Archive for the ‘Sacred Sites’ Category

  Poised between spring and summer, Beltane is the Celtic quarter-marker festival of budding fertility. As the sun waxes brighter in the northern hemisphere, it is a festival marked by flames and bonfires in earthly reflection of the heightening solar powers. The fires are and were also intended to purify the world for the upcoming bounty of spring fruits and autumnal harvests.

  Standing as it does on the cusp of warmer weather and as the herald of the vivid growth and coloring of late spring and summer, Beltane was a festival of the in-between. In the ancient mythology of the Celtic Isles, particularly Ireland, it represented a changing of regimes and hunting grounds among the Tuatha de Dannan, the Fianna, and the more human aspects of the ancient population. Famously, the Sons of MÍl (the mythical Milesians) first landed on the southwest coast of Ireland on Beltane in an attempt to upset the balance of power and claim the islands for themselves. As they first stepped foot on the beaches and upon feeling the power emanating from the earth on the sacred isles, connecting them to the sacred day, the sun, and the cycle of life and death; their poet Armhairghin composed a song-chant in honor of the occasion. He sang:

  “I am an estuary into the sea.
 I am a wave of the ocean.
 I am the sound of the sea.
 I am a powerful ox.
 I am a hawk on a cliff.
 I am a dewdrop on the sun.
 I am a plant of beauty.
 I am a boar of valour.
 I am a salmon in a pool.
 I am a lake in a plain.
 I am the strength of art…”

  The sacred place on the sacred day of Beltane inspired an ancient invocation of one-ness between man and the universe: a positive invocation that inspires boundless definitions beyond the borders of human conception and perception. For, like its parallel fall festival of Samhain, it is a time when the boundaries between the worlds is dim. And like Samhain, it was a time when fierce protections were set in place to ensure that the roaming faeries and ancient gods of Dark Age and early Medieval Ireland did not interfere with mortal affairs or kidnap mortals into the Otherworlds beyond the mortal veil. Of particular concern were the Aos SÍ (the people of the Mounds), better known as the Tuatha Dé Danann or the Sidhe: the common name in Irish Gaeilge for the Mounds themselves. These faerie mounds which still dot the landscape of the Celtic isles are in reality Neolithic burial sites. But prior to the archaeological excavations conducted over the past several centuries (and really, still), these mounds were superstitious spots on the map. They were sites associated with the unknown depths of antiquity that had come before and when the early religions of the pagan past were translated into Christian terms as fairy tales and mythic saints, the ancient mounds retained their mysterious symbolism.

 

Legends held that the mounds variously housed the denizens of faerie or acted as party portals between the mortal realm and the Otherworlds ~ which in Celtic mythology are a complex and intriquing web of inter-dimensional theories modern physics are currently exploring. On certain special days, (Beltane among them) the locks between the layers of reality were undone, and the Aos SÍ were able to travel into the mortal realm via the Faerie Mounds and other portals within the landscape despite their contract with the Milesians that they must remain in the Otherworlds. Often their travels involved wild rides through the countryside or midnight dances near the mounds or in the surrounding forest. Hapless mortals lured into their revelry would often disappear, never to be seen again or returning suddenly years later, thinking only a few days had passed. Such was the case of the literarily infamous Tam Lin from last year’s Sacred Mists Beltane Blog who disappeared with the Sidhe and returned centuries later.

  In order to avoid being caught up by the Aos SÍ, various rituals were enacted for protection and to simultaneously draw the good blessings of the faerie folk upon their households. The bonfires, ripe with fertile and purifying symbolism, also serve as faux-faerie fires. In this sense, the bonfires act as a sort of apotropaic magick whereby the humans mimic the revelry of the fey thereby keeping other bands of Tuatha Dé Danann from wandering their way by convincing them that there were already faeries in residence. Less flammable offerings of foods were also often left outside of the house or certain plants or flowers hung over the doorways and windows to keep the sidhe out, while still currying their good favor as they passed by on Beltane, Samhain and other days of the in-between. Milk, honey, cakes, and bouquets of fresh and dried herbs were, in particular, favorite offerings to the faerie folk.

  Though Beltane is an ancient festival of hope and confidence, it is still widely celebrated in the modern world as one of the highlights of the Wiccan and Druidic calendar. And the belief in faeries and in other magickal denizens of the house and countryside remains strong the world over. So be sure to celebrate this festival of light, growth, and impending summer. It is a marker of good things to come!

Check out Sacred Mist’s Free Beltane Spells and Recipes : especially the Fried Honeycakes ~ just be sure you make enough for you and the Aos SÍ!

[Pictured at the top is Edward Hugh's Midsummer's Eve].

  I don’t know about you, but the wall in front of my desk is a veritable collage of notes, images, and articles I’ve pulled out of magazines and printed offline. They’re up there as visual reminders to inspire me during the daily grind and to direct my research. The current center of that web is a picture I pulled out of National Geographic last year of an Aztec offering found buried deep beneath Mexico City’s Zócalo Plaza (pictured at right). Despite excavation, the positioning of the shells, animal bones, and pottery within their stone tomb remains virtually the same as when they were placed in the stone box centuries ago. And what’s more: the unique positioning of the box within the stratigraphy of offerings buried in the Plaza is indicative of a wider sacred emphasis on the use of space and placement within ancient ritual magick and mythology. I can’t recall exactly where I put the Aztec Offering picture on my wall at first, but over the intervening months it has slowly migrated, becoming the central focus of my paperwork montage. With this particular picture suddenly as my desk focal point it seems fitting to address the power of placement and the art of magickal spatial management.

  In cultures throughout the ancient and modern world the arrangement of objects on altars, in rooms, and throughout their personal and public space has held power. Be it the arrangement of the candles on altars or the positioning of furniture in line with the tenets of feng shui, the idea of symbolic alignments is an active one with ancient (and potentially psychological) depths. In arranging objects in a way which is pleasing to the eye and therefore to the mind, there is the assumptive potential that they will also be pleasing to the divine or on a divine plane; thus balancing out or enhancing the divine and mortal energies flowing through the world. Or so follows some of the premises behind much of modern anthropological and psychological enquiry into the contemporary use of aesthetics. While the philosophies behind the ancient use of spatiality (sometimes called phenomenology when applied to sensory perceptions of the spatial use of ancient landscapes) are not as clearly known as those which remain into modern times like feng shui, what can be understood from ancient patterns of placement typically relates to the placement of objects and sometimes buildings in ritual contexts, mythic tales and divine cosmologies.

  The Aztec Offering from Mexico City is an example of these latter instances. Once, hundreds of years ago, Zócalo Plaza was where the Temple Mayor stood as a visible reminder of the sacred mountain Coatepec (a sort of darker Aztec Olympus) where one of the greatest mythological soap opera’s occurred. For it was on Coatepec that Huitzilopochtli the sun god killed his sister the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui and threw her body off of the mountain. Portions of the dark Aztec sacrificial rituals of the 14th to 16th centuries AD were intended to be representations of this event, which for various reasons was central to their mythos. And in lieu of being able to access the sacred mountain of Coatepec, men built pyramids in Mesoamerica to stand in their stead. In front of the Temple Mayor was a series of ritual statements symbolic of other aspects of Aztec mythology: like the pink stone monolith of andesite (now broken) representative of the earth goddess Tlaltecuhtli squatting to give birth before the pyramid. And beneath them, representing the various levels of the Aztec Underworld were a series of symbolic ritual offerings: a level of sacrificial knives representing the razor sharp teeth of the earth monster opening his maw to accept incoming souls to the afterlife. Beneath which was a leaf-wrapped cache of incense, beads, and jaguar bones: potential gifts paid for entrance or a magickal bundle to ensure correct passageway to the best part of the Underworld. And below that was the stone box that started this train of thought. A box filled with seashells, snails, crustaceans, and corals hailing from the three nearest seas (the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific); along with a series of sacrificial knives each inscribed with the attributes of deities associated with the setting sun. And in its center, was placed the remains of a wolf or dog, bejeweled with a jade collar, gold anklet bells, and turquoise ear plugs: a testament to man’s best friend, who would lead the way and protect his master’s soul even unto death and its Underworld.

  Funerary contexts are often where the spatial patterning of artefacts is most clearly detected by archaeologists. The Egyptian pyramids, like their Mesoamerican counterparts, are complex tapestries representative of the ancient mythologies: inside and out. From their placement within the landscape, to the elaborate burials they contained, placement was of the utmost importance. For instance, the pyramids at Giza (pictured at the start of the articles) were built in alignment with the ancient sky, just as many standing stones were throughout the ancient northern European world. And everything about an Egyptian burial or entombment was ordained by ritual: from the placement of grave goods in certain areas of the tombs to the placement of scarabs and papyrus spells around and within the body and its wrappings. The shape of the Egyptian pyramid itself was dictated by local mythology and was often ascribed as a symbolic representation of the sacred mound which rose out of the primordial waters of the world and formed the foundation of all life.


  And while these ancient uses of space and arrangement might seem really distant from the modern world of sky scrapers, motorways, and electrical appliances: consider how often you do ‘arrange’ things without even noticing. You arrange flowers. You set the table for dinner (forks on the left, knife and spoons on the right!). You display your furniture, family pictures, and artwork. You organize your desk and in my case, the mess of inspirational papers you have tacked above it. And whether you’re following a set of traditional rules or just setting things up to be as pretty or as practical as possible: there is a method to that madness and a symbolism behind your movements. Be it an offering to the gods, the spacing of your living room set, or the arrangement of the herbs in your gardens, there is an unconscious art involved. There is a visual language ripe with meaning, some of which only you can decipher. And perhaps, the more you are conscious of the art of space and the art of offerings, the closer to something greater you might just be.

  For Further Reading check out the National Geographic article that inspired this train of thought:

UnBurying the Aztec by Robert Draper from the November 2010 issue.

And to investigate the most prevalent trend in aesthetic spatiality in the modern world, check out the Sacred Mist’s collection of Feng Shui texts!

The Sacred Land.

There is one belief that runs through all aboriginal belief systems across the world and that is that the land is sacred. From the native Americans to the aboriginal tribes of Australia the land is something to respected and held in high regard.

Dare I also include Britain in this august company? I think that at one time I could have, and people in the Pagan world be they Druids like myself or Witches are trying to reclaim this sense of the sacredness of the land.

Some good friends and I visited Avebury on Saturday and we were treated to a guided tour of some of the lesser known sites in the landscape, some of which were over six thousand years old.

What struck me was the relationship the people had with the land and how in tune with it they were. From birth to death they included the land in there daily lives. Our lives are governed by small increments of time, days, hours, and seconds whereas our ancestors were governed by the turning of the seasons.

This is where I believe the wheel of the year plays its part. Although to some extent it is a modern construct I feel its biggest benefit is to slow our thinking down. As we follow this yearly cycle our brains are rewired to think in terms of what the land is doing at any given time.

So I believe that the land is sacred and I would go even further in believing that the land is the body of the Goddess. Her body the hills, her hair the waving grass, her arms and the majestic trees, her feet buried in deep dark soil.

So is the land sacred? Look around you at all the trees bursting in to leaf and the land becoming fertile after the fallow time of winter and I think that you would agree with me when I say yes it most certainly is.

Pangur-ban

Symbolic Archetypes in the Native American Mural at the Mission Dolores

Tucked away behind the baroque wooden altar of San Francisco’s oldest standing building, the Mission Dolores, is San Francisco’s oldest known mural. Painted in 1791 by the indigenous Native Americans of the area, the Ohlone; it was partially preserved from the ravages of time by the wooden reredos which was placed over it. The mural depicts a series of geometric designs and swirls which are broken by two yellow circles, one at either side of the mural; each containing a pierced heart. The heart on the right is pierced by a single sword. The heart on the left is pierced by three spears or nails in an image inexplicably reminiscent of the classic Three of Swords card from the Sola Busca and Rider Waite tarots, which form the symbolic base of most modern tarot decks. The Three of Swords, one of the few cards within the Rider-Waite deck not to feature a human figure of any kind: is a card of loss, of betrayal, and of injury to the spiritual heart and passion. And though it is unlikely that the designers and artists of the mural had the tarot specifically in mind; the symbol’s presence in a church hints at a subconscious and spiritual meaning which the symbol of the pierced heart embodies and which mankind recognizes at its deepest levels.
Read the rest of this entry »

In one of those rare confluences of the natural world, the cusp between December 20th, 2010 and December 21st, 2010 will hold special magickal significance.

Tomorrow, as many of you may well know, is the Winter Solstice. It is the shortest day of the year and its longest night. Traditionally it is a time of celebration, of rebirth; as winter fully begins within the grand circle of life, we honor the transition between the seasons. From time immemorial, man and womankind has commemorated both the astronomical event it represents and the symbolism inherent of the occasion. Life and Death, Spring and Winter: the turning of the clock and the changing of the season are inevitabilities we have charted and attempted to understand. We have built stone clocks and viewing points to witness the transition. Neolithic monuments like Newgrange, Ireland and the infamous Stonehenge; as well as modern viewing points like the Sunstones atop the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley display the actual moment of the Solstice as the sun reaches its lowest yearly high in the sky. The parties and festivals to celebrate the Solstice have traditionally lasted much longer than that single moment in time: anywhere from a night of partying to several weeks of merriment. Often several festivals would take place at the same time. In ancient Rome, the Saturnalia, the Festival of Invictus Sol (itself an accumulation of several festivals to many sun deities), and the more ancient Brumalia were celebrated all together. Today the Germanic Yule and the Celtic Midwinter Grianstadh an Gheimhridh still compete alongside the more mainstream Christmas and Hannukah, when really, they too are celebrating that same winter solstice in disguise. At the time of the world’s greatest darkness, we are all working together to celebrate the light.

Read the rest of this entry »

Native American Landscapes at Lake Tahoe

In North American it is easy to forget how long mankind has been wandering around its sprawling landscape. History here seems to start post-conquest and often ignores the thousands upon thousands of years during which Native American groups initially crisscrossed the continent.

I myself was once guilty of this thinking. When I started my academic career I very pointedly steered myself towards classical Mediterranean subjects; explicitly ignoring the archaeology of my own American backyard. Older now, I recognize the error of my ways and the sublime interest and importance of all anthropological topics. I also recognize the primary reason why North American Indian topics are so easily overlooked by the education system and the media: lack of archaeological and anthropological evidence, and particularly lack of spectacular archaeological evidence. Alas, there will be no equivalent of Tut’s tomb in North America. But there is a rich and varied tapestry of ritual and mythology that belies this lack of archaeological evidence, perhaps making it all the more magickal for its mystery.

I recently had a chance to visit one of the most gorgeous natural wonders of North America, one which despite a loaded ancient past, is often ignored as a site of Native American importance: Lake Tahoe. Nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California and Nevada, Lake Tahoe and its surrounding smaller lakes were created through a combination of fault line activity between the geological plates of the earth’s crust and the eruption of the nearby and now extinct Mount Pluto, which dammed up a large portion of the northern end of Lake Tahoe, resulting in the Lake’s particularly unique size and depth for the region. It is, in fact, the sixteenth deepest lake in the world, and the second deepest in North America.

Lake Tahoe is surrounded by ridiculously majestic mountains and strands upon strands of alpine trees. It is a place both of great beauty and abundant resources. It is no wonder that when mankind first migrated across the northern icy land bridges and into what is now the continental USA; many of them lingered by Lake Tahoe, refusing to follow their brethren farther south and east across the wider North American plains as indicated by the antiquity of the local dialect and its unique place within the linguistic branches of Native American culture. Classified in antiquity variously as the Martis complex and then the Kings Beach complex; when white settlers arrived in Lake Tahoe approximately 300 years ago, the local people called themselves the waashiw, which means ‘the people from here.’ A fitting term for a group who had indeed been ‘here’ as long as being there was humanly possible. Waashiw in turn was transliterated into the modern name for the group: the Washoe. The Washoe furthermore divided themselves up, not into tribes, for they did not consider themselves a tribe or to have smaller tribes within itself, but rather family units who associated themselves specifically with a particular side of the Lake. In my exploration of Lake Tahoe, I particularly explored the sacred sites round the south end of the Lake, the sites of the Washoe who called themselves Hanalelti.

Ritual Landscapes

The southern end of the lake encompasses both rocky cliffs dropping steeply into the freshwater below on its western side; narrow, boulder strewn beaches on its eastern, and gentle plains descending into the water between. It is a varied place. One minute you can be strolling through the forest with only trees ahead and the next you’re overlooking the lake in all its glory or below a pulsing waterfall. It is a place of natural wonder. And if it still conjures up images of a magickal landscape to modern eyes, one can be sure it did the same for ancient orbits. One of the widest trends in the majority of Native American mythology is its use of the local landscape to define itself. A tree is not simply a tree nor a mountain a mountain. They are ideas of a mythic place set in the mundane human world. They are portals into the Platonic realm of the otherworld where the divine shapes are kept. This tree is the tree of Ta-iw, the god of the sky; that rock is where the Star Wives fell to earth. Places were not simply places, they were a part of a cosmic mythos themselves.

Washoe rituals reflected this idea of space. The Washoe spent their summers up on the mountain slopes overlooking the lake, and their snowy winters and springs along the more congenial lake shore. This annual migration is reflected in what little is known of their rituals and where they were held. In September, when the pine-nuts, a Washoe staple food, were plentiful, they would hold the pine-nut dance, the Tlagum-las: a processional ceremony begun by the dance, culminated in the movement from the mountain slopes to the lake valleys as they harvested pine nuts along the way and ending again with the dance in their new encampment. They likewise had a similar acorn dance, the Mallun-las performed higher up the mountains at the elevations where the oak trees live and a Peleu-las, the jack-rabbit dance, performed in the forests to ensure a good hunt. As you can tell by the types of the festivals held, the Washoe were very interested in keeping their food supply bountiful, not surprising given the harshness their mountain winters.

Cave Rock: A Site of Shamanic Dreaming

The wisemen and women of the Washoe were likewise influenced by their landscapes. The Washoe believed that their shaman and herb-doctors (both of which, by the way, could traditionally be held by either a man or a woman: a delightful affirmative action rarity in the ancient world) earned their power and their sacred knowledge through dreams. And that dreams could be influenced by sleeping in certain sacred places within the landscape.

Cave Rock, on the southeastern shore of the lake is one such site. The Washoe believed that whilst sleeping in the caves there, their medicine men would be visited by the water sprites of the lake who would teach him or her about healing and potentially give them special medicinal powers. However, for all its magickal significance to the Washoe, Cave Rock, like much of the lake was sold to the US government by the Washoe between 1916-1924. And though a small national park hunkers just below it, much to my dismay, I learned on my trip that the actual caves themselves are now highway tunnels. To get round the eastern shore of the lake, one actually drives through these sacred caves on the main road just above Zephyr Cove. A very sad development indeed, and unfortunately just another in a long list of sites which have been regrettably misappropriated by the government or other agencies before their anthropological significance could be appreciated and the site thereby preserved.

The Mythic Origins of the Tahoe Landscape

But it was not just individual spots which held mythological and ritual significance to the Washoe. Local legend attributes the entire creation of the surrounding landscape to magick and myth. The following was recorded by local colonists attempting to document the fascinating anthropology and mythology of their Native American counterparts at the turn of the last century.

Legend has it that once upon a time, The Good Indian tried to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains. But he was being chased by an Evil Spirit who did not want him to reach his destination on the western side, so he beseeched the spirits of the earth and sky and a Good Spirit heard him and gave him a magickal branch. The Good Spirit informed the Good Indian that whenever he plucked a bit from the branch and dropped it on the earth, it would create a body of water behind him to slow the Evil Spirit down long enough for the Good Indian to get away. For the Evil Spirit could not cross water and would have to detour around it. The Good Indian continued along his way and when next the Evil Spirit caught up with him, the Good Indian attempted to use the magickal branch. But in his haste to use the magickal branch the first time; he snapped off a huge piece of it and tossed it to the ground, thus creating Lake Tahoe, Tahoe meaning ‘big water’ or ‘big lake’.

The Good Indian fled further south through the canyons but eventually the Evil Spirit caught up with him again, and so he tossed a second smaller bit of the magickal branch to the earth and it became ‘doolagoga’ aka Fallen Leaf Lake. The Evil Spirit was briefly detoured but kept at him, and the Good Indian kept right on making lakes behind him until finally he came out of the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, thus reaching his destination and defeating the plan of the Evil Spirit to stop him. The Evil Spirit gave up and went away to torment another Good Indian and our Good Indian lived a long and happy life with the family he found in his new home.

My recent trip to Lake Tahoe and its sacred sites was, shall we say, otherworldly. And its brought home, literally, a very intriguing concept. There are statistically few places in the world that have not felt the instep of a human foot at one point or another. Look around at your own backyard. Who passed through it once upon a time? Even if there isn’t any archaeological evidence for anyone having been there doesn’t mean that it wasn’t once part of a greater mythic landscape which the modern world can but glimpse.

Bibliography

E. S. Curtis, 1907-1930. The North American Indian Courtesy Northwestern University Digital Library
G. W. James, 1917. The Lake of the Sky, Lake Tahoe, in the High Sierras of California.
Include link to Cave Rock website
Sacred Land Film Project: Cave Rock
Site Materials, assorted