Shadows of the Holy: Where the Gods Walk, Still

## The Long Forgetting

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From Holy Oak and Stone Grove to Canterbury, Greenwich, East Cahokia, Chaco Canyon, Tenochtitlan, Tepeyac, Sinai, and the Alamo—the land is marked by names that remember aspects of sacred life far older than our modern institutions. For example, Massachusett, Wampanoag, reflect a world deeply connected to the natural world and its inherent spiritual power.

This session explores The Long Forgetting: how an enspirited—once openly magical and mystical—cosmos was gradually lost to cultural memory, leaving behind only the names of the sacred as its shadow. Mountains, trees, wells, hills, and cities were once understood as living presences—places where the world responded to attention, ritual, and care.

Nothing disappeared all at once. The forgetting was slow. Reasonable. Administrative. Sacred groves became property. Sacred hills became sites. Sacred forces became metaphors. Over time, attention shifted—from participation to observation, from relation to control.
And yet, the pull never stopped.

We still feel it in places built atop older ground: cathedrals where groves once stood, missions raised on Indigenous sacred hills, cities laid over cosmological centers. We feel it when a place quiets us without explanation, or when a name—Tlaloc, Tonantzin, Sinai, Holy Oak—seems to carry more weight than it should.

This session is not about recovering a lost religion or reviving ancient belief. It is about restoring a way of reading the world—one that recognizes land, name, and memory as active participants in human life. The Long Forgetting did not silence the world. It trained us to stop listening.

What remains is a penumbra: sacred shadows, lingering names, charged places. And the question this session asks is simple and demanding:

What might change if we learned to notice them again?