The Magic of Place and Space
I realize I’m dating myself, but I’ll own it: when I was a teenager there were no cell phones or Internet. You couldn’t just look things up with a couple of clicks or the swipe of a touch screen. Coupled with limited finances, this made traveling near or far challenging, and when I was seventeen I was desperate to find a place in New York City called the Magickal Childe. A staple witch shop of the tristate area, the shop had already existed in several incarnations by the time I started looking for it. I’d heard of the shop through a friend, who could only tell me that it was “somewhere downtown,” but it wasn’t in the New Jersey phone book, my only resource. I spent any free afternoon that I could searching for it. Needless to say, I didn’t find it—then.
Years later I graduated from college and started working at a publishing house in New York City. Two months into my new job, I discovered that I was pregnant. I was twenty-two, excited, and terrified. I went for a walk at lunchtime and was just wandering around when, looking up, my heart skipped a beat. Right in front of me, fluttering in the summer afternoon breeze, was a tattered banner: the Magickal Childe. I still have my purchase from that day: Culpeper’s Book of Birth. The Childe has been gone for a while now, but I found it when I most needed it and when I was ready for the experience. After that, I learned to keep my eyes open because there are pockets of magic to be found everywhere and sacred sites waiting to be stumbled upon. But how do you know when you’ve found such a place?
A sacred site is any place that speaks to your soul and makes you feel that there’s something bigger than you at work in the world. Something, to quote mystic and scholar Katrina Messenger, “that cares about you.” Sacred sites change you and heal you and make you feel alive. And—like my finally finding the Magickal Childe—it can be an experience as well as a place. It can be discovering something new or rediscovering something you thought was lost. Our experiences create memories and enshrine them; the locale of the encounter becomes a holy place where we’ll return if we can to recapture that memory and that feeling, be it awe or gratitude or love.
What triggers those feelings is a bit more complex.
There are centers of energy that exist in the earth. Places like Stonehenge or Glastonbury in the United Kingdom have inherent power that you can feel in the air and under your feet when you visit them, and that alone makes them sacred. There are places tied to events—sometimes tragic—where the incident and the resulting emotions create hallowed ground. The faithful converge on pilgrimage sites, infusing a place with the power of belief and hope, sometimes making miracles. Iconic locations have their own aspect of being holy; we give these places significance, we build stories around them—or, sometimes, the stories are forgotten, and all that’s left is a mystery, itself a sacred thing.
Sometimes a person or group of people builds something wonderful and beautiful, and while the people are instrumental, it’s the site that’s important, the place transcending person and personality. As Michael Smith of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel told me when I visited the New Alexandrian Library, “It’s about working generations ahead. It’s about creating something that you know will outlive you.”
Sacred sites and magical spots can be large or small. Some are natural, some are manmade, and still more are collaborations between nature and humanity, both deliberate and accidental. A sacred site can be an ancient ruin with complex secrets and astronomical alignments—or it can be simple, like the heart of a national park that echoes with the thunder of moving water. Sometimes it’s a place where everyone goes, but not everyone knows the language hidden in the symbols and the architecture. Sometimes it’s a touchstone to the past—or, perhaps, the future. Sometimes it’s quirky and light-hearted. Sometimes it’s serious and awe-inspiring. Some are places of beauty or history or are a labor of love. Some just exist—and that’s enough. One sight isn’t better or more significant than another; each simply offers its uniqueness to you, the traveler, to experience. You must decide if it speaks to you.
During my travels—for fun and for penning “Wandering Witch,” the feature I write for BBI Media—I have discovered that geographic location plays a huge part in spirituality, the “where” having a great impact on the “what” and “how” of what is practiced, the land shaping the lives of its people and, however brief the encounter, the chance visitor, too. Magic lurks in every corner of the USA. Let’s find it together—starting with some of America’s oldest states.