What I'll Be Presenting at the ASWM Conference in Tucson March 27 - 29th

 

I'll be presenting this short paper (or something very like it) at the upcoming Association for the Study of Women and Mythology Conference (ASWM) which will be taking place the last weekend of March, 2025 here in Tucson, Arizona.  It's based on my own mythic experiences and ponderings 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.   Paul Devereaux, an important Earth Mysteries explorer, called that "geomantic reciprocity", a relationship that develops between an individual, or a society, and the land itself, imbuing Place with transformative and intrinsic power and sanctity.  

To think of ourselves as in Relationship with place, with the land, with the creatures that inhabit it, with the "Numina" is to re-awaken to the understanding that everything is alive and intelligent within Gaia, our "Mother Earth", alive and environmentally interdependant.  This is, I believe, something, a kind of "mythic consciousness" we have lost in modernism and post modernism, and need very much to reclaim and re-invent in order to re-harmonize our relationship to the Earth. 

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                         Numina: Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage

“To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension. In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced: every place had its legend and its own identity….what endured was the mythic landscape.”

R.F. Foster, (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.  By Mything place  humans have created a language  wherein the “conversation” can be spoken and interpreted, and thus 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.

Our Lady of the Desert Spring: Prayers in the time of Drought

 

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.

Chubasco! Monsoon! Waiting for the Rains...........

"Our Lady of the Desert Spring", performance from "The Awakening",
 a Play directed and produced by Annie Waters in Willits, Californis (2013)

In Southern Arizona, June is like January in, say, Minnesota - we just try to endure and survive it.  It's mind boggling hot in June, and dry, the month when fires start, when plants and people wilt, when kids fry eggs on the pavement a few times before becoming bored with it all.  Shimmering heat waves seem to rise from the asphalt pavement of parking lots, and people hurry from one air conditioned space to the next.  

We, and the parched and thirsty land, await Monsoon Season.  Chubasco, the great magnificent storms that, if all is well, begin in mid July and last sometimes into September.   The storms that seem to roll in the afternoons, announcing themselves with thunder and lightening, the delightfully scary and loud darkening of the sky, and then Boom!  A blessed wall of water descends (if the Thunder Gods are so inclined). 


Suddenly the streets fill with water, a river runs down Broadway, cars stop, and a few of us just stand in the rain getting drenched by the blessing of it all.  And then, just as quickly as they rolled in, the Katchinas, Chubasco, the Numina of the waters.........blow away, off to some other part of the desert.  Then you stand amazed at the river your street has become, the sound of emergency vehicles and car horns are heard (because there are always fools who try to drive in the midst of the downpour), magnificent rainbows are seen over Tucson, the pungent scent of chapparell is ubiquitous, and all are refreshed.  

Within two hours, the streets are dry, and seemingly overnight, the desert has greened and flowered.   Most of our water for the coming year comes from the Monsoons - if these patterns of rain should change, life here would cease.  Water is life.   Yes, we love our Monsoons!  

Story Masks: "The Bone Goddess"

I love stories, discovering the stories that "wrap themselves around old bones" and wrap themselves around each of us.  With masks, the story is as much a part of the mask as the mask itself.  Masks are by their very nature "vessels for Story",  stories ever evolving in mysterious ways. If you let the mask "talk to you", much can be revealed.  While re-visiting the  Superstition mountains not so long ago, I remembered an encounter I had once with a persona of the land, a Numen of the mountain.  She spoke, I listened. Her name, I think, was the Bone Goddess.  

THE BONE GODDESS

I was the first one.

I am this land,

and you no longer know me.

Ah well. So what. I've been here a long time.

A long time.

In the beginning, I was alone. 

Alone in this place.

Me, and Old Man Mountain, 

sleeping beneath the hot sun. 

Running when the sun was young,

waking up the People in my country: 

Ho, Hare, Snake, Mallow, Saguaro. 

There were more People then.

Some have gone.

We spoke together then, laughed more. 

These ones,  these new ones, 

they think they own the place.

Ha! They dig and dig, 

but they will not find me!

Listen, I will tell you something, 

since you have come here with your hands empty.

You are full of holes.

Sometimes a person stands up and just walks outside

and keeps on walking into the sun, and does not know why.

There comes a time when you have given so much of yourself away 

there is nothing left, when you have become transparent,

when you can be seen through to the bone, 

when your spirit has become woven into bad things.

That's when you find yourself in my country.

Walk into the desert

sit beneath a cholla and be silent.  

Notice the shapes of bald mountains. 

Old Man, sleeping. 

The shape of his shadows, 

the shape of the sky, the color of shadows. 

That is when you must find beauty 

in a cholla 

crack in the sun like an old bone. 

That's the time when you must collect your own shadows.

I may help you. 

Bring your offerings if you wish, 

I will give them to the Bird People, the Mouse People, the Lizard People,

walk in the shimmering heat, the silence, you may find me.

If I want you to.

I may tell you stories that wrap themselves around old bones, 

around quartz and turquoise, pottery shards, 

stories of Snake and Coyote 

and cracks in the land like a spider web, 

full of light.

And I may not.

I was the first one. This is my place.