Sacred places

Canyon du Chelly, the springs at Lourdes, the Ganges River, and hundreds of others-have drawn people seeking insight, inspiration, healing, or proximity to the divine. Often, the same places have been revered by very different societies. Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike venerate Mt. Sinai; the California hot springs that incubated many of the spiritual and cultural changes of the 1960s were once sacred to the Esalen Indians; and many of Europe's cathedrals were deliberately built over pagan springs and ritual sites. Powerfully augmented by the pilgrim's expectations, the special physical properties of what the Bible calls 'high places seem to have the capacity to promote physical and psychological change.

Recently, hordes of upscale spiritual seekers, drawn by claims that the former sacred mountains of the Incas foster mysticism, have been flocking to high places in the Chilean Andes. The obliging peaks even periodically blaze with weird glows and flashing lights, accompanied by popping, sizzling sound-effects. To the swelling community of New Agers, this mysterious son et lumiere is tangible proof that they're at a hot spot of spiritual magnetism. The phenomenon was first reported in a 1912 issue of Scientific American, more recently by Gemini astronauts, and scientists suspect that the visions are, in fact, generated by electromagnetism. They claim that anomalous energy fields are generated not only by the conductive sediment in mountains, but also by the large basins considered holy places by native Americans, including the Uinta in Utah, the Tucumcari in New Mexico, and the Black Hills in the Dakotas. "We're electrical beings living in a magnetic environment," says scientist Louis Slesin. "Because we're finely tuned to subtle energy fields, when they vary, as they would on top of a mountain, we change biologically and psychologically too:'

During 1968 and 1969, hundreds of thousands of people reported seeing the Virgin Mary and other celestial beings over a Coptic Orthodox church in Zeitoun, Egypt, not far from Cairo. Accounts described different sorts of visions, including "doves"--small, moving, short-lived lights--longer-lasting, corona-type luminous displays, and detailed apparitions. The events took on an extra frisson because they couldn't entirely be dismissed as the products of overheated imaginations: photographs taken at the site actually showed glowing blobs of light. When Michael Persinger, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, examined seismological records, he found that the Zeitoun visions began a year before an unprecedented increase, by a factor often, in seismic activity 400 kilometers southeast of Cairo.

After reviewing the circumstances of 6,000 strange events of the sort usually labeled either supernatural or fraudulent-fish or frogs "raining" from the sky, UFOs, haunted houses, poltergeists--Persinger has found that many lend themselves to natural hypothesis, if not explanations. Although he primarily studies brain function, Persinger has a background in geophysics as well, and this combination of interests inclines him to think about how the Earth's processes affect the nervous system. Starting with one of the bizarre phenomena that most scientists steer dear of, such as the lights at Zeitoun, he works backwards to see how the brain perceives this phenomena. "We're conditioned to think that fish stay in water, that rocks don't pop out of the ground, and that odd lights don't suddenly appear, so when we're confronted with anomalous data, we try to cram them into best-fit scenarios. Both religion and science provide structured ways to do that. Until the development of plasma physics, we had no scientific way to think about ball lightning, but that doesn't mean it was caused by demons."