Anne Parker - Earth Alchemy: Aligning Your Home with Natures Energies

Anne Parker & Dominique Susani 2011

The right of Anne Parker and Dominique Susani to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

First published by Findhorn Press 2011

ISBN 978-1-84409-567-4

All rights reserved.
The contents of this book may not be reproduced in any form, except for short extracts for quotation or review, without the written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Edited by Nicky Leach
Cover design by Richard Crookes
Illustrations by Alexis Susani
Layout by Thierry Bogliolo
Printed and bound in the USA

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For All Life

This book is dedicated to Henry Quiquandon, the father of geobiology, and Raymond Montercy, the last European magister odo (specialist of measurement). Each man, in his own way, has revived the knowledge of the master builders and the ancient cultures of Europe. May this knowledge contribute to the harmony and rebalancing of the human relationship with Earth and all life.

Special thanks to our friends Doug Dupler, Elyn Aviva, and Gary White, who kindly gave advice on the presentation of this material and to Nicolas Susani for his clairvoyance and participation in this project. Great gratitude to the guardian angels of the book project: Karen Jarldane of the Boulder Centre for Master Builders and Sophia Fairchild, executive editor of Soul Wings Press. Sophia also contributed to the choice of the book title. Our colleagues at Findhorn Press, Sabine Weeke and Thierry Bogliolo, as well as editor Nicky Leach, have been an absolute delight to work with; we are grateful for their vision and support of this work.

In the 1970s, I lived in the central desert of Australia, in an Aboriginal community, where I worked as a community development officer. Out there, in the red dust and vast spaces, I was living in the Aboriginal world a world governed by the Dreamtime and the indigenous peoples great mastery of the living earth and its ways, a knowledge that is embedded in what are known as the Aboriginal songlines.

Songlines, also called Dreaming tracks by Australian Aboriginal peoples, are paths across the land that mark the route followed by creator-beings during the Dreaming. With this knowledge a person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the songs, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena. By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, they can navigate vast distances. In essence this is an embodied way of internalizing a map of the entire landscape in which they live. I suspect that the songs are not mere mnemonic devices, but that they mirror the natural harmonics of the land. They may also follow natural energy patterns or lines of the land as well, although this has not been specifically documented.

I was deeply moved to discover that the songlines are not mere dry accounts of long-lost practices from anthropological texts; they are living spiritual practices held by present-day Aboriginal people carried out though the telling of legends, enactment of ceremonies, singing of songs and walking of the lines. Through their knowledge of the songlines, my Aboriginal friends had an intimate, reciprocal relationship with their land that led them to respect and feel a responsibility to care for their places. I admired them and longed to have such a living practice of relationship to the earth in my lineage and in my modern world back home in the United States. At that time it seemed that no such thing existed, and even if it had, it must certainly have been irretrievably lost.

Years later, an email popped up in my inbox one day, mentioning a training in my town by a Frenchman who was said to know about the European tradition of earth energies. I would have hit the delete button, thinking that sounded flakey but for the fact that the friend who had sent it to me is a trained scientist with a Ph.D. I thought, If she is recommending this, I might as well take a look.

Not long afterward, I found myself at this training. As I walked in I was thinking, What was I thinking? This could all be quite bogus. But my fellow students reassured me. They included high school geometry teachers, university professors, people from the School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, trained Feng Shui experts, and other plausible people.

Relieved to be in such a reasonable group, I settled down to listen to our lecturer, Dominique Susani. Dominique launched into his topic with a wonderful mixture of humor, logic, and practical exercises. Within 15 minutes, I had what I later described to friends as a smile hanging off my face about 40 miles long. I felt ecstatic to find that I was from a living lineage of relationship to the earth and that a few people from my European heritage still understood the old ways; in fact, they were developing and testing them, so that they could once more take their place in our cultural discourse.

At one point, we stepped outside to try our hands at what, for me, was my first dowsing experience. I felt scrambled, strange, and irreversibly altered by that first wobbly experience. The closest metaphor I can offer is that it was as if I had hooked up my ponytail to the living fabric of life, like the character Jake being trained in the fictional Navi community in the movie Avatar. It is not that I had not devoted myself to caring for the earth throughout my entire adult career, that I had not deeply loved the lands I have lived in, nor been unaware of the insights of the traditional peoples I have studied with and learned from, nor even lack profound spiritual experience; it was that something of a new order had opened in me. Since that first experience I have studied with Dominique in the European tradition, and this book is the fruit of that learning and collaboration. The European tradition focuses on the natural energies within the land, the patterns and lines, and how they affect the human body, among other ways of attending to our profound relationship with the earth and the cosmos.

Dominique, his teachers, and colleagues have collected what is known about earth energies and sacred geometry in Europe and are reviving them as a living practice. This information comes from a rural tradition that has kept some of it intact and in use, modern research that is measuring the ancient sites once again, direct body experience, sacred stones, and the land. This knowledge was suppressed and lost over the last 1,700 years in Europe. The resulting disconnected relationship with the earth then spread to the colonies and the New World, with sad and destructive results for indigenous peoples who had maintained their reciprocal relationship with land and life.

The revival of this European wisdom tradition comes at a time when we desperately need to repair and recover a collective sense of the reciprocal relationship with land that engenders respect and responsibility in caring for our places. It is an honor to share it with you.