PSYCHOSCAPES: Sacred Spaces & New Myths

CC Jean Stimmell: 9/18/14 Pawtuckaway Park

Can Mythology Save Us? In an interview on this subject, Arthur George points out how humans have moved from fantasy thinking to more linear, rational thinking through language only very recently, just in the last two to three thousand years of our long evolutionary history.

This rapid psychic development, he says, has resulted in a major imbalance, allowing our rational ego consciousness to almost totally repress our vital unconscious processes, “which among other things has rendered our culture too masculine, warlike, and out of touch with nature.”

I believe that Arthur George has put his finger on the root cause of the dementia that haunts our modern world. It’s not what the conservatives have done or the liberals; it’s not what the Christians have done or the Muslims; it’s over-dominance by our rational minds that is the problem.

For the sake of our mother earth and all her precious inhabitants, we need to find a way to a higher level of existence, one where our conscious self is integrated with the full contents of our unconscious.

George says the way to do this is by creating new myths.”[i] But to do so, he says, certain criteria must be followed:

For a new myth to work, it has to reconnect us to what in the ancient world was called the center of the world: “a sacred spot where the divine, in the heavens and the underworld, connected with the earthly…it is where the three planes of the cosmos meet and thus lies at the heart of reality. Archetypically, it was also thought of as the place of creation.”

In simpler language the sacred spot is a temple or sanctuary where we can interact with our deities and experience transcendence: “Sacred space is existential for humans, and can exist anywhere on earth.”

My sacred spot is the Boulder Field in Pawtuckaway State Park, but it wasn’t always so. When I was younger and more rational, it was just a nest of giant rocks. However, over time as I age, I have become increasingly mesmerized by the magic of this spot.

It has become a sacred space.

Something changes as soon as I pass up over the last ridge and descend down into the valley of the boulders. I enter a more-than-human space: I feel the temperature drop and sounds fade, like being ushered into the cool stillness of a great cathedral. Surprises abound as I come across giant stone figures in a truly mythical world, one that Gaia built.

As I have tried to show with these two photographs, great hulking beings inhabit this sacred place, sad and reflective, two-stories high.