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Haunted Land: Investigations into Ancient Mysteries and Modern Day Phenomena

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Paul Devereux has been a leading researcher of earth mysteries and sacred landscapes for decades, and anything he writes on these subjects are required reading for those interested in the mysteries of the landscape in human perception. Following is an overview of this book.

Part 1, "Shamanism and Ancient Mysteries of the New World" discusses rock art and linear rock arrangements in the desert southwest of the U.S.; chapters in part one include "Signs of the Spirits" and "Patterns of Power."

Part 2, "Shades of Shamanism in the Old World" compares the shamanic landscapes of Part 1 with the author's search for similar landscape features in Europe such as leylines. However he finds that Europe focused on "pathways of the dead" (corpse ways, doodweg) and their association with fairies, witchcraft and night battles, the Wild Hunt, and night creatures, though there are indications of an ancient thread connecting Europe's funerary landscapes with Central Asian shamanism. Chapters in part two include "Death Roads and Funeral Paths" and "The Secret Life of Old Europe."

Part 3, "The Invisible Country" looks at the numinous landscape of Europe through anthropology, archaeology, and folklore. Chapters in part three include "Last Voyage to Avalon," "Fairies, Witches and Werewolves", and "The Mysterious Ways of the Gods." Some of the high points for me in this part was how people's spirits become part of the land after death, and how unwanted "spirit traffic" can be interrupted through devices like "witch traps" and labyrinths, or shifted as "church lines".

Part 4, "The Land is Still Haunted" relates what has been learned from earlier times to contemporary sightings of the uncanny along roads and paths, with examples mostly from Britain, such as spectral vehicles, phantom hitchhikers, black dogs, earth lights or mystery lights, time-slips, white lady apparitions, and hooded "monk" apparitions. Chapters in part four include "Road Hauntings," "Non-Human Shades of the Land," and "White Lady and Black Monk."

Part 5, "Seeking Solutions" returns to Native American rock art sites; as he says earlier in the book, "I find that the traditional explanations for ghosts as offered by both believers and sceptics to be inadequate and follow lines of thought that lead to the frontiers of recent research and thinking about the mind and its relationship to physical reality" (p. 4). The last chapters are "Between a Rock and a Hard Place" and "The Magic Theater" covering such topics as "Hallucination Triggers," "Zones of Disturbance," "All is Illusion," and speculations on the mind's connection to time-space reality.

For those interested in the mysteries and interactions of the human mind, and the spirit (or spirits) of place, especially in connection to linear movements of spirits and features on the land, this is a must-read.