"If Women Rose Rooted": for EARTH DAY

 

"This is the core of our task:  to remake the world in the image of those ancient   stories.  To respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognized once again as holding the life-giving power of the Earth itself.  We can reclaim that image in each of us:  the creative, ecstatic, powerful feminine that each of us embodies in her own unique way.  Lacking it, it is no wonder that we are grieving, alienated, imbalanced - that we cannot find a way to belong to a world that teaches us to cover up not just our bodies but our feelings, our dreams, our intuition.  There comes a point in each of our lives when we face a choice.  Will we stay as we are, embracing the pale shadow of womanhood permitted us by the patriarchy?  Or will we sink deep into the heart of the boglands, and find in the depths what it is to reclaim our creative power as women? 

As always, the stories show us the way.  The old stories, the ones which tell us that women are the land, the Body of the Earth Mother.  The old stories, the ones in which the Earth is sacred, and so women are sacred too:  the force of creation, the givers of life.  The stories in which women are the bearers of the Grail, the keepers of the cauldron of inspiration and rebirth. "

Sharon Blackie, IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED (2016)

In 2018 I went to the Gatekeeper's Conference in Pewsey, in the U.K.  It was also my delight to visit a number of prehistoric sacred sites, including Avebury, Silbury, the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, the  great (fallen) Stones and Henge of Arbor Lowe in Derbyshire, the Nine Maidens, also in Derbyshire,  and others.  Truly, as I sit here in my urban home, I reflect that it has often seemed,  among these ancient Mysteries, that I feel most at home.  

I was also introduced to Sharon Blackie's book  IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED   which I enthusiastically read throughout my visit, feeling that it resonated greatly with me.  The author lives in rural Ireland, close to the   beloved land she writes about, and speaks with passion,  and the bitter/sweet  story-teller lilt of an Irish Bard, about an instinctual need women women have to return to mythic (and actual) roots in the land. 

In some ways she reminds me of  Clarissa Pinkola Estes, as she urges women to regain, and celebrate the creative power of the life-giving  Divine Feminine in mythology. and speaks of  an essence deeply rooted in nature because we ARE nature. 

 She  returns again and again to the need to be ROOTED in the Earth as well as a mythic and conversant landscape that is also woman affirming;  the Heroine's journey, she writes, is not the same as the classical  Hero's journey proposed by Joseph Campbell -  because it is a journey of interconnection, relationships, co-creative and co-experienced cycles, and finally, the journey of belonging to the Great Mother, the great "conversation" of the planet.  The Heroine's journey, in a new and yet ancient sense, is perhaps now  the journey of the Eco-heroine.

Ms. Blackie speaks with passion because she believes it is urgent for all to "rise rooted",  as the death dealing forces of  patriarchy and sociopathic,  unlimited capitalism  are  quite literally destroying the future for not only humans, but all children of Mother Earth.

The title is a poem in itself, and as an artist who compulsively for decades has been putting roots on  faces and  hands and  bodies........well, it jumped off the shelf at me!  Yes, all my work has been "rooted" for a long time, even if I haven't always consciously been so............ but like many Americans with a life of bewildering change and movement, I have always  wanted to be rooted, attuned to the essence of place, without always  knowing how or why.  I look at 45 years of art, and always the Tree is there.  The Tree that is Asherah, the Tree of Life, the union of Above and Below.  For me, intuitively a quest to find identity within the those  vital roots, found in the  living, composting dirt, and  among the twining vines, flying webbed among the branches with the sparrows.  

 

Silbury Hill, Avebury, Wiltshire, UK - believed to 
represent the pregnant belly of the Great Mother

When did we lose our roots?  When did the separation between nature and human happen?  When did the Great Earth Mother, eternally birthing and growing and dying and returning again...........when did She disappear under the weight of myth and patriarchal cultures?  When did the processes of nature and the cycles of nature cease to be sacred and became profane?  A question I many have sought to answer as we move fully now into ecological crisis. 

The Nine Maidens,  Derbyshire (Henge and Processional in background)

"For it was no peasant, but calm and cunning wizards, ruling and pegging out in granite  the windings of the dragon track  that writhes unseen in  marsh and moss and meadowland,  that twines in stellar gravity among the eaves of the cubic sky.   So they, upon the veins of Anu,  print a spell of glory in our blinks of lives.   Rightness of the world Self seen:  the green, the garden.  

Older yet and wiser far, and I will not forget."

.....Robin Williamson, "Five Denials on Merlin's Grave"

Speaking With the Land

In so many  rural areas of the UK  the 21st Century seems like it is just another layer atop a continually emergent pentimento, the patterns of  a much older landscape.   Of course this is true everywhere, but it is so much in daily evidence in the UK and Europe.

That "pentimento" is like an ancient tattoo - circular, serpentine, full of  standing  stones, henges, magic wells, pregnant "harvest hills",  and geomantic ley lines.   For me,  when I was able to walk and explore this overlay my vision expanded  to a  broader vista, a panorama that  opened in my mind  as  I imagined the world of those who walked there so long ago.  And that very faint yet vibrant Pentimento gave me a vision as well of what,  as myth makers and "geologians" for the future, we might re-invent from the dreaming Earth. 

As far as these energized, ley crossed sites go, what poet and Bard Robin Williamson called the "veins of Anu and the windings of the Serpent Track",  I agree with those scholars who believe that once upon a time the  very lands the people walked on, the land they grew their food and marked the Solstices and Equinoxes and the movements of the moon and the stars  upon, was  the "temple"  itself,  The Deity was beneath their feet, and all around them. 

As   Marija Gimbutas, and later Michael Dames, have argued, these sites mark a sacred landscape that was once viewed  literally as  the Body of the the  Great Mother from which the blessings of abundance came, and ultimately to which, in the great cycles of the year , all return.    Here, and in ubiquitous similar sites in Southern and Central England, Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Brittany..........perhaps as well in the mysterious realms of the great Temples of Malta,  or the barely excavated, and truly ancient circles of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey as well, we see the remnants of a worship of the Earth as Great Mother that lasted for a very, very long time.    

According to  Michael Dames in his book the Silbury Treasure, Silbury,  which I visited in 2018 along with other similar "harvest hills" (there is one along the Processional to Arbor Lowe as well)  literally represented the pregnant belly of the Great Mother, and were associated with certain times of the agricultural cycles.  In the Neolithic and early Iron Age he makes a significant argument that there was a universal religion which regarded the LAND ITSELF AS THE DEITY.    Situated just south of Avebury, Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is Europe's tallest prehistoric structure.  When his  book was first published in 1976,  archaeological investigations sponsored by the BBC  had demonstrated that the hill was not, as had previously been believed, a burial mound, nor did it have any buriel remains connected with its antiquity. Dames surveys the history of earlier digs at the hill, then uses comparative archaeological evidence, astronomy, ethnography, folklore, mythology, mathematics and place-name research to argue that the shape of the site is designed to represent the pregnant Belly of the Goddess.  

As with the ditch/henges that surround stone circles, Silbury would have been at certain times of the year surrounded by a human made body of water, which Dames believed not only was fundamental to the "temples" that these ceremonial sites represented, but in the case of Silbury, actually formed the shape of a squatting (birthing) woman.  He believes that Silbury was a sacred mound that was part of the Avebury ceremonial landscape.  He likens the "Goddess form" of the henge surrounding Silbury to similar pregnant Goddess sculptures and icons found throughout Europe during the Neolithic.  

As a child, I had great conversations with flowers and squirrels.  And, of course, my cats. Even earthworms were not immune to my words of concern for them.  Much later, I read avidly of the Findhorn Community, or Perelandra, or the Sirious Community,  the conversations members of these communities had  between the Devas of the plant kingdoms and those who came to learn and grow amazing vegetables, healing herbs, and magical gardens in conscious collaboration with them.  

 We need to learn to "speak with the Earth" again.   This impresses itself on me again, and again.  Not in some removed, abstract, distant way, but intimately, beneath our rooted feet, in our creative hands rooted in a great collaboration with the planet that stands aside, protects,  and at best shepards  the land.  That releases for good the outmoded concept of "domination" of nature.  Humanity must become friends again with the family of planetary life, the "Covenant" of the Garden.  I believe that our next  evolution as a planetary humanity is not out in space, but right here, on the Earth.   There will be many new innovations, but there will also be many, many re-discoveries of what was once known and understood.  This is indisputable  in the face of climate change,  and a technology that is advancing much more rapidly than we are evolving as a global humanity  to meet it. 

So where does religion come into this?  To be honest, I am not a religious person, although I have an abiding interest in  and experience of spirituality.  But I am a mythologist, and religions are founded upon myths, upon world and creation stories, which are ever revised and co-opted throughout history within  different cultures, sometimes to serve specific purposes.  

The change that must occur within western religious systems is that we cannot continue with a  patriarchal, tribal  alpha male centered mythos.     Nor  can we continue to worship deities that are founded upon ancient warrior sky gods -  wifeless, daughterless, motherless, preoccupied with with dominance,  however they are packaged.  We can't continue with religions that are "Renunciate" either, not if we wish to make our way back to a "conversation" with the land that sustains us.  Dissociative religions that teach that divinity and sanctity lie somewhere other than here,  whether that be conceived of as Heaven, Paradise,  some elusive "Enlightenment" or Nirvana,  or, as various New Age groups teach, that life is "not real", and hence we must reject its "unreality". ..... will not serve our children, or all the many other forms of consciousness that are co-evolving on planet Earth with us.  The paradigm is changing and the Goddess is rising - why?  Because She must.   

This is what is meant by the Return of the Goddess.  For  Restoring the Balance in the divided human psyche.  We cannot understand Her perhaps as  neolithic peoples understood Her, but we must facilitate Her rising as people of the 21st Century urgently need to understand Her.     Not as some hierarchical deity that replaces a tyrannical, misogynist  sky god with an equally "dominating" and merciless  matriarch -  but as, scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrated in their Gaia Theory,  the Body of the Earth itself, which we are living IN.  Not ON, but IN. 

And what we do to Her, we are doing to ourselves.  

 I respond deeply to Sharon Blackie's call to women to  "rise rooted" .  For those of us who have been rooting about in the shards and buried roots of prehistory and mythology........while we cannot really know what the ancients did or believed, we can sense it with our feet, divining rods,  instincts and imaginations, and (gnow)  that it is something that points toward a different way of being.  One we can invent, re-invent, and re-member ourselves into.

REFERENCES:

1 Blackie, Sharon,  If Women Rose Rooted:  The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging  2016, September Publishing 

2 The Gatekeepers Annual Conference, “Dreaming the Land” November 2018, Pewsey, Wiltshire, UK..   https://gatekeeper.org.uk/2018/05/dreaming-the-land-annual-conference-2018

3 Estes, Clarissa Pinkola,  Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,  November 27th 1996,   Ballantine Books

4 Williamson, Robin, “Five Denials on Merlin’s  Grave” from A Glint At The Kindling & Selected Writings 1980-83    

https://youtu.be/iuRUVzqAfgk (to hear the performance)

http://www.songlyrics.com/robin-williamson/five-denials-on-merlin-s-grave-lyrics/  (lyrics)

 5 Gimbutas, Marija,  The Language of the Goddess,  (1989)  (and other writings), see also Old Europe Excavations and Kurgan Theory,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marija_Gimbutas

6 Dames, Michael,  The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered,  November 20th 1978 by Thames & Hudson

7 Findhorn Community of Scotland: https://www.findhorn.org/

8 Sirius Community of Massachusetts:  http://siriuscommunity.org/ 

9 Perelandra Center & Michaela Wright:   https://www.perelandra-ltd.com/ 

10 Lovelock, James and Margulis, Lynn ,   The Gaia Hypothesis AKA  Gaia Theory, Earth Sciences, first published 1972  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Portfolio: "A Work in Progress" .... a Presentation at 2022 Pagan Studies Conference

I was embarroused to see that I never shared on this Blog the Presentation I was honored to give at the Conference on Current Pagan Studies ** (via Zoom) in January of this year.  Their Theme for 2022 was "Pagans and Creativity" so I offered a presentation on my own 50 years of being an artist, with (obviously visible) Pagan roots and Pagan iconography even in the very beginning.  It seems Gaia and Myth and the Goddess have been with me almost as soon as I could pick up a crayon, and it't been so ever since.  

https://www.slideshare.net/laurenraine/lauren-raine-portfolio-a-work-in-progress

Lauren raine portfolio a work in progress from Lauren Raine

** There will be another Conference this year January 14- 15, 2023

For information on the upcoming Conference:  https://www.paganconference.com/

"Catriona MacGregor: The Wild Path" - Interview on The Mystical Underground

The Mystical Underground is a series of podcast interviews conducted by writers Rob and Trish MacGregor on their Synchronicity Blog........their Blog is always fascinating, and their interviews equally so.  I felt like sharing a recent interview here that touches deeply on Gaianism and communing with the living Earth.   Thanks again for your continuing inspiration, Trish and Rob!

 https://soundcloud.com/themysticalunderground/tmu-0036-catriona-macgregor-the-wild-path

https://themysticalunderground.com/

Join Trish and Rob for a conversation with…

Catriona MacGregor has over thirty years experience in education and environmental leadership. She is a visionary bridge builder between nature and humankind – and an intuitive mystic.

Catriona oversaw one of the largest coastal sanctuaries in the United States stretching over 600 miles with wintering grounds & stop over sites for 98% of the long-distance migratory bird species in N. America.

Her conservation program led, in part, to the comeback of an endangered species for which she received a blue ribbon award from the Governor.

She has extensive experience in habitat management and species conservation and is leading a resilient forests initiative to apply innovative and bold solutions to forest & species management.

She’s an expert on environmental trends, she has advised scientists, government officials, non-governmental organization leaders, and the public on environmental topics.
Catriona was the Director of EarthScope’s Academy of Science and Communications for 15 years and she founded the International Bering Sea Forum, a public-private partnership and a diverse international coalition with representatives from 5 countries seeking protection of marine species and promoting the sustainable livelihood of coastal communities, indigenous communities.

After a mystical experience with a tree which brought her back to her ancestral Celtic roots, Catriona founded Nature Quest and has led Vision Quests and spiritual retreats for two decades.

She is the author of Partnering with Nature: The Wild Path to Reconnecting with the Earth, which won a gold medal from the Nautilus Book Awards, which recognizes world-changing books that promote positive social change. Previous winners include His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, and the Tibetan author Thich Nhat Hanh.
Catriona has a Masters of Science in Resource Management & Administration and a Juris Doctorate. She was admitted to practice law in New York and Pennsylvania. She specialized in environmental law for seven years. Catriona wrote a Supreme Court brief on issues of environmental and constitutional law.

She also has a new book coming out called Secrets of a Celtic Mystic: Sacred Earth Prophecy.

Earth Speak: Envisioning a Conversant World

I was looking forward to presenting this at the Association for Women and Mythology Conference in New Mexico, but unfortunately I have had to cancel because of illness.  But I just felt like posting it again anyway................brings back the revelations of that wonderful trip!

Earth Speak Power Point presentation from Lauren Raine

Earth Speak 2019 presentation from Lauren Raine

Earth-speak:

Envisioning a Conversant World

By Lauren Raine MFA

""Speak to the Earth and it shall teach thee"

Job 12:8

In 2018 I attended a conference on sacred sites and dowsing at Pewsey, in Southern England, called the Gate Keepers Conference (1), an annual conference of dowsers, mythologists, and Earth mysteries researchers who have been investigating sacred sites throughout the United Kingdom, as well as intentional pilgrimage to them, for many years.  I also undertook my visit as a personal pilgrimage, visiting in the course of my time in the U.K. Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, Arbor Low, and other sites.

 My introduction to this adventure took some fortitude.   After a 15-hour flight from Los Angeles, I waited in line 2 hours in Customs, then made my way to Paddington Station in London, then to Swindon by train, and finally to Avebury by bus.  By the time I stepped off the bus, I was, perhaps, in an altered state of consciousness from utter exhaustion.  I stepped from the bus to see, perfectly aligned with my sight, rising from the morning’s mist, the great prehistoric monument of Silbury Hill, the mysterious Omphalos of an ancient world. 

When I saw Silbury through the mist, what opened before me was a vision of a time when the entire landscape was the sacred body of the deity, a cyclical mythos of an animated Earth that ensouled and enlivened and enstoried every hill, spring, river and forest within a cosmology of conversant belonging.  I will never forget that moment of revelation.

Situated just south of Avebury, Silbury Hill is Europe's tallest prehistoric structure.   Michael Dames, in his book THE SILBURY TREASURE (2) demonstrates persuasively that Silbury, like other "Neolithic Harvest Hills" associated with nearby henges and standing stones, literally represented the pregnant belly of the Great Mother, and was associated with a certain time of the agricultural year, in particular, the harvest of July/August. 

Silbury Hill is part of the great Avebury ceremonial complex, and has been excavated over the centuries, never once finding the “great chieftain’s treasure” which, Dames points out, it was assumed “must” be there.  We now know, at last, that its interior does not hold gold or the bones of a mythic hero king and his unfortunate slaves.  Rather, it simply holds grains, turf, and animal bones, with no evidence of human burial at its core.  Silbury is also surrounded by a henge or moat, once considerably deeper than it now is, and which would have been full of water, at least at certain times of the year.Dames points out that this henge actually forms the shape of a squatting or birthing woman in profile.     He likens the "Goddess form" of the henge to similar ubiquitous Goddess sculptures and sites associated with Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Brittany.........as far as the mysterious Temples of Malta, or the barely excavated stone circles of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

Why has this interpretation of Silbury never been seen before?  Because, Dames points out, to do so one must make a kind of paradigm shift into an alternate view of his-story.  “Silbury “Michael Dames writes,

“Conveys a philosophy which is of exceptional relevance to the modern world.  Silbury has been reduced to an enigma because of the attempt to impress upon it concepts such as kingship, personal property, and individual male glory. Who put “King Sil” into Silbury?  We did, because we wanted him there - a superman chieftain with a super treasure and hundreds of slaves, so vain, so aggressive, so acquisitive, so preoccupied with eternal fame, that he could provide us with a monumental tomb and treasure.  All treasure finding attempts have failed because the builders belonged to a society for which such concepts had little importance, or even meaning.  And yet, since their compelling priorities are not entirely absent from our values, we can appreciate something of what the original Silsbury treasure was, especially since the future of our own civilization may give us urgency and humility to tender our investigation.” (3)

 

When I walked the Avebury complex, I experienced the intensification of life force vitality I have come to recognize in places of numinosity and telluric force.  There is no doubt in my mind (or body mind) that these sites marked places of intrinsic geomantic power, and that the placement of stones also served to intensify or channel the animating Earth energies present.   Sacred landscapes also augment their healing or consciousness elevating properties through the interaction of generations of people with the "spirit of the land” through what researchers such as Paul Deveraux (4) have termed "geomantic reciprocity".

 Geomantic reciprocity occurs as human beings bring intentionality and focus to a particular place, making it a holy or sacred place.  This  communion with place becomes more active as place itself accrues story or mythic power  in the memory of the people, and in the memory of the land.   Sacred places have both an innate and a developed capacity to bring about altered states of consciousness, especially if people come prepared within the open, liminal state of pilgrimage or ceremony.  And myth   is the language spoken to engage the numinous presence.

I also went to Glastonbury in Somerset as part of my journey to visit the famous Chalice Well.  Glastonbury is Avalon - the source of the Arthurian legends, the land of Merlin, Arthur and the Lady of the Lake.  Once the hill now called the Tor was surrounded by a lake.  During the Middle Ages Glastonbury was the home of the great Gothic Cathedral of Glastonbury and its community of monks, a place of universal pilgrimage.  The Cathedral was destroyed by Henry the VIII, and the Abbot executed, after the Abbot refused to leave the Catholic church.

Dowsers Caroline Hoare and Gary Biltcliffe (5) write of the “crossing of the Michael and Mary lines” at the Tor, a prominent point of interest to those investigating Earth energies.  The Tor also features a tower, once part of the destroyed Abbey, visible from miles away, that stands atop the famous hill.  They also speak of the more mutable “Dragon lines” of serpentine force that weave throughout this highly energized area.  Underground springs originate in the area of the Tor, springs that have been renowned for their healing powers since long before the advent of Christianity.   Now called the "Red Spring" and the "White Spring”, where these springs emerge, at an underground chamber and at the Chalice Well Garden, are still revered by pilgrims who come to them from around the world.   The red color found at the Chalice Well is from iron oxide deposited by the spring.  The White Spring deposits calcium, leaving a white residue.

 The Avalonian springs are famous as part of the ancient mythic landscape of Avalon…………. but in truth, there are hundreds if not thousands of once revered historical and prehistoric wells and springs throughout the UK, many of them still named for St. Brigit, the ancient Goddess of the Isles of Britannia.  The Chalice Garden, for me, is infused with presence, with the Goddess local  devotees call the Lady of Avalon. She is the Genus Loci of Avalon, what the Romans called Numina. (6)

The garden of the Chalice Well looked different, as the last time I had visited had been high summer.  It was deserted, and I was able to sit before the Well in meditation alone.   I took water from the springs to bring home, and then walked around.  What popped into my mind,  as if I heard it spoken, was odd - the words "Covenant Garden". When one is on a Pilgrimage, it is important to pay attention to whatever occurs, internally or externally.   As I walked among winters sleeping apple trees and bright red holly berries, I wondered:  what could "covenant garden" mean, and why had I thought of it? 

I remembered the name of the English Goddess Coventina.  According to Wikipedia,

Coventina was a Romano-British goddess of wells and springs. She is known from multiple inscriptions found at a site in Northumberland County, an area surrounding a wellspring near Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall. (7)

A Triple Goddess of wells and springs was certainly appropriate for the Chalice Springs  of Glastonbury.  Interestingly,  the word Covenant, like "coven", "convening",  etc.  refers to a gathering of people to reach a harmonious agreement, which can include an agreement that is holy in some way.   

Such musings then led me to imagine  the famous  "Ark of the Covenant", which was said to hold writings and objects of Biblical veneration, as well as containing  "God's sustenance for man" which was called Manna.   Manna was the food, variously described as different substances or grains, which was provided by God to feed the people.  "Manna" has also come to mean a kind of inherent numinous power that may be found in a place or an object.

 The Ark of the Covenant, described in the Book of Exodus, was a gold-covered wooden chest containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.  It also was supposed to contain “a golden jar holding manna, and Aaron's rod, which budded". (8)

Interesting:  holy food and a budding rod or tree.  The Garden is indeed a "harmonious agreement" between earthly beings of all kinds.  And "Manna" is the food provided by the Garden, which I view as the sustaining power of nature.  Aaron’s  "rod that blooms “could also be seen, from the viewpoint of a feminist mythologist like myself,  as a symbol originally belonging to the ancient Hebrew and Middle Eastern  Goddess Asherah, who was often  represented as a tree.  In the days of the Old Testament, She was an important deity, and was represented as a rod, or "Asherah pole”. (9)  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, along with the Goddess, as the Hebrew deity became exclusively male. 

I reflected that a Garden represents a "Covenant” between human, animal, plant, soil, air, rain, water.......A successful garden is a harmonious Ecosystem in balance with all of its components.  A garden thrives through a network of inter-dependant relationships.  Trees communicate with each other through a vast underground weaving of roots and fungi.  The bees and other pollinators bring new life; the worms, microorganisms and other insects assist in the decay process.  And the birds assist in distributing seed as well.  Not to mention 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 to reach a divine agreement.  THE GARDEN OF THE COVENANT.

As I was leaving the Chalice Garden, I saw a tiny metallic heart on the ground.  I was going to take it, but then it occurred to me that perhaps someone left it as a token or as an 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 that the camera showed light surrounding the little shape in the photo!  So I took two more, and they came out the same.   A Green Heart ……… 

Perhaps the Earth is Speaking to us all the time, we’ve just forgotten how to listen.  I believe there are ways to renew that conversation, to attune we once again to the voice of place, and hence, to see Place once again as sacred.  How might we live, how might we act, if we saw the world with such a vision, as both Covenant and Conversation?

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional bardic culture, every place had its legend and its own identity.... what endured was an ongoing conversation with the mythic landscape."

R. F. Foster (10)

In so many areas of the UK the 21st Century can seem like just another layer atop a pentimento of a much older landscape, one that proceeds our short view of history.   Of course, this is true everywhere, but it seems so much in evidence there.  That "pentimento" visible just below the surface is circular, serpentine, and full of standing stones, henges, magic wells, and ley lines.   What, as theologians and "geologians" for the future, might we recover, re-learn and re-invent from it?

With the evolution of monotheism and patriarchal religions that increasingly removed divinity from both nature and the body, and in the past century the rapid rise of industrialization, we have increasingly looked at the world from a "users" point of view.   Places with their unique qualities and beauties become "resources" instead of living lands.  Renunciate religions have also served to de-sacralize earthly experience, further complicating our crisis.   Yet every early culture has insisted that nature is full of intelligence and intelligences that inform, bless, heal, and communicate, often through the multi-dimensional language of myth and altered states of consciousness.   

Contemporary Gaia Theory, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (10), proposes that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, responsive and evolving.  If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, and the innate interactive intelligence of ecosystems, it follows that everything living is responsive and conversant in some way, in ways both visible and invisible.  I believe we need to learn to "speak with the Earth" again, not in some abstract way, but intimately, beneath our well-rooted feet, in our creative hands entwined and webbed among a great planetary collaboration. The "Covenant" of the Garden.  

How do we regain our niche in that great “Covenant”?   One answer is through “re-mything” culture.  Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate with what is ultimately vast, deep, and mysterious. Our experience changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou" instead of "it".    We can renew our conversation, and change our paradigm, by looking back as well as forward, to a time when "nature" was about relationship with the land.  Relationship  in which cultures, individuals and religions were profoundly embedded as both story and as living metaphor.   And some places were places of special power, places of pilgrimage.

References and Notes:

1.  The Gatekeeper Trust,  “Dreaming the Land – Working with the Consciousness of Nature", Annual Conference 2018,  Pewsey, Wiltshire, UK https://gatekeeper.org.uk/2018/05/dreaming-the-land-annual-conference-2018/

2.  Dames, Michael:  The Silbury Treasure:  The Great Goddess Rediscovered, 1976, Thames and Hudson, London

3.  Dames, Michael:  The Silbury Treasure:  The Great Goddess Rediscovered, 1976, Thames and Hudson, London, Page 76

4.  Deveraux, Paul:  Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia,Paul Devereux; John Steele; David Kubrin, 1992, Inner Traditions, Vermont 

5.  Biltclilffe, Gary and Hoare, Caroline:  The Power of Centre, 2018, Sacred Lands Publishing, Dorset, UK 

6.  Cambridge English Dictionary (2019): 

   numen ^{/ (ˈnjuːmɛn) /, noun} plural -mina (-mɪnə)             (An ancient Roman religion) a deity or spirit presiding over a place,             a guiding principle, force, or spirit

7. Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia; “Coventina”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventina

8. Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia; “The Ark of the Covenant”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_the_Covenant

9. An Asherah pole was a sacred pole (or sometimes a tree) that was used in the worship of the Goddess Asherah. The Asherah pole was often mentioned in the Old Testament as one of the ways the Israelites sinned against their God by worshipping other gods.  The "Asherah pole" was mentioned in the Judeo/Christian Bible a number of times, including Exodus 34:13 (NIV): "Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles." The Israelites were commanded to destroy any Asherah pole they found - however, it seems that the custom, as well as the worship of Asherah, was absorbed and retained nevertheless by Israelites for a considerable time.  For more:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah_pole

10.   Foster, Roy F., Modern Ireland:  1600 - 1972, 1990, Penguin Books, N.Y

11.  Lovelock, James with Margulis, Lynn: 

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, 1979, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England.