Topographies: Walking the Psychic Landscape

I’ve recently been visiting my hometown of Kirkcaldy, the crematorium where my grandmother’s ashes are scattered, and to visit Chapel village (aka Chapel), on the northwest outskirts of the town. Chapel was my home between the ages of 4 –16, and I have always felt a deep, at time possessing, connection with the place. My urge to visit is not nostalgia per se, it’s more like a continuing relationship with a place which appears to me as both real and mythical.

This connection, a psychic connection, is reflected in my natal astrological chart where I have my moon in the 4^th house, on my IC, conjunct Uranus. In fact, including asteroids Karma, Kaali, and both Black Moon Lilith, I have 1 angle, 1 outer planet, my moon, two asteroids and Black Moon Lilith (mean & true) in my 4^th house. It is no wonder I feel such a strong connection with the place where I grew up. But it’s more than just astrology.

It seems to me that the many dreams I’ve had about Chapel over the years were not only an integration of my personal experience but also spilled beyond the boundaries of myself. The tangibility of this place as it continues to exist in the physical world exists also in the fluidity of my psyche, only much more vibrantly. At some point it became clear that in both the inner and the outer planes of existence, Chapel was/is a “ritual landscape”. While in the physical world, the ritual and sacred aspects of the land have long been buried and forgotten, on the inner planes Chapel continues to hold the vibration of what it has always been- a ritual or funerary centre of some sort.

Initially, I had two main points of reference for my quest: Though sometimes disputed by scholars, others believe that the name Kirkcaldy relates to the early Christian sect known as the Culdees, and that Kirkcaldy means, “Church of the Culdees”. The other focus for my quest was the name “Chapel”; I reckoned that at some point there must have been an actual chapel on the land. A little to the southeast of Chapel, 1.5 miles away, is Temple Hall, where my junior high school used to be. There was also a masonic hall there, and though it wasn’t my father’s lodge, I recall going there sometimes for Christmas parties.

Chapel village sits to the west of a long road (Chapel Level) that runs adjacent to an equally long road called “Standing Stane” road. The place where my grandmother’s ashes are scattered is roughly half way between the standing stone and Chapel village. As a child I knew Standing Stone Road, as the “Stawney Stane” road, and it wasn’t until many years later I realised there is an actual stone there- it is either a marker stone or a more ancient stone.

Around Chapel village is Chapel Grove, Chapel Hill, Chapel Road, and until recently Chapel Farm, but that is now a retail park. The original Chapel village consisted of a couple of Miners’ cottages, and a row of 1950s council houses that we called the “old houses”. Down the brae and up the hill toward Redcraigs was the Post Office and a few much older houses. The Chapel Tavern, the oldest pub in Kirkcaldy, dates to 1605. The estate, or “scheme” that I grew up on was built in the early 1970s. It was a Scottish Special Housing Association (SSHA) development of about 200 houses, curiously made up of mainly incomers- we moved from Glasgow, but there were lots of English, Italians, a few Africans, and even a Yugoslavian dissident upon whom an attempted assassination was made in 1988.

In 2022 I contacted Fife archives to try and get some information about the SSHA development in Chapel as I was unable to find anything on the internet. The Dean of Guild plans that I needed were in a shelve that was at that time jammed and so any documents on that shelf were for the time being unobtainable. A while later, I received a message to say that shelf was fixed and that I could arrange an appointment to see the plans. For whatever reason- probably a lot going on at the time- I never made the appointment. I called the archivist again this week, and it seems the shelf is jammed again…

In other avenues of enquiry, I discovered that the name Chapel does indeed comes from an actual chapel. A reference is made to the chapel in 1562, but it is likely to have existed for much longer, and there are speculations (though the information is scant), that the chapel was built on a far more ancient site. Dedicated to the early Christian saint, Ninian, not much is known about the chapel or it’s practices, however seven urns containing human bones turned up in the early 1960s and were documented in the 1962 records.

Kirkcaldy (Scottish Gaelic: Cathair Chaladinn) is a former royal burgh and town. Known as one of Scotland’s “most ancient burghs”, the area surrounding the modern town has a history dating from the Bronze age between 2500 BC and 500 as a possible funerary landscape. Fife also has several notable Stone Age structures such as the stones at Lundin Links, Balbirnie stone circle, Balfarg henge, and ancient cup and ring marks near Burntisland.

The site of St Ninian’s Chapel – of which there are no remaining ruins- was situated in what later became a limestone quarry to the right of a pub called the “Country Inn”. The chapel sat toward Broom Road and is just about visible in this old picture- just beside the first tree on the right. The pub no longer exists and there is now no access to what was the old quarry. New houses have been built around the area, and judging by what I could see from peeking through fences, there is still a small disused area covered with bushes, scrub, and trees. The path leading up to the site is called “Chapel Grove”. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I fell into the quarry and gashed my leg, it was a bloody scene, and I was taken to A & E in the Victoria Hospital for stitches. Today I have a lovely scar at the top of my right thigh.

Ninian, a Christian saint born in AD 360, is first mentioned as a missionary among the Pictish people of Scotland and is known as the “Apostle to the Southern Picts”. There are numerous dedications to him in the parts of Scotland with a Pictish heritage, throughout the lowlands, and Northumbria. Ninian is generally credited with being the first Christian missionary to Scotland and is responsible for the widespread conversion of the Celts and Southern Picts to Christianity. There is a notable lack of dedications to St Ninian in the Scottish Highlands. Saint Columba (also known as Colmcille), who is also credited with the conversion of the Picts, came to Scotland later in AD 563- there are more dedications to him among the Northern Picts, Gaels, and Dal Riata.

St Ninian appears to be a shadowy figure, and very little is known about him, except that he was educated in Rome. There are no written references from the time of his missionary, and it is many years later before he is mentioned. His main cultic centre was in Whitehorn, Galloway.

Why were the Christian saints drawn to certain places. What was it about those places. And who were the saints? What we do know is that many Christian chapels and churches were built on previously existing pagan and Druidic sites. These sites were sacred places where spirit and the gods felt close, such as groves, streams, wells, springs, hills, and forests, as well as notable formations and shapes in the landscape.

The Culdees, those early Celtic Christians appear to have acted as a bridge between the Druids and the encroaching Christian missionaries. A quick google search reveals that the Culdees were present in Scotland from the first century AD, but how could that be given that the first missionaries came to Scotland in the 4th and 5th centuries? In his book, “An Historical Account of the Ancient Culdees of Iona” John Jamieson, writes-

“We may safely assume, that there must have

been a considerable number of Christians in the northern part

of our island about the time assigned to his reign, that is,

towards the close of the second century. For Tertullian, who

flourished in this age, asserts, that the gospel had not only

been propagated in Britain, but had reached those parts of

the island into which the Roman arms had never penetrated.

This perfectly agrees with the defence, made by the Culdees,

of their peculiar modes of worship. For they still affirmed,

that they had received these from the disciples of John the

Apostle.*”

If the Culdees did receive teachings from the disciples of John the Apostle (which means that the disciples must have travelled to Scotland) it is not too outlandish to suggest that the Culdees were a Gnostic sect. The Apocryphon of John, also known as the Secret Revelation of John, is a foundational Gnostic text which is believed to have been written in the 2nd century. The text is considered central to Sethian Gnosticism and was addressed by Iranaeus in Against Heresies.

As well as the Culdee connection, I am interested in the Picts, and the Druids who occupied Scotland, and in particular Fife, Kirkcaldy, and (possibly) Chapel, before the arrival of St Ninian. There is evidence of Female Druids (priestesses), and reverence for women in Pictish and Celtic culture where women held spiritual and political positions of power. With the coming of the Christian saints and missionaries, holy women, priestess, and women of power were written out of the picture.

Nearly all of what constitutes history, religion, politics, and philosophy has been formulated and communicated by men. There is another way of knowing that is more intuitive and less constricted than canonised knowledge that often appears to be devoid of soulful revelation or direct experience. In the past, I might have considered these two types of knowing as the rational left brain versus the intuitive right brain. Most of what has created the structures of our consensual reality has been shaped by left brain thinking, while right brain experiences have been largely marginalised and rejected. I might even have described these two ways of knowing dichotomously- masculine/feminine, solar/lunar, mind/soul, but now I view them as limited dimensionality and multi-dimensionality.

As I walk in the landscape of my childhood, remembering actual experiences, as well as astral experiences, and dream experiences, there is a visceral sense that time and space are not as limited as we have been led to believe. The past is not the past in the way we have imagined it to be, and the boundary between the inner and the outer is much more fluid that we usually acknowledge.

For now, I am in St Andrews, the epicentre of the Christendom in Fife, and the destination of an ancient pilgrimage route from the 8th century. It is also where the Culdees established their main church and monastery, located at St Mary on the Rock also known as Kirkheugh or St Mary’s Collegiate Church.

St Mary on the Rock, St Andrews, taken by Karen Mullen Smith©

I am repeatedly encountering remnants from a past -fragile as they may be- where women held an active and sacred role in the spiritual lives of their communities whether within Celtic, Culdee, Druid, Pict, or Pagan, cultures. On the inner planes this truth, a balancing and a healing truth, survives and is breaking through rigid structures and hegemonies that have sought to suppress the feminine and erase her from history. It is a truth that is also breaking through individual and collective psychic structures and is being revealed through dreams and the inner calling of women and men.

A couple of years ago in a significant dream (I feel like I have had a hundred dreams about Chapel) I was shown the site of an ancient well not far from the location of the chapel. In the dream I was immersed in the water that came shooting up out of the earth and was collected in a huge vat. On my most recent trip I took my dowsing rods and dowsed the area I had been shown. Sure enough, my rods indicated that it is a site of water. My notebooks are filled with years of this kind of psychic/nocturnal activity. It is as if a whole other dimension is running parallel to my waking life, and sometimes, the points of the two dimensions intersect. I wondered if my experiences could be considered “psycho-geographical”, “mythic-geographical”, or even “psychic topographies” but none of these terms quite fit. Maybe it will become clearer.