Places
of Peace
and Power
INTRODUCTION
"..anyone wishing to understand societies of the past must makea determined effort to liberate himself from the pressures of his
own mental attitudes."
Georges Duby
"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and
true science."
Albert Einstein
Since prehistoric times, certain places have exerted a mysterious attraction on billions of people around the world. Many cultures of antiquity recognized the existence of these sites, called power places or sacred sites, and marked their geographic locations in a variety of ways. The names of such places are familiar to us all; they include Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, the Pyramids, Jerusalem, Banaras and Mecca. Power places are found all across the planet in the form of sacred mountains, healing springs, oracular caverns, enchanted forest glens and places of divine revelation.
Ancient legends and modern-day reports tell of extraordinary experiences that people have had while visiting these holy and magical places. Different sacred sites have the power to heal the body, enlighten the mind, increase creativity, develop psychic abilities, and awaken the soul to a knowing of its true purpose in life. While contemporary science cannot explain - and therefore disregards - the seemingly miraculous phenomena which occur at the holy places, these sites continue to be the most venerated and visited locations on planet Earth.
What is the key to the mystery of the sacred sites? How are we to explain their power? In suggesting answers to these questions, I may be accused of making broad generalizations about widely different places and religious events. That is precisely my intention. Sacred sites in Burma are indeed different from those in Mexico, and the pilgrimage practices of Hinduism are quite unlike those of Christianity. Yet many similarities can be found among the world's sacred sites and pilgrimage traditions. I will focus on these similarities, these common denominators. This book is designed to introduce the subject of sacred sites and to show how their common characteristics hold the key to explaining the extraordinary phenomena that occur at the sacred sites.
This book chronicles my own search for answers to these questions. Over an eighteen-year period I went upon a rambling yet purposeful pilgrimage to more than 1000 sacred sites in eighty countries around the world. I was able to determine the locations of these sites by researching the anthropology, archaeology, mythology and religious traditions of the world's past and present cultures.
SACRED
JOURNEYS
My
journeys to these places
have been pilgrimages in
the real sense of the word.
The term pilgrimage means
so much more than mere travel.
In its original and pure
meaning, pilgrimage describes
a religious journey to a
site or set of sites that
have been invested with sanctity
by tradition. Pilgrimage
may also be defined as exterior
mysticism, while mysticism
is internal pilgrimage. Such
has been the nature of my
travels. Wandering extensively
around the world, my journeys
have fundamentally been an
inner exploration of my heart
and mind and soul. While
I have been concerned with
the scholarly study and photography
of the sacred places, my
primary intention has always
been to interact with the
sacred sites as a pilgrim.
To gather information on the sacred sites I have used two methods: the objective method of the scientist and the subjective method of the mystic or the shaman. Neither method is inherently a better way of knowing; each merely offers a different perspective, an alternative view of what is essentially a unitary reality. Yet, while both methods are valuable and complementary, in today's world the scientific method is dominant, and the mystic's approach is all but forgotten. Mystical experience, however, is an equally important way of knowing. It offers a means of gathering information beyond the realm of scientific instruments. Mysticism has as its source of information the direct and personal experience of the sacred.
In applying this dual approach, both subjective and objective, to the study of holy places, I have done something rare. Most anthropologists and cultural geographers studying the institution of pilgrimage visit only a limited number of sites while doing the bulk of their research in libraries. I consider it presumptuous, even arrogant, to write about sacred sites and pilgrimage if one has not personally lived the life of a pilgrim and visited a large number of holy places.
Colin Turnbull, one of the more sensitive anthropologists writing on pilgrimage, echoes these sentiments. He comments...
that we have tended to avoid, in our study of religious systems, what is central to all religion:
the power of Faith, the sense of the Sacred, the perception of Spirit. In just the same way that it is not comfortable or seemingly appropriate, in "polite" society, to discuss God in the living room, so among polite anthropologists it is too often considered improper and inappropriate, if not irrelevant, to discuss Spirit and Faith, Beauty and Goodness, which are dismissed as though they had no substantive reality or application. It is still less acceptable to attempt to capture such qualities and report on them from the point of view of personal experience....The only way that I can see by which we can effectively tackle faith is for the fieldworker to be willing to sacrifice his academic self and perhaps his personal, moral, and "religious" self and, through this self-sacrifice, open himself to total, unfettered participation in the process of spiritual quest and subject himself as nearly as possible to the same conditions in time and space to which the other pilgrims are subjected. (1)
The deep feeling-experience of pilgrimage to the sacred places is enriched by a parallel journey through their mythology and history. To do this, I have read more than 1500 sources of information, mostly books but also a large number of academic journals articles and Ph.D. dissertations. This material has ranged widely over mythology, earth sciences, astronomy, archaeology, anthropology, ethnology and folk lore studies, trance, magic and shamanism, comparative religion, geomancy and sacred geometry, hagiography, parapsychology and mysticism. Combining scholarly study with long-term pilgrimage experience, I have been able to make conceptual leaps of understanding which I will share in these pages with you.
