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Recent archeological finds in rural, westernmost England have provided evidence that pagan rituals very much like many shamanic rituals performed across the globe have been practiced in the area for over six thousand years. The finds were reported in the magazine Archeology. The researcher, archeologist Jacqui Wood, found the remains of ritual charm pits, as well as a remarkable spring-fed pool, that had been lined in white quartz near her home in Saveock Water, a rural hamlet in Cornwall.
One of the charm pits were found in a dig in an even older mesolithic site dating from about 8,500 years ago. The pit was a hole dug down into the much older site's clay floor. The hole was lined with a swan skin with its feathers intact and facing inwards. The results produced a cavity in the ground lined in feathers. On top of the swan skin were a pile of pebbles from a coastal region fifteen miles away and claws from several birds. Another pit she found during a later dig was similarly lined with a swan skin but also held the remains of fifty five eggs that held nearly full-term chicks. The remains of magpies surrounded these eggs.
As of the 2008 digging season, Wood and her team have unearthed 35 of these ritual pits. She postulates that such pits were actually offerings to the Goddess petitioning her to bless a woman with a child. Similar rituals were carried out in Ireland to Saint Bride/Bridget who is the Christianized version of the older, pagan mother Goddess.
The spring-fed pool also contained offerings. Wood found 128 textile scraps, six medieval pins, heather branches, fingernail clippings, hair and part of a cauldron among other finds. It appears this particular pool was used for ritual from approximately 4,000 BC until the seventeenth century. Theories suggest that the pool was a place to offer objects to bring the bearer good luck. If this is indeed the case, it would suggest that the ancient people of Europe practiced a spiritual tradition that has parallels with many shamanic cultures.
For instance, the despacho ritual from the South American Andes requires a bundle of objects and food be either buried or burned to honor the Earth (Pachamama) and in so doing, receive her blessings. In an echo of the Corwall pit's nearly hatched eggs, the Q'ero of Peru use llama fetuses in their despachos to represent those dreams and projects that haven't yet come to fruition -- thereby encouraging fertility. Similar shamanic rituals of burying objects or placing them in sacred pools or in moving water to petition the spirits are found across the globe from Asia to Africa.
Research such as Wood's provides a growing body of evidence that many of our ancestors thought and worshiped in similar ways. They understood that Nature was either itself a Divine entity, or provided a portal for human beings to access the Divine realms.
For more about the Saveock Water digs and the work of Jacqui Wood, go to: http://www.archaeologyonline.org/index.html.
Source: Archeology, http://www.archaeology.org/0811/etc/witches.html.
Preliminary Evidence from the Peace Intention Experiment
Lynne McTaggart author of The Intention Experiment recently reported the first extraordinary scientific results of the Peace Intention Experiment held during a week last Fall.
Roger Nelson, architect of Global Consciousness Project (GCP) and a member of their scientific team, analyzed the effects of the Peace Intention Experiment on the Random Event Generators (REG) he continuously runs all over the world.
An REG is built to examine the effect of mind on machine, performing the electronic, twenty-first century equivalent of a toss of a coin. The output of these machines, (the computerized equivalent of heads or tails) is controlled by a randomly alternating frequency of positive and negative pulses. Because their activity is utterly random, they produce "heads" and "tails" each roughly 50 per cent of the time, according to the laws of probability.
Nelson has organized a centralized computer program, so that REGs located in 50 places around the globe. They run continuously and pour their stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub through the Internet.
Periodically, Nelson and his colleagues study these outpourings and compare them with the biggest breaking news stories, attempting to root out any sort of statistical connection. Standardized methods and analysis revealed any demonstration of order - a moment when the machine output displayed less randomness than usual - and whether the time that it had been generated corresponded with that of a major world event. Whenever people reacted with great joy or horror to a major event, the machines seem to react as well. Furthermore, the degree of "order" in the machine's output seemed to match the emotional intensity of the event, particularly those that had been tragic: the greater the horror, the greater the order.
During the Peace Intention Experiment, several analyses revealed that REG machines were affected within a 40-minute window of meditations during the eight days of the Peace Intention Experiment, and that these changes were similar to those that occurred during moments of mass meditation in areas attempting to lower violence.
When analyzed over the entire week, Nelson and his colleagues found a consistent daily pattern. Increases in order of the REG output were similar to the changes specified in the experiment protocol, during the 20-minutes of preparation, or "Powering Up," of viewing the Sri Lanka target and then of the 10-minutes of actually sending intention. Although the machines demonstrated a change during the Powering Up stage, when participants were getting ready to participate, the effect was most striking during the actual 10-minutes of the experiment.
"In particular, the steep negative slope of the data during the 10-minutes meditation looks like that seen in our examination of data during Transcendental Meditation (TM) gatherings of advanced meditators," writes Dr. Nelson. "These 'social calming' experiments served as one of the models for the Peace Intention Experiment." The Peace Intention Experiment was sparked by the numerous TM studies showing that when a critical mass of meditators regularly meditate in an area, the crime rate or severity of an armed conflict goes down.
But the TM studies simply examine the effect of "attention" and calming practices like meditation. The Peace Intention Experiment took the work one step further by examining what happens when a large group sends a highly specific intention to make a change.
Why this result is so important is that it showed an effect every day of the study and demonstrated a surge of change just during the 10- minute window of the actual experiment, Nelson said that the experiment shows "an important demonstration of the effect of consciousness and sensitivity of the Global Consciousness Project network at an unexpected level of detail."
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Source: www.theintentionexperiment.com.
Bat Disease Fungus Identified
Notes From the Biosphere in the June issue of Spirit Living, reported that the bats of the Northeastern United States were in serious trouble. A recent update written by Henry Fountain in The New York Times offers us more clues.
David S. Blehert of the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin and colleagues identified a fungus linked to white-nose syndrome, a condition that has affected bats in recent winters in upstate New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. The fungus, newly described, is unusual in that it grows in the cold, dotting areas of the bat’s skin with white strands. It penetrates the skin through hair follicles and sweat glands and may cause the bats to starve while they are hibernating, the researchers said.
“We do have good circumstantial evidence that this could be the primary pathogen”causing the deaths of large percentages of populations of little browns and other bats in caves in the region, Dr. Blehert said. The die-offs are one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States.
It had been thought that the fungus was a secondary symptom of whatever was killing the animals — a virus or a toxin like an environmental contaminant. But the fact that the identical organism was found in bats from several caves “kind of rules out the possibility that there are all kinds of fungi out there and that opportunistically they are infecting the animals,” said Alan C. Hicks of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, a co-author of a paper on the fungus published online by the journal, Science.
Dr. Blehert said that the infection could have led to starvation because of the way bats hibernate — they cycle through two-week stages of deep torpor interrupted by brief wakeful periods. The fungal infection may make the bats wake up more often, and since each period of wakefulness uses up vast stores of fat, the bats may deplete their energy reserves much sooner than normal.
More research is needed to determine how to combat the die-offs, but one thing is clear, Dr. Blehert said — just spraying a cave with fungicide could do more harm than good. “Wiping out all the fungal organisms in a cave probably would be a bad idea,” he said.
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Source: The New York Times, www.nytimes.com.
The changes we have made on our planet are creating new diseases and spreading old ones into new, vulnerable areas. Please make every effort to reduce your carbon footprint and eliminate your use of chemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Make 2009 your greenest year ever! Please also donate what you can to Bat Conservation International's efforts to fund much needed research to help save the bats: http://www.batcon.org/index.php/donations/make-a-donation.html
- Editors.
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Do you have news that would be right for Notes From The Biosphere? Let us know at: editors@spiritliving.org.
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