Reflections on "Numinous"

A few weeks ago I had an art project called "Numinous" pop into my mind while at a hot springs.  So I've been researching and reflecting on what that means to me ever since, and a few posts that represent my "research" keep  evolving.

When I attended the Women and Mythology conference in May, I had an "ah ha" moment when a presenter, speaking of the ancient megalithic sites of  Britain as "stations within a sacred landscape", commented that myth making has always been a way for human beings to become intimate with, to commune, with what is vast, deep,  and mysterious, like the forces of nature.  In the past, people were embedded within the environment, and the environment was the body of the Mother Earth, from which all things arose, and all things returned.  "Nature" was not just a "backdrop", or as now in corporate thinking, a "resource"...........nature was a conversation full of mythological,  visionary reciprocity, intelligent, and alive.

"Speak to the Earth and it shall teach you".  Job 12:8

In an "en-chanted" environment all beings, visible and invisible, are perceived as having Mana, as being Numinous.  Raven and Magpie were not just birds........they were also Relations, and might even be, on occasion, Messengers.  Plants had Medicine Spirits, and healers invoked their gifts with gratitude and no small measure of caution for fear of offending the powers within. A mythic landscape was inhabited by animals, plants, people, weather, seasons, sacred mountains, goddess rivers, and Numen, the energy and intelligences of place, what the Romans called Genius Loci.  Culture was founded within a grand conversation with many voices, and not all of them were human or even visible without a little shamanic help.

Ancient tribes hunted antelope, buffalo, or mammoth - but not without a sense of  gratitude which expressed itself as reciprocity.  Among the Dakota, dances and prayers were necessary to honor the sacrifice of the buffalo. Their great teacher, who gave them their Great Rites and ceremonies, White Buffalo Calf Woman, manifested as both human and as the great generous spirit of the Buffalo.  Among the aborigines of Australia, there was "geomantic reciprocity".  If the landscape is sacred and holds memory, then walking across the landscape is a way of harmonizing with the "song lines".  As the land is activated by the act of a "walk about", so is the mind of the walker animated by the land.    A mythic conversation. Among the Inuit, rites of cleansing and attunement were cyclically enacted to restore the balance with Sedna, the great Ocean Mother from whose body the sea animals that sustain the tribe come. It was believed that without enacting these rituals, Sedna would withdraw, and starvation would follow.

Paleolithic artists painstakingly painted animals in caves that symbolized the dark womb of the Great Mother -  sympathetic magic meant to assist the animals to return again.   Early arts were no doubt enjoyed, and beyond a doubt are aesthetic - but their essence and purpose originated in ritual, prayer, magic.  The earth and all of its creatures, to them, was alive and communicative, and responsive.  Which is not unlike what James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have suggested with the Gaia Theory,*** which is now taken very seriously in the world of Earth Sciences.

Calendar 2 Stone Chamber Vermont, photo by James Garfall

In 1982 I visited one of the mysterious Cairn sites on Putney mountain in Vermont. These sites have been explored by NEARA, written about by Barry Fell in America B.C.  They bear a remarkable resemblance to cairns and standing stone "Calendar sites" to be found in Britain and Ireland, which is why many believe they were made by early Celts or Phoenicians who colonized along the Connecticut River valley.  There are some 300 of them in Vermont and New Hampshire alone.  Although no one knows who built these sites, dowsers know that they are built on geo-magnetically powerful places where ley lines cross and underground water domes are.  They are, like the one on Putney mountain where I spent a radiant summer morning, often aligned with the Summer Solstice.  Regardless of who built them, they are attuned to auspicious days and the cycles of the year, and built in places that are "power places" because of their unique abilities to change consciousness.  How is it possible we have lost this sense of participation that our ancestors felt and knew?

Numen/Numina is Roman, and  meant the deities of place, presences that presided over springs, orchards, or mountains.  The Numina were later, as the Romans became influenced by the Etruscans and Greeks, personified, but in the early days of Rome they were not given human attributes.  Numinous  means a sense of Presence, the invisible intelligence (intelligences) that inhabit and are unique to a place.


I so strongly felt the presence of the Numinous when I went to Glastonbury, to visit the sacred wells, and walked within this ancient pilgrimage site.  You cannot visit the Chalice Well, or the White Spring, or walk up to the Tor which stands high over the ancient lakes of Avalon......without feeling the presence of the Numinous, and the memory of the many people who came before.  I believe one would have to be very dense indeed to not be changed in some way by visiting this ancient place of pilgrimage.

But one does not need to travel across the ocean, or even into the  maple forests of Vermont, in order to experience the "conversation".  An open mind and heart is a profound tool for communion of all kinds, with people, animals, and the invisible realms as well.  If one has the idea that the Earth is alive, then it follows that beings on the Earth are alive and thus responsive in some way.  Our experience changes when World becomes a "you" instead of an "it".  Or  "Thou".  Myth can provide a language with which to interpret.

 **

See,  The Re-Enchantment of the World:  Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Edited by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, Stanford University Press, 2009

** Here's a great Blog about the sacred sites of New England:  http://hiddenstonz.blogspot.com/2011/03/mysterious-stone-chambers-of-new.html

 *** On James Lovelock and Gaia Theory:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44yiTg7cOVI

Spirits of Place

"Numina" (2009)

 "I experienced contact with something or someone sentient and much greater than my individual self. I had experienced contact, even momentary communion, with the "essence" of what could be called a transpersonal presence. Afterwards I was told by the local shaman or caretaker that I had met with the guardian spirit of the place.""

Debra D. Carroll "From Huacas to Mesas"

DIALOGUES WITH THE LIVING EARTH, compiled by James and Roberta Swan (1989)

I was reading the above article by Debra Carroll, an expressive arts therapist from an important (and sadly obscure) book by the Swans, published in 1989. Within her article, I found a wonderful description of a visionary experience she had with the "Spirit of Place" at a site she visited in Mexico. I was equally enthralled by a story she quoted by someone called Martin Gray, in which he described his own experience in Japan. I was moved enough to earmark the book, and I pulled out my yellow marker just to be sure I held them in memory. Ms. Carroll described Mr. Gray as a "pilgrim".*** Because "pilgrim" embodies, I think,  the humility necessary to approach a sacred site, or perhaps any place with its myriad beings and ecosystem, with a willingness to listen.

I have a story as well,  I've told it before, but it's good to tell it again.  It still haunts me. 

In 1992, I was living with my former husband on 40 some acres in upstate New York. Where we lived was a rural area rapidly being built up with new housing and industry. One of the mysterious places in the area, to me, was a field I used to go to. To get to that field, which bordered our property, one had to go through a kind of obstacle course - crossing an old stone wall, you immediately ran into a rusted barbed wire fence, and then tramped through a nasty barrier of poison ivy, grape vines and small trees. Braving all of this, an expanse of field appeared.

Bordered on all sides by trees, you could stand there in the tall grass, or the snow, and see nothing of the warehouses or homes nearby. It felt, oddly, as if it was somehow protected, as if you entered a special, quiet, mysterious place. The land had obviously once been worked, but it had been left fallow for many years. In the center of the field  I perceived a "fairy circle".....small trees, bushes, even tall grasses formed a loose circle, if one looked. With my divining rods, I found there was a ley crossing in that exact spot - the rod "helicoptered" and whirled at the center of the "fairy ring".   We came to revere the THE FIELD as magical.

My ex and I were actively involved in Earth based spiritual practices, and he facilitated a lively men's group. One night when the moon was full the group, energized by shamanic drumming, decided to visit "THE FIELD".  It was November, and there was snow on the ground.  I was not present, but my husband told me that as the young men strode to the stone wall, something pushed two of them backward into the snow!

Being young men, they got up and aggressively thundered forward - and something again pushed both of them backwards! They fell on their behinds in the snow.  This (I was told) was enough strangeness for everyone, and the party turned around and went back to the house.  The next day, my husband and  I took offerings to the place where one entered "the field".  We came to believe the place had a guardian spirit, what the Romans called "Numina".   I remember placing crystals and flowers on a stone by the old stone wall, and as I did, I felt such an overwhelming sense of sorrow that tears ran down my face and would not stop. I was, for that moment, the empathic medium for something that  lived there. I believe what I felt was  the sorrow of the guardian spirit of that place, and I think that field was a sacred site of some kind, perhaps special to native peoples long ago in some way.

The encroachment of industry and the loss of habitat in that area was a sad fact.   A year later there was an oil spill in a nearby truck depot, and the wetlands that bordered "the Field" suffered  ecological damage, and a number of the old trees there died.  When I left the area, I bid the Spirits of Place there farewell, thanking them for so much beauty, for allowing us to be a part of that place.  I was saddened that this "secret garden" was surrounded by thoughtless and uncaring forces that might continue to invade its invisible walls, and prayed that others would come who might perceive the magic of the place.

I like to think we opened a portal there, a conversation if you will, because we were practicing ritual, and making art, that was about the earth. The spirits of that place responded to us, simply because we were there, and  we were listening. Reading  Debra Carroll and Martin Gray brought that time back  to me.

"There is an earth-based energy available to human beings, concentrated at specific places all across the planet, which catalyzes and increases this eco-spiritual consciousness. These specific places are the sacred sites discussed and illustrated on this web site. Before their prehistoric human use, before their usurpation by different religions, these sites were simply places of power. They continue to radiate their powers, which anyone may access by visiting the sacred sites. No rituals are necessary, no practice of a particular religion, no belief in a certain philosophy; all that is needed is for an individual human to visit a power site and simply be present. As the flavor of herbal tea will steep into warm water, so also will the essence of these power places enter into one’s heart and mind and soul. As each of us awakens to a fuller knowing of the universality of life, we in turn further empower the global field of eco-spiritual consciousness. That is the deeper meaning and purpose of these magical holy places: they are source points of the power of spiritual illumination.".........Martin Gray

 ***Martin Gray published  his monumental book Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power in 2007 with Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. of London based on his decades of travel to research sacred places throughout the world.   The author spent the last 20 years on a  pilgrimage: he visited 1,000 sacred sites in 80 countries around the world. His journey unfolds in a remarkable compilation of images that reveals just how devoutly pre-industrial cultures everywhere worshipped and respected our Earth. Gray’s stunning photographs and fascinating text provide unique insight into why these powerful holy places are the most venerated and visited sites on the entire planet.