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Volume 7: Number 1: Article 1
Acculturated Topographical Effects of Shamanic Trance Consciousness in Archaic and Medieval Sacred Landscapes
Paul Devereux, Penzance, Cornwall, United Kingdom
Various linear enigmas exist in ancient sacred landscapes worldwide.
These include examples of Native American landscape lines, such as the
Chacoan "roads," New Mexico, and the Nazca "lines," Peru; Neolithic
linear earthworks, called "cursuses," in Britain; stone rows in Europe,
Malaysia and elsewhere; temple alignments in Indonesia. There is also
the archaeologically heretical idea of "leys" (alignments of ancient
sites), put forward by Englishman Alfred Watkins in 1921. Although the
ley theory has long been derided by mainstream scholarship, new German
and Dutch findings show that there was a medieval tradition of straight
"Doodwegen" (death roads) or "Geisterwege" (ghost paths). It seemsWatkins
may have unwittingly uncovered vestiges of these features. Certainly
Watkins had no concept of current "New Age" notions of "energy leylines,"
which are modern fantasies. It is argued that such medieval features
arise out of a deep-seated, universal conceptual complex associating
"spirit ways" with straight lines: straight cords and threads in ancient
traditional healing practices as well as straight tracks and other ceremonial
landscape markings. It is suggested that these ideas have their roots
in archaic shamanism, which, throughout Eurasia, influenced later, ceremonial
aspects of monarchy. A proto-Indo- European language vestige is cited.
Preliminary evidence is presented indicating that the spirit-line association
derived from the ecstatic "journey" experienced during the shamanic
trance. This gave rise to images of "flying shamans" in tribal societies
throughout the world, and, ultimately, to the "magical flight of the
sovereign" in proto-state and state societies. It is this "flight of
the soul" that seems to have been translated onto ancient sacred landscapes
as straight lines, which later became variously acculturated as sacred
ways, spirit and fairy paths, roads of the dead or of ghosts, or Royal
Routes. The neurological aspects of the so-called out-of-body state,
and its possible association with modern psychological epidemics such
as "UFO abductions," is alluded to.
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