Earth Alchemy: Aligning Your Home with Nature's Energies

By Anne Parker and Dominique Susani

Exploring a European tradition formerly considered a lost art, this accessible guide offers day-to-day applications of earth-energy work. From the simple act of bed placement to choosing the location of a home, practical tools are offered for making living and working spaces healthier. Encouraging realignment with the natural earth patterns and influences on both personal and planetary levels, this exploration delves into work with trees, alignment of stones, and the value of sacred sites. Geomancers, feng shui enthusiasts, and those simply looking for more health and harmony in their lives will benefit from the hands-on, practical tools for building stable, flourishing relationships within daily environments and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781844093991

Anne Parker

Anne Z. Parker teaches classes in environmental studies and environmental leadership at Naropa University, and she consults and teaches in the European tradition of the Master Builders in her community. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant for her work on traditional agriculture in Bhutan, Nepal, and India. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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This book is dedicated to Henry Quiquandon, the father of geobiology, and Raymond Montercy, the last European magister odo (specialist of measurement). Each man, in his own way, has revived the knowledge of the master builders and the ancient cultures of Europe. May this knowledge contribute to the harmony and rebalancing of the human relationship with Earth and all life.

Special thanks to our friends Doug Dupler, Elyn Aviva, and Gary White, who kindly gave advice on the presentation of this material and to Nicolas Susani for his clairvoyance and participation in this project. Great gratitude to the guardian angels of the book project: Karen Jarldane of the Boulder Centre for Master Builders and Sophia Fairchild, executive editor of Soul Wings® Press. Sophia also contributed to the choice of the book title. Our colleagues at Findhorn Press, Sabine Weeke and Thierry Bogliolo, as well as editor Nicky Leach, have been an absolute delight to work with; we are grateful for their vision and support of this work.

Preface

In the 1970s, I lived in the central desert of Australia, in an Aboriginal community, where I worked as a community development officer. Out there, in the red dust and vast spaces, I was living in the Aboriginal world— a world governed by the Dreamtime and the indigenous people’s great mastery of the living earth and its ways, a knowledge that is embedded in what are known as the Aboriginal songlines.

Songlines, also called Dreaming tracks by Australian Aboriginal peoples, are paths across the land that mark the route followed by creator-beings during the Dreaming. With this knowledge a person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the songs, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena. By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, they can navigate vast distances. In essence this is an embodied way of internalizing a map of the entire landscape in which they live. I suspect that the songs are not mere mnemonic devices, but that they mirror the natural harmonics of the land. They may also follow natural energy patterns or lines of the land as well, although this has not been specifically documented.

I was deeply moved to discover that the songlines are not mere dry accounts of long-lost practices from anthropological texts; they are living spiritual practices held by present-day Aboriginal people carried out though the telling of legends, enactment of ceremonies, singing of songs and walking of the lines. Through their knowledge of the songlines, my Aboriginal friends had an intimate, reciprocal relationship with their land that led them to respect and feel a responsibility to care for their places. I admired them and longed to have such a living practice of relationship to the earth in my lineage and in my modern world back home in the United States. At that time it seemed that no such thing existed, and even if it had, it must certainly have been irretrievably lost.

Years later, an email popped up in my inbox one day, mentioning a training in my town by a Frenchman who was said to know about the European tradition of earth energies. I would have hit the delete button, thinking that sounded flakey but for the fact that the friend who had sent it to me is a trained scientist with a Ph.D. I thought, If she is recommending this, I might as well take a look.

Not long afterward, I found myself at this training. As I walked in I was thinking, What was I thinking? This could all be quite bogus. But my fellow students reassured me. They included high school geometry teachers, university professors, people from the School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, trained Feng Shui experts, and other plausible people.

Relieved to be in such a reasonable group, I settled down to listen to our lecturer, Dominique Susani. Dominique launched into his topic with a wonderful mixture of humor, logic, and practical exercises. Within 15 minutes, I had what I later described to friends as a smile hanging off my face about 40 miles long. I felt ecstatic to find that I was from a living lineage of relationship to the earth and that a few people from my European heritage still understood the old ways; in fact, they were developing and testing them, so that they could once more take their place in our cultural discourse.

At one point, we stepped outside to try our hands at what, for me, was my first dowsing experience. I felt scrambled, strange, and irreversibly altered by that first wobbly experience. The closest metaphor I can offer is that it was as if I had hooked up my ponytail to the living fabric of life, like the character Jake being trained in the fictional Na’vi community in the movie Avatar. It is not that I had not devoted myself to caring for the earth throughout my entire adult career, that I had not deeply loved the lands I have lived in, nor been unaware of the insights of the traditional peoples I have studied with and learned from, nor even lack profound spiritual experience; it was that something of a new order had opened in me. Since that first experience I have studied with Dominique in the European tradition, and this book is the fruit of that learning and collaboration. The European tradition focuses on the natural energies within the land, the patterns and lines, and how they affect the human body, among other ways of attending to our profound relationship with the earth and the cosmos.

Dominique, his teachers, and colleagues have collected what is known about earth energies and sacred geometry in Europe and are reviving them as a living practice. This information comes from a rural tradition that has kept some of it intact and in use, modern research that is measuring the ancient sites once again, direct body experience, sacred stones, and the land. This knowledge was suppressed and lost over the last 1,700 years in Europe. The resulting disconnected relationship with the earth then spread to the colonies and the New World, with sad and destructive results for indigenous peoples who had maintained their reciprocal relationship with land and life.

The revival of this European wisdom tradition comes at a time when we desperately need to repair and recover a collective sense of the reciprocal relationship with land that engenders respect and responsibility in caring for our places. It is an honor to share it with you.

—Anne Z. Parker, Ph.D.

Boulder, Colorado, 2011

Chapter 1

Introduction to the Art of the Master Builders

We humans are deeply sensitive to the energies of the earth and the cosmos. When circumstances are aligned or harmonious we feel them and are affected by them. Our ancestors had deep and abiding reverence for natural places and sacred sites that had been unchanged by human activity and understood their profound energetic and healing qualities.

In ancient cultures, as today in indigenous traditions, buildings, too, were built with this sense of harmony with life. Centuries, even millennia, following their construction, a megalithic circle, an ancient temple, or an early church generates a feeling of awe and inspiration that somehow eludes us in modern buildings. This book welcomes you to learn and remember this ancient art.

All cultures have a long history of knowing how to build in harmony with the environment. In Europe—the specific tradition we will be addressing in this book—the knowledge and artistry of master builders were responsible for shaping great public buildings, such as cathedrals, over millennia. People working in the European tradition sought to connect Heaven and Earth by observing sacred principles that joined earth energies with the celestial alignments of the sun, moon, and stars. The understanding about how to work with earth energies also found its expression in personal dwellings and communal structures, where it was seen as a way of aligning humans, in both daily life and at sacred sites, with the living earth. Awareness of their knowledge of the celestial alignments has resurfaced through recent work in the field of archeoastronomy that has revealed the incredible knowledge of astronomy and the land in the megalithic period in Europe (and around the world). The construction of megaliths, great stone structures including standing stones, stone circles, dolmen and other great monuments took place in Europe primarily during the Neolithic period, but actually extended from the late Mesolithic period through the Neolithic and continuing in to the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, thus covering a time span of some 4000+ years from at least 5500 BCE (BC) to 1200 BCE (BC) in western Europe.

From what remains of the work of early master builders, we sense not simply a technology or set of skills but a living practice of alignment with the living earth and cosmos—steeped in inspiration from and connection with all life. This lineage extends over a long period of time, from the ancients who built the megaliths, through later time periods that included Celtic cultures and Druidic expressions, up until the period of the building of the Gothic cathedrals in the medieval period. The tradition of the master builders was thus practiced for thousands of years in Europe until it was suppressed in the 16th century. It was finally completely lost to general public discourse in the 18th and 19th centuries, during the Industrial Revolution.

In writing this book we, the authors,