The Topophilia Effect E-Book

Roberta Rio

• Herausgeber: edition a
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 264

Beschreibung

Health. Success. Love. How do the places where we live, work or spend our vacations, affect our life? Historian Roberta Rio is researching the history of buildings, apartments or land and finds recurring patterns. In this book she shows, based on old knowledge and new research results, what we should know about the effect of places and how we find out.

Leseprobe

THE TOPOPHILIA EFFECT

Roberta Rio:The Topophilia Effect.

All rights reserved

Translation from German to EnglishGail Atkinson-Mair

Der Topophilia Effekt. Wie Orte auf uns wirken

© 2020 edition a, Viennawww.edition-a.at

Cover and setting: Isabella Starowicz

Typeset in Premiera

1 2 3 4 — 26 25 24 23

ISBN 978-3-99001-707-4

Roberta Rio

THE TOPOPHILIA EFFECT

How places affect us

It is not the light and rays of the sun that lead us out of darkness, but the knowledge of things.

Titus Lucretius Carus (ancient Roman Poet and Philosopher)

Content

A Secluded House

The Secrets of the Etruscans

The Ghosthouse

Our Ancestor‘s Knowledge of Radiation

Mystic Cathedrals

The Red Thread in the History of Places

The House on the Bend

The Mystery of the S16 and A7

No Place without Spirit

A Chapel in Southern England

Hippocrates of Kos

The Monastery in the Forest

The Vitruvian Site

The Enigmatic Mansion

The Eccentrics

The Farm

The Network of Red Crosses

Orchard Way

Guidelines for Dealing with Places

The Golden Rule

The Historical-Intuitive Method

Preface

by Dr Ruediger Dahlke

For the past forty years in my professional life as a doctor, I have been trying to convey a sense of quality. A feeling for how quantity and quality are connected and for the fact that quality is usually more significant for our soul.

Everyone knows, for instance, that Sunday has a different quality to Monday, although both have 24 hours but just how much the phenomenon of time has quality as well as quantity, was brought home to us at the very latest by Stefan Zweig in his work “Sternstunden der Menschheit” (Shooting Stars: Ten Historical Miniatures), a collection of miniatures about, as Zweig himself wrote, “dramatically concentrated, fateful hours in which a time-spanning decision is compressed into a single date, a single hour and often only a minute“ and which is “seldom in the life of an individual and rare in the course of history“.

The Austrian teacher, Franz Xaver Gruber, showed us how information can convey quality rather than quantity in the Christmas carol “Silent Night - Holy Night” which he composed: It conveys more feeling for Christmas than all the sermons of all the preachers put together.

The composer Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle surely once motivated more soldiers to march to his “Marsellaise” than all the exhortations of their commanders, and the American singer, songwriter and composer, Scott Mckenzie told the story of us hippies in his song “San Francisco” far better with the line “a new generation with a new explanation“ than any sociological study, however comprehensive. Or why does an expression like “honestly-earned money“ stand in contrast to terms such as ‘blood money‘, ‘black money‘, ‚speculative money‘ and ‚inheritance money‘, if there were no deeper quality differences even in the case of money, which according to an Austrian proverb has no ‚Mascherl‘ – meaning approximately ‚no label or individual quality‘?

In the book you are about to read, The Topophilia Effect, which I find fascinating for many reasons, Roberta Rio shows how necessary it is that we also recognise the quality of the places where we decide to live, work or go on holiday. She shows how we can save ourselves suffering and get support for our plans, and that every place in itself does something to us which we have to recognise as a challenge in order to be able to deal with it consciously.

Roberta Rio provides wonderful advice and guidance on this, both as a historian and as a woman with a great sense of the quality of space and time. Reading, we feel how much she is interested in the history of places and are captivated by the world that is revealed.

As someone who spent three decades in the role of a psychotherapist dealing with the history of people and the quality of their past days, I can understand her interest in the history of places all the better.

I also understand her desire to share her knowledge about it. Those who only decide on a place according to trivial factors such as square metres, prices and transport connections may perhaps pay for this lack of awareness later on.

Roberta Rio always refers to historical and scientific evidence and soberly gets to the bottom of the facts.

Moreover, I also gather this from the book: Among the things I deal with, there are the so-called “laws of fate“, which I wrote about in the book with the same title and subtitle The Rules of Life. One of the most important of these laws is the law of resonance, which reads: Everyone gets what they need (to learn), which means that we may choose the places we stay for the wrong reasons, but never by chance. But even with that, it is useful to know what we are letting ourselves in for.

To help with this the author offers valuable and practical advice and encourages us to trust our own intuition, our gut feeling. She spans an arc from the energetically charged hollow pathways - Vie Cave (excavated streets) - of the Etruscans and mysterious Gothic cathedrals to modern electromagnetic fields and the new 5G mobile phone standard.

As we read, we encounter some interesting and some great names, such as the physician Otto Bergsmann, who conducted the first study on the quality of places, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who, like many other architects, knew about these connections and built according to them, or the psychiatrist C.G. Jung, who, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, assumed that places have a soul, that they are inhabited by various “gods“ and “spirits“ and are shaped by the thought patterns and traditions of the people who lived there.

Roberta Rio sensitively brings us closer to this “genius loci“, the “spirit of place“, and makes the true meaning of the shrines in Thailand or our Christian “Marterl” clear to us so we are able to understand why many of us like to travel and go on pilgrimages to special places, and why we have favourite places where we can recharge our batteries particularly well.

“Marterl” are small religious monuments to commemorate a saint, someone killed in an accident., or to give thanks for a danger averted or survived. Often found in Alpine countries e.g. Switzerland, Austria, Germany.

I hope this remarkable and valuable book reaches many people because it creates a new awareness based on facts and intuition for the amazing dimensions of space and time.

Ruediger Dahlke

TamanGa, August 2020

Dr. Ruediger Dahlke has been working as a doctor with additional training in naturopathy, a degree in homeopathy and also as a seminar presenter since 1979. His books on topics such as holistic psychosomatics, vegan nutrition and a spiritual worldview reach millions of readers in German-speaking countries and are available in more than 280 translations in 28 languages. More Information at: www.dahlke.at – www.taman-ga.at

A Secluded House

The sun was shining and it was still quite warm for October. The air smelled clean and fresh. The leaves still hanging on the trees were glowing in friendly shades of red and brown. I was happy - firstly because of the good weather and secondly about my upcoming working day.

I had an appointment in the north of Friuli with a client who had asked me to look at a house he had recently bought.

He had read an article in a newspaper about me and my work called “The Spirit of Places”. It was about how I research the history of properties, houses, buildings, but also cities and regions and draw conclusions for their current inhabitants. What patterns can be discerned in a place? For example, with regard to the health, the housing or the economic situation of the previous inhabitants? What could these patterns mean for the present inhabitants of the place?

When I got out of the car, I first took in the exterior of the building. It consisted of a fascinating mixture of wood, raw bricks and plastered masonry. It was a beautiful two-storey house from the 18th century, although it was obviously in need of restoration.

For me as a historian, 300 years is not too long a period. Often enough I have worked with much older buildings and houses, some of which are in a much worse condition. I love that. Standing in front of buildings that carry so much history is a very special feeling for me. To know that in every room, in every corner and at every window, very different events have taken place.

Moments in the lives of people, important as well as.

insignificant, that have made up long-lost destinies.

The atmosphere surrounding this house was idyllic. The property stood in the middle of a park, quite secluded, with no direct neighbours and no traffic to disturb the peace.

“Hello Roberta,” my client greeted me, a slim, athletic, good-looking man in his mid-fifties, maybe early sixties. He glanced down, “You sure have a cute companion.”

“Let me introduce you: This is Leya,” I said.

Leya wagged her tail happily as he stroked her head.

Generally, I proceed in the following way. I do a tour of a house with the owner and let him / her show me around. Then I go around again on my own to see everything from a different angle, to experience it and to let it have an effect on me. Before I start my historical research, I want to get a feeling for the place without outside influence because owners of houses always have a very special bond with their property. It can easily happen that visitors like me lose their neutral attitude through owners’ stories and overlook important details.

This time, there were three other people there besides the owner and me. They were all craftsmen who wanted to get an idea of the condition of the house. The idea was to build several flats in it and the owner wanted to turn the stable next to the house into a function room.

“It’s a wonderful property,” he said to me. “I think you will be as excited as I am. Why don’t we start with the stable?”

There wasn’t much to see in the stable. It was empty and damp. The old beams on the ceiling immediately caught my eye.

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

He nodded. “It all has charisma, doesn’t it? Seminars could be held here and weddings celebrated. I can already imagine the happy faces of the visitors and guests.”

The man was a notary and obviously thrilled to have invested part of his considerable income here.

“How did you actually come by this house?”, I wanted to know.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I heard that it was for sale. The price was okay and I thought it was a good investment. Why don’t you take a look at it? I just had to snap it up.”

Further inspection took us inside the house. There, a, shall we say, very individual architectural style was revealed to me. I had already expected as much after noticing that the front looked a bit like patchwork, too. You could see that the house had been rebuilt again and again over the decades, but without a uniform structure, rather chaotically, so that the whole thing seemed crooked and interlocked.

However, I could hardly concentrate. No matter how hard I tried, something kept distracting me. Either it was the conversations of the others, who were talking about the laying of pipes and power lines and the condition of the walls, or it was Leya roaming around somewhere. I followed the owner from room to room, but I hardly managed to really experience the house.

When we had finished with the ground floor, we climbed up a wooden staircase to the first floor. In the first room we visited, something strange happened. Leya stopped abruptly as if rooted to the spot. She did not want to move at any price. I called her name several times, but she did not react. She stood there, stiff as a board, staring into a corner as if spellbound. But there was nothing there. No insect fluttering about, no light dancing on the wall, no sound coming from that direction.

She didn’t even react to the treat I held under her nose. It was very strange. At the dog training centre I had learned to test her stress level in this way. If she accepted the food, the level was manageable to low. Everything was OK. If she did not, she was stressed and I was called upon to remove the cause. But how, when there was no recognisable reason?

I crouched down next to her and looked in the same direction. Maybe this way I could see what was irritating my dog so much? But I still saw… nothing. Leya stood still for a few minutes longer before she relaxed again just as suddenly as she had frozen. As if nothing had happened, she cheerfully continued to explore the surroundings.

Sometimes I regret not being able to read Leya’s mind because it is evident that dogs can perceive things that are hidden from our human senses. The area of a dog’s brain for smells, for example, is forty times larger than that of humans. This enables them to sniff out things that are long since gone. It is a miraculous organ that makes it possible to travel back in time to yesteryear. So, in her own way, Leya is a historian herself and possibly more.

There are numerous reports that dogs and cats and all kinds of other animals also have prophetic gifts. Their ability to predict earthquakes, which has been proven many times, is currently being investigated by the renowned Max Planck Society in an elaborate project carried out by its Institute for Behavioural Biology.

Only recently, Leya’s behaviour at a friend‘s birthday party had given me food for thought. Leya, the model of a pack animal who loves to have people around her, had steadfastly refused to join us in the living room that evening. Later, I discovered that the house where my friend lived used to be a butcher‘s shop and that the place where we were sitting was exactly the place where the animals had been slaughtered.

Many dog owners can confirm that animals instantly sense whether or not they like something or someone. When I take Leya for a walk and we meet other people, she either heads towards them in a friendly way or comes to my other side to avoid them.

I have also observed that Leya prefers to defecate in places that have negative energy for humans. Once, when we were going on a short train ride, I took her for a walk before we left so that she could do her business. Out in the countryside she refused, and only when we were already on the platform did she finally do it, right under a high-voltage power line. Many dog training guides confirm this behaviour in dogs. In gardens, for example, they like to stand over underground water veins.

It is also possible that dogs have a magnetic sense that allows them to detect things that remain inaccessible to us. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, together with colleagues from the Technical University of Agriculture in Prague, are investigating whether dogs prefer to do their business along the magnetic north-south axis if they are allowed to but unfortunately I am not one of those people who can supposedly communicate with animals. I can only observe Leya and make her behaviour part of the impression I take away from a visit.

Several days after the tour round the house, I set to work researching in the municipal archive and discovered more about the previous owners of the house.

As an archivist and historian I have access to documents available only to authorised people. However, even archives open to the public are important sources of information for me. Even more important are church archives, which often reach back into the 16th century, unless they have been destroyed by fire or other catastrophes.

I then sit for hours in rooms surrounded by valuable old documents and books. Mobile phones are prohibited but mostly the archives are in basement rooms with no reception anyway. The atmosphere is always a little like Dan Brown’s historical thriller The Da Vinci Code. It’s adventurous and exciting, as I never know what secret I’ll come across next.

There is also a certain mix of tension and curiosity in the activity, so that I can often hardly drag myself away from these documents and spend many days in a row in these rooms, always on the look out for details and names, which bring me new clues.

In the meanwhile a lot can also be found out about the history of a house or place online, sometimes simply through google, although with google it’s essential to check the sources because, in addition to some useful information, there is also a lot of nonsense on this topic floating around the internet.

In this specific case the records in the municipal archives only went back as far as the end of the 19th century because the area on which the building stood had been a battlefield in both world wars. Many records, especially the older ones had therefore been lost or destroyed.

However, as always in such cases, my research did not only focus on archives. A large part of my work is talking: I talk to people who live in the immediate vicinity of a house or a place I am dealing with. Especially in rural areas, such people often have passed-down knowledge which has only partially been documented or not documented at all. Some are more talkative and forthcoming than others and these are the ones I have to find. For that I need patience, time and sensitivity.

However, by the end of my research I had gathered enough information to realise that one event had recurred time after time. People who had lived there had had to struggle with economic problems. All of them had been forced to sell the house soon after buying because they had fallen into financial hardship and could no longer afford it.

One family who had lived in the house had owned a company which manufactured metal cans for food at the time of the Second World War. Due to the demand for such products at the time, one would assume that they could hardly have coped with the many orders. After all, tin cans were essential for the survival of the soldiers in the war. But exactly the opposite was the case: the company went bankrupt.

Later, a couple and their son moved into the house. Over the years they had built up a successful business in the textile industry, which they handed over to their son when they were old enough to retire. At first, the business continued as successfully as before, but then the tide turned. The son, who never married and had spent his life with his parents in the house, became addicted to drugs and gambling and in the space of a few years the business went bankrupt.

Illness, too, played a significant role in the past. In two families who had lived in the house, people had died early from the same kind of lung disease.

Then I came across another strange event that could not be assigned to any pattern, but which I nevertheless took note of. At the time of the Second World War, a handful of German soldiers set up camp in the large barn. They stayed there for a few weeks. When they left, one of them had been left behind - dead in the shed. No one ever knew whether he had fallen victim to a crime or died naturally.

Back in the notary’s family home I told him everything that had happened in the house in the past and then he asked me, “Do you know what Leya might have been staring at in that room?“

I smiled. “You noticed that?”

“It made me think.“

“Honestly, I have no idea,“ I said. “They say there are people who can communicate with animals, but I‘m not one of them.“

He remained serious. “Anyway, I‘d better sell, don‘t you think?“

“You can only answer that question yourself,“ I replied. “In any case, the history of the house indicates that people before you had similar problems here, especially economic ones.“

“Are you sure I will have these problems too?“

“No,“ I said. “There is no scientific evidence that such patterns recur and anyone who constructed such evidence would be a charlatan. I can only recognise the patterns in my work and draw conclusions from them, which always remain subjective. I can ask myself the question: What would it mean if these patterns continued? If the most clearly recognisable pattern in the history of this house continues, you may not achieve the return on investment that you expect when exploiting it. You might even pay more, precisely because you don‘t find tenants or because costs arise that you hadn‘t foreseen.“

Worried, he furrowed his brow. “What would you do?“

“You can only make your own decision,“ I said. “It will never be one hundred per cent rational and you will never know if it was right, not even if you bothered to observe what continues to happen with and in the house. Another person may have a different destiny, which would be fulfilled here in a different way than yours would have been.“

He pondered for a while; “My wife will be surprised,“ he said finally. “Would you explain it to her? “

The next day I had lunch with his whole family. The notary‘s wife was an elegant, petite person with shoulder-length blond hair and a friendly laugh. I immediately found her warm manner appealing. The couple‘s two children were also there. A boy and a teenage girl. There were colourful roasted vegetables, courgettes, tomatoes, fennel, all sorts of things, and salad.

“Lunchtime everyone,” the woman said as she placed a large portion on each person‘s plate. “Enjoy!“

As we ate, we chatted about the lovely weather and how happy we all were with it. This autumn was indeed beautiful - lots of sunshine and hardly any rain. The family planned to go away for a few days in the coming weeks.

Not far away, just a change of scenery, to see something different and gather new impressions. I said I could well understand that and that they should enjoy their short trip to the full.

Meanwhile, Leya kept attracting attention by tilting her head and demanding to be stroked. She is really good at that.

We got round to the subject of “real estate“ late in the day, after dinner, over coffee and cake. The notary was very tense the whole time as there was a great deal of money involved. Before the meeting, he told me that he would give me a signal when the time was right to talk about a certain matter. When he gave me the signal, I said to the group, as had been agreed: “As far as the house is concerned, I think it would be a good idea to sell it.“

The woman‘s eyes widened and she flung her arms over her head. A moment of absolute silence was followed by a loud “At last!“ she exclaimed, “Finally someone has said that! It‘s time we got rid of this property. Get rid of it quickly!“

The man was as stunned by her reaction as I was. Then she told me that since the purchase, her husband had always been tense and nervous whenever he went to the house, even though he kept claiming to be so excited about it.

“Maybe I was actually kidding myself,“ he reflected. “Probably I was distracted by the paper value of the property, its comparatively low price and the theoretically achievable return. Once you have invested so much, you don‘t really listen anymore when a gut feeling deep inside you sounds the alarm. You don‘t want to know about it, you suppress it and get tense. But I’m asking myself this question: Can I sell the house with a clear conscience? Now that I know what might be waiting for me there?“

“My clients often ask me that question,“ I said. “But I should warn you. My answer to this sounds a bit Jungian and it is in fact influenced by the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology Carl Gustav Jung, to whom I will return later. It is this: If someone wants something in his life at all costs, it means that his subconscious is directing him towards it for some reason.

Perhaps the person who buys and keeps the house may actually have the strength to face these circumstances and cope with the matter. Or they are unconsciously looking for precisely the experiences that they need there in order to grow from them - like you. Jung said, ‚Until you become conscious of the unconscious, it will control your life and you will call it destiny.‘

You have learned that you should pay more attention to your gut feeling, even if it says something different to the numbers on the paper. You could look at it this way: You hired me to confirm that for you.“

The Secrets of the Etruscans

Our ancestors were more aware of the effect of places than we are. This is documented, among other things, by the history of the Etruscans, who took those effects into account in their settlement strategy and built architectural monuments around them that are still preserved today.

Many people intuitively feel that places have an effect. We have all said phrases like: “I immediately felt at home there“. Or: “Right from the start I felt uncomfortable there“.

Most people take these impressions into account when deciding whether or not to buy a flat or a house. Many give these feelings more importance than criteria such as balcony, room size and height or parking space. It is said that you should observe your dreams the first night you spend in a flat, because they carry meaning for your life there.

Only recently, Bavarian television ran a programme about an ancient lime tree, which parents tell their children about and in turn those children tell their children that it is so mighty because it stands on a water vein and that it is split into two main trunks for the same reason. In the village, this is just as much a part of the knowledge as knowing where the next supermarket is or where to go swimming in the summer.

I know people who don‘t want a flat because there used to be a dentist‘s surgery there, which they associate with pain. Likewise, I know a woman from the Upper Austrian capital Linz who avoided a certain place in the city centre all her life without knowing why, until someone told her that a synagogue once burned down there. It was a terrible catastrophe with a number of fatalities. I also know successful entrepreneurs who hesitate for a long time before changing their place of business because they fear that the energy might be worse in the new place and harm their business.

Is all this really nothing but superstition?

I myself was also aware of the effect of places long before I began to deal with them scientifically. As a historian, for example, I have always been fascinated by the ancient Etruscan people. The Etruscans probably lived in the area of today‘s Italian regions of Tuscany, Umbria and Latium from 800 BC on until their culture was absorbed into the Roman Empire in the second half of the 1st century BC.

The Etruscans were a remarkable people in every respect and should deserve much more historical attention. Not only because, according to an ancient tradition, they predicted the duration of their rule and the end of their own people quite accurately, but they were also enormously advanced in the matters of daily life. They were excellent seafarers and had a long-standing monopoly on the so-called metal route, which stretched from the Aegean to the Middle East. Metalworking was therefore also, along with trade in oil and wine, an important feature of their economic system, which is why they excelled in goldsmithing, hydraulics, architecture and shipbuilding.

Today, they are best known for the design of their graves. They decorated them with paintings that reflect their attitude towards death. The pictures show that they celebrated life in every respect. From today‘s perspective, some of these drawings even have a pornographic content.

The Etruscan temples are also interesting; They were built in the middle of nature and were thus connected with it. Etruscan spirituality revolved around the “Sacer of the Earth“, i.e. the primordial energy of the Earth, which, according to their beliefs, created everything but could just as easily destroy everything. They worshipped this energy as a deity.

For the Etruscans, the awareness that places had an effect on them seems to have been quite natural and to have permeated their daily routines in many aspects of life. I have always found their custom of the “liver show“ particularly interesting.

The liver show was an indispensable ceremonial component of a festival they convened once a year. It was held in the “Fanum Voltumnae“, which means sacred district, sacred place dedicated to Voltumna, an Etruscan deity. The heart of the complex is a U-shaped area with a temple in the centre and two fountains. Magnificent streets flanked by canals led to the temple and were most likely used for religious processions. Once a year, in spring, according to Roman documents, the leading priests and politicians of the Etruscans met there.

It can be imagined as a fair, with everything that antiquity had to offer: theatre performances, sporting competitions, markets and crowds of people everywhere, athletes, musicians, dancers, jugglers, traders, believers and pilgrims. It was also astonishing that the Etruscan women attended these colourful events - quite contrary to the habits of the Romans, who turned up their noses at it even from afar.

At this annual meeting, there was always a liver show. Only the highest priest, called Haruspex, was allowed to conduct it. Depending on the condition of the livers of different sacrificial animals, he made predictions for the future. He divided the liver into regions, which were given names such as mountain, river, road, palace, ear, leg, finger, tooth, vulva, testicle and so on. Unusual holes in the liver were considered a bad omen.

But the Etruscans also used the liver show in their settlement strategy, namely to clarify the good or bad effect of places on people. Before founding a new city or erecting a building, they would bring their sheep to the place and let them graze there for a while. Some sources claim this lasted for a year, others think the period was much shorter, in the range of 14 days.

After the sheep had grazed there for a certain period of time, they slaughtered one of the animals and examined its liver. If it was in a bad condition, they killed another sheep to find out if they had just accidentally caught a sick animal. If the liver of this animal was also diseased, it meant that the place had no good energy and they abandoned it.

According to ancient reports, much later cultures also used animals in their settlement strategy. Just as the Etruscans