There's more than one way to look at the earth. For instance, a desolate desert playa can be a vision of Hell or the ultimate stage for the Burning Man art festival. Strange vapors rising from the ground can cause alarm or inspire the ancient Oracle at Delphi. This site focuses, most of the time, on the scientist's ways of seeing the Earth. But I like some of the other ways, too.
Early one Sunday not long ago, I visited a thermal spring on the California coast that is only exposed during especially low tides in the predawn hours. Along with a dozen strangers, I soaked in a deep, rocky bowl of water that fumed with sulfurous vapors and subterranean heat, while the full Moon set over the cold Pacific before us. The sea crept in and covered the spot by sunup, then we clambered off in our different directions to join the civilized day. The experience was powerful and elemental, to say the least. I knew the hot spring lies practically on a major earthquake fault, but geology was secondary that morning.
Sense Before the Days of Science
It's fun to imagine things as they were before science. Science isn't natural, it's a recent and highly artificial practice—logical, mathematical, skeptical of the senses. And because much of the scientific frame of mind has leaked out into the rest of society, we have to work at forgetting common sense, too. Maybe that's not fully possible, but the exercise has to get us closer to prescientific, real life.
Real life depends on following hunches, on knowing your own internal state, on keen awareness of the senses, on recognizing other beings and discerning their motivations. This is more like how other animals live their lives, and it's how we must have begun as a species. Without the long training that scientists undergo, the natural human tendency is to believe what we perceive and to see what pleases us the most. Visions make sense, and dreams and revelations are acceptable ways of acquiring knowledge. (If you don't believe me, visit my colleagues the About UFOs Guide and the About Urban Legends Guide.)
The Primitive Landscape in the Beholder's Eye
Before the landscape was seen as a puzzle to be analyzed or as a possible source of dollars, humans had more elemental ideas about the lands they inhabited. Volcanoes and earthquakes are clear evidence that the Earth is animated, like us and like the animals. The sea rises and falls like slow breathing. The soil seems to be a sort of living thing, too, giving life to plants and receiving the bodies of the dead. On the face of it, the world and everything in it is alive.
Dramatic rock formations, picturesque hills, deep canyons, and dark ponds arouse emotions and sensations—and to persons of heightened awareness, they pulse with significance, even personality. Stories arise and turn to myths, and as groups of people live in an area for generations their beloved homeland fills with spirit and meaning. I believe this is inevitable: the affectionate bonds we develop with the land arise from our deepest nature as a species that depends on affectionate bonds among people.
So when we learn that prehistoric people around the world moved large stones into regular arrangements, held ceremonies in underground caves or in artificial chambers, and had elaborate stories about the landforms around them, it feels familiar. We are a species of stories, and we love a mystery.
The Mysterious Sites of Europe
Thanks to our built-in tendency to animate the world in our own image, we have beloved, sacred places everywhere on Earth. Europe has thousands of them, as is well documented. Many old European churches are built upon sites that were holy to far earlier societies. And the countryside is dotted with structures built of large stones, many of them arranged in long-distance lines and oriented toward significant astronomical occurrences like the path of the Moon and particular stars.
I focus on Europe here because there's something special about it. As in the rest of the world, the exact reasons for building the structures have been lost. But because a good story is irresistible, in Europe a whole new rootless complex of "Druid" and "new age" mythology has arisen around the monuments.
Stonehenge, for instance, is just too old to be built and used by the Celtic Druids. When Celts first arrived in Britain, Stonehenge was already over a thousand years old. So any records and stories told about it and other stone structures must be suspect. Even the writers of ancient Rome and Greece knew that their sources were not very reliable, but their only choice was to preserve what knowledge they could.
This has not stopped later searchers from accepting whatever evidence they liked from other sources. It's human nature, in the most basic sense, to make connections across gaps in knowledge for the sake of a good story—or a scientific hypothesis.
The late writer John Michell worked this ground for 30 years. His classic book, The View Over Atlantis, is as hypnotic as a good sermon, beginning with Stonehenge, its kindred sites, and the ley lines that connect them across all of Britain. He mixed these with archaeology and ancient records, spirit communicators, Atlantis tales, and UFO stories, and added Jungian and Reichian psycho-theory to thicken a bewitching gumbo. Of the old stone structures, Michell concluded that "such places still bear the invisible marks of some feat of natural magic, performed by the adepts of the former world, space and time travellers, masters of revelation, to whom the earth was but another living creature, responding like a man to certain shapes, sounds and poetic correspondences, the keys to universal enlightenment."
That was in 1969, written as the Age of Aquarius dawned. He was a bit more modest in the recent writings you'll find on brittania.com in the informative and entertaining section on the Earth mysteries of the British Isles. But he was still a great prose stylist, and the stones can't contradict him. People I know have gone to centers of Earth energy like Glastonbury and enjoyed visions and vivid dreams. I'd appreciate that myself. Those things are as real as human experience can be, and totally outside Earth science.
PS: If hot springs are more your speed, the Web is crawling with kindred souls. See the U.S. government's list of hot springs for the whole country to get you started. (Mine seems to be listed.)
