Sacred Geography: Deciphering Hidden Codes in the Landscape

This important book with its many stunningly beautiful illustrations breaks new ground by bringing together for the first time all the different facets of sacred geography. In comprehensive and fascinating detail, Paul Devereux explains why shamanic cultures endowed the landscape with such profound meaning and how specific features of it acted as a doorway to an invisible 'Otherworld': "Sacred Geography is where the physical world and the 'otherworlds' of spirit or mind meet." Shamanic cultures defined three worlds connected by a vertical axis: an underworld of the ancestors, a middle world inhabited by humans and a heavenworld of spirits. The sacred place of connection with these worlds could be a specific feature of the landscape such as a sacred mountain like Mount Kailas or the source of a river like the Ganges. Much later, temples like Borobodur in Indonesia or the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem were to fill this role. The basic premise of these early cultures was that people lived within a Sacred Order. Therefore the landscape was sacred; it held meaning. The bond between a people and the land in which they lived was living, spiritual and sacred because it was the gateway to an invisible landscape peopled by the unseen powers of nature and by the ancestors. There were certain features of the landscape that were particularly numinous: mountains and sacred hilltops, caves like the Palaeolithic caves of the Dordogne, large rocks (dolmens) such as those of Avebury and Carnac, special trees, springs, waterfalls, deep fissures or crevices in the rock. Sometimes such places would be enhanced by decorative or symbolic features added by humans. All these contributed to mythologizing a landscape or a particular feature of it, giving it meaning. Places remained sacred for thousands of years and many are so to this day, as pilgrimages to Mount Kailas testify. There was the sense of the need for a world centre, marking the meeting place of the four directions, an axis mundi. This could be marked by a holy mountain such as Mount Fuji in Japan, an omphalos, as in Greece or a sacred stone, as in Mecca. There were also sacred ways or avenues that could be "walked" by devotees in ritual events, such as the great causeways of the Maya or Aztec cultures and the Nasca Lines in Peru. These sacred paths were thought — in cultures such as that of the Kogi Indians of Columbia — to echo the sacred routes in the Otherworld and Kogi shamans to this day walk their sacred stone paths. Hallucinogenic drugs assisted the flight of shamans along these otherworld paths. Sounds were another avenue of connection with divine power — echoes, whispering or burbling water, rocks which gave out a musical sound heard as the "voices of the land" — any of these could mark a numinous place in the landscape. Out of this relationship with the landscape, myths developed, specific to the people who inhabited it for millennia. Today, with the movement of vast numbers of people into cities where they are cut off from any relationship with the land, there is a disconnection with the soul of the landscape and, ultimately, with the soul of the Earth. There is no longer a myth to connect these disenfranchised people with a sacred Earth. Long before our time, as Devereux writes in the Afterword, "the human race saw the world as in some way alive, enchanted, sentient and capable of communicating with us. This worldview is the essence of all sacred geographies, regardless of specific cultural beliefs and differences." He asks whether we might benefit from changing our current worldview, which regards matter as inanimate, to holding the world to be sacred and alive and therefore not subject to our ruthless exploitation of it. "The mapping of the physical world needs to be integrated with the geography of the soul." This book will be treasured by anyone who wishes to understand the ancient foundations on which later cultures were built and how tragically cut off we have become from our roots.