by Searles O'Dubhain

Why do sacred places matter? Searles O'Dubhain answers by analogy: the chloroplast in a plant cell captures the energy of the sun and turns it into life; the mitochondrion in an animal cell stores and releases that energy into action. Both are centers of organized, renewable energy — and both work against entropy. In this February 2006 post to alt.religion.druid, he argues that spiritual communities need the same kind of centers: places where bri and buas — the Irish words for sacred energy and spiritual power — are accumulated, renewed, and released. The analogy bridges Celtic cosmology and modern science, and grounds the practice of sacred site maintenance in a larger vision of life as the increase of order against dissolution.

It is well known that trees and plants sustain life and create it through the process of photosynthesis. This is done within their cells in special areas known as chloroplasts. Here the energy of the Sun is used to power the process which does the work of life for a plant. This process of life in a plant bucks the trend in the rest of Nature where order is said to disintegrate into disorder. It is only in life that order leads to greater and continuing order — because life does the work of sustaining itself while it also does the work of replicating and perfecting itself.

Within animals, a similar process occurs in the cells in energy centers known as mitochondria. Here sugars are metabolized and synthesized, as well as stored for a ready source of energy in the work of life. Again, it is a process that becomes more ordered as it goes and evolves, bucking the natural trend in most other processes.

After reflecting on how plant and animal life create and sustain life through an increase in order and a storing of energy, it occurred to me that mental life as well as spiritual life also benefits from having a similar organization. In a person, the centers for such activities are most likely the mind and the soul.

It is my understanding that the mental and spiritual lives of communities benefit from having centers where mental energy is stored or spiritual power is accumulated. For thoughts and knowledge, great centers of learning like schools and universities serve this need. In the spiritual life of a community or people it is the spiritual centers that serve the same functions.

Some Pagan people called this storing of spiritual energy "mana." Among our Irish Celtic and Druidic ancestors this storing of spiritual and magical energy was said to occur through the flows of spiritual energy known as bri and buas. It was considered that the spiritual energy of a place could be increased through ritual actions. Of course, the inherent structure and form of a place also served to enhance this effect.

On such sites as they were discovered in ancient times, structures and a reshaping of the landscape occurred to aid in this storing and organizing of spiritual energy. The work of these centers was to help in sustaining the people's spirit and their connection to the source of such energy. It also was a place to create new spiritual and magical energy, a place of greater spiritual development and order.

This is how and why sacred places were identified and sustained by the Druids of the past. It's also why other spiritual groups set up and sustain their own spiritual centers. Having such a place of abundant and renewable spiritual energy insures the continuity of the spirit of a people and their higher aspirations in the ordering of spirit.

Perhaps these workings were so successful in the past that new spiritual life forms developed? Maybe the older spiritual forms evolved to become a new order themselves? In this ordering and empowering of life, spirit should not be drained or de-energized by the forces of disorder and dissipation. That's not how life works, as has been demonstrated even within Nature.

The preserving and elevation of ideas and minds is the work of universities and schools. The advancing of the spirit is the province of churches, groves, synagogues, mosques, and sacred centers all over the known worlds. How could it be otherwise? What is the Sun of the Spirit? Where is the food for the mind?

Colophon

Written by Searles O'Dubhain and posted to alt.religion.druid in February 2006. Bri (vigor, energy, excellence) and buas (virtue, spiritual power, triumph) are Old Irish words appearing in legal and poetic texts; their use in the context of sacred energy flows reflects modern Druidic interpretation of early Irish spiritual concepts.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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