What Makes a Place Sacred?

 

After hearing a talk during my zoom Zen meeting recently—a talk which included accounts of pilgrimages that the speaker had taken to Buddhist and Hindu sites such as Mount Kailas in Tibet—I was intrigued by the obvious question: do certain places on our planet actually have a palpable, perceptible “spiritual” presence?  And if so, to what is the alleged “spiritual” feel of a place due: its site, its geology, its appearance, or the simple historical fact that humans have chosen it to be significant?

None of these questions is simple to answer definitively. But a great deal of work has been done over the years to try to answer them. It turns out that I have several books dealing with the so-called “spirit of place,” and so I consulted one in particular, James Swan’s anthology, The Power of Place: Sacred Ground in Natural & Human Environments, (Quest Books, 1991). And what I found on re-reading a few articles there was fascinating. In the introduction, Swan himself gives us some history about the concept of geomancy, an ancient practice first made notable by Pliny the Elder when he supposedly met some Persian magi able to divine the right actions for a specific place by studying the configuration of stones tossed on the ground. As to the term itself, its essential notion is that “some places have more power and presence than others” (1). As examples of such places, Swan cites Chartres Cathedral, Stonehenge, and Mount Fuji. He also mentions the one described by our speaker, Mount Kailas in Tibet, describing it as the “ultimate sacred mountain,” one identified as the cosmic axis of the universe, or axis mundi. Now what’s interesting about this latter concept is that many, if not most traditional, shamanic cultures have designated their own axis mundi—symbolizing the center of the world, where heaven or the sky connects with the earth. According to the New World Encyclopedia, the axis mundi symbol can be a mountain, a tree, a vine, a column of smoke or fire, or even something of human production—a staff, a tower, a ladder, a maypole, a cross, a pillar, a temple and so on. It can be feminine (an umbilical cord) or masculine (a phallus) or neutral (the omphalos or navel.) In Japan, it is Mount Fuji; in China the whole country, but especially Mount Kun Lun; the American Sioux said the Black Hills were the axis mundi; and for the ancient Greeks, both the oracle at Delphi and Mount Olympus were considered sites of the earth’s omphalos. 

So what does this mean? How many axis mundi(s) can our earth have? Is this all based on outdated magic and self-centered hallucination? Perhaps; but perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss geomancy. In another article in Swan’s anthology, James Beal marshals evidence that, though ancient shamans did not know it, their sense that certain places were special may well have been due to their location at “dipoles,” which he describes as “nodes in the earth’s magnetic fields” (280). Apparently, the ability to “sense” magnetic fields is common among many species of plants, animals and birds. In pigeon brains, scientists have found tiny deposits of magnetite that seem to act as a kind of compass; and such magnetic sensors have been found in “nearly thirty species,” including humans. Beal goes on to say that 

deep within the earth the circuits of subterranean streams had formed a pattern which in turn generated changes in the earth’s local magnetic field, and are associated with improvements in positive electrostatic field strength and negative ion concentration….Shamans did not know these things…But they sensed them in the excited electro-chemical processes at work in their own nervous systems, which in turn triggered inspired firing of neurons and synapses in the circuits of their own brains…the place felt special and magical, spiritual…(280-81).

 

As a side note, Beal’s article asserts that both a positive electrostatic field, and negative ions are associated with positive emotional feelings in humans. In short, it could well be that the feeling of “spiritual” leading to the special-ness of many places had (and still has) an actual material basis. 

Elizabeth Rauscher in a subsequent article, “Working With Earth’s Electromagnetic Fields,” expands on this idea of human sensitivity to magnetic fields. Rauscher focuses mainly on the sensitivity of humans and other animals to magnetic fields set up by planetary activity, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. While human brain wave activity in the range of .01 to 10 Hertz is associated with relaxation and creativity, the onset of volcanism gave off a signal of 2.8 to 4.2 Hertz when measured. Rauscher then connects this to the electrical activity of the human heart:

I like to think of a 3.2 Hertz reading right before a quake or volcano as a little like a heart arrhythmia, following the Hopi idea of the “heart of Earth Mother” as being a viable model of reality (300).

In other words, Rauscher is suggesting, like Beal, that some humans are sensitive enough to detect electromagnetic signals from deep within the earth, especially concentrated around mountains—possibly explaining the long human predilection for “sacred” mountains. 

Whatever we make of this “scientific” information about what may have influenced human decisions about special or sacred places, it does provide some basis for what might otherwise seem like rank superstition. Which, given the plethora of sacred or special places that appear in almost every traditional culture, with the axis mundi attributed to so many disparate places over the globe, I must confess, activates my innate skepticism. After all, how many world navels could there be? And so, for this writer, the power of place tends to make more sense if viewed as a product of human choice— ‘this place is sacred, so we will name it the center of the earth and surround it with ritual to reinforce its sacredness.’ This is basically the thesis of Thomas Bender in “Making Places Sacred.” Bender begins with several italicized principles:

What is significant about sacred places turns out not to be the places themselves. Their power lies within their role in marshalling our inner resources and binding us to our beliefs (323).

In holding a place sacred, we grant power to a place and acknowledge that power of the place (324).

The inviolability of sacred places is essential (324).

 

In short, whether or not we “feel” something special when we enter Chartres Cathedral or when we circumambulate Mount Kailas may depend more on how many centuries humans have venerated and conducted rituals at such places than on the places themselves. This is not to say that the choosing of such places originally had no basis in material fact. Shamans may well have been people especially attuned to magnetic or other forces present there. But the main reason we now “feel” the “spirit of a place” may be due more to tradition and the culture that held it sacred, than any inherent spirituality. And, we should add, to the long practice of keeping it inviolable. 

This last consideration may be something we should all take into account. For with modern mass tourism—now said to be the largest industry in the world—it is becoming almost impossible to maintain this inviolability. As Bender notes early in his essay, given that “all places live through the reverence with which we hold them,” the fact that masses of  tourists flash their bulbs and gawk without reverence, without giving, with, rather, the desire to acquire something for themselves, constitutes the “root destruction of tourism” so prevalent in our time. In short, nothing sacred—not Delphi, not Yosemite, not Mount Fuji—may be able to withstand the assault of mass tourism which we modern humans have unleashed. Not to mention the weakening of our ability to sense the grand symphony of magnetic resonance to which we were once adapted and attuned, and which may be responsible for more of our well-being than we had thought heretofore. In sum, whether we believe it or not, the places which our forebears have designated as “sacred” may require our best abilities (if we value our sanity, and the genetic endowments not always obvious to our acquisitive cameras) to keep them more or less inviolate. For what would our world be if, as it is so fast becoming (think the ubiquity of shopping malls, fast food outlets), every aspect of our world had the same disneyfied, dismal look as every other; the entire world a street filled with cheesy Las Vegas replicas. That would be a loss, indeed. 

Lawrence  DiStasi