I s this possibly the beginning of a scientific explanation for the energies of
what has been termed the spirit of place? Actual places are experienced as having
qualities that are transcendent and potent; Lourdes, Jerusalem, Lake Eyre, the arid
salt pan which flooding rains transform into Australia’s mythical inland sea, ley-lines
and aboriginal song-lines are examples. The ancient practice of Feng Sui and its
Western counterpart, geomancy, involve the perception of place as being influential
and portentous, almost in the same way that archaic consciousness attributes
autonomous animate qualities to place, qualities which force us to experience more
deeply its nature. These practices involve identifying lines of energy that can be
mapped and sometimes that energy affects imaginal-symbolic perceptions whereby
these energies are metamorphosed into entities; dwarfs, elves and daimons
representing the hidden forces of nature embedded in particular places.
A variant of this quasi-scientific electromagnetic force explanation for our
attachment to place as an energy field is offered by Maurice Cotterell:
This electromagnetic view also explains away another enigma
perplexing scientists who cannot understand why rates of
schizophrenia in West I ndian immigrants is higher in England
compared with figures for the indigenous population of the West
I ndies, and higher than those of the progeny of West I ndians born
in England. This is quite simply due to biorhymic
desynchronisation: whenever an organism is removed from its
place of birth (to a different geographical point on the surface of
the earth) it is subjected to a different combination of magnetic
fields from the sun and the earth (together), because the earth’s
field will have changed (this is how the homing pigeon finds its
way home). This different magnetic field, through the process of
electrochemical transduction, disrupts hormonal levels throughout
the endocrine system. I n its simplest sense we call this
homesickness. The body, like the pigeon, simply wishes to return
to the geographical place on the earth’s surface where it was
conceived, where its endocrine system was in equilibrium.
Homesickness is a biochemical response, like jetlag, to a shift in
magnetism affecting the endocrine system (Cotterell, 1999:259).
However, much more striking is the view offered by Jung that there is a
mysterious potential within places to affect the physical structure of the individual:
The mystery of the earth is no joke and no paradox. One only
needs to see how, in America, the skull and pelvis measurements
of all the European races begin to indianize [ sic] themselves in the
second generation of immigrants. That is the mystery of the
American earth. The soil of every country holds some such
mystery. We have an unconscious reflection of this in the psyche:
just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a
relationship of body to earth. (Jung, CW 10, par. 18 - 19).