When we first set up the Circle of Eight, we stood in our eight places on my vast living room floor, our backs to each other, and faced outwards into the directions. We had our eyes open and called to them, welcoming whatever winds, whatever feelings, and whatever images came to us. I had a sense of the circle stretching out from the room and then wavering, uncertain of how far it extended. After all, if you call the East, East goes on forever. Yet my intent with the Circle of Eight had been to work local magic, relevant to this land we lived on.
The main room of my house was itself a container; the east and west walls nearly sixteen meters or fifty feet apart, the ceiling maybe nine meters or thirty feet above us, the concrete floor resting solid on the earth. Through high windows we saw a gorge, cliffs, trees, and greenery or, at night, spacious sky with stars and the new moon setting in the west. Those were boundaries; yet I had not meant for the circle to be quite so local, not just what we could see from this house. I wanted it to have a sense of geography, relatedness to the whole, much as those European stone circles had; a sense not just of exactly where they were, but also of the land and people they were a part of.
I could imagine parties of surveyors measuring out distances and sight lines, hammering in small wooden posts that would rot in the rains or be eaten by white ants, but that was nothing like what I yearned for. I longed for that mythic sense of the land relating to us, of understanding the sight lines that already existed, of human magic stepping into and within the magic of the land. Of the landscape revealing itself to our senses, of being able to call not just vaguely east, but precisely and exactly East; to an eastern place that was specific and held the outpost of our circle—a place of power; one that recognized us and worked with us.
Our local area is particular in many ways. Geographically part of a vast caldera formed when the mountain exploded twenty-three million years ago, the earth is rich and fertile and the rains heavy enough to create their own small wet season most years. The green pasture cultivated after the forest was felled makes ideal dairy farming country, and dairy farms need roads; unlike other farms that can survive cut off for weeks or months, they need to get the milk out every day. This complex network of roads carving among the hills meant the land was opened up past its logging and dairy history and into the next invasive wave, housing. The reasons our little area is so wonderful to live in and so accessible to settlers and small properties stemmed from its history of volcanic eruption, rainforest, clear-felling, and small-scale dairy farming.
Politically, our shire is distinctive. Large numbers of retreating city dwellers running small businesses from home, seeking alternative lifestyles and spiritualities and a small, friendly community to raise their kids in mean our local government has a strong contingent of the political left and Green. One of the alternative centers of Australia, undisputed in terms of a New Age lifestyle, people arrive here seeking healthier ways to live, inner peace, and active community. Distinct from the city councils to the south, north, and west, our shire has a very particular political, social, and cultural identity.
The borders of the shire made sense as a boundary for our circle, the extent to which its influence would extend. But I didn’t just want a line drawn on a map to guide and hold our magic; I wanted actual places, eight distinct markers, like standing stones. Instead of standing stones, or anything like them—anything that had been carted there by humans or told what function it would perform—I wanted to discover places already existing, holding their own magic, and ask if they would extend their briefs to include holding one corner of our eight-cornered circle.
We looked at maps. Water was the first and most obvious thing we saw. East of us was the sea. In fact, the sea was not just east, it was also south-east and north-east. There was a lot of sea. When we looked west on the map we saw all the streams and rivers; the larger area our shire is part of is called the Northern Rivers. There was a lot of fresh water; those rivers are so enormous that, seeing them, I am always astounded we can ever experience drought or water shortages. When we looked at the map of Australia we saw that the Great Artesian Basin lay directly west of us. This vast underground water supply, surely sacred to the continent of Australia, is to my mind the best and most magical sort of water to have in Australia: fresh water hidden and contained under the earth. In this hot, dry land, water has to be held, protected; this whisper of secret water carving its own passages through the land unseen seemed incredibly potent.
There was something else we saw on the map that first time we looked. The extinct volcano that had created this land and still dominated all the landscape around lay to our north-west. It was not strictly inside the boundaries of the shire, yet it had created the shire. The edges of its caldera swept around us; we received its rains now as the land had received its fire earlier, before humans were here. To our north lay the equator and the hot midday sun; it should be the high point of the circle, the place of the most obvious blazing power, and yet somehow it never had been. Without us planning or asking for it—and rather to my perplexedness and slight annoyance—again and again North-West came through more strongly than North whenever we cast a circle and nearly regardless of whoever was calling to the direction. Looking at the map, for the first time we saw why.
Our land was shaped by the energies of this volcano. If you listened to the land, if you called to what you felt and saw and heard, that was what you called to. The volcano—and therefore the North-West—was the origin of our land; it was naturally the orientation of our circle. We came to see it also as a guardian—one not significantly noticed by us before, but that now, within the Circle of Eight, was accorded its rightful place in our understanding of this particular land’s magic.