Earth Mysteries

One of the most common questions I am asked after a lecture or workshop goes something like: "Tell me Paul, how should I visit an ancient sacred site? Is there some special method?" My usual answer is that, by and large, no, there isn't any specific "rule" about how to approach an ancient monument or temple. Just be respectful and value being there. While this is true, there is an elaboration I would suggest to aid you in getting the most out of your experience. It revolves around my suggestion that prehistory is analogous to the human subconscious, and that history is the chronological equivalent to our waking, conscious mind. In this model, prehistoric sacred sites are the equivalent to fragments of dreams we struggle to remember -- the word "monument" comes from a Latin root meaning to recall to the mind -- and we can only fully experience them by letting our unconscious mind take full part in the visiting process.

To deal with this, I have developed a system I call Monumenteering (which is put in its full context in my Re-Visioning the Earth, due out from Simon & Schuster/Fireside in October this year -- watch out for it).

Surveys indicate that "visiting of ancient sites" is given by tourists as one of the prime reasons for vacation travel. When one considers that almost a million people visit a monument like Stonehenge in a single year, it is easy to believe it. It is almost as if the old places are calling us back again. More prosaically, it may be that in a modern world of transience, speed and uncertainty, it simply feels good to "touch base" with something that speaks of time and permanence and other ways of being in the world. Something that utters what I call the archaic whisper. But whatever the reasons, what I suggest as Monumenteering is not mere tourism; it is not only visiting a sacred site and getting to know it physically, but it's also apprehending it through mythic means, allowing it to provoke memory and unsuspected associations. Allow the place to activate the profound depths and wisdom of your subconscious mind.

First, decide where you are going to go to visit an ancient sacred place. Take a special trip or make it part of your vacation plan. You could visit one of the great prehistoric megalithic sites of Europe, say Newgrange in Ireland (or, much better, the chambered cairns on the Loughcrew Hills thirty miles away), Stonehenge in England (or, again much better, the Avebury complex twenty miles to the north), the great rows of standing stones, dolmens or chambered mounds around Carnac-Ville in Brittany, or the mighty dolmens of Spain. You could visit instead one of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Any of them will do the trick, but it is difficult to better the mighty Chartres Cathedral in France for sheer power of place. Or you might visit the evocative, dreamy temples of Greece or Egypt, or the ancient marvels of Rome.

Then again, there is a remarkable range of ancient sacred places in the Americas to choose from: the mysterious, two-thousand-year-old Serpent Mound of Ohio; the medicine wheels in the Rockies of Canada and the USA; the Cahokia mounds in Illinois; Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, or the many other extraordinary prehistoric Native American ruins and rock art of the Southwest. And so on and on -- there is the whole world to choose from. Whatever your choice, for the purposes of this particular activity it needs to be sufficiently well known to have something written about it and for its photograph to be reasonably accessible to you in books or brochures before you visit it for the first time. When you have chosen the site and assembled data and picture, you are ready to begin.

To begin the process of Monumenteering, just say the name of the sacred place out loud a few times. As Lage Wahlstrom has pointed out: "Hearing the name of a place often gives rise to certain associations." Note any connotations that may arise. Then, after reading up on the place, study its photograph. How do you imagine the place to be from its picture and the descriptions you have read? Visualize your preconceptions strongly.

The next stage is to physically visit the site, the temple, the monument. Take a camera with you. Encounter the site with as few other people around as possible. Choose your moment. In that first encounter, try to catch the difference you sense between the place as you experience it and the place as you imagined it before you came. Play with that difference, both at the monument and afterwards. Try to identify what it is that is different. Is it the size of the monument? The area it encloses? The extent and nature of the surroundings? (I recall visiting the mystery temple of Eleusis, and being shocked to discover that there were cement factories and housing hemming it in on all sides. Yet the site itself was picturesque and maintained its own sense. In fact, the unfortunate surroundings actually amplified the power of the place.) Don't tell yourself the difference, try to make yourself feel it. Remember that feeling.

As you move about the site, use not only your eyes but other senses and sensibilities as well. Are there any legends associated with this place? If there are, run them through your mind as you "take in" the site. How does your body feel; how does it relate to the space the site creates? How do you feel on an emotional level? A little fearful? Somehow enhanced and liberated? Awestruck? Disappointed? Don't analyze these feelings, simply be conscious of them.

How does the site smell? There may not be a particular smell that you are readily conscious of, but sometimes there is. I recall visiting Delphi for the first time on the sunny morning after a torrential rainstorm. Walking up the Sacred Way, the smell of flowers, of freshened earth, and above all the scent of cypress trees, was noticeably strong. Now, whenever I smell the scent of cypress, I am instantly transported to Delphi; a sunlit picture of that powerfully expressive place is flashed into my mind. Smell is, of course, strongly linked to memory. It is a direct sense, in that it doesn't "cross over" in the way that, for example, the information impinging on the right eye is "read" in the left brain. Smell connects to the limbic system, and can evoke emotion and memory in powerful ways. (And smell can be at work on you without you being aware: it takes only eight molecules of substance to trigger an impulse in a nerve ending in the olfactory lobe, but it takes forty triggered nerve endings for you to consciously smell anything.) So if you have the opportunity, visit your selected site either prior to or just after a storm when the smell rising from the soil is most noticeable, or during low pressure when there is more moisture in the atmosphere and scents carry more readily. In the evening, too, ambient scents tend to be stronger. Perhaps it is the earth at the site that gives off a recognizable odor, or local plants, bushes or trees. But if you can't detect a "site scent," come prepared so that you can "cheat" by taking a lump of incense, a sprig of herb or an essential oil with you -- any scent with which you have no prior personal associations, and which you feel is appropriate to the site. (So, for instance, I might take cypress to Delphi, frankincense or myrrh to an Egyptian temple, sage or copal to a Native American place of power.) As you walk around the site, quietly sniff the scent you have selected. Touch the place, too, where it is permissible to do so. Take many photographs, from many angles, distant and close up, including the surroundings viewed from the site and perhaps a series of pictures to produce a panorama of overlapping shots. If you have even rudimentary drawing ability, take a sketch pad along too: there is nothing like drawing a place or an object to make you see it. And spend some time just sitting or being at the place, not doing anything or thinking or concentrating on anything in particular. Before you leave, scan the surroundings so as to visually and haptically [kinesthetically] note how the site relates to its broader environment. If it is permissible and non-harmful to do so, go into the vicinity of the site (not the site itself) and take a blade of grass or a leaf off a weed or plant, a pebble or a small handful of soil or sand (but take nothing if it would cause noticeable material damage to the site or its surroundings, and never take any archaeological fragment from an ancient place).

Later, when you are back home and back in your routine lifeway, put the photographs you took of the site, the associated scent of the place, and a tactile reminder (should you have been able to bring one back) and put them together in a box. On one or two nights every week, go through this material, looking, touching, smelling, remembering, immediately before going to sleep. If a scent is involved, then see that it is sprinkled on your bedclothes or in the air of the bedroom. Repeat this (perhaps for several weeks) until you recall having a dream about the place. However brief and inconsequential it might seem, make a written note of it and add that to your box of the site's memorabilia. Keep at this until your dreams about the place become more frequent and, perhaps, more complex. Note the imagery and associations that creep into your site dreams. Continue with all this until you get to a point where no fresh development in your dreamlife regarding the place seems to be happening. Hopefully, by means of this process, which may take some months, you will develop a mythic relationship with the site you visited. Ponder the story that your unconscious mind tells you about the place (and, inevitably, about yourself through the medium of the place). In this way you stand a chance of recovering some of the interaction that went on unconsciously between you and the site . . . the primal, information superhighway that bypassed your conscious mind.

Events:

In the USA, remember that on September 27-29 this year there will be a big earth mysteries conference called "Return to the Source" at John M. Clayton Hall, University of Delaware, at which I'll be speaking. Advance registration is necessary, so if interested, contact Carole Seifred at (302) 831-2216 (between 8.30 am and 4.30 pm), or via email at carole.seifred@mvs.udel.edu. For program information contact Barbara Keller at Metamedia Inc., on (609) 965-3657 or email at mtamedia@acy.digex.net.

In Germany there is to be an OK Corral-type 'shoot out' on the topic of ley lines, called Die Ley-Line Konferenz, where New Age notions will be challenged by the research-based material championed by this column. I will be speaking (giving two papers, as it happens) at the conference, as will other British researchers such as John Michell and Nigel Pennick. The New Age viewpoint will be championed by the likes of German artist Marko Pogacnik. Other speakers include the excellent Swiss researcher Marco Bischof, the German artist and researcher Peter F. Strauss, and many others. Presentations will be mixed English-language and German, and there will be translation facilities. It will be held in Sonnenhausen/Glonn from Friday 4 October to Sunday 6 October inclusive. Cost is DM390, and details can be obtained from Hagia Chora, Moltkestrasse 12, 84453 Muhldorf/Inn, Germany. Fax: (08631) 37 96 34.

In the UK, there will be a "CoreMoot" or conference held by The Ley Hunter journal in London. The theme is "Ancient Signatures of Trance" and the main speaker is archaeologist Thomas Dowson, who along with David Lewis-Williams of the Rock Art research unit at Witwatersrand University, Johannesberg, South Africa, has done so much to reveal Bushman rock art as being shamanic, depicting altered mind states imagery, and which has triggered a worldwide revolution in the interpretation of prehistoric rock art. It is being held on Saturday 9 November at the University of London Students Union Halls, Malet Street, London WC1. Entrance fee is just 10 pounds -- now there is a bargain! Seating is truly limited and pre-booking is essential. So don't delay, contact The Ley Hunter journal (TLH) at once.

Which brings me to a reminder about the venerable journal itself. The US address of TLH has changed to B&S USA, Dept. TLH, Box 940, Beacon, NY 12508. The phone/fax stays the same, (914) 838 4340, as does the email -- leyhunt@aol.com. The UK address (to which conference communications ought to be sent) is P.O. Box 258, Cheltenham GL53 0HR, England. (Phone/fax 01242 261680). The journal's Web site is nearing completion.

The latest issue of TLH is number 125, and we have just received our transatlantic shipment of copies. North American subscription (three thick, packed issues) is $15.00 via the US address. For further details, send a SASE to the US or UK address as appropriate (depending whether you live in the Americas or Europe/Asia; use international postal coupons if outside the US or the UK); or North American folk can send their name and address via email, for an information/subscription sheet to be sent them.

Copyright: Paul Devereux, 1996