This text was originally written for the anthology Živel ZEMĚ (Agentura Koniklec, Prague 2004, pp. 222-227); however, it was first published in the magazine Ateliér (21 / 24.10. 2002, p. 16) and subsequently published in a German translation under the title “Die Erde als Körper” in the German magazine Hagia Chora (5 Jahrgang / 15 / 2003, pp. 82-85).
“In the highest heaven her heart beats, immortal, veiled by truth, may she give us brightness and strength…” — “Mother Earth” / Vedic Hymns
The “Call of the Earth”, which is pressing upon us from all sides today, is connected with the search for the lost balance and harmony of life in the contemporary world, exposed to the impacts of the ecological crisis. It is therefore not only related to conservation work in relation to nature, it is also the call of our own soul, the search for a new story. In this context, the idea of the landscape as a living body or the human body as a landscape repeatedly emerges from our collective memory, connected to the archetype of Mother Earth, the goddess Gaia. It is one of the key images in which, it seems, the outlines of a new mythology are crystallized, which has the character of a kind of integral spiritual ecology, which could give the life of a person of our late times a deeper existential meaning and allow him to find a natural identity with the surrounding world. These images speak of the inner connection of the individual with the “fabric of existence”, of the connection of our perception with the omnipresent all-pervading energy, “which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spirit, from spirit to plant, from plant to galaxy." (Anna Mendieta)
The imagination of this ecological or mystical body is therefore the opposite of the concept of the body as a perfectly mechanically functional physiological apparatus, as modern science and technology offered us in the twentieth century. Its message is also different: instead of the modernist domination of the world, which ultimately resulted in the construction of artificial robot bodies, it comes with a life philosophy of "merger", i.e. emotional understanding and love. It therefore contains a distinct erotic element from the beginning. As Gautama Buddha used to say: we are here to embrace, not conquer, the world. The imagination of the landscape as a body suggests to us that the mind is not an exclusive property of man, but permeates the entire evolutionary structure of nature and is therefore objectively recognizable even outside of human beings. This knowledge is extraordinarily liberating and literally drives out the lonely Cartesian or Faustian mind of Western man into a renewed emotional harmony with the universe. Slovenian conceptual artist and geomancer Marko Pogačnik mentions how this realization was literally shocking for him. Among other things, it means that, just like humans and animals, trees, plants and stones are also animated by consciousness. They are part of that shared “morphogenetic field of meaning”, traditionally referred to as the “spirit of the earth”, whose vibrations shape all the multifaceted forms of our manifested world. The medium of knowledge, the communication of this complex living entity and substance of the “body of the earth”, is rather the intuition of our own physical and psychological perception, the intelligence of feeling, combined with inner listening, than rational discourse.
A similar relationship to the world was, and in some cases still is, part of the spiritual pagan traditions of the original indigenous and prehistoric cultures; however, these were rejected by the Jewish and most Christian religions (the only exception here is Celtic spirituality). In the process of the so-called demythification of nature, they were suppressed. This could be compared to the cutting off of roots that severed our connection with Mother Earth. This allowed us to accelerate the growth of materialistic science to an unprecedented extent, which resulted in immense technological and technical progress, but at the cost of the fact that the natural world actually became an obstacle for us and that we largely lost connection with the sources of our own existence. According to the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, modern man has exchanged the soul for a disparate collection of facts and knowledge. In the context of Western culture, it was primarily some poets, artists and philosophers who, since the time of Romanticism, have been warning of similar dangers.
Wandering with the spirit of the land
"Nature is such an immense and all-encompassing personality that we have never seen a single one of its features."
Henry David Thoreau / Walking
Pilgrimage is the oldest and most effective way in which a human being connects with the landscape, when during the walk he not only explores and penetrates it, but also unites himself more deeply with its being. There is again something of amorous origin present in this, which often corresponds to physical touching and caressing. In this respect, human feet are "as unique as the palms of the hands and the cerebral cortex." (Zdeněk Neubauer). According to John Michell, the legendary pioneer of modern geomancy, they were the "first people" - wanderers who lived in perfect harmony with nature and the gods: "they were not controlled by other people, but by spirits who corresponded to the eternal element in human nature."They lived in intimate union with the vital spirit of the earth as Adam with his creator, without formal institutions of religion, philosophy, science, usury, or political economy; its creative forces shaped the features of the landscape, regulated the seasons, the cycles of fertility, the lives of animals and men. Rocks, trees, mountains, wells, and springs were recognized as receptacles of the spirit of the earth, manifesting at certain times their various qualities, relating to fertility, healing, or divination. According to John Michell: "Before civilization arises, the earth is one universal divinity." Ultimately, the worship of the land remains latently present even in the so-called civilized religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam), despite the efforts of their representatives to suppress this original spirituality. This seems to confirm Michell's opinion that the deepest element of every religious tradition is the cult of the spirit of the land. We also encounter the experience of wandering as an archetype of a spiritual journey, based on the process of the pilgrim's inner unification with the landscape, in some artists and philosophers of the first half of the 19th century. The American philosopher and poet Henry David Thoreau understood walking as an act of contemplation, liberation and purification (a pilgrimage to the "Holy Land", i.e. a pilgrimage "without return"), through which we awaken to the clarity of vision and the fullness of spiritual being, which nature expressed and symbolized for him in its original wild beauty. It is an expression of his understanding of life as a gift: a single deeply experienced sunrise or sunset is, in his opinion, more valuable to human experience than leadership engagement in revolutions or wars.
The typical image of a romantic wanderer is embodied by the Czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha. In his suggestively depicted scenes of dramatic landscapes with ruins of old castles, distant high mountains – the Giant Mountains –, deep black forests and mysterious lakes, he often personifies the landscape as a living being. The poet, plunging into the abyssal depths of existence, addresses the earth as “mother”: “my cradle and my grave"; in this context, in his poetry and diaries, the motifs of "womb", "wedge" or "face" often appear in connection with the landscape. In her analysis of Mácha's texts, Daniela Hodrová pointed out that they are an expression of a psychic experience that corresponds to what is often referred to in transpersonal psychology as holistic consciousness. The author illustrated this on the theme of love, which in Mácha's work is often heightened into a metaphysical feeling that permeates the entire landscape and nature and becomes "metaphorical name for the internal energy of the universe". In his interpretation of one of Mách's text fragments with the physical image of the earth as a face, the visual artist Miloš Šejn recently pointed out its direct connection with geomantic thinking. He writes about Mách "touching the essence of things and places, stones, rocks, trees and vegetation, hills, valleys and waters with their own psyche".
Šejn's own artistic creation, which is intrinsically related to the earth and action art of the 1960s and 1970s, is intrinsically linked to wandering. He too often creates his works directly in specific places in the landscape from its materials (clay, stones, plants, water), processes and elements. His concept of creation as a "journey", "wandering", has the nature of a kind of dreamlike setting of consciousness, when the body, mind and landscape are in a permanent state of mutual emotional exchange, from which the language of the artwork is gradually born. In the accompanying text for the event "Touch of the Grass" (Vědomé snění, 1967), the author noted: "I touched the grass and became everything – I saw everything, I felt everything, and I was felt by everything."This experience of deep union with nature corresponds to the experience of psychophysical transformation, known, for example, in Zen as "satori."
Mutual love
"...earth,... I live with you, in you, on you, I feel with you and in you, as you in me..."
Karel Hynek Mácha / "The Return"
The activities of Cuban performer and sculptor Anna Mendieta, American sculptor Charles Simonds, and Slovenian sculptor and geomantic artist Marko Pogačnik also stemmed from the creative ferment of 1960s art in the areas of action, earth, and conceptual art. Their work is characterized by a similar effort to express other forms of culture, free from our exclusive anthropocentric demands. Mendieta's bodily earth sculptures, in which she repeatedly let her own body sink, merge, ritually bathe, dissolve, and transform in the earth, are an expression of her "thirst for being," for finding a deeper, authentic personal identity, stemming from an earlier experience of abandonment and solitude. It is a desire for a rejuvenating fusion with Mother Earth, a desire "to re-consecrate the body,…to restore its meaning as a miracle" (Donald Kuspit) and thus restore its value, which it lost in the twentieth century by its reduction to a mere functional mechanism or an object of sexual desire. Mendieta's deeply personal poetic statement today becomes a powerful metaphor for the sought-after new story, telling of the current transformation of our relationship to the Earth.
We also read a similar urgency in the works of Charles Simonds. In his performance "Birth" (1970), he portrayed the story of the mythical beginning of human life, born from the mud of the earth; he expressed his conviction in the fateful unity of human existence with the existence of the Earth. In the work "Landscape - Body - Dwelling" (1971), he again immersed himself naked in a mass of clay, transforming it by modeling it directly on his body into a landscape and a city. This work became the starting point for all of Simonds' other work, based on the creation of a fictional story of the nomadic nation of "Little people" in the form of numerous miniature models of mythical landscapes with cult buildings and dwellings, which are literally born from the body of an anthropomorphized seething landscape. They are often evocations of the order of human life in relation to those original animistic cosmogonies.
From the beginning of his work (the OHO group), Marko Pogačnik's efforts were directed towards discovering other modes of perceiving the world, free from human projections. In 1971, he and his friends founded a rural commune in Šempas, Slovenia, where they tried to combine art with everyday work in the project of the so-called "art of life". In conscious and loving communication with nature, his feelings gradually began to open up to ordinary human perception the multidimensional dimensions of reality unknown. He began to discover the landscape and the Earth as a living whole ("being"), permeated with various levels and qualities of consciousness. In this context, he realized how this "other world", which shapes and maintains the character and appearance of our external manifested material world, is connected to human life and influenced by its activities; therefore, he focused on developing alternative methods of landscape therapy and treatment, on conscious communication with the soul of the Earth.
Pogačnik's lithopuncture projects, which he implemented in a number of Western European countries, became the most famous: based on the examination of energy flows in the "acupuncture" pathways and foci ("chakras") of the landscape body, he places sculpturally shaped stone steles with carved relief signs - cosmograms - at certain points. These sculptures are reminiscent of megalithic stone menhirs, and their function is similar: to release, support or eventually restore blocked energy flow.
Pogačnik's perception of the landscape is a deep psycho-somatic knowledge, which usually has the character of an identifying feeling of her psyche. In the book School of Geomancy describes his unforgettable encounter with the “soul” of the Swiss region called Seeland. He calls it a “goddess.” He suggests that it is a being that cannot be precisely localized in the landscape, but that permeates it evenly and appears to be the embodiment of the spiritual and mental quality of a certain landscape space. He describes his connection with the soul of Seeland as a unification on the level of consciousness, emotion and force energies, making it possible for him to fully experience the body of this landscape in his own body. He writes that after this experience he was left with “a deep sense of connection with this region, which can best be described as mutual love." Elsewhere, he characterizes the female body as a fractal of the body of the landscape goddess, and her body as a fractal of the planetary body of Gaia.
The imagination of the human body as landscape and landscape as body seems to be not just a metaphor, but a testimony to the integral living, psychophysical nature of the world, inhabited by infinite consciousness. The renewal of our relationship to the Earth, related to that geomantic sensitivity, therefore appears in this respect as a prerequisite for a deeper awakening of our authentic spirituality. The fact that in the last fifteen years similar ideas and visions have become the subject of new scientific theories (Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonances, James Lovelock's theory of Gaia, Gregory Bateson's ecology of mind, or Stanislav Grof's theory of holotropic consciousness) and the fact that biologists, anthropologists, psychologists and ecologists are beginning to significantly influence the shape of contemporary philosophy and cosmology, suggests, in my opinion, that there is a gradual reassessment, if not a reversal, in the further direction of the development of our Western civilization.
Literature:
- Stanislav Grof, Hal Zina Bennett, Holotropic Mind.Harper San Francisco 1992.
- Hagia Chora, Zeitschrift für Geomantie. C. 8, Spring 2001.
- Daniela Hodrová, Places with secrets (Mách's mysterious space). KLP – Koniash Latin Press, 1994.
- Donald Kuspit, "Ana Mendieta, Autonomous Body." In: Ana Mendieta (cat. exhibit. Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, 24.7.–13.10.1996), Funació Antoni Tápies, Barcelona, 1996.
- James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, Bantam Books, New York 1990.
- Karel Hynek Macha, Prose, notebooks, diaries – work II.. Czechoslovak writer, Prague 1986.
- John Michell, The Earth Spirit / Its ways, shrines and mysteries. Crossroad, New York, 1975.
- OHO / retrospective (cat. exh. Moderna galerija Ljubljana, 1.2. – 13.3. 1994; Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz – 18.8. – 18.9. 1994), Ljubljana 1994.
- Marko Pogacnik, Geomancy School. Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf., Munich 1996.
- Marko Pogacnik, Earth systems and Christ power. Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf., Munich 1998.
- Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature.Rider 1991.
- Charles Simonds (cat. ex. Center Cultural de la Fundació "la Caixa", Barcelona, 25.4.-5.6.1994), Fundacia "la Caixa", Barcelona, 1994.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walk"Special edition...", Brno, 1995.
- Miloš Šejn, "The Song of Paradise". In: The face of our country / landscape of home – The spiritual dimension of the landscape (3); proceedings of the conference on landscape, Prague Castle and Průhonice, 21-23. 2. 2001, pp. 26 – 30.