Geomantica 95
January 2026
The magazine of Earth harmony, via dowsing, geomancy, esoteric gardening & agriculture,
and eco-sensitive living, since 1998. Edited by Alanna Moore.
Geo 95 Contents
Editorial and letter
News
* Geomantica workshops in Ireland, Italy & UK are HERE.
(It’s the last chance to attend such, as Alanna is moving back to Australia later this year.)
* Southern Spring workshop programme in Malaysia + Australasia is HERE.
* News from Indigenous Australia
Ancient Aboriginal cosmology; ‘First Contact’ Kimberley people; This Place – Discover the stories behind the names; Dingo totem.
* Energy and Society today
Combatting SAD, the Winter Blues, with light power; Electro-culture technique in Australia; Our king, our priest, our feudal lord – how AI is taking us back to the dark ages.
* Ancient History
Humans made fire 350,000 years earlier than thought, UK discovery; Linguists start compiling first ever complete dictionary of the ancient Celtic language.
* Environment
Otter and fox, night life in the city; Vegan diet massively cuts environmental damage; Sacred springs in Tuscany, Italy; 2025’s AI boom caused huge CO2 emissions and use of water; AI, pollution and climate; Are you an animal or plant lover?
Feature Articles –
Ireland is the heart centre for the world
by Alanna Moore January 2026.
Thoughts on the Spirit of Geography
By Yolande Hyde, December 2025.
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G95 Editorial
Dear Folks,
Welcome to the 95th edition of Geomantica magazine. Coming to you from Ireland, but not for much longer, because I am moving back to Australia permanently this October. No more European workshops after then.
Enjoy the news links and the feature articles.
All contributions to the next edition in late March are most welcome!
Thanks to contributors this issue.
Happy reading!
Your editor,
Alanna Moore
Geo 95 Letter
Hello Alanna,
I have another beautiful message for you regarding the operation of my tower. It turns out that the energy it emits destroys chemtrails. They are sprayed from planes, and the energy from the tower eliminates them. They disappear, dissipate before reaching the ground. I am happy that I managed to build such a powerful device showing what is hidden in the forces of nature.
Leszek Olszewski
Geo 95 News
News from indigenous Australia –
* Ancient Aboriginal cosmology
How Wiradjuri constellations like the Great Celestial Emu make us look at the sky in a different way, from –
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-02/the-art-of-space-indigenous-constellations/106046350
* ‘First Contact’ Kimberley people
It’s a steamy Wet Season morning when Bugurra rummages through her bedroom wardrobe trying to find the photo album. “I was 11 years old when the photos were taken,” she explains. “I was with my family when we first saw them [white people]. We were shocked.”
Bugurra’s childhood was spent moving rhythmically around Juwaliny country in the remote inland desert of northern Western Australia. Isolation had buffered her family from the cataclysmic change that had swept the continent throughout the century prior. While the rest of Australia listened to the Beatles, debated the Vietnam War, and watched rockets take off into space, the desert clans slept under the stars and navigated by the sky. Bugurra says they knew every waterhole and rocky outcrop for hundreds of kilometres. “We walked everywhere, go hunting everywhere … we’d sleep, make fire,” Bugurra explains. “We used to have rainy days in the cave.”
But by 1967, things were starting to change. Unfamiliar tracks appeared on the landscape; sometimes a large glinting object rumbled in the sky. Then came the day when the strange pale people approached. “They came in a Toyota,” she says. “I saw him, a white person, walk over with shirts and trousers. My sister ran and hid in the bush.”
Eventually the photo that recorded this first contact event was found and it’s wonderful to see Bugurra and her family as they were naturally accustomed to be, although clothing was quickly thrust upon them. Impressive hairstyles too!
* This Place – Discover the stories behind the names
From towns and rivers to mountains and landmarks, many places across Australia carry names from First Nations languages. This Place explores the stories behind these names, offering insight into the deep cultural and historical connections to Country. This Place project is a partnership between ABC News and First Languages Australia, with ABC producers working with language custodians to record a place name story the community want to share.
From ABC (Australia): https://www.abc.net.au/education/this-place/102566508
* Dingo management should be ‘non-lethal’, traditional owners say
Jirrbal woman Sonya Takau says saving dingoes and advocating for the often-maligned apex predator has become her life’s priority — even though it means she’s often breaking the law.
The dingo is the totem of the men in Ms Takau’s family, and the black-and-tan rainforest dingo is part of her creation story.
“They are family and we have to protect and care for these animals,” Ms Takau said.
“We strongly believe that when we die, we go back into the being of our totems or where our language name comes from.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-28/non-lethal-dingo-management-push-by-traditional-owners/105807306
Energy and society today
* Combatting SAD, the Winter Blues, with light power
The journalist relates how “Sick of losing months of my life to the gloom every winter, one year I decided to do a deep dive into the science of SAD and even spoke to a serious-faced Finnish scientist about it for a feature I was writing. His advice? Sit yourself down in front of a light box emitting 10,000 lux, for up to an hour, at least five times a week. Eight out of 10 people will have good results with this, the Finn explained, and you should start a couple of weeks before the symptoms usually kick in. And do it in the morning.”
* Electro-culture technique in Australia
A Cairns biotech startup is combining traditional Indigenous knowledge of “rainmaking” and modern science to optimise plant and fungi growth. The company Rainstick is using electrical fields to treat seeds to improve germination and productivity. Its technique is based on a tradition of the Maiawali people of central west Queensland, who used a chuggera – lightning stick – to direct thunderstorm activity.
* Our king, our priest, our feudal lord – how AI is taking us back to the dark ages
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously defined the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Immaturity, he wrote, “is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another”. For centuries, that “other” directing human thought and life was often the priest, the monarch, or the feudal lord – the ones claiming to act as God’s voice on Earth. In trying to understand natural phenomena – why volcanoes erupt, why the seasons change – humans looked to God for answers. In shaping the social world, from economics to love, religion served as our guide.
Humans, Kant argued, always had the capacity for reason. They just hadn’t always had the confidence to use it. But with the American and later the French Revolution, a new era was dawning: reason would replace faith, and the human mind, unshackled from authority, would become the engine of progress and a more moral world. “Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your own understanding!, Kant urged his contemporaries.
Two and a half centuries later, one may wonder whether we are quietly slipping back into immaturity. An app telling us which road to take is one thing. But artificial intelligence threatens to become our new “other” – a silent authority that guides our thoughts and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won courage to think for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to code.
ChatGPT was launched only three years ago, and already one global survey, published in April, found that 82% of respondents had used AI in the previous six months. Whether deciding to end a relationship or who to vote for, people are turning to machines for advice. According to OpenAI, 73% of user prompts concern non work-related topics. Even more intriguing than our dependence on AI’s judgment in daily life is what happens when we let it speak for us. Writing is now among the most common uses of ChatGPT, second only to practical requests such as DIY or cooking advice. The American author Joan Didion once said: “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.” What happens when we stop writing? Do we stop finding out?
Worryingly, some evidence suggests that the answer might be yes. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor the brain activity of essay writers given access to AI, search engines like Google, or nothing at all. Those who could rely on AI showed the lowest cognitive activity and struggled to accurately quote their work. Perhaps most concerning was that over a couple of months, participants in the AI group became increasingly lazy, copying entire blocks of text in their essays.
The study is small and imperfect, but Kant would have recognised the pattern. “Laziness and cowardice,” he wrote, “are the reasons why so great a proportion of men … remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature.”
Sure, AI’s appeal lies in its convenience. It saves time, spares effort and – crucially – offers a new way to offload responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be explained in part by people preferring to surrender their freedom in exchange for the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a new way of surrendering that burden of having to think and decide for yourself.
From – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/26/ai-dark-ages-enlightenment
Ancient History –
* Humans made fire 350,000 years earlier than previously thought, UK
Humans mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago, almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known, according to a groundbreaking discovery in a field in Suffolk. It is known that humans used natural fire more than 1m years ago, but until now the earliest unambiguous example of humans lighting fires came from a site in northern France dating from 50,000 years ago.
The latest evidence, which includes a patch of scorched earth and fire-cracked hand-axes, makes a compelling case that humans were creating fire far earlier, at a time when brain size was approaching the modern human range and some species were expanding into harsher northern climates, including Britain.
The people who made the fire at the site, in the village of Barnham, Suffolk, are unlikely to have been our own ancestors, as Homo sapiens did not have a sustained presence outside Africa until about 100,000 years ago. Instead, the inhabitants were probably early Neanderthals, based on fossils of around the same age from Swanscombe, Kent and Atapuerca, Spain, which preserve early Neanderthal DNA.
* Linguists start compiling first ever complete dictionary of the ancient Celtic language
More than 1,000 words used as far back as 325BC are to be collected for insight into the past linguistic landscape. The remnants of a language spoken in parts of the UK and Ireland 2,000 years ago are being collected for what is being billed as the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic.
Sources for the dictionary will range from Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of parts of northern Europe to ancient memorial stones. It will include words from about 325BC up to AD500. Dr Simon Rodway, a senior lecturer in the department of Welsh and Celtic studies at Aberystwyth, said it was exciting to be involved in compiling the first dictionary of its kind. He said: “These disparate sources have never before been brought together in a way that offers such an insight into the nature of Celtic languages spoken in these islands at the dawn of the historical period.
Elements of modern languages such as Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton and Cornish have some roots in their ancient Celtic counterparts…. The plan is to produce online and printed versions of the dictionary.
Environment –
* Otter and fox, night life in the city
Hightailing along city streets and raiding ponds, the otters’ revival in Britain. Still rare only 20 years ago, the charismatic animals are in almost every UK river and a conservation success story.
* Vegan diet massively cuts environmental damage, study shows
Detailed analysis finds plant diets lead to 75% less climate-heating emissions, water pollution and land use than meat-rich ones. Eating a vegan diet massively reduces the damage to the environment caused by food production, the most comprehensive analysis to date has concluded. The research showed that vegan diets resulted in 75% less climate-heating emissions, water pollution and land use than diets in which more than 100g of meat a day was eaten. Vegan diets also cut the destruction of wildlife by 66% and water use by 54%, the study found.
The new study analysed the real diets of 55,000 people in the UK. It also used data from 38,000 farms in 119 countries to account for differences in the impact of particular foods that are produced in different ways and places. This significantly strengthens confidence in the conclusions. However, it turned out that what was eaten was far more important in terms of environmental impacts than where and how it was produced. Previous research has shown that even the lowest-impact meat – organic pork – is responsible for eight times more climate damage than the highest-impact plant, oilseed.
The global food system has a huge impact on the planet, emitting a third of the total greenhouse gas emissions driving global heating. It also uses 70% of the world’s freshwater and causes 80% of river and lake pollution. About 75% of the Earth’s land is used by humans, largely for farming, and the destruction of forests is the major cause of the huge losses in biodiversity.
* Sacred springs in Tuscany, Italy
Since she was a child, Martina Canuti has been venturing down the steep hill flanking the Tuscan town of San Casciano dei Bagni, known by residents as “the sacred mountain”, to take a dip in the two ancient hot springs famed for their therapeutic benefits. Little did she know that just a few metres away lay a sanctuary built by the Etruscans in the second century BC, containing a trove of treasures that could now reverse the fortunes of this relatively isolated town of 1,400 inhabitants near Siena.
“We used to gather at the springs for parties too,” said Canuti. “It is odd to think that these treasures were so close by, but then again we were always curious as to why nothing relevant had ever been found. This is an area rich in spas built by the Etruscans and Romans, and plenty of relics had been found in towns nearby, so why not in San Casciano dei Bagni?”
* 2025’s AI boom caused huge CO2 emissions and use of water, research finds
The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed. The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.
The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a company that researches the unintended consequences of digital trends.
“The environmental cost of this is pretty huge in absolute terms,” he said. “At the moment society is paying for these costs, not the tech companies. The question is: is that fair? If they are reaping the benefits of this technology, why should they not be paying some of the costs?”
“Just one of these new ‘hyperscale’ facilities can generate climate emissions equivalent to several international airports. And in the UK alone, there are an estimated 100-200 of them in the planning system,” said Campbell. The IEA has reported that the largest AI-focused datacentres being built today will each consume as much electricity as 2m households with the US accounting for the largest share of datacentre electricity consumption (45%) followed by China (25%) and Europe (15%).
* ‘An unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?
More of the same. Best to avoid AI if you can.
* Are you an animal or plant lover?
In their new paper, author B. Blake Levitt and team point out how man-made radiation is harming our plants and animals and how international standards aren’t addressing the problem. They also point out ways the problem can be addressed.
Levitt said, ‘[i]t is time to recognise non-ionising EMF as a biologically active form of air pollution … and develop rules at the pertinent regulatory agencies to designate “airspace as habitat” so EMF can be regulated like other pollutants. Defining airspace as habitat would provide a legal foundation to assess cumulative EMF impacts as well as mitigate exposures.’
Levitt BB, Lai HC, Manville AM II and Scarato T (2025) Flora and fauna: how nonhuman species interact with natural and man-made EMF at ecosystem levels and public policy recommendations. Front. Public Health 13:1693873. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1693873
Article via EMR Australia, www.emraustralia.com.au
Feature Articles
Ireland – a heart centre for the world
by Alanna Moore January 2026.
Aquarian Age
Astrologers have been telling us about the coming Age of Aquarius for a long time now. While the timing is debated, it certainly feels like we are there, as it’s characterised by rapid technological advancement, intellectual growth, humanitarianism, freedom, innovation and a collective shift towards higher consciousness, community, social justice, and moving away from the individualistic focus of the Piscean Age towards global unity and empathy. Key themes include communication, scientific progress, personal liberation and a call for wisdom and universal love over dogma. There will be rapid, often challenging, societal shifts that demand mental flexibility and adaptability. This sounds like now alright.
Key characteristics and themes of the Aquarian Age are of freedom and individuality: personal liberation, nonconformity and radical self-expression; and spiritual awakening that involves seeking inner wisdom and evolving beyond old paradigms towards deeper understanding; moving beyond specific religions that characterised the dualistic Piscean Age, towards universal truths and deep connection with nature.
In the West the upcoming Aquarian Age has slowly been manifesting. It was partly ushered in by a great spiritual reawakening that came in the form of ancient Vedic wisdom that was encountered by British colonial administrators in India. A bold group of inspired mystics and seers came together and went on to set up the Theosophical Society. This non-profit organisation has spread the eastern beliefs and widened the spectrum of peoples’ spiritual enquiry globally. (I spent a few years in the Melbourne TS Lodge in Australia and my great grandfather was a TS member in Perth; he was also involved with the revival of Druidry in Cornwall in the 1950s).
The Theosophical Society has had a long history and a venerable one – it was founded in New York City on November 17th, 1875. So 2025 saw it celebrate 150 years of existence! Well done! The Society continues to provide a spiritual community at Lodges around the world.
With the global shift away from mainstream religion, people’s spiritual hunger has brought in some new dogmas. New Age ideology, for example, is often steeped in old-school monotheistic assumptions. For example, the concept of an ancient and singular Great or Mother Earth Goddess. People in the past didn’t know about the rest of the planet, they were locally focussed and would have only recognised the various spiritual beings of their own region and tribe. (Goddesses and gods co-evolved with us over long periods of time and are a reflection of human society. Consider the war god that was seen by Australian clairvoyant observer Junitta Vallak, who used to write for Geomantica, but has since passed on. When she went to visit the Holy Land years ago, she saw this war god, Yahweh presumably, stationed over Tel Aviv.)
A quickening of the Aquarian Age impulse manifested dramatically with the era of Crop Circles, patterns in fields of grain that started to appear on a regular basis in the 1980’s, mostly in the UK. This extraordinary phenomena has been much reduced in recent years, while scientists are still confounded by it. So, like all things strange and new, the magic patterns are generally ignored. And fewer and fewer of the old esoteric books, such as the tomes of Theosophical wisdom, are being printed now. (However pdfs of some old TS books can be downloaded freely from https://www.theosophy.world )
Earth Chakras
A geomantic part of New Age thinking is the idea of a chakra system for the planet, an anthropomorphic take on planetary energies, copying the human chakra system. It posits that there are massive planetary energy lines encircling the world (aka Dragon, Rainbow Serpent lines) and that these have nodal points on them that are ‘power places’. There are said to be seven chakra places on the planet, mostly at spiritually significant spots where powerful energies may be palpable, plus a few spare ones. (Multiple maps can be found online, each a bit different, but based on the original one.) A chakra is a nexus point where energies are pulsing through, with potentially transformative effects. In people, the chakras are points where energies are transmuted into useful frequencies.
One of two great energy lines said to flow around the planet goes via Uluru, Australia, to Mt Kailash, the holy mountain in Tibet, to Glastonbury in southern England and Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. This seems to have been first described by author Robert Coon, but I don’t know from where his information is derived. Coon wrote the book ‘Earth Chakras’ in 1967, but I haven’t seen it. Rudolph Steiner also alluded to Earth power centres and we also don’t know from where his information comes. Divined wisdom can be a mixed bag and cannot be relied on. I prefer more evidence and diverse corroboration before accepting such perceived ‘wisdoms’.
I suspect Coon’s view to be ‘Conceptual Geomancy’ – hypothetical, an idea. (An article on this is in Geomantica 35, May 2007). One can project such thought-forms into one’s dowsing. The concept is certainly great news for spiritual tourism providers at sites. However I imagine that the chakras and energy lines, if they are out there, could well change location over time, in response to various factors, as smaller ones do at a local level. Nothing is static.
Glastonbury
Let’s look at the candidate for the world’s Heart Chakra position. Several sources (online at least) claim that a node on the great Dragon Line passing through Glastonbury makes it the ‘Heart Chakra of the Earth’. The village is a centre for New Age thought and activities, a place of long history, with strong early Christian connections. It’s a great draw for the spiritual tourist. But does it deliver, as has been suggested, on “love, healing and compassion”? Glastonbury Tor is a wonderful hill and it does feel good up there. But the ambience of the town has been destroyed by public wifi, installed with no public consultation, to the dismay of the good folks there. And personally, on a couple of visits to Glastonbury, I found the local people to be very unfriendly.
Does Glastonbury live up to the hype of ‘Earth’s Heart Chakra’? In the historical era it was an early Christian site that first drew people here and there are also associations with Arthurian legend and the Holy Grail myth. Then entrepreneurs played upon its past fame, talked up the Chalice Well, embraced the New Age and to this day, the village attracts spiritual tourists galore. It has been fantastic for business.
So I think the heart chakra designation is purely aspirational. Another website assigns Earth’s ‘throat chakra’, to the region of Glastonbury (and also including Stonehenge, Somerset, Shaftesbury and Dorset), describing it as “a centre of communication for the world. Currently, this communication manifests as crop circles, which are communication symbols that share hidden messages. Crop circles are said to be created by extraterrestrial life and were designed for humans to decipher and learn from”. A throat chakra seems a much more appropriate attribute for this lovely region.
Ireland’s heart shines out
Living in Ireland for over ten years now, I’ve seen it as a great centre of heartfulness. To see how she welcomed the 125,000 or so Ukrainian refugees with outstretched arms, giving housing and support, was truly wonderful. Those people are now giving back big time, contributing to the economy, their children filling tiny rural schools that would have otherwise closed and helping to bring life back to rural towns and villages.
In early December 2025 there was news that a number of nations were withdrawing from next year’s Eurovision Song contest, in protest at the non-exclusion of Israel from attending, due to its genocidal war on Gaza. While Russia had been quickly vetoed from the contest after invading Ukraine, a vote on banning Israel was avoided. A small few ethical nations – Iceland, Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Ireland – pledged to neither participate in, nor broadcast the wildly popular Eurovision event. Ireland also recognised the state of Palestine in May 2024. Once again it showed the world that a small, neutral nation can take action for peace.
Around Christmas time, Israel announced further illegal settlements for the West Bank of Palestine, in violation of international law. Ireland was one of fourteen countries, including Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands and Norway, who quickly issued a joint statement. “We call on Israel to reverse this decision, as well as the expansion of settlements…We are resolute in our support of Palestinians’ right of self-determination. We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on the two-state solution in accordance with relevant UN security council resolutions where two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace and security within secure and recognised borders. We reaffirm that there is no alternative to a negotiated two-state solution.” 25.12.25 Guardian
You might wonder why only fourteen countries were prepared to make this statement. It seems that there’s not a lot of heart around in the world these days.
It’s not surprising for Ireland to show a lot of heart. It’s a society that was colonised for around 800 years, as well as enduring the longest lasting feudal system in Europe. So it should know a thing or two about being brutally bullied and dominated. Genocide is a touchy issue. It was experienced during the Great Famine, when starvation was used as a tool for ethnic cleansing, leading to a tsunami of death and migration. (Not a true famine, food was still being exported from Ireland to the UK during those dark times.)
So lately, Ireland’s heart has been shining brighter than ever, inviting others to share in its compassionate approach. And I was stunned to find its light shining through from the past, in a Theosophical book from a century ago!
A century old insight
Geoffrey Hodson, the prominent English Theosophist, seer and author, shone a clear light on the Other worlds of nature in his books (mostly out of print now), describing his perceptions of, and communications with the fairy kingdom. His clairvoyant investigations are unparalleled and I recently came across something of great interest, in his book ‘The Fairy Kingdom’ (The Book Tree, USA, 2003, first published in 1927.) In it, Hodson wrote of a deva (nature spirit) who informed him much of the spiritual reality of life and which “commenced a regular system of teaching in 1926”, this being published in his book ‘The Brotherhood of Angels and of Men.’
The deva’s discourse to Hodson, noted on August 23rd 1925 (page 74), was on the nature of the Spirit of the Earth. It described how all parts of nature on Earth are expressions of this Great One, an evolving being that expresses its evolving consciousness through the evolving forms of the biological beings of nature. The deva explained – “You may think of rock as the skeleton and soil as the flesh, rivers as the blood vessels, the water of the rivers and the seas as the blood, and the magnetic currents as flowing along the nerves of his body, the vegetation bearing the same relation to that body as hair does to yours…”
“This mighty consciousness is spread equally throughout the whole globe and has its centre, or heart, in the middle of the Earth, and subsidiary centres at other parts, in relationship with particular centres on the surface. It is these areas or force centres of the Spirit of the Earth that the great civilisations gather. Egypt, for example, is one, Shamballa [Mongolia] is another, there is another in India, one in central Europe [possibly Exersteine, Germany, some suggest], one in Ireland [and] others where there are seas now, to be used by the humanities of the future. The [spiritual] hierarchies are aware of these centres and make use of them for the furtherance of their work…”
“Amongst the many changes that are occurring,” the deva continued later, at the end of his illuminating discourse, “one will arise as the result of what might be described as a stirring of the Spirit of the Earth within its form, a stirring which will bring certain aspects of its life nearer to the surface and more nearly within the reach of human consciousness. The effects of this will be many. One will be to draw men nearer to nature, and so to keep them simple amid the ever increasing complexity which is such a strongly marked characteristic of the present phase of human development. Contact with it will tend to develop the mystic side of human consciousness, and it will exercise a co-ordinating, synthesising and unifying influence upon man.”
What an extraordinary and beautiful discourse, one that seems entirely plausible!
A recent insight
My Irish shaman friend, Simone ni Chinneide, had another illuminating insight to share about Ireland, from an experience she had in October 2023. Simone wrote – “I was returning to America to give another seminar on ancient Irish shamanism. In preparation, I went on a journey with my guides, to connect in with the deities and the land spirits of that continent. My guide Boann [the white cow goddess] was with me, and Macha [another Irish goddess] and my badger. We boarded a great galleon, an old 16th century behemoth of a boat. We sailed beyond the ninth wave, across the Atlantic and as we landed on the shores of north America, we were greeted by White Buffalo Woman, and a host of resident sidhe [spirits of the land]. White Buffalo Woman is the American counterpart of Boann.
“The journey was long, and I received much salient instructions from the gathered assembly. But one thing that stood out was when White Buffalo Woman said to me how important it was for me to come, to share some of the green grace and magic of Eire with the people of her lands. She explained how fractured and divided the people of America are.
“And that the Earth’s heart is located in Ireland. Essentially she said, that the Heart Chakra of the Earth emanates from this green and fertile land.”
Thoughts on the Spirit of Geography
By Yolande Hyde
Some lands speak from a hail of bullets, others from the ache of grief. Some will break the heart with histories too heavy to hold, while others speak only of famine and war. But here, in the wide silence of the South, the Earth still speaks in the language of nature. The realm of the Dreaming is clear and intact for those who listen.
Every land bears a unique spiritual imprint: a folk-soul if you will, and in the case of continents, a continental-soul. These spiritual harmonics shape the destiny of the people who live there and the way Spirit lifts and rises through them.
For this reflection, I use “North” and “South” as symbolic and cultural orientations—North representing the industrialised, post-Enlightenment nations of Europe and North America, and South referring primarily to the Southern Hemisphere, and more specifically, the Australasian continent and its ancient spiritual landscape.
In the northern hemisphere, the etheric forces of the land are deeply entangled with the karmic consequences of mechanised intellect, organised religion, industrialisation, and the bloodshed of centuries of war. The spiritual teachers who rise there, many of whom now form a legion of the most relevant global voices, shoulder a noble task: that of bringing light into fractured places, telling uncomfortable truths, and speaking peace into fields and fields of rupture.
This is not to suggest the North is spiritually barren; in fact, far from it. It has birthed the mystics, poets, healers, and visionaries of our Age who have carried immense wisdom through fire. But it is to suggest that the texture of that wisdom often bears the imprint of struggle, defiance, and reformation—a spiritual clarity forged in all that was rent apart.
Their work is necessary, but it is weighty and hard going. Teachings often emerge from the trauma of lands layered with resistance, conquest, war, and division.
Yet here, deep in Southern Oceania, in the land of strange creatures like the egg-laying Platypus and Old Man crocodile, the spirit of the land moves in a very different way. Culturally, we are young – in the colonial sense that is – but in true memory, we are ancient beyond reckoning, yet we have not been soaked with the same centuries of violence and bloodshed.
Now I want to pause here because colonisation left a deep and grievous wound in this place. There is not one heartfelt Australian who speaks lightly of that history, of its genocide, of slavery and of the theft of land. However, this continent remained, in the broader arc of human history, largely untouched by global wars, ideological crusades, or the industrial ravages experienced by the North.
And this matters.
In many places, the etheric consciousness of the land here remains less disrupted, still vibrant and intact in ways that offer a rare kind of spiritual clarity. The pulse of the Dreaming still thrums, especially in the wild places, where the Elementals move raw and sovereign, unbound by any form of personification or religion. Though colonisation severed many of the ancient songlines that linked the people to the place, it would take much more than that to quiet the Soul of the land herself, and she remains strong, insistent and true.
“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.”
- Australian First Nations Teaching
The Spirit of Place
In the North, the ground has been worked and reworked by the rise and fall of empires. The mythologies that shaped it—Roman, Greek, monotheistic—often bore the archetypes of conquest: Zeus as chieftain and seducer, Mars as the war God, Hercules the square-jawed hero. From here, spiritual teachings came as a healing response, a transmutation of shadow into light with teachers as lantern-bearers in a landscape darkened and fractured, speaking from an urgency born of all they have walked through.
The North, for all its scars, has been a place of profound transmutation—where mystics arose from monasteries and cathedrals, where poets spoke immense beauty into bleakness, and seekers carved brilliant light from deep in the machine of industry. Its spiritual teachings have often carried the energy of redemption, revolution and resurrection through ruin.
In contrast, the land here has not needed to call for rescue in the same way. It is not a site of emergency, but of emergence. Its teachers are not forged in reactivity, but in revelation.
Dreaming in Futures
There is a distinct ancient purity here that carries the thread of Lemuria, Mu, and other elder, nature-based cultures. There is magic too, spaciousness, elemental clarity, and spiritual perception rises as a natural faculty, not in defiance of darkness but as communion with light.
Though colonisation brought untold loss to the people, the land itself was not a battlefield in the way of great world wars. There were no trenches dug across her ‘sweeping plains’, no holocaust camps in ‘ragged mountain ranges’, or razed cities in her ‘green and shaded lanes’. There have been no Iron Curtains and no Cold Wars fought in her name. And her soil, for the most part, remembers stillness and peace. She offers all of this not as abstraction, but as atmosphere.
And from such peace, a different type of teacher rises—one who is not required to react to centuries of darkness, but an order of seekers who have been born resonating with a healed future. Here, spiritual work need not struggle to be heard—it needs only to be received.
This is not to diminish the grief borne here, particularly by First Nations peoples. But it is to recognise that the Earth herself, beneath all this and all of us, still holds a pulse of intactness, and it is from this well that a different kind of wisdom has begun flowing into the world.
‘’My expectation of a good Australia is when White people would be proud…when they realise that Aboriginal culture…is all there waiting for us all.”
- Charlie Perkins. Indigenous hero, activist and changemaker.
Seeds of the Future
The voices that rise from this land speak more slowly. They feel less urgent because they are not answering fire with fire. They don’t have to speak from the ramparts or the watchtowers. Instead, they can speak from the forest floor, the river’s edge, the stony gorge and the wide red plains. From Currawong calls between eucalypts and the scent of slow-burning desert sandalwood in the hearth.
Here, the archetype of the teacher does not have to be a Revealer, they can be the Listener-Witness who waits for the land to speak first.
There is a doctrine of rhythm and presence alive here. Even for those raised in the cities and the towns, the Earth was never far. Hierarchies are softer, traditions less binding. And in this looseness, there is spaciousness enough to hear the Dreaming.
Because we are not called to the same level of spiritual triage, we can tend the soil of the future. We can speak into the next arc of human becoming because the land here was left in true custodianship. We remained Terra Australis Incognita as Europe and the Americas burned with the violence of industry and power.
No one will argue that these are thresholding years. Old empires are falling, and new technologies are rising to replace them. It is no accident that a cross-section of voices is needed to meet the complexity of this shift. The wisdom of Nature from the South, the wisdom of human experience from the North—each a thread in the fabric of whatever comes next. And it is my hope that teachings steeped in Oneness and connection continue to rise in strength and clarity across the world. There are wild, wide skies in all of us, where diversity reveals our strength, and is the very thread that pulls us together.
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