I just stumbled on the work of Paul Devereux, via his Acculturated Topographical Effects of Shamanic Trance Consciousness in Archaic and Medieval Sacred Landscapes:
Death and straightness seemed linked in earlier centuries, but why? Why “dead straight”? The connection seems to be with the spirits of the dead, for German researcher, Ulrich Magin, has recently found an old reference to Geisterwege, or “ghost paths”…. “These paths,” says the German source, “always run in a straight line over mountains and valleys … In towns they pass the houses closely or go right through them. The paths end or originate at a cemetery.” The spirits of the dead “thrive” on these paths, and “one meets with ghosts quite often” on them….
The concept of lines for spirit use is also incorporated into the American Indian sweat lodge tradition, in which a straight earthen ridge is built to connect the firepit with the lodge entrance for spirits to use to enter there-in….
I have found that the strange, ancient association between spirits and straight lines could also extend to threads and cords…. So an Australian Aboriginal healer would fix the filament produced by a certain insect to the head of a sick person, and run it to a nearby bush where the patient’s soul was ensnared…. The spirit would be coaxed down the insect’s thread back into the person’s body. Again, during a healing, Siberian Buryatshamans would lay an arrow next to a sick person, and run a red thread in a straight line out from the arrow-point to a tree outside the tent, so that the patient’s spirit could be brought back along the “road” formed by the thread…. The Kalahari !Kung “climb threads” when their souls go out-of-body during trance dancing … and the Rigo people of Papua New Guinea leave a taut “fishing line” behind them when they go on out-of-body flights….
Southern African San (or Bushman) rock art repeatedly displays a curious figure known to archaeologists as a “flying buck.” Recent research … confirmed by the San themselves … shows that this creature, with lines trailing out behind it, represents the out-of-body shaman who transforms into an antelope and then flies….
The effigy mounds (above) depicting birds and winged humans were typical of Amerindian shamanic symbolism. The eagle feather, especially attached to people (c. 900-1500 AD) left many examples of pottery and shells decorated with human-bird figures classed by scholars as the “flying shaman” motif. A tablet of stone bearing the image of a man in bird costume was found in Monk’s Mound, North America’s tallest prehistoric earthwork, at the center of the Mississippian ceremonial complex of Cahokia….
The antiquity of this bird imagery in shamanism is shown in the Palaeolithic cave painting at Lascaux, France, of an apparently entranced man wearing a bird-mask. Near him is a bird-headed stick, and this was a documented symbol of shamanic trance in Siberia up until recent centuries. In addition, the Siberian shaman might wear bird-claw shoes and a metal representation of a bird’s skeleton on his ritual garb, similar to the way a Hopewell Indian shaman would hang bird claw shapes cut out of mica on his robes, as have been found in the Hopewell necropolis known as “Mound City,” Chillicothe, Ohio, along with wooden effigies of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Chinese Taoist priests were known as “feather scholars,” denoting their shamanic origins (the idea of spirit lines in Feng shui probably came from archaic shamanism via Taoism), while at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, Celtic Druidism, too, was associated with the ability of magical flight. For example, the powerful Druid Mog Ruith is described as wearing an enchennach or “bird dress,” and rising up “into the air and the heavens.” Again, the father of the pagan Celtic Irish king, Conaire, was said to be a supernatural birdman. The Vedic Upanishads refer to the out-of-body spirit as “the lone wild gander” (in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad) and geese figure prominently in the symbolism of shamanic magical flight worldwide….
Another familiar Western image of spirit flight is the witch on her broomstick. This relates to the use of “flying ointments,” prepared by medieval “wise women” (known before their Satanization by the Church as “Night Travelers”—qveldriga, “night rider” or Myrkrida, “rider in the dark”) from herbs containing hallucinogenic alkaloids which specifically generate out-of-body sensations and, often, the feeling of body-image transformation into animal forms. Broomhandles were sometimes used to apply the ointments to vaginal tissues….
Tribal societies developed into more complex proto-state and state cultures, and great religions developed across Eurasia, absorbing or marginalizing the earlier shamanic practices. Shamans became priests, and they in turn became theocracies or divine chieftains and kings. Throughout Eurasia, there are myths of “flying sovereigns.” In his classic work on shamanism, Mircea Eliade wrote that “The ‘magical flight’ of sovereigns manifests the same autonomy and the same victory over death” as did the shamanic journey.
Most of the Eurasian myths of flying sovereigns belong to the linguistic group we call Indo-European, and a proto-Indo-European word, *reg, seems to relate to a priest-chieftain function, and means “movement in a straight line.” It has become the root of many European words to do with kingship and governmental, spatial, moral and figurative straightness. The English word “ruler” derives from it, for example, and means both a leader and a straightedge. In Sanskrit, *reg can also be translated as mana or supernatural power, and, possibly, “protector.” So we have the image of a shaman-chieftain, a protector figure, with charisma or special power….
Eventually, in state societies, the ecstatic, shamanic origins of the straight line-spirit connection became forgotten and the Straight Way became rote ceremonial ways, boundaries, royal routes, imperial avenues, and so on. A vague sense that the Straight Way was somehow sacred or represented power associated with rulership survived, however, as we see with features such as the avenues of Versailles, the Mall leading out from Buckingham Palace, and even the Masonic lines of roads radiating from the White House in Washington DC.
Devereux has also written non-woowoo-ily on the related topic of ley lines:
Feng-shui, the ancient Chinese art of landscape divination, has its ancient roots in ancestor worship and Taoism, which in turn derived from shamanism. One of Feng-shui’sbasic tenets is that houses and tombs should not be built on straight lines in the landscape. Such features includeroads, ridges, river courses, lines of trees, fences and such like. They all facilitated the passage of troublesome spirits, so if a tomb or building was on the course of such an “arrow” in the land, then preventative measures had to be taken. These included the erection of physical barriers to mask the entrance to the building, placing fearsome “door guardian” effigies either side of the door, or placing a special mirror at the entrance so that any horrible spirits would scare themselves off by their own reflections….
This basic idea of spirits traveling in straight lines is found all around the Pacific rim, but the association of straight ways across the land [typically in societies which had neither horses nor the wheel] with the passage of spirits is even wider….
In Ohio, between 150 BC and 500, the Hopewell Indians built geometrical earthworks covering many acres, along with straight linear features which seem to have been ceremonial roadways. In 1995, archaeologists announced the discovery of a 60-mile-long, dead straight Hopewell ritual road connecting earthworks at Newark with the Hopewell necropolis at Chillicothe….
NASA surveys have found paths running through the mountainous rainforest of the Arenal area of Costa Rica. These paths, which “follow relatively straight lines” despite the difficult terrain, have been examined at ground level and have been dated to AD500-1200. Investigators discovered that the paths are “death roads,” and are still used for carrying corpses to burial, and also for transporting laja, volcanic stone, used in the construction of tombs and cemetery walls….
Five hundred or so miles south of Cuzco, lines criss-cross the altiplano of western Bolivia. These lines can reach lengths of twenty miles, considerably longer than any found at Nazca. These are absolutely straight, regardless of the irregularities of the ground, and link shrines of various kinds.
Lines, solitary and in groups, in the form of desert markings or long rows of small stone heaps, have been seen at other places in the Andean region, at least as far south as the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Prehistoric roads and rumors of lines occur as well in lowland, rainforest parts of South America, east of the Andes. Some of these take the form of perfectly straight causeways through dense jungle….
But why straight lines? Dobkin de Rios suspected that they derived from the entoptic patterning that occurs in the human cortex early in trance states as a result of poorly-understood neurophysiological mechanisms. These entoptic (“within vision”) images are universal to the whole human race in all periods of time, and adhere to a specific range of “form constants”—grids, dots, webs, spirals and tunnel forms, arabesques, nested curves, lines, and so on. They dance before the closed eyes in trance states (especially in trance states induced by hallucinogens), and form the basis of vivid geometric patterns that shimmer and move. With open eyes, the images can seem projected onto surfaces in the physical environment.
Eventually, as trance deepens, the entoptic forms attract representational imagery stored in memory, so that, for instance, a wavy line might turn into a snake. This produces fully-fledged hallucinatory or visionary material. This would of course always have been dressed up in the cultural baggage of particular Native American societies, in just the same way that ayahuasca-induced entoptic patterns are used to convey cultural ideas within the decorative art of the Amazonian Tukano Indians even now.
In brief, the straight landscape lines were a formalised expression of shamanic trance, whether occurring as a desert marking or ritual, ceremonial road. It was, in essence, a specific entoptic pattern, derived, it would seem, from the “tunnel” form constant, which is an experiential straight line….
The symbolic interpretation given to such straight lines by the native peoples themselves was naturally very different to our modern neurophysiological explanations. To them, the original nature of the straight landscape line appears to have been symbolic of spirit travel, of journeying in the otherworld of spirits, of the ancestors, which in shamanic terms was simply another level or dimension of the physical landscape. The line was a sign, or even an actual mapping, of the shaman’s ecstatic, out of body journey.
The shamanic straight lines in many societies developed from direct associations with the spirit flight of shamans and lines of spiritual power, to lines associated with the dead, as the shaman was considered temporarily dead while in trance, and the spirit world was inhabited by the ghosts of the ancestors. From such associations, the idea of the “death road” evolved.
There are numerous ways in which travel in the spirit realm was envisaged, but as indicated above, spirit flight is the pre-eminent form. It is the one most emphasised throughout shamanism worldwide: the allusions to flight, particularly through the medium of bird imagery, can be found in rock art, in geoglyphs, in effigy mounds, on a shaman’s robes, in ceremonial dancing and costume, in ritual paraphernalia, in shamanic gestural symbolism (such as the flapping of the arms atop ritual poles), and in the legends concerning shamans (the exploits of flying shamans are particularly prominent in Inuit lore, for example). Flight is the very image of ecstasy, of course, and it is the central experience of shamanic trance.
Within the context of soul flight, straightness lends itself to an extra dimension of symbolism, for flight is the straight way over the land—we say “as the crow flies” or “as straight as an arrow,” using the very metaphors used by shamanic tradition itself. The lines, in essence, were the markings of a spiritual geography—a geography of the mind superimposed on the physical landscape. The mapping of ecstasy….
It has recently been ethnologically confirmed that these theories regarding the mysterious straight lines of the prehistoric Native Americans landscape are accurate. Enquiries among the Kogi Indians have confirmed that they view some of their straight paved “roads” as physical traces of the spirit routes they follow in the spirit world they call aluna….
In Old Europe, “spirit traps” consisting of webs or nets of threads woven over hoops or other frameworks, or tangled threads in bottles, were placed on paths leading to and from cemeteries, or at the entrances to houses. These can sometimes still be found in regions such as Bavaria. The principle behind these was that while straight lines facilitated the passage of spirits, convoluted or tangled “lines” of threads or cord could ensnare them. [Cf. Native American "dreamcatchers."] There is evidence that ancient stone and turf labyrinths, found in many parts of Europe and Scandinavia, were also used for trapping evil spirits. These ideas are of course very similar to those in Feng-shui, and the idea of straight lines allowing the passage of spirits and crooked one hindering spirit movement seems to have been universal.
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