Table './thoth_sunthoth/nuke_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired Table './thoth_sunthoth/nuke_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired Table './thoth_sunthoth/nuke_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired Table './thoth_sunthoth/nuke_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired Table './thoth_sunthoth/nuke_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired Table './thoth_sunthoth/nuke_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired Table './thoth_sunthoth/nuke_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
David Abram observes that âThe curvature of time in oral cultures is very difficult to articulate on the page, for it defies the linearity of the printed line. Yet to fully engage, sensorially, with oneâs earthly surroundings is to find oneself in a world of cycles within cycles within cyclesâ (186).
I think it is harder for literate cultures to engage the cycles of time that surround us, but I donât think it is only the provenance of oral or pre-literate cultures. We can observe the changes of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the movement of the stars, and other perpetual cycles in our world, if we choose to do so.
I am aware of my coming menstrual cycle by looking at the phase of the moon. Again, I cannot say when my awareness of the moonâs cycles in conjunction with my own occurred, but it seems completely normal to answer my doctorâs question âwhen was your last menstrual period?â with âat the last new moonâ, even if she requires that I translated that into a calendar date.
Caroline Merchant writes that âThe idea of cyclical processes, of the interconnectedness of all things, and the assumption that nature is active and alive are fundamental to the history of human thoughtâ (293). Is my menstrual cycle really connected with the moonâs phases? Itâs hard to know for certain, but the temporal connection between a womanâs menses (even the word derives from the word moon) and the lunar cycle has been known for millennia.
I know intellectually that the constellations process in a circularly way throughout the year, but it is another kind of knowledge to observe how Orion moves location during the year when I go outside before the sun rises to pick up the dayâs newspaper. Picking up the paper, I turn around to face the house and look up: and I note the position of Orion, and then turn to locate Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, and then the Pleiades. This is a morning ritual of many years, just as when I leave my front door for the first time each morning, I automatically look for the placement of Venus in the dawning sky. How did I come to acquire these daily rituals of placement and time? Again, Iâm not actually aware of when I started to do this, look for certain constellations and a planet each morning, but I am aware of doing this for at least the last twenty years. I derive a certain amount of pleasure when I can locate the stars and Venus and experience disappointment when the sky is overcast or clouded over.
Itâs much harder to follow a set of cyclical seasons in Southern California, where some people joke that the four seasons are: drought, fire, earthquake, and flood. The landscape has been nearly completely transformed by the growth of Los Angeles in the last century. Susan Griffin, who also was born in Los Angeles and grew up there, as I did, described Los Angeles in the 1940s as âalready so filled with asphalt and highways that the shape of the place, a wide bowl between several ranges of mountains, skirted by the Pacific Ocean, was scarcely visible any longerâ (Griffin 12). She goes on to describe another exile from nature, that of moving from the farm to the city. Her grandparents had been farmers before moving to Los Angeles so she lost the connection to the earth in two generations (Griffin 13). It took only one generation for me, my parents moving from Joplin, Missouri to Los Angeles in 1955. I grew up in one of those housing âtracts of boxlike structuresâ that Griffin describes as âan architecture based on efficiency that yielded to no other human or natural impulsesâ (12). To connect with the landscape of Southern California, I had to first leave the North American continent.
I took a trip to southwest England and to Cornwall to visit various site associated with the legends of King Arthur and those of the Holy Grail. One place that I paid particular attention to was the town of Glastonbury in Somerset, visiting a number of relevant sites there: Glastonbury Abbey, the purported burial place of King Arthur and his Queen Guinevere, Chalice Well, an iron-infused spring with reputed healing powers and the place of discovery of a 2000-year-old glass dish, Glastonbury Thorn, a tree native to the Middle East that is said to be the flowering walking staff of Joseph of Arimathea, and Glastonbury Tor, a terraced hill topped by a bell tower, the remnant of the church that once stood there (Rahtz 42-47, 53, 106-107 and Mann 23, 98-102).
The historical veracity of many of these tales and legends of place didnât matter to me at all; it was the images and feelings that these stories and places evoked that were important, and were the reasons why I was visiting.
All of these locations had what some people would call âpresenceâ, spirits, or energies. Was this coming from me or was I sensing the devotion of countless pilgrims over a long period of time, venerating these places? Jung observes that âThere is nothing without spirit, for spirit seems to be the inside of thingsâ (Jung 81). And David Abram suggests that, âEach place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligenceâ (Abram 182).
Climbing Glastonbury Tor, I had decided to walk the Tor Maze, a pattern that some say is part of the Tor structure, cut into the hill for ancient ritual purpose (Mann 101). This maze has seven turns and was described as a type of Cretan-maze, or the prototype for the labyrinth Dedaelus created to house the Minotaur. The day of my hike was stormy and windy, cold and rainy, and I questioned the wisdom of performing this walk on the day I was there, but my time was short and I knew I wouldnât get another opportunity on this particular trip, so I started out at the labyrinth entrance, located near the cement walkway that has been built from the bottom of the Tor, past an apple orchard, to the church bell tower at the top. My path would veer off almost immediately from the sanctioned cement walkway.
I entered the labyrinth very close to two fallen monoliths; I had read that at one time in the past, they had stood upright as part of a larger installation of stones, called âDruid Stonesâ which are said to mark a certain ley line, or energetic meridian on the Tor (Mann 99). When I had just walked past them, my environment suddenly changed. It was no longer windy or raining, but a warm and sunny day and the apple trees were in bloom. One of the monoliths was standing up in place; the other was still on its side in the grass. I could smell the warm grass and hear birds singing nearby. A woman was standing near the fallen stone and she wore a dark gown or long tunic of what looked like a woolen weave. Her hair was long and reddish-brown and she had brown eyes. I took two or three breaths and suddenly, the landscape reverted back to the cold and rainy hillside where I had started my walk.
In the brief five seconds of my âotherworldâ experience, I knew I was in the same place, but in what time? I had a flash of a thought that determined that the sunny day Iâd experienced was in the past (based on seeing one monolith standing), but it could just have easily been a point of time in the future. It also could have been one of parallel universes described in quantum physics and it could have been a soggy projection from my over-stimulated-with-legends mind.
It felt like a real place, I could feel the sun, smell the apple blossoms, hear the birds. The vision was a sensory experience, embodied, and yet ephemeral in the remembrance, now twelve years later. I have felt, reflecting on the experience, that I was being âshownâ something important about the nature of reality, particularly of that place. But I also learned something about myself, that I wasnât closed to such experiences. David Abram writes âOur spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivityâ (34). And Jung writes about individuals who have had experiences that conflict with the notion of a perfectly causal and solid world:
âSomething of this sort happens to many modern people â provided they are not too thick-skilled â when they are confronted with events which natural causation fails to explain. They are unpleasant because they disrupt the orderly course of our world and make anything seem possible, thus proving that the primitive mind in us is not yet deadâ (108).
Taking Jungâs comment about âthe primitive mindâ not being dead reminds me that such non-rational ideas are still inside us, unconsciously interacting with our environment, with only a rare circumstance, such as my experience, revealing a crack in otherwise Cartesian world view. I am grateful for the Tor experience.
It was only later that I realized that my âexperienceâ occurred at the very beginning of the walk into the labyrinth, not at its center and not at its end, a liminal experience of crossing over from ordinary space into a sacred realm. I felt as though I finally understood by experience what a sacred place might be like. As David Abram observes, âThe singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. To tell of such events is implicitly to tell of the particular power of that site and indeed to participate in its expressive potencyâ (182). And phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty writes âIn what sense the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior to ⊠other moments of time and the past, but has them really behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself, and not it and they side by side âinâ timeâ (quoted in Abram 207). Merleau-Pontyâs comment resonates when I think of that experience on the Tor; it was if I had walked into a layer of existence, or a moment of time that is there to be experienced if encountered with openness.
Modern Americans do not have sacred places, they have real estate. It took a trip crossing more than 4000 miles for me to feel a sense of the sacred in a place where some of my ancestors once lived. And perhaps this is one of our problems as Americans, we are transplanted peoples, mostly from European countries (although that is rapidly changing) and in immigrating, we couldnât bring our sacred places with us. What we have failed to do and continue to fail to do is establish new sacred places on this continent. The closest things we have are the National Parks, but these operate as profitable businesses and are affected by the political interests of whatever federal administration is currently in office. Some of us are aware of the sacred places known to the Native Americans, and for some European Americans, these locations resonate, but for most Americans, these are places to photograph while on vacation, not to interact with in any meaningful or soulful way. Jung writes:
âWhether that is our own psyche or the psyche of the universe we donât know, but if one touches the earth one cannot avoid the spirit. And if one touches it in the friendly way of Dionysus, the spirit of nature will be helpful; if in an unfriendly way, the spirit of nature will oppose oneâ (81). I believe that people must get out of their cars in order to truly touch the earth and encounter the spirit of nature.
It is possible though, to work with any numinous experience that one has in nature and translate it or adapt it to ones daily life. When I returned from that trip to the British Isles, the new sense I had about the landscape continued; as I hiked my local trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, I looked at every tree, boulder, and chaparral bush with new eyes. I wanted to know, what was behind what I was seeing here? Was it possible to have a similar experience such as I had on Glastonbury Tor? Iâve not experienced anything like that time in Somerset twelve years ago, but I set out on a program to hike the same canyon every week for a year in order to observe the changes over time. And there are changes, even if the freeway-laden horizon doesnât seem to change. I noted the flowering of different trees and wildflowers, when the streams held water and when they dried up, when the grasses reached their tallest, and when the coyote pups arrived and the rattlesnakes became active. I watched the continued natural repair from a large wildfire that had burned the area a year earlier and saw migratory birds traverse the area in their seasons. I even found a place near a seasonal spring that some people have designated as a special or even sacred spot. On a tree branch near the stream was a collection of colored ribbons and torn fabric strips, some attached to shells or pieces of carved wood. The spot was lovely to sit in during a hot dry day and the water sounds were soothing, the nature spirits of the area were welcoming. So I added offerings of my own after a time and I assume that people are still doing so.
I never developed the deep sense of oneness of nature that David Abram learned while traveling in developing countries, and I never achieved a level of communication with animals like he did, but I felt as if I knew the local landscape more clearly. I felt that I could recognize the annual cycles that Southern California experiences, a view that I had not cultivated previously. I agree with Susan Griffinâs commentary that:
âIf human consciousness can be rejoined not only with the human body but with the body of earth, what seems incipient in the reunion is the recovery of meaning within existence that will infuse every kind of meeting between self and the universe, even in the most daily acts, with an eros, a palpable love, that is also sacredâ (9).
Iâm more optimistic than most people about our ability to reconnect with nature. If a career laboratory scientist like me, who grew up in concrete-slabbed Los Angeles and works in the most reductive of all the biological sciences, molecular biology, can reconnect with nature in a reverential way, then I think that others can, too, develop a sense of place on the earth.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
Griffin, Susan. The Eros of Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Jung. C. G. The Earth has a Soul: Nature Writings of C.G. Jung. Ed. Meredith Sabini. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2002.
Mann, Nicholas. R. The Isle of Avalon: Sacred Mysteries of Arthur and Glastonbury Tor. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1996.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. 2nd Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
Rahtz, Philip. English Heritage Book of Glastonbury. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd/English Heritage, 1993.
About the Author C. Clogston is a protein chemist and crystallographer working in biotechnology with degrees in Biology and Mythological Studies. Clogston is currently a Ph.D candidate in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, and can be reached at c.clogston@gmail.com
May I congratulate you on an interesting article - and one that brings attention to phenomena I am interested in.
you write:
Caroline Merchant writes that âThe idea of cyclical processes, of the interconnectedness of all things, and the assumption that nature is active and alive are fundamental to the history of human thought"
In this regard, please have a read of my article 'The Grail and the Alpha Omega' - on page 2 of the articles section on this website.
Also follow the link to the cycle diagrams on my own website - especially look at Figure 4.
Resources
Audio/Visual
Discussion & Chat
Information
Keep Up To Date
Fun & Games
Submitting
Spread The Word
Rules & Help
Personal
