that homes are very much on our minds nowadays, with increasing emphasis being put on them. More of us in the West own our homes than ever before. We spend more money on fixing our homes, and one of the most popular hobbies is home improvement. Whereas in the past we might have boasted of going on exotic holidays or buying flashy cars, now we impress our friends with our new sofa, with a fresh coat of paint, with a new alarm system. It seems that now, maybe more than ever before, we need to feel the security of our homes. It’s not hard to see why. Our working lives are becoming ever less secure – few people nowadays can count on a job for life. With divorce rates soaring there is little certainty in our relationships. And as our knowledge of space and the cosmos deepens, we can no longer rely on being at the centre of a gentle, embracing universe. Life is becoming psychologically very frightening. Someone once asked Einstein, ‘What is the most important question you can ask in life?’ He replied, ‘Is the universe a friendly place or not?’ In the past we trusted that the universe was friendly: at the very least we saw ourselves as an important and large part of the universe. But now we are less certain. We see into the cosmos with telescopes and find ourselves becoming smaller and smaller as the telescopes become ever more powerful; our stature and importance seems to dwindle the further into space we look. The physicist Rupert Sheldrake points out that 90–99 per cent of the matter in the known universe is ‘dark matter’, utterly unknown to us:
It’s as if physics had discovered the cosmic unconscious. We don’t know what this dark matter is, or what it does, or how it influences the way things happen.
Space is almost utterly unknown. We may be alone in infinity, which is frightening enough. Even more scary is the thought that we might not be alone and that our fellow inhabitants might not be gentle, evolved ET beings.
It’s a strange feeling for us – this uncertainty. In the last few centuries we have been growing in confidence almost by the minute. Technology has given us greater control over our environment; we have thought ourselves masters of the Earth and everything in it. We merrily plundered the planet’s resources without a regard for the future and then, once we started heading up out of the Earth to the moon and beyond, our arrogance knew no limits. So what if we destroyed the Earth? Undoubtedly there would be another planet ‘out there’ we could colonize. Our planet, our home, become disposable. We turned our backs on Earth and turned our sights towards new places. We headed for the sun. The very name of the space missions, Apollo, drum home the fact. Apollo, or Helios, is the god of the sun – bright, shining, new, outgoing and outreaching, a very masculine energy which always thrusts upwards, away from Earth, the warm, embracing, feminine energy of the goddess.
REACHING FOR THE SUN
Some psychologists believe that our society has been in the grip of the Helios/Apollo archetype for some considerable time, certainly since the rise of Christianity with its insistence on looking to the life beyond, an afterlife in a heaven situated somewhere ‘up there’ where angels play their harps sitting on clouds and God is enthroned on high. The entire ethos of Christianity has been that life on Earth is relatively unimportant – in order to enjoy life everlasting we need to fix our eyes on God and heaven. So it’s no surprise that Christianity emphasized spirit over body; the heavenly hereafter over our earthly home.
Now science is taking the place of God but we continue to reach upwards. Helios/Apollo is still too dominant. When we become entranced by the sun, lured by the heavens, we forget that we already have a home, here on Earth. Instead we fix our eyes to the stars and think that maybe one day we will leave all this behind. It shows a deep lack of balance in our psyche. In the chakra system you could say that we have become overdeveloped in the upper chakras, shunning the Earth, our roots and our groundedness and reaching only for the pure spiritual ether. We turn towards the sky, heaven, the universe, the masculine, father God and turn our backs on physical matter, the feminine and Mother Earth.
Where does that leave us? In a very uncomfortable place. Without a sense of Earth, we are ungrounded, unbalanced; we have lost our roots. At a very deep level we have lost our home. For the Earth is our home, our only home, like it or not. And in our hearts, in our souls, we recognize the link. We have a deep connection with our planet, and by denying it, by seeking to transcend it, we are cast adrift, as I am in the big city, wandering, always looking for a place to sit and rest for a while.
THE HEARTH — CENTRE OF THE HOME
In order to understand what all this has to do with our physical homes, we need to look back in time, to how the ancients perceived home and the Earth. The very first concept of home was the hearth, the fire that cooked and warmed and kept us safe from wild beasts and cast light into the dread of darkness. This original fire was always round in shape – as if our ancestors knew that the Earth itself was also spherical. In Ancient Greece the structure known as an omphalos was originally a fire banked and covered with earth – a glowing heart, surrounded by the earth. It was considered to be the navel of Gaia, the Earth Mother. Later it became represented as a rounded mound of stones but its symbolism was the same: it demonstrated the link between us and the Earth. Examples can be found, not just in Greece, but all over the world.
So the round hearth became a powerful symbol of home, the centre of every sacred space and, by extension, a symbol of the sacred Earth itself. Since time immemorial the circle has been seen as a symbol of wholeness, of the complete psyche, the fullness of the Self. The Eastern mandala represents the path to the centre, to individuation, to becoming ‘whole’ in soul. Mazes, spirals, labyrinths, circles of standing stones – they all lead from the outside to the inner mystery. The circle is the hidden heart, where the mystics find their gods or goddesses; where others simply find their soul.
The first houses were also round, continuing this close link and honouring our essential connection with Mother Earth. When the great psychologist C.G. Jung built his house at Bollingen he said:
At first I did not plan a proper house but merely a kind of primitive one- storey dwelling. It was to be a round structure with a hearth in the center and bunks along the walls. I more or less had in mind an African hut where the fire, ringed with stone, burns in the middle and the whole life of the family revolves around this center. Primitive huts concretize an idea of wholeness, a familial wholeness …
Jung expanded his basic hut into a two-storey tower – but kept the round shape and the central hearth. He commented that, ‘the feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was intense from the start. It represented for me the maternal hearth.’
ARCHITECTURE — NOT ‘EGOTECTURE’
Just because we are modern people, living fast, furious lives, it does not stop these archetypes resonating within us. In recent years some far-sighted psychologists and philosophers have recognized that we need to rediscover and respect the archetypes within our homes. ‘Every home is a microcosm, the archetypal “world” embodied in a house or plot of land or an apartment,’ says Thomas Moore. ‘A real home is always at once a particular place and the entire world.’ Note he says a ‘real’ home – in other words a home made potent and numinous by the love and feeling we invest in it. ‘Show’-homes just won’t do it. Psychotherapist Robert Sardello drums the point home when he says:
When architecture becomes ‘egotecture’ we live and work in inflated, hollow, monotonous, self-reliant, flashy, defiant space.
I’m sure you know the kind of places he means – buildings which are built and designed so full of pride and prestige that you feel uncomfortable the moment you walk in. You barely like to sit down in case you crease the cushions. These are the kind of homes that make you stand to attention; that make children and animals unwelcome and adults feel ill at ease. They symbolize a complete breakdown between the owner and the Earth – the link is simply not recognized. But anyone with sensitivity of soul can feel it in their bones. The place is not a home, it is a statement – like the latest designer
