1 oretnA fo krA 2 Ark of Antero, America’s Sacred Landscape Peter Champoux 52 pages, 25 illustrations www.geometryofplace.com/antero.pdf [email protected] Happy Birthday, Matthew AdobeAcrobat/view/page display/two-up background images from internet, all illustrations by Peter Champoux Ark of Antero 3 lisT of illusTrATions: The Blader of the Fish The Ark of Antero TAble of ConTenTs: The Vessel Touched by the Hand of God The Sacred Landscape Senñora de Guadalupe America’s Sacred Landscape From Ley Lines to Lei Lines Geology and Hydrology of Spirit Kachina Lei Mother of the World Beijing Lei Spider-Woman’s Loom Gaia’s Living Matrix Circle to Center EarthRings of North America Spinning Water into Life Rings that Spin Remembering the Circle Geomagnetic Spin Kokopelli’s Bullroarer Kokopelli @ Center Conclusions The Spindle of the World– Shiprock The Hopi Elders Speak Hopi-Navajo EarthRing The Land of Flowers The Earth Mother Prayer for the Universel Two Horn Society Purification Breaths Imaging the Mother EarthRing dimensions EarthRing Artifacts Ode to the Water Dowser EarthRings-EarthShperes Earth Stone Reader Water’s Nebula Earth Stone Reader FOUR CORNER EarthRing Hopi Maps of America’s Sacred Landscape oretnA fo krA 4 The SAcred LAndScApe The idea of a ‘sacred landscape’ is foundational for cultures worldwide. A sacred landscape is a seed of consciousness in both earth and mind that roots a People to the land with a sense of holiness and mutual love of place. Many world heritage sites are landscapes treasured as such for their spiritual bounty. Sacred landscapes are places of collective spiritual identity. They are a place apart welcoming spirit to take rest in the Land, a common ground for the spirits of the people. Japan’s Mount Fuji, Arabia’s Mecca, India’s Ganges, Tibet’s Mount Kailash, and America’s sacred lands tend to be blood-soaked or defused into nonexistence in an ego-centric egalitarian esthetic. Where is North America’s Shangri-La? Its focus? Its center? Its moral compass? The American psyche yearns for a mythic land. A place where the restless American spirit can call home—the seat of its soul. North America is a living land the people called “turtle island,” partly because it looks like a turtle. It is also named after the turtle creation story. North America can easily be seen as this great turtle, just as clouds and flowers give metaphor and geometry to summer days, telling us stories of becoming, giving the heart wonder. Sacred landscapes are Creation’s gift drawing us into the wonder of the heart. Yes, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Black Hills are each sacred landscapes. But in the American vernacular: sacred plus land equals the Native peoples of the Four Corner region, in total. Ask any native American and they’ll say that all is sacred. And it is. Yet each tribe had its own special place of ‘manitou’ reserved for higher power. Where is the American tribe’s center of higher power? If North America is a living landscape with its Great Lake lungs and Mississippi blood, where is the seat of its soul. The Lakota appreciate the Black Hills as the heart of the world, whereas the Hopi see their Mesas as its heart. Surely given its red rock, water and native people Colorado Plateau’s ‘four corners’ region can be seen as the heart, with the Colorado River its main artery. The seat of the soul in all humans remains a mystery, never mind America’s soul. It is generally accepted in native circles that an animal’s soul is seated in the liver. Its warm life force is shared at the kill by hunters in gratitude with All That Is. While our soul may seat in our liver at birth, where it drives the will, the soul moves to the heart with acts of spiritual merit. Ark of Antero 5 SACRED GEOMETRY 2 H O O 104.5º Vesica Piscis H H phi Ratio1:1.618... water spirit matter Sky 3 Earth 2 5 Moon 3-5-8-13-21-34-55-89 51.51˚ Earth Blanca Peak Ute Mt. San Luis Valley, Mt Antero oretnA fo krA 6 The search for this ‘sacred landscape’ is a search for the soul of America. After a stumble by Bourbon Street, a dance with Gene in the rain down Broadway, and a rumble thru Sturgis to the ‘Buffalo Chip,’ this essay offers a look at America through the lens of a sacred landscape in which spirit and matter come into focus in Colorado’s San Luis Valley as the Ark of Antero. It sees it as a sacred American landscape, the seat of its soul. AmericA’S SAcred LAndScApe The San Luis Valley of south central Colorado is sacred land, a place blessed with beauty and unseen power. In 1719 the Spanish explorer Antonio Valverde y Cosio was so inspired by the mountains bordering the valley’s east side he named them Sangre de Cristo or “blood of Christ.” Geometry is ever-present in nature, but rarely do the tectonic forces that shape our world create such perfect geometry as it does in the shape of this valley. Seen from space, the San Luis Valley resembles cupped hands, a mouth or a Hopi bullroarer. The shape made by two intersecting circles, in the terms of sacred geometry, is a vesica piscis, or vessel of the fish, it is not unlike the eye logo of CBS. Thought of classically as the intersection of spirit and matter, this “vessel of the fish” is often found in religious art and architecture. We can see the vesica piscis in the pointed arch of gothic cathedral. Marked by the arc of the Sangra de Christo mountains, this unique configuration of geography is a naturally-occurring sacred landscape, which is drawn from Man and nature’s meta-patterns revealing this ‘ark’ of a high mountain valley. The two vertices of the valley’s vesica piscis are Mount Antero and Ute Mountain, New Mexico, which is the center axis of this Ark of Antero. Why Antero? Why an Ark? In classical sacred geometry (nature’s geometry) the vesica piscis implied equilateral triangles that unite to form a Star of David which heralds “as above, so below” within the context of spirit and matter. Varying from this equal-sided triangle, the valley’s inner triangles are more Ark of Antero 7 F r ASarnkL uoisf VAanlletyero aquamarine ont R K ata h din angeK u c h u m a a – Mt Mt Center K a c hin a L ei Blanca Peak Alamosa cottonwood F O U R Shiprock Armature the hands CORN E RB E eiji a n rth g L R ei A in -B g o Ute Mt land of the sun m b n di geometryofplace.com/antataero Front Range uchumaa–Mt K 104.5º LA–NYC K Mt Beijing San Luis Valley. Colorado Four Corner Earth Ring Kachina Armature A-Bo 36º30’ mb oretnA fo krA 8 elongated. One triangle is marked by mountains, the other triangle mirrored to the south is drawn by water features oriented toward Mexico City, and down the Rio Grande Valley . As a temple of nature, the San Luis Valley is alive with the geometry of the water contained in its Alamosa Basin Aquifer, located beneath its valley floor. The sacred landscape is a place imbued with the metaphors of life; a place where the ‘seven sacred directions’ come together in nature. It is a place where the year’s processions are mark by distant mountains ; a place where clean healing water bubbles into your hands, a place where the confluence of Creation comes to center. A place where we can feel God’s presence. Peru’s Machu Picchu is one such place, as is Colorado’s south-central San Luis Valley, another nature-carved sacred landscape. In the lower San Luis Valley, a pregnant condition is suggested as with hands pressing up on the valley floor in Costilla County, Colorado. Anthropomorphic shapes like ‘the hands,’ teeth, blood, mouth, vagina, and eye are all classical indicators of the presence of spirit in the land. Ritual caves worldwide have examples of ‘hand’ petroglyphs that mark its location as holy. Like the hand of the Creator, the hand forms that comprise the San Luis Hills mark this valley as a holy land. The obvious “talk to the hand” metaphor comes to mind, but a common gesture of an open hand on the land welcomes relationships on many levels. The ratio phi (also called the God number) is found in all life and it is easily seen in the digits of the hands and the proportions of beautiful face. Cultures that endured a thousand years used this ratio in their building designs in order to grow with nature. Where the phi proportion is present, life is made vital. It is also considered to be marked by God. Alamosa, Colorado is located at the phi divide of the Antero–Ute center axis. It is the population center for San Luis Valley, its greatest concentration of life. (But more on this later, after a little background information.) Ark of Antero 9 104.5º Lei ei L Kachina San Luis Valley, Colorado SanJUauTnE RM.T MT ANTERO MT ANTERO ANTERO AQUAMARINE 100 miles Alamosa Basin Aquifer Alamosa UTE MT UTE MT oretnA fo krA 10 GeoLoGy And hydroLoGy of SpiriT In ancient Greece, the Oracle of Delphi was placed above a fault line in the Earth in order to increase the Sybil’s intuition. This crack in the earth determined this temple site should be high on a mountainside of sacred landscape that is full of myth and mystery. When rock is put under pressure, it increases its piezoelectric charge. It is precisely at fault lines where this rock current is channeled through vertical paths of least resistance, from the furnaces of the Earth’s core, reaching to feet wiggling in hot spring waters. San Luis Valley’s bedrock granite gneiss has series of vertical fracture faults. These were made from a titan struggle against ‘block-faulted’ Sangra de Cristo Mountains that allow deep, primary, earth energies a direct conduit to the surface along with the primary waters of the Alamosa Basin Aquifer. Crestone, Colorado’s many sybils, as in Delphi, gain second sight from vapors that rise up Sangra’s arteries, thereby filling the valley’s aquifer chalice with those deep abiding powers of a mythic sacred landscape. Layers of alluvium, volcanic flow, and limestone atop its vertical fractured bedrock, the valley’s layer-cake aquifer forms a pool for consciousness at rest. Like many World Heritage sacred sites the San Luis Valley is under-laid with ‘living rock,’ the stone of culture—limestone the lithic remains of life. A kind of planet-neural ganglia, limestone is found beneath sacred landscapes worldwide: the Holy Land, Rome, the south of England and the Yucatan of Mexico. A beautiful thing about sand, limestone, and volcanic pumice—they naturally purify water. It is a quality so appreciated that it makes a landscape sacred. Born from exploding suns, water is the animating force of nature. Water is synonymous with life and spirit. It enlivens people, place, and purpose. The ‘healing spring’ (especially hot springs) mark sacred landscapes without exception. Alamosa’s aquifer makes the desert bloom and soothes farmers bones in its hot springs. The geometry of the vesica piscis is often associated with water mimicking its flow patterns in everything it touches—from fish to rock. Geometry in nature is simply water’s effect on everything in nature; people, erosion, and growth patterns, the clouds. It is in a sacred landscape where spirit and matter align with Source. In sacred landscape an-cestral and post-cestral memories are synapsed via limestone’s earth-mind. A sacred landscape retunes us to our soul’s truth that is held in place memories. Ark of Antero