Almost two years ago, before I’d even heard of Pacifica Graduate Institute, I felt called to make a pilgrimage to the sacred sites in England near Glastonbury and Cornwall. A walk in the woods through Rocky Valley to Boscastle in Cornwall, England was my initial invitation to explore the world of the faeries. On the footpath that day, I saw an iridescent apparition floating above a tree stump next to the river. I had to blink my eyes and shake my head for a moment because what I had witnessed seemed so oneiric, so unreal. But something inside me knew that I had seen something––I was surely awake, wasn’t I?. Somehow, linear time melted into mythical time and a veil separated to allow me entrance into an otherworldly, deathlike realm. Philosopher Ernst Cassirer describes mythological time as “always conceived both as the time of natural processes, and of the events of human life” (Cassirer 148). It was a disorienting experience to say the least.

I had no prior knowledge of what is known in this part of England as the faery faith, but I strongly felt that this particular experience was connected to this exact place. Reflecting back to that time, I now understand why many people in Celtic countries still believe in faeries: the natural landscape and human-made sacred monuments penetrate the psyche and shape the imagination, creating a symbiosis with the archetypal patterns imprinted there.

Now, through the topic of Celtic imagination and sacred landscape, I have the opportunity to reflect on many numinous experiences and explore the imaginative processes that I believe were connected to the land, the rivers, the trees, and definitely to the faeries.

The Celts’ beliefs and religious practices are unknown, primarily because the documents that exist were written by Romans, Greeks and Christians (class lecture). Many scholars, including Walter Evans-Wentz and Michael Dames, have skillfully approached the subject of religious beliefs and practices of the Celts through archaeological, mythological/narrative and linguistic evidence. Although the actual names of gods and goddesses vary from region to region in Celtic countries, there is one definite consistent factor that seems to exist overall: the land and the sacred sites (standing stones, barrows, even churches) are all connected to stories, legends and myths. For example, many narrative versions of faery myths in Ireland center around a powerful, feminine creatrix, Danu, or dangerous encounters with Danu’s children––the faery race, the Tuatha De Danann.
The Celtic imagination is richly expressed through the land itself, or herself, as the land is often thought of as the actual body of the mother goddess. This inheritance, possibly passed down from pre-Celtic cultures, is a treasure to be nurtured and protected by the modern Irish, Welsh and English cultures. Similar to the United States, where most Native American sacred sites have been desecrated and forgotten, many Celtic artifacts and monuments have also been lost. In parallel to the desecration of sacred monuments is the destruction of nature itself. Modern humanity’s disconnection from the natural world and its magic is a major culprit in a multitude of current problems. What can be said about a transcontinental culture of people who don’t belong to a place? I now know that part of my psyche’s unconscious insistence to go on a pilgrimage to England was a call to reconnect to the natural world in a numinous, magical way.

Keith Basso’s book, Wisdom Sits in Places, is written about the sense of place in Western Apache language and culture. Stories about specific land sites, called “name places”, passed down from generation to generation were the main source of cultural knowledge, wisdom and history. If the people were displaced, forcibly by being moved to a reservation or because the resources of an area were destroyed, the knowledge could be lost forever. Places hold memories and are containers of a culture.

Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother...You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise. (Basso 127)

In his book, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Walter Evans-Wentz describes his thesis concerning how the natural world fuels the human imagination. Most of his work in the book entails ethnographic research he conducted in small towns and rural areas of Ireland, Wales, Britain and the Isle of Man: he spent many a night listening to stories about the faeries from natives in each area. In Ireland for example, dramatic changes in the weather or even the shape of a hill in a specific place contour the cultural imagination of the country:

When there are dark days and stormy nights, let him sit beside a blazing fire of fragrant peat in a peasant's straw-thatched cottage listening to tales of Ireland's golden age––tales of gods, of heroes, of ghosts, and of fairy-folk. If he will do these things, he will know Ireland, and why its people believe in fairies. (Evans-Wentz 3)

Myth, memory and language are intimately attached to the land in Celtic countries, like children to their mother. The great goddess in Celtic regions is the faery queen Danu, “the Divine Ancestress of the Danaan” (Biaggi 1999) who rules over the Celtic Otherworld named Tir na Nog, “the Land of the Forever Young” (Green 210). Danu’s children, the Tuatha De Danann, lived on earth until they were conquered by the sons of Mil at the battle of Tailte (Evans-Wentz 333). Danu and her people subsequently relocated to Tir na Nog, which for the Celts is a parallel world to ours; a subterranean region that can be “entered through caverns, or hills, or mountains” (Evans-Wentz 332). In Ireland, the Hill of Tara, Temair, was the entrance to the Otherworld and at the same time the place where many Irish high kings ruled (Dames Mythic Ireland, 225). “The Heaven-World of the ancient Celts, unlike that of the Christians, was not situated in some distant, unknown region of planetary space, but here on our own earth” (Evans-Wentz 332). The Celtic imagination was capable of holding the tension between the physical and numinous planes of existence. They did not feel a need to separate the faeries from the mundane world of humanity, even when violent discord erupted between the two races, since the faeries were a direct expression of the natural world, its beauty as well as its dangers.

Sacred landscapes were, and for many “believers” in the faery faith still are, places where the three worlds of the Celtic cosmology intersect, sometimes called the “thin places,” where the veil between the human world and faery otherworld may be penetrated. The natural world of the Celts contains many meeting places of earth, sky and water which embodied the powers of the middle world (earth), lower world (water) and upper world (sky). “They are viewed either as concentric circles, or, in keeping with other traditional cosmologies, ascending planes upon the column of the world tree” (Pennick 11). The concentric circle and number three are two symbolic motifs that are prevalent in the art and monuments of the Celtic cultures––one sacred monument in particular, Silbury Hill, is exemplary of how these recurring themes were employed in the creation of the sacred architecture of the land.

Similar to Basso’s work with the Navajo cultures, writer and scholar Michael Dames has made a career of observing “the merger of myth and landscape” (Dames “The Goddess,” 1999) in Ireland, Wales and England. All of his work is impressive; his material regarding Silbury Hill and its mythological connection to the feminine biological process of birthing is deeply moving. Although the depth and quality of Dames’ scholarship is unquestionable, even he admits that all notions of why Silbury Hill was created are pure conjecture and the site’s true purpose remains a mystery.

Silbury Hill is a manmade, earth-covered chalk mound located in Wiltshire, England and dates from the Neolithic period. It’s inner core is composed of six tiered (multiples of the sacred number, three) concentric circles, is approximately 130 feet high and 550 feet in diameter (Dames Silbury Treasure, 18). Besides the immense size of Silbury Hill, the ditch around its base is one of its most notable features, especially when filled with water at certain times of the year. Dames observes that the structure of the mound and surrounding ditch form an image of a pregnant woman laying on her side:

none was more remarkable than the construction of the Silbury monument, which was designed to match the physical shape of the birthgiver. Silbury is the Great Goddess, pregnant. (Dames Silbury Treasure, 54)

Dames’ theory of the pregnant mother goddess is also illuminated by the placement of the Silbury monument in correlation with the movement of the earth’s two main celestial bodies, the sun and the moon. At the Celtic holiday Lammas each year, during the first week of August, pilgrims congregate on the hill overlooking the mound to witness the great goddess giving birth. During this time, the full moon is reflected in the moat as if it is the head of a child traveling out of the womb, through the birth canal of the goddess (Dames Silbury Treasure, 165). Lammas is harvest time, when the wheat is cut down, sacrificed like the Celtic sun god Lugh (Lammas is also referred to as Lughnasa). The theme of death and rebirth has been ritually celebrated at Silbury Hill for thousands of years and umbilically connects human life to the natural world as well as to the otherworld where the ancestors, the faeries, are believed to dwell.

The measure of the Silbury achievement is that not only does the monument correlate solar and lunar events, but that it combines them to bring the deity in human form to a credible and continuous life, which could be witnessed by all. (Dames Silbury Treasure, 158)

The motif of birthing in death is symbolized by mounds such as West Kennet Long Barrow located near Silbury Hill, in which human burial remains
have been found during excavations. The Irish word sidh means “fairy mound” or “peace” (Green 190) and the plural sidhe means “people of the mounds” (Dames Mythic Ireland, 12). Perhaps, the Celts believed that being buried in the sacred dwelling of the faeries was being placed back into the womb of mother earth for rebirth into a new life.

In Wales, similar, yet smaller monuments still exist that may have been imagined to be the womb of the Great Mother, Danu, or Don as she was known in Welsh:

These birth-mounds were echoed by the many rounded, isolated Welsh hills, named moel ('bare'), suggestive of human
pregnancy. They also served as the locations of pagan festivities, the burial mounds of patron saints, and sometimes as the gorseddau, or 'seats of princes'. (Dames “The Goddess,” 1999)

The birth-mounds in Wales were duplicates of the natural landscape, helping to bridge between the worlds of man and of faery, maintaining relationship while at the same time acknowledging the dangers associated with the powers of the otherworld.

Just as nature shapes the human psyche, human hands built the mounds, keeping with the character of the natural landscape, and mimetic of the sloping hills, the dipping valleys, the serpentine rivers. The symbolic monuments in Celtic countries, like Silbury Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow, are human creations that were inspired by the natural environment. The cultural blueprint, or identity, of the peoples of Ireland, England and Wales is imprinted throughout the land. It makes me think of how much deforestation humans have done all over the world and in turn how the majestic trees were replaced with skyscrapers. For the most part, the monuments to Capitalism that we have in most major American cities, have raped nature, instead of nurturing and enhancing it. However, the interplay of myth, memory and place has functioned in American culture much as it has in the faery faith of Europe, but in a non-spiritualized, and unconscious context.

Many great thinkers, including C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, wrote and spoke out about how complete reliance on science and technology does not assist in the psyche’s integration with experiences outside of the factual realms; as a result, experiences of a numinous nature are often repressed. The dangerous acts of both birthing and dying have been anesthetized by the clean, sterile hospital environment. Both experiences are miraculous and numinous; the images, feelings and sensations that emerge from the psyche during birth and death cannot be explained away or covered up by scientific knowledge and facts. Cassirer summed up the complexity and ambiguity of birth/death experiences when he wrote, “In mythical thinking there is no definite, clearly delimited moment in which life passes into death and death into life” (Cassirer 37). The delicate veil that the conscious ego perceives as a barrier separating the world of reality and the world of the imagination is ultimately a filmy, shimmery fantasy.

It is my personal wish that more people all over the world (especially the ones who have become so disconnected from nature) will begin to feel that call within to reflect on how nature, and in turn a sense of place, can help the psyche reintegrate the numinous, magical imagination that was displaced by exclusionary trust in empirical facts.

places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become. (Basso 107)

Perhaps, after listening to the voice of a gurgling stream or the whistling wind, a renewed consciousness of how “place” fires up the human imagination and helps form distinctive cultures and myths will begin to emerge. The faeries will surely leap with joy.

Works Cited

Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1996.

Biaggi, Cristina. “Myths of the Goddess in Neolithic Island Cultures of
Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean”. ReVision; Winter99, Vol. 21
Issue 3. 12 May 2004.
<http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=1593473&db=pbh> .

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, v.2. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale U P, 1977.

Dames, Michael. “The Goddess in Wales.” ReVision; Winter99, Vol. 21, Issue 3. 12 May 2004.
<http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=1593470&db=pbh>.

- - -. Mythic Ireland. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.

- - -. The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.

Evans-Wentz, W.Y. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. London and New York: H. Froude, 1911. 12 May 2004.
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/ffcc270.htm#page_358>.

Green, Miranda J. Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

Pennick, Nigel. Celtic Sacred Landscape. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996.