Leviton - Encyclopedia of earth myths: an insiders a-z guide to mythic people, places, objects, and events central to the Earths geography

We can thank the depth psychologist C. G. Jung and the mythographer Joseph Campbell for refreshing our cultural interest in symbolism and myth and how both relate to the psyche, even illuminate it. But now it's time to take things a step further. As Campbell once commented, we need a new myth of the Earth.

The Jungian interpretation of symbolism and myth is not the edge of the world. It is but the edge of a dimension, a layer of truth. The next layer or horizon is the clairvoyant interpretation of myth and symbolism, the focus of this encyclopedia. One of the rich discoveries of this approach is to see that many, if not all, of the world's myths, culled from a variety of different cultures, say something profound about Earth. They are myths about Earth. They are clues to a secret about our planet, and they are portals into that secret realm.

What is the secret? That Earth has a soul. That Earth has a subtle body, a spiritual body, an energy body, a Light body, a mythic body, a visionary geographythere are many ways to say it. This is what it is:

Picture Earth as seen from space in the familiar NASA photographs as a lovely blue-white planet. Think of all the sacred sites you have seen pictures of, or visited, or even know of. Picture the physical features at these sites: stone circles, stone rows, pyramids, artificial hills, caves, temples, labyrinths, massive stone ruins or single standing stones, cathedrals, pagodas, shrines, mountains.

Each of the planet's many thousands of sacred sites has another aspect not ordinarily seen by the physical eyes yet able to be seen through clairvoyance. Each site has a temple of Light in the same place as the physical feature, or sometimes it is bigger. A temple of Light is one of many possible ways to point to a structured subtle space created for human interaction and illumination.

Here is where the world's myths are helpful because they provide a descriptive language for this unsuspected terrain of Light temples at sacred sites. Myths speak of Grail Castles, Sun temples, residences of the gods, Celestial Cities, dragon caves, golden apples, fairyland doors, Cosmic Eggs, hollow hills. To clairvoyant perception, these mythic terms are all maps to Earth's secret. If we take myths literally but at a clairvoyant level, they suddenly reveal a whole new terrain around us, what I call Earth's visionary geographya landscape of visions. Visions of what? Of interactive Light temples, all part of Earth's secret.

This book looks at 153 items from the myths of 21 different cultures and interprets them in terms of what they reveal about Earth's visionary geography. Valuable knowledge about the planet's secret soul life and energy body is embedded in the myths around us. It's as if clues about Earth's visionary geography have been scattered in all cultures, awaiting our retrieval and decoding. It's just a question of how to decode them accurately.

Each entry shows how something considered mythic, such as a person, god, place, object, or event, actually illuminates something central to the esoteric makeup of the planet.

In most cases, an Earth myth also revealssomething important about human consciousness because the remarkable fact about Earth's sacred sites and their subtle Light temples is that they are individually and collectively reflections of us, of how our consciousness, generically, is put together and works. So decoding an Earth myth contributes to our self-knowledge.

But there is yet another crucial aspect to this arrangement. The Earth actually depends on our informed interaction with it through the sacred sites. It's a question of reciprocal maintenance. Sacred sites are not with us just to provide vacation opportunities. They are part of the planet's anatomy and physiology, and we are the physicians who are supposed to keep Earth's body in good trim.

This is more than environmentalism; this is tending to Earth's soul life. The Earth maintains and nurtures us physically; we are supposed to maintain the planet spiritually, contributing our spiritual light and presence back to the planetary system as a kind of food. Not much of this is happening today, largely due to the fact that few people are aware of the arrangement, and those who sense it probably lack the vocabulary to describe it and the protocols to interact with it.

It didn't used to be this way. For the most part, indigenous peoples following traditional ways contributed what was needed from the human realm to Earth. The Hopi of the American Southwest, for example, speak of how they were instructed by the god Masauu at the start of their residence on Earth in how to live correctly on the planet. They called it the Hopi Life Plan, and when they followed it, their lives prospered. The rains came, the crops grew, and the gods looked favorably upon their existence.

This knowledge for the most part has been lost in Western culture. But not lost forever; it is still all around us in the myths we take for granted, or dismiss as fairy tales, or interpret only symbolically, not realizing they are living doorways into another realm of reality, both human and planetary.

So think of this encyclopedia as a guided tour through a layer of Earth reality whose existence you might not have suspected before. It's also an interactive tour. Each entry will send you to numerous related topics; follow the threads to related topics as a way of navigating the hologram of Earth's visionary geography.