an incredible feat, to create an entire cosmos in that way. The Life of Pi  - astounding. 

Ritual Theatre is an art form that is literally “visionary”, and I wish it was more widely experienced in mature, effective ways for audiences other than  groups that are generally esoteric. As Americans, many feel we’ve lost our rituals by and large, or the ones we have don’t have much energy left in them. People are hungry for  potent events that offer rites of passage, mythic enactment and immersion, and shared transpersonal, visionary experiences. It’s really a very ancient human heritage continually renewed. 

I was thinking of a ritual I experienced with the Earth Spirit Community years ago close to Samhain, All Souls Day. We processed in the twilight through a field with candles into the ritual hall, accompanied by the distant sound of drums.

The final segment of the ritual involved everyone being seated on the cold floor, in a large dark room, and blindfolded. For what seemed like forever we heard distant voices, people brushed by us, hands moved us around, strange music was heard. It was powerfully disorienting, suggestive, and frightening. Then at last our blindfolds were removed, and we found ourselves in a room beautifully illuminated with candles. In the center of the room was a woman in white, surrounded with light, flowers, fruits, water – the Goddess herself, the “return of the light”. Finally, as we left we were greeted by figures with mirrors for faces: we beheld our own reflections.

I’ll tell you, you felt that experience! We had truly been “between the worlds”. When we left the ritual and gathered for food and drink, every one of us felt love for each other and joy for being alive.

12. Any final words? 

Here’s a quote I love by the Buddhist philosopher David Loy:

"Stories are not abstractions from life but how we engage with it. We make stories and those stories make us human. We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us. The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as it is "What stories do I want to live?" Insofar as I'm non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, "What stories want to come to life through me?"

"Dream Weaver" (2009)

References:

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" (1999)
Ortiz, Raphael Montanez Ph.d, "Interveiw with Lauren Raine" (1989)
Josten, Katherine, "Interview with Lauren Raine", the Global Art Project (2004)

"Numina" Article Published in Coreopsis Magazine

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.

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.

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.