Persephone - A New Bas Relief

 

Persephone is so much about the Turning of the Year, the Goddess of Equinoxes, the Balance point at which the regeneration of spring begins, and the diminishment and going in to the Dark of winter begins as well.  I think that's where this sculpture arose from, feeling the incipient life beneath the Earth, the stirring of spring.

                           All artwork and text unless otherwise specified is COPYRIGHT Lauren Raine 2024

La Llorona

La Llorona

 

Sometimes you walk out

under an old, cold moon to call.

You call, but there is no answer,

no heartbeat, no rhythm to follow or find.

 

Dry.  All you hear is traffic, dust,

Smoke obscuring the distance. 

Your time is eaten by long lists of little things.

The sounds of human discord ring like a broken bell

where once the lucid air sang among the stones,

this you know with bone knowledge,

bone history, you know this with your feet.

 

Where once the lucid air sang among the subtle stones,

metates, petroglyphs.  Where once a river flowed.

Even here, a river, before the cattle,

cars, too much thankless taking.

 

As if the waters would always flow.

As if the breast would never run dry.

As if, as if there were no children lost

And yet unborn, their open mouths,

Crying just beneath your feet.

 

Dry.  I look into my life, the river is dry.

I have also been eaten. There is no magic to replenish

these years made of too many little things. 

Sometimes, you hold your hands to the mountain

You ask, "whose hands are these?"

 

Am I not also this land?

One small and moving piece of it?

You call, but there is no answer.

 

Where have they gone?  Coyote moon celebrant,

even Snake and Scorpion, who leave all stones best unturned?

Plastic katchinas made in China invent them.

Spirals written among the holy rocks are silent,

where old men push little balls across green grass

among the desert's drought.

 

Here, where once a river ran,

A river that ghosts among the stars.

(2002)

In looking at my 2018 illustrated poetry collection  APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices  I've had the urge to share some of them here (well, some of them I've already shared over the years but they are finally finished  now!) Since very few people will ever read it, and I'm not doing any copyright infringements, I think I will share some of them here.  This poem "ghosts" a river that sometimes I glimpse, a river lost in the dry arroyos of consumer culture.  Perhaps, not my most optimistic of poems.............

 

 

Found: A Book for Spider Woman

 I'm at a funky hot spring I sometimes go to when I need to, and this morning I saw a beautiful snake curled up by my campsite.  Determining that it was not a rattle snake, I watched it unwind, flash its forked tongue at me a few times, and then spiral away slowly into the bushes.  I felt quite graced by that presence!  Which may or may not have anything to do with finding another "book that never happened"  in my Blog, and wanting to share it again, as well as to remind myself to not let it just vanish.  It was a proposal for a book arts residency that I didn't get.   I really should see about just finishing the book myself somehow........................ 

Nov. 17, 2017

This is the time of year I go through the tedious process of applying for things, which I try not to be disappointed by when the rejections roll in.  I figure it's kind of like "artist Bingo".......sometimes you win.  And I've "won" a few times in the past, and been fortunate to have some great residencies and even a few awards and fellowships.  So this was an application to make an artist's book in the spring at the Women's Studio Center  in New York. Usually I tear my hair out when I make these applications, but this was fun!  

A book would consist of no more than 20 pages all silk screened and hand bound, so the pages would really be part of a "bound theme show" in a way.  I returned to my many  years of devotion to the Legend of the  Spider Woman in coming up with these prototypes for pages.  With so much competition, I seriously doubt I'll be considered, but, the ideas were fun to make and who knows, maybe they could become a book anyway.  I shall never tire of images that speak to me of the meaning of "A Webbed Vision".

All images are copyright Lauren Raine MFA (2017)

"Aphrodite in Brooklyn and Other Mythic Voices" - Illustrated Collection of Poems

https://www.blurb.com/b/9735581-aphrodite-in-brooklyn-and-other-mythic-voices

PREVIEW:  https://www.blurb.com/books/9735581-aphrodite-in-brooklyn

This is the trail of my poetry, all I have really, from the early 1970's to the last poems. While I have been a prolific visual artist, and fairly so with community arts as well, poetry has not poured forth from me except in certain poignant moments.  And myth, it seems, has always been present.

I find these poems are touchstones along the path, lucid and sometimes numinous artifacts that, by touching them again, enable me to renew my acquaintance with those luminous moments of insight, love, loss, and above all, the sheer beauty of being alive. Beyond that, there is a pattern, a woven pentimento that glitters  beneath each seeming surface, a pattern that enfolds me from young adulthood to old age and belongs to all and none of those "identities". There is a voice here  I recognize as uniquely my own. Archiving these poems in this little collection, even better, having the pleasure of illustrating them............. has allowed me to hear that voice again.

I made this Collection for that reason, and as a Gift or Offering to any fellow Wayfarer who may chance upon it as well. If you find a resonance here with your own voice, I am pleased indeed.

Saraswati

Love is Saraswati's river

flowing through our lands.

She will feed the rice fields,

She will accept our woven offerings.

She will bear our ashes

and the fires of Kintamani

to the sea.

Formless,

she neither takes nor gives:

we impose these significances

upon the flowers we cast in her.

From birth to death,

Saraswati's river sustains us to the sea.

(2000)

ON THE BEACH

Oct. 11th, 2001 

  

One month after the world ended. 

The little island world we, the privileged few, 

could pretend was safe, forever, and righteous. 

The fallen towers, the fiery messengers 

of unfathomable destruction yet to come. 

  

Tourists walk here, barefoot on the beach. 

They came here, I imagine, as I have 

to remember, not to forget. 

To remember a red dog and a yellow-haired child 

as they enter the water, their cries of goodly shock 

and honest forevers cold, blue, and always new. 

  

A white heron stands balanced in perfect equanimity upon one leg. 

Wave forms overlay my feet, transparent hieroglyphs of infinity: 

      Her way of speaking 

      Her manifest, unspoken words. 

  

A brown man lies spread eagled on the cliff. 

He is cast between sky and sea and land, 

sand sunk, leaf-molten, blackberry thorn, the Green. 

Toes, fingers, flesh reaching into the green redeeming Earth. 

He is rooting himself.   He is taking himself back. 

  

I lie down in grateful imitation, 

a stranger in companionable human proximity, 

sharing this rite of re-membering. 

  

I see a girl, walking on this very beach. 

Yesterday, and 30 years ago (how did I get here from there?) 

  

She is sourcing, sourcing the one who lives here, 

a river Goddess with no name. 

She has made a mermaid offering 

of sand and stick and seaweed. 

I can hear her sand prayers sound here still. 

Wave resonant, purified by fire and time, 

memory rooted, sky seeded, they ring true still, 

here, in Gaia. 

(2001)

Art and Myth Making

 "Myth is a living force, like the telluric powers that stream through the Earth.  It is this mythic vision, looking for the ‘long story,’ the timeless tale, that helps us approach the deep mysteries because it insists that  these are  the stories we really live by, rather than the one we like to think we are living.  And moreover,"mythic vision" helps us  decide if our myths are working for or against us. ’' .........Phil Cousineau

Sometimes it occurs to me that I speak a language not many people speak, a language I think was  once spoken more widely in my circle, my world, and now I hear so rarely.  And like any traveller in a foreign land, there is such a delight when one meets a fellow country person who speaks your language, your mother tongue.  Because one has become accustomed to not speaking, to being silent, to nodding politely, knowing that the words forming in your mouth cannot emerge.  

The language of art, not always of course, but often, is like the mother tongue of those who explore the language of dreams, is mythic, multi-layered, inter-dimensional, and, as Phil Cousineau comments in the brief essay I take the liberty of copying below, a language that "resembles the god Proteus in the Odyssey, a shape-shifting creature who knows the secret that the lost Greek sailors long to hear—the way home.  But they must learn how to get a grip on him, if only for one slippery moment, so he might surrender his hidden wisdom."

Artists of all kinds, in my humble opinion, are floundering around for identity in a world that stupidly, blindly, dangerously defines value and success according to the $ in front of it.  Artists are spoken of as "emerging", kind of like a stock portfolio, and artists are often called "artist entrepreneurs" (which is not to say that some entrepreneurial skills aren't helpful).  But they  do not realize or value the deeper function, which is that  they are translators, the ones who can venture into that liminal realm and return to tell the tale of what was seen to the benefit of the tribe.  They might find themselves empowered if they allow themselves to view their work as a kind of sacred task, myth makers of their time.     Then they can see that they have their creative, intuitive hands in the ever evolving loom of Spider Woman, weaving and unravelling brightly colored threads, finding ways to communicate the story even as the story continually reveals itself to them, and through them, to others.  

 
 On Myth and Mythmaking

 excerpt from book by  Phil Cousineau

 Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Our Lives (2001)


I was raised on the knee of Homer, which is an Old World way to describe growing up on stories as old as stone and timeless as dreams.  So I see myth everywhere, probably because I am looking for what my American Indian friends call “the long story,” the timeless aspect of everything I encounter.  I know the usual places to look for it, such as in the splendor of classic literature or the wisdom stories of primal people.  

I want to explore the aspect of myth that most fascinates me: its ‘once and future’ nature.  Myths are stories that evoke the eternal because they explore the timeless concerns of human beings—birth, death, time, good and evil, creativity and destruction.  Myth resembles the god Proteus in the Odyssey, a shape-shifting creature who knows the secret that the lost Greek sailors long to hear—the way home.  But they must learn how to get a grip on him, if only for one slippery moment, so he might surrender his hidden wisdom.

This is what I call ‘mythic vision.’  The colorful and soulful images that pervade myth allow us to step back from our experience so that we might look closer at our personal situations and see if we can catch a glimpse of the bigger picture, the human condition. 

 But this takes practice, much like a poet or a painter must commit to a life of deep attention and even reverence for the multitude of meaning around us.  An artist friend of mine calls this ‘pulling the moment,’ a way of looking deeper into experiences that inspire him.  In the writing classes I teach, I refer to this mystery as the difference between the ‘overstory,’ which is the visible plot, and the ‘understory,’ which is the invisible movement of the soul of the main characters.   In this sense myth is a living force, like the telluric powers that stream through the Earth.  It is this mythic vision, looking for the ‘long story,’ the timeless tale, that helps us approach the deep mysteries because it insists that  there are  the stories we really live by, rather than the one we like to think we are living, and moreover, ("mythic vision" helps us)  decide if our myths are working for or against us. 


If we don’t become aware of both our personal myths and the cultural myths that act upon us like gravitational forces, we risk being wholly overpowered and controlled by them.  As the maverick philosopher Sam Keen has written in Your Mythic Journey, ‘We need to reinvent them from time to time. . . .  The stories we tell of ourselves determine who we become, who we are, what we believe.’'

"A Webbed Vision" ~ Reflections on Interdependency and Individualism

"What might we see, how might we act, 

if we saw with a webbed vision?  

The world seen through a web of relationships…

as delicate as spider’s silk, 

yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”  

Catherine Keller, "From a Broken Web"3

The quote above, from Theologian Catherine Keller, derives from the ancient and original root meaning of the name "Penelope", the "faithful wife of Ulysses".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she became demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology, and as such her name meant "with a web on Her face", one who "sees the connections".  I have never forgotten the significance of that.

It's been 5 years since the shooting of beloved Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  Because I lived close to her former office, I saw a candlelit altar develop for her, with so hundreds of  wishes for her recovery and for peace.   Having been witness to this  tragedy in my home town  of Tucson,  which took the lives of 6 people including a child, and remember so many other atrocities committed by men with guns since,  I' ve been  unable to think in terms that are too abstract.  When confronted with the horror of violence, and the heavy pall of grief, the need to experience  inter-dependence, with-in our bodies and with-in the refuge of our imaginations -  is very real and immanent.   We want to know we are not alone, we want to believe we can support each other.

I was struck by  the  way "Together We Thrive" became a  theme echoed throughout Tucson at that time, and a motto that headed healing activities, from President Obama's call for unity, to spontaneous Shrines created throughout Tucson.  Does any of that moment remain?  Congress is trying to end Obama Care, which will end health insurance for millions of people, and one of the most arrogant of exploitative capitalist  billionaires, Donald Trump, is running for President.   As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only our former democracy, but the very life of our planet, and the unreasoned ideology of capitalist "individualism" that in many ways makes that possible in this country.............I don't know.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  

Altar for Gabrielle Gifford at her office, January 2011, after she was shot 

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create community in today's world.  Could a strong community  have prevented what happened?  Unbalanced individuals will always abound, and lethal weapons are readily available - the American gun culture, and easy access to lethal weapons, ensures the violent deaths continue year after year.  Yet even so, the failure of community speaks to this tragedy.  If we weren't in so many ways a culture of "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors", and our technology increasingly allows us to insulate ourselves from the so-called "outside world" ... would this young man have received the attention he needed before he erupted in catastrophic violence in 2011?

"The Rugged Individualist" writes sociologist Philip Slater,1 "cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, because this is "getting government off our backs. "   

This kind of thinking fails in every way to communicate that we live within a vast web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is also very intimate. This is my ultimate Iconic Image, the Great Web of Gaia, the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the sacred links, the archetype of Spider Woman.  I know my art seems obscure to many, but that is what it derives from, in one image after another.  I can't seem to stop making them, because the Web underlies every aspect of our life.   A successful adult is so because of parents, teachers, community resources, and distant ancestors  that enabled him or her to mature.  And without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into future generations,  human beings end up feeling alienated and ultimately without a sense of purpose. They feel disposable, and perceive others as equally disposible.

Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable corporate consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.  And by the way, local free enterprise is not the same as the kind of souless capitalism we now have.  Within a healthy free enterprise system the wealth circulates within the community - if the baker does well, the   pharmacy does well, if the dressmaker does well, so does the restaurant, and so on.  In what we now have the wealth is removed from the heart of the community to the mega stores, like Walmart, on the outskirts, and all the jobs imported to slave labor overseas, to the loss of all except the very, very wealthy exploiting the situation.  

In tribal societies, survival depended utterly on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to  adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is the template upon which they stand;  a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse. Without a theology of co-dependency, which we have lost in the advent of mega global capitalism and its "individualism" which benefits only a very, very few individuals, that collapse is apparent.  Because the system, ultimately, cannot adapt, cannot become sustainable, cannot become viable.

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary..........." Philip Slater  commented in his last book The Chrysalis Effect,  "the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis".   But that metamorphosis, I believe, is based up the profound realization of our inter-dependency in every single way, the "Great Web", a Webbed Vision.  We need this vision, updated and evolving for the challenges of our time.  

I call on artists and other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe. 

Renunciate theologies (and mythologies) that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and the demands of relationships of every kind, either in service of some abstract "better place" (be it heaven, paradise, enlightenment or nirvana) or in reaction to teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us, or those who must come after us.  If we're going to speak of "oneness", we need myths that include tremendous, creative diversity within that "oneness", that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic." wrote artist Rafael Montanez Ortiz.  "The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order  to "have control".2  Ortiz maintains that if the logic of one's society is relational, you are in a construct that places you in  relation to all things, and thus, develop an  empathic response to all things.   In earlier societies, he believes,  the entire world mythos was about a living world, alive, entangled, conscious, animistic and full of Anima Mundi, the World Soul.  It's no coincidence that this "primitive"  worldview is very close to what science, from Gaia Theory to Quantum Entanglement, is discovering.

Myths, as the "narrative foundation" for  societies, become more meaningful through embodiment, through an actual enactment - through ritual that is engaging and potent.   Culturally in the West we have, by and large, lost our rituals, or they have become weakened through commercialism - witness the sad transformation of Solstice rituals into the meaningless commercialism of Christmas, or the diminishment of the important days of honoring the ancestors into "scary Halloween". 

Our minds aren't just in our skulls, but in  the entire body, which includes the aura and the etheric networks that exist between us and the rest of life.    Whether we're talking about a forest, or another person, abstractions can remove us from the  experience of communion, the immanent ability to sense what is going on.  Abstractions become what is going on.  I have experienced, and helped to create, rituals that were profoundly transformative.  My experiences of the Spiral Dance with Reclaiming, or with the Earth Spirit Community's Twilight Covening, or the Lighting of the Labyrinth at Sirius Rising......will always energize me when I remember them.  Within those magical circles, I entered mythic time and mythic space and mythic mind, and experienced, as Joseph Campbell put it, the "Thou" realm of existence.  That  does not end when you leave the circle.

In 2004, I directed "Restoring the Balance", a non-denominational event devoted to cross-cultural stories of the Great Mother.  Our cast wished to dramatize the need for healing the great Earth Mother.  We chose as our centerpiece the Inuit legend of Sedna, and the rituals of atonement and reciprocity the Inuit perform with their shaman when they believe they have fallen from balance with the life giving Ocean Mother.   Artist Katherine Josten (founder of the Global Art Project) danced the role of  Sedna.  In bringing up the event, she  observed that:

"The work of our group is not to re-enact the ancient goddess myths, but to take those myths to their next level of evolutionary unfolding.  Artists are the myth makers."

In this same spirit, another member of the cast chose to weave a web with the audience as  Grandmother Spider Woman.   Morgana Canady wove a web with 300 people.  In this performance biodegradable cords from “Spider Woman’s Web” were later distributed among cast members, and scattered throughout the desert, symbolically "extending our web".  As part of the Global Art Project an exchange was made with the AFEG-NEH-MABANG Traditional Dance Company, in Cameroon - a part of the weaving.  


 Among the Navajo, infant girls often have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will "become good weavers".  

May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands for the work ahead of us ..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".

1) Phillip Slater, The Chrysalis Effectt (2007)

2) Rafael Montanez Ortiz Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine for unpublished manuscript (1989)

3) Katherine Keller Ph.D., "From a Broken Web" (1989)

4) Katherine Josten M.F.A., The Global Art Project

Celestial Navigations and Geoffrey Lewis

I was sad to learn that Geoffrey Lewis died this year.  He seems to be remembered for his roles with Clint Eastwood, but to a great many of us he is remembered as  storyteller, a truly contemporary Bard of the 80's.  I listened to Celestial Navigations with rapture, just as I did the work of the Scottish Bard Robin Williamson.  Those stories will always be imprinted on my imagination.  Thank you to the BARD and his colleagues for a treasure!

And because this Blog is also as much an Archive as a Memoir, I take the liberty (thanks once again to the great generosity of UTube)  of adding below a site that has a great many of his stories, in case you are  maniac like me and can listen to them forever.  And a few of my favorite ones preceed that listing.  Although I'm a film fan, there is something about the listening to Story that really holds to the heart  just as reading a book does, because the listener must fill in the spaces with her or his imagination.  It's not  a passive process.  Viewing a painting is the same - a painting is really a window into another world.  

But the Storytellers.............I find myself becoming a child again, listening before a campfire to that story, wanting to know what happens, and also wanting the story to never end.

https://youtu.be/nPW7osZrL0A









For a large collection of Celestial Navigations stories:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ0nWoWqNDwFbRHCRWjgcXjNP6g4l7-xp

Everyday Goddesses.........

Our Lady of the Green Heart (2015)

Lately I've begun to paint again, tentatively and trying to find my hand again.  It used to be so easy!
Everything I make is an Icon, in one way or another.  And I also think, as I create portraits of people I know, that the Goddesses are great universal archetypes that belong to the Collective Sacred Mythos, etc., but............they also live right here, in the contemporary here and now, in real women.  

And thinking that, synchronistically, women have turned up who seem to embody those Goddesses - I snap pictures of them, and the Goddess looks out at me from them, smiling and at ease in the 21st Century just as much as 500 B.C.  A young Chinese doctor is staying at my house, and a Quan Yin mask is evolving from her compassionate face.  A beautiful German nurse is renting my guesthouse, and as she walks with such kind, lush, and un-selfconscious  beauty, I see Freya in scrubs, Goddess of love and healing and beauty.  

Green Heart (2009)

Anyway..........the first painting I have done, rusty as it is, wants to be called "Our Lady of the Green Heart".  But maybe she is also Gaia.

I wanted to make a better version of a self-portrait I did years ago (on right), but, although (I confess) I did use a younger picture of myself, the painting evolved in a whole new way, much more Iconic, and the expression, I like to think, both intelligent, joyful, and Ironic.   In other words, not without a great sense of humor about all of it.

Go figure.

This month has brought quite a few meltdowns, internally, for me,  A lot of endings, a lot of internal work, revelation, change.  Hecate seems to have been working with me indeed, and we're not out of the underground yet.  This is become my own "Winter of Listening", and I sink into the dark and quiet of November with deep gratitude.

But, and I think this is why I write this entry in this journal, I realize that it's important to listen to what the painting has been saying as well.  The beauty of art making is that the Conversation is not always visible at first, but it is always there.  And the painting, even as I enter a truly incubating time, is an Invocation for the future!  Even as I go underground in November, I see that I have painted a hope for the seeds of my spring.    And I say this without modesty, but gladly!

May we all be incubating Everyday Goddesses and Everyday Gods.

Hecate (1997)

"Numina" Article Published in Coreopsis Magazine

I'm pleased that my article (below)  has been published  in Coreopsis for the Summer edition.  Great magazine. 

Numina: Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage

by Lauren Raine MFA

ABSTRACT:

The importance of Pilgrimage to the formation of mythology may have much to do with the actual interaction between place and society throughout human history. The ancient Romans called “spirit of place” the Numina, and this personification of place is found throughout all early and traditional cultures.

---

 

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

R.F. Foster, (2001, p. 130)

 The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called Numina, the “genius loci” of a particular place. I personally believe many mythologies may be rooted in the experience of “spirit of place”, the numinous, felt presence within a sacred landscape. 

To early and indigenous peoples, nature includes a “mythic conversation”, a conversation within which human beings participate in various ways. Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious. Mything place provides a language wherein the “conversation” can be spoken and interpreted, and personified. Our experience changes when Place becomes “you” or “Thou” instead of “it”. 

In the past, “Nature” was not just a “resource”; the natural world was a relationship within which human cultures were profoundly embedded. The gods and goddesses arose from the powers of place, from the powers of wind, earth, fire and water, as well as the mysteries of birth and death. In India, virtually all rivers bear the name of a Goddess. In southwestern U.S., the “mountain gods” dwell at the tops of mountains like, near Tucson, Arizona, Baboquivari, sacred mountain to the Tohono O’odam, who still make pilgrimages there and will not allow visitors without tribal permission. This has been a universal human quest, whether we speak of the Celtic peoples with their legends of the Fey, ubiquitous mythologies of the Americas, or the agrarian roots of Rome: the landscape was once populated with intelligences that became personified through the evolution of local mythologies.

 The early agrarian Romans called these forces “Numina”. Every river, cave or mountain had its unique quality and force – its inherent Numen. Cooperation and respect for the Numina was essential for well-being. And some places were places of special potency, such as a healing spring or a sacred grove.

As monotheistic religions developed, divinity was increasingly removed from nature, and the natural world lost its “personae”. In the wake of renunciate religions that de-sacralized nature and the body, and then the rapid rise of industrialization, nature has become viewed as something to use or exploit, rather than a relationship with powers that require both communion and reciprocity. Yet early cultures throughout the world believed that nature is alive, intelligent, and responsive, and they symbolized this through local mythologies. From Hopi Katchinas to the Orisha of Western Africa, from the Undines of the Danube to the Songlines of the native Australians, from Alchemy’s Anima Mundi, every local myth reflects what the Romans knew as the resident “spirit of place”, the Genius Loci. 

Contemporary Gaia Theory revolutionized earth science in the 1970’s by proposing that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, interdependent and continually evolving in its diversity.  The Gaia Hypothesis, which is named after the Greek Goddess Gaia, was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being used in subjects such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry, systems ecology, and climate science. …………….In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all life forms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.

If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, it might follow that everything has the potential to be responsive in some way, because we inhabit and interact with a vast living ecological system, whether visible to us or not. Sacred places may be quite literally places where the potential for “interaction” is more potent. There is evidence that Delphi was a sacred site to prehistoric peoples prior to the evolution of Greece. Ancient Greeks built their Temple at Delphi because it was a site felt to be particularly auspicious for communion with the Goddess Gaia. Later Gaia was displaced by Apollo, who also became the patron of Delphi and the prophetic Oracle. Mecca was a pilgrimage site long before the evolution of Islam, and it is well known that early Christians built churches on existing pagan sacred sites.

There is a geo-magnetic energy felt at special places that can change consciousness. Before they became contained by churches, standing stones, or religious symbolism, these “vortexes” were intrinsically places of numinous power and presence in their own right.

Roman philosopher Annaeus Seneca junior commented that:

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

Personal Encounters

Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one morning I went down to the local Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont’s mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain, the subject of a popular book by Barry Fell, a Harvard researcher, and under continual exploration by the New England Archeological Research Association (NEARA). I had stumbled upon their yearly Conference. Among them was Sig Lonegren , a well-known dowser and researcher of earth mysteries who now lives in Glastonbury, England and was then teaching at Goddard College in Vermont. Through his spontaneous generosity, I found myself on a bus that took us to a chamber constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly framing the Summer Solstice.

Fell and others suggest that Celtic colonists built these structures, which are very similar to cairns and Calendar sites found in Britain and Ireland; others maintain they were created by a prehistoric Native American civilization, but no one knows for sure who built them. They occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River. Approaching the site on the side of Putney Mountain, I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away. I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as we traced the “ley lines” that ran into this site. Standing on the huge top stone of that submerged chamber, my divining rod “helicoptered”, letting me know, according to Sig, that this was the “crossing of two leys”; a potent place geomantically.

According to many contemporary dowsers, telluric energy moves through stone and soil, strongest where water flows beneath the earth, such as in springs, and also where there is dense green life, such as an old growth forest. Telluric force is affected by planetary cycles, season, the moon, the sun, and the underground landscape of water, soil and stone. Symbolically this “serpentine energy” has often been represented by snakes or dragons. “Leys” are believed to be lines of energy, not unlike Terrestrial acupuncture lines and nodes, that are especially potent where they intersect, hence dowsers in Southern England, for example, talk about the “Michael Line” and the “Mary Line”, which intersect at the sites of many prehistoric megaliths, as well as where a number of Cathedrals were built.

At the time I knew little about dowsing, but I was so impressed with my experience that months later I gathered with friends to sit in the dark in that chamber, while we watched the summer Solstice sun rise through its entrance. We all felt the deep, vibrant energy there, and awe as the sun rose to illuminate the chamber, we all left in a heightened state of awareness and empathy.

 Earth mysteries researcher John Steele wrote in EARTHMIND, a 1989 book written in collaboration with Paul Deveraux and David Kubrin, that we suffer from what he called “geomantic amnesia”. We have forgotten how to “listen to the Earth”, lost the capacity to engage in what he termed “geomantic reciprocity”. Instinctively, mythically, and practically, we have lost the sensory and imaginative communion with place and nature that informed our ancestors spiritual and practical lives, to our great loss. 

We diminish or destroy, for money, places of power long revered by generations past, oblivious to the unique properties it may have, and conversely, build homes, even hospitals, on places that are geomagnetically toxic instead of intrinsically auspicious. Our culture, versed in a “dominator” and economic value system, is utterly ignorant of the significance of place that was of vital importance to peoples of the past. Re-discovering what it was that inspired traditional peoples to decide on a particular place for healing or worship may be important not only to contemporary pilgrims, but to a way of seeing the world we need to regain if we are to continue into the future as human culture at all. 

Making a pilgrimage to commune in some way with a sacred place is a something human beings have been doing since the most primal times. Recently unearthed temples in Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe reveal a vast ceremonial pilgrimage site that may be 12,000 years old. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for over two millennia. 

One of the most famous contemporary pilgrimages is the “Camino” throughout Spain, which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella. Compostella comes from the same linguistic root as “compost”, the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter – the “dark matter” to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form. Pilgrims arriving after their long journey are being metaphorically ‘composted’, made new again. When they emerge from the darkness of the medieval cathedral in Compostella, and from the mythos of their journey, they were ready to return home with their spirits reborn.

In 2011 I visited the ancient pilgrimage site of Glastonbury, England. Glastonbury’s ruined Cathedral once drew thousands of Catholic pilgrims, and Glastonbury is also Avalon, the origin of the Arthurian legends, a prehistoric pilgrimage site. To this day thousands still travel to Glastonbury for the festivals held there, and for numerous metaphysical conferences, including the Goddess Conference I attended. The sacred springs of the Chalice Well and the White Spring have been drawing pilgrims since long before recorded history, and many people come still to drink their waters. 

Making this intentional Pilgrimage left me with a profound, very personal sense of the “Spirit of Place”, what some call the “Lady of Avalon” and taking some of the waters from the Holy Springs back with is ever a reminder of the dreams, synchronicities and insights I had there.

Sacred Sites are able to raise energy because they are geomantically potent, and they also become potent because of human interaction. “Mythic mind”, the capacity to interpret and interact with self, others and place in symbolic terms (as, for example, the way the Lakota interpret “vision quest” experiences) further facilitates the communion. 

Sig Lonegren, who is one of the Trustees of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, and a famous dowser, has speculated that as human culture and language became increasingly complex, verbal, and abstract, we began to lose mediumistic, empathic consciousness, a daily intuitive gnosis with the “subtle realms” that was further facilitated by ritual. Dowsing is a good example of daily gnosis. “Knowing” where water is something many people can do without having any idea of how they do it. Sometimes, beginning dowsers don’t even need to “believe” in dowsing in order to, nevertheless, locate water with a divining rod.

With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning, and with the development of patriarchal religions, he suggests that tribal and individual gnosis was gradually replaced by complex institutions that rendered spiritual authority to priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of God. The “conversation” stopped, and the language to continue became obscured or lost.

Perhaps this empathic, symbolic, mediumistic capacity is returning to us now as a new evolutionary balance, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering mythic pathways to the Numina.

References:

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

Lovelock, J. and Margulis, L., (1970) The Gaia Hypothesis, quote is from Wikipedia
Retrieved on: May 11, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Seneca, L. Annaeus junior (65 A.D.) Epistulae Morales at Lucilium, 41.3.
Retrieved on: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium

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

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

Steele, J. (1989). Earthmind: Communicating with the living world of Gaia, with Paul Devereaux
and David Kubrin. Harper & Row: N.Y. Page 157.