Today’s offering comes to us from Christian Cooper. Christian is a New York City-based lifelong birder and the author of the books Songs of the Metamythos, a Pagan work of new mythology, and Better Living Through Birding, his newly-released memoir from Random House. He hosts the new television series Extraordinary Birder for National Geographic.
Whether they form a part of our individual practice or not, most of us modern Pagans are familiar with the four cardinal directions and their corresponding classical elements: east/air, south/fire, west/water, and north/earth (with local caveats; for example, in the southern hemisphere — where the power of the sun strengthens as one moves northward toward the equator — the corresponding elements for north and south are reversed). Some Eastern cultures may recognize other elements, but in Western traditions these have long prevailed, tracing their roots to the ancient Greeks and coming to us through the alchemists to embed themselves deeply in esoteric thought. Along with the center/spirit—the fifth element—these four cardinal directions define a metaphysical landscape that we can use for self-exploration, harness in meditation and contemplation, and invoke to create sacred space.
But why stop at the four cardinal points plus the center? What might we find if we strike out in whole new directions?
Christian Cooper hosting the National Geographic television series “Extraordinary Birder” [National Geographic]
Don’t get me wrong; personally I have found the traditional elemental arrangement to be a powerful tool to facilitate insight and understanding and to connect with the world around me. Indeed, I structured a five-part, multi-year global Pagan pilgrimage around the four directions plus the center, culminating in a trek through the Himalayas to the roof of the world. I describe the results of that pilgrimage in a chapter of my book Better Living Through Birding (a lifelong passion for birds being only one of a preponderance of east-facing aspects of my personality – and the very fact that I describe myself with the term “east-facing” shows how much I value the existing directions). Being somewhat hesitant to mess with time-tested things proven to work well, I approach the idea of altering the traditional arrangement with caution.
But it was the birds that led me to an epiphany. I was wondering what it must be like to think like a bird, and I realized that because we humans are forced by the limitations of our legs to travel across land surfaces, we tend to think in a flat plane – forward, backward, left, right – and our conception of the cardinal directions reflects our earthbound habits. But birds, gifted with flight, move freely in three dimensions, integrating a whole other aspect to their notion of motion: up and down. (I’m avoiding the terms “above” and “below” to avoid conflation with “as above, so below,” which is better understood as describing the recurrence of patterns and cycles at all scales of existence.)
Some Pagans have taken this leap. Reverend Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary, for example, describes how the sacred circle can be expanded into a sacred sphere by adding Up as the direction of the cosmic — the planets, stars, and other celestial phenomena — and Down for the Earth’s biosphere. This has great intuitive appeal.
Alternatively, up and down can be viewed as further projections of the center, spirit: Up looks toward the future and the spirits of those who will come after us and inherit the world we’ll pass on to them; Up is toward the light. Down looks to the past and the spirits of our ancestors on whose shoulders we stand (and one can interpret the term “ancestors” as broadly or narrowly as one sees fit); down is toward the dark.
Birds flying among cherry blossoms [Kanenori, Pixabay]
While the four cardinal directions allow us to locate ourselves in metaphysical space, the latter correspondences for up and down can place us in metaphysical time: poised between past and future, ancestors and inheritors. We can understand who we are not only in the balance between our intellect and our emotions, our physicality and our energy, but also in the context of whom we came from and our hopes for future generations. We can better create sacred space that is not only between the worlds, but apart in time.
Surely other meanings for up and down can be envisioned. Or perhaps with sufficient creativity, the two above systems could be merged, so that the cosmic Up doubles as an astral realm of light where future spirits reside, pristine, waiting to be born, and the Down of the biosphere is also chthonic, the underworld where our forebears are interred. With careful thought as to the rationale for vertical expansion, the possibilities are as limitless as the path of a bird through the open sky.
Will a modification of the existing four cardinal directions plus center work for everyone? Of course not; nothing in the incredibly varied array of Pagan practices could or should. But at the very least, it may serve as a prompt to get our imaginations going and, with deference to what has worked so well before, get us thinking in new directions.
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