Lines Upon the Landscape: Spiritual and Energetic Ramifications of Oil Pipelines and Fracking

I’ll never forget May 1^st, 2014. I came down to the sacred circle at my homestead in Michigan and with the intention of performing a private Beltane celebration ritual I had prepared. As I began the ritual, something felt very, very wrong. Wrong in the deep, gut sense. Behind the circle was a ley line (in an energetic sense) held by a number of hawthorn trees in a growing in a straight line. I had built the circle before I had found this line, and was delighted when I found it years later. This pathway created an abundance of positive energy upon the land. This ley line ran a good ½ mile or more.   But on Beltane over a year ago, the energies of the line had substantially diminished from even the day before when I had visited the circle. On Beltane, line felt stifled or dampened, and was weakening by the minute. This change had been going on slowly for some time, but this new development was immediate and intense. I knew that a company called Enbridge was putting in an oil pipeline and a compressor station; the pipeline ran less than half a mile from my land and the compressor station was about 3 miles north of my home. I knew that this was the worst kind of oil with a horrific environmental toll—the tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada. But what I didn’t know was that that pipeline was turned on that exact day–Beltane of 2014. Instead of performing my planned ritual, I investigated the energetics further, and I found that where the now-active pipeline crossed the ley line, the line’s energy just stopped, cut off, and that the pipeline was corrupting and weakening the line tremendously. As I observed in the time since, the line literally became non-existent. This isn’t to say the magic of the land was gone, but the magic of that sacred place that I had created was different and altered. The line had shifted the energies, and they are still shifting in the time since. I think its significant that Enbridge (likely unknowingly) chose the day celebrated in my tradition, and in many others, as the day when blessings, abundance, and fertility were returned to the land.

In many places and across many time periods, ancient humans created a sacred network across the land*. Lines of stones, sacred roads, stone circles, wood circles, cursuses, ancient old straight paths provided networks are all examples of these lines. From the Incan lines radiating outward from their greatest city, to the spirit roads of the Chinese, to the henges, trilithons, hills and old straight tracks in Great Britain, humans developed physical energetic pathways for specific purposes along the landscape. Using mathematical principles from sacred geometry and the sweat equity of countless humans, some of the lines, curses, mounds, stone circles, and even groves of sacred trees were local occurrences, and yet others went for hundreds of miles and even today can still be viewed from space. Whole cities were built with their holy sites in alignment with the stars, the city and travel ways aligning to sacred wells, stones, and hills. This weaving and creating of a sacred landscape was a defining feature of so many ancient cultures—from South America to North, from the British Isles to China. Most theories suggest that these lines had numerous cultural functions, including emphasizing channeling down the sun into the land to bring abundance, communicating with spirits or ancestors, and in overall blessing the land. The lines upon the landscape, the old straight paths, were a consistent feature upon the landscape for well over a millennium or more. Humans lived, played, ate, loved, breathed, slept, and eventually died on landscapes where the sacredness was set into the very stones.

But over time and in many places, the old knowledge of sacred geometry and the power of the straight line, of setting of stones, were lost.  Eventually, the sacred worldview under which these lines were created and maintained was replaced**.

As time passed, and the world became disenchanted. With the industrialization, mechanized processes, and rationality, the lines that had held the enchantment of the world slowly began to be replaced with modern highways, rails, and subdivisions, who by their very nature are the antithesis of sacred geometry. The ancient henges were dug up in the name of science, the ancient curses and old straight roads were plowed over to make room for “development.” People like “Rock Breaker” farmer discussed in Alfred Watkins’ Old Straight Track purposefully destroyed the stones that had stood for thousands of years because they were inconvenient for his fields. The idea that the land could hold magic was abandoned; the land was physically, mentally, and spiritually disenchanted.   New energy lines, very different from the sacred ones of the distant past, are now a permanent part of our landscape.

Like the lines our ancestors once set, these profane oil and gas energy lines are the legacy we leave our ancestors. What energetic pattern do these lines create? What will this new energy line system to do our lands long-term? If our ancient ancestors spent generations upon generations building sacred lines to ensure the peace and prosperity of our lands, what legacy do these new lines leave behind. The disenchanted worldview doesn’t even acknowledge, much less understand, the ramifications of what I write. The photo below shows these new energy lines weaving across the landscape.  For anyone that doesn’t think this affects you or for anyone who thinks that if you just move, you can somehow avoid this….I think this map tells a different story.  When you combine this with mountain top removal, fracking wells, refineries, and more–its pretty much impossible to avoid.

As I read a story after story about people fighting to stop yet another pipeline through their backyards, I think about how these pipelines and wells are built manipulation and misinformation perpetuated in communities. I never even knew about that pipeline or new compressor station in Michigan until well after my township had already given them their rubber stamp of approval without any real public notice or opportunity for response. I think about what that pipeline in Michigan did to the landscape, I attempt to understand the deep ramifications of the loss.

If nothing is sacred, then nothing is sacred. Profit becomes the driving motivator of all change, to the short-term profit of few and to the long-term detriment of all. While the world has been largely disenchanted for well over a century or more in most industrialized areas, at least, we are now in a time period where the toll of the profane actions upon landscape is coming due. Among the many other challenges, the drive to put in more and more pipelines, frack anywhere that holds a bit of gas or oil, and continue to consume fossil fuels has led us down such a dark path. I read a few days ago how fracking companies have been spreading their toxic wastewater upon almond and pistachio fields in California, and I think about the long-term ramifications of the disenchantment of the world. Even the way the article reporting on the new practice for fracking wastewater and farmer’s fields is written is disturbing and disenchanted. It speaks of “conservation” and “recycling” in an industry that is literally poisoning our lands and water on a massive scale, and now, apparently, dumping even more poison (likely radioactive and certainly carcinogenic) on our food system. Of course, an 8 million dollar pipeline for the fracking wastewater was just approved to ensure the quick passage of their toxic slurry to your dinner table.

In the last week, I helped a friend who is fighting a natural gas compressor station and gas pipeline revise a survey and flyer that will help alert people locally to what is happening. I read stories from all over the country about other groups doing the same—and I pray for their success (I may blog about this group soon–they are using impressive resistance tactics!)  I think about my own experiences in Michigan. I think about my experiences in going hiking after returning to my beloved mountains in Western Pennsylvania, now deep in the heart of fracking country. Fracking didn’t exist when I moved away in my early 20’s after graduating with my BA, but now, it is a permanent feature upon the land, a feature I’m still trying to grasp, understand, and personally respond to.

When we hear the news of yet another species extinction, or the poisoning of yet another waterway, or the spill of yet more oil in another ocean, or the release of yet another set of toxins, culturally there is no real response on a widescale level. The industrial machine plows forward with reckless abandon. There seems to be no limit—or care—about how things like fracking, oil pipelines, chemicals, and toxins are changing our landscape. This is because, culturally, we would need radical shifts towards more sustainable living and with a lot less stuff or fossil fuel to make a real difference, and that is something that many modern disenchanted minds cannot currently conceive.

Even given this, I believe there is hope. The gas lines and oil pipelines and fracking wells exist upon our landscape now because there was demand and need for them.  By transitioning our own daily living, the demand for such things diminishes. As much as seeing the alternations upon my homelands have saddened me, I know there is hope, both for our physical lands and for the re-enchantment of those lands. We have tools, already in existence, that can help us transition to lower or no fossil fuel living and ways of regenerating our landscapes and lives.  There is also spiritual work we can do to help, at least energetically, engage in the start of healing.  Given these possible tools of response,  I’ll be posting regularly on both the physical and the energetic responses that we can have.  The important thing, I think, it to feel empowered and to do something.  We never truly know how far we can go, and what we can achieve, until we try.

*For readers wanting to learn more about this topic, I highly recommend Lines Upon the Landscape by Paul Devereux and Nigel Pennick.

**For readers wanting to understand the shifts in worldview, the first chapter of The Druid Magic Handbook by John Michael Greer serves as an excellent introduction.