As my regular readers know well, whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to my commentariat to nominate and vote on the topic for the fifth Wednesday post. Sometimes the results are entertaining, sometimes they startle me, but it’s only happened once before that, as the votes came in and one topic broke from the pack to win the contest, I yelped in dismay and wondered if there was some way to wriggle out of the deal.
The one previous time that happened, a little over three years ago, the subject du jour was “sacred masculinity.” Partly I still have no idea what that phrase could possibly mean—to me, it makes at least as much sense to talk about “sacred gravity”—but it also cut much too close to some of my childhood miseries to be easy to discuss. I managed to make a post out of it, mostly by talking a little about those miseries, shifting focus as quickly as possible to the occult philosophy of sex, and then sketching out something of the cultural politics of gender as I see them. I think the post worked tolerably well, and it got me some choice saliva-flecked denunciations, which is always a good sign—as I see it, ideas that don’t challenge the conventional wisdom enough to get squawks of indignation aren’t worth bothering with.
This month’s contest winner also got a yelp of dismay from me, for a different reason. I’d dropped comments from time to time in blog posts and comments here about the ways that spirituality and occult practice seem to vary geographically, and some of my readers picked that up and started lobbying for a fifth Wednesday post on the occult geography of North America. That was the theme that won, and not narrowly, this time around. The difficulty I face now is that I’m not at all sure I have anything useful to say about it.
This is certainly not because the theme isn’t relevant or important. Native American philosopher Vine Deloria Jr., in his fine book God Is Red, argues that the modern Western world is almost uniquely blind to the spiritual importance of place. We haven’t quite lost our sense of the importance of time—most people of European cultural ancestry who have any spiritual life at all have some sense that certain times in the annual cycle, such as Christmas and Easter, and certain days in the weekly cycle, such as Sundays, have a particular importance in religious terms, though many of them aren’t so clear about what that importance is, and these sacred times pale in importance next to the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and multiyear cycles tracked closely and used to guide worship by other cultures and faiths.
The spiritual sense of place doesn’t even get so modest a level of attention from most Western people. That certain geographical places have unique spiritual qualities, so that certain kinds of prayers or ceremonies are best done there (or alternatively shouldn’t be done there at all), is recalled only by a minority, and treated in most cases by them as an occasional indulgence: people go on vacations to places once recognized as sacred, stop by the holy places as they do their tourist rounds, and maybe say a prayer or spend a few minutes in meditation before heading to the beach or what have you. The passionate sense of spiritual place that sent crowds of pilgrims across the landscape is all but absent among us, and deserves to be revived.
No, the issue is that I simply haven’t spent time in enough places to be able to make any kind of general survey. I lived for two-thirds of my life so far in one very narrow region, the Puget Sound basin of western Washington, where I was born, grew up, and settled down; after that, I lived for five years in a mountain valley in southern Oregon, eight years in another mountain valley in the north central Appalachians, and another eight years on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, which in ecological terms is very nearly a precise Atlantic equivalent of Puget Sound. Now I live in the Chesapeake Bay watershed of Maryland, not far from Washington DC. During the first half or so of my life, my income was low enough that I didn’t do much traveling; during most of the last decade, I didn’t do much traveling, either, because I was taking care of my late wife during what turned out to be a prolonged final illness.
This matters because magical geography is not something that can be painted with a broad brush, and it’s also not something that can be looked up in convenient reference books; I’d be delighted to have an Atlas of American Enchantments on my bookshelves, but no such volume exists. It’s something that has to be learned through close attention to place, on the local scale. An example will help here, so let’s take Glastonbury, once one of the most important sites of pilgrimage in the British Isles and still a spot to which people travel from all over the world.
There are scores of places like it all over the West Country, pleasant little towns with ruined monasteries under the shadow of hills marked with ancient earthworks. They’re delightful to visit, most of them, and here and there you can catch some whisper of the sanctity that once clung to the ruins or the earthworks. Then there’s Glastonbury, which has been a magnet for pilgrims and strange visionaries and a place of earth magic and unexpected revelations since records have been kept. They’re not the same.
It’s probably also necessary to point out that not all sites of pilgrimage would be highlighted in an atlas of enchantments. Some places are culturally or spiritually important because of something that happened there, or someone who’s buried there. I used to live very close to a pilgrimage site of that kind. On the north end of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, an easy walk from the apartments where Sara and I spent the first decade of our marriage, is Lakeview Cemetery, and if you know where to look you can find the tomb of its most famous resident, martial artist and movie actor Bruce Lee. People make pilgrimages there and leave offerings at his grave. One time when Sara and I visited the site, someone had made a bouquet in which all the stems were nunchaku and all the flowers were shuriken, and left it as a gift to Lee’s spirit.
I also heard via the Seattle tai chi scene of two Russian martial artists who, after the Soviet Union imploded, left Moscow on foot, walked the length of Siberia to the Bering Strait, crossed to Alaska, and kept walking down Al-Can Highway from there to Seattle, where they paid their respects at Bruce Lee’s grave. Then they turned around and walked home. That’s a classic pilgrimage, not to mention the adventure of a lifetime, but the north end of Capitol Hill has no inherent holiness about it. It wasn’t one of the sacred sites of the Duwamish, the local Native American people—those are documented if you know where to look, and I’ve been to some of them. They have qualities of place which Lee’s grave, for all its fame, does not.
Describing those qualities is difficult. It’s partly that our language isn’t well suited to such discussions, but the same is true of most other languages, too. I suspect the main issue is that what we’re talking about is inherently hard for the human mind to process.
I’ll give an example here to try to show what I’m talking about. There’s a quality that some hilltops possess. I first encountered it on a hill south of Seattle which has a potent role in Native legend; it’s the hill where Stormwind, the hero of one of the great cycles of Duwamish myth, met his grandmother Rain for the first time. Even though the hill rises up in the middle of a rundown suburb and there’s a lot of traffic close to it, once you reach the top there’s a sense of silence and of space opening up around you, a feeling as though you’ve passed just a little distance into another world. The zone where the effect is palpable covers maybe 200 square yards, maybe less, but it’s very distinctive.
I’ve felt something very similar in a few other places, usually on hilltops. Glastonbury Tor has that quality; so does a hill whose name I forget that rises above Caernarfon in Wales, crowned by ancient earthworks; and I encountered it once in an open meadow in Michigan, north of Detroit, where the ice age glaciers scraped the land bare not that long ago and the thinness of the layer between primeval stone and open sky is palpable. The feeling is unmistakable once you’ve encountered it. It feels as though you’re somehow closer to the sky. What do I mean by that? If you’ve experienced such a place, you know already; if you haven’t, you probably won’t understand me no matter what I say.
Some places have qualities along these lines. There are places that are close to the sky; there are places that feel more deeply rooted in the earth than any ordinary factor can explain. There are places that exhilarate and places that depress, places that support human life and places that are inimical to it. In earlier times people paid attention to such things, especially when siting religious buildings. Nowadays in the Western world we generally don’t—and then we wonder why prayers don’t get answered and churches don’t radiate any appreciable positive influence into the neighborhoods that surround them. Any competent shaman could explain the issue, but I doubt most people would listen.
Are there broader patterns in spiritual and magical geography? My limited personal experience leads me to think so. To make sense of them, though, it’s going to be necessary to coin some technical terms. Those of my readers who dislike jargon will have to put up with some anyway, because a few good pieces of terminology can bring clarity to fields that are otherwise condemned to flounder about in vagueness.
I want to start here with a distinction I’ve made tolerably often in recent years, especially but not only in my books on the Golden Section Fellowship. That distinction is a trichotomy that sorts out the universe of human experience into three realms, each with its own body of knowledge and methods of effective inquiry. For these realms we can use the common modern folk terms “body,” “mind,” and “spirit.” The realm of body, of material substance generally, is investigated using the tools of science; the realm of mind, of mental substance generally (and yes, I heard the shrieks of scientific outrage at the thought that there could be “mental substance”), is investigated using the tools of occultism; the realm of spirit, of spiritual substance generally, is investigated using the tools of religion.
For reasons that I hope will become clear as we proceed, the language I’m going to use for each of these realms is modeled on that of ecology. Thus we speak of a biosphere, the sum total of living bodies on earth; the individual living things are called biota; different sets of biota can be found distributed geographically in bioregions, and so on. In a once-famous book that seems to have been all but forgotten at this point, The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used one part of that terminology as a model and spoke of the noosphere (pronounced “NEW-uh-sphere,” by the way), the sum total of thinking minds on earth; we can go on in the same way and use the term noeta (“no-EH-ta”) for individual thinking minds, nooregions (“NEW-uh-regions”) for geographic areas where certain kinds of thinking have their home, and so on. With this in mind, the terms theosphere, theota, and theoregions should be self-explanatory.
Yes, I’m suggesting that there are geographical dimensions to mind and spirit. It’s an interesting detail of global history, as Oswald Spengler pointed out more than a century ago, that complex cultures never really seem to transplant well outside their original homelands. Technologies can be carried from place to place easily enough, but social forms are less portable, and undergo distortions that often look like unintentional parody when transplanted to other regions. For the last four centuries, for example, Europeans have been rolling their eyes at the attempts of Americans and Russians to act European. No matter how hard they try—and the intelligentsia and would-be cultured classes of both nations certainly can’t be accused of not trying!—the results are never convincing. My suggestion is that this is a function of boundaries between nooregions, separating the noeta of the European nooregions from the very different noeta (that is, different minds and mental structures) of the nooregions to either side.
Religions don’t transport well, either, but in their case, at least with dogmatic missionary faiths, it’s less a matter of unintentional parody and more a process of wholesale adaptation and reinterpretation. You can see it in the relation between European and American Christianity, for example—to Americans, European Protestantism looks Catholic, while to Europeans, American Catholicism looks decidedly Protestant. You can see it in the ways that Islam in India and Indonesia has morphed into something that doesn’t always look much like Islam in its desert homelands. Here again, we have theoregions in which noticeably different theota insert themselves into roles defined by doctrine and culture.
From this perspective, it’s possible for me to say a few things about a few of the nooregions and theoregions of North America—not much, again, because I haven’t encountered most of them, but a little. The Puget Sound area, and more broadly the regions of Washington and Oregon west of the Cascades, is distinct from the rest of the continent in both these senses. Most of the rest of the United States west of the Mississippi belongs to a nooregion and theoregion we can call the West; there are many subregions within that vast expanse, but there are cultural continuities (at least until you get far enough south that the Mexican influence becomes dominant) and common ground in the Native religions. Western Washington and Oregon aren’t part of the West in any sense that matters. The local cultures are different and so are the myths.
Especially in the Puget Sound region and the mountains to either side, there’s a darkness in the land. The Native peoples always lived close to the water’s edge, along the Sound’s many inlets or on rivers that flowed into it; the vast dark forests were a hostile realm filled, according to the legends, with strange and hungry beings. To this day, even in our age of cell phones, people who go hiking in forested country regularly vanish and are never seen or heard from again. Head east across the Cascades into the dry country, with the sagebrush and tumbleweeds you’ve seen in cowboy flicks, and you’re in a different world; the land will kill you if it can—it’s dry, barren, harsh, like all the West—but it’s open about it. Further west, what waits in the shadow of the trees moves in the dark and no one hears it strike.
I’ll skip over the whole intervening continent—the soaring Rockies, the vast sweep of the Great Plains, the equally vast Mississippi watershed—because I’ve never lived there, and my few visits have been busy enough that I’ve rarely had the chance to take time to sit and sense how things are. The Appalachians are another matter, since I spent years there. The land seems much more comfortable with human beings than anywhere else I’ve lived. It’s an odd fact of geology that the Appalachians are identical, geologically speaking, with the mountains of Wales and Scotland on the other side of the Atlantic; the range rose before the Atlantic opened up, and the northern chunk of it got left behind on the Eurasian plate as the North American plate wandered off.
There is something profoundly British in the Appalachians and the land sloping down to the east of it; the mountains feel like Wales and Scotland, the eastern slope like the less urban and domesticated parts of central Britain. It came as no surprise to me when I learned that musicologists and historians spent most of the 20th century prowling Appalachian “hollers,” encountering music, customs, and even bits of grammar that got lost in Britain centuries ago but survived in the mountains. Nor is it in the least surprising to me that so many Scots, Welsh, and Irish immigrants made a beeline for the Appalachians and its related mountain chains as soon as they got off their respective boats. I’m not sure why so many Germans did the same thing, but I haven’t visited Germany in my adult life and have no idea what the land feels like there.
Further east, you’re in a busy coastal zone heavily influenced by immigrant cultures from around the world, and even more heavily overlaid with the bland arrogant forms of late industrial society. It all feels very temporary to me. Sometimes the line between the temporary and the enduring seems very exact: in Pennsylvania, for example, if you take the train from Philadelphia and head for Lancaster, about two-thirds of the way there you cross an unmarked boundary between evanescent Suburblandia and timeless West Britain. Sometimes it’s a slower transition. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to the coastal realms of Suburblandia and Skyscraperia, but they feel oddly phantasmal to me. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to them or when, but if they were to dissolve like mist one autumn morning, I don’t know that I’d be surprised.
Beyond that? The very few times I’ve been to the American South it felt distinctly as though I’d crossed a border into a completely different country. The two times I’ve been to Florida, it felt as though I’d crossed yet another border; to me, Florida feels like a Caribbean country, not even part of this continent. Don’t ask me about Texas; every time I’ve been there I’ve come down with bronchitis and that’s most of what I remember about it. Las Vegas, where I’ve been twice—both times, with fine irony, for conferences on alchemy—reminds me forcefully of Hell. Most of the rest is a complete unknown.
If the Atlas of American Enchantments is going to be written, in other words, it won’t be by me. It’s an intriguing project, though, not least because each of the major nooregions and theoregions divides up into many smaller noosystems and theosystems, and so on until you get down to this hill where the sky feels close, this river with its personality, this bit of woodland welcoming or hostile to human beings, and the like. That’s the work of many hands, minds, and spirits, though, not just one—and it may have to wait until the challenges of our age and the age to come drive more of us out of phantom Suburblandias into a more direct experience of the land.
Lots to comment on in this post, but I’ll confine myself to one observation: I also was raised in the Puget Sound region, and have spent much of my adult life here, and still reside here. With regards to Germany, I’ve been there twice for multi-week visits, and both times I was forcefully struck by how much the forests (what little of them remains, that is) and mountains of Germany remind me and feel like those of western Washington.
The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau carved the continent up in much the same way. Eastern and Western Washington and Oregon are often at odds. Heated odds at that.
East of the the Cascades to about the 100th meridian was the Empty Quarter, the wetter portion of the plains is the Breadbasket, Miami was the capital of The Islands, and Las Vegas was an aberration. Quebec had its own entry as well.
I spent a summer in Orlando (pre-Disney. The Navy used to have a training base there, and I was really too busy to explore the culture in much detail. I’ve been out west ever since, mostly in the Empty Quarter. The West Side (Ecotopia) never did appeal to me.
I’m a geologist and, despite science distinguishing itself by saying “we don’t do magic,” when I lecture on volcanoes, I describe how volcanoes and volcanic features inspire supernatural awe and dread. It gets the students’ attention. I mention Pele’s curse on people who take souveniers from Kiluaea, the battle between Llao and Skell that formed Crater Lake in mythology, and Shiprock, sacred to the Navajo. I also refer my students to the Werner Herzog documentary “Into the Inferno,” which explores the same theme with entirely different examples and was nominated by the Critics Choice Association for Best Science Documentary late last decade. Those all strike me as examples of the spiritual dimensions of place.
JMG,
The place in the US where enchantment, magic and spirituality is the most closely tied to the landscape is Hawaii. That of course because it is the one place the western colonists did not succeed in wiping ( or putting on reservations) the native inhabitants. And unlike most Native American spirituality on the Mainland where it is confined to the remaining survivors of that culture in Hawaii it has disseminated through the culture as a whole.
So though my wife’s family are all descended from Japanese plantation workers and not native Hawaiians there belief in the power of Pele ( Hawaiian god of volcanoes and fire) is real and also their belief in things that are considered Kapu ( forbidden ) is also ingrained. This is the only place in the US where the magic of the place is widely believed and often celebrated by a bulk of the population ( except perhaps recent arrivals from the mainland and tourists).
For the proof of this try and go dig up a heiau ( ancient spiritual site) and see where it gets you in Hawaii. Most likely a quick trip to visit madam Pele if one of her outposts ( volcanoes) is nearby.
I agree with you that most of the work that will go into knowing a place should be done on the local level, the microcosmic. Yet I think things can be gleaned about larger chunks of land on the bioregional and macrocosmic level, by studying the history of those places and in particular, the work of artists and when available mystics or priests or mages of some kind… people who might be tuned in. Yet, without so many records from mystics to study, I will have to listen to the records of people who made music in certain to see what I can figure out, as well as other creations that came from those places. Music and art have often had regional associations, and in American underground music, you can hear the way different places have a different kind of sound though even of the same genre. hat’s part of the gamble I’m making in my American Psychogeography pieces anyway. The literature and films that are about or come from certain places are another angle.
Another way, and related, is too look for the very place specific “Johnny Appleseed” types in certain areas. They have often have a deep connection to the place they are from: Wesley Willis from Chicago, Harvey Pekar from Cleveland, Bob Moss from Utah…
That’s the doorway or keyhole I’m trying to look through at the topic and see what I can figure out. I figure its at least worth a shot.
I do think too, like said there are these places which have a very inexpressible quality. Three Native American fort enclosures in the area all have very different vibes. Burial mounds around them all too. Fort Ancient has a crispness to the energy, Shawnee Lookout a more sedate feel, watchful, but also celebratory, whereas Fort Hill is a darker, though not unfriendly energy, at least not to me. Others I know have felt unwelcome there.
The different mounds I can access easily also have very different vibes between them.
—
When I visited the Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland with my wife last year, it was really strange. I know I told the story before, but we ended up meeting the widower of the widow of Harvey Pekar who noticed the county on my license plate and struck up a conversation with me. Earlier in the day we had visited some places Pekar was fond of, and I didn’t know we’d end up being right near his grave… I wanted to see a famous angel statue that happened to be in the cemetery. But it felt like a handshake from Cleveland and Pekar, who was of course one of the cities greatest boosters. And all round loveable curmudgeon of comic writers. Must be something about the Lake Views!
People stick pens and pencils in the ground at Pekar’s grave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Pekar#/media/File:Harvey_Pekar_grave_stone.jpg
Your descriptions of Las Vegas & Florida don’t line up with Middle TN. Here, it’s small towns separated by expanses of woods and fields. Much of Clarksville feels like a growing tumor of generic sub/urban sprawl. Older residents say they can remember when some of the now major roads weren’t paved Western TN & southern Kentucky feel a little different than Middle TN, but that may be because they’re flat and Middle TN is somewhat hilly. The rocks in Western TN are also of Tertiary age, but the rocks in Middle TN & southern Kentucky formed in shallow seas in the Paleozoic Era.
They all feel very different from New Jersey where I grew up.
Also, the checkbox to receive email notifications has disappeared very recently.
This is an excellent start, JMG. And yes, your “yelp of dismay” was entirely justified. I think very few people could have done as much and as well as you did with this difficult topic. (And it is difficult, for precisely the reasons you say.)
I’m going to mull over a little more what I’ve experienced in various parts of the US, and with people I;ve fgotten to know well who were raised in parts I haven’t visited myself, and then I’ll post another comment maybe later today, maybe tomorrow.
Thanks for the terms adapted from Chardin. Those are good and I’ve been thinking of some of the terminology I might use. Also, there are other elements to what I’m working on that are about the built environment and the influence of that hopefully misty and vaporous and temporary Suburblandia- so perhaps it will be a kind of interim work, more about breaking disenchantments to see whats beneath, while the Atlas of American Enchantments waits… in many respects I just go into the dark… so though I have a conception of what I want to do, there is something else at work as it unfolds.
Thanks… this was a nice overview.
Cincinnati is an ecotone between the German overlay and the Appalachian overlay and we sit on edge of the Appalachina foothills, but have the Ohio river influence and then going West starting into the plains of Indiana and Illinois which have a very different feel and quality.
Maine & Nova Scotia seem to be part of their own vibe that is a bit different from other parts of New England, but then again there are overlapping areas. Theoregional ecotones.
I grew up in Maryland, and I very much relate to what you say about the Appalachians, and that I also felt that a lot around the Chesapeake, and certain parts of the AgReserve.
I was actually just thinking about this topic the other day, because my daughter is doing a research project on some of the short stories of Washington Irving. Rip Van Winkle is full of the Catskill fairy lands, and the odd tension of how quickly the Dutch Puritans and Quakers became so comfortable with the goblins of the New York wilderness.
We had an experience with those fairy lands ourselves a few years ago. We were driving home from a baby shower in Boston Massachusetts (that we had attended illegally, actually, because it was the heady days of lockdown when driving across state lines to attend a “super spreader” event was punishable by fine if you got caught doing it) and were trying to race back to Glen Echo Maryland for a birthday party of a friends’ child. We were up in the mountains coming down through Pennsylvania, and were trying to get from one highway to another. We followed the directions to get off at the correct exit (I triple checked the number because I didn’t want to risk being late), and about 30 seconds later were told by the GPS that we had gotten off at the wrong place and needed to turn around. The problem was that we were on a forested road with no pull-offs or side routes, so we had to keep going. And then the GPS died. We lost all cell phone and wifi signal, and were driving blind, so we decided to just keep going until something changed – either the GPS would come back or we’d figure out where we were. The road was mostly going South, so I figured we wouldn’t get too badly out of the way.
We drove for about a half hour, passing nothing but trees, down the mountain into a valley, until the trees broke and we saw a turn off into building with a parking lot. It was a long two-story building, shaped sort of like a motel, right next to an empty golf course. The sign out front said that the top floor was a long-term stay motel, and the bottom floor was a small family owned funeral home and crematorium. At this point, our GPS finally located itself again, and told us to keep going the direction we had been. We drove that way another half hour, passing more trees, back up a mountain, and found ourselves at the exact same exit we had taken the first time. The GPS told us to take the exit again. I and the driver had a brief panicked argument at 70 miles an hour as to whether we should take the exit or not, and we ended up going for it. But this time, the exit took us to the Interstate back to Maryland. Despite going at least an hour out of our way, the ETA was exactly the same as it had been, and we made it to the birthday party on time. When I got home that night, I told my husband that I was pretty sure we’d been lost in fairyland for an hour.
All that said, since moving to Florida three years ago, my experience of the land has been almost entirely barren. I’ve been trying to connect with my surroundings, practice gratefulness for the beauty around me, and learn the rhythms of the seasons here, but most of the time it just feels empty. Even the beach and ocean have been hard to connect to, and I usually have no problems with that. Perhaps I’m just too much of an apple tree to thrive in this transplant, but for work and family reasons I’m going to be stuck here for at least a couple of decades, so if anyone has any advice, I’m all ears.
Thanks for taking this on, JMG! As a former resident of Seattle, I’m curious where those sacred Duwamish sites are. That said, if sharing that information is off the table, I totally understand.
I have lived in SW Idaho for over 25 years, and spent parts of my childhood here in the 60s and early 70s. There is an austerity to this land, and I think you nailed it. Build what you want to build, and you won’t be opposed exactly, but don’t expect any help.
On your advice long ago, and also out of sheer laziness due to the blazing summer heat and wildfire smoke, I left a corner of our small yard to the nature spirits July through most of September. When I went back there to start some early autumn cleanup, I was astounded at how lush it was. A local cat, who we call “Three Leg” because that’s all he has, bolted from the jungle in surprise. He’s been in this neighborhood since we moved in over 16 years ago, and is one nervous cat. I’m glad he found refuge in our impromptu forest. I’ll leave it be once I’ve cut back enough so that the humans can pass without dodging thorns, vines, and other greenery. This land can be generous indeed if treated well.
OtterGirl
I’m from the Land of Red Shale. There’s a band of Mesozoic rock that runs from up and around NYC in a straight shot southwest to Philadelphia. It’s characterized by deep, iron rich soils pocked with crumbly sedimentary rock. It’s also the site of most of NJ train lines, host to the most culturally diverse section of the state, and grows pome fruits like nobody’s business. You can see it on the electoral map. It’s that deep band blue river that runs through a towering red valley (though admittedly, like most rivers, that one is drying up too). If you ever wanted to see what the vanguard of modernity looks like, pay us a visit. But I suggest you come soon. The people are primed to go feral.
Excellent! How much of the feel of a place do you think is due to location and how much is due to configuration? I’m thinking here of the reproductions of the grotto of Lourdes scattered about the globe as well as the reproduction of Stonehenge on the Columbia River. Are they importing the qualities of their originals or are they fighting futilely with the “spirity loci” where they’ve been placed?
Mr. Greer, et all. Oddly, I’ve just picked up a new book from the library. But, I haven’t yet given it a good look. “Don’t Go There: A Tour of the World’s Most Sinister Spots.” (Ocker, 2026.) Seems to be quit a few American entries.
When I was a kid, we’d hit the road for a two week vacation. Every other year, we headed further west ( from Portland), on our way to Nebraska and Montana. Coming back, we’d often go over Donner Pass. Now, that was a place with ominous bad juju. Ominous lowering skies, blasted rock, and a lake that was black and so still.
I took a high school road trip, with a couple of friends. The old road from Lyle, on the Columbia River to Goldendale, Washington. This was back in the mid 1960s. Ominous skies, and windy. Never saw another human being, the whole way. It was … creepy.
Not in America, but there’s the pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago. From France to the tip of Atlantic Spain. I recently saw two films. One, a documentary, and, the other, a fictionalized account of one man’s trek. I’ve read a book or two, also. It seems to spiritually impact, quit a lot of people. Speaking of trek’s would hiking our Pacific Crest Trail, or the Appalachian Trail, count as a pilgrimage, of sorts?
Then there’s Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock), in Australia. Never been, but even looking at pictures gives me a sense of … something. Not sinister, but something that demands respect.
Well, this was going to be short, and, I’ve wandered all over the place. Lew
At a first approximation I’d conjecture that whether land welcomes or rejects humans might correlate with how suited it is to farming: as you pointed out in one of your posts or books, human agriculture creates ecological border zones where life of all kind thrives, but if the area is poorly suited for farms (low water table, dry air, poor soil, or in the case of the northwest just massive old-growth forests that have to be chopped down to put farms in) then the damage human activity causes outweighs the benefits.
But certainly the temperament of the land itself has to be a factor: while I’m nowhere near as sensitive to such things as you are, one of the main characteristics of the South seems to be its resistance to change. It may well have resisted human occupation when we first reached the area, but now that we’re here and it’s used to our presence, it would hate to see us go.
Appalachia, in addition to the good climate for farming. seems like a pretty rowdy place in general, and there’s no rowdier species than us. Maybe it finds us entertaining.
Also, your comments about Florida make perfect sense of the various memes I’ve seen that amount to saying “Florida is in the South but not of the South,” such as “Florida is the only Southern state where the further south you go, the less Southern it is,” or this meme: https://i.redd.it/d4vsdkzsh17d1.jpeg
I’ve driven across the country quite a few times, from the coast to the other coast. Alone, mostly. Feeling the qualities of place, some. There’s a feeling when you’re driving mostly downhill to the Mississippi that’s vastly different from the land before. There’s a quality to rural Missouri that’s hard to describe, complicated in hard-to-discern ways. Upstate Vermont altogether brought me close to the stars and planets in a tangible way. The mountain country of Western North Carolina has a strong presence, it makes itself felt. Eastern NC (the eastern plains) has a “time immemorial” feel to me, maybe due to my ancestors having been there since the mid-1600’s. Secret magic wells inside(!) old, old trees in uncut forests. The pre-development Outer Banks had something going on that was purely magical: I met some of the Colonial era settlers there who had the strangest Old English accent. It was another country, like Innsmouth in the WOH, maybe. New Mexico has a vibe: the land rejects people who don’t fit, as has been testified to a lot. The first rule is “respecto.” Works for dealing with locals and local spirits. You can feel Coyote and that flute guy and others: harsh and funny, and dangerous, too, with their own Native humor. Just the land (the local natives aren’t too inclusive of strangers). Our Lady of Guadalupe guards the place, too. If you talk to her, you might get a temporary visa to live there safely. Upstate Michigan, again, pockets of serious magic, a sense of the “little people” of great power, and remnant Native clans that didn’t go the DIA route, full of their own power and magic. The land had been raped repeatedly, yet still had it’s own sense of itself. The crab country in the Chesapeake Bay, and the old bay islands, were another country entirely. Merry Mount? Plenty of own qualities, and nicely run-down without being abandoned. Boston and its suburbs which weren’t suburban (dating to Colonial times), very, very intense, focused. Ah. Memories of a somewhat autistic older guy, who relates to land more than people…
JMG
As someone who’s lived in and experienced most of Texas I would say is that it also feels temporary. It suffers massively from urban/suburban sprawl in the center with estimates have Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston eventually meeting to become a mega city within the next decade.
East Texas is unique in that it has a mix of Louisiana and Arkansas. It’s culturally more like the American South than the rest of Texas which often times feels like suburban busybodies larping as rednecks. Not to mention there is a lot of sections between east and central Texas where it is nothing but trees for miles and a single lonely highway cutting through it.
The west and Deep South of Texas are basically a desert already and not that different from Mexico at this point.
Functionally, I think whatever spirits live in Texas are currently being “choked out” by the current industrial infrastructure.
For a post you weren’t keen to write you did an excellent job with this one.
I’ve lived or spent considerable time (weeks, months) in many different parts of the US. Southern Oregon and Southern California; Boulder, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona. I grew up in the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania, and have lived all over the mid-Atlantic region south of New York. Now, of course, I live about an hour’s drive from you in Maryland.
My experience of the land and its spirits is similar to yours. A few things I would note:
— Modern American culture regions match very closely to Native American culture regions. I wrote something about this a few years ago, and a post on my old blog, with promises of more to come that haven’t materialized. This really is a very big topic, difficult to discuss, and difficult to explain with the tools our language makes available to us.
–Regarding the Appalachians and their Britishness. I doubt you’ll remember, but when we met at Glastonbury last summer one of the first things that I said to you was “Have you noticed how much this land feels like Western Pennsylvania?” Feels and looks. I personally felt more physically , comfortable there than in any place I’ve visited outside of the Appalachians. I left England via the airport at Bristol. While spending time in that city I had the constant sense that I was in Pittsburgh. Right after I returned to the US I drove to Pittsburgh to visit my brother, and felt like I was still in Bristol.
— Traveling the North American continent, one regularly passes from world to world. Each world has its transitional realm, as you described. California’s Central Coast is the transitional realm between Southern California and the Pacific Northwest, for example. But once you arrive in a new world, you know it. And I’m using the term “world” advisedly. I remember long ago you pointed out that it comes from a term meaning “age of man,” “wer-eld” or something to that effect. In the passing of cycles of time, we encounter ages turning one to the next, but in passing through the land we encounter them as well, turning from one to the other. I am keeping in mind Proclus’s comment, somewhere, that “Every God is a world unto himself”; in the same way, every world is the expression of a god, or a theosphere. Equally, “age of men” could be translated “Aeon.”
Each American World does indeed seem to have its own relationship to time and its cycles. Every world has its own time, or is its own time, its own age.
I was reminded of this just recently in a very painful way. For years I lived in Santa Barbara, in California. Santa Barbara and its surrounding communities felt and, from a distant, feels, very much like a place outside of time. A longtime resident once told me that it was “the kind of place where you could blink and find out that 17 years had gone by.” I notice that, in hindsight, much of my development stopped sometime around the day I moved there. I noticed time pass when I would visit my family on the East Coast for holidays, but not otherwise.
On Monday of this week I felt like it would be good to reconnect with some friends I’d known in Southern California. Good friends, in every case; men I’d spent considerable time with. I called 4 different numbers. Only one answered. And it turned out that he had no idea who I was, or how I could possibly have gotten his phone number. The degree to which I had vanished from his consciousness was uncanny. We spoke for half an hour and he never figured out who I was. One could argue that he had gotten on in years, and memory wasn’t what it used to be. But one of the others called me back a short while later, one closer to my age (and I’m in my 40s)– and he had no memory of me either. We were close enough that he was one of only a few to visit my wife and I in the hospital after our daughter was born, but it seems that leaving the bubble around Southern California had simply removed me from his consciousness.
Roy, most interesting. I plan on paying a visit to Germany in the next couple of years; it’ll be interesting to see if I get that same sense.
Siliconguy, the state boundaries out west are a fine example of absurdity on the hoof. In a saner world there would be a state of Oregon west of the Cascades, including western Oregon and Washington, and a state of Greater Idaho east of them, including eastern Oregon and Washington, and everyone would be happier.
Neon, I’m glad to hear this. Growing up within easy sight of Mount Rainier, as I did, and knowing from childhood on that when it next erupts, twenty towns and a quarter million people or so are going to be erased from the map by catastrophic mudslides rocketing across the landscape at 60 mph, I tend to think that the more people who treat volcanoes with superstitious awe, the better.
Clay, well, it’s not the only place. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited Navaho country in the southwest; yes, it’s a reservation, but it’s the size of an east coast state, and a lot of people in the broader region know about skinwalkers and the like…
Justin, but once again, it takes close familiarity with the music or what have you. That, too, I don’t have.
Patrick, I’m trying to make some kind of sense of that first sentence of yours — “Your descriptions of Las Vegas & Florida don’t line up with Middle TN” — and failing. Did you actually read my post? If so, you might try doing it again; my whole point is that descriptions of Las Vegas and Florida don’t “line up with” anywhere else. Each place is unique.
Robert, I’ll look forward to your reflections.
Justin, by all means have fun with the terms!
Calliope, my late wife and I got fairy-led in the woods near Glastonbury in 2003, so I know it happens. As for the goblins of the Catskills, everything I know about the subject suggests that they’re kissin’ cousins of the goblins of northwestern Europe; the Dutch and English settlers must have been relieved to find themselves on familiar terms with them.
OtterGirl, I certainly don’t want to share that information in a public place like this. As for the corner of the yard you left to the nature spirits, I’m delighted to hear his. Not at all surprised, mind you, but delighted.
Mark, interesting. A lot of America is going feral in one sense or another right now, and that’s arguably the direction of destiny just now…
Roldy, I’ve been to the Stonehenge in eastern Washington, as well as the real one in England. The Washington one is energetically dead — that’s partly because the “stones” are made of concrete, but the location is also wrong. Place is the most important factor.
Lew, that sounds like a fun book; unfortunately two of the library systems available to me don’t have it and the third, the DC public library system, has a catalog search function that apparently had a nervous breakdown and babbles nonsense, so I have no idea whether they have it or not!
Slithy, Clarke, and Anon, many thanks for these reports from the field!
Steve, I do indeed remember that comment, and you’re quite right about the common physical and spiritual geography. As for California, that state does something to people’s brains. I get the creeps from it the same way most people get the creeps from Lovecraft.
This is one of the most fascinating topics for me. I lived in Atlanta for two years. The place is indeed phantasmal. Totally covered in those new style 5over1 apartment buildings sprouting like cancer everywhere. People there are giddy with excitement. It’s a new money town. See and hear seen! Cocktails and pool parties. The old Atlanta downtown is more stately. To me it’s the real Atlanta. You can feel the heaviness and sadness and grace of the old Atlanta downtown. But even that is more a memory than a living being. Atlanta feels like it won’t be here much longer. I feel all that will remain is the huge highway going north.
There is so much else to say. I don’t think the Appalachian mountains like me all that much, and I don’t know why. I appreciate them though. It seems I was always meant to live on the shoulders of this great mountain range, but not within. I live in Cleveland now. The land is quiet, a bit brooding, not particularly dark. The western reserve has a consistent vibe that changes immediately upon the border with Pennsylvania. The western reserve feels like the edge of the world. A good place for contemplation, and a gathering of strength. This place is not particularly ambitious. The land doesn’t support it. This is not a hot fiery place, in temperature or in spirit. To some that may be dreary. To others it might be a relief.
The one thing I can say for Las Vegas is that immediately to the west, there are some lovely red sandstone peaks rising up out of the desert, which I found quite climb-able and sublimely beautiful when I was younger. The rest of the city, I would gleefully bulldoze into the sands.
Not far from where I live now, there’s a valley full of petroglyphs. One panel has many large, distinctive elk tracks, indicating (according to the archaeologists) that this is where the elk emerged into the third world from the second world, according to Ute mythology. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to feel anything different there, but I haven’t spent much time at it.
Nearby there’s a rough hemisphere carved out of the side of a sandstone bluff. All around it are grooves from where medicine men gathered sacred sand for their paintings. This spot is said to have healing properties, and indeed, when I sat in it, I could feel a sort of quiet difference that I can’t put any words to.
Thinking about Las Vegas… I think you’re description of it as Hell is pretty apt, but where the center is decidedly Ahrimanic (though that’s spelled “Dionysian” when you don’t take it too far), the outskirts strike me as Luciferian: uptight, highly status-conscious, too good for the actual world (why else would you try to have lawn in a place like that?), looking down their nose at the sinners downtown (while also working downtown, often enough at the same casinos they condemn).
I’m not sure exactly how to talk about my percepts of the land I live on, but I’ll mention one aspect. I don’t want to be two specific but I’m in the Ohio River Valley. For the last two autumns, I’ve spent a lot of time energetically charging and tuning with the land to get ready for winter. I sense a very strong telluric presence. Kind of a vast undulation of energy which seems related to the local river. I wonder if it’s a telluric dragon or serpent being? Every autumn I feel like I’m wrapped in a blanket of this being or energy. I think these beings are mentioned in A New View of Atlantis if I’m not mistaken.
Islam in Britain is morphing into two distinct versions that are alien to historical Islam in South Asia: a “Reformist” Islam practiced by the middle class British Punjabis in London and South East England that is very much like the Islamic version of 17th century Anglicanism, and a “Neo-Orthodox” Islam practiced by the working class British Mirpuris in the post-industrial mill towns of Northern England that is very much like the Islamic version of 17th century Puritanism. Both forms of Islam do not have much respect for the traditional Islam as practiced in South Asia filled with stuff like Sufi mysticism and the veneration of local saints in Pakistan, just like how both forms of English Protestantism in the 17th century did not have much respect for Catholicism. But the Reformists try to make their Islam compatible with the beliefs of the British state, and the Neo-Orthodox try to make their Islam compatible with only the holy texts of Islam.
Also–
I’ve shared this before, but the best way to introduce oneself from a distance to the spiritual geography of North America is to start with the books The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau, Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer, and American Nations by Colin Woodard. Then read at least one good general overview of Native American culture regions (I don’t have any recommendations since I did that research long ago in college.)
My sort of mental working model of spiritual geography relies on the idea of the Limit, the Unlimited, and the Mixture, from Pythagorean lore. In this case, the physical features of the land, presided over by their ruling gods or daimones, form the Limit, by weaving into being the landscape and its demands before human beings ever encounter it. Human culture, meanwhile, which is presided over by its own set of spirits, including heroes, form the Unlimited. Human cultural forms vary widely, and much more widely than most people ever realize; even more to the point, the possible variations in human culture really is unlimited. We really could organize such things as religion, government, gender norms, family life, patterns of residence and subistence, any way we can imagine–
Until the land spirits have their say. Then we discover that crops that grow well in England fail in Arizona; that festivals organized around (say) giant yams in New Guinea are impossible in Canada; or that allowing women to participate in warfare during times of population growth risks extinction during a time of population contraction.
And so the union of these two produces the Mixture of physical limits and unlimited human imagination, the world of daily life transmitted from one generation to the next. This, too, has its presiding spirits, and these are, above all, ancestors, spirits of the dead who lived this same life, in this same place– and spirits of the living, guided by the dreams of the dead.
Of course, these various categories of spirits merge into and inform one another. A local ghost can become a culture hero with time, or even a great god. The line between nature spirits or fairies and spirits of the dead has always been blurry in folklore. I’ve sometimes wondered if the term “indigenous,” if it has any meaning at all, may mean “a condition in which a certain plurality of the local nature spirits are the spirits of one’s own ancestors.”
I think what drives this is that each region has their own hierarchy of local Gods and spirits that shape the evolution of the plants and animals and earth under them, giving each region their own flavor. Japanese honeybees and Japanese people are big on self sacrifice for the example, and rigid hierarchy is something that shows up in both Japanese people and Japanese macaques.
This post stirred a memory in me. And perhaps this is a good place for a location-based retrospective, too.
I grew up in Beaverton, OR, smack in the middle of that West Cascades region, and for about 5 years as an adult my family and I tried to move back “home”. We ended up fleeing the place in a mixture of despair and disgust. But my own methods for trying to psychologically cope with the location at the time ended up being unexpectedly… revealing.
Often, I make up novels/stories/TV shows/etc and play them in my head as I am trying to work through some life change or other – I’ve always done it, it’s entertaining, and it really helps to delineate an outside perspective, as well as reveal my own hidden thoughts on a matter. So as I was struggling to deal with Beaverton, I made up a TV show I could play in my own head that would have the perspective that Beaverton was a lovable place to live. Well – it didn’t turn out quite like that!
It was intended to be one of those children’s educational programs, like Captain Planet or Miss Frizzle or even Sesame Street, which would have a very bland and likeable POV character who interacted predictably with other very bland characters while the real focus would be on what the show was trying to teach; namely, the history and geography of Beaverton. I read everything I could find in the public library about Beaverton and walked around and across its small downtown core daily, feeling and seeing whatever I could to ground my story in the real place.
The first thing I noticed – had noticed my whole life, in fact – is that Beaverton has water everywhere. Roads are often secretly bridges; our house nearly flooded up to the front door multiple times; the rains set in by November and don’t clear out until mid-summer. A truly astonishing amount of engineering effort and resources has gone into dredging Beaverton quite literally out of a swamp. The Native peoples were far too intelligent to live in Beaverton, of course! It was used only as a summer hunting ground.
So what occurred to me, is that the main character should “time travel” back to significant points in Beavertonian history, perhaps a different one every episode. And the time-travel should be water-based. And why not throw some beavers in there too?! (Beaverton reintroduced beavers about 20 years ago and you can sometimes see them swimming around in the larger creeks.)
What my subconscious suggested to me for the medium was a deep, dark shadow realm beyond the reach of time, “located” beneath the town, filled with reflections of people and places and things – whirling slowly about like leaves in a stream – which had once been located “above” at some point. Anyone who arrived there could “enter” a reflection and see a “memory” the land itself had kept of its former inhabitant. It was simultaneously very cool – the POV character, who was a child of about 14, certainly thought so! – and extremely menacing, having no clearly delineated edge, entry, or exit, and with its contents mostly unknown even by frequent travelers.
The POV character ended up getting there by slipping and falling into a stream one day while trying to get closer to a beaver – his “spirit” could travel there, it turned out, simply by immersing his head underneath any still body of water, and no matter the amount of time he spent in it (in the episode) he would return to his own body a few seconds later. He met two guides there, of two very different temperaments, both of whom explain the place and keep him as safe as they can. I wrote them as if they were real people who lived in the town – one was a staunchly Christian occultist and Freemason, while the other was the lapsed Catholic woo-woo lady who ran the local crystals shop (these businesses currently occupy the same block in Historic Beaverton, separated only by the Intersex Salon, YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP.) Both of them had accessed the shadow realm for their own purposes through their own sophisticated spiritual methods and were quite surprised to find a child had joined them, which raised uncomfortable questions about what else might lurk in the dark…
(Not sure if there are text limits – I’ll end this as Part 1 and continue in another comment)
(this is a Part 2 from my previous comment above)
Anyway, I wrote over a dozen episodes for this TV show, focused – it turned out – on how many changes Beaverton had been through in its own short history, how many philosophies of land usage and economy and ecology and politics had blazed through here in less than 200 years. I hit the pioneers and the fur trappers and the railroad and the intense focus on business development the region has had as its true throughline and the surprisingly large population of Catholics and the barring of black people from the Oregon territory and the completely forgotten shooting war the first settlers conducted against the Native people before using the legal system to ship them out to a reservation and some very intense moments with the Ku Klux Klan – Union Army veterans and their descendants ran the KKK out of town, can you imagine forgetting that?! Beaverton has!! – as well as the tech industry’s arrival, the Nike campus, the suburbanization, the focus towards accepting large amounts of immigrants in recent years, and Beaverton’s most current reinvention as “tiny Portland but with more parking”.
The final climactic episode, though, was centered around that giant earthquake that Cascadia gets on the regular every few hundred years. All the history shown in my TV show had happened since the last one came though in 1700, and it’s been “overdue” for some time, so it’s realistic to have it happen in the near future. The main character is walking across a non-descript bridge when the earthquake hits, liquifying the earth around the supports and collapsing beneath his feet, chucking him right into the water below. Unexpectedly thrown into the shadow realm, with no guides to protect him, he finally meets what’s been lurking all this time down there in the dark.
Beaverton’s true third rail, in my opinion, is the fate of the Native Americans that once lived here. I felt such a reluctance from the people around me to discuss or even think about them growing up that when I started my research, I fully expected to uncover a grisly genocide. That wasn’t the case – as far as I was able to tell, no Native people were intentionally murdered in Beaverton – I mean, they didn’t even live here. However, there was a terrible region-wide event in the 1830s where some disease passed on by the white man – the sources guess it was malaria – killed a horrifying percentage of the total Native population, something in the realm of 70-80%. It passed through all the trade routes and wouldn’t have missed Beaverton, or more accurately, the giant lake that Beaverton used to be, before the fur trappers killed all the beavers and the pioneers dynamited (yes, literally!!) their remaining dams holding the water in place.
The presence lurking in the dark is that of another child – a Native child, who passed into this shadowy realm by accident in the midst of that tragedy, staggering out of the wigwam the rest of his family were dying inside and tripping and falling into the lake. His body died at that place and his soul was trapped inside the shadow realm. Alone and brutally exposed to all the memories of the land itself at once – without the sophisticated spiritual protections my POV character had constantly been surrounded by, thanks to his guides – he went mad with grief and rage, as he watched his people and everything he had ever known and valued swept away by the inexorable changes of our last century and a half. He tells the POV character that his world, too, will be swept away. He shows him a vision of his suburban house sliding down the hill and collapsing, presumably with his parents inside, and all the buildings of his former life being torn to pieces by the earthquake. He shows him visions from much further back, too, like volcanoes erupting and the Missoula floods scouring the entire valley with walls of water thousands of feet high. He tries to show him the future, too, so that he can see exactly what–
The POV character, though, at this moment, rejects this vision, and delivers the tagline of the entire show: that he will live in his own time. The various scenes sprinkled in of him doing school sports and visiting Costco and enjoying modern local festivals ARE history. They ARE part of the whole, and HE is one of the whirling reflections, too, and he will limit himself to that, and he will live on and face what the time he has been born into will bring to him, no matter what it is. That’s what he’s learned from meeting the “memories” of so many significant Beavertonians, and watching the events of their lives play out. He finds his own way back out of the shadow realm – there’s a “traveler” Native character who keeps showing up in every episode, either as himself or as his jewelry after his grave gets robbed by the white settlers, always traveling and traveling here and there around Beaverton – and when he finds that man’s “reflection” he is able to travel with him once more back to his own time, and swim to the river’s shore. It turns out his parents survived the house collapse, and he joins them in the emergency shelter along with his friends, who he is able to give wise counsel to in their grief that this is only a moment in time, and that they will find a new way to live in Beaverton.
Anyway – this is perhaps leaning more towards a psychological profile of myself than a narrative, and nothing like this would EVER be allowed in children’s programming in America, LOL! But I think it matters to the topic at hand because it represents the sense of menace that I constantly felt from Beaverton, and from the land in Beaverton – mad, perhaps, at losing its comfortable covering of water and all of its eponymous beavers which had lived there for millions of years previously – even though its human history was tame in an American context. The dark water, the shadowy realm in which something dark and forgotten lurked, the whirling reflections… these all came to me as impressions, not logical conclusions. The land has its way of expressing itself, to anyone who is trying to listen.
We currently live in Spokane, which is vastly more friendly to humans – the local Native tribes described it as a “good land,” too, and actually lived on it. There is a much larger Native presence here, too, though the usual sadness of reservations and massacres also occurred. I am hopeful that we will live here for decades, in fact, while in Beaverton I was always dreaming of being somewhere else. I wish the land its covering of water back, so that it can be at peace. I hope and expect that it will not be too many more centuries before it gets it.
One of the ways I’ve been researching some things is looking at old roads, many of which used to be Native American trails, and animal traces before that. Noting what is along the way, where things have been kept more or less intact at parks and preserves, springs and the like. I am looking forward to what other tools I will learn about in the Earth Mysteries Workbook.
Street names and the like can also be a good method for research… often you’ll at least what used to be there and what the street was named after.
Anon wrote, “Functionally, I think whatever spirits live in Texas are currently being “choked out” by the current industrial infrastructure.” –and I think beyond Texas as well.
Got me thinking of how many ticked off dryads and the like there must be in the U.S.
Interesting essay JMG
Like Neon Vincent, I am also a geologist and, in my work, I had the opportunity to directly observe almost all the various regional cultures of my country, Canada. I’ve also had the chance to see a lot of the USA. From what I have seen, people grow attached to their home regions and develop local cultures that reflect their experience there. It seems to grow naturally.
This leads to another observation, we don’t the land, it owns us. At some point after we have lived in one place long enough, the land takes possession of us. It shapes our consciousness and perception of the world and we bond with those who are also owned by the same place. This seems to be in the nature of things.
This also helps explain why religion changes with location. I consider myself a sincere Christian and I have studied the history of my faith. An interesting journey is to see how the original Christianity of the Levant changed as it was introduced to Europe and then changed again in the Americas. Christianity i. The place itself changes the people it has adopted to populate it.
Thanks again
I wanted to add that Christianity is now undergoing profound changes in Africa. It the wrong button and posted before I finished inserting the sentence
“There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.”
— Wendell Berry
Sacredness in a place usually seems to be hyper-local/specific, at least to me, and seeing the broader patterns, if any, is challenging to say the least. Nevertheless, nearly everyone seems to respond in remarkably similar ways to places that have intrinsic power.
Do you feel that the widespread practice of invasive cultures tearing down existing spiritual infrastructure (of both people and things) and placing the invasive religion’s structures on the same spot makes real changes to the spiritual essence of a place or it is just a temporary veneer? Those surface layers often seem to rapidly morph into something distinctly different; due to the actual power still there beneath the surface? Or does human intention eventually change the underlying energies as well?
Humans seem to be universally drawn to, and inspired by, unusual/powerful landscape features; our Neanderthal ancestors occupied the Rock of Gibraltar for literally hundreds of thousands of years, so this sensitivity is clearly not a new trait for us!
Interesting post. I don’t recall this topic discussed when I took Geography classes in college. I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwest, and found even here where the scenery tends to be pretty boring, there are places that have brought about a sensation similar to what you describe.
But I have found these experiences are not always repeatable.
I would definitely agree with Neon Vincent (#3) that volcanoes are different, as Hawaii and Crater Lake are a couple of my favorite places. But when I lived in the Portland, OR area for six years, I made numerous stops on motorcycle rides at an overlook of Mt. St. Helens – and sometimes the “amazing” experience would occur – closer to the sky, the eerie silence, the closeness of the volcano 15 miles away, but other days it would seem like a normal roadside stop.
I’m not sure if visiting the same place multiple times brings about a familiarity that restricts the otherworldly experience, or if weather or season is a factor, or if it’s just me. I’ve noticed this effect with other places too.
“And when Jacob saw them, he said, This is God’s host: and he called the name of that place Mahanaim.” Genesis 32:2, King James Version.
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יַֽעֲקֹב֙ כַּאֲשֶׁ֣ר רָאָ֔ם מַחֲנֵ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים זֶ֑ה וַיִּקְרָ֛א שֵֽׁם־הַמָּק֥וֹם הַה֖וּא מַחֲנָֽיִם: (בראשית פרק לב פסוק ג)
Today Mahanaim is a car road junction, and people who know their way around northern Israel prefer to hitchhike there than to wait for a bus in the central bus station that’s within a walking distance because it’s well known someone will stop for you within a heartbeat.
Hello JMG,
Thank you for your essay. I think that an Atlas of American Enchantments (if ever written) is going to be a collective effort, just like the book on old technologies. Another project?
I see what you mean when you say that at Glastonbury Tor you felt closer to the sky. When I visited, it felt to me as well that the place was dominated by the sky. It is quite a contrast to my hometown of Saint Petersburg, Russia, which is dominated by water, with its Finnish Bay, countless rivers and canals crossing the city, endless rain and snow, and puddles – puddles everywhere. It’s also surrounded by swamps.
Where I live now in Northern California, there is a place called Sea Ranch. Every Thanksgiving, it gets swamped by Russians doing a very Russian thing – hunting for porcini mushrooms. It usually rains a lot during this time of the year. I recognize fellow Peterburgians by their clean shoes. We are the ones traversing a swampy area, carefully stepping from one tiny dry island to another without getting our shoes dirty. We never step into a puddle. We can estimate the depth of a puddle by just eyeballing it – a natural talent for people who grew up in a place with 32 sunny days a year on average.
JMG (and everybody), what natural talents did your place imprint on you?
A very timely post for me, as I am reading an excellent history of the Aztecs (or Mexica) now, and one of the themes the author grapples with is the mystique that kept bringing nomadic tribes from the north to the
“magical” cities of present day Mexico, Chalchiuatl and, more famously, Teotihuacan, other than the fertile soil. He postulates, that perhaps it was the south’s complex calendar system, with two cyclical calendars, one solar and one ceremonial, which spread and eventually attracted barbarian tribes who later emulated the calendar system. In any case, I have visited Mexico City and Chichen Itza many times, and both feel special, in their own ways.
When I first moved to Victoria, BC to go to UVic, I was out walking in a natural-ish area of the university grounds when I experienced this weird rooted feeling as if I had grown out of the moss and belonged there. Like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. It was rather powerful, and left me blinking and feeling a little odd but very right.
I’ve left and come back to Victoria, and have now lived in the home where I live for longer than I’ve lived in any one home in my life. And as many years total on Vancouver Island as any other place in my life.
When you hand me a paintbrush, no references, and tell me to paint something though, what comes out is usually tiers of mountains covered in dark conifers, some grey rocks, and possibly water and or mist. Like the coast range foothills I grew up in. Those mountains seem to be engraved on my soul permanently.
I wonder if the rough borders of a “magical map” from a human perspective, at least, can be found by looking at the distribution of languages and dialects. At least in Germany – and maybe even in most other parts of Europe – this may be relatively easy because the names of our villages and cities are usually old or at least derived from much older names. If you drive through Germany and read the traffic signs announcing motorway exits, for example, you can usually roughly identify where you are by just looking at the names even if you don’t know them. And then you can look at certain festivities like carnival – which in south western Germany is something very, very different compared to, say, the Rhineland. When looking at the land, I don’t find it very difficult to feel the connection to how it shaped the people, that inhabit it. But I am a native speaker, of course, and have spent lots of time in this country which in turn has been inhabited by its “native people” for a longer time than the United states are inhabited by the “new natives” if I may use that term. Without knowing too much and without ever having been there, I would guess that looking at the distribution of native nations and languages in pre-colonization times will provide a rough outline and that – as you have hinted – cross-national links may be related to geological features (from a European perspective, again, standing in Normandy or Dover does in fact give you a feeling of relatedness and somehow I can easily invent a link to legendary Rungholt – but well, who knows…)
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
JMG
Thank you very much for this John. Whenever a fifth Wednesday essay comes up I am always surprised by what gets written. I have been voting for this one for a while and the result was surprising and delightful.
I am not someone who is very spiritual sensitive and I also haven’t been many places. I have only lived in Minnesota and the Central Valley of California. Both of those places feel very different, how I can’t even say but I feel the difference. Then there is the rural California coast which I have visited often over the years. It is again a different place and one where I feel deeply at home. Why I have no idea but it always feels good to me there.
Thank you very much
Hello JMG and everybody within commentariat:
I’ve just read last post later comments, and of course I won’t comment the latest ones, for respect to our “boss”, John. So I’m sorry for not answering some interesting comments, which are evidently entering now fully in the “off topic.
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I’ve read your reference to “sacred masculinity”, and IMHO, it seems a catch-all term for some topics under current “man-o-sphere” domain. This is isn’t good or bad by itself: I don’t see myself identified under nowadays “men concerned by feminist imperialism” (ahem), but I don’t like to whip myself (a straight “white” man with a personal manhood) for all the problems women have had reportedly in every times and cultures, under the (ahem) pervasive “patriarchy”. So you can guess I’m quite skeptic to this loose term and anothers which apparently are the opposites ones, according wokesters doctrine, and their opposite side.
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“Native American philosopher Vine Deloria Jr., in his fine book God Is Red, argues that the modern Western world is almost uniquely blind to the spiritual importance of place.”
Well, I’m an “arrogant and ignorant” European man, but I can tell you I agree to some extent with Deloria Jr. In ancient times, there was a concept named “genius loci”. I wonder if this idea is near to the spiritual importance of this or that place…
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“people go on vacations to places once recognized as sacred, stop by the holy places as they do their tourist rounds, and maybe say a prayer or spend a few minutes in meditation before heading to the beach or what have you.”
It’s interesting I’ve felt especially two places relatively near my town, which fit in your paragraphs as sacred ones. Both of them are mountains, a geographical landform which always have attracted me, much more than the see. I think, at least for me, some mountains are sacred places, with or without religious buildings built in them. Even in Europe you can find sacred places, if you get beyond your materialist Pavlovian conditioned reflexes.
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“so let’s take Glastonbury, once one of the most important sites of pilgrimage in the British Isles and still a spot to which people travel from all over the world.”
Oh man, I can tell you I don’t like especially travelling outside my comfort area, and I don’t like very much the UK for tourism, but the two places I’d like to visit before I die in Britain are Glastonbury and Stonehenge…(due to personal motives).
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“One time when Sara and I visited the site, someone had made a bouquet in which all the stems were nunchaku and all the flowers were shuriken, and left it as a gift to Lee’s spirit.”
Humph…interesting. Although I’m not a big fan of Bruce Lee, I think those presents were the best gifts for his soul…
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A few words about pilgrimage:
It’s very interestting what you’ve written about that modern pilgrimage toward Bruce Lee grave. I can say the most important in a pilgrimage is the road before you arrive to your sacred place, it doesn’t matter how true it’s that place in historical terms. I’ve always wished to walk or riding my bike toward Santiago de Compostela, here (I wish to achieve it before I’m too old). Ironically, I tend to think (like some pedants…errr..scholars) that there are some reasonable doubts about Saint James corpse resting in peace in that place in Galicia. Maybe there’s another body there? Maybe the “heretic” Christian Priscilian? It doesn’t matter, what it count IMHO is your effort as pilgrim to arrive some day to Santiago. It’s a spiritual path in itself.
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“It’s not just that the architecture of modern churches is so often hideously ugly. It’s also that nobody bothers to think about the spiritual dimensions of place.”
I agree, and I can also tell you modern churches architecture repels me, due to that same reasons. It’s sad and awful you know (if you didn’t know before) that infamous architect Le Corbusier, in addition to build ugly housing for working people in France and another countries, he dared to build a church in France…You can see it in this link, if you thin it won’t offend your sensibility (as Christians or simply as art lovers):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_du_Haut#/media/File:RonchampCorbu.jpg
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“The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used one part of that terminology as a model and spoke of the noosphere”
Now, you’ve remembered that near forgotten special Catholic priest, it’s interesting (and haunting too), his theories have been dismissed by materialist scientificists and tough Conservative Christians alike. This unlikely alliance to attack his ideas has made me to think he maybe had some reason in his bizarre claims…
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“complex cultures never really seem to transplant well outside their original homelands.”
I agree. For example, I see Latin-American people speak Spanish, and they’ve been to some extent under a western paint layer in their original countries (nothing strange, because, in spite of biased Central and North Europe ideas, Spain has been part of Europe since some centuries ago, too); but I also see Latin people who come here, have some trouble to adapt themselves to our mind, attitudes and behaviors. They’re partly like us, and partly others different (I’m not speaking about their “racial” appearance, but about customs and mind). Even Argentinian people (who mostly have European “white” ancestors) seems IMHO living in another mindset than Spaniards, until they adapt to our country, mor or less (I bet they never adapt completely). For example, it’s funny some Argentinians have been living here for more than 20 years and they’ve still got their original accent when they speak in Spanish…I bet there’s a reason for it beyond psychological and nationalist motives.
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“I’m not sure why so many Germans did the same thing, but I haven’t visited Germany in my adult life and have no idea what the land feels like there”
I know Germany is a less mountainous country than Switzerland or my own country, but its highest mountains behind the Alps, the Harz mountains, aren’t very high nor rugged, even by European standards. So do the math (well, some German within the commentariat can write about German mountains better than me…). By the way, the highest peak in Germany, in the Alps, doesn’t reach not even 3,000 m,and it’s near Austria. The Harz is more toward the center-north of the country, interesting…
Las Vegas, circa 1995. July 4th. We gathered at a hilltop above the city to watch the fireworks. At 9pm or so, it was still over 100F. The wind kicked up the dust, which was thick enough to taste. The greasewood in a nearby arroyo caught on fire and the smoke blew our way. Off in the distance, at several locations in the valley, the pyrotechnics set off. Hell? Yes.
> Skyscraperia
There is only one place to which I have been which felt “defiled”: Manhattan, New York City (NYC), New York, USA.
I got to know NYC better than any other city.
I was about twelve, and it was about 1964. My hometown was an upstate New York small city, the city of my mudder‘s folks. Due to my parents’ divorce about 1962, I lived on a street with 1920s and 1950s houses🏘️. The downtown buildings were typically no more than four storys🏫. Off in the distance, I could see buildings that were as high as seven🏢stories but I hardly ever walked by them.
My father “George” (who grew up in Queens County, NYC) took me on a day tour highlighting his most enamored place on earth: Manhattan. We were among skyscrapers (his 2nd beloved) (his 1st beloved was the sea). I looked up: I felt nausea and horror. While he felt comforted, I felt antipathy. I am quite sure I said exactly how I felt, but sadly I didn’t register, specifically, at that moment, how he felt about my feeling repugnance. He died in 1968, so I was not able to talk to him about how he felt about Manhattan.
About 1987, I was 35, when I took a commuter train from my home in western Connecticut to do genealogical research in Manhattan. In those pre-Internet days, such research was done by physical visits or by (snail)mail. Some things were not available by mail so, in some cases, I had to hike it. I chose clear, gorgeous days to go to Manhattan, and the weather that day was a duplicate of 11 September 2001.
At the time, New York City Port Authority (train and bus stations) was in one of the twin towers of World Trade Center (I can’t remember which tower; call it south tower). I stepped out onto the sidewalk of Manhattan, outside the Port Authority building of south tower, and looked up; I walked to one corner of the south tower, and again, looked up.
What I saw, I felt: ugly, abomination, creeped-out, and “this is wrong.”
I proceeded to the building where the family records that I needed to consult were located. “What is wrong with these people?” is pretty much how I felt regarding everything and everyone I came in contact with on the sidewalks, subways, and in buildings. I felt like I had a big❎on my back marking me as “patsy.” I accomplished what I needed to do, and high-tailed it out of there by train with much speed. I was all-business and did not tarry. I did not need to stop at an eatery as I had brought my lunch.
There is something wrong, very wrong, about skyscrapers: they poison. There is something sick in the head of the millions of people who willingly jam themselves into the cramped spaces of the five boroughs that comprise New York City (not to mention other cities).
Although I didn’t grow up on a farm, my small town was surrounded by farms, a 20-minute drive or an hour walk. (It turns out the gentleman-farmer whose road I walked on all the time as a kid was my 8th-cousin Dutch colonist, several generations apart; I wish I’d known that I was “somebody” even though merely a poor relation). One of my grandmothers (born about 1900) was born on a farm.
I feel safe in the countryside. There are dangers in the country (particularly at night) but frankly, I’d rather encounter a rattlesnake (as long as I had a walking stick) than offer myself up to be among skyscrapers. There is nothing outwardly sacred about the plot of land I find myself, but it feels forgotten, and I like to feel forgotten. No other human wants to be here: THAT makes this plot feel sacred. Feeling forgotten is a good thing: me + animals. I say prayers “for people to git”,— I desire invisibility. These years, hermitage is a blessing.
Back to skyscrapers. Skyscrapers have a “yuck factor“ about them.
I try to imagine Manhattan island in 1626 before Peter Minuit “bought“ Manhattan. Forty years later,— in the 1660s, at the time the British forcibly took Manhattan from the Dutch colonists, except for the southern tip of the island, the rest was largely countryside.
In a thousand years, Manhattan’s skyscrapers will be gone. In two-thousand years, there, the existing “defilement of place” will have been extinguished. A clean vibe shall prevail.
💨🫥🌇🌱💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
I’ve spent a little time in Colorado and New Mexico – Yes, the places will kill you. But… if you show and live your respect, they will let you live with them. Ohio is different. It says, “Welcome,” and seems to be waiting patiently for those troops of silly monkeys to grow up.
Well I live in Cincinnati too. It feels like home to me. Warm and comfortable, but that may just be my lived experience.
This is not a place of stark beauty, like say Toas New Mexico, but it is pretty. Spring and Fall are full of color and smells, in winter we get “powdered sugar covered ceders line the road ” as a local band once wrote. In the summer we have fire files (Blitzen bugs). And whenever i go to the Cincinnati Art Museum I end up spending a lot of time in the section for Cincinnati Artists. Cincinnati has produced some of the finest ceramics i have ever seen. It is also hard to find a place with more cool Art Deco buildings than Cincinnati.
( and we are named after the greatest Roman General :
The most famous story related to Cincinnatus occurs after his retirement from public service to a simple life of farming. As Roman forces struggled to defeat the Aequi, Cincinnatus was summoned from his plough to assume complete control over the state. After achieving a swift victory in sixteen days, Cincinnatus relinquished power and its privileges, returning to labor on his farm)
Roy S. # 1:
“With regards to Germany, I’ve been there twice for multi-week visits, and both times I was forcefully struck by how much the forests (what little of them remains, that is) and mountains of Germany remind me and feel like those of western Washington.”
According Peter Wohlleben (I think he’s the best forests expert of Germany and one of the best in Europe and the world), “native” original forests in Germany were made mainly by beech trees and some oaks, at low altitudes, and local conifers in high mountains. After WWII, more or less, Germany was “invaded” by Scandianvian spruces everywhere for mere economical interests, denaturing the few original German forests which survived modern times, except some very small forests. I think you must know this “dirty secret”.
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Neon V. # 3:
Speaking about volcanoes, I can tell you in my country the only one area where you can see (and eventually smell and fear) likely active volcanoes is Canary Islands, “slightly” far from Iberian Peninsula. I’ve met Canarian people here, and they usually seem to me nice and sweet people, but when they begin to talk about their volcanoes, they often never end talking about them…they’re afraid of volcanoes and they love them, too.
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Roldy # 12:
“I’m thinking here of the reproductions of the grotto of Lourdes scattered about the globe as well as the reproduction of Stonehenge on the Columbia River.”
I’ve read about those bizarre Catholic tributes to Lourdes grotto, but I didn’t know anything about a reproduction of Stonehenge in the Wesrern Hemisphere. Thanks for your information: I’m puzzled…
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Lew # 13:
“Not in America, but there’s the pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago. From France to the tip of Atlantic Spain. I recently saw two films. One, a documentary, and, the other, a fictionalized account of one man’s trek. I’ve read a book or two, also. It seems to spiritually impact, quit a lot of people.”
Indeed, I’ve met people in my own town who walked or cycled toward Santiago. Some of them were very religious people, but others not even were Catholic people, and a few of them weren’t not even believers in any religion…all of them told me that pilgrimage was very special to them, and encouraged me to do it before I get too old…
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Anonymous # 16:
Some years ago, I was told by an American expat that Texas didn’t seem a true part of the South, in his opinion. He also told me Texas partly seems like Mexico, but it isn’t fully like Mexico (?). He wasn’t a native Texan, and I’ve never gone to Texas, so I told you as hypothesis (“one swallow doesn’t make a summer…”).
Being raised in Scotland, and having lived for a couple of years in the Sierria de Mariola hills off the Costa Blanca, I sensed a surprising familiarity with the ‘vibe’ of my Spanish home….something of the rise and fall of the speech patterns of the Valenciano tongue I felt was also presentthe ‘doric’ Scots of Aberdeenshire…by the way, the Isle of Iona, off the coast of Mull in the inner hebrides is a famously ‘thin’ place…a place of pilgramage for centuries…
Biggbub, fascinating. I’ve never been closer to Atlanta than a brief layover at the airport, so your field report is interesting for more reasons than one.
Cliff, what you’re telling me is that Las Vegas could be greatly improved by handing it back to the scorpions. I tend to agree. 😉
Slithy, interesting. I’ve never been outside of core downtown, a short distance from the Strip.
Luke, yes, John Michell wrote about that extensively.
Anon, I wonder how long it will be before they reenact the English Civil War with a Muslim accent…
Steve, nicely Pythagorized!
Dennis, that makes sense. I’ve noticed in recent visits to England the remarkable Englishness of people whose ancestors came from all over the globe; even the hedgehogs have an irreducible Englishness.
Shinjuki, I wish you’d write this at book length! It would make a fine, fascinating read. Spokane is a lovely city, and I don’t just say that because my late wife was born and grew up there. She had Native American friends and playmates in her childhood — living in a poor Catholic neighborhood made that relatively easy.
Justin, I think you might end up having a lot of fun with the Earth Mysteries Workbook.
Raymond, no arguments there. I don’t imagine I’ll ever really feel at home away from Puget Sound, but exile is sometimes necessary.
Ken, oh, the land always bats last. Human intention is a transitory thing; the meditations of stone and earth, and the spirits thereof, overwhelm our intentions in due time. Some ancient and medieval peoples recognized this — that’s why, for example, the original Catholic missionaries to England were advised, in a famous letter from the Pope, that when one of the little English kingdoms converted, they were to find the saint most akin to the deity ruling each local temple, turn the temple into a church to that saint, turn the local festivals into festivals of that saint, and leave everything as untouched as possible while bringing the spiritual life of the people within the ambit of Christianity.
Drhooves, time and space intersect in fascinating ways. That’s why many holy places are traditionally approached only on certain days or in certain seasons.
Circle, interesting!
Inna, I wonder if the very large Russian expat population in Seattle was mostly refugees from St. Petersburg, then — they’d have found the weather and the constant presence of water familiar! As a child of the Puget Sound area I’m comfortable with rain, and the kind of damp chill that settles in most people’s bones and makes them uncomfortable doesn’t bother me at all; heat and humidity, by contrast, make me miserable.
Anna, to people from the dry and desolate north of Mexico, the green lands further south must have looked like paradise. That said, no doubt there were other factors.
Pygmycory, I know the feeling. This silkscreen print is by Elton Bennett, who spent his life in the Pacific coast town where my father and grandfather both grew up.
He’s a figure of purely local fame but to this day I find his work achingly beautiful, because it captures the light, the landforms, and the spirit of the Pacific coast more perfectly than a photo could.
Nachtgurke, that’s a fascinating question, which could only be answered by trying it. We do have definite local dialects and accents here, btw — they’re not as striking as those in Europe, but if you pass a street sign reading BEAR HOLLER RD I promise you that any American can tell you what region you’re in…
Will, thanks for this.
David, oog. Yeah, that would qualify.
Northwind, interesting. I know a lot of people have that reaction to Manhattan. I find it exhilarating, and would like to live there for a while if I could ever afford to.
Rhydlyd, I can see that. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Ohio but I’ve been there for up to a week on a few occasions, and yeah, it has that ambience.
Dobbs, thanks for the field report!
I found your treatment of the subject quite interesting, JMG, even if it had to be rather general by necessity. Particularly fascinating to me was your distinction between the West and the PNW west of the Cascades. I’ve never been there and so can’t speak to that, but it brought up a very interesting bit of conversation from years ago. Deep in the woods of rural southern Missouri, we were talking with an old friend of my grandpa’s, the local Yarb Doctor. Picture a shorter Jed Clampett and you’d be pretty close. One person had been talking about “the West” in kind of general terms, using it the way you did here, the US west of the Mississippi. The old mountain man listened patiently, then finally said “You ain’t in the West, son. You’re in the Ozarks.” And he said it like it mattered.
I note that the Ozarks are on the border, like the Pacific NW, though I have no idea if that’s relevant.
Florida 😀
That’s home, of course. I live close to the state line– just a bridge between us and the next county, which is in Alabama. And it is the *weirdest* thing, crossing that bridge. Not some supernatural experience, but the complete total cultural shift that happens once you reach the other side. Everybody drives slower (I love this as I’m a poky driver myself), nobody’s in a hurry, the accent is noticeably different. And I’ve lived on both sides of the line: the most surprising part, to me, is that *even the soil is different* I have no idea how that works, but one side of the river is Alabama red clay soil so intense that you double-take driving by any place with a fresh-dug hole: it looks like the ground is bleeding. The Florida side is white quartz sand. Must be some crazy alluvial deposit vs. ancient sand dunes thing going on there. It’s like with the ground so different, they couldn’t help but be very different places in every other way too.
Have experienced the other sorts of place though, both positive and negative. There’s a hill, in a reserve, in the suburbs north of Boston, that I used to climb pretty regularly. It had a nice view and stuff, but I think I kept going back because I was looking for the remains of the temple or altar that *must* be there somewhere. It was that kind of place. Lots of glacier-dropped boulders perched in odd places about the park. Back in Florida… there’s a really neat geological feature a daytrip from my hometown, where a small creek falls seventy feet into a sinkhole. We don’t have many waterfalls in our very flat state, so it’s a local site-of-interest. It’s also absolutely gut-level terrifying for no obvious reason. It hates you, it probably wants to eat your soul, your kids, or your dog, and you should probably leave as quickly as possible. That’s the vibe.
@Calliope
Not sure how a transplant would “find place” in Florida, but it’s there. A good place to start might be to just look at a map, see what state and local parks are near you, and start exploring them. There’s way more to the state than the beach, but the beach is certainly where everybody goes! It’s a big state and I’m not sure whereabouts you’re at, so I can’t make specific recommendations other than: look around and see what people have thought worth protecting from developers, aside from the beaches. It’s a neat state, but I can see where it might not be as easy to catch the vibe of as other regions, but I promise it’s there. You have to get out of stripmallville first though. You might check out the state’s Roadside Geology book for some insight into the different regions:
https://geology.com/store/roadside-geology.shtml
…such as the limestone “spine” of the state that goes down the east coast right through to the keys. You wouldn’t think that “geology” had much to say about a state with so few rocks, but different soil types often equate to… different ecosystems, plant communities, agricultural crops, and cultural variations.
There is a fascinating synchronicity for me in this. I was worrying/wondering about a recent phenomena in my life where people I used to know from earlier days have come with me on a trip to a certain mountain in New Zealand, and that trip/mountain has somehow revealed all sorts of extremely odd, borderline dangerous, behavior in those people. I’ve known that mountain for 20 years or more, in all seasons and moods. But for some reason it reveals character in others. This mountain has literally put some deeply insincere people into states of madness recently. Sincere people – no worries. The revelation has been swift and a bit terrifying. I’m fine, just a bit shocked.
There is definitely a speed up in the world at the moment, karma and the like seems to be coming around far more quickly at present. I like to think I am fairly balanced and attuned to this stuff, but I’m certainly getting whiplash.
Then you write this!
The Maori people of New Zealand had over 40 words (and counting) for wai (water), they describe the essence and quality of a place (the “mauri”) as much as they were the water itself. In New Zealand the energy landscape varies more than in any other place I’ve visited. You can be in one place and it feels oppressive, keep on walking, and it’s fantastic, and then the weather changes. There’s a reason too Maori saw the mountains as battling atua (gods or deities). Yes I’ve experienced that darkness you find around the Puget Sound area, as I think it extends up into British Columbia a bit. I agree about the harsh openness on the other side of the Rockies too. NZ has parallels of both – the West Coast bush isn’t to be messed with, people do disappear, but not as frequently and if treated with respect, it’s fine. Maori passed through that landscape, living mostly seasonally on the coast, rather than in the interior, although this was primarily about food supply – too cold for agriculture, large birds mostly gone by then.
But I do think there’s something else going on. A sensitive american friend of mine told me she thought that the NZ landscape was too young, and was just getting used to humans. As the southern alps are only 3 million years old, that makes sense. There are some deeply indifferent parts of the NZ landscape.
The east coast high country (east of the mountains) in New Zealand is amongst the most hospitable and inspiring landscapes on the planet, I have found no parallel amongst the 18 countries I’ve been lucky enough to visit. That’s probably why the high country, more so than the southern alps (ka tiri tiri o te moana), is so deeply embedded in NZ literature, film, and photograpy (and healthy and unhealthy forms of nostalgia). It intriguingly is much older, 10 million years or more. The older parts are amongst the most hospitable.
The North Island is different again. Volcanism, some deeply hostile forests, and a memory of human warfare that the South Island for the most part doesn’t have. Also quite possibly, various past practices that might be on the murkier and grubbier end of things, but I am not the one to pass final judgement on that. The North Island makes my head spin. But, I know North Islanders who get upset with the great empty spaces of the South Island I thrive in.
Dr Phil Callahan of course looked into some of this with his language of para-magnetism, which I think is on the blurry line between known electromagnetism and the direct etheric substance, but I think there is more to it than this as well.
Your concept of the noeta and nooregion covers it well I think. It’s a vast landscape.
@JMG
I’ve had a chance to spend time in both sides of Vegas. Both can be pleasant in a rather superficial way, but I wouldn’t want to live in either. If I were to summarize the the common theme of “vibes” I got from both in one word, it would be “escape.” Vegas is a place where you can pretend to have the perfect life — whatever that means to you — for a bit, and as long as you don’t stay too long or get too caught up in it, the city will play along.
Last time I spent time on the Strip, I was strongly struck with the sense that in downtown Vegas I didn’t have to worry about what other people would think of me or anything I was likely to actually do there. They’ve seen it all and they don’t care. I wouldn’t even register as a blip on their radars. For me, for various personal reasons, that was an amazing comfort. The experience stuck with me.
But like I said, I think it’s superficial, and almost certainly the first part of a kind of trap. I think maybe Vegas gets a kick out of seeing people suffer from the consequences of their own actions, which is why it encourages people to go to extremes in either direction.
When my wife and I were first married (several decades ago), we took a trip to the UK. While staying in Edinburgh, one day we drove out to Traprain Law. My wife was a medievalist who knew it as the stronghold of King Lot of Lothian. When we got there, it was deserted: there were sheep grazing on the hill, and a fence to keep the sheep in, but no humans and no signs telling us to keep out. So we hopped the fence and wandered up one of the well-trodden trails to the top.
The day was cloudy, but the sun came out when we got to the top. The view was clear, vivid, and unobstructed, as if it were Amon Hen. After a few minutes, we sat down and pulled out a picnic lunch we had brought with us.
As we finished eating, my wife looked around and said, “We’d better go.” “Why, is something wrong?” “We’d just better go.” So we packed up everything carefully and went back to where the trails had brought us up.
There were no trails. We spent several minutes looking back and forth, but the well-trodden trails had completely disappeared. We knew we had come out onto the top here, so the trail had to be nearby … but it wasn’t anywhere close. And the sky was preparing to rain.
In the end, we found our way downhill without a trail, pushing through the tall grass and watching our steps closely so we didn’t step amiss on rocks or thorns. It began to rain in earnest. The trip down took longer than climbing had, and was considerably more difficult. But finally we got to the bottom, scampered into our car, and drove away.
@Siliconguy, #2, Yes on Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America! It’s a great book and I am a big fan.
In the Introduction, Garreau explains the logic of his map very simply: “The reason we are nine nations is that when you are from one of them and you are there, you know you’re home.”
Simple and elegant.
You say you won’t be writing the Atlas of American Enchantments, but is there enough interest among the rest of the commentariat to write it as a collective effort? Could we all contribute to it the way so many have contributed to the Technonomicon? Who has a story to add?
I see that @Inna, #34, has made the same suggestion. Who else is onboard?
If I may, for Northwind and Myrian and I think one other poster about creative sourcing of fabric, I just bought a brand new still in its’ package all cotton twin sheet at a thrift store. Good for testing or lining or casual shirts.
@Lew, #13, writes about driving over Donner Pass. Recently some enterprising employee of the State of California put up a sign at one of the freeway exits, announcing the “Donner Pass Picnic Area”!
Sometimes you have to wonder….
There is also the magic that can be imbued into land by the art of cultivation. I spent two years 1977-79 embedded in the gardening world created in California by Alan Chadwick, a visionary though quite temperamental English gardener. His methods brought gardens to exquisite pitches of fertility, productivity, and beauty beyond the ordinary.
https://modernfarmer.com/2015/08/meet-alan-chadwick-the-high-priest-of-hippie-horticulture/
He was a conscious expression of classic European culture going back to Renaissance, medieval and Roman/Greek cultures complete with the seasonal influences of the 4 archangels, the monthly cycle of the moon, careful horticultural technique, a knowing of the subtle secrets of plants, soil, birds, and animals. The human being meant to be a channel to bring nature to a special cultivated state., which was Adam’s mission in the garden, “to dress and keep it”as it says. The Hebrew first “dress and keep” could be translated as “to serve and observe closely”
Our sons and I have hiked or paddled mostly in the northern areas…The one time when we experienced a particularly strong feeling occurred when we hiked into a small lake in Yellowstone that may not have been visited for quite some time…The only sounds were the wind softly blowing through the trees and an occasional bird call…we just lay down for a couple of hours and experienced a magical feeling that we had escaped from the rest of the world and its noise…it was heavenly…
Cool topic, and JMG, I think you pulled it off well.
Your paragraph about the difference between science, occultism and religion is one of my take-home keepers from this essay. I’ve been wondering how occultism fits in or plays with my religious studies, and now I have an answer, thank you.
Shinjuki, your cool mini-novel about Beaverton is my other take-home keeper today. And great intel as well, thanks!
Here are some maps of the theoregions of the continental USA; you can very clearly see them. Appalachia is one theoregion, the South is another, the West most certainly a third– especially visible in the “religiously unaffiliated” map. Check out:
https://prri.org/research/tracking-vaccination-by-religion-at-the-county-level/
(Feel free to bypass the comments about “fauxination”; there are plenty of just-plain maps that are useful here.)
I’ve spent a lot of time in Michigan and in San Diego, CA. There’s a darkness in a higher proportion of the Michiganders, but the land is rich, deep and meditative. San Diegans are kind, open, and human, while the land is sunwashed meditatively half-asleep/estivating, until the rains come, when the sage bushes and grass quietly have a green party for a couple of months. There is a metro city area of 3 million here, but I don’t know how long it will stay. The land is timeless and patient. It’s easy to see why early-20th-century occultists set up here along the coast.
I’ve driven through Las Vegas and couldn’t see it in my rearview fast enough. “Sin City” is definitely the vibe. It was originally a series of spring-fed meadows in a low spot which got piled onto and obliterated by colonists, which is why it is located at the lowest, hottest location instead of up on the higher, cooler ground to its south.
You couldn’t pay me to live there, and it looks doomed anyway. Lost Vegas in a hundred years, I’m calling it.
Interesting! I’ve lived in Texas my whole life, and had chronic bronchitis as a child; every head cold seems to go straight to my lungs and try to move in even now. I wonder if it’s more common here?
Every time I visit Anderson Island in Puget Sound, I want to move there. Maybe since the water is so close on every side, it doesn’t have the dark vibes? I’ve never noticed any. In any case, it’s a stunningly beautiful region.
Hi John Michael,
Ah, the writer’s journey becomes the story itself! 🙂 Thanks for the enjoyable read, and personal stories.
Why would anyone expect that the old ones have suddenly gone away? I guess western civilisation pretends that place does not matter, and this is simply untrue. It matters greatly, and yet the need for the elites to exert control exhibits itself in a rules based approach, which may, or may not work equally, even from a geographical perspective. Does it work in this location, is perhaps a more important question. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
@JMG
I really mean that my area of the south somewhat resembles the popular conception of the American South, but Las Vegas and Florida don’t.
Ah, this is one of my favorite topics. I am lucky to have travelled, and have always taken temperature of the land wherever I go.
California, my home state, is a strange place, no doubt, as it is vast, and I suspect there are many smaller regions within the state itself; the Central Coast resembles little of Eureka or Arcata; San Diego and Tahoe are similarly distant; the Central Valley and the Bay Area are similarly different, and you always know when you leave one place to arrive in another. Many different indian tribes lived here, with more than fifty unique languages familiar in the land. I am not surprised California is home to so many immigrants now.
On the strange madness of the land, the great California artists seem to pick up on it: the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Thomas Pynchon’s novels, David Lynch’s movies Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, The Mamas and the Papas “California Dreamin’,” the Eagles “Hotel California,” the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. Allen Ginsburg’s Howl is a poem which could only birth itself in California.
There is an enegry here which enraptures people and relaxes them, I’ve noticed, with beatiful beaches and impressive mountains, bountiful land, iydillic weather. Things are so perfect you wonder if things are too perfect. It is imprinted on everyone’s mind. It’s always interesting to hear the stories about Californians going other places, because it seems like other Americans can sniff it out quite easily. Some dark things lurk around, but they are not always felt here. The egregor is masked by the sprawl, and everyone is obsessed with getting rich.
The Winchester Mystery House is perhaps the best example I can think of. Sara Winchester, heir to the Winchester Rifle business fortune, developed a fear that she would be haunted by the ghosts of poeple killed by Winchester rifles. Her solution was to build a massive Victorian mansion, with numerous dead ends, false doors, and corridors to confuse the ghosts. Construction began in the late 1800’s and never finished. The house was continually expanded until she died in 1922, for she believed that endless construction would keep spirits from finding her in the mansion.
And herein lies a metaphor for California: an endless mansion of weath and opulence, whose endless construction drives the owner to madness.
I like the silk painting. Really nice.
Thought provoking post JMG! Thank you.
I’m a “part time” transplant to the bubble of Orange County CA… we sit under the Santa Ana Mountains, and our totem, so to speak, are two peaks called Saddleback (they resemble a saddle). Those peaks speak to me often, sometimes sadly when I notice all the ugly cell towers poking out of them, but other times expressing satisfaction in their job of looking over “us humans”. I find it personally a cozy bubble here maybe because I also lived in Manhattan for so long?
Speaking of which, yes, Northwind @ 41, Manhattan in the 1980s WAS a nightmare…dirty, grungy, dangerous… the only thing going for it back then were its cheap rents, which I took advantage of, stuck it out and have come to love it now dearly for all the valuable experiences it gave me!
Jeff, that yarb doctor was a man worth listening to. He’s right, of course — and even within the West as such, there are many distinct nooregions and theoregions.
Methylethyl, thanks for this. Limestone sinkholes are scary places generally — It makes a certain bleak sense that the Mayans used to throw human sacrifices down them, just to placate what lies in wait beneath them.
Peter, fascinating. If the mountains wake up, things are going to get really weird — and if that happens, I’ll be even happier to be far away from Puget Sound. There’s a Native American prophecy that someday Little Sister will speak and Grandfather will answer, and the land will be wiped clean to the sea. Little Sister is Mt. St. Helens, and I remember very well when she spoke. (I heard the shockwave from the blast more than a hundred miles north, in the south Seattle suburbs.) Grandfather is Mt. Rainier, and we’re waiting for his answer…
Slithy, my most compelling memory of Vegas was seeing people gambling on the casino floor of the casino-hotel where the conferences were held, a third-string place off the Strip. It’s the only experience I’ve ever had that made the Christian conception of Hell believable to me. All these people, caught up in a trance of frustrated greed and craving, crouching like damned things in front of the slot machines that tormented them — and the most horrifying thing about it was that every one of them could have stood up straight, turned away, walked out of the casino and gotten a life, and they wouldn’t. They clung to their damnation like a drowning man to a bit of floating debris. Thinking of it still makes me shudder.
Michael, thanks for this! A properly spooky haunted-landscape story. As for the Atlas of American Enchantments, by all means, but someone else will have to coordinate it. My plate is very full just now.
BeardTree, yes, there’s also that.
Pyrrhus, that sounds lovely.
Cicada, I’ve been using that trichotomy a lot recently, and finding it very helpful. Glad it works for you!
Jennifer, the islands are relatively safe. I think whatever lurks in the forests doesn’t like to cross water.
Chris, I know, but that sort of idiocy is very deeply embedded in modern Western thinking these days.
Patrick, thanks for clarifying. Of course neither of them do — nobody I know of considers the Southwest to have anything to do with the South, and as several people have commented, Florida is a different country altogether.
Mrdobner, thanks for this.
Pygmycory, everyone I know who knows the coast in that part of the world — which includes the BC coast, of course — loves Bennett’s work at first sight. It’s gorgeous stuff.
mrdobner #63:
Oh, yes, definitely California has different regions with different vibes.
I’ve visited a lot of parts of it. Here’s my start at a catalog:
San Diego-by-the-coast: sunwashed, open, meditative on the edges where not too Suburblandia’d. “Plein Air” paintings capture this vibe perfectly.
Mountains east of San Diego: eccentricities and individuality amongst boulders.
California desert, ranging from the Mexican border up to by Nevada: = same region as southern Nevada, southern Arizona. The state border here is arbitrary; the actual border is the aforementioned mountains, where the rain shadow starts.
Hell A: Way too overcrowded for my taste. A hyperbustling metropolis, hard to feel the land under all the people.
Southern Central Valley: Not unlike farm country in the Midwest in feel, just drier and there is more Spanish spoken.
Northern Central Valley (north of Sacramento): Still farm country but starting to take on more of a Pacific Northwest vibe.
Central Coast: A lull in the middle of California. It’s largely been left alone. Sea and cliffs.
Northern California, especially the coastal regions, seems more like western Oregon and Washington in vibe.
I can’t speak to the Bay Area; I haven’t been there in decades.
Given some of the wildly varying accounts of reactions to the same locations, I am reminded that there is something called (it has a trademarked name, I’m gonna give it a less impenetrable one) astrocartography. Mapping out individual charts onto the whole world. Your Sun-Ascendant line might be my Saturn-Descendant line, and depending on aspects to either planet in one’s chart, one or the other could be good and magnetizing or bad and repellent.
My skills as an astrologer are flaking off of me for a variety of reasons. I’ll leave it to others to discuss how the whole thing works. This might need to be related somehow to the various spirits of place we’ve been discussing. Also, there are periods in one’s life when one or another planets are more or less influential (firdaria being but one way of determining such things).
So, like me, you could find your Sun-Jupiter-Asc lines fell near San Francisco at a very opportune time for living there, but the prominence of those planetary influences waned and you would find yourself leaving. Wheels within wheels within wheels, cones and squares and colors and wisps of vapor fading in and out and circling back again. Not to mention the non-euclidian geometries of places inhabited by other beings… The whole topic of humans relating and related to land and spirits of land is so vast!
This is one of your finer posts and has moved me to share a bit of my experience. I grew up in northern New Mexico in a little town created from a boys camp to gather the worlds most insane people to create the Atomic Bomb. Situated on the eastern flank of the Jemez Mountains not far from a volcanic Caldera known as the Valle Grande. In my youth I spent a great deal of time in these mountains and especially in place called Bandolier National Monument which holds an ancient abandoned Native settlement. Nestled in the pumice cliffs of Bandolier is a grand cave within which are three Kivas – which are pueblo indian sacred places.
There is an unmistakable, tangible mystique in the air in the canyon leading to the sacred site and as you climb the ladders and follow the ancient steps up the the big cave at the top, you can’t but help feeling the imprint of the lives that passed these ways before you. One night three of my friends and I were enjoying the psychotropic effects of LSD and went into one of the Kivas. Immediately I was confronted by the Coyote kachina who let me know, in no uncertain terms, that my presence was a desecration and that we needed to leave. At the same time, the two of my friends who also ventured into the kiva were visited by their own spirit guides with the same message.
We bolted out of that kiva like our pants were on fire and were fleeing gracefully when the fourth member of our gang called out for help. He was being held in place in a nook at the back of the cave by some entity he was convinced was going to kill him and was simultaneously begging for help and bargaining for his life. We eventually got him out of there though I don’t remember how exactly. I’ve never been more afraid in my life! Point is, sacred places can also be sacred to other entities and respect is generally appreciated by the local denizens. That lesson has stuck with me my whole life.
Another fantastic place in NM (which is rightly called the land of enchantment) is Monte del Sol in Santa Fe. On moonlit nights you can literally see an aura coming out of the mountain. No drugs needed! There are hundreds of such places in NM and Utah, Southern Colorado and Eastern Arizona that I know well and I’m greatly pleased by your essay.
I’m still reading through the comments and hopeful that this particular awareness grows and blooms. fwiw, I lived in Seattle for three years and am now in upstate NY and know flatly that geography is inherently magical. For an excellent series of insights into geology, I’ll recommend to everyone the book Annals of the Former World by John McPhee.
Great post, this is one of my favorite topics!
As someone who lives in Western NY state (Buffalo area), I’m not only on an international border, but also right near the border of two subregions. Where I am is on the Erie/Ontario portion of the Great Lakes Plain, which naturally is a flat woodland region with the Niagara escarpment (and most famously, Niagara Falls!) running right through it. Just 20 miles south of Buffalo and you’re in the Appalachian foothills. The accent begins to change from that “flat-a” Inland North speech to something more similar to that of Western Pennsylvania (I do wonder if different nooregions help shape how regional accents develop over time?). These two areas definitely each have a different vibe to them, though I feel the two fit together into a larger region. The US/Canada border actually slices right through the Great Lakes Plain region. The vibe across the bridge in Southern Ontario is quite similar to that on the American side where I live. Huge foreign-born population aside, nearby Toronto does not feel like an alien city at all to me.
From my rather limited magical senses, the land here doesn’t feel hostile at all, just serenely indifferent to humans. I’m sure the old folklore could tell some interesting stories though. And there is quite a lot of local folklore that predates the coming of the Europeans. The Seneca Nation (part of the Iroquois) were the natives of this land when whites started settling in large numbers. The Senecas (Haudenosaunee) have some really cool lore about Niagara Falls:
“The authentic Seneca (Haudenosaunee) myth attributes the creation of Niagara Falls to a cosmic battle between the Thunder Beings (Hi-nu) and a giant Water Serpent, rather than human sacrifice. According to the legend, a young Seneca woman named Lelawala was accidentally swept over the falls in her canoe but was rescued by Heno (the God of Thunder), who lived in a cave behind the cascading water.
When Lelawala returned to her people, she warned them that a venomous serpent was poisoning their drinking water. As the tribe fled, the serpent pursued them; Heno struck the creature with lightning, killing it. The serpent’s massive body lodged in the river, damming the water and creating the Horseshoe Falls, while its thrashing carved out the basin. The thunderous roar of the falls is said to be the lingering voice of Heno, and the mist represents the spirit of Lelawala.
This original narrative contrasts sharply with the “Maid of the Mist” tourist legend, which falsely claimed the maiden was sacrificed to appease the gods. Seneca elders and anthropologists have long worked to correct this distortion, emphasizing that the Haudenosaunee do not practice human sacrifice and that the original story highlights healing, community, and the balance between benevolent and malevolent natural forces.”
And, “For both the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse) and Anishinaabek (The People), whose later presence displaced the Neutral Nation, and for whom the region became important for hunting, trapping, and trading, Niagara Falls holds special significance as a natural world feature possessing great meaning and power. Both the beauty of Niagara Falls and its frightful connotations attracted visitors to this location, thereby transforming the Indigenous relationship to this place.
Among the Haudenosaunee, the people of the Seneca Nation (Onondowa-gah, Great Hill People) began visiting Niagara over 1,000 years ago, and fashioned stories about the falls as a place of power. They imagined a world of constant struggle between the forces of darkness represented by giant, horned, serpents that lived under the waters, and the benevolent Thunder Beings who lived behind the falls, who only ventured out whenever the serpents tried to rise to the surface to attack humans.
As the story is told, one such serpent, swimming up-stream, was fatally struck by a lightning bolt hurled by the Thunder Beings. Wounded, its huge body was carried by the current to the brink of the falls where it’s horns and tail got caught on the rocks. As it died, the body grew rigid and solidified in the shape of an arch, thereby making the crescent-shaped falls.
When the French arrived in the 17th century, Niagara Falls was located about 100 metres to the north. Constant erosion has made the brink of the falls recede over the centuries. However, 13,000 years ago, when the first Indigenous peoples viewed the falls, it was located near where the present-day Lewiston-Queenston bridge spans the international border between Canada and the United States, a distance of approximately 9 kilometres from its current location!
Haudenosaunee oral tradition explains that as more and more travelers began to arrive, the Thunder Beings decided to leave their home behind the falls and head to the western mountains. However, they still return to this region, flying behind the dark thunderclouds and still cast their lightning arrows to the waters to keep the remaining serpents in check.
Niagara Falls, as seen through French Jesuit eyes, was also an awe-inspiring sight. Perhaps this is why the newcomers created a fanciful story of the sacrifice of a beautiful maiden to the spirit of the falls. There is no evidence that the original peoples ever did such a thing. However, what became the “tourist” legend of the Maid of the Mist lived on for quite some time and can still be seen reflected in the souvenirs that were created around the myth.
There does exist an authentic Indigenous version, however, that emerges from Haudenosaunee oral tradition wherein Niagara Falls is seen as a symbol of power and home to the thunder beings, known for its healing energy. The traditional Seneca story of the Maid of the Mist reveals Niagara Falls as a special place capable of restoring mental and physical balance to a distraught young woman. Inherent in this authentic tale is the expression of a range of human and community dynamics, including everything from jealousy and maliciousness to empathy, compassion, honour, wisdom, and health and healing. The story is every bit as rich and evocative as the majestic geography of Niagara Falls and its environs might suggest.
The French soon realised the strategic importance of the Niagara River and convinced the Senecas in 1720 to let them build a “House of Peace,” at the mouth of the Niagara River and the head of Lake Ontario. The building, which quickly grew into Fort Niagara, played a major role in the European contest for North America between the French and the British.
Colonization changed the look of the landscape and impacted Indigenous cultures as well. Manufactured goods began to replace the hand-made household goods of the past. Ceramic cooking vessels were replaced with metal kettles. Wood and stone tools were replaced by metals utensils and European-made weapons.
The local Indigenous peoples were often caught between the French and English, or later, between the Americans and the British. The river became both a geographic and political border between those opposing forces.”
the whole story is here:
https://nfexchange.ca/museum/discover-our-history/brief-history-of-niagara-falls/indigenous-history-a-brief-summary
Something tells me these “thunder beings” are still very much present here. I think they might be what occult lore refers to as sky spirits or Sylphs.
Anyway, loving this topic as I do, I’m sure lots more interesting things will come to mind!
JMG, if you think Mt Rainier and Mt St Helens are bad, look up Taupo. The giant lake in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand (which Maori called the eye of the fish, despite not having planes to fly around in – yes they are seriously smart) is the result of the largest eruption the world has seen in the past 25,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oruanui_eruption
That may be the unease that lies underneath New Zealand, before I even start with the magnitude 8 earthquake overdue on the alpine fault. The country may not be habitable after all that.
Just as well New Zealand is technically written into the Australian constitution as a state…
So here are a few comments from an occasional silent visitor to this site, who as a Bay Area native ultimately spent half of his 7 decades in San Francisco, and a significant chunk of his childhood at the northern foot of the Eastern Alps, with many return visits to the latter region during the years in-between. I’ve been residing in Southwestern Oregon for the past 15 years, where I find my semi-rural corner of the woods to be quite hospitable– aesthetically, energetically and otherwise. The “darkness” thing may apply more to the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest than to my stomping grounds 100 km inland. I haven’t felt more than a rare passing mood of it here– another color in the palette, more somber than dark– but have there.
Mysterious winds have led me to a variety of magical and powerful sites across the American West and abroad, though to my knowledge none of these have been publicly recognized as such, except in regions whose human culture overtly acknowledges such correspondences. Otherwise, tacit nondisclosure agreements can be part of the deal.
As a side note, I find the desert region and canyons surrounding Las Vegas to be quite lovely, notwithstanding the cheesy antechamber to perdition at their center. Additionally, while I found Colorado to be scenically attractive, I never really felt at home there, or in most of New Mexico. As for California warping people’s minds, I see that as possibly attributable to the cultural amplification factor of population densities that have clustered at the continent’s edge (stay on your feet and dont fall off). Despite not having set foot in California for years, I haven’t lost any of my deeper love for its lands (they are many), which nourished me for dedades, and which will remain as the enduring California.
These experiences, and my sense from reading the comments so far, suggest that each individual’s experience of the land and the specific sites it hosts can largely be a function of the synergy between the energetic resonance of the location and the unique psychophysical constitution and associated contours and sensitivities of the experiencer. Alternative explanations are of course always welcome and seek to be heard.
Happy and fruitful explorations to all!
Hello John Michael and Everyone,
I have many stories about the mental and spiritual life of places. This comment will keep to the place I live now, called The Gold Coast, in SouthEast Queensland, Australia. I have lived here fifteen years.
The Gold Coast is a very young city, with major development beginning in the mid twentieth century. Southport is an overly large suburb within it that well displays how the White Fella cannot take a hint. He builds and then tears down rail lines, bridges, shopping centers, hospitals, hotels, swimming pools – almost like he knows that these things do not belong here. Then he builds them again, but they never function properly and end up like ghost structures. Before development, the waterfront of Southport was home to large pelican colonies and from what I can learn from the Yugambeh traditional owners, people did not dwell there and only passed through seasonally.
The suburb to the north is Labrador – everyone who lives there loves living there, and everyone who does not live there cannot understand why. “Lock Your Door Labrador” has a bad reputation and the people shopping at the local store look frighteningly unhealthy. But the residents have a way about them that is soft and welcoming.
Surfers Paradise to the south is, John Michael, another Hell for you. For our readers who have experienced the Hawaiian island of Oahu, imagine Waikiki with feral palm trees, huge glass skyscraping hotels right up to the ocean shore, and a complete absence of Hawaiian native culture (not replaced by Yugambeh culture). But here is an example of where the White Fella knows but does not realize – the heart of Surfers IS the great gathering place that the developers think they created. Everyone is having fun, people of many cultures happily vacationing together. But if you step just outside the boundary of that Spirit of the Land, then the businesses are shuttered and even empty spaces cannot be filled permanently.
Finally for here, two parts of the Gold Coast keep me out and I respect this. I do not stop in Mudgeeraba or Musgrave Hill, for if I do everything I try will fail. I’ve never sensed a malice from those places. Sometimes only the initiated are welcome in a place, so maybe I am not ready.
What I know of the Aboriginal Australians, they understand the mental and spiritual dimensions of place – I learned “Spirit of the Land” from them. Some Australian places still have their traditional names. When the Australian Federal Government custom-built their capitol in 1913, they chose to keep the Aboriginal place name, and the Aboriginal people had places named after human body parts, so our Federal Parliament is in a town called “boobs” (True Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia Volume 2, David Hunt, 2017, Black Inc.).
Live from the NorthEastern Border of Yugambeh Country,
Christine Clifford
@methylethyl
I’m down on the Space Coast/Brevard County, so the easiest nature to find is beach nature. I’ve been to a few of the parks and nature preserves around me, and I haven’t found one I’ve really connected with yet. Mostly they just feel humid and unhappy to me.
Unfortunately, this area is trapped in development Hell (and more is coming – apparently Amazon is slated to build a massive warehouse complex a couple of miles from my current rental house), so it’s hard to get far from the strip malls and housing-tumors. My husband and my brother both work extremely specialized jobs that really only have opportunities here, in DC, and a couple places on the West Coast, so my whole clan is kind of stuck here for now. I’ll take a look at that website, though! Maybe it’ll help me find a place I vibe with.
@JMG
Brrrr. Just your description makes me shudder. I didn’t pick up on anything similar at the hotel I was at, but I was probably just oblivious to it. The casino didn’t interest me that much, anyway; I was more interested in the buffet and the various restaurants and shops around the periphery. Those were hard enough on my bank account.
As much as I liked it there, I also recognize that Vegas is a city that wants you to get sucked into the illusion, then leave you chasing it long after it’s drifted away on the wind. I think that’s just as true of the well-manicured suburbs as of the seedier parts just off the Strip, it’s just the illusion is different and the vices run in the opposite of the usual direction.
(Then again I admit I might just be talking about my relatives who live there!)
My son is heading for Portland next on his big adventure, and mentioned planning to go to Olympic National Park to camp. He’s 28, a grown adult, and I flat out forbade him to go. Neil Gehring’s body was found and suffered “extensive blunt trauma involving his head, torso and limbs.” I never, ever dictate to my kids like this. My daughters were sitting with me while I talked to my son on the phone and they said “You should SEE Mom’s face. You can’t go there.” And he agreed to go to Cascadia National Park instead.
I obviously can’t speak for anywhere in the US, but in New Zealand I have noticed some odd divisions. For instance, in Wellington (the capital) there is (in my experience) a distinct divide between people who are from North Wellington and those from the Hutt Valley (technically a different city, but considered part of the Wellington conurbation by most). Both characterise the other area as crime-ridden and swear they would never live there. It is not a class or economic thing as both have well-off areas and poor areas. Oddly enough, traditionally the ambassadorial residences were generally either in Waterloo/Woburn (in the Hutt Valley) or in Khandallah (in North Wellington) (a dig into which were where and whether there were patterns in that would be fascinating, but probably not something I’ll ever prioritise).
My own home town of Whanganui (the wh is pronounced locally like the wh in the old-fashioned way of saying when, whereas elsewhere in NZ it is pronounced as f) is odd for a coastal city in New Zealand in that the areas by the beaches are the poorest socio-economically – the most well-off areas have always been up on the hills. It was first settled by colonists in the reign of Queen Victoria, like most of NZ.
Well, JMG, for a topic that you felt that you didn’t have anything to say you sure said a lot! I had no idea that this would be the topic for the 5th post of the month, but it just so happens that a few very related thoughts have been rattling around in my mind in recent days that you, and others, may find at least mildly interesting. Here is my first installment (probably of four):
I see art to be an important intermediary between the bioregions and the theoregions. And one hugely important contemporary work of art in the geographic region I have spent over 90% of my life in (Lakelandia) is The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, written and sung by the Canadian folk music icon Gordon Lightfoot (for those who may not know the song but are curious, it can be listened to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A). Every person of my generation in ‘Lakelandia’ grew up hearing the song thousands of times in the late ‘70s and throughout the ‘80s. Chilling to the bone! I understand that in some states – Wisconsin and Michigan, for example – it is virtually an unofficial anthem. For some inexplicable reason, I chose to listen to it a dozen times last night, after not hearing it for years. (As an aside, there were more than 100 shipwrecks within 2 miles of where I grew up, and I even watched one wreck in progress – a huge laker! – when I was a wee lad) These lakes are so vast, so beautiful and yet so deadly, they make an immense impression on all of us who live here on many levels, including – I truly believe – the spiritual/religious. In the case of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a religious ritual has been created: the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral in Detroit rang the church bell 29 times on November 10, 1975, on receiving the news that all 29 hands were lost in the wreck. This has been done annually every November 10 – except in 2023, when it rang 30 times, as Gordon Lightfoot (who donated every penny he earned from that song to the 29 widows of that ill-fated Laker and who broadcasted and immortalized that maritime tragedy through his song) himself died earlier that year.
JMG, many thanks for this fascinating and stimulating essay! Lots of intriguing discussion already.
As a Central Californian born and raised, with ancestors resident here for 3, 4 (surname), & 5 generations, I think the expressed revulsion to California may be an artifact of how many Californians are transitory newcomers. JMG, you’ve acknowledged already in one comment “I don’t imagine I’ll ever really feel at home away from Puget Sound, but exile is sometimes necessary” and in that I think is an important key: can it be that it takes generations to settle in to a land’s nooregions, and before that point you’re going to be lucky if the new land you inhabit decides to be welcoming? California, as a geographic province and as a bioregion is VERY diverse, and (my theory) with diversity comes craziness. Imagine a room full of people all shouting out “Here!” “No, here!” “Hey, sit down, it’s OUR meeting!” in an absolute cacophany of voices.
Correspondingly, when I lived in New Mexico for a few years (hat tip to Clarke aka Gwydion @15 and Rhydlyd @42) it was quite easy for mystic-leaning me to quickly key into a profound respect for the landscapes of the desert Southwest and its many peoples. I think that’s because the Southwest, specifically the Four Corners region, still has viable remnants of peoples who have lived there a LONG time and also, perhaps more crucially, the land tells a fairly consistent story: dry, high. Whereas California is just All Over The Place: it’s a beach, it’s a desert, it’s mountainous, it’s Hollywood, it’s a Bunch of Hicks (looking at ya, Central Valley), it’s chic, it’s Fruit & Nuts! Yaaaa!
The rural bit of Central California coast where my wife and I now live has been, ever since my father dragged us kids over here on weekends, a bubble of calm, grace, and beauty which to my grateful surprise remains a place which few humans seem to gravitate to, compared to similar places in SoCal & NorCal.
Music: Drone Zone via SomaFM. Weather: foggy overcast. Composure: content, grateful.
Regarding the ugly architecture of modern buildings, I mentioned it here a few years back but it worth repeating for others how may have missed in.
In the context of the essay ‘Hate is the new sex’, in the same way the Victorians oppressed sex and it came out in the form of their buildings and furniture, modern architecture looks like what happens when you supress hate.
Also, I have never been there but I can see the charm of a place like Las Vegas if Las Vegas wasn’t there. The deserts have their own special place but when you try to transpose modernity on it, it turns into Hell. Like trying to mix oil and water, it just makes a mess of it all.
A personal experiences with this stuff, the more time I have spent in the Australian wilderness, the more you can really feel what the aboriginals were talking about in terms of the spirits of the lands. If only vaguely but it grows with time. I speak with the local keeper of the wilderness reserve that I live next to, he has been doing it for 63 years and he is completely convinced of it all this despite his English heritage. Makes you think.
” And it is the *weirdest* thing, crossing that bridge.” [Between Florida and Alabama]
That’s funny. In a Spell for Chameleon there is a magical barrier there. Piers Anthony must have felt it too.
JMG
Something this post has made me painfully aware of is my own lack of knowledge of Native American mythology. I blame the public school system. The only Native American lore that I was taught in school is the legend of how the Texas blue bonnet came to be. And while not mythology per se, I was also taught about the ghost dance and how superstitious the Native Americans were.
Do you have any good unbiased recommendations on Native American mythology?
I was thinking of two different interpretations of the same deity interacting differently in different theoregions, and in all probability both of them are true.
1. I imagine a godly classifieds page with listings for roles to take up for mortals: A Mary needed for Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A Poseidon for the English Channel. And so on. The god roles are filled by local entities, hence they differ from place to place. I actually thought of this when considering JMG’s Jesii hypothesis, and I imagined a group of fanatical Christians going to war over the appearence of their “Savior” (which they have seen): Jesus is red skinned, horned, and carries a trident and anyone who thinks differently is a heretic!
2. That the manifestation of a Deity is filtered by the energies of the land like how the planet Venus operates differently in Capricorn than in Scorpio.
@ Peter #50
Every time I have been to NZ, there is just something about special about South Island, and not just because of the vistas. Even the tourist trap of Queenstown hasn’t completely erased that feeling, yet.
As for the North Island, yeah, mostly not my jam. There is a reason why I call it ‘Business Island’. North of Auckland is neat enough and the volcanism is much clearer at places like Taupo and Rotorua. But as Tony Martin once said “God loves new Zealand, he gave us boiling mud.”. You can have him back once we are done with him here in oz. 😉
I feel there is a reason why NZ was the first country to recognize a river with personhood, speaks to the general state of the place in that these factors haven’t been entirely erased. If only that luxury was extended to others and Fonterra can stop dumping junk in them. 😉
One has to wonder what it is like on Stuart Island/Rakiura as it is largely untouched by industrial society. The closest I have been is the look out from Bluff Hill, but I didn’t stick around for long because speaking of weird vibes, there is something very off about Bluff. I couldn’t put my finger on it but it really feels like the end of the world and not just because of the location.
@ Ken RE : Sacredness in a places
I have said for a long while, we are renting the world from the trees. Take care of it or risk being evicted. 😉
Decades ago when I for the first time stepped into the first floor of a Nevada casino filled with machines, tables and gamblers – Harrah’s in South Lake Tahoe, I was surprised and shocked by the presence of so many evil spirits. I had never had encountered such a congregation of them.
I was also born and raised and have spent almost all of my adult life in Washington. I’ve traveled across most of the United States except the east coast, and briefly visited Europe on my way to the middle east. Even though there’s some major drawbacks to living here it’s home for me and I don’t think I’d rather live anywhere outside the PNW.
I spent a lot of time camping and hiking around the Capitol State Forest and Olympics. I’ve had a few paranormal experiences. I was terrified of getting abducted by “aliens” in my youth. I have no idea why other than too much X-Files perhaps. My first paranormal experience happened at my grandparents house which was nestled back in the woods of Steamboat Island Road and fairly remote. One night while trying to go to sleep in a guest room at the far end of the house I head activity outside my window. I heard odd clicking noises coming from multiple sources. They seemed to me to be communicating with each-other. It didn’t sound like anything natural I’ve ever heard before. The next thing that happened made me jump out of bed and run to my grandparents for protection: I heard beeping and tapping noises that were OBVIOUSLY unnatural, and they were right outside my window. I ended up sleeping with my grandparents that night and I don’t think I’ll ever know what it actually was, but knowing what I now know I suspect what I experienced that night was faey activity. I think they knew of my fear of aliens and used that to play a trick on me. There were other things that happened: I often heard footsteps outside my parents house (a remote farm house), in the gravel driveway, and when we had a dog it would bark… I suspect the same thing (faey). I’m grateful it never went any further than that.
I was out hiking alone in the capital forest one afternoon when all of a sudden a chill went up my spine and I was alerted to a “presence.” I just knew something wasn’t right. I stopped, looked and listened. All quiet. As soon as I started walking again I heard something moving in lockstep with me in the brush nearby. When I stopped, it would stop in perfect unison. When I started walking it started walking with me in unison. I freaked out and started running and could hear it keeping pace with me. I just bolted. Finally it seemed to stop following me and I kept running until I needed to stop for breath. I walked briskly out of there, got in my car, and never came back to that same place.
The last one is the one and only time I actually saw something in the woods. I was out camping with a cousin one summer evening next to a fire on the banks of the Skykomish river. It was warm and clear skies so we weren’t using a tent and only had light sleeping bags. My cousin had fallen asleep, and I was just about to when all of a sudden, with my eyes closed, I started to see an outline of the trees above and around me illuminated in white light. I opened my eyes and was startled to see a bright orange/red orb illuminated in the sky above me. Instantly, as if in reaction to me becoming aware of it, it descended behind the treeline with unnatural speed. I was stunned, but not scared. After laying awake for a while longer, not knowing what else to do I laid down and went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning I didn’t tell my cousin about what happened. In times since I’ve felt called to go back there, but I don’t ever intend to.
I’ve been out driving around forest roads after dark looking for a place to set up camp and had an overwhelming sense of dread and foreboding that I don’t get in other places. But there are also places that are more warm and welcoming. The Hoh Rainforest is one such place in my experience. And whenever I’m out driving around the more populated areas I’ve developed a sense for places that feel like “home.” It’s a very distinct wall or threshold, like passing through a curtain, and I can tell instantly when I’m in one of those more welcoming areas. But my grandparents house was one such place and I still had those weird experiences, so I don’t know…
Just some things I thought to share! Hopefully it’s interesting.
“The very few times I’ve been to the American South it felt distinctly as though I’d crossed a border into a completely different country. The two times I’ve been to Florida, it felt as though I’d crossed yet another border; to me, Florida feels like a Caribbean country, not even part of this continent.”
I’m a native of the South with family on mother’s and father’s side, both of which we’ve traced as far back as the late 17th century to what is now Georgia. I spent my first two and a half decades years in the South, much of that with heavy connections to nearby regions of the Florida panhandle and the gulf coast. The next five years were in the southernmost regions of Florida. You are 100% spot on with all counts.
The older I get and the longer I spend away, the more I appreciate what was good and unique about it. It’s one of the few regional sub-cultures that is barely managing to survive against the monoculture. I still don’t miss the summer-time heat and humidity. But the lands itself, yeah. I understand what you mean about place when I think of the tail end of the Appalachians, and then an hour or two south the coastal plains that stretch all the way out to the Gulf.
Florida’s an odd duck because there are at least three sub-regions, and a case to make for several more. The Florida panhandle from the Perdido river in the west over to somewhere around Tallahassee is effectively Lower Alabama in all but the official boundary lines. Real-estate predators and tourism are over-developing that coastline now to a degree that makes me weep, but the ruination of eyesore condos and mass tourism is a relative late-comer and regions a few miles from the water aren’t so badly touched. The regions over toward the Atlantic coast around Jacksonville are something else, and then as you move south it gets weirder still depending on which coast and how far you are from Orlando or Miami.
One anecdote relevant to the theme of place: I live in New Zealand now. Peter Wilson mentioned up front the wilder nature of some regions in this country and I have my own story about this. Several years ago I went with my family to a location in the North Island which was a partially excavated cave formation once used by the local Maori as a burial place and portal into the underworld — as far as I understood what our guide was telling us, anyway. It had been recently rediscovered during earth-works, and the opening bored open to make it accessible to visitors.
This was when I was first opening myself up to the world of occultism and the esoteric, so I didn’t know much of what was going on in that respect. But I recall descending into that cave and feeling, not exactly fear or dread, but a presence of something that was unsure about our presence. At the bottom, there was a natural drip of water on to a rock formation. The guide told us that the custom was to wet your hand, place a drop on your forehead, and say a short blessing. I did that right before ascending up, and I swear to you I felt a great weight come off of me and a feeling of something or someone being pleased. I don’t doubt that there are powerful forces here who are not hostile, not exactly friendly, but as yet unsure about us. In my very limited experience with them, they’re quite approachable if one is respectful.
Hello, JMG and the many commenters.
My first thought is that the cat is part of the local “noosphere,” although I have no idea how to gauge his thoughts or experiences on the topic of spirituality.
Marine mammals are going to have their own description and geographic division of the ocean, of course. Parrots? who knows?
I do have the feeling that big trees must be special, but can’t actually feel it for myself. Maybe they have conversations with the weather?
It would honestly not surprise me if the most spiritually potent place in America has been, albeit temporarily, transmuted into a fenced-in corporate parking lot with NO TRESPASSING – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY emblazoned on its sides..
(Although more likely, it’s been turned into a tourist attraction.)
Thanks for the “best I can offer” post on an interesting topic. Despite what you might think, there are some useful nuggets in here like the bit about hills and so forth.
I think I’ve mentioned this before: by contrast to the posts talking about “dark energy” in some areas, the place my wife grew up, in the middle of the woods in rural Canada, has a lovely, calm, peaceful, warm energy about it. We enjoy going there because the atmosphere is soothing; one gets the feeling of being watched by benevolent spirits.
When I’ve read about the settlement of that community, I’ve seen vague remarks like “yeah the guy who founded it decided it seemed like a good place for a farming community.” But I wonder. Could he “tell” that there was positive energy there?
I always enjoyed hanging out at the Carew Tower. Used to be biggest building in the city. It’s from the Art Deco era and the restaurant / bar in the hotel portion has magnificent beautiful interior. Great place to hang out, though it was mostly running around the other parts of the building when I was a teen or just walking through the areas open to the public in later years. I learned that a massive mound complex was once on the site in my early twenties. My friend Ron recently told me he figured out a ley line connecting the spot to Mt. Adams, a massive hill in the city where the art museum is and an old monastery and beautiful church. Beyond that the line connects to the Newark mound complex -itself having significant astronomical alignments. A golf course has been built around it now. So typical.
There is a much smaller mound near the river in a neighborhood that is also on a golf course. In the same neighborhood there used to be another that people raced their cars around back in the 50s.
Golf, cars, earthworks…
I read an article once about architectural acupuncture. It seems to me this might be something that could be explored in the psychogeographic / earth mysterion toolkit. & a more esoteric version of course as well…
Here is one article, I don’t know if its the same one, but people are still thinking about this topic:
https://thecommontable.eu/architectural-acupuncture/
“On the strange madness of the land, the great California artists seem to pick up on it”
I would add Philip K. Dick to the list.
Chuaquin @#44: “I’ve read about those bizarre Catholic tributes to Lourdes grotto, but I didn’t know anything about a reproduction of Stonehenge in the Western Hemisphere. Thanks for your information: I’m puzzled…”
If that puzzles you, allow me to present the mighty roadside attraction of Western Nebraska, Carhenge: https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2606
No, I can’t explain it either, except to note that the prairie wind can do strange things to the human mind, and that Midwestern winters are very, very long…
Another comment about Texas:
In addition to my last comment, I met some time ago a Mexican migrant here who had visited Texas, He also told me it seemed for him quite similar to his country (especially the North of Mexico), but different in another aspects. He wasn’t able to tell me exactly why, in reasonable terms…maybe he had a feeling about it: being and not being “at home”.
On the other hand, you know I’ve never gone to Texas nor another part in the US, but I like very much cinema, especially “film d’auteur”, so evidently I also know German filmmakers Win Wenders has been for long years “in love” with American landscapes and their people. So I remember very well his old movie “Paris, Texas”, with its unforgettable actors and actresses, and its countryside and urban landscapes, which seem another actor more…
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/paris_texas
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I can tell you, as a fun fact in geographical similarities between an American landscape and an European one, that more or less at 30 km from my town, local people can see a likely half-desertic landscape which resembles Monument Valley. Even some American expats who live here have admited this likeness, to some extent. Soils are red with some greens mixed in them, and there are also some strange hills for being in Spain, loosely similar to Monument Valley buttes. It’s said everybody in this world has a double, and it seems landscapes may have another one, too…
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JMG # 18:
“I’ve been to the Stonehenge in eastern Washington, as well as the real one in England. The Washington one is energetically dead — that’s partly because the “stones” are made of concrete, but the location is also wrong. Place is the most important factor.”
OMG, concrete instead true stone! Stonhenge copy cannot improve the original monument, starting with that ugly modern butchering…
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Steve # 24:
“The line between nature spirits or fairies and spirits of the dead has always been blurry in folklore.”
I think you’re right. Difference between worshipping dead people as “saints” and believing they’re “nature spirits”, is blurry. In his novel “The Hungry Tide”, Indian-origin writer Amitav Ghosh wrote about a local belief within people in the Ganges delta Indian area (Sundarbans), named “Bon Vivi”. In its origins, she was an apparently real human woman, who came from an Arab country as a “muslim saint”(maybe Sufi?) with her brother, to Bengala. Her legend began when some people said she could calm down animals, even big predators like tigers (like Orpheus?). This legend evolved toward this woman becoming near a goddess. It’s interesting that area in Bengala has been normally inhabited by Bengali muslims, but since the last part of the XIXth century, Sundarbans have received a lot of migrants from another parts of India, who are Hinduists. These people, ironically, have worshipped Bom Vivi, a muslim woman, like a Hindu goddess, making offerings her statues, like their old Pantheon “imported” gods. “Se non é vero, é ben trovato”.
https://www.goodreads.com/es/book/show/4950.The_Hungry_Tide
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Justin P. # 28:
“Street names and the like can also be a good method for research… often you’ll at least what used to be there and what the street was named after”
Thank you! I think it’s a good idea to know our towns past, not only in the USA, but here in Old Europe too. Indeed, we never hadn’t “indian” natives, but Iberians and Celts before Romanization (an historical euphemism used instead of “Romans invading, killling and enslavering Spaniards far ancestors”). My town has a Latin origin name, but some nearby small towns seem to have Iberian origin names…
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Inna # 34:
“It is quite a contrast to my hometown of Saint Petersburg, Russia, which is dominated by water, with its Finnish Bay, countless rivers and canals crossing the city, endless rain and snow, and puddles – puddles everywhere. It’s also surrounded by swamps.”
I’d like to ask you a doubt about your hometown in Russia. It’s said here in West Europe that Russians, especially the old school people, don’t like St. Petersbourgh. Indeed, in some in his novels, Dostoievski depicts that town people (at least its middle class during the XIXIth century) as corrupt, bad and intriguing people, under their thin layer of European-Westernized aspect and customs, maybe in contrast with Moscow (I remember in “The Idiot”, he even wrote a paragraph about St. Petersbourgh smelled badly). Is it a commonplace within Western Europeans? A Dostoievskian personal “black beast””? Or this bias against that town really exist within average Russians outside S.P., even today? Thanks on advance.
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Nachtgurke # 37:
“At least in Germany – and maybe even in most other parts of Europe – this may be relatively easy because the names of our villages and cities are usually old or at least derived from much older names.”
I agree. Here it happens the same thing. An example, “Pamplona” town, whose name comes directly from Pompeius, the famous Julius Caesar main enemy. Evidently, this town was established in honor of this Roman politician and military (for Basque nationalists dismay, who prefer to name it as “Iruña”, ahem).
You can see its population was tired soon of its original name: “Pompeiopolis”, so it changed slowly toward its today name.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Pamplona
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(To be continued)
I have felt the ‘passing into another world’ effect most often in woodlands, though sometimes also on hilltops. The feeling in woodlands is different to that on hilltops. So yes, I do agree that places do have their own very local theo- or noo- atmosphere, and it is not just the obvious places marked with prehistoric standing stones or mounds. Having said that, some of the places marked with stones do definitely have strong energies. (Stonehenge I find is now dead – too desecrated. There are much better stone circles and monuments to visit).
When it comes to bigger regions, it is hard to separate out my personal experience from my knowledge of history. Plus, There is always the question of to what extent human culture interacts with the pre-existing spirit of place, in a mutual two-way relationship.
Here in the UK, we have had a couple of thousand years of history of immigration and migration (plus more going back into prehistory).
Not many outsiders have ever invaded or conquered the hills of Wales or Scotland. The Romans took some tentative steps into Scotland and retreated again behind the walls (Antonine and Hadrian’s). The Anglo-Saxon invaders never went there either. The medieval English kings surrounded Wales with castles, but didn’t touch the interior culturally. Those places remain very different to England and the Scottish lowlands. Wales was eventually conquered, but Scotland was brought into the UK by mutual agreement, so was not conquered.
More recently (about 1200 year ago), the north and east of England were invaded by Viking settlers. To this day, I find that area different : the region around Newcastle is what I call “Geordie-land” (Geordie being the nickname for the people), not the same as England.
Then later, 1000 years ago, the Norman invaders treated Northern England very differently to Southern England. These historical and cultural factors leave indelible marks, even a millennium later.
Other areas also feel different – the lowlands of the East (Norfolk and the fens), the west country beyond Dartmoor, the chalk hills of southern England, etc. Hard to say how much of this is my reaction to the physical geography, or a regional spirit-of-place.
We do have a lot of different physical landscapes, and a lot of spoken accents, crammed into a small island.
I grew up in southern Illinois, near the KY border, and I always found the place to have an oppressive, negative energy, especially after dark (and this was before I became more sensitive to these kinds of subtle sensations). That feeling has only grown with age., but there are places there that are strikingly beautiful and continue to occupy my dreams, so I don’t know what to make of it. Yet even some of those beautiful places are still filled w darkness: bands of vagrants and robbers that haunt the trails, disappearances, and that kind of thing. It’s been like that for generations. I grew up with a pervasive sense of paranoia and dread about the wilds: there were bad people out there prowling about.
I now live in the upper midwest, which is more energetically neutral, but it has its spots. There’s a natural hillock en route to my friend’s homestead and it’s always resonated with me. I have a powerful urge to put a shrine atop it. It feels uniquely juiced up compared to its environs. Sometimes as I drive by I find myself imagining a column of light shining out of it up into the sky. In the SW of WI and NE of IA there is a region known as the driftless that I love to visit: it is geographically unique and feels adventurous and wise. It’s one of the few areas up here that escaped glaciation, and it has visible precambrian rock strata, rocky cliffs, and even some small waterfalls. It doesn’t look like the midwest at all.
I was at an event some years ago at a private area near Lake Michigan, atop a ridge, and while staring at the Lake in the distance I felt myself suddenly overcome by the lake itself, and the sky, and the hills, not just its beauty, but their actual presence. I’ve felt this at the ocean, and before tall, fresh mountains, but this time the lake itself and its environs seemed to be talking to me. I had daydreams for a month about the lake, and about how I wanted to build a chuch or shrine nearby. They were markedly more vivid than what I usually experience, as if the area itself were telling me to do it.
How can we commune with the spirits of a place and better feel their energies?
An emergent property of ecosystems over time.? I think the living human frame is sensitive to aspects of reality that are unavailable to dead scientific instruments.. I felt the below recently in a mature second growth redwood forest and in other forest types and individual trees over the years..
A quote from Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers by Stephen Harrod Buhner
“ Great. Forests, when they attain a certain age, take on an inhabited state. That is, there is a conscious and living presence in the forest. This does not occur in young forests and any forest that is extensively logged will lose this living presence. Humans have grown as a species in long relationship with this forest presence and we are immediately aware of it when we encounter it. The loss of the great forests thus deprives us of something deeply necessary to our humanity.”
Aged California valley oaks have a sweet gravitas.
Sorry for the copy/paste from google search but your mention of Glastonbury brought to mind the topic of geographic chakras.
The 7 Earth Chakras
• Root Chakra (Grounding and Survival): Mount Shasta, California, USA — Known as a massive volcanic energy vortex tied to primal existence and earth grounding.
• Sacral Chakra (Creativity and Emotion): Lake Titicaca, Peru and Bolivia — Positioned as the planet’s emotional and creative womb, bridging masculine and feminine energies.
• Solar Plexus Chakra (Willpower and Identity): Uluru and Kata Tjuta, Australia — Sacred desert sandstone monoliths representing planetary vitality and self-identity.
• Heart Chakra (Love and Compassion): Glastonbury and Shaftesbury, England — Celebrated as the spiritual heart coordinating global harmony and legendary grail myths.
• Throat Chakra (Truth and Communication): Great Pyramid of Giza and Mount Sinai, Egypt; Mount of Olives, Jerusalem — Acts as the collective voice and communication center for the planet.
• Third Eye Chakra (Intuition and Vision): Mobile location (frequently associated with Western Europe or shifting astrological ages like Shaftesbury, England) — Believed to move dynamically over time rather than staying fixed.
• Crown Chakra (Spiritual Connection): Mount Kailash, Tibet — Regarded as the ultimate sacred Himalayan gateway to cosmic consciousness and divine energy.
It seems like hills are the key. Wawel castle in Kracow Poland also has some writeups about it in this regard.
JMG # 46:
“the original Catholic missionaries to England were advised, in a famous letter from the Pope, that when one of the little English kingdoms converted, they were to find the saint most akin to the deity ruling each local temple, turn the temple into a church to that saint, turn the local festivals into festivals of that saint”
Oh, not only in England, here missionaries did the same thing, too…It’s quite common for archeologists here to find some Pagan Roman and/or Pre-Roman remains under or near some Catholic churches and countryside hermitages, here. And I guess it happens the same among another European countries.
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Peter W. # 50:
“I’ve known that mountain for 20 years or more, in all seasons and moods. But for some reason it reveals character in others. This mountain has literally put some deeply insincere people into states of madness recently.”
Well, mountains are special sacred places for a lot of religions, so it isn’t very strange some people (bad) worsens their character when they climb them, and some others the opposite (even living a spiritual experience). I think it’s not accidental the Gospels story when Jesus and some of his disciples went to Mount Tabor peak and then it was the Transfiguration scene. Often mountains change people.
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Michael 20 and Lew (#56):
I’ve near missed your comment about Donner Pass, but that area which evidently makes remember everybody those macabre past events, has made me think directly about “The Shining” movie. Indeed, I love every Kubrick movies.
It’s very famous how Nicholson character and his wife and son, when they’re in his car toward the (in)famous mountains hotel, have a talk about some unfortunate old times travellers who went to the West, but they were trapped in the mountains and eventually cannibalism happened…It’s too evident it’s a reference to the Donner story.
Of course, during that famous movie, like in another classical American horror movies, there’s a moment when somebody says there’s an ancient Native cemetery under the building…
I’ve gone across the continent 6 times, from St John to Tifino and aside from the obvious physical differences between the Rockies, the prairies, the Hudson’s Bay woodlands, the Niagara escarpment, the Glacial moraine, the Laurentians, the Chick-Choks in the northern Appalachians, the Bay of Fundy , &c. I have found that doing my morning meditations produces a very different feel in each place. Something ineffable, a sensation that even similar geography feels different. Montreal, at the confluence of three rivers, feels different from Quebec City which is just downriver.
The same is true visiting Europe, even within France, my morning meditation in Paris felt different from morning meditation in Orleans even though both are cities on rivers.
I know I’ve said years ago that when I visit a place, one can see how the people who live there are different, there is an aura about them. So people on Vancouver Island seem to have the same ineffable sense that they are different from people in Alberta, even newcomers soon adopt a style of being. I’d say it is partly due to the observation that people in similar geographical regions tend to have similar cultures, i.e. mountain people are like other mountain people and rich fertile river plains people are similar, but it’s more localized and specialized than that.
Ineffable, but definitely discernible.
@Methylethyl:
I’m right on the border to KY… whenever I spend time in KY I am more relaxed. Maybe its cause I’m not at work and not in the grind, but sometimes I’m just visiting my sister over there (still part of Greater Cincinnati conurbation) and its a more relaxed mood. I think going across the river really does something.
John, having been to southern Germany in Bavaria, it’s easy for me to see how people from that part of Europe settled around the upper Delaware River in the region of northwest New Jersey and northeast Pennsylvania where I currently reside. The two regions have a very similar vibe.
Oh, yes, the Southwest is a country in itself, if not the northern branch of Mexamerica.
I will be here in North Florida the rest of my life, even if my daughter settles elsewhere, which I don’t think she’ll do. This part of North Florida is a lot like southernmost Georgia, except for Gainesville, a college town and a blue spot in a red state. St. Augustine is pure Spanish Colonial, which felt familiar to this old desert rat from the most Hispanic state in the union, New Mexico. The Florida Panhandle is culturally Alabama.
OTH, Orlando feels like Las Vegas, being the home of Disney World etc. The Keys, of course are your Caribbean country, and Jimmy Buffet is its prophet. Like any long, narrow state, we’re many, many things, from North to South.
My very woke daughter feels right at home in Gainesville.
Greetings JMG and all commenters!!
A wonderful read, and as you so humbly acknowledge your starting point is not the one of an ‘expert’, but the trichotomy works well, and is reminescent, for me, of the description of ‘three brained beings’ (humans) as used by Grudjief in ‘Beelzebubs tales to his Grandson’. It works well.
Living as I do a few hours North of the puget sound, in a whole other country, the art of Bennett you shared is indeed extraordinarily gorgeous, thnks for this, will be looking for more of him and his art. Although I have not reason to travel south to that area in recent years, it so happens I may be going there in the weeks ahead, and you have shared two places I am now aware of and will make a pointy of visitng, may soon.
Personally, this sits well with the idea I have been open to and living up to, is relationsip with land and with plants and trees and things wild. Without direct line of teaching and shared culture that imbues all geography with a sense of sacredness, one can make some progress by approaching all these non-human peoples with respect, and an openness to communicate with them, including the earth her self. Addressing them, and listening to them, has been my focus for past 8-10 years, and although I do not come by this easily or naturally, with practice, things happen and messages are recieved.
Peace, 13 Thankyous, Long Life!!
Hankshaw
@shinjuki ,
I have lived near Beaverton for most of my life, and lived there proper for about 10 years. I think that one reasons that it has such a strange vibe is that it is essentially medieval in character. It went from being a home for Beavers to a succession of 2 feudal overlords. The first ( and one that essentially built industrial Beaverton) was a more benevolent one. Howard Vollum of Tektronix. His reign passed almost immediately across the corner of Jenkins and Murray to Phil Knight and his huge bermed compound (nike). Nike is not actually in Beaverton as Phil uses his outsize political influence to keep it from being annexed so he can save on taxes. Across from Nike is the most spiritualy sinister place in the area, ” Uncle Phil’s Haunted Woods.” between world headquarters and the train stop.
As usual, reading your post, lines up with other studies I am involved. Right now, one of them, is a rereading of The Cosmic Doctrine (sooo good for me, also so timely). The personalities or tendencies of geography and place, sound much like the evolutions of great organisms, within the great entities, moving through their unique angles of the whole effecting and effected by other tendencies, but retaining a particular uniqueness. . Areas that have a form of completion, influenced by the presents of other competed forms, increasing complexity to form new forms.
This also makes sense why, as you mentioned, trying to force European norms on non European geography dos not quite work how one might hope. Leading not to the establishment of the former, but some nuanced unexpected form.
Someone wrote:
“Do you have any good unbiased recommendations on Native American mythology?”
Here are two options.
https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/american-indian-myths-and-legends
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lame-Deer-Seeker-of-Visions/Richard-Erdoes/Enriched-Classics/9780671888022
Pierre
This is a topic I am enthusiastic about, and I appreciate your treatment of it – and am glad you couldn’t come up with an actual atlas, because what’s the need for another coffee-table book? Instead, your frank admission that coming up with such a thing requires what you, personally, haven’t experienced (being present in and to a myriad of places to get a “reading” on them) prompts a more interesting conversation about what it takes to know the deeper layers of a place; that is, personally.
I’m going to reserve some of my thoughts on the topic since there’s overlap with the thinking I’m doing and the things I want to touch on in my draft-of-an-idea-of-a-book, but some things this post brings to the surface for me include:
Tian, Di, and Ren or Heaven, Earth, People- and the conversation here and at Magic Monday around humans being uniquely poised to offer blessings (bringing the energy of the heavens to the earthly realm), but perhaps also, as the Chinese feng-shui tradition points to, humans being uniquely poised to suss out the energies of the earth and work with them (or leave them alone if that’s what they want) for earthly flourishing.
And our (general) experience of being a way-too-busy civilization and living modern lives that close us down to and deny what places say to us (this being the way I am most aware of a sense of disenchantment), combined with a generated distrust of the feelings and images that arise in the body and mind leading to the normalcy of obliterating any place’s unique energy to plop a strip mall down and call it “good.”
Re: California, it’s almost unfair to call it an individual entity. Certainly the sprawl creates a mono-cultural feel, but its landscape diversity creates palpable nootones and theotones that are as varied as its ecotones. It’s almost like the state is more edge-subliminal-places than a unified whole, even though we’re trained to think it is one thing. Its native peoples’ diversity testifies to what the places of California have to say. But this is just a flitting feeling because I’m still trying to listen to what the land says – and where I live is a trammeled place that is in a hunkered-down-and-waiting-it-out state.
To answer Inna’s question maybe somewhat obliquely: In spite of the hills of California feeling the most energetically alive and unique, the places I’ve lived the longest here have been river valleys where the land’s utility for modern agriculture has been forced down its own throat. For a while, I worked out my own existential pain at feeling disenchantment-disconnect from the land (a most unnatural state to be in, in the scheme of humanity), through writing poetry, frequently acknowledging that the writing was 99% the land, and 1% me.
So, at the risk of having folks’ eyes glaze over, here’s some of what it’s said to and through me:
(where I grew up)
Nothing has changed in all these years.
I am still there,
bending on the hillside,
searching for those poppy bright truths
as the summer grows dry
and the late season petals of my heart
blow away
without ever having known of the fields of bloom
contained in all the seeds
it has, itself, called into being.
***
(near where I live now)
There is a Path Through
Early morning tracklessness,
the only direction:
here.
There is a way to enter
the burst of primary song
lit on the sway of tules.
Flame winged blackbird opens the door.
***
Obviously these don’t relate incidents of high weirdness, but rather speak to the inextricable (though occluded) connection between human and place. A topic worthy of a lifetime’s reflection, in my opinion.
The Great Plains freak me out. I drove through just the southeastern corner of Oklahoma on the way to Ohio and I was revolted. The land doesn’t speak there. It just says nothing at all.
Little Rock Arkansas had a crazy vibe. Serial killer kind of mad. We got out of there quick. Fayetteville AR was much more reasonable. There was still a bit of a craziness and darkness to the area but it was manageable.
As others have said, Ohio is fine and pleasant.
Justin Patrick Moore, what do you make of the Miami River Valley?
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 9/28). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has now had surgery for the cancer from which she was suffering, recover quickly from the physical and psychological consequences of the surgery, and may the cancer never return.
May Luke Dodson’s father John (aka Mo, photo) recover from his recently diagnosed atrial fibrillation and chronic abdominal hernia, and may his health be fully restored.
May Luke Dodson’s friend’s dog Tlakis recover swiftly from his fractured elbow that resulted from a car accident.
May Beyond the Wild Wood’s husband, Rob, who died on September 18 after a long and painful struggle with congestive heart failure, be relieved of all pain and fear, and be comforted, cherished, loved, and restored in the pure light of heaven.
May JC of Geauga County, Ohio, who is fighting cancer, be blessed and uplifted so that he may receive the healing he needs and recover as best as possible.
May NebulousRealms be protected from hostile spiritual entities and curses at this time, so that he may be grounded, in accordance with the will of his Higher Self.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May Open Space’s oldest friend’s mother Judith recover her strength and health completely.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Trubujahs’s mother-in-law, Helen, who is currently hospitalized after side effects from chemotherapy for her pancreatic cancer became a liver infection, be filled with vitality and be healed of all serious ailments; may Helen’s mind and spirit remain strong in the face of these ordeals.
May Brother Kornhoer’s daughter Katharine have strength in acknowledging her situation, total honesty with others as she works her way out of it, fortitude so that she can put in the work necessary to get out of her situation, and divine guidance on how to proceed. May she face her problems squarely and not hide from them, and may her anxiety be dissolved through trust and acceptance of divine assistance.
May Matthew Jussaume be granted healing and relief from his Multiple Sclerosis. May the Divine guide him to health, as well as grant him guidance for dealing with the condition.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin continue to make progress in her healing toward full mobility, and prayers for strength and support for her family.
May Atmospheric River’s gall bladder full of gallstones heal and be filled with such vitality that her current stones diminish, her comfort increases, and her gall bladder remains free of new stones.
May Northwind Grandma’s husband Jeff, who passed away unexpectedly on July 22, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination; may he be healed of the “wound in his heart” that he held in life.
May Jeff’s cat Henry accept, twice a day, Northwind’s giving him his Flovent inhaler dose and pill, and let her take him to the veterinarian once a month for an injection.
May Anonymuz get the strength and resolve he needs in his endeavors for justice, and may truth and justice be served.
May Lukeszy’s father’s post-surgery swelling be healed.
May Helen in Oz be free of inflammation in her biceps and shoulder, and may she be successful in the slow process of regaining pain-free range of movement and increased muscle mass and strength therein.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, who still has some lingering issues in his ongoing recovery from a heart condition, be healed and strengthened.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s reconstructive surgery on his left ureter go well; may his right kidney heal; and may his empty nose syndrome abate.
May Brother Kornhoer be able to afford his son’s international surgery.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Kimberly Steele and Sister Crow, I just wanted to let you know that your prayers for pawpaws and for Kameli have been added to the main prayer list. I apologize for the delay.
To me the feeling is like being in a cathedral, or in some cases just “twinkly.” Every so often I’ll be someplace natural and just sense the importance of the place. The trees are arranged with architectural purpose. Everything around me seems to be just saturated with meaning. Like a feeling of “aha this all makes sense” completely unattached to anything
I’m grateful this post is bringing to mind a backpacking trip of mine in Columbia. We were hiking through the Paramo, a landscape that even at its worst is an extremely magical place: https://search.brave.com/images?q=paramo+frilojones&source=web
And at a certain point (wish I could tell you where!) I had this indescribable feeling. I just felt so grateful to be let into and experience this. It was almost comical how much I couldn’t control my emotions (and how much my hikemates just rolled their eyes as I’m randomly in tears.)
I live in a large northeastern city, but even in cities there are spots that seem to have this meaning (albeit it in a different way when combined with the increased human activity.) In a Magic Monday a while back I asked about observations of my own neighborhood and you compared magical urban geography to fractals, which was a really interesting framework. My own neighborhood is an old farming town that was engulfed by the surrounding city, yet at the same time is on the boundaries of several neighborhoods. That somewhat-contradictory-but-not-really of being both central and on the edge is palpable through the old town’s streets.
@Luke Z #22: when I read your words, “I wonder if it’s a telluric dragon or serpent being?” chills went down my spine? Are you aware of the massive Serpent Mound in Peebles, Adams County, Ohio? The Natives of your area sure felt that being! So did the Natives in my area: there are serpent mounds on the north shore of Rice Lake, just an hour’s drive east of Toronto. You are fortunate in that the public has access to the serpent mound in Ohio (which also has the properties of being an observatory); sadly, the public does not have access to the serpent mounds in Hiawatha First Nation near Toronto – though that may change in future years. I have visited Ohio several times in my life; it has a similar “feel” to my part of Ontario: we are all part of “Lakeland” and the same quiet but potent serpent energy lives here. It is a land of extremely ancient geological faults: one forming the St. Lawrence/Lake Ontario/Lake Erie lowlands; the other forming Lakes Superior and Huron. There is a legend/prophecy of Two Serpents among the Haudensaunee (Iroquois) people that traditionally occupied much of the land of the first fault that I mentioned (the one that both of us dwell upon).
Hi JMG, everyone
First- I’m new here, been reading the blog a lot but this is the first time I have commented. I have lived all my days in the UK- various places, currently south west Wales. Been in Wales more years that anywhere else and married a Welshman.
I always have felt sense of place. Some places just feel special- Castlerigg stone circle in the English Lake District stands out in my mind. I feel far more of a presence there than in Stonehenge. Where I grew up in the north of England near the Scots border, it was a different country. Not always friendly- too much blood spilled over the years maybe as it was “debateable land”- Border Reivers. Whilst I was happy growing up there, once I moved away and had been away for a few years, I was no longer welcome. The land didn’t welcome outsiders.
Current place I live in Wales feels good. I remember when we viewed it, I just stood looking at the stream that runs through the grounds, and it was just right (even though the house needed a LOT of work 🙂 ). Everyone who comes here comments on what a lovely spot it is, so peaceful. (This on a hillside in an area full of scenic surrounds.)
I lived and worked in Glasgow, Scotland for a bit during my career. Lived on the south side of the river, worked on the north side. Different feelings in both, maybe I was more comfortable on the south side as that’s where one of my grandparents and his family grew up. But still- I was glad to head back to Wales for good.
There’s a Welsh concept of “Hiraeth”- sort-of translates to “longing” (doesn’t translate well). It’s the pull back home to your roots later in life. Hill sheep in Wales, north upland England and upland Scotland are “hefted”- basically wherever the ewe births the lamb, that’s where the sheep will always go back to. No need to fence them in, they stay in the area. You cannot sell the land and sheep separately, they go together. Part of the reason that the foot-and-mouth outbreaks in the early 2000’s was so devastating- the flocks could not be replaced as they were hefted, so part of the soul of the hills was destroyed.
The north of England is very different to the south, there’s a mix of Briton (old Welsh- Hen Ogledd), Northumbrian Saxon and Viking in varying proportions. Much of the uplands retain their soul and not all of the uplands welcome all people. I admit, I don’t connect with Glastonbury, it feels too contrived for me, but YMMV as they say.
The soul of the land is certainly still there in Great Britain, but probably easier to feel in Wales and Scotland where there’s more upland and less burden of cities/people crushing the life away.
The extent of how much people effect the soul of the land vs how much the soul of the land effects people is something I often think about. Do those who don’t want to listen gravitate to the places like Las Vegas (thinking of JMG’s description- Hell indeed)?
I remember years ago when you delighted me with the neologism “theota” to go along with “biota”. Now I’m trying to get my tongue around the triplet “the theota, the noeta and the biota of place.” Thank you. 🙂
Rocks seem to be the thing you notice most in Donegal. Rocks and hills and heather. I went on a local fossil walk a few years ago and learned that there is an ancient fossilised riverbed nearby which (apparently) has its nearest counterpart, thought to have once been part of the same riverbed millions of years ago, along the St Lawrence river.
These rocks have seen a great deal, but most traces of any ancient animals and/or ancient people they would have known in older ages would have been buried, and then washed away, as the last ice cap two kilometres thick began to melt.
So, of Donegal’s rocks and people, the relationship is just getting started again, as it were. 🙂
JMG and Blue Moose,
I did an extensive study of Robert Coon’s earth chakras and sacred geography of the New Age religion in general. In studying the sacred geography, there are certain places that ping for people. They are either mythic or have a feeling of a sacred energy. The New Age religion adds the idea of vortexes to the mix. What I have notices that these particular places are mentioned over and over in various religious traditions, New Age, and UFO writings.
Comments within BlueMoose’s post
BlueMoose says:
October 1, 2026 at 10:17 am
The 7 Earth Chakras —–> From Robert Coon, who was the first.
• Root Chakra (Grounding and Survival): Mount Shasta, California, USA — Known as a massive volcanic energy vortex tied to primal existence and earth grounding.
———> Mount Shasta is usually listed on various vortexes around the earth. It is also a religious place.
• Sacral Chakra (Creativity and Emotion): Lake Titicaca, Peru and Bolivia — Positioned as the planet’s emotional and creative womb, bridging masculine and feminine energies.
——–> Lake Titicaca is often mentioned in New Age writings starting with Shirley MacClaine.
• Solar Plexus Chakra (Willpower and Identity): Uluru and Kata Tjuta, Australia — Sacred desert sandstone monoliths representing planetary vitality and self-identity.
——-> Uluru seems to attract everyone who senses the sacred.
• Heart Chakra (Love and Compassion): Glastonbury and Shaftesbury, England — Celebrated as the spiritual heart coordinating global harmony and legendary grail myths.
——-> Glastonbury seems to be the center of ley lines, legends of Avalon or connecting to dragons. A hot point for many religious traditions.
• Throat Chakra (Truth and Communication): Great Pyramid of Giza and Mount Sinai, Egypt; Mount of Olives, Jerusalem — Acts as the collective voice and communication center for the planet.
——–> Giza of course well known for obvious reasons.
• Third Eye Chakra (Intuition and Vision): Mobile location (frequently associated with Western Europe or shifting astrological ages like Shaftesbury, England) — Believed to move dynamically over time rather than staying fixed.
——-> Coon said it moved with the Aeon Age from Pisces to Aquarius – now Glastonbury.
• Crown Chakra (Spiritual Connection): Mount Kailash, Tibet — Regarded as the ultimate sacred Himalayan gateway to cosmic consciousness and divine energy.
——–> Gosh, Mount Kailash is a sacred mountain in its own right.
——–
Continuing on with chakras extra, Ivan Sanderson developed the 12 vile vortexes starting with the Bermuda Triangle, as places where mystery and disappearances about.
People are discussing the differences in the land. I have always noticed how different Bridgeport CT was from Stamford and New Haven. It seems to be separate from the rest and their sense of staid “colonial” manners.
Bridgeport was incorporated by P.T. Barnum (yes, the circus guy), who discovered Tom Thumb in the city. He imprinted the city with his will, leaving Seaside Park as his legacy. Yes, Barnum is buried in Bridgeport, and no his grave does not have “Never give a sucker an even break” on it.
I wonder if Barnum with his massive ego and will warped and imprinted the city with his essence. His presence is subtle but can be felt. Can land hold a person’s essence, and can it meld with the person?
“Sometimes the line between the temporary and the enduring seems very exact: in Pennsylvania, for example, if you take the train from Philadelphia and head for Lancaster, about two-thirds of the way there you cross an unmarked boundary between evanescent Suburblandia and timeless West Britain. Sometimes it’s a slower transition. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to the coastal realms of Suburblandia and Skyscraperia, but they feel oddly phantasmal to me. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to them or when, but if they were to dissolve like mist one autumn morning, I don’t know that I’d be surprised.”
I have read that regional accents/dialects are disappearing due to a combination of increased mobility to major economic centres (especially among young people) and the “smoothing out” of local dialects by ubiquitous telecommunications.
Do you see a revival of such local/regional dialects and other customs in the future then?
@Luke Z: if it was good enough for the Mound Builders, the Hopewell, Adena, Shawnee… it’s good enough for me.
I think you are right about the telluric energy here.
This is a fascinating article and discussion. I am absolutely drowningly busy at home right now so I haven’t been active much on the forums but I had to jump in on this one. There is a lot I could say about this topic but I don’t have time to write a book length reply!
I definitely have little travel experience outside of the US other than a goodly chunk of the British Columbia coast and my time in the middle east but I have been to every US state. I don’t count the airport either, you have to have been out in the state and, at the very least, stopped to go pee. I’ve also spent quite a lot of time outdoors in a bunch of different regions and can vouch for areas having wildly different energies.
I do find the Olympics craze humorous though. I grew up and have lived most of my life at the foot of the Olympics. While I spent a lot of my childhood and younger years on the water and around the coastal areas I spent even more in the foothills and wilderness in the Olympics and still love to get back to the mountains when I can. For me the Olympic Peninsula is home and the mountains most of all. I have spent a lot of time from the ocean to the east slopes, in the forest and the alpine, well off of the beaten trails and I am most comfortable there. Thinking of it as a place that people find terrifying is definitely humorous.
It kind of reminds me of Australian people and people from the American west. You talk to Americans about Australia and it’s all, “Oh my god the bush will kill you! Everything is venomous! There’s man-eating crocodiles and sharks!!!” Then you talk to some Australians headed out into the American west and they’re all, “Oh my god! THERE ARE BEARS HERE! What about mountain lions?!?!? This place is terrifying!”
I suppose belonging in a place changes the feeling immensely!
HV
Perhaps, the Appalachians and their cousins across the sea define a North Atlantic region? One that includes Britain?
You’ve written about Faustian culture before, but I am unconvinced it includes Britain except as a pseudomorphosis. Compared to even our Continental neighbours we’re egalitarian individualists who’s philosophy is to meet the world’s messiness with our own. For all that John Dee worked, Man the Conqueror feels more Franco-German than Anglo-Celtic, to me (a point of disagreement I have with certain “Anglofuturists” who want a restore British Space Empire). If there is a North Atlantic region, it is Anglo-Celtic in character. May not even cover all of Britain, even; certain southerners have too much continental in them for my liking…
Of course, Iceland and Greenland would test this. Norway possibly, if the mountains form the boundary.
As a person born and raised on Vancouver Island (BC, Canada), who left many years ago and has since travelled to a few places on the globe, I can report that Van. island is a hotbed for some of the most powerfully affecting “magic places” (as I called them as a kid) that I’ve ever encountered. I grew up convinced that the veil between Here and The Other Place is extremely thin in a random patchwork of places all over. You’ll find one on a big craggy rock here, then one over there in a section of a field where the deer lay, while other spots are weather dependant…ohhh I miss the island. 🥹
Much of Japan comes in as a very close 2nd place,for me, and I would attribute that to the population’s dedication to maintaining it’s robust culture of shrines and other related Shinto/Buddhist workings. Vancouver island feels like uncharted territory of sporadic energetic hot-spots, while Japan feels like it has an evenly distributed ‘baseline’ of energy everywhere, with well marked out peaks and valleys.
Iceland also had an incredible feeling to it but that energy was too unfamiliar to me to properly understand or digest it. Fascinating place.
Now I’d like to toss in a story about a place that’s special to me: The Sooke Potholes (Vancouver Island)
Imagine a string of natural pools in varying sizes, carved out from the bedrock from when the glaciers passed by, bridged together with waterfalls and shallow stretches of river that wind through a couple of miles of thick forest. For the more visually oriented, this site has a few pictures that somewhat capture a bit of the feeling of being there: https://604now.com/sooke-potholes-park-vancouver-island/
Another interesting feature of this idyllic place are the ruins. Not of any great civilization of the past, sadly, they are the remains of a partially built but never completed, “Destination Resort”. It was meant to be a ” world-class retreat specializing in adventure, wellness and ecotourism.” The failure of this “innovative development” (🤮) to come to fruition has been blamed in the news on the developer’s difficulty securing funding/financing, but it’s so very obviously a case of the land spirits ejecting unwanted pests. They weren’t satisfied simply stopping the construction, either. An article from 2020 notes that, “The ground under the lodge’s stone foundation and chimneys is sliding into the Sooke River below, and parts now overhang the cliffs.” The son of the stonemason who laid that foundation even admitted in an interview that, ” it’s a “blessing” that the [developers] dream was never realized. ” and the government body that owns the land feel the best use of it is to simply return it to it’s natural state. Everyone knows this river/forest does not welcome “development”.
And, it’s funny, while my memories of this place circle around how much I loved swimming in the water, pushing my arms into the small waterfalls to feel the water roll over my shoulders, and being spun around in circles in one of the many ‘natural jacuzzis’ formed from the carved out rock walls, it is also the only place that’s ever nearly drowned me. It came out of nowhere and, to be honest, I still struggle to make sense of how it happened. It was almost as if the spirits of the water couldn’t help themselves. No malice, just instinct.
Ron M,
I am aware of Serpent Mound but I don’t think I’ve ever been there. I’d like to get there for a solstice but maybe any day would do. For some reason I foolishly never connected it to the presence of the serpent being here, but that makes complete sense! I get the sense the serpent being is feminine and is loving (for lack of a better word) to those it likes, but can pack a powerful bite if you step too far out of line. I’ve kind of always thought this being was local to the Miami River Valley but maybe it’s bigger than I thought or there are a lot of them.
As an inhabitant of Utah and an avid nature lover, I would like to put in my two cents and try to describe how its geographies make me feel.
I’ll start with what I call the ‘yellow hills,’ the foothills along the Wasatch mountains. They are relatively gentle, covered brittle yellow grass, sagebrush, rabbitbrush, and the occasional juniper. When hiking these on a hot day you can smell the sweet smell of junipers, sages, and pines. Here I feel a profound sense of freedom, yet the oppressing heat. The hills are fun and mostly safe but they can play rough sometimes. Because of a lack of shade, they will bring you close to the sun and they won’t coddle you. I have had many ecstatic moments on those hills as I tromped around sweaty, dirty, and a little scuffed. The hills bring you close to the Divine as the Sun.
Moving up higher into the mountains we move into cool forests of fir and pine. You have the meadows full of western aster. You’ll see mountain goats, deer, and all kinds of critters. The tall mountain walls are rough, but nestled in the cracks is moss and lichen. Everything is profoundly beautiful. If you pull out a camera and try to take a picture, you’ll see that the picture cannot capture it at all. Here you meet the Divine as the Beautiful.
But the place in Utah that I feel is the most sacred—and none of the others mentioned above come close—is the sandstone canyons down south. You have to visit them to truly understand. It’s hard to describe the feeling. It feels as though the rock absorbs the memories and the hopes and the spirits of all the transient lifeforms around it. Like the rock remembers us all and holds us in its heart. It is as though the layers of sediment not only fossilize things in a physical sense, but also on some higher plane. It feels profoundly ancient and all-knowing. I wonder if it was for this reason that the native peoples couldn’t help but put massive petroglyphs on them (look up newspaper rock for a superb example). The sandstone cliffs bring you close to the Divine as Memory.
I find it fascinating that when the mormons settled my valley, they built houses of worship on the sacred groves of the Shoshone, who in their turn had claimed those sites from the Fremont people. And then Mormons who have left the faith, advocate politically to protect the remnants of the sacred sites.
In my own sense of Utah geo-spirituality, I find it dramatically fractal in nature, highly dependent of micro-locations. Nowhere on Earth have I ever found a match to the sacred feeling of a douglas fir forest. Granite domes buzz with energy. Limestone cliff faces drain it away. And each lake or stream carries its own essence. And the residual energy of Lake Bonneville smothers everything.
A warm thanks to everyone who shared their memories and experiences of different places! I could thank each of you individually but it would involve a lot of repetition of the same sentence or two, so please consider this a personal thank you. 😉
Now, a few more specific comments…
Clarke, there’s also a nontrademarked version that, in my experience, works better. You simply cast your birth chart as though you were born at the same moment, but in the place you have in mind. The planets will all be in the same zodiacal positions but in different houses. That’s part of why I moved to the east coast — on the west coast, Saturn is angular, and so poverty and career difficulties were my lot there, while here on the east coast, Jupiter is conjunct my midheaven, with very different consequences!
Mithridates, I looked up Haudenosaunee myth while working on one of my tentacle novels set in western New York, and found it very rich and profound. Thanks for the reminder.
Peter, even a small volcano can kill you very dead. The thing that makes Rainier so lethal is that due to the very wet climate, it has more water locked up in its glaciers than any other mountain on the planet…
…and when it has a major eruption, all of that melts, turns to mud, and sweeps across a very large section of the Puget Sound lowlands. It won’t affect the whole planet the way Taupo did, but that’ll be small consolation to the quarter of a million people who will be snuffed out by the mudslides unless there’s adequate warning. We’re also waiting for a huge earthquake, by the way, but it’s not in the mountains — it’s just off the coast. When it goes, to judge by past geological traces, every coastal town from Vancouver Island to northern California will get hit by a big tsunami within minutes. There will be no time to evacuate and, in many cases, no safe routes. Fun times!
Michelle, how ghastly. I’m sorry to hear about Gehring — but again, not surprised.
Ron, I know the song well, and Gordon Lightfoot’s music generally also. My father was a fan, and so was Sara — did you know that the poem Tolkien set in Bilbo’s mouth, “The road goes ever on and on…”, can be sung to the tune of “Minstrel of the Dawn”? Sara used to sing that, and I literally can’t hear it any other way. When Lightfoot died we both raised a glass to his memory.
Michael, oh, freely granted, the southwestern desert is gorgeous in its own harsh way. One of the things that makes Las Vegas so hellish is that it abolishes the desert’s fragile beauty to replace it with an ugliness that would have made Sauron wince.
Anon, the crucial thing is to remember there is no one “Native American mythology.” There are hundreds of different Native American mythologies, as far from one another as Irish is from Egyptian or Greek from Japanese. The best way to avoid the ghastly plastic travesties that have been made of Native myth by wasi’chu kiddie books is to look for the myths of specific tribes and tribal groups. The book I treasure most along these lines is Mythology of Southern Puget Sound by Arthur Ballard, a 19th century settler who learned the local languages and took down stories word for word; I grew up in the area many of those stories describe. Two other very good collection from very different places are December’s Child by Thomas Blackburn, which collects Chumash myths from central California, and any recent edition of the Popol Vuh, a native text from the Kich’e Mayan people of the Guatemalan hill country. I recommend that you find collections of stories from the area where you live, and concentrate on those.
(I should probably explain wasi’chu, shouldn’t I? It’s a Lakota ethnic slur directed at white people; literally it means “eats the fat,” and so is used for “greedy one.” There are white people who deserve it.)
Patrick, both those seem quite reasonable.
BeardTree, well, that certainly matches my experience!
Sylvia, find a big tree that feels friendly to you, greet it out loud or silently, sit down with your back to it, and just let yourself relax. Do this regularly and you’ll discover that you’ve actually been feeling its consciousness all along, but didn’t notice it.
Brendhelm, and it’s quite possible that the fencing and signage are there very deliberately…
Bofur, most people can sense the positive or negative energy of a place very easily. Just pay attention to how it makes you feel.
Justin, thanks for this! There are theories that standing stones were put up for that reason.
Diffeomorph, your experience with the lake is a good answer to that question! Some others are in a recent book of mine, The Earth Mysteries Workbook. All of them depend on going beneath the rational veneer of consciousness and paying attention to the deeper levels of the mind.
BeardTree, the human body, mind, and soul all interpenetrate and perceive the wider reality, of course.
BlueMoose, that’s an interesting conceptualization. The thing that interests me is that each traditional society maps out its own energy center matrix onto the landscape where it lives.
TemporaryReality, you seem to be tapping into some of the same voice as Robinson Jeffers, long one of my favorite poets. Here’s his poem “Carmel Point”:
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Cath Wen, I hope to have the chance to get up to the border country sometime soon, for historical reasons, but I don’t expect the Debateable Land to be welcoming!
Neptunesdolphins, good heavens — I haven’t thought of the Vile Vortices in ages. I’ll have to reread Sanderson.
Gunstone, yes.
Hippieviking, my father’s people were in Aberdeen for four generations and the Olympics are familiar ground to me — my father, sister, and I hiked the Enchanted Valley trail when I was ten, for example. I still find the dark energy of the Washington forests spooky.
Alice, there’s a real point to that. The northeastern coast of North America, the southern half of Ireland and the southern two-thirds of Britain, and an oddly shaped strip running southeast at an angle through Europe all belong to an ancient continent geologists call Avalonia; northern Ireland and Scotland are both chunks of North America that broke off when the Atlantic Ocean opened up during the Cretaceous; while Scandinavia was part of a different protocontinent (which also left chunks of itself in eastern Greenland). So Britain and Ireland are geologically much closer to the American Northeast than they are to most of Europe. As for Iceland, it’s not geologically related to anything — it’s a volcanic mass that rose up when the Atlantic split a little too fast!
Well… I live in one of those delightful little medieval towns in the south of England. If I am so minded, I can visit both Stonehenge and Glastonbury inside a comfortable day, but there’s so much else to see (Amesbury? Knowlton Henge?) that that would be far too fast; what about stopping for tea & cake or maybe a pub lunch in an ancient country inn complete with roaring fire, good food & fine ale or cider? I am also one who cannot thrive in the concrete canyons & bleak vistas of the big cities, but is at home in the hills, the woods and beside the sea.
Anyway, we live on the site of an old monastery that vanished in the Dissolution, after 800 years of existence, albeit overshadowed by a big and famous nunnery nearby – ours may have been the poor house, or the leper hospital that market towns on main roads generally had. I have an “allotment” – a patch of land we rent to grow food – 100 yards up the road from our home, probably where the church actually was, going by the flint and mortar that underlies my plot. Most of the plots are let to other inhabitants of the immediate area, of all colours, trades and religious affiliations, with or without decent gardens of their own, which is highly unusual (plotholders on other sites are generally drawn from a much wider area) and it’s amazing how determined we all are to keep the plots well cared-for & fruitful, whether or no we have any experience or felt any previous desire to grow our own food! It’s not just because it’s pretty; I came to the conclusion years ago that the land itself was “calling” us to defend it from development; it would be worth an absolute fortune to be built on, but there’s an ancient legal covenant that prevents that as long as the land is being used to produce food for the people of our town, though few people are aware of that. Interestingly, as well as the clay pipes & broken pots left by previous tenants from the 1600s onwards, I have found many worked flints; this is a little tongue of raised, fertile ground at the foot of a hill, reaching into the wider flood plain of the local river, not too far from the sea. It would have been a great area for hunting and gathering, back in the paleolithic, just high enough not to flood, between the forest, the chalk uplands and the river and marshes. It’s a kindly & fruitful place, still mildly redolent of centuries of prayer, healing & fruitfulness.
If anyone wants to experience a wild landscape that feels actively inimical, try Glencoe… you can almost hear the cries of the souls that met their untimely, unfair end in the famous massacre, and over it all tower the ruins of ancient volcanoes that ultimately blew themselves apart. I’m regularly in other areas of the UK that had volcanism, and indeed battles, but none of them have the feeling of barely repressed savagery and – wanting humans to go, and stay, away, perhaps – that I felt there.
Thank you for taking up the challenge this week. The result was certainly worthwhile from my perspective!
As far as your basic definitions go, could it be said that “mind” = “soul”? To me, both those words are just synonyms for what a modern scientifically-minded person would identify as “consciousness.”
When this topic comes up, the way I’m able to comprehend it is as “soul” = “mind” = “consciousness.” Hopefully I am more or less correct in my understanding!
I know we’ve covered this point before on your blogs, but unfortunately I didn’t take notes. If I’m lost, maybe you or another commenter could point me to the cliffs notes version?
(A little background. Paul writes a line in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 where he says “…may your spirit and soul and body be kept…” so he is clearly referring to three separate things. I have always struggled to understand the distinction between the last two. I think that’s because I have direct experience with my own body and my own consciousness. And I have enough experience that I can comprehend how my consciousness could exist without my body, so I would call that “soul.” But frankly, I don’t really know if I’ve ever directly experienced my “spirit” as a separate thing.)
JMG – when I read the words in your post: “That certain geographical places have unique spiritual qualities, so that certain kinds of prayers or ceremonies are best done there (or alternatively shouldn’t be done there at all), is recalled only by a minority, and treated in most cases by them as an occasional indulgence,” another recent thought of mine immediately cropped up. I have been bothered by the fact that Hindus in the region where I live (which I refer to as ‘Lakelandia’) have been practicing the religious practice of submerging huge idols of the god Ganesh every year in our lakes: this year it happened just a few days ago. These idols are made of flimsy light-weight materials and end up being carried by currents and washed up on beaches, making a horrible mess. They are often made in India and are coloured using gaudy paints that often contain heavy metals. I don’t think that the spirits/deities of these lakes are pleased with these offerings. I have also seen video footage of Hindus making various religious offerings to major rivers in my region (for example, the Grand River), which – as a practicing Hindu – greatly upsets me. The Hindu faith is deeply saturated with the spiritual importance of place, but they are places halfway around the world! I love the fact that Hindus accept that every river is a god, every mountain is a god. But why can’t they see that the river gods in this part of the world were revered in very different ways for millennia and will not be pleased by these foreign transplanted rituals and offerings? I am still working on how to properly apologize to the spirits of these waters to “forgive them for they know not what they are doing”.
Great essay. I guess I can add a story about feeling very at home in a place.
Years ago I went with some friends to Canyon Lands National Park in southern Utah on a backpack/camping trip on a long weekend. We weren’t very well prepared, but we managed. I don’t really remember being in a place other then the place I grew up in (Springville, UT) where I felt so at home. It was early spring, so it was cold and dry rather then hot, but the place felt very familiar in a way I don’t think a place I had never visited before had ever felt. It felt like home. I felt I could roam cross country, off trail and never get lost. Fortunately I didn’t put the feeling to the test, but I did guide us back to our camp in the dark when we over estimated how far a side hike to Delicate Arch was.
We also had one very odd experience with a time dilatation that I thought later might have come about because we had really tuned into the land. It was our last day camping and we had run out of water (good thing it was spring and not hot) and we planned to hike to the confluence overlook of the Green and Colorado rivers before hiking out of the park. The trail was along a dirt road that ended at the confluence overlook parking area where there were some people in a camper that gave us some water. We thanked them and sat at the nearby picnic table and sipped our water and just sat looking at the surrounding landscape. I don’t think we even talked much. While we were sitting there, an SUV zipped in to the parking area, the doors exploded and any number of people popped out and ran around the SUV at what seemed like super speed. They quickly gathered, sped down the trail to the overlook and in what seemed like seconds sped back, ran around the SUV, jumped in and then zipped away. We were still sipping our water. We looked at each other rather dumb founded to see if we had just seen what we had seen. We had. Eventually we finished our water, strolled to the overlook sat there for some time and eventually made our way out of the park and back to our car. Since it was my car, I was driving and I found it very difficult to get my being back up to highway speed. It was a fascinating trip and since then even though I know that land can be lethal, I have felt a kinship with the slick rock country of Utah.
Hi John Michael,
Yes, probably only complete and utter failure will shake that belief system. Mind you, the bond markets right now… 🙂 Hope you are taking note of how the limits of the big spenders are being tested?
By the way, Bennett’s work is delightful, and the greys, greens, muted blues and orange skies tell a story, for those who can read. Where I am, is probably close to the PNW (wetter western part) than probably anywhere else in your country. It’s a big continent down here (with an astoundingly large central anchoring pebble – nod to Lew!) and not all is arid, that’s for sure. Two inches of rain has fallen here in less than 24 hours. The cold wet chill feels natural to me too. Fortunately the super volcano I’m on the side of, is meant to be extinct. This area however is quite volcanically active, it’s just there are millennia when nothing happens. The hot up-swelling mantle is still there, underneath, waiting, but apparently south of here now, maybe. 🙂 The Earth is rarely quiet.
We’ve got Hanging Rock just over on the other side of the super volcano mountain range. Not far from here at all. A mysterious place, with loads of energy, but feels friendly to me. I should point out that everyone experiences these things differently, and someone allegedly fell there a week or two ago, and perished. Baffles me how it happened, but then I wouldn’t get lost there either. Dunno. A mystery. Probably like that scene of Luke going into the cave, the folks may take the wrong things with them.
Cheers
Chris
I recommend Vincent Scully’s work, The earth, the temple, and the gods; Greek sacred architecture
https://archive.org/details/earthtemplegodsg0000scul
Magical Geography in the Northeast of the USA:
It seems to me that small-scale magical geography may be the bast starting-point, national magical geography probably needs to wait for quite a number of small-scale studies. So I will take New England plus New York first.
(I should note that I lived in New York State, mostly a few miles north of Sleepy Hollow, from birth to age 10 (1942-1952), and then in Rhode Island from age 25 (1967) to the present; the intervening years (1952-1967) found me in California, more precisely in the San Francisco Bay area, where all my most recent ancestors had lived since the late 1860s. So New England plus New York, on the one hand, and one region in California, on the other, are the areas to which I can speak from my own experience.)
New England plus New York fall into at least five distinct areas on European settlement.
First came the Separatists (who were far more radical than the Puritans), who settled in Plymouth Colony from 1620 onward. Most of their territory is now the part of Massachusetts to the south and east of the Old Colony Line.
Second came the Puritans, who founded three colonies from 1629 onward: Massachusetts (as it was before it swallowed up Plymouth Colony in 1692), New Haven, and Connecticut (which swallowed up New Haven colony in 1665).
To the north of Massachusetts, where present-day New Hampshire and Maine are, from 1623 onward there were smaller colonies and settlements established not for any religious reason whatever, but simply “to fish and trade,” as one very early anecdote says. This is the third area, the “Northern Fringe” of New England.
The fourth area is tolerant Rhode Island, founded in 1636 by a radical thinker who maintained that the State had no right whatever to support or condemn any religion or theology, but that such matters were wholly up to each individual to maintain for him- or herself. Consequently it quickly became a refuge for every religious thinker whose views were judged to be “heretical” by the Puritans, and also for Jews,
(In addition, there was the very short-lived colony of Saybrook (1635-1644), run as the personal domain of John Winthrop Jr, an alchemist and esotericist; it abutted the Southwest corner of Rhode Island. Nor was Winthrop the only alchemist working there; another was Jonathan Brewster, and there may have been others there as well. This might be a separate area in its own right.)
South of Connecticut lay the former colony of New Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch in 1624 for economic reasons, not religious ones. (Like Rhode Island, it also welcomed Jewish settlers early on.) Centered on Manhattan Island, it spread somewhat northward and westward from that center. In 1664 it was seized by English military forces, and renamed New York. This originally Dutch region is the fifth area.
The original boundaries of New Amsterdam / New York stretched indefinitely westward and northward; boundaries between it and New England were highly disputed. This disputed region, now usually called “Upstate New York,” may also be viewed as the “Western Fringe” of New England, and some of its territory was eventually detached from New York to become what is now the state of Vermont. The “Western Fringe” is the fifth area.
The Northern and the Western Fringes of New England resembled Rhode Island in that they were a refuge for every sort of radical and dissident religious thinker. Indeed, the first published North-American anti-Christian thinker, Ethan Allen (of the “Green Mountain Boys”), spent his life in the Western Fringe. Nor was he the only such radical; the two Fringes also saw the early days of Joseph Smith Jr, the first Mormon and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as well as many other less famous religious thinkers and esoteric movements.
This “map,” of course, reflects original religious-settlement patterns, not necessarily physical or esoteric geography. However, there are some striking parallels to it in the physical geography of New England. Most obviously is the glacial deposit of fertile soil that covers most of the territory of Rhode Island and much of old Plymouth Colony, and the much less fertile soil left after the glaciers had scoured the more northern parts of New England, leaving uncommonly rocky soil after their passage. The ancient quip, that the New England’s best crop is rocks, not plants, reflects this harsh fact. It is a relatively hard land to feed your family from.
And, obviously, regions are separated from one another by natural boundaries such as mountain ranges, deserts, or dangerous rivers. They are also defined by unifying factors, whether natural or man-made: easy ways of transportation and/or communication, such as rivers suitable for boating (or canals), terrain easily traversed on foot with ample sources of water along one’s path, high places where shouted messages travel much farther than usual, and so forth.
And then there are legends, which generally reflect the egregore of the region where they are first told. For instance, Connecticut has Mount Tom, with its mysterious underground noises (the “Moodus Noises”) that remind one of forges and smithies at work deep within the land. Rhode Island has Carbuncle Pond, where tradition says a great carbuncle, in which one can foretell the future, was tossed into it long ago as the dying act of a powerful Aboriginal magician-chief.
Rhode Island also once had a strange traditional cure for the infectious fatal wasting disease formerly called “consumption” (now diagnosed as tuberculosis), which could carry off an entire family, one by one. The wasting disease was thought, back in the day, to be the result of a not-quite-dead corpse feeding “etherically” on its living kinfolk. The traditional remedy for this was to exhume the recent dead of the family to see whether any if the remains appeared unnaturally lifelike. If such a corpse was found, one cut out its heart, burned it to ashes, mixed the ashes with water, and gave the resulting drink to the living members of the afflicted family. (In old New England, it was mostly the Puritan colonies that maintained town cemeteries.) Elsewhere, for instance, in Rhode Island and in Maine, families established small burying grounds for their own family dead somewhere on their own farmland. There are literally thousands of these tiny graveyards scattered throughout non-Puritan New England and parts of upstate New York..
These are just a few examples of regional peculiarities here and there in New England plus New York. I could go on at quite some length about this, but my comment is already far too long.
I may put up a second comment on California’s regions later this week.
To add to the menu of noo-zones in the U.S., once on a plane flight my seat-neighbors were a couple from Tennessee. The lady told me that the state is divided into three regions east-to-west, each with its own large city.
Unfortunately, I did not document what she said the character of each third of the state is, but I do remember her saying they were different from each other.
JMG,
I have had a theory, for a while now, that one of the causes of Portland’s troubles is that like much of the PNW,it has a certain dark, melancholy and subdued vibe that comes from its history and terrain. The dark drizzly winters and shadowy forests can drive newcomers crazy.
If one observed people back in the time before the internet and common jet travel the people of Portland matched this vibe. Subdued, not easily excited, excessively laid back. Also notoriously nice in public. Famously, in the old days Portlanders in automobiles would get jammed up at 4 way intersections because each driver wanted the other to go first. Also a kind of live and let live attitude.
But in the early 2010’s it became a popular destination for the those who thought of themselves as on the cutting edge of social trends. It became a low budget Williamsburg ( the one in nyc) as well as a new frontier for legalization of drugs. You could feel the mood change as the out of state license plates multiplied. People started crossing against the walk signals ( never done in the old days). People started pushing to get in line early for things ( never done in the old days). Portlands lack of the kind of social, economic and religious structure that regulated many other places combined with its weather and forest mystery drove these newcomers crazy. They in turn drove many of the younger natives crazy.
So we now have a place where many of the residents are maladapted to its climatic, social and spiritual geography. They are being driven insane by this conflict and it shows.
Vile vortexes are interesting.
It is though the earth has areas where things go backwards, and other areas where they go forwards. I believe Sanderson thought in terms of Platonic solids when he developed them. I think they are a dodecahedron, the 12 sided one that Plato said was the heavens. I wonder if 12 was a magic number.
Geography is peculiar. Along with vile vortexes, are places where time goes wonky. There is a region that spreads between West Virginia and Maryland in the mountains, where people lose or gain time. Or experience another time altogether. It is quite common to hear reports from that area. (I experienced the time shift there as I went from now to the local Ice Age to now in a matter of 30 minutes.)
I believe there are multiple areas like that around the earth. Perhaps the New Age folks glommed on to them and called them something else.
Final comment.
I was delving into the Mothman of West Virginia. From what I uncovered, is the believe that the land created Him. The TNT area was originally a WWII weapons manufacturing site. After the war, it was abandoned. People noted how polluted the land was and how all the WWII stuff remained around. It seemed to have generated a unique being as the Mothman, who is considered a one of a kind being.
Probably other regions have similar beings from disruptions in the land.
This is a wonderful survey, JMG, even if you felt like you didn’t contribute much. My own personal experiences included living in the Southwest, where I felt welcomed. New Mexico was like walking into a fairy land. The air was filled with something I couldn’t recognize. It was totally different than Arizona, and is truly the Land of Enchantment. In Nevada, there was a sense that I could let loose with any preconceived notions and everybody would respect me. Maybe that’s why alien investigators like Nevada. I lived near Reno, not Las Vegas which is different.
To me, Dallas is part of the Midwest, not a part of Texas. Being there felt exactly like being in Iowa. I think it changes further south.
Last week I climbed Mount Monadnock and the best impression I can relate is to imagine a three week old kitten snuggled up on the belly of this strange entity that is warm and gives you food every day and even cleans your litter box. Monadnock enjoys the company. Maybe because, as you say, the mountains are related to Wales and Scotland. Somehow I was diverted from the main path and I think this was intentional by the mountain because she showed me several interesting plants, including a purple mushroom and an Indian Pipe plant which is completely white.
Once again, a warm thanks to everyone who posted their own stories about the spirit of place.
Thrifty1, if English politics were different and I didn’t have to worry about getting thrown in gaol for making an incautious blog post, I would love to spend a year or two in the west country, visiting those delightful little medieval towns and tipping back ales in local pubs. Glastonbury in particular is one of my favorite places on the planet. Someday, maybe. As for Glencoe…brrrr.
Blue Sun, one of the miserable disadvantages of English is that it’s lost the distinction between soul and spirit that’s present in most other European languages. French esprit and German geist, both of which mean “spirit,” also mean the higher properties of the mind, the capacity to experience meaning and value, which in occult terms belong to the mental plane. French âme and German seele, both of which mean “soul,” refer to the emotional, expressive, and imaginative side of the mind, more or less what “soul” used to mean in African American slang: in occult terms, the astral side of human experience. Thus, in my terms, Paul is talking about the whole incarnate organism: the spirit (mental sheath), soul (astral body), and body (etheric and physical bodies). In much the same way, the concept of salvation used to be understood more in the sense of healing — the Greek word for salvation, soteria, also means “healing.” Thus saving your soul means healing the disordered condition of your emotions and imagination.
Ron, I know. One of the downsides of India’s rise to great power status is that a lot of immigrants from India are behaving like conquering overlords, ignoring the land and the people among whom they’re settling. That’s likely to generate some ugly blowback.
Chris, oh, I’m watching the markets carefully. Volcanoes aren’t the only things that can have devastating eruptions!
WRW, it’s a fine book — I have a copy on my shelf of earth-mysteries books. If I ever go to Greece, that comes with me.
Clay, that makes perfect sense, not least because the newcomers came rushing in with utopian fantasies and now get to experience the cold, gray, damp feeling as those slowly rot to compost in the rain.
Neptunesdolphins, 12 is indeed a magic number. Renaissance books on magic assigned it its own set of powers and influences. I never experienced the time shift myself when I lived in the Maryland mountains, a stone’s throw from West Virginia, but I knew people who did; that helped shape some of the experiences Owen Merrill had in my tentacle novels. As for Mothman, maybe so, but beings like him have been seen in other places.
@Smiley Rover #72 I’m mulling over this essay and your suggestion that each individual’s experience of the land is largely a function of the synergy between the location and the unique psychophysical makeup and sensitivities of the experiencer is very plausible.
I was trying to think of places that repelled me (or was repelled by me) and any negativity I sensed was not a feeling of place but in interactions with other humans. I’m guessing certain places attract or repel certain people but I do think that Clarke aka Gwydion is on to something mentioning Astro-cartography (#68).
TLDR for my trip down memory lane below but Greece and Athens especially, is smack dab on a Venus AC line on my astral relocation chart.
Greece is one of my favorite countries to visit but beyond the history, it shouldn’t be as it is too arid for my tastes and there is a lot of dysfunction there. When my wife and I first visited we had a few hours to kill in the city center. Soon after dropping off our bags we started wondering about the ubiquitous riot police. In the distance more police riot buses were pulling into the city center. I took a picture of my wife standing in front of the Syntagma Square Christmas Tree and I didn’t have the stones to include the squad of riot policed formed up with batons and shields just off to the side. Merry Christmas!
Time to catch the bus and after about forty minutes and a few missed times slots we found out the bus route was discontinued for the day. After making it to the hotel I asked about all this and was warned to avoid the city center as it was the anniversary of a police shooting and that protests on that day usually turned violent.
Despite the foreboding start to the visit, we thoroughly enjoyed the country. There were many nice surprises and experiences. A nice memory is an early morning walk to the Delphi Museum. As the highway leaves the village and takes a left there was a very large dog laying down, enjoying the early morning sun. I was hoping he was friendly and gave some extra room but as we passed I told him to be careful of cars. That’s when the dog decided to get up and lead the way to the museum. That and Apollo favored us that day with ensuring the sun stayed out.
A small correction to my earlier post (#134):
I lost count as I was typing of the various settlement-regions I see in New England plus New York. There are six of them, not five; the “Western Fringe” is the sixth, after the “originally Dutch” fifth region of New Amsterdam / New York. Old Saybrook Colony, short-lived as it was, may count as a seventh region, too.
I have just put up on archive.org a map, drawn to my specifications by a former student in the 1990s, which may help visualize the four major regions in New England proper.
The local lore about how to cure “consumption” may have had a German origin: a few early German settlers, including one (Samuel Eckerlin) with a reputation as a physician, made a long slow pilgrimage from Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania to the Seventh-Day Baptist congregations in Rhode Island, and back, sometime in 1744.
JMG mentions places in which he feels he is close to the sky. I didn’t know it at the time but I had the same experience but with the ocean, especially where it interacts with the land at the reef. At night the constant sound of waves interacting with the reef is both ominous and soothing. I say ominous as someone that was almost sucked out into the ocean through a reef passage (“ava” in Samoan) and the memory of shallow water and coral heads on one side and the waves pulling me out to the very edge of the ava with a canyon of deep blue water on immediately below me along with a shark swimming deep, deep, below really put an impression on me. Hearing that sound at night was a reminder not just of that experience but all the positive experiences of viewing reef life while snorkeling.
For the past few years I’ve been wanting to hear that sound again.
Dear Mr. Druid
What would the magical geography of places like a battlefield be? Can this be changed?
And how about ancient Cities, like Rome or Cairo, as these places have had some very high highs and some very bad lows?
@Michael_20, #54 & @Inna, #34
I have yet to launch my own dérives but I wouldn’t mind sharing my dérive experiences / findings from different places.
https://ecosophia.net/situationism-the-art-of-the-derive/
JMG re: Gordon Lightfoot: no, I didn’t know that. I never fail to learn something each week via your posts: it’s just that sometimes what I learn is far from what I expect to learn! 😉 Thanks for the info.
I do know what you mean about the feeling of a place! In the woods near the house where I grew up, there were some places where I felt comfortable and welcomed, and others that I explored once and then ever after skirted around, because I did NOT feel welcome.
On the flip side, I wonder about places that humans have enhanced through magical ritual. My childhood and young adulthood were profoundly impacted by annual stays at a summer camp for children and youth, a swampy bit of failed farmland near the shore of Lake Huron that was mostly given back to the forest some sixty-five years ago, when the land was re-purposed as a seasonal retreat for the particular church denomination I was raised in. I don’t know what, if any, significance the place had for local native people, but they still live just up the road, so I suppose I could go ask them if I knew who to talk to.
What I do know is that sixty-five years of summer camp, which is essentially highly ritualized, highly intensive polarity magic, enacted in the months following the summer solstice, has made the place ‘sparkle’ in a way that I think is more than just the colouring of my childhood and pubescent memories. When many, many couples from a distinct ethnic and religious egregore meet and court and sometimes marry in a place, then send their offspring to the same place to carry out the same rituals, it does something to that place.
And it did something to me too! Even though I don’t go there much any more, that landscape and those memories are the spiritual omphalos of my life, the place my unconscious mind reaches for when it needs to explain or express the world around me as I experience it today.
I’ve been reading Paula Frederickson’s “Early Christianities.” Along the way, I’ve been made aware that scoring rhetorical points among the intellectuals of the era was WAY more important than anything like a search for truth. Which points to the same thing happening today, as various actual realities get glossed over in favor of narratives. Land is just land, right? Trees are just trees. Water is just water. Nothing to see here, move along.
Is the internet a place? If so, it has experience a major shift this morning, as YT is requiring some or all of its viewers on multiple platforms to “sign in” before watching anything. Or maybe I’m being singled out, specially (I doubt it). Can’t watch anything at all without signing up, signing in. Brrr. I’m thinking the internet just underwent its next slide down of enshalification.
Of course, Congress (the best money can buy) has all but enacted a KOSA (Keep Online Safe Act) that requires everyone to be ID’d for everything, essentially. Details to be worked out, apparently.
If it’s not a place, does it qualify as having some kind of “spirit of place?” If not, why not? If so, how? Inquiring book readers want to know… If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect nefarious activities by a body known in WOH as the Radiance.
I can’t imagine how large the continent-sized essay you aren’t writing would end up!
Geography is fractal; you could fill a book detailing the vibe shifts just within one small town. Indeed, I think far more useful than the over-large overview you wisely did not attempt to provide would be more details on how to locate sacred spaces.
Yes, there’s traditional lore, but around here “indigenous” sacred places have a habit of popping up whenever a rich ore vein does… never to be mentioned again, once the elders squeeze sufficient concessions from the government and the miners. A cynical man might wonder about that.
Speaking of– I have nothing against the Seneca and their lore, but who the heck wrote that screed Mithridates quoted about Niagara Falls? Talk about cultural imperialism! “My culture’s stories about this place are authentic and good. Your culture’s stories are false and base.” Whoever came up with that can stuff that attitude up their keister. No one bloodline has a monopoly on stories!
@Mithrades,
I can echo that from the other side of the border– I was born and raised in Ontario, but in the Transition Forest of the Canadian Shield. Even before you had to go out of your way to hear a Canadian accent, Toronto always felt like a foreign city to me.
I’ve lived all my 36 year, except for two, on one rural property east of Lancaster that my great grandfather purchased in the 40s. . Many of the roads were once trails of the natives. I spent my childhood summers exploring overgrown fence rows and building forts by digging groundhog holes large enough to crawl into. I spent seven weeks biking from San Diego, CA to St Augustine FL when I was 16.
If I were to write a book on the particular qualities of the Lancaster plain region, the title would be “On the Land: An Amishman’s Guide to the Geography of Belonging”.
Late to the party. Missed the open post because I’m caring for a newborn – he’s healthy, and my wife’s well, so all’s good.
This was an interesting essay, and it really got me thinking about the places that have reached me.
I’m a born and bred Nebraskan, and like many, I’ve got strong Czech heritage. The region I grew up in is called the Bohemian Alps because so many Chechs and Slovaks settled there around the turn of the century – mainly because it looks a bit like the Czech countryside. Surveying spiritual places is a bit tricky, but I can try to name a few that I’ve been to or have struck me.
I’ve been to the Pahuk, the ancient Pawnee sacred site over the Platte, but never felt anything. The main region I definitely feel a spiritual “vibe” is among the bluffs along the Missouri River. The Hitchcock Nature Center in Iowa, Ponca and Indian Cave State Parks in Nebraska, there’s something awe inspiring when you reach a cliff amid all the bur oaks and look up and down the longest river on the continent, almost as though you can see its whole length. I’m sure there are some Otoe, Pawnee, Ponca, and other sites in those, though it’s hard to find resources on them.
In the Bohemian Alps, there are some nice little Christian sites. Holy Family Shrine overlooking the Platte River on I-80 is genuinely amazing. It’s a beautiful building, built to offer sweeping views of the surrounding woods, prairie, and river valley. You can really feel the winds there.
If you ever wanted to visit Nebraska’s geography in spirit, I highly recommend Willa Cather’s short story “Neighbor Rosicky.” Really captures the feeling of life on the Plains, something only Cather could do.
However, I do wonder how much things vary person to person. I know a good view or the river can stir my soul, but I’ve been on hikes with friends and they can often be completely immune to the sensation. Maybe if we went to Glastonbury or a similar place it’d be different, but I’m not sure. Is the magical feeling entirely subjective? If Glastonbury weren’t a known holy site, would it be just another hill? I’d like to think not.
This week’s essay and the comments are quite divergent, but form an interesting fan of answers to the question why people feel that certain places are special. I have not yet come to a conclusion what I can contribute to that question, but I have two small comments.
Christianity has preserved much more of a connection to sacred time than to sacred space, as JMG wrote (though it is my impression that many evangelical Christians don’t really sing Easter or Pentecost or Advent songs – any song will be sung on any Sunday). However, the Hebrew Bible contains very strong links to places. Most of 1. Chronicles is a long list of genealogies, connecting certain ancestors to certain places. Of course, this makes it excruciatingly boring reading if you don’t consider yourself a descendant of these ancestors and haven’t lived at these places.
Many commenters have mentioned suburbs, strip malls and highway crossings. There is an apt German neologism for this, “zersiedeln”. It can be explained like this:
A. “stören” = disturb; “zerstören” = destroy
B. “reissen” = pull sharply, rip; “zerreissen” = rip apart
C. “siedeln” = settle, “zersiedeln” = ?
Maybe somebody can come up with an English neologism for the activities that destroy a landscape by settling it.
(Off topic, but I think it’s interesting…)
This afternoon (local time here); I’ve seen in my main town public library, a book titled in its original English edition “Entangled Life”, in its Spanish Translation. Its author is Merlin Sheldrake. Well, in JMG previous post I think someone pointed that eccentric and controversial (and heretical) scientist Rupert Sheldrake named one of his sons as “Merlin”, maybe un a funny ironic mood or like a tribute to that legendary magician (or the two ideas alike). So I’ve matched his name and surname…
I can tell you it seems a scientifical book about how fungi work, but being the son of that father, I bet there’ll be some surprises as soon as I can read it (it’s loaned now).
By the way, the public library reading club has chosen this same book to have a weekly talk this month. It’s very interesting they’re excited enough to read a non fiction scientifical book instead usual novels…Unfortunately, I can’t join the club, number of places is limited…
Mithridates # 70:
“This original narrative contrasts sharply with the “Maid of the Mist” tourist legend, which falsely claimed the maiden was sacrificed to appease the gods. Seneca elders and anthropologists have long worked to correct this distortion, emphasizing that the Haudenosaunee do not practice human sacrifice and that the original story highlights healing, community, and the balance between benevolent and malevolent natural forces.””
I bet that distortion of the original myth wasn’t a mistake made by a naïve and wrong interpretation of it, but I’m afraid its seems to me a biased and malevolous distortion (or even a half-made up story) to present Natives as bloody savage people.
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Christine # 73:
“When the Australian Federal Government custom-built their capitol in 1913, they chose to keep the Aboriginal place name, and the Aboriginal people had places named after human body parts, so our Federal Parliament is in a town called “boobs” (True Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia Volume 2, David Hunt, 2017, Black Inc.).”
From my point of view (as an “arrogant and ignorant European”) that paragraph in your comment about that historical and bizarre fact has puzzled me…Well, “boobs” are indeed a part of human body, in women, but, not being an Australian, I won’t try to find a direct relation between that name and your Federal Parlament building…
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Michael Gray # 84:
“I feel there is a reason why NZ was the first country to recognize a river with personhood, speaks to the general state of the place in that these factors haven’t been entirely erased.”
In addition to your phrase, I’ve thought: If corporations are legally recognized with their own (fictional) “personhood” before laws, why not a river too? (maybe with more reasons to do it: for example, rivers are real).
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(To be continued)
On my way to a science fiction convention in Reno, I spent the night in a motel with a casino across the hall from my room. The restaurant was in the back of a casino as well. Yes, Hell squared and cubed; I think I ended up staying at another place up the road whose only concession to the casino culture was a slot machine in the lobby. Also, there were no laundromats anywhere. I told myself on the way back, This will be my last Worldcon; my endurance was running thin. Other than that, the guest of honor was worth hearing.
I never did go back.
Hey JMG
I can’t really comment on “spiritual geography” because though I have traveled, I have neither stayed anywhere long enough nor really possess the ability to notice the difference in spiritual qualities.
However, yesterday I came across another foreign attempt at recreating the megalithic structures found in Britain, on a far smaller scale than that American “Stonehenge”.
I decided to walk around the area between Milton and Toowong, and came across the “Celtic Nations Monument” dedicated to the Celtic immigrants who settled in Australia. It consists of six granite slabs arranged in a manner that recreates the positions of the stars that make up the “Southern Cross” constellation. I think that it is the closest thing to a megalithic site that I have ever seen.
https://www.scottishbanner.com/2023/12/08/the-inauguration-of-the-celtic-nations-monument/
Clay (etc): I respectfully offer the archipelago of southeast Alaska as another exception! In a lot of these coastal communities, the traditional lifestyle is alive and well. Geographic isolation and a favorable climate has done the Haida and neighboring tribes many favors compared to their counterparts elsewhere.
On a New Age tip, whats up with the Sedona vortexes? Mt. Shasta?
Not discounting their power, but those places seem to be pilgrimagr sites for the Shakti Gawain set.
Aldarion #153: in my dictionary zersiedeln translates as overdevelop, which seems to fit IMHO
Chuaquin #165 Mithriades
The Senecas belonged to the Iroquois confederación, who don’f match in absolute with the myth of the good savage (movies “The Last Mohican” and “The Black Rope”. The idea of sacrifice selected individuals ,for achieve the sympathy or indulgence of supernatural entities, belongs to the core of the relations man/numen in wich are based all human societies.
@Aldarion
Topocide — from Greek topos (place) + Latin -cide (killing).
Literally, the killing of a place.
Lococide — the destruction of a place through the very act of occupying it.
Chuaquin, Mithriades
Excuse me. I meant “The Black Robe”
It’s weird. A place can feel very sacred at one time during the seasonal cycle and not at another. I had the privilege of living on the Atlantic for 3 months during the winter of 2020 before Covid. I swam in the 55 degree waters every day. It was a time of complete spiritual immersion. No one was around at all. I’ve been there in tourist season multiple times and it’s not anywhere near as close to as sacred. It’s still very nice swimming the ocean no matter what time of year but all the masses of people kill the spiritual vibe.
Justin P. #91:
“I read an article once about architectural acupuncture.”
And I’ve just read it, too. I think the name “architectural acupuncture has been well chosen, not by accident, but to follow and ancient tradition (at least as a well chosen analogy). It’s interesting to point that acupuncture for human bodies has been practised in China even during the fiercest Communist times, so it seems a distinctive Chinese cultural hallmark, beyond apparently full materialist and atheist politics in Beijing…In spite of routinary and predictable western sceintific materialism claims against that “superstition”.
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Sister Crow # 93:
“If that puzzles you, allow me to present the mighty roadside attraction of Western Nebraska, Carhenge: https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2606”
Well, I’ve had some problems to see Carhenge in that link, but I’ve managed to see some photos of it in another sites. My first impression about Carhenge has been: “It’s too ugly…”, but I’ve understood soon it could be an American (post)modern version for old Stonehenge, in a “Art Brut” mood. However, I also think there’s some post-modern ironical “flavor” in using cars like stones were used in UK Stonehenge, which saves it from boring and serious view I see sometimes within some Art Brut non-professional artists (though others have made their works with a healthy irony). I think Carhenge main author was an amateur artist. Thanks for reminding this bizarre American art work.
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Beardtree # 97:
“there is a conscious and living presence in the forest. This does not occur in young forests and any forest that is extensively logged will lose this living presence.”
I agree. To some extent, I’ve personally felt different feelings in usual reforested areas here with the unavoidable pines (a “dullness and void” feeling maybe caused partly for the half-artificial landscape but not only by it…), and the remnants of mountain primary forests, in another places (a “greatness and majestical” feeling, not only for their views…).
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Cath Wen # 115:
“First- I’m new here, been reading the blog a lot but this is the first time I have commented.”
Hi. C.W…welcome to this blog, at least as a new-old commenter.
“Some places just feel special- Castlerigg stone circle in the English Lake District stands out in my mind.”
I’ve met some people here who visited as tourists the whole English Lake District, and they told me they felt they weren’t really in England (or at least the England which they imagined before travelling there). In addition to this feeling, I can tell you Lake District appears in the ’90s graphic novel “The Tale of One Bad Rat”(Bryan Talbot). It’s interesting how its main character begins the story in London with serious problems, and as soon she travels toward the Lake District, she slowly changes, as a kind of self-therapy. Landscapes are very well drawn in this old comic.
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Alice E. # 122:
“a point of disagreement I have with certain “Anglofuturists” who want a restore British Space Empire”
I didn’t notice until now there was an “Anglofuturist” party, groups of whatever way of union they have…As a relatively “arrogant and ignorant” Continental European, I’m puzzled by this apparently bizarre claim.
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Little Toad # 123:
“Iceland also had an incredible feeling to it but that energy was too unfamiliar to me to properly understand or digest it. Fascinating place.”
Some years ago I went to a conference about a trip to Iceland, made by a guy from my town who had travelled to that island. He told us that most Icelanders were living in a Protestant culture, mildly secularized (it isn’t strange, they come from the old Vikings, like Scandinavians). However, when he travelled in the countryside, he realized rustic people told him about elves and another Pagan spiritual beings in an apparently half kidding half serious mood. He was a very “squared” rational man, but he began to suspect, according some strange behaviors he saw in those Icelanders, they tended to believe “slightly” in those old stories. I thought it was the best part of that conference. Well, “too many” volcanoes and glaciers there…
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JMG # 127:
“The thing that makes Rainier so lethal is that due to the very wet climate, it has more water locked up in its glaciers than any other mountain on the planet…”
I agree. Indeed, I remember now a recent sad example (in geological and historical terms), about a volcano eruption mixed with glaciers near its top:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armero_tragedy
Keep on mind that disaster happened in a tropical area in the Colombian Andes, with probably a fair less amount of ice masses than Mt. Rainier has nowadays.
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Robert M. # 134:
“The wasting disease was thought, back in the day, to be the result of a not-quite-dead corpse feeding “etherically” on its living kinfolk.”
According your phrase and the “treatment” to the suspicious recent corpse, it seems (to some extent) like the old Slavic/Balkanic legends about vampires, methink.
“in Rhode Island and in Maine, families established small burying grounds for their own family dead somewhere on their own farmland.”
I knew about that funerary customs thanks to a TV documentary I watched on one occasion. I’ve also seen them in some American TV films. I thought (puzzled) it was a strange idea, because as a South European who lives in a not yet fully secularized and culturally Catholic country, here dead go always to big and small cemeteries, correlatives to their live people towns, not to family cemeteries. Well, I think they’ll have their cultural reasons to do it there.
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JMG # 141:
“French esprit and German geist, both of which mean “spirit,” also mean the higher properties of the mind, the capacity to experience meaning and value, which in occult terms belong to the mental plane. French âme and German seele, both of which mean “soul,” refer to the emotional, expressive, and imaginative side of the mind”
In adddition to your paragraph, I can tell you here some people can tell the difference between “espíritu” and “alma”, (me too) like it happens in those another languages. However, others don’t distinguish well those two words, mixing them like synonyms. I think it’s a sign of recent decline in true spirituality in my country. Indeed, a short online search in these two words etymologies could make them to learn they’re different terms…Indeed, Latin “anima” have a similar origin like “animal”(maybe in old times people believed animals had a soul-“anima”, too…). “Espíritu” seems to come from the Latin verb “spirare”(to blow).
JMG,
Do you have any magical or spiritual insight in to the area of upstate NY that was once called the ” Burned Over District?’ Or was there just something unusual about that time and place when that label was earned?
Aldarion @ 153
“,Maybe somebody can come up with an English neologism for the activities that destroy a landscape by settling it.”
“disneyfication…” a term I first heard from the comedian Kate Clinton circa 1990’s.
JMG,
This post unlocked some old memories I haven’t thought about in a while. I lived in Santa Cruz, CA from 2003 – 2007, and that area had more of a sense of presence than anywhere else I’ve lived. It felt more raw, like someplace where human influence was thinner than I’m used to. Often when I spent time in those woods I felt like I was rudely interrupting a conversation that had just stopped. It felt like there was some contained hostility buried within whatever mind I was picking up on. The predominant sense I had was of something vital, energetic, and temporarily subdued, like a sleeping volcano.
The beaches had a different feeling – just as raw, but more melancholic.
Also – just out curiosity, since you mentioned Appalachia, did you ever make it to Pittsburgh? If so, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. I just moved here a few years ago myself.
JMG,
“You can see it in the relation between European and American Christianity, for example — to Americans, European Protestantism looks Catholic, while to Europeans, American Catholicism looks decidedly Protestant.”
I’m afraid you lost me there. In which ways does European Protestantism look Catholic to Americans? I’m still puzzled about this one…
“Nor is it in the least surprising to me that so many Scots, Welsh, and Irish immigrants made a beeline for the Appalachians and its related mountain chains as soon as they got off their respective boats. I’m not sure why so many Germans did the same thing, but I haven’t visited Germany in my adult life and have no idea what the land feels like there.”
Well, it would have depended on where the latter came from in Germany. Germany is a _very_ diverse country, all within short distances. To give just one example, the Black Forest is only about 150 km long altogether, and between maybe 30 and 50 km wide. Yet there is a very sharp divide between its Northern and its Southern half, the two are distinctly different. And yet another, equally clear, divide between the actual heights of the Black Forest (its core area), and its foothills area (which again differs, albeit not quite as harshly, depending on where you are in the foothills).
We don’t have regions which bascially have the same vibes for hundreds of kilometres, everything is much more closely packed over here. Thus places where a German from the North Sea cost would feel right at home would be very different from where a Lower Rhine valley German would feel at home, or an Alpes foothill German, or a Northern Black Forest German, or …
And for what it’s worth, the Northern Black Forest (Hesse country 😉 ) doesn’t care about humans at all. Not in the sense that it’s indifferent, but in the sense that it doesn’t care about you or your well-being, and it certainly doesn’t mind if you know about this fact….
Roy Smith #1, if you don’t mind sharing, wherabouts in Germany did you visit back then? The forests and mountains here are quite different in different places, and I’d be interested to know which German region(s) reminded you of Western Washington.
Chuaquin #39, about this: “I know Germany is a less mountainous country than Switzerland or my own country, but its highest mountains behind the Alps, the Harz mountains,”
Not quite. The Brocken in the Harz is only the fourth-highest of the German low mountain range peaks. The Feldberg in the Southern Black Forest has almost 1500 metres, Großer Arber in the Bavarian Forest about 1450 metres, Fichtelberg in the Erzgebirge 1215 m, and the Brocken is only at about 1140. The Black Forest alone has a few dozen peaks higher than the Brocken.
The German North, in contrast… is mostly flat. I vividly remember driving towards the North on a German motorway and having a good, hard laugh about a road sign warning us about a 3% downward slope! 😀 Half the roads in my village are considerably steeper than this, and I don’t live in the mountains. 😉
Milkyway
@Scotty, #146,
I look forward to hearing your stories. If there were interest in collecting all these stories together, I’d be happy to help. But several people have already noted that the subtleties of place seem to be fractal in nature: the more you look, the more you see. So the Atlas of American Enchantment might end up as a huge, multivolume, permanently unfinished work.
And then there are companion volumes like the Atlas of British Enchantment, the Atlas of New Zealand Enchantment, and so on.
I forgot to mention the first place I experienced “feeling” a place with a strong presence – Maryland’s Eastern Shore, especially around Salisbury. I lived in Delaware, and whenever my parents would take me to visit extended family we would drive through an area that was dominated by estuaries and swamps, and I always felt like there was something evil there. There was even a stretch of road in the swamp where my parents’ headlights went out – 3 different times, in 3 different vehicles.
The Eastern Shore in general feels oppressive to me.
JMG
“One of the downsides of India’s rise to great power status is that a lot of immigrants from India are behaving like conquering overlords, ignoring the land and the people among whom they’re settling. That’s likely to generate some ugly blowback.”
I think that’s starting to boil over in Texas with the H1-B scandal. I’ll save the details for the next open post, but let’s just say the bull statues they’re putting up look a lot like depictions of Moloch/Baal and at this point it is not just the Christians who want those torn down.
@Calliope:
Florida being what it is, nearly everything is nicer to visit in the winter, even the beaches 😉 I grew up in a beach town, and recall the *only* times we’d go to the beach-beach (as opposed to the bayside where we’d happily harass the snails and hermit crabs for hours) was in the middle of winter, or after a tropical storm or hurricane went by (that’s when the good beachcombing is). The good local spots were lakes, creeks, springs, and a handful of nature preserves with unique ecosystems or very impressive trees. Your side of the state is, alas, not a familiar stomping ground. Have you tried the Enchanted Forest? The pictures on that look like any number of delightful managed forest trails I’ve been to elsewhere in the state. Those are a great way to familiarize yourself with the local trees and wildlife. Whatever you do: don’t climb the cypress trees. They don’t like it.
@Neptunesdolphins: places where time is screwy: we discovered one of those around the 441 exit off of I-75 in Alachua, FL. Super weird. I know someone (who never does drugs) who did the whole time-loop thing there: exited, pulled into gas station, saw minivan pull in, parents jump out and execute a quick diaper change. Got back on road, then did *the same exit again* got really confused, pulled into gas station to check map, minivan pulls in, parents jump out, diaper change just like before… I never repeated the loop, but always did find that exit weird and confusing.
In my hometown there was a place along one of the major roads that consistently, for many years, even after I moved away and moved back, used to screw with my sense of direction. I’d go in there knowing exactly which way I was facing, which was was north, etc. and as soon as I hit it, *poof* the sureness reversed. I was convinced I was going the wrong way, north felt like south. I learned to navigate it by making very sure of my direction before I got there, and then just telling myself over and over again “keep going straight and it’ll stop being confusing.” After a few blocks it would resolve.
Maybe my experience is too local to fit the topic of this post, but one of my most moving experiences involved place. So here’s the story:
I went to collage in central Pennsylvania. That place felt very old and tired and kind of creepy. I swear one of my apartments was haunted. It had a lovely little screened in porch in the back that should have been a magnate for me, but I couldn’t sit out there for more than a few minutes before getting creeped out.
When I graduated, I wanted to go to grad school somewhere back west (I grew up in the East Bay Area, California). One spring break I had visited my ex-high school sweetheart up in Humboldt County and just fell in love with the place! It called to me. So, Humboldt State University it is.
I had a three day weekend over the Fourth of July. My ex was still there. She said I could crash on her floor. My plan was to come up late on Friday, find an apartment on Saturday, and drive home on Sunday. Everyone said I was daft and there was No Way I was going to find a place that fast. But I figured I’d give it a go.
Saturday morning we walked to a nice place for breakfast. On the way back I saw a sign that said Apartment For Rent, so of course I stopped to check it out. And it was perfect. I filled out the application. By four o’clock I got a call that the place was mine! I spent the second night in my own place!
I had nothing but some clothes in my suitcase. I often, and to this day, feel a little “off” trying to sleep in a new place whether it be someone’s house or a hotel room or outside somewhere. But I plopped down on the floor (no furniture) and leaned against the wall… and got the strangest feeling of belonging I’d ever had. It didn’t just feel “homey”. It said “I AM HOME”. It was like I had lived there my entire life and just returned from a long journey. I guess coming home to a place you’ve never been before really is a thing. There was not the slightest bit of “creepy”. Quite the opposite.
I’m still there. It’s been 36 years now. I still sit in the same spot I first sat (although I have a couch now). It’s my power spot. Maybe that feeling I had was some sort of premonition that I would be there a long time? Maybe I was called there, and it was the Universe telling me I was doing a good job? Maybe it’s a power spot for everyone who lives/lived there? Anyway, I wouldn’t say I’m super sensitive to such things, but that experience hit me hard.
@Aldarion #153 – A lot of the more traditional churches do adopt seasonal liturgies. My wife is Catholic, and our church cycles through hymns based on the liturgical season. So Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time, and others will all feature at least one song unique to the season.
My wife always gets excited for “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” during Advent.
Hi John Michael,
Yeah, at the core of the market story is a lack of trust resulting from years of over use – from all sides of that story, including I’d have to suggest, the bond traders themselves, for they are part of the system and went along with it all. Cold feet were probably once warm.
You know what man. I had an eerie insight about the charity mugger incident, and in some ways your essay this week touches upon the matter. Turns out we were looking at different things whilst having the discussion. I was looking at the land, whilst he was seeing the veneer, or overlay, or whatever you want to call what was going on all around us at the time. Not the same thing at all. Hmm.
3 inches of rain so far, and it continues… Plus there was a 4.8 earthquake last night way off to the south east. I awoke to hear the door rattling and thought to myself: “Well that’s unusual!” Then went back to sleep 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Mr. Greer .. with regard to the Cascades, as they relate to the human denizens who inhabit the ‘skirts’ of said volcanic protuberances .. the subduction sword cuts various ways. In my re-reading of Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa .. e.i. ‘Krakatou’, the Dutch Colonialists .. shortly after the 1883 cataclysm trying as they might, couldn’t sway the local inhabitants of Java from turned their angst and frustration on their colonial betters .. with a helping of Arabian centered Islamic influence .. towards their colonial ‘stewards’ with great resentment, even though the Dutch administrators attempted, in vain, to mitigate the catastrophic effects of said volcanic destruction affecting the surrounds of the Sudra Srait – both on the Sumatrian side, as with the Javanese .. Winchester’s point, as with mine .. is that Geologic Shale happens .. with very mixed, and unpredictable results, societal wise ..
Imagine the results, if one, or more, Cascadian volcanos erupted simultaneously .. what would the results be, both within the region, and beyond?? Being as I do, living on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I often entertain the prospect of a new volcanic subduction event occuring somewhere within the confines of the Strait itself! I’m within sight of Mt. Baker, to the northeast.. One never knows reliably, when or where an accretionary wedge may manifest itself.
@ Clay Dennis (#166):
The easterly end of Upstate New York, including the Burned Over District, is what in my long post above (#134) I called the “Western Fringe” of New England.
The Western Fringe, like the Northern Fringe, were both settled from the British Isles by people who resisted the general British (and Puritan) idea that every village or small town ought to share a common (Protestant) religion, and have a single church at its center, with a single burying ground near that church. The settlers in both Fringes came to the land for economic reasons (‘to fish and trade” as one ancient anecdote puts it), not to form strong communities beyond the bare necessity for common survival.
One might think of them as the “Lands of Thousands of Small Graveyards,” which I think is not just a quip, but a highly significant fact. People who don’t come together all that closely in life, also don’t bury their dead all that closely together.
In such an environment, religious individualism flourishes like hardly anywhere else. And where that is the case, waves of religious enthusiasm can sweep through the area like wildfires, burning fiercely and then dying out as the fuel they need is consumed. That’s where the “Burned Over District” moniker came from.
There is a classic book on it, The Burned Over District — more precisely, on the western end of the district — by Whitney Cross (1950), which I think doesn’t do a very good job of getting to the roots of the phenomena.
@Chuaquin (#165):
Modern folklorists such as Michael E. Bell have happily adopted the “vampire” label for that old theory of “consumption” and its old-style cure. But at the time and place where it prevailed, the dead who were believed to feed on their living kinfolk weren’t called “vampires.”
B y the way, Bell’s two books on it all are truly excellent: Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001; revised edition, 2011) and Vampire’s Grasp: The Hidden History of Consumption in New England (2024). I can’t recommend them highly enough to anyone interested in a deep dive into folklore,
On translating German zersielden: how about “misdevelop”?
@KAN: Thanks for the suggestion! “Overdevelop” sounds a bit bland to me, though…
“Disneyfication” gets at it, but I like “lococide” even better. Topophthony?
We should probably get back to talking about the effects of the living and undestroyed land.
Again, thanks to all who shared their stories of the magic of place.
Scotty, I love the sound of waves on the beach, but of course that’s keyed to the wide shelving sand beaches of the Washington coast. One of the oddities I’ve picked up in my vinyl record collection is a set of 1970s nature-sound records — no music or anything, just natural environments. I put the surf-on-a-beach record on when I have trouble sleeping; it usually helps.
A1, it depends on the battlefield and the city! One size emphatically does not fit all in those cases.
Ron, just one of the services I offer. 😉
Clarke, the Radiance is fictional — players of the Call of Cthulhu RPG will recognize it as Delta Green with a bad case of megalomania and a psychopathic streak — but I modeled it on realities that, if less systematically organized, have the same basic flavor. I’d encourage you to be very careful about accepting job offers that involve moving out West… 😉
Tyler, I wrote a little about sacred spaces in The Earth Mysteries Workbook, but not much. The last thing we need is more clueless goobers working spells they don’t understand at genuine sacred spots.
Jfisher, I would buy that book!
EchoEcho, congratulations!
Aldarion, the German language is almost uniquely gifted when it comes to such terms. The nearest I can get is a clumsy construction like “malsettlement.”
J.L.Mc12, interesting. I wonder what the energy of the stones feels like.
Justin, I’ve never been to Sedona so can’t say. Mount Shasta — I’ve been there, and it’s got a genuinely strange vibe. I don’t think there are actually two hidden Lemurian cities underground there, but it’s the kind of place where that doesn’t seem entirely implausible.
Luke, that’s quite common. There are sacred places in many societies that are only “active” at certain seasons of the year.
Clay, I want to go there someday and see what the vibe feels like!
David, yes, I’ve been to Pittsburgh a few times. To me, it has a pleasant, down-at-heels feeling, though I know people who find it very unpleasant. It may be one of those places where the energy responds differently to different people.
Milkyway, I’ve been told this by people I know who have visited, for example, Lutheran services in Germany, and come back saying that they feel more Catholic than Catholic services in the US! As for the German settlers in the Appalachians, the great majority of them came from the Rheinpfalz, but there was also a notable migration from Sachsen.
Anon, I know. It may get ugly.
Chris, interesting. Does the area often get earthquakes? It’s an odd feature of geology that adding water to a dry country can sometimes lubricate faults enough to make them slip…
Polecat, heck of a good question. I’m just glad to be out of the region!
Robert (if I may), the English word “vampire” reached our language only quite recently, having been borrowed from Hungarian; iirc the first recorded use of it (as “vampyre”) was in 1732, and it was an exotic term then, used to talk about happenings in eastern Europe. There are comparable legends from Britain of evil, predatory revenants dating from long before that time, of course, but they don’t seem to have had a standard label. So I don’t think Bell’s decision was inappropriate.
Aldarion, “topopthony” is a word I want to hear Sylvester the Cat repeat. 😉
I visited Chaco Canyon, a site famous as a previous great ceremonial center. I declined to pray with the people who visited with me. In doing so, I feel like I had a more authentic visit than the group that prayed, because like the original inhabitants, I chose to step away from it as a remote sacred site, in favor of personal worship close to home.
I dont like insulting Dumbo but this is dumb:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/08/disney-town-cotino-california
https://www.clickorlando.com/features/2020/01/13/what-is-celebration-the-history-of-a-community-developed-by-disney/
JMG, never doubt your writing talent if you can write this good of an article without wanting to (lol.) I believe anyone can talk to the spirits of the land. First of all, notice how the land spirits express themselves in the accents of locals. That alone will tell you a whole lot. Second, just start talking to land spirits as if they were people and then be patient in waiting for an answer. It will come… eventually… if you listen in earnest. I have found out all sorts of things about my native Chicagoland suburbs. For instance, there’s a hill by my parents house that is cursed. It’s now part of an ugly townhome subdivision. The land spirits told me that many battles had been fought at that hill, which I guess has been there for a very long time. There’s a forest nearby, and they tell me that patch of land spent many years soaked in blood, and that’s some of the reason why the soil is so good. My wild baby bird (Clarice, the starling) who died in July talks to me via the spirits of my parents backyard. She’s trying to reincarnate in a hurry and I keep on telling her there is no hurry.
The whole world is dramatically haunted. The only thing missing in any given ghost hunt is our perceptivity.
Hi JMG,
Fascinating post! When you mentioned the feeling of standing on a specific part of a hilltop and the sky feeling closer I knew exactly what you were talking about. Geography, to me has always felt important in terms of the (for lack of a better term) spiritual vibe of a place.
I live in Japan now and have spent some time in Hokkaido, and it felt really oddly similar to the Upstate New York hill country where I grew up. I was not expecting it at all. Nowhere else in Japan feels like this to me.
Maybe I should write an esoteric atlas of place. The only things I’ve ever come across that are remotely similar are books on regional folklore and legends about cryptids/monsters. Maybe that would be w place to start.
Best,
JZ
In many ways commenting on this is difficult as I have lived and traveled in many places and have always pondered what made some of them feel like home, and some magic places to visit, though as a guest or pilgrim and not somewhere to stay and others places to get get away from ASAP.
I was born in NYC and grew up within a 100 mile radius of it, though much of that area was still quite rural in the 1940s and 50s. I had a great time in the woods and fields there, though in some way it never quite felt like home. My mother was from Ohio, my father England so I had no real family roots there.I remember feeling more and more at home as I traveled west the first time. I was in the army in coastal CA for a year and went to college there, in the central coast and the Bay.Whenever I have lived in the US since then, with the exception of Hawaii, it has always been in central CA. I have always felt at home here and related to the magic of the land and found good groups of friends. I have lived and felt equally at home on the NSW and QLD coasts and hinterlands in Australia, also on a Greek island, though I was aware that I was at home on the land there, but a guest in the culture. The other place I loved and felt completely at home was Hawaii.. I guess the one thing the places have in common is that they are either in the Pacific or Mediterranean basins. I have also felt I have had past lives in all these places.
Here in CA I feel so at home with the coast and the oak woodlands and the wild coastal mountains. The Sierra Nevada is a place of magic to me and I have walked and climbed most of it, though I would not choose to live there.
I know there are many on this site, our host included, who have a very negative feeling about CA, but it only has to be magic for me, not everyone, and for me not the whole state. I think of the Eagles song,the title of which I don’t remember, but with the line ” once you call a place paradise you can kiss it goodbye.” That seems to be what has happened to most of CA
Stephen
Near me, on the property reserved for the Adams Lake (First Nations) Band, there are the remains of a village of Kekuli, the mostly-underground winter houses of the local First Nations. They have not been excavated, just some minor tending to the land. I’m told by people who have been there that walking through it, you get the feeling that the ancient residents are in their doorways, watching. I’ve not visited there. Maybe someday, when I get enough courage…
JMG, I think if you came to live in England, you’d be quite safe, for various reasons 🙂
My biggest gripe about living in England is the control humans have over the land. As a densely populated country, it’s ubiquitous – intensive farming, chemicals, monoculture, soils stripped of life, a lack of true wilderness.
The most magical places for me are where nature has been “let go” and allowed to do it’s thing. Neglected places filled with scrub and “weeds”, ie. wild shrubs, young trees and flowers buzzing with insects and life. Waste ground, forgotten corners, motorway verges, ex-industrial sites spied from a train, and land earmarked for development and therefore not cultivated for years (unfortunately for the latter, the bulldozers eventually arrive).
Until recently conservation has been about preserving specific habitats in aspic and keeping a tight lid on natural succession. Attitudes are changing and there’s now more focus on “rewilding”. But even now, efforts to increase tree cover means planting dense rows of expensive saplings encased in plastic tubing – a depressing sight whenever I see it.
It feels that relinquishing control is slightly unnatural for the British psyche. But when we do, and allow the land to live and breathe, that’s when magic happens.
Slink #175
Funny how some places just seem to suit a person. When I purchased my current apartment I made a list of all the places I’d stayed in since leaving home. It turned out I had moved every eighteen months on average. Next year I’ll have been here for 30 years. At the time I had no intention of settling down. It just happened to be a convenient place in my price range.
I also do my bit for the general area — picking up litter, keeping the sidewalk clear and weeded, removing rubbish from gutters and drains etc. I don’t want to be accused of occupathology, to coin a word.
“Aldarion, the German language is almost uniquely gifted when it comes to such terms. The nearest I can get is a clumsy construction like “malsettlement.””
To all contributing to this sub-thread, I very much like the word which you yourself have often used, JMG, “metastasise”. It contains the connotation of colonising or settling into a new place without ever having belonged there, and without any intention of “adapting” and “fitting in” there – just extracting any available nourishment while destroying the host.
Our “samy-samy,” hungry and insatiable industrial centres metastasise across the countryside, toxifying all they touch….
“,Maybe somebody can come up with an English neologism for the activities that destroy a landscape by settling it.”
Here in Utah, “Californication” is a term that would fit the bill.
I have been lately thinking about how in various ways Canadian culture has melded with the various “spirits of place” across this land. True, Canadian culture is more European than American, but Canada is not just “Europe with maple syrup”! One thing in particular – and again this may just be something in my region – is that for generations, at least until the time I was growing up, it was considered to be the responsibility of each adolescent boy to figure out what livelihood best fit their purpose in life. Not what was the traditional family profession, nor what brought money or social status; what one was born to do – what was one’s “calling”. I don’t believe that this was common for my grandparents when they were growing up in Britain – though I am glad to be corrected on this point if I am wrong. I see this seeking to find what one’s career path as an individual to be reminiscent of the spiritual practice of the Native peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, where – like the more famous peoples of the Great Plains – male youths were expected to fast and pray for a spirit to guide them through their life. Maybe I am out on a limb here, but this is what I have been thinking.
Justin Patrick Moore says:
October 2, 2026 at 4:30 pm
On a New Age tip, whats up with the Sedona vortexes? Mt. Shasta?
Not discounting their power, but those places seem to be pilgrimagr sites for the Shakti Gawain set.
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From my study of the New Age belief systems – they seemed to be attuned to vortexes or positive energy centers. As part of the planetary grid of energy. These places are used for ascension to union with the divine center. It is a place for the evolution of the soul. These particular vortexes are strong . Various New Age folks glommed on to them, and then more followed. It is like with any religious “craze” that develops into a dogma.
JMG and DavidPGH
DavidPGH says:
I forgot to mention the first place I experienced “feeling” a place with a strong presence – Maryland’s Eastern Shore, especially around Salisbury. I lived in Delaware, and whenever my parents would take me to visit extended family we would drive through an area that was dominated by estuaries and swamps, and I always felt like there was something evil there. There was even a stretch of road in the swamp where my parents’ headlights went out – 3 different times, in 3 different vehicles.
The Eastern Shore in general feels oppressive to me.
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I experienced this at Virginia Beach, VA. Especially at the ARE Center devoted to Edgar Casey. I felt that either Casey or the ARE people were either not benign or they opened a channel of malevolence.
Nearby Newport News has a statue of Neptune, (not Poseidon) but the actual Roman God. Neptune seems to be holding the line against what is happening in Virginia Beach. I often ponder the choice of the people to erecting Neptune instead of Poseidon there. Did they sense something that needed to be kept at bay?
I also wonder about the ARE Center know what they are doing.
Off this topic, or maybe not if we are including the magic of animated places as well. Wagner as well.
https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/why-whats-opera-doc-looks-like-that
@Chaquin
I’m guessing the truth is probably in some middle position between the extremes of the Wicked Savage and Noble Savage narratives.
@Anselmo
Yes, the Senecas were a rather warlike people. And they weren’t even native to the Buffalo/Niagara area. IIRC when the Europeans first showed up in the Americas, the Senecas were living somewhere around the Genesee Valley (Rochester) and the Finger Lakes region. Through trade they acquired guns and horses from the Dutch and proceed to immediately go on a conquering spree. When they moved westward and reached the shores of Lake Erie, they fought the native Erie and Wenro peoples, defeated them, and took the land for themselves. In other words, they were a group of opportunistic human beings (with some rather fascinating lore), just like every other group of opportunist human beings. Big shocker, I know!
Much of modern anthropology uses the “noble savage” fallacy as its core dogma. It’s purpose is not to seek the truth and capture an accurate picture of the peoples they study, but to push a “decolonialist” political narrative, and this means green-washing the history and folklore of every ethnic group around the world who was on the losing end of European exploration, expansion, and colonization. This means pretending that so-called “indigenous” (a very politically-loaded term these days) peoples were/are all peace-loving hippies whose mere existence serves is an antidote to the evil and rapacious ways of the white man. As a result, an accurate and meaningful understanding of the world’s peoples gets sacrificed on the altar of supreme wokeness.
Modern anthropology came about as an overcorrection to the preceding paradigm which labelled everyone not Christian Europeans as being wicked savages who need to be conquered and subjugated in the name of Jesus. Among today’s intellectual “dissident” right, the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction and the “savages” are seen as just plain old savages once again. Yes, I fear the end result is going to be yet another unhelpful overcorrection. Human beings seem very bad at dealing with nuances, grey areas, and middle grounds. As a weird Hermetic Druid of sorts, I’m personally interested in understanding the world as it is, not as this or that fanciful romanticist fantasy or religious agenda wants it to be.
Scotty # 142:
“Greece is one of my favorite countries to visit but beyond the history, it shouldn’t be as it is too arid for my tastes and there is a lot of dysfunction there.”
Maybe…it depends how do you define “dysfunction”. There are a few Greeks here in my town (even we’ve got two Greek “Gyros” restaurants), and one of them told me last year that Athens tendency to show in demonstrations/riots social unrest is real, but overstated in the rest of EU countries. Worst times after 2008 have passed, and in addition to this, another Greece towns and the couuntryside in the Continent and the islands, are usually very quiet places, even too quiet for some tastes (contradicting usual commonplace about typical Greeks as hot-headed people).
Maybe he was biased by his typical migrants nostalgia for the motherland, but after a short online search, I’ve seen Greece doesn’t seem a more dangerous country than my own one.
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Robert M.#143:
“The local lore about how to cure “consumption” may have had a German origin”
You could be right. By the way, when I was a teen, my parents gifted me a teenage ethnographic book about the history of (beliefs in) vampires, with bizarre pictures. Strongest hysteria about alleged vampirism cases happened in the Slavic Balkans, with their correlative “countermeasures”(often, profanating recent corpses, ahem). Some of them happened in Greece until the XIXth century, but according that funny and creepy book, there were some vampires superstitions in Germany before Industrial Revolution. Unfortuntely, I missed that book during a family moving, more than 30 years ago (sigh!). However, I wrote some names in a notebook I saved until present day. So I can tell you, there was a kind of not-dead in Bavaria named Nachzehrer, who sucked “life” or “energy” from the living. Another kind of vampire was the Neun Toter, who had a nasty aspect (its body was full of sores) and apparently spread some illnesses.
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Clarke…#149:
“Is the internet a place?”
A good question, which hasn’t an easy and fast answer, so it could be the beginning of a debate. I think internet is part of our live, in addition to our “in person” life, and to some extent our online life is as real as offline life; especially within the younger generations. However, if/when you turn off your computer and your “smart”phone”(yes, it’s possible to do it by now). I like sites likes this one, but I know I can touch and see directly my offline friends in my town.
In addition to this, I read some years ago Marc Augé essay about “Non-Places”. It was published in 1992, but I think it isn’t outdated yet in its main ideas. On the short form, this French writer thinks a “non-place” is every place where a lot of people are going round in real world (like bus and trains stations or airports), but also virtual places in which invisible masses meet, beyound material world (like TV channels, at least in old TV times before internet boom). In all the “non-places” you can live for a while, but you aren’t “at home”, you’re there for a while.
So if old massive TV channels with their audiences, were “non-places”, I tend to think online life is another “non-place”. I point this idea as hypothesis, not as a full and perpetual truth.
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Echo Echo # 152:
“Late to the party. Missed the open post because I’m caring for a newborn – he’s healthy, and my wife’s well, so all’s good.”
Oh, that situation for you and your wife deserves you missed the open post…Life is life, methink.
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“The region I grew up in is called the Bohemian Alps because so many Chechs and Slovaks settled there around the turn of the century”
Interesting. I knew some mountains outside the original Alps in Europe had been called also as “Alps”, for example New Zealand Alps. And even there are a mountains in the Moon called “Alps” too! I didn’t know “Bohemian Alps” until now.
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Anselmo # 161:
Well, the noble savage myth is opposite to another myth, who have told western people how bloody are non Westerners. Both myths have a loose true base and both are wrong, methink. Propaganda exists everywhere.
“The idea of sacrifice selected individuals ,for achieve the sympathy or indulgence of supernatural entities, belongs to the core of the relations man/numen in wich are based all human societies.”
If you’re wrote that phrase thinking in analogy, you’re more or less right. For example, Jesus sacrifice in Christian mass, and personal sacrifice of soldiers in all the wars. however, if your intention was to mean literal human lives sacrifices within a religious context, I doubt it very much, and i find your claim too bizarre.
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Milkyway # 169:
“The Black Forest alone has a few dozen peaks higher than the Brocken”
Oops, I had forgotten the Black Forest was also a mountain chain…I’m sorry.
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Robert M. # 179:
“The settlers in both Fringes came to the land for economic reasons (‘to fish and trade” as one ancient anecdote puts it), not to form strong communities beyond the bare necessity for common survival.”
So that attitude explains funerary behavior in favor of family graves instead towns necropolis.
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(To be continued)
Robert M. #180:
OK, the map is not the territory, but vampires label comes soon and easy to minds when you read those old stories…
I take note of those books, thank you.
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JMG # 184:
“There are comparable legends from Britain of evil, predatory revenants dating from long before that time, of course, but they don’t seem to have had a standard label. So I don’t think Bell’s decision was inappropriate.”
Your answer to Robert M. reminds me another story in my lost book about vampires which happened (allegedly) in Middle Age England. A dead man called every night a person in a house, and that unlucky guy died soon, until a soldier was called by the vampire-like dead, so he run toward him, he drew his sword and cut dead man head: problem solved…I don’t have where and when it’s said that event happened…maybe like in another legends.
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Mithridates # 199:
“I’m guessing the truth is probably in some middle position between the extremes of the Wicked Savage and Noble Savage narratives.”
No argument here. For example, I watched in a TV documentary some years ago, some scholars visited a hunters-gathered tribe in the Amazonas. Its tribal leader seemed a nice man, until he was discovered hitting his younger son (a child) with a long stick “to make him to become soon a man”(cough). On the other hand, alleged fake human sacrifices and unavoidable claims of cannibalism everywhere, outside the Western paradise, have been too common until yesterday, speaking in historical terms.
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“As a result, an accurate and meaningful understanding of the world’s peoples gets sacrificed on the altar of supreme wokeness.”
That dangerous infiltration of ideology into anthropology and another social sciences has eroded their believability as sciences, closing more and more toward fake sciences. This vilification shows how deep has fallen western Academia during last decades (of course, I don’t say fake scientific racism in old schools Antrhopology was true nor cool…).
Kay Robison #194,
“Californication” is a freely used term here in the greater Boise area. Earlier this year, after parking at the post office and heading inside, I noticed a car with a big sign in the rear window that said “This car is a rental! I was born here.” The license plate was California. I could tell many similar stories.
The animus predates our arrival here, in 2001. “Outsiders” who moved here from California in the 80s recall a fair amount of dislike sent their way from random Idahoans.
I guess it’s become a tradition of sorts. As a former Washingtonian, I seem to dodge the unfortunate, and largely unfair, “outsider” stereotype.
To my mind, the corporate, bland flattening of land and culture that seems to accompany the large influx from California is the issue, perhaps not so much the people themselves.
OtterGirl
JMG,
Thanks for the response. I get the same sense of Pittsburgh – after living in San Francisco for almost 20 years, this city feels more human. And there’s WATER here – I’m grateful for the 3 rivers and the abundant tree cover. After the long droughts and especially after the wildfires, my wife and I both had to get the hell out of dodge – like any other animal running out of a burning forest. I marvel at the lack of survival instinct that gets people to stay in these places that burn every year now.
Pittsburgh is wild in a way I’ve never seen in another city. My wife and I used to take “bunny walks” from our house to a small park in Bloomfield, a neighborhood smack dab in the middle of the city. She called it that because we would see so many rabbits along the way. We also have lots of deer and hawks even well within city limits. We have wild Jerusalem artichokes growing in the backyard now, and we’re planning our first garden ever.
Something else I noticed as a newcomer to the Rust Belt – so many areas where nature is reclaiming the city. Every time I leave my house I pass abandoned houses that are almost hidden inside of greenery run amok. I appreciate how alive this place feels.
A few personal observations from all around the United States:
1) The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is, more appropriately, Wisconsin with a slight Michigan overlay from occupation (and the Keweenaw Peninsula is its own place). Also, northern Lower Michigan (roughly Muskegon to Bay City excluding the Thumb) has a different feel from the southern parts, which is a mix of Michigan Darkness (which I must admit fits the mitten well) and the Southern Lakes plains.
2) There’s an odd similarity between The Lower Peninsula of Michigan and The Florida Peninsula (which I place south of FL 26, Gainesville and FL 20). Only Orlando is different – it reminds me more of an anarchic version of Las Vegas.
3) The Southeast United States is much more wildly natural than the Midwest. The borderline for that seems to be Kentucky (with West Virginia being a northern outcropping of the Southern wildness. Not sure where that border extends through the Carolinas, but Virginia seems not to be part of the Southern belt.
4) Southern Illinois indeed has its darkness.
5) Wisconsin (with the western Upper Peninsula) and Kentucky seem to be the most welcoming states in the Great Lakes region – more so than the Illinois-Indiana-Ohio stretch, and definitely more so than The Lower Peninsula of Michigan (though having grown up and lived in Michigan, I would have no problem adapting to that state again if needed).
Stephen Pearson #189: I think of the Eagles song, the title of which I don’t remember, but with the line ” once you call a place paradise you can kiss it goodbye.”
I believe you’re thinking of “The Last Resort”: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+last+resort+eagles+youtube&view=detail&mid=78F9E633F65DBCF2C8D678F9E633F65DBCF2C8D6&churl=https%3a%2f%2fwww.youtube.com%2fchannel%2fUCPTypnDNlOZVnD7MY30_YBw&FORM=VIRE
Most places that made a strong impression on me were cities built astride a bridge or on a hill or both. I don’t feel at ease even for a day in cities without a visible river or seaside or hill which gives clear directions – downriver, uphill etc.
The beauty of natural environments, for me, is approximately their original beauty divided by the number of persons present at the same time. I know my own presence decreases others’ appreciation of a place – nothing can help that…
One place not built up by humans that impressed me not simply by beauty but in a more specific way was the mighty river Uruguai from the side of the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, looking over to Rio Grande do Sul. I lived there for over a year and rode my bike along the river every week. It was like a Promised Land, a fay place on the other side. I never did cross the river in that region… The land on my side seemed very welcoming, too.
PS1: I still like lococide best, it captures the seemingly irreversible destruction (though I know nature does eventually come back!).
PS2: topophthony would actually mean envy of place, a useful concept though it really doesn’t roll off the tongue! Topokteiny or Topophony are correct, but confusing.
PS3: myself, I love the songs reserved for certain days of the year! That’s why it surprises me that some people don’t.
@Michael_20, #170
– “So the Atlas of American Enchantment might end up as a huge, multivolume, permanently unfinished work”
I don’t think it could be anything else.
I will start some derives done in the near future.
-“Atlas of British Enchantment, the Atlas of New Zealand Enchantment”
And like the American atlas they would be unwieldy and never done but I say the world would be a better place for them.
Chuaquin, #200
It is hard to describe but despite whatever faults Greece had or has, I enjoyed the place and people immensely.
@Donald Hargreaves @204 My youth was in rural southern Wisconsin on the edge of the unglaciated Driftless area in the SW. A most lovely and friendly part of the USA. Curiously the state perfectly stands out as the most heavy drinking state in the country in the map linked below. Perhaps it is the combination of cheese and beer that creates the welcome.
https://intoxistates.com/
I live in a big European city with 6 lower (and 2 or 3 higher) hills turned into or left alone like mostly wilderness parks.
It’s one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, but surprisingly enough none of the hill tops and higher slopes have ever been developed for housing.
I visit them regularily and each time the feeling I get as soon as I’ve climbed the stairs or trails up to the top I experience I’m welcome, my respectful and loving presence is appreciated. I feel at home on each of them.
Your very inspiring essay and the comments have encouraged me to explore the hills again in order to perceive the different energies/entities that inhabit them.
Thanks so much, I’m definitely a person who connects with place. Above all, hill tops.
“True, Canadian culture is more European than American”
I think this really depends on which part of Canada you come from. The culture of Quebec and Ontario are a lot more European than American, while the culture of the Canadian prairie provinces and British Columbia are a lot more American than European.
@Mithridates #199,
You’re probably aware of this already, but some of the best ethnography of North America comes from the early French Jesuit missionaries. New France wasn’t out to conquer at that point, and while the Jesuits were seeking to convert they recognized they could do that best if they understood the people they were preaching to. Thus there was a good, practical reason to give good intel to the next guy coming down the missionary pipeline, and not much reason to lie about what was seen. Modern anthropologists would probably disagree, but as you say– they’ve got an axe to grind and little else.
I am glad to learn, JMG, that you have had the experience of standing on ground that had been scoured by the glaciers of the last ice age. I grew up on the stuff – the rocky granite and gneiss knolls of the Frontenac Axis. It has a uniquely powerful feel to it, and it took several years for me to adjust to the muted energy of deep-soiled Toronto. Some of the Canadian shield lands in my province of Ontario are several billion years old. They are to be trod upon with reverence.
There are a few spots in my part of Canada which I have had special feelings about which I am willing to share. I’ll mention three (going from east to west).
The first is Saint Joseph Oratory in Montreal. This is a place of pilgrimage – and rightly so. Innumerable spontaneous healing miracles have occurred there. When I visited it, I felt the presence of something both very holy and very powerful. It is built right into the west flank of Mount Royal – an ancient volcano – and there is portion where the bare rock is visible inside the oratory: I believe that this fountain of telluric force, coupled with the pure solar force invoked by the Oratory’s founder, Brother André, makes this an exceptionally holy spot.
The second is an odd little spot in the wilderness. One of the numerous lakes in the Frontenac Axis of the Canadian Shield is named Charleston Lake. Within it are several islands. When I was a teen, a friend of mine who had a cottage on the lake had me paddle a canoe with him to an island in the middle of the lake. It was more like a 200-foot-tall column of granite than an island. We climbed the north slope to a high spot from which there issued a spring of sweet water. I learned two things that day: one was that I have vertigo (I have absolutely no idea how I managed to get down); the other was that this was a powerful spot of life force and healing.
The third is a place of pilgrimage to numerous groups of Native North Americans, and a minor tourist spot for non-Natives. It is simply called Petroglyphs. Deep in the woods about a half-hour drive northeast of Peterborough there lies a dome of white marble upon which hundreds of images have been etched many centuries ago – sacred visions carved into living stone. It is managed by the Curve Lake First Nation, which regularly performs religious rituals to the petroglyphs. The spot absolutely blazes with power. Everyone who goes there either whispers or does not speak at all: there is something about the place that gives a sense of awe to all but the most spiritually insensitive people. There are many such places of power in the Canadian Shield part of Ontario, but this is the only one that the public really knows and has access to (the rest are the exclusive domain of our First Nations, who reserve these places for their traditional cultural practices – and rightly so).
In my early twenties, I realized that there was an “L” (rapid transit) station in downtown Chicago that gave me a major energy boost. I used to sit in the station (underground) for a spell, even missing trains, just to recharge. I mentioned this to a friend who laughed: “Lainie, some people go to a pyramid to meditate. You got to an “L” station.
Indeed.
Oh, Las Vegas. The one time my son and I were there (for an international ballet competition) we looked at each other and said “This is a temple city for the worship of the gods of conspicuous consumption.” We live close enough by car we’ve been there many times and have seen no reason to change our opinions.
We live on the edge of the land carved out by the Yellowstone Hotspot and then the Bonneville Flood, in the old Cretaceous seabed. It’s very interesting how different up in our hills is from down on the flat. Some intangible denizens overlap the areas-the last couple summers have held the kind of thunderstorms that have contineous thunder for over half an hour-and others do not. Ottergirl, are you getting those over on the other side of the Snake River Plain? If so, do you have a sense of whose storms they are?
I second the Utahan contingent’s comments about their canyonlands. It’s not my place, but as a visitor, those lands hold power. Bryce is my favorite.
Being, as it is, just southwest of Yellowstone, I feel obligated to mention that the coastal volcanoes are moderate. Yellowestone is a very different scale of matters. Mt. St. Helens, to me seems to be of a single nature. Walking through Yellowstone there are those who are well pleased by the admiring throngs and wish more to come admire, and those who crave human sacrifice. The news indicates that their current consumption of lives is moderate, one or five a year, but geologic history suggests that eventually the devourers will have their fill, if such can be filled. Like the worshipers down in Las Vegas, perhaps the hunger for more is not satiable?
We all live only a moment on this earth. Sooner or later Yellowstone or one of his kin will put an end to many, as they have done before. I do not think there is any human way to keep such as those at bay.
Once again, a warm thanks to everyone who shared their own experiences of place.
Joseph, that makes sense to me. I make a habit of treating Native American sacred places with respect, but I don’t intrude myself or my prayers there.
Justin, that kind of fake community cobbled together to make a fast buck off the suckers does a fine job of encapsulating the profoundly corrupt Disney mindset.
Kimberly, I ain’t arguing! The world was never disenchanted; we were all just lied to, and bullied into ignoring the normal and natural human capacity to perceive spirits and gods.
John, please do write that. I’ll look forward to reading it.
Sidaway, more than 6000 people are currently doing time in British prisons for social media posts the government didn’t like — and some of those posts echo things I write about. I’m not willing to risk becoming another prisoner of the British gulags.
Scotlyn, I use “metastasize” because of the implications of cancer. You’re right that it works in this context, of course.
Kay, we used to use that in Washington and Oregon, too!
Siliconguy, a reminder that cartoons were once genuinely funny. Thank you.
Ottergirl (if I may), Sara and I had the same experience in Ashland, Oregon. When we moved there everyone was very suspicious of us and asked, “Where did you come from?” When we explained we were from Seattle, the suspicion evaporated and we were welcomed. If we’d been from California they probably would have thrown rocks at our windows at night.
David, that’s common all through the Rust Belt, of course. I used to take the train from Cumberland, MD through Pittsburgh to Chicago, and along the tracks were any number of old brick factory buildings sinking back into forest.
Ron, I grew up in glacial territory. Puget Sound is a glacial valley that filled with sea water in a cataclysmic flood around 11,000 BC — the native legends still record the flood, and I’ve stood on the hill where the surviving animal people took the lump of mud Muskrat got from the sea bottom and sang it into a world. The area I knew growing up, though, was all hills of compacted glacial till shoved up by the edges of the Puget Sound glacier; I’d never before been on flat land that had been under the ice sheet.
Lainie, that doesn’t surprise me! Chicago has interesting energies.
Yavanna
Thank you.
……………….
Where I lived on the Greek island many of the chapels were very powerful places because they ha been built on the location of old temples, often of the material of the old temples, and the old temples had been built on very powerful or magic places. One chapel I knew was actually just the old temple with walls bricked in between the columns. On the tops of most mountains were chapels to saint Ilias, which had been temples to Helios, or the sun. Very powerful spots those.
Stephen
I’ll chime in. Someone mentioned Sedona. I went a few years ago for a work thing, and fully expected it to be overhyped. While it is crawling with rich woo woo people buying crystals, I found it really does have the energies that are claimed. People refer to a “vortex” and I got the chance to talk to a local who literally wrote the book on the vortex. He says it’s a buzzword for what is actually something like a chakra of the earth, where various energies converge in a beneficial way, and it tracked with my experience.
He also mentioned Ojai, CA as a vortex spot (he doesn’t seem to love the word but uses it since his audience likes it). I have spent some time in Ojai and I agree, it does have the advertised energies, though also the rich woo woo people.
Places I’ve lived:
South Louisiana – This is where I was born and raised. The energy here is just as welcoming as the people, and perhaps that’s why the people are welcoming. The Atchafalaya Swamp feels like another world, but not a hostile one, just an ancient one with its own rules. The rest of the southern part of the state has a lot of fertile land and waterways rich in edible animals. It provides quite well for anyone who learns it, and it isn’t hard to learn. A mild, watery energy overall. I will say more in a bit.
Los Angeles – I never could get a sense of the place that wasn’t polluted by the massive city and its population. Whenever I would return to it from a trip north, it always felt like driving into an astral smog. The stress is palpable. I don’t think the land is hostile, but maybe indifferent, just like the people.
Santa Barbara region – I concur with Steve that it feels like a bubble. I happen to like the bubble. I often visited this area while living in L.A. due to it being my ex-wife’s homeland, and we both just felt all of our worries evaporate driving up, and return driving back to L.A. It’s the only place on the CA coast that faces south instead of west, and the south coast produces a mild and lovely microclimate that I think is part of the bubble and extends into the astral feeling. The land is bountiful and welcoming to me compared to nearby places. The concern would be to forget about the rest of the world. It plays well with all types of magic and religion and hosts a hotbed of spiritual and magical practitioners. Ojai, mentioned above, it nearby.
However, I have never personally encountered the strong effect Steve reported of people forgetting someone they knew very well. I don’t doubt it, I just haven’t seen anything that severe, so I would think at worst people might be susceptible to it but not guaranteed to fall victim.
On Indians:
Louisiana and S.B. reflect very well the tribes who lived there. All across the South, most of the tribes were initially very friendly to white folks. Louisiana is notoriously hospitable, with the exception of a narrow band along the Texas border that used to be a no-man’s-land of criminals. I note that before Europeans arrived, the Apache territory began around that spot, and there are native Apache in western Louisiana. The Apache were not friendly.
In the Santa Barbara region, the Chumash ranged from Malibu up to San Luis Obispo and beyond, and were famously hospitable when they first encountered the Spanish, competing with other villages to give them the best feasts and dancing. Compared to other CA tribes, the Chumash had an easy time providing for themselves, but they were strongly striated along class lines, the chiefs being very rich. This still holds true. Many billionaires settle along the coast in Carpinteria and Santa Barbara, as well as some merely-millionaire celebrities. Due to the limited land, their homes are very close to people living on government assistance, trailer parks, etc. A bountiful place, but the bounty isn’t equally distributed.
I notice that the temperament of the Indians before European conquest, at least in these two places, reflects very well the temperament of the people living there now.
Stephen Pearson #216
I had a similar experience being drawn to a chapel on a Greek island visited even though I am not a Christian.
On the other hand, in the early 2000s, I went to a retreat/workshop a short bus ride out side of Potsdam (former East Germany). One day, I went for a hike out into the surrounding countryside. When I sat down to meditate, I tried to connect with the local spirits and they simply weren’t there. It felt as though someone had scraped that land clean of the spirits I can usually dimly sense. I guessed that the scraping way was due to war, but that was just a guess. What I could sense were spirits that were deeper and on a longer time frame. It felt as though those spirits operated on a scale of millennia and were just noticing the disappearance of the Roman Empire.
(This doesn’t make all that much sense because Rome didn’t get close to there but maybe it was the ripple effect. I read somewhere that in Scandinavia, there was a change in ornamentation of jewelry and armor right after 476. Much more Roman influence before 476.)
Blue Sun wrote, “As far as your basic definitions go, could it be said that ‘mind’ = ‘soul’? To me, both those words are just synonyms for what a modern scientifically-minded person would identify as ‘consciousness.’ When this topic comes up, the way I’m able to comprehend it is as ‘soul’ = ‘mind’ = consciousness.’ Hopefully I am more or less correct in my understanding!”
It is interesting that in your search for a word to clarify the overlapping broadness included in mind and soul you chose a word of equal broadness. While consciousness does have an aspect that could be considered synonymous with mind or soul, it also has an aspect that is their polar opposite. Much of our soul and mind are what could accurately be described as our subconscious or unconscious self. Our souls do have their own awareness and are clearly conscious of themselves and their awareness, yet, from the perspective of our conscious mind, they dwell fully outside of our mind’s limited consciousness.
Sorry to add complexity upon complexity, but that is what trying to grasp at the meaning of any of these three terms requires. Any language that we try to use to describe these overlapping categories will at best be a useful approximation, which hopefully will give us some insight into their subtle incomprehensibility. In other words, our maps can’t do justice to the actual experience of the terrain we would like to map out.
That said, the best approximation I have found to work with in clarifying the relationship between the three terms in question is to break the broad category of ‘mind’ into two parts. Thus, soul = mind = consciousness would become soul = mind and mind = consciousness, with those two minds describing different aspects of our existence on the mental plane. The mind that equals consciousness would not be our soul, which dwells mostly outside our consciousness. The mind that equals our soul would not be within our consciousness, though it has a consciousness of its own.
Of course, that predisposes that we are still identifying with our big I rather than our little i. In those rare moments when we can move beyond the perspective of our separated little conscious egos to embrace our souls’ and all of creation’s perspectives, then the mind that equals our soul can for a moment become our consciousness. Once those magical moments pass, we’re back to being separated into two minds, the conscious and the unconscious, reaching out towards each other across a divide of our own imagining.
On the topic of pilgrimages and how they are performed (modern style versus traditionally), I have a story that is on topic. I heard it from a friend who was a direct witness to the event. So, there was a great saint who lived in an extremely remote location in India (until the 1970s it had no roads to the rest of the world and pilgrims had to ford a river to get there). But as this saint’s fame spread, followers from all over India and then, from the 1980s on, all continents, came to bask in this saint’s presence. It was the habit of this saint to grant interviews to visitors unannounced: he’d just pick some people out of the crowd twice a day and lead them into a small interview room in the temple that was his home. My friend was one of a group of Canadians who had been there for many days, and they had not yet been chosen for an interview (nor was there a guarantee that they ever would, no matter how long they stayed). Then one day a group of Greeks showed up – and the first time they attended “darshan” (gathering to watch the saint walk his rounds), the saint selected them for a group interview. My friend, and his fellow-Canadians, naturally felt a twinge of envy and were curious why the Greeks got this ‘VIP treatment’. Later that day, my friend approached one of the Greeks and asked him about the interview experience. In broken English, the Greek said that the group had been told by the saint that he had chosen them immediately because they made the pilgrimage the traditional way – that is, after arriving in an airport in India, they walked for a week to this remote village. It’s not just the destination that matters – and the Divine knows it!
Ottergirl #202 and JMG
Ottergirl I think you are probably right about most Californians who emigrate to Utah and Idaho. However, while they move here sometimes to escape the bad aspects of life in California, they very frequently bring other bad parts that they don’t recognize as bad with them and thus earn a less then welcome from the locals. I didn’t understand this until I was an adult and experienced it first hand by walking into a gift shop in Rockville, UT (just at the entrance of Zion National Park) and listening to the owner, a California emigre, complain about how backward the locals were and how they didn’t hold the right ideas about how to live in the modern world, how they failed to modernize. I am sure he had no idea about how offensive his own ideas were to the locals, but I now understood the meaning of “Californication” better.
@ Robert Mathiesen
I am thoroughly enjoying your writings on New York State (NYS), New York City (NYC), and New England. I never tire of your stories.
ASHOKAN RESERVOIR
I started a reply, which included the Ashokan Reservoir (furnishes clean drinking water to NYC), how about 1910-1915, some of my relatives got displaced and their lands deluged, and how I will never be able to walk that valley, which so many of my white pioneer ancestors frequented since 1800, but I don’t have the energy to go into that saga. It is the classic real-life story about NYC city slickers vs NYS hillbilly folk. I represent the hillbilly side, and we lost.
The reservoir needs the water to be let out gently, the reservoir completely demolished, and the land resume its creek valley ways (of a typical creek) once again. “My” pastel towns, villages, farms, roads, light industry (Esopus Creek) cannot be resurrected as before,— although I read,— if one looks into the drowned depths, one can see a church spire or two.
The story is on Wiki.
ASHOKAN FAREWELL MUSIC
The musical piece Ashokan Farewell that Jay Unger wrote, which one will definitely recognize if one watched/es Ken Burns’ 1990 The Civil War mini-series (the tune having been played twenty-five times), is a perfect lament for the demise of Esopus Creek.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9TcXmBNbtM
💨🫥😢💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
JMG you haven’t said much about “DeeCee” even though you live there now.
I would be interested in hearing a bit on your personal sense of the place, if you’ve had time to sit with it for a spell and are willing to share. 🙂
The Intact Coast Redwood forests in Northern California, to me, have a very reverential vibe. Peaceful, quiet, cathedral like. Not a productive food forest place to make a living off the land, live there, commute elsewhere, A place to go spend time in, hang out and leave, or live in seasonally to beat the summer heat or hunt or fish at the right season. And yet, people do get lost here too, it can be tricky for some at times. But to me seems very peaceful and for everyone I have talked to, to go hang out in the middle of a grove. The Washington state Forests sound very different.
Thanks for this, I saw it late. I too can ‘feel’ the places where I grew up, at a very micro level. Hard to put into words indeed, it’s like a sensory input that goes beyond the mere visual.
Always love to hear about the Puget Sound.
Hi Martin,
I’m amazed how often people move. My mother moved up here to die and lived in that house for almost three years. Turns out, that was the longest she had ever lived, anywhere, in her whole life!
Obviously, the apple fell far from the tree on that one. I put down roots. One of my biggest fears is having to move from this place. My plan is to die here. This is my place.
Michael_20 170
> Atlas(es) of _______ Enchantment
> lococide
There seems to be a pattern here. The more (by default, “clodhopping”) people dwell in/at a piece of land, the more “lococide” happens.
@ jfisher 162
In other words, the fewer people, the better. One person, maybe. No people, the best.
Atlases of enchantment would be better off never written. If anything, it would be good NOT to advertise. Word of mouth only.
Good idea in theory. Horrible idea in practice.
💨🫥👣❌💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
I have also traveled and hiked extensively in the red rock country of the four corners, with quite long backpacking trips in the Escalante, the Paria, the Maze, etc. To me it is one of the most magical places on the planet. I have always respected the spirits of the land and felt welcomed, but as a visitor and felt, were I to try to stay too long, things would change and become much less welcoming to me.
The only place I felt a really negative energy was in Chaco Canyon. I hear it was one of the last Anasazi places before they moved or died off from the great drought.
I have read a lot of tony Hillerman and other SW writers and get the feeling that a lot of negative witchcraft exists in the area.
In the various places I have lived and traveled I have encountered many instances of feeling a bad energy and the need to get out of a place, but that always seemed a product of the immediate situation and the people there more than an embedded evil in the place itself. Growing up in NYC, one develops that awareness as a survival skill. Two of the places where I felt the evil really embedded in the place itself were the Colosseum in Rome and a small town in Eastern France where a friend’s father’s family came from and she still had the old house. The area had been fought over so constantly over the years. In the first WW the French and German trenches were only about 100 ft apart in one place. You could hardly stick a shovel in the ground without hitting a helmet, bone or part of a weapon.. I was very glad to leave. I’m not sure if evil was even the right word, but there was a very strong feeling of violent death and the people were very closed and hostile.
Stephen
Hi Stephen Pearson,
I also have a huge affinity for the Sierra. I would say that’s where I became a man. As soon as I got my driver’s license I would go backpacking for two weeks or more with my buddy. No cell phones back then (mid-80’s). Some years the snow covered any trails. No people. Just us out there alone figuring it out. I remember we wore tennis shoes and carried wool sweaters and leather jackets! When your’e 17, you can carry a lot of weight. But the mountains never tried to kill us. I think they were amused.
Thirty years later I hiked from Mexico to Donner Summit on the PCT and really felt the mountains welcoming me back. But as you say, a wonderful, magical place to visit, but not to live. I’m glad so much of it is still wild.
Clarke aka Gwydion 149
Internut; UTub
JMG 184
> I’d encourage you to be very careful about accepting job offers that involve moving out West…
Got that right👣❌.
We (Jethro and I) removed from Northern California (“SiliconE Valley”) in 2020 during COVID. Neither of us regretted one minute of getting the heck outa California. It has the pox. California has only gotten worse.
The farthest west, I would advise, is stay east of the Mississippi River. Once upon a time, “northwest” meant New York State, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Seriously, stay east of the Mississippi River.” One good reason: California is RUNNING OUT OF WATER. But one won’t hear LOW ON WATER on the news,— much.
💨🫥👣❌🚰💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Rupert Sheldrake is behind a (it would appear very successful) initiative to repopularise pilgrimages in Britain, via the British Pilgrimage Trust: https://www.britishpilgrimage.org/
He is also encouraging churches to put on feasts during local saints’ days, which also seems to be going well.
One interesting theory regarding sacred geography is the suggestion from a number of British occultists that Britain is home to so much venality precisely because it is such a magical land – it is a place that needs to be magically suppressed if certain dark forces are to prevail. I thought this sounded crazy until somebody pointed out how military bases in Britain are all situated on the intersections of ley lines. Check how close Porton Down is to Stonehenge!
@Ron M
Thank you for sharing “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” – I’m 50 years old and I never heard it until today. My wife is from Rochester, and we’re looking at making a move to that area in a few years, possibly right by Lake Ontario. I’m just starting to dip my toes into learning more of the history and culture of the Great Lakes region, and this is a fine addition.
That aside, this was a gorgeous song. If you’re interested, I got a lot out of this vocal coach’s first-time reaction and analysis of it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJJIF2PC82E
@Northwind Grandma (#223):
Thank you so much! Coming from one amateur genealogist to another, that means a lot. I love your family-history posts, too.
Ancestors mean so much to me, far more than any place ever can! I was strongly drawn to learning as much as possible about my own ancestors even before I turned 10 years old. It felt almost like an irresistible calling from beyond the grave, a thing of greater importance for me than anything else I might ever do.
Though we were living in New York until 1952, my mother never stopped longing for her own family in the San Francisco Bay area. So we went back to visit them for a few weeks every summer or so, and we stayed with her grandmother in her own house. Her grandmother had saved everything from her own ancestors, including a hatbox fell of photographs of most of her own ancestors, as well as her own mother’s scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings featuring her own ancestors.
The hatbox also contained a genuine human skull, a medical specimen from the late 1800s, that a doctor friend had given her. My mother told me once that her grandmother took out the old photographs and the skull at Hallowe’en and did something with them that bored my mother. Probably it was some sort of small-scale private Spiritualist séance. That ancestral line was anything but religiously conventional: it was full of Spiritualists, Swedenborgians, Agnostics, Christian Scientists, adherents of New Thought, and so forth, all smooshed together into a single mix.
I was allowed to rummage through all this old stuff to my heart’s content, and I still have the best and most interesting part of it. Later, after my mother’s grandmother died, we moved back to California and settled down in her old house, with all her stuff still in place.
A few years ago I finally made a book of everything I had heard or found out as a child (and everything I had dug out of local newspapers and older genealogies) about all of my ancestors, as far back in some lines as 13 generations before me. (Anyone who’s curious can read it on archive.org: Mathiesens are Different. Here “different” really means “very odd.”) Though I don’t suppose it will interest anyone other than perhaps a few amateur genealogists 🧐 .
Stephen Pearson and Slink, a rousing greeting to two fellow Californians who have, in your own particular ways, made & nourished contacts with the diverse spirit(s) of the landscape here.
Slink @230, the Sierra: yes! I’ve done, over decades, quite a number of what one might call “full-pack” trips, where I start out with a plan and with full bearcan(s)/bear bags (bags? shhh, don’t tell the rangers…) containing ~20 lbs. of food, and then hike until very nearly all the food is gone. My favorite areas’ names all end in “Basin”, several trail-less and quite remote. Amazing energies! Occasional quite-sober (the Sierra strongly suggests: don’t do drugs here!) cherished visions. Hiking sometimes for multiple days without seeing another human. Did the Muir Trail too; saw a few more people on that, but I went in early July on a low-snow year and almost everybody hikes the trail later than that.
Stephen Pearson @229, per feeling negative energy at Chaco: I first explored Chaco and the surrounding region when I lived in NM in the 1980s, and approached it as sort of a Disneyland (oooh, look! Ah, let’s explore that ruin!) But as time went on, in subsequent visits I started to pick up on the sad/negative vibes at Chaco. An “aha!” moment was finding and reading the Stephen Lekson book “The Chaco Meridian – One Thousand Years of Political and Religious Power in the Ancient Southwest.” HIGHLY recommended for any wanting some insight into Chaco and the people who built it and lived there. Summary, as relates to the negative feelings/perceptions: Chaco (and the subsequent cities at Aztec Ruins and Paquimé and Culiacán) was an Altepetl, a class-stratified city-state ruled by a royal family or familes based and derived on cultural practices from the south (Teotihuacan, then Tenochtitlan.) The mass exodus from Chaco & Mesa Verde PRECEDED the drought oft-times held up as the reason why… everybody left. The Pueblo tribes still resident around the area were commoners who, apparently, decided to definitively (!) divorce themselves from class-stratified elite rule and who now are VERY egalitarian and VERY… shrug, “spiritual” doesn’t capture it, they’re more than that, as the label “spiritual” so often has an aspect of “woo” which they seem quite distant from. Solid folks.
(Stephen, click on my name to get my eee-male ad-dresh (bottom of that page); you had reached out to me months ago in another comment stream here but things came up; would still like to have a tagup in SLO sometime/somewhere. Lokum!)
Cheers!
Boy’s Mom # 215 .. Don’t discount the Long Valley Caldera for insanely explosive volcanic events.. Could be next week, could be 10,000 years from now .. but, as subductive watery goo to hotspottery, Homo$@pians var. ‘futurii’ will have to adapt somehow, no? What’s to say that a um, ‘seismic zipper doesn’t manifest itself suddenly in the vicinity of say, the Gulf of Mexico northward towards the Salton Sea region?? All of modern man’s geologic models are just that .. models .. not surety. So, tis a coin flip as to what happens going forward. As for Mr. Greer’s angst over seismic events within the confines of ‘Cascadia’ … does he ever consider the possibility of say, a tsumonic event precipitated by a Canary Island sub-oceanic landslide .. causing a monstrous wave, possibly inundating much of the eastern U.S. seaboard?
I have lived in California since 1977. Its area is close to the area of the 6 New England state plus the states of New York and Pennsylvania. It’s wildly diverse in climates, terrain and vegetation, feel with added human diversity. It is really a combination of 5 or 6 or even 7 states or regions. From my knowledge of world geography it is rather unique region. It is a botanically diverse state holding around 32% of the plant species found in the USA, many unique to California.
Robert Mathiesen 234
Mathiesens Are Different
Online I located a pdf version of “Mathiesens Are Different,” and am reading it. I first went to the Lussier branch, thinking perhaps it was Lussier of New York State, but nope. Now I will start at the beginning. Velly interr-rresttink…
💨🫥🤓💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
@ polecat
” One never knows reliably, when or where an accretionary wedge may manifest itself.”
what a great line/aphorism/rule to be guided by – for sure this is my new motto! I can not wait until I get a chance to use this in conversation! Really.
Kay Robison #222
That’s a fine story! I get that. One thing I have noticed about some Californians (certainly not all) is a bad allergy to all things Mormon. And yet they tend to know nothing about its history. I’m not of that faith, although my mother’s people most certainly were, and some still are. Her family has lived in the Utah/Idaho area since the 1850s.
Like it or not, newcomers, there IS a culture here, and it may well be different from yours. I’ve gained a whole new appreciation of this recently.
The funny thing is, if these same newcomers viewed this as a temporary stop on some tour, they might find it all rather intriguing, do a little reading, and withhold the judgement.
For a bit, anyway.
OtterGirl
Only getting to this now because I’ve been quite busy this week, and for some reason it’s always the posts I delay reading until later that seem to fascinate in unexpected ways. Thanks for this.
I grew up agnostic but first encountered this feeling when my family went to see the Kings Gardens in Maui, and so instead of hilltops I’ve always associated it with forests and trees. I can see what you mean by “closer to the sky”, I would describe it similarly as if I’d stepped into a quiet enclosure, or a secret grove. A hush settles in, and the rest of the world feels so far away. I feel the presence of life teeming from every branch, every bush, even if I can’t see it. I felt this at the Kings Gardens, and I’ve also felt it beneath particularly old and gnarled trees. Miyazaki conveys this feeling well in his animated films, now that I think about it. Spirited Away and Totoro come to mind, among others.
And the way you describe Puget Sound, I can’t help but notice your Weird of Hali novels give me a very similar feeling when I read them. If you don’t mind me asking, is your distinct love of Lovecraftian horror perhaps based in a feeling of familiarity? 🙂 I don’t mean to presume, but it would explain a lot!
Oh, and I couldn’t agree more about Vegas. I visited it for the first (and only) time about 5 years ago and I have no idea why anyone would voluntarily live there or even visit. It was a distinctly scummy, grubby, awful feeling, and I wouldn’t go near that place again if I had any choice in the matter.
It’s something I never went out of my way to note until now, but it seems I’m decently sensitive to this kind of thing, so perhaps it’s something to pay more attention to for the future!
BoysMom #215,
I always enjoy your comments. It’s good to know what’s up in the eastern portion of Idaho! We have indeed had what, in hindsight, seemed longish thunderstorms. With or without rain. I wish I had the ability to sense what’s behind it. As a Heathen-inclined person, I just think of Thor when that happens, and marvel at the power of the storm. And am of course grateful when it passes over!
Yours is a very interesting perspective on Yellowstone. I must say I feel similar. It’s the largest volcano in North America, IIRC. When it goes off, and of course it will, the impact will be global. It makes perfect sense to me that some entities in that region are eager for sacrifice. What amazes me year after year is how some of us march right up and volunteer. The hotspots are clearly marked, trails are obvious, and the rangers hand out graphically illustrated “stay away from the huge, unpredictable wildlife that can effortlessly maim or kill you” brochures to the driver of each vehicle that passes through the gates. It could not be more obvious. And every year, tragedies.
The days of my grandparents driving us through the park, with a bag of chocolate crackers in the car to lure “a bear of our own” are SO over. (Thank heavens. That was absolutely terrifying to this former 5 year old. I cannot unsee that drooling bear, nose through the window, that I swear was about to eat me and my little sister.)
OtterGirl
Slink & Bryan Allen
Most of my time in the Sierra was in the 70s & 80s.I was lucky to have a friend who was a ranger at McClure meadow. We would often hike in with a huge amount of food, stash it at his cabin and do hikes of up to a week from there with less stuff cross country, often seeing no one for days.. It is such a magic place. John Muir called it the range of light. I have hiked in other mountain ranges, the Brooks Range or the Canadian Rockies for instance that did not have that feeling of light and were quite dour. The mountains in Greece and parts of the Himalaya had it, but were so much more imprinted by prolonged human presence.
Bryan
Thanks for the info about Chaco..
I will contact you. Los Osos to Oceano ain’t too far.
Stephen
Warm thanks again to all those who chimed in with their own experiences of place!
Scotlyn, I’ve been here for only eight months and am still settling in. I may be in the slow class, but it takes longer than that for me to get a sense of an area.
Northwind, granted, but I meant my comment as a Weird of Hali joke. In the last novels in that sequence, people were being lured out west by fake job offers; those who responded to them were promptly anesthetized, and had their brains removed by the Fungi from Yuggoth, who shipped them offworld to use as biological computers.
Louise, good to hear about the pilgrimages. As for the other, that makes sense…
Polecat, yes, I’m well aware of the potential tsunami risk from the Canaries. There’s a reason my current residence is 350 feet above sea level, in an area with plenty of low ground to either side.
Untitled-1, I’ve considered writing serious horror fiction set in the Pacific Northwest. There are towns out on the Pacific coast and the area just behind it — places like Hoquiam, Raymond, and South Bend — that could pass for Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. It’s very spooky country. So you may be right!
January 7th of 2000, I launched on a 30 day winter demonstration program trip on the Grand Canyon. My wife and I were safety kayakers for a group from Taos and Santa Fe who I’d met through a phone conversation while living in Boise. 13 of us had a most magical trip and it was jarring to reenter civilization afterwards. That trip was the highlight of my life. Despite being winter, we swam in the river, sunbathed, and only had 3 cold days.
We’re currently living on the Nez Perce reservation, just a half mile from an ancient winter camp for the Nez Perce, and this place is wonderful. There’s nowhere I’d rather be.
@Northwind Grandma (#238):
If you have ancestors named Lussier in New York State, then almost certainly we are distant kin. Pretty much every Lussier in North America is a descendant of Jacques Lussier/L’Huissier (1646-1713) and his two wives, Charlotte Lamarche (1646-1671) and Catherine Clerice (1653-1715), each a “fille du Roy” sent to Quebec with a royal dowery to help populate New France and secure it as French territory.
“Untitled-1, I’ve considered writing serious horror fiction set in the Pacific Northwest. There are towns out on the Pacific coast and the area just behind it — places like Hoquiam, Raymond, and South Bend — that could pass for Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. It’s very spooky country. So you may be right!”
Do the temperate rainforests in particular give off an air of magic for you?
Disney Adults scare me.
sgage # 239 .. You know, I think you’ve stumbled onto something there.. I can see any number of social conversations where such a response might be warranted.
Mr. Greer .. ok, I see that your bases are um, covered. Have a paddleboard at your ready, just in case. ‘;]
@ Louise #232 and generally on the topic of pilgrimages, there is also a website giving guidance to some Irish pilgrimages.
https://www.pilgrimpath.ie/irelands-pilgrim-paths/
The Brigid’s Way pilgrimage route has long been on my radar.
JMG 244
> people were being lured out west by fake job offers … had their brains removed … biological computers
Yeew-yooh. Gross.
💨🫥🧪🦠💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Robert Mathiesen 246
> Jacques Lussier/L’Huissier (1646-1713) and his two wives, Charlotte Lamarche (1646-1671) and Catherine Clerice (1653-1715)
Yep. A woman “Mary” Bell who married a man Lussier. Both born 1890s; both died about 2010. I jumped onto Ancestry Family Trees, and backtracked her husband ___Lussier to the above Jacques. A quick search through published genealogies. Sure enough, Mary’s husband Lussier was something like your 8th cousin.
I knew Mary Bell Lussier in the 1970s; she was in her 60s. Sweetest, kindest woman I ever met. She made an impression on me; I’ll never forget her beneficence. I remember the month, the exact room, the exact building, the exact address, what she did, what I did. I was a mere slip of a girl at 19. At the time, we were strangers: she and I both did the other a good turn. Fifty-five years later, I still remember.
JMG speaks of “place” here. I wonder if Mary’s act of graciousness is recorded in the walls of that particular house. If walls could talk…
I am struggling with who I want to be when “I grow old”: “ill-mannered grouch” sounds about right.
I am glad I remembered Mary Lussier at this time.
💨🫥🧬🧑🧑🧒🧒💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
I haven’t seen much regarding Minnesota, so I’ll share my experience here. This is a place that (in general) is happy to have you, to feed you and to provide calm for your soul. It is not, however, a place to relax and lose track of time. It rewards those who work hard, plan ahead and have the patience to wait out a winter that is 2 months longer than you feel it really should be.
“I’ve considered writing serious horror fiction set in the Pacific Northwest. There are towns out on the Pacific coast and the area just behind it — places like Hoquiam, Raymond, and South Bend — that could pass for Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. It’s very spooky country.”
There is also Humptulips, a village I just had to visit while I was stationed in Bremerton. Nothing spooky about that. Honestly I was pretty much tired of pine trees and mountains by the end of the tour. The 50-odd straight days of rain didn’t impress me either. The East side is much nicer.
Northern Nevada was another interesting place . As JMG noted the Great Basin has a vibe that goes “I’m quite willing to kill you, but I’m not going to go out of my way to do it.” It takes some getting used to but the high desert has a charm. And by high I mean Winnemucca is about 4200 ft, work was 5200 ft, and most of my vacation time was above 7,500 which is where there is enough rain for the trees to grow.
Great Basin National Park has Douglas fir and spruce at the 10,000 ft level. Down lower there are bristlecone pines. The microclimates are wild.
@David PGH – thanks for returning the favour! The “Charismatic Voice” really did justice to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, as she does to many songs, it seems.
And if you – or anyone else in this community – are interested in a deeper dive (so to speak) regarding the Edmund Fitzgerald, the song that commemorates it and the man behind the song, feel free to visit my little nook on dreamwidth in a few days — https://mystical-mountain-9.dreamwidth.org
Ah, Rochester, NY! The city certainly has seen better days, but I am fond of the place and the whole south shore of Lake Ontario aka “Lake America”. All other things being equal, I’d far rather live there than the north shore of the same lake. Sparsely populated. Good, solid, laid-back folks. Plenty of agriculture around. And a land that seems to be ‘at ease’ with human presence. You could do far worse than choosing Rochester to live, my friend!
@Ron M (#256)
Rochester is only about a half-hour away from the legendary Seneca Falls, and both places lie well within the “Western Fringe” of New England plus New York that I wrote about above (#134). Good places for unconventional people (including those who follow a certain Archdruid Emeritus) to spend time. That’s where such key movements as Spiritualism, Mormonism, Woman’s Rights, etc., got their starts.
JMG – Fair enough. 🙂
I reckon these things do take time.
I much enjoyed Trey’s interactions with the submerged DeeCee, and also, I am pleased to know that someone who can say this: “We have an unusual capacity to bring energies from higher planes all the way down into matter, and blessing is one of the things we’re supposed to do with that capacity” is now hanging out in a place which can do with being blessed.
I apologize for comme ting so late – life has been keeping me busy. However, I would like to add my 2 cents about 2 places I have encountered with very distinct vibes.
One is the Four Quarters Interfaith commune in a valley in the mountains of artemas, Pennsylvania. They have raised a stone circle upon a hilltop in the valley, and you truly do feel close to the sky there. There is a profound peace, but also a semse of something deep and lush amd alive everywhere upon the earth. They have several large gatherings at key dates – the equinoxes and solstices, samhain, etc. At these gatherings, there is a sense of community, and even when visitors get rowdy and foolish, they seem to end up being perfectly ok by pure luck, like the fool just happening to avoidbstepping off the cliff despite stumbling about blind.
In central virginia, I once lived in a place I can only describe as haunted amd dark. You felt like things lurked in the woods, dark spirits were always watching, and something pulled you toward the earth. I lived in a house that had been an old poat office, that during the civil war had been occupied by a union cavalry detachment, who demanded the southern poatal workers help them conduct raids by giving them maps, correspondence, feed, etc. They ahot anyone who refused. When the south killed the union soldiers retook the post office, they hung anyone who cooperated. A lot of very angry ghosts still fighting their old fight. There was also an unsolved murder in that place in the 1920s. My ex friend who owned the plave used to throw parties in the woods, which over the years degenerated into debauchery, addiction, and then became really twisted. After I escaped the place, my ex friend lost everything to addiction, sold the land, and then the old poat office burned down under mysterious circumstances.
I think places have uplifting or decaying energy, and we humans congregate amd form communities in response, though our actions can alter the energy, they mostly reflect it. Virginia’s soil is soaked in blood and feels old and haunted, but also sacred in some places, wretched in others. Just some observations for you.
In KY and parts of TN and perhaps elsewhere in Appalachia, the Scots influence can be seen in the way they live to put a dam in a holler and fill it up to create a lake / loch.
Whenever I’ve had the occasion of driving the I-5 up NorCal, I get a huge melancholic vibe from Shasta .. especially if viewed from the north, say near Yreka. Nothing evil or sinister, just a kind of sadness..
TangerineDream recorded a cut on their album ‘Lily on the Beach’ named ‘Shasta’. I speculate that they greatly impressed by the Mountain … as well as the regional pop-drink label of the same non de plume.
A warm thank you again to everyone who shared their stories of the spirit of place.
Gunstone, no.
Justin, Disney anything makes me distinctly uneasy. It’s like Barney the Dinosaur; I always figured that the reason he appeared with different children in each episode was that once the cameras stopped rolling, he ate them. He’s a tyrannosaur, right?
Polecat, nah, this far inland vertical evacuation’s the better option, and I can arrange that easily enough — there are plenty of tall sturdy buildings in Silver Spring.
Northwind, well, yes. It’s Lovecraftian, right? I had to throw in a little body horror.
Siliconguy, Humptulips has always been my nominee for the silliest town name in the English-speaking world. Alas, it’s a drab little place, much like Forks. (Everyone I know who’s spent time out on the Olympic peninsula giggled helplessly at the way whatsername portrayed Forks in those sparkly-vampire books.)
Scotlyn, it’s probably not accidental that less than a year before I decided to move here, I received an initiation (the Rose+Croix d’Orient) that brings with it a hefty collection of healing and blessing ceremonies, which are to be practiced (and which I do practice) very regularly indeed.
I wanted to stop and reflect on it for a bit before giving my impressions of the land here in my home state of California, because I’ve long suspected that JMG is quite right, there’s a madness in the people here that I think is reflected in the attitude of the land, and having grown up around it, it is distinctly creepy.
I sat and thought about why that was for a good long while, and I’ve arrived at a hypothesis, which is that I believe the spirit of the Coyote, that is, the Trickster, is very much embodied in the golden lands of this state. Let me explain.
The perpetually sunny weather encapsulates the essential attitude of the land here. This state promises you everything, it promises you whatever you want. Wealth, power, freedom from your troubled mind, a chance to try your idealistic or radical idea, it promises you that yes, you can have a perfect life.
There’s only one problem, which is that this is a bald-faced lie.
What the land actually does is that it calls out to people craving a perfect, flawless life, gives them a chance to act out that flawless life, then gut-punches them with the impossibility of that ideal, over and over again. It mercilessly assaults them with the consequences of their actions. However, that’s not all. When you’re sent reeling by those consequences, hurt and bruised and battered, it’s quite happy to baby you as well, that is, if that’s what you really want. “Aww, poor thing. Yes, it’s hard. Here are some goodies to help you forget about it. Indeed, forget that ever happened, then go do it all over again!”
This I believe is exactly why the state has such obvious problems (rampant homeless, crime, drug abuse) that consistently get papered over by long-time, well-off residents. The most common reaction I get from older Gen-Xers and Boomers when I mention anything about living anywhere else is a look of horror and the response, “but why would you WANT to live anywhere else?” I think it’s all very telling. This is a land that’s quite happy to let you hide from your problems as long as you like. It will cackle madly as you run yourself into a brick wall, over and over again, until you get a clue, which it will emphatically never encourage you to do.
It’s also why I think the state has such a raging hatred for Donald Trump. As one who embodies (or at least, once embodied) the Trickster, he is a literally-iconic reminder that the pretty lies that they all tell themselves are just that, which is why seeing him drives them mad.
However, there is another side to this, which is that if you ever do decide to get a clue, if you take up a serious discipline or spiritual practice, and set your goals modestly towards things that are likely to to genuine good (for example, stewarding the land), my experience is that the state won’t stop you there either. In fact, it will lend it’s unconditional support, just as it did before, only the consequences stop blowing up in your face this time. Whether it’s folly or genuine growth, the land is happy to feed it all. As you can see from the general character of the population, most people fail this test. It’s one I failed for an embarrassingly long time until I got a clue myself, but seeing the positive changes that have happened since then have convinced me that the land here can be supportive, but it won’t lift a finger to help you find sanity. You have to decide to do that on your own.
@JMG
I would happily read such a series! I didn’t grow up in the Pacific Northwest, but the gloomy, mysterious vibes it seems to give off sound quite lovely to me. I’ve always been quite fond of that sort of atmosphere, for reasons I cannot quite put into words.
Magical Geography of Coastal California:
Here is the other post I promised when this topic won the 5th-Wednesday contest:
I only know the coastal regions of California, the southern part of the region or sub-nation that Joel Garreau called “Ecotopia” and Colin Woodard called “The Left Coast.” Neither I nor my ancestors ever lived in the inland parts of the state, so I have nothing to say about it. Moreover, I myself only lived there from 1952 to 1967.
My earliest immigrant ancestor to coastal California was Martin William Mathiesen. He came around Cape Horn on a whaling ship out of Copenhagen sometime in the later 1860s, jumped ship in San Francisco, and gave up the sea forever. Back then San Francisco was home to a substantial Danish community (with its own Danish-language newspaper, Bien [“The Bee”]). There he married a Denmark-born daughter of another immigrant Dane, Jens Holm Thrane, who had come West with his wife and children as far as San Francisco, riding on the newly opened Union Pacific railroad. That was on my father’s side; on my mother’s side, my earliest ancestor who came to California arrived there in 1886 from Joliet. Illinois, by way of three years in Texas. So my roots in coastal California reach back more than a century and a half.
Coastal California, before the Gold Rush of 1849, was very sparsely settled. Even so, its early settlement patterns still impact the magical geography of the state. Its southern half had been settled by Catholic Spanish (later, Mexican) settlers moving northward as far as present-day Santa Rosa, about an hour’s drive north of the Golden Gate. The northern half of the state, in contrast, had been settled by Eastern Orthodox Russians, from Alaska and the Bering Strait through what are now British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, as far south as the Russian River and the Farallon Islands in present-day California. The old boundary between Russian Orthodox and Spanish/Mexican Catholic California cuts present-day Sonoma County roughly in half. Relations between the two settlements were not particularly amicable; each nation had designs on the other’s territory. Once the Gold Rush got underway, of course, these two old territories were both massively overrun by Protestant Americans coming from the East; but their divergent Catholic and Orthodox roots can still be felt by perceptive Californians.
Ecologically speaking, however, coastal California seems to me to fall into two other distinct major regions, defined by a different boundary, namely, by the presence or absence of giant redwood trees, especially Sequoia sempervirens). These trees grow only about as far south as the southern end of Monterey Bay. The oldest of them are among the oldest living things on earth, and they make their presence felt on the land where they grow. (Much further north, in the Pacific Northwest, it seems to be the cedar tree that plays a similar role.)
Settlement patterns, of course, are almost always determined by the various geographical and ecological features to the land being settled; the land itself is not simply a blank slate upon which one might draw whatever boundaries one wishes. So the two geographies usually reinforce one another. As John Muir once famously wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911).
In consequence of all this, coastal California might well be divided into three major regions: (1) Northern, from the state’s northern boundary with Oregon as far south as Russian/Mexican settlement boundary in Sonoma County; (2) Central, from there as far south as the giant redwoods grow, that is, a little to the south of Monterey Bay; and (3) Southern, from there to the state’s southern boundary with Mexico.
Of the three, I feel least at home in the Southern region, and most at home in the Central region of coastal California, more precisely, in the East-Bay city of Berkeley, where I spent my ‘teens and college years.
There is a distinctive feeling to this part of coastal California, and a fair amount of it (as I see it) has its source in the most prominent mountain there, Mount Diablo, or “Devil Mountain.” No one now knows for certain why and how this mountain got its evocative name, which it has borne since the early 1800s at least. The mountain was sacred to the indigenous peoples living near it, so its Spanish name (Diablo) probably goes as far back as the Catholic missionaries, who counted the indigenous Gods as devils.
Mount Diablo has long been famous for very many reports of strange, unexplained happenings on the mountain or nearby. (This seems to be true of several other mountains in California as well, such as Mount Shasta and Mount Lassen.) Also, as one drives along Highway 101 on the East side of San Francisco Bay, a low ridge of hills lies to the east along the highway; if one is in the right frame of mind, that ridge suggests nothing so much as a gigantic sleeping dragon in the earth, with its head pointing northwards, in the general direction of Mount Diablo.
As for other dragons in the earth, this part of coastal California is riddled with earthquake faults. One of them, back in 1906, came close to leveling San Francisco; most of the city in the immediately following days was burned to the ground due to careless fire-building for cooking and warmth. Lesser quakes have been happening, on and off, since then, some of them with significant loss of human life.
The land there does not feel hostile to human presence per se, but to me it feels profoundly uncomfortable with the modern human civilization that we have built there.
The indigenous peoples that had lived there for centuries, long before the Mexicans and Russians arrived, seem to have led a fairly easy and simple life in small communities here and there, living off the bounty of the land and the sea, without any impulse toward centralization, city-building or large-scale government.
And that, it seems to me, is what the land there still favors, not the titanic urban landscape that is still growing larger, swallowing up nature everywhere, and ever so slowly driving all but the wealthiest away. It seems to me only a matter of time before that all comes tumbling down, accompanied perhaps by earthquakes to rival the great one of 1906.
[Also, what Untitled-1 just posted about California resonates with me, too.]
Untitled 1
I think CA has just handed you and many others a dark mirror. Any place with a welcoming climate and land gives you longer for your folly to catch up with you than a harsher place. I have lived in coastal Australia and the Mediterranean as well and much the same situation prevails. They are easy places to bring your own shale with you and then look for someone to blame when it turns out to be your same old shale.
Many harsher places we are aware at the start that things are not going to go well. CA pretty much gives you enough rope to hang yourself
Stephen
UntiItled -!
I reread your post, and realize I was preaching to the choir a bit in my reply.. Sorry about that
Stephen
Dear JMG,
I arrived late to this party, but I would like to add my two cents if you don’t mind.
In my country we have quite a few special sites. For Christians the most famous is Fátima, where supposedly Mary, Mother of Jesus appeared to three children. I don’t know if it was Mary or not, but what i know is that approximately 2 kilometers from that local you can feel the difference in energy . As one approaches the church, my experience is that the worshipers add a buzzing to the energy like hundreds and hundreds of furious flys flying around. In the same place but in a different area the energy feels far different. There is (or was) a place where people go to offer candles. It is supposed to be a quiet place, BUT… as soon as you arrive there you’ll see that instead of a few hundred candles there are thousands. In the afternoon there are so many that people can’t get close and have to throw the candles through the air. The energy there is like getting inside a car and suddenly you’re thrown against the seat because of the speed and energy. I know quite a few sorcerers that have used that place to throw their own candles and boost up their workings. In a completely different vibe, on one of the most famous megalithic sites there was no energy. How do I explain it? It was choke full of tourists, disrespecting the place, doing everything that they were not allowed to do. I felt that the place had withdrawn, removed its heart/face from us.
A place that i thought that I wouldn’t feel ok, was Bruges in Belgium. I travelled alone to a bloody medieval city to meet people that i have not met before, an adventure to a homebody like me. As soon as I arrived in Bruges it was as if breathing had become lighter/easier. You know how people talk about having a weight lifted from them? It was that exact sensation, beginning in the first two seconds that I was there. I still don’t enjoy medieval cities, but Bruges was my heaven. I lost that feeling returning home, and felt it again returning to Bruges on the next year. I hope to return there before dying.
Jumping two years in time, I travelled to the deep South of the United States, to meet friends on Tennessee. The place was nice and oddly reminded me simultaneously of the north and the south of my country. The land was nice, the people were nicer and the rivers were dragons. Somebody in the group where I was decided to go to a creek and swim. I was one of the last persons to enter the water. I have no words to describe it. Clean, pristine, untainted. And all of a sudden that bloody creek told me in no uncertain terms to get the rock out of there. I told it to go rock itself, there were over twenty people there and he was picking on me. Suddenly five or six fish decided that a scab that I had on my left leg was an appetizer. I freaked out silently and got out of the water. The sensation that I had was that someone/something was waiting for a chance, a place/time where it wouldn’t be caught. Two days later when I entered the plane to leave Tennessee, I felt the same sensation and something kicked the back of my right knee. I managed to keep quiet. It took me over six months to be able to walk properly.
Hi, JMG and everybody:
These last days I haven’t had spare time enough to read and comment here, due to personal family affairs I’ve had recently (OK, let’s draw a veil…). I’ll have more time to return again to John’s blog tomorrow evening (local time), when it’ll be a new post.
However, I’d to read and comment only one of your last previous comments, in these few minutes I have now…
*****************
Ane the chosen one has been (without any acrimony for the others):
Polecat # 261:
I see you’ve got good taste in electronic music, or at least the same taste like me. I tend to listen rock music, but indeed I like very much Tangerine Dream. My favorite disc of them is “Le Parc”, though I’ve heard more LPs…I remember dimly “Shasha” theme, when I’ve got more spare time I’ll seek it in my discs collection, or eventually online. It’s interesting Tangerine Dream liked to name a heck of their songs with urban places and natural places, and they usually depicted very well feelings and views of them with music.
@Untitled 3263
I live in the south Central Valley of California in between Fresno and Bakersfield which has it’s own feel IMO different from what you feel inother parts of California I call it the Texas/Oklahoma part of California with a dose of Mexico, down to earth. When I first moved there in 1994 one of the towns reminded me of a small county seat back in my birthplace, the upper midwest.
Thanks for the reminder to look more closely at Jeffers. You’ve posted that poem of his before and I’ve always liked it, but just now I dug through the poetry “section” of the books I inherited and found that I have a volume of his selected poems – so shall now remedy my unfamiliarity with most of his work!
A small elaboration on the bit I wrote above: In contrast to the Pacific NW, which sounds hostile to humans, or other areas which are more friendly to humans, I would characterize California as a region that finds humans endlessly entertaining. There are many aspects of the culture here that can be taken as a sort of satire or parody of the greater American culture, and I don’t think that’s an accident. People here often don’t realize how goofy and ridiculous they end up looking as a result of their misguided chasing, and I think the Coyote finds great humor in all of it.
I don’t think it’s an accident Hollywood sprung up in this region, of all places.
@Robert Mathiesen #264
Indeed, I resonate with your post as well. I think the soul of California is in its profound, and often terrifying, natural landscapes. In fact, I suspect the aggressive ugliness of the urban landscape in California is simply another way in which the region subtly points out, by simple juxtaposition, the ridiculousness of the idea that this land has been “developed” in any way. California’s best features are not its sprawling suburbs or skyscrapers, after all. It’s just, instead of wrathfully pointing this out to us, the land just smiles politely, lets us continue in our folly, and leaves anyone with eyes to appreciate how unnecessary it all is, knowing in the long term none of it will last.
@Stephen Pearson #265
No worries! But yeah, I pretty much agree. California is a dark mirror where idealists go to either learn about their limits, or go insane trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Anyone who is more down-to-earth probably would never feel called come here in the first place 🙂 Not that I had any choice in the matter. I was born here, but I now suspect karma was involved.
@BeardTree #269
Certainly! The state itself isn’t a monolith after all, the lines on the map are of course arbitrary. There are pockets of sanity here and there, where people live rather modestly, but people from other places who aren’t familiar with the details of the geography are going to go by the general vibe of the whole region, for better or worse.
Northwind Grandma re: #228. I so totally concur that such volumes should remain unpublished. Word of mouth only, or accidental discovery or poring over a map and daydreaming about what feels right…
Publicity has ruined so many lovely spots in the last 6 years. Just so hordes can arrive and take pictures for TikTok, play streaming music, loudly, and do everything they can to have egalitarian “access” to nature without attending to who is actually there.
Chauqiun # 268 .. I’m not a TD aficionado as such … however, I really dug both the above mentioned album, as well as ‘Tyranny of Beauty’ ( of which I’d like to acquire on vinyl, could I find it!) .. and yes, they seemed to have had a pulse on the subject(s) thereof.
Robert Mathiesen # 264 .. the central coast .. I spent a few years in SLO whilst attending studies at Questa Comm. College in the mid 80’s. My then girl friend and I hiked up Bishop’s Peak, and upon reach the top, gave a supreme view of the regional surrounds .. stretching from the other ‘Moros’ to the north – of which Moro Rock makes the above sea terminus of the line, the Santa Margaritas to the east, to the Nipomo dunes southward. I’ll always regret not scaling the backside of Hollister Peak, just aways south of Questa-by-the-Sea off HY-1, east of the Los Osos Valley. That piece of Franciscan Formation always beckoned your’s truly. Oh well..
As an aside: there is Central Valley ‘Giant Orange’ history in my lineage..
@ polecat
He is using his own descriptions of areas of California, so when he says “central coast CA” that does not include SLO county. I tend to agree with this, SLO county is very different than the central coast. Anyways, he described central CA as being the part of the costal redwood range below Sonoma county thru big sur or so it sounds like. But then he mentions Mnt Diablo,…..
For those not of here, mnt diablo is part of the typical inland dry hills with oak trees. Some fun rock outcroppings. Not coastal redwood territory.
Untitled1, et al
I have a collection of essays, excerpts, etc about CA called West of the West. There is a quote which says:” The US is the place against which the rest of the world defines itself as sane. CA is the place against which the rest of the US defines itself as sane. LA is the place against which the rest of CA defines itself as sane”
I wouldn’t want to live down there, but you can have some fun if you don’t take it or yourself too seriously. That is always the trap, though.
Stephen
Once again, warm thanks to everyone who contributed stories about the spirit of place.
Untitled-1, I’ll consider it. I have other things in process right now, but we’ll see.
TemporaryReality, I adore Jeffers’ poetry. Here’s a part of another of his, “The Purse-Seine”:
“Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers–or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls–or anarchy, the mass-disasters.”
Amazing stuff.
@Robert Mathieson (#257): I was thinking that Rochester may be close enough to Seneca Falls to be part of that delightfully “weird” part of New York State. I had never previously looked for Seneca Falls on a map, but after you mentioned it, I checked and now I can see how close the two cities are.
I don’t know if the region’s propensity for spiritual oddness is a factor that plays in the story I am going to tell, but it certainly can’t be discounted! In March 2025, my wife and I went to Rochester, as there is (believe it or not!) a Hindu temple in the vicinity (Rush, NY) that is a place of pilgrimage and my wife had taken a vow to visit it. We had heard good reports about this temple for 20 years (and especially the main priest, who seemed to be somewhat psychic) but until 2025, circumstances had just never “jelled”. So, it was our first (and, so far, our only) visit. I have been to quite a number of Hindu temples in my life: some of them major places of pilgrimage in India and an assortment of “modern” temples in southern Ontario and neighbouring US states. What I can say from direct personal experience is that all the Hindu temples that I have visited in the West are “empty” inside. I feel no spiritual presence of note in these places, despite the regular rituals and prayers of the priests. There can be many possible explanations for this discrepancy, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just say that this is how it is. But there is one major exception: the Sri Vidya Temple along the outskirts of Rush. My goodness! I could feel the “presence” of living Divinity the moment I stepped in! And it was continuous. One of my wife’s vows was to perform service in the temple kitchen, so for an hour I was on my own in a rather empty part of the temple (it was between rituals) and just blissed out on the energy! I was curious how the neighbouring spirits would be taking to this energy, but what I surprisingly found was a willing acceptance of this goddess’ presence in their forested midst.
The thing that I found most unique about the Sri Vidya temple near Rochester was how it felt “rooted” in the land. And it has had me wondering. The one factor that perhaps helped to bridge the “alien” Hinduness and the “native” local spirit beings was the unique feature of this temple: a permanent structure for performing fire sacrifices smack dab in the middle of the temple. It is a Hindu belief that when one offers materials in the sacrificial fire, during Vedic rituals, the fire transports the merit of these offerings to the heavenly gods. It reminds me of how in so much Native North American beliefs, the smoke of a ritual fire (or sacred pipe) reaches the heavenly beings. I don’t know for sure, but this is how it felt to me. Perhaps it will forever remain a mystery. Regardless, I’m glad that I was fortunate enough to have the experience.
@JMG
Delighted to hear it. I understand you’ve quite the hefty backlog, so no rush. Just wanted to pitch in that at least this individual would be quite interested 🙂
@Stephen Pearson #276
You know, that’s more or less what I ended up concluding. The best way you can survive in California and stay sane is if you just learn to see a bit of the humor in things as you live here. That doesn’t mean losing your empathy for others of course, but just seeing all of the silliness for what it is and chuckling at it (and yourself) instead of despairing about it strikes me as a much healthier way of going about things.
Honestly, it’s mainly aging family keeping me here, who of course refuses to move anywhere else. They’ve put down roots here, so I have no intention of forcing them to move or abandoning them, but it’s possible that later in my life I’ll find reason to move on. Only time will tell.
@Atmospheric River (#275):
I remember Mount Diablo as being visible, indeed quite prominent, as one drives northward along HIghway 101. To me, it always felt like a focus for the sleeping dragon that is the range of hills to the east of that highway. I had never thought of it as part of some inland region, though doubtless you’re right that it is.. So I’m not sure whether physical location or visibility counts for more here.
@JMG (#277):
You’re right that Jeffers is a marvel. I think he captures parts of the egregore of the central region of coastal California (where he lived) superbly. Of course, he is not a poet to be read and swallowed swiftly, but chewed over and savored, which means he is rarely appreciated all that deeply.
Do you happen to know the books on him by William Everson (for a while, Brother Antoninus)? They are Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury (1968), Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (1976) and The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure (1988).
I always wondered what was that thing that you suddenly feel while crossing a river, or a specific part of the road that you are not longer where you departed from and you start to be were you are going to. I have been paying much more attention to that, partly because I am very sensitive to such things, partly because if I ever become lucky enough to build myself a house, I want it to be in relationship to the surrounding land.
I don’t know if I have a story to share at the moment, but central Mexico feels to me like this painting of Gerardo Murillo, “Dr. Atl”
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EB5a8XvUcAATUCD?format=jpg&name=large
@ Robert Mathiesen #264
“As John Muir once famously wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911).”
It strikes me that this quote provides a key to the qualities of discursive meditation – BOTH the frustratingly difficult task of “picking out anything by itself” AND the amazingly sudden way in which revealing connections can be discerned between the thing by itself and some other thing it is “hitched to”…
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
PALATINES
The Mohawk River valley (New York State) with its points west along the corridor from Albany to Buffalo (roughly Erie Canal route), had a large influx of several hundred families of Palatine German origin pioneering the region about 1710. It is they who brought the wackiness and creativity we all have touched on over the years, many by different names.
The Palatine Germans WERE different. They weren’t all German and weren’t all Protestant. Part of “The Palatine German Saga” goes back a century to the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648.
The whole saga is little known. There are a handful of books on the subject, but not much. One has to work to become aware of how influential the whole thing was: it involved all of Germany and surrounding regions in Europe from 1600 to 1800: aristocrats just couldn’t stop themselves from warring with each other, where peasants could NOT find safe places out of the line of fire.
Very few people have heard of the Palatine Saga, or if they have heard of it, they gloss it over and soon forget. Now and then someone like me pops their head up out of the gopher hole (like a Jack in a Box), shouts “The Palatines Were Here,” then disappears back down.
A decent review is the Saga, before and after, at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatines
As an amateur genealogist focusing on the Hudson River valley, I eventually bumped into the Palatine Saga of 1709. I, too, knew nothing. Then, putting my family tree together, I found a dozen 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th great-grandmothers as ancestors. Seriously, they were female rather than male. Matrilineal. It’s not only me. A huge amount of people alive today who came from New York State, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Ireland (the country), etc., spreading out from those places, have their matrilineal lines scattered with Palatine WOMEN,— forgotten women. If, and when, one has time and money, look for these women and document them.
The Palatine Saga is one of those things that has been a secret thread of creativity for three-hundred years.
It is NO ACCIDENT that various weird🤪religious movements got their start between Albany and Buffalo, and fanned out from there to the south, west, and southwest. It was the Palatines❣️
💨🫥🤪📚💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Wassail again Mr Greer,
I am just wondering if I missed a trick with the technology, as I couldn’t seem to join the conversation with this post? I am a bit of a Luddite, but I think I filled in all the required fields. My comment would have appeared about thirty or so comments in. As a long-time reader and big fan, I am hoping to join future conversations.
Kind regards,
Frederick
Hey, it worked, my comment successfully posted! I may as well append my original comment, just in case it’s of interest, and then I’ll jump in on future conversations:
Wassail Mr Greer,
This is the first time I have commented here, although I am a long time reader and I greatly appreciate your work. Alan Garner’s strange, difficult, and achingly beautiful novel Strandloper engages similar themes to your post. As an Anglo-Saxon Heathen living in Tasmania, Australia, I have been deeply attracted to this book, because Garner seeks a kind of rapprochement between Australian Aboriginal and indigenous English culture. As an English Australian this of vital interest to me, because I want to truly belong to the land I steward, without losing my Anglo-Saxon folkway. Garner’s books always express a powerful attachment to place, especially his native Cheshire, and this topophilia even reaches down into the very bones of the earth, marrying the mineral and earthen to the realm of human culture. Australian poet Gregory Day has described Garner’s work as “famously saturated with a mythic swirl of endemic rocks, meres, trees and meteorological phenomena, and also with the vernacular palimpsest of the historical and pre-historical cultural landscape.” Garner’s vision is a deeply primal expression of the English imagination. Indeed, it is a vision of English aboriginality. That’s what makes his attempt to engage with Aboriginal Australia so interesting. The promise at the heart of this book is that white Australians can indeed overcome their alienation and not just be from this country, but of this Country. (“Country” with a capital “C” has a very specific meaning in Australian Aboriginal parlance.)
Mythologist and storyteller Dr Martin Shaw tells us that the earth dreams in story and that it is our job, in this time of crisis, to allow ourselves to be claimed by a part of the earth, to put down roots and trade breadth for depth. To be of a place and not just from a place. To know, intimately and with deep sympathy, the storied geography of the piece of earth on which we dwell. He enjoins us to participate “not just as a conqueror, not as a devourer, but in the spirit of relatedness…To be of means to be in. To have traded endless possibility for something specific. It means that, over the slow recess of time, you become that part of the land that temporarily abides in human form.” It means “Getting so smoked, so weathered by a tuft of ground that, occasionally, you become its eyes.”
That is the message of Garner’s work as well. And it is stories that achieve this alchemy of belonging. If we are to take Garner and Shaw seriously in their injunction — and I do — how am I, as an Australian, particularly a Tasmanian Australian, to achieve this? Stories turn spaces into actual places, and in Tasmania and much of Victoria we have lost most of our Aboriginal stories. We burnt the library.
If our feet are to ever really speak the earth here, if we are ever going to hear the voice of the land and speak it back to ourselves in story and dance, then maybe we just need to abide here for a long, long time. The land needs to chew on us for a lot longer. The process has already begun and inevitably, living in Australia has given us a new psychological dispensation and a new, distinct sensibility. Nevertheless, there are psycho-spiritual dangers and tensions inherent in our being here. Author and academic David Tacey has written: “There is an enormous psychic gap between the consciousness of Europeans and the primal reality of the Australian landscape. That gap is so great that consciousness could be swallowed up if it attempted to cross the gap in search of psychic roots in the local soil.” And yet there is an old Aboriginal belief which states that the souls of the ancestors are reborn in the bodies of all subsequent generations who live on and with a given piece of land. That is the Dreaming. In the book, convict William Buckley’s transformation into the reincarnated Aboriginal chief Murrangerk speaks to this idea. This is a very destabilizing theology and one should not take it literally, and yet it expresses, if not a literal truth, then a great psychological truth: that the Land itself will eventually render us indigenous and that we will have to accommodate and acknowledge the first inhabitants as part of this process. Is it possible to retain our English identity and folk religion whilst also integrating the spiritual and geographic reality of Australia? I believe so, but the changes that this process will render in us over time may alter us indelibly. As the Anglo-Saxon seed stock sprouts in strange soil, could we be seeing a new ethnogenesis? Could we be becoming Aboriginal? It is a book well worth reading.
Frederick
Haileo JMG,
A few comments from my experience of place.
Ireland being a magical land (despite attempts of desecration for centuries and ongoing, by bureaucratic forces) is covered in magical places, many of which have ancient sanctified structures.
There is a wonderful book called ‘The personality of Ireland’ 1973 by E. Estyn Evans), in it Mr Evans notes that the natural line of drumlins at the south of Ulster, created a natural border with the rest of the country, this natural boundary led to distinctly different peoples north and south. This Drumlins ‘border’ existed long before the Norman plantations of Ireland (the Normans are sometimes given ‘credit’ for said differences).
I lament over the incredible changes that have captured Ireland in recent years. The so called celtic tiger era, with its greed and materialism veiled our Emerald Soul. The aforementioned bureaucratic forces took an even greater hold, and since the covid era the people have been in a daze, constantly bombarded with propaganda! it has been said that the creation of the motorways (the great symbol of the myth of progress), especially the one through the Tara valley angered the Gods, and we are now being punished for it!
But there is still great beauty and magic…
In Ulster (where I am from),
Emain Macha (Navan Fort) one of the great royal sites of Ireland, is a hidden up on a wooded hill surrounded by hawthorn. It is a place of great beauty.
Nearby, Slieve Gullion, which Yeats called Ireland’s most mystic mountain, has a depth to it, an ancient presence.
The Burren in County Cavan (an area of mythological significance, associated with Crom Cróich. There was human habitation in this rugged place from the Neolithic era, with cairns, dolmens and ‘tombs’. Now it is covered in forestry (non native), however when one walks through the mossy groves of this forested site, there is a presence felt, as if one is being watched by benevolent forces. One of the most magical places I have been, and a wonderful tonic for any form of depression.
On Devenish Island in Co. Fermanagh, there is a round tower, which it is said has the power to increase the yield the cattle produce. That aside, this is a serenely peaceful ancient monastic site.
Leinster
Boyne Valley:
Dowth is the lesser known of the Boyne Valley monuments. Even though partially destroyed by 19th century antiquarians there is deep magic there, upon visiting one doesn’t want to leave.
In comparison, Knowth, which is in much better condition has lost its magic.
Newgrange is very magical inside the chamber, however the reconstructed facade and heavy tourism has taken something from it!
The Hill of Tara, I have had amazing experiences on this hill, which is the ancient seat of the kings of Ireland, with monuments going back to the Neolithic. Once after a thunder and lighting strike I walked the hill barefoot and it was alive with magical energy. During the Covid era local sports clubs used this sacred place to do their running (a desecration, the materialist slide of the Irish psyche), however this practice was put an end too and the sanctity has returned.
Connaught
Croagh Patrick (Co. Mayo), this is an ancient pilgrimage mountain, famous for its association with the Welsh fella. Even in the depths of Winter there are pilgrimages here. It is a place to let go and receive. God/Gods reside here.
Rathcroghan (Co. Roscommon), This is the ancient royal site of the West, home to Queen Maeve who took part in the mythological ‘cattle raid of Cooley’). The soil is rich and cattle thrive here (that is no myth). The magic is gone from the site, however there is peace here and the surrounding area is imbued with a great calm. The areahas great association with Samhain.
Nearby is Oweynacat, a souterrain with a natural fissure cave at its end. It is known as an entrance to hell by some and to the Otherworld by others. This is a magical place, I have sat in silence inside the cave and experienced the most profound calm.
I now live in this area and own a piece of land with a cottage, I witness the sunset and sunrise each day. On days like today, a brisk autumn Sunday, it is as if everything is in slow motion, the veil is thinning and the otherworld is near.
Munster has many magical places also, but alas I have said enough.
Bí go maith
Slán go fóill
Caoimhín
The Glastonbury example made me think of how quickly the feel of a place can change within a short walk. I’ve noticed that at the coast too: one spot makes you want to sit quietly for ages, then a few minutes later everything feels completely ordinary. Paying attention to place is the bit I’ll take with me.