"NUMINA: Communion with Spirit of Place" - my Presentation at 2025 ASWM Conference

 

NUMINA:   Communion with Spirit of Place

By Lauren Raine MFA

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

    R.F. Foster

The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called Numina, or the "genius loci" of a particular place. Often a Shrine to the Numen of a place, like an orchard for example, would be placed so offerings could be left to ensure the goodwill of the numina. The Goddess Pomona, who later became the Roman Goddess of agriculture , was originally a spirit of place, a Numen. This process of personification in art and story is found throughout the world. 

Myth is a way for human beings to become intimate with what is vast,  deep, and ultimately mysterious. Modernism has continually  “de-enchanted” or “un-mythed” our world, ending the Conversation as place becomes commodity. And yet many have a deep longing for a magical and sacred experience of place, without being able to articulate it. And I  personally would like to propose that some stories, identified with special places or nature, may be rooted in actual  transpersonal visionary experiences.

With the evolution of patriarchal monotheism Divinity has increasingly been removed from Nature. We think of animism and the “nature religions” as primitive, trivial, even evil in light of a transcendent Biblical deity. With the rise of industrialization, we have looked at the world from a "users" point of view.  Yet every early or traditional culture has viewed environment as ensouled: stories about landscapes are full of invisible numinous beings that are conversant, protective, dangerous or beneficial, and responsive to what human beings do in some way.

For example, here in Southern Arizona, the Tohono O’dum view Baboquivari as their sacred mountain, inhabited and protected  by their creator God  I'itoi. According to legend, I'itoi inhabits a cave below the mountain, which is “the navel of the world – a place where the earth opened, and the people emerged after the great flood. According to local legend, at the beginning of the Spanish conquest of what is present day Arizona, a Spanish officer and his men tried to dig their way into the mountain. Suddenly, the ground under them opened and Baboquivari swallowed them. The O'odham believe that I'itoi continues to watch over them to this day, and they make pilgrimages to their sacred mountain.

 

In the UK,  when the Romans occupied the hot springs of Bath, they retained the name of the Numen honored there,  Sulis,  for fear of offending Her. The Baths became dedicated to both Sulis and Minerva.   

In recent times a famous experiment in working with the Numina to create a mind-boggling Garden and spiritual Center occurred at Findhorn in rocky Northern Scotland.  In the words of one of the founders, Peter Caddy, “The garden clearly had become the focal point for an experiment in the cooperation of three kingdoms:  the devic, the elemental, and the human. Each of us at Findhorn was playing a distinct role in the experiment. The ancients, of course, accepted  nature spirits without question as a fact of direct vision actual experience.” 

 Human experience changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou" instead of "it". From selkies to Lorelei, naiads to dryads, Islamic Djinn or Hopi Kachinas,  local myths abound with  the numinous residents of special places. Sacred places were especially revered because they had the potency for revelation through dreams or prophecy, for healing or fertility, and for shamanic or transpersonal experiences important to the individual or to the tribe.

Early Christians knew this when they built churches on earlier pagan sacred sites. Many Catholic shrines exist where earlier goddesses associated with a holy spring or well  were revered, such as the ubiquitous Bridgit’s wells throughout Ireland,  or the sacred caves dedicated to Black Madonnas in Europe.

There is a geo-magnetic  energy concentrated at certain places  that have been visited throughout the millennia because they catalyze visionary experience,  even prophecy. Before they became identified by  religions or designated, even enhanced,  by monuments, sacred geometry,  and the accumulation of  human interaction, these sites were still,  in their essence,   places of intrinsic numinous power.

 Like acupressure points upon the earth, such places speak to those who visit, and sometimes no  religious practice or belief system is necessary for them to have a transformative effect on those who visit.

Roman philosopher Plinius   Caecilius commented that:

 "If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numina."

Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one fall morning I stumbled down to the local Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont's mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain. Among the researchers was Sig Lonegren, a well-known researcher of earth mysteries. I went with them to a chamber in the woods, constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entranceway that would perfectly frame the Summer Solstice. Long investigated by the New England Archeological Research Society (NEARA), theories abound but no one knows who built these structures. There are many cairns, and some calendar sites, up and down the Connecticut River area that are very reminiscent of the same structures in Ireland.

Approaching the site,  I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in our hands, and I watched them open and close as we traced  what he called ley lines that ran into this site. Standing on the top of the submerged chamber, my divining rod "helicoptered": Sig explained that this represented the center or crossing point of two ley lines, a potency for which he believed the site had intentionally been built. 

Months later people gathered to sit in that chamber as the Summer Solstice sun rose through its entranceway. We all felt awe as the sun illuminated the chamber. And for me this was the beginning of a lifelong journey into the mystery of sacred places, and a quest to find the ancient Earth Mother.

Earth mysteries researchers like John Steele and Paul Deveraux in their book EARTHMIND have written that we suffer from "geomantic amnesia".  We have forgotten how to listen to the Earth, to engage in "geomantic reciprocity", instinctually, mythically, and practically - to our great loss.

The act of making a pilgrimage is among the oldest of human spiritual endeavors. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece apparently combined sacred place with mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for many years. The ancient Greeks built their Temple for Gaia at Delphi because  the unique personality, or Numina,  of that place was divined to be especially suited to the Goddess and to the Oracles of Delphi that would reside there. They also sited their healing Dream Temples according to the particular auspiciousness of place. Respecting what inspired the early Greeks to decide on a particular place may be important not only to pilgrims, but to creating future sustainable human societies.

I’d like to share a quote by a Mentor of mine,  Gloria Ornstein, one of the founders of Eco-Feminism:

“The ecofeminist arts do not maintain that analytical, rational knowledge is superior to other forms of knowing. They honor Gaia’s Earth intelligence and the stored memories of her plants, rocks, soil, and creatures. Through nonverbal communion with the energies of sacred sites in nature, ecofeminist artists obtain important knowledge about the spirit of the land, which they can then honor through creative rituals and environmental pieces”

Gloria Orenstein, The Re-Flowering of the Goddess

In 1999 I went to Harbin Hot Springs in California, where I had an extraordinarily vivid dream. I dreamed I was given an antique typewriter. When I set it on my desk I saw that it was covered with fine loamy dirt, like potting soil, as if it had come out of the Earth.  As I watched, the typewriter began to type by itself, and soon sheaf after sheaf of stories about Goddesses flew from it.  Soon the papers became color photos of Goddesses……….and then they became actual women, all colors, white, black, brown, yellow, even blue. The dream concluded with a long line of Goddesses standing in a procession………all looking at me!

Two months after that I received a commission to make masks for the Invocation of the Goddess at the 20^th Anniversary of the Spiral Dance in San Francisco, and I spent that summer making multi-cultural masks of 25 Goddesses for the Procession. And that was the beginning of my longest collaborative work with women, performance, and masks.

One of the most famous pilgrimages is the "Camino" of Spain,  which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella.

 Some believe the pilgrimage was earlier made to the original “Black Madonna of Compostella", a very  ancient effigy.

Many of the Black Madonnas may originate prior to the advent of Christianity, and, because so many of them occur in numinous caves or near springs,  I suggest they also represent the Earth Mother,  She who brings forth  life and takes it back in an unending cycle, within the Womb of the Earth.

Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost",  the alchemical soup to which everything living returns, and is  resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form. When pilgrims came to Compostella they were 'composted' in a sense, cleansed and renewed.  

In 2011 and 2018  I visited the Chalice Well,  and the White and Red springs of Glastonbury. The mythic Goddess  there is the  Lady of Avalon, who appears in the Arthurian stories, and whose origins are pre-Christian. More than a myth, She is  a presence I and many others experienced personally.

In 2013 it was my privilege to create a series of masks for a play by Anne Waters she called “Numina:  the Awakening”, which was produced in Willits, California. She and her collaborators imagined what it would be like to give voice to the Powers of the elements and of nature in this time of climate change. To hear what they might have to say. Her community was even invited to meditate together  to “listen” prior to rehearsals.

Among those voices was a prayer to “Our Lady of the Desert Spring” (read in both English and Spanish), Glacier or Ice,  and Dawn, a hopeful voice for a New Age .

 

Sig Lonegren has spent many years exploring sacred places, and commented that possibly, as human culture changed, we began to lose a mediumistic form of  consciousness, a daily gnosis with the “subtle realms.”  Perhaps this empathic capacity can return to us again, within a new evolutionary process, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering mythic pathways to the Numina.

                     Job 12:8  "Speak to the earth, and it will teach you"

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 inter-dependant.  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.

Job 12:8 

                                 "speak to the earth, and it will teach you"

References:

Devereaux, P.,  Steele, J. & Kubrin, D.  (1989). Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia, 1989 Harper & Row: N.Y. Page 157.

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

Foster, R.F.(2001) , The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press), page 130.

Lonegren, S. (2013) Mid Atlantic Geomancy, Blog. Retrieved on: http://www.geomancy.org/

See also, Spiritual Dowsing:  Tools for Exploring the Intangible Realms, Gothic Image Publications, 2007

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

Ornstein, Gloria, Reweaving the World:  The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Sierra Club Books, 1990, page 280

Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus), AD 61- 113

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Younger

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

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.