Many Sedonans think Sedona is special. Some say it’s so special that it’s “sacred,” such as the members of the city of Sedona’s Tourism Advisory Board.

“I see myself as an environmental steward of our sacred lands,” Councilman Brian Fultz wrote as a candidate in a June 2022 statement.

Also-ran candidate Jennifer Strait likewise referred to her efforts to address the importance of “keeping our natural lands clean and sacred.” “We need to change to better represent our residents, our local businesses and our sacred land.”

Mayoral candidate Samaire Armstrong later mentioned “how much the stewardship of this sacred land means to me.”

British anthropologist Susannah Crockford and environmental scholar Adrian Ivakhiv, both of whom did their doctoral research in Sedona, described two prevailing models that underlie the conception of Sedona as “sacred” land, one of which appeals to a fictitious history of American Indian spirituality, while the other derives Sedona’s sacredness from its pseudo-scientific energy vortexes.

Neo-Native Spirituality

“Suppositions, both real and imagined, about the Native history of the area pervade the marketing of ‘spiritual Sedona,'” Ivakhiv wrote in his study “Claiming Sacred Ground.” “Vague references to Native Americans abound, and are facilitated by two facts: That there are thousands of burial and other traditional cultural sites in the Sedona area, and that few Native Americans actually live in area — thus making it easier for the mystique to be appropriated into other agendas.”

In many traditional American Indian religions, most of which are animist, inanimate objects can acquire sacrality when inhabited by a spirit. Geographic areas can be so inhabited; Standing Rock Sioux activist Vine Deloria, Jr. wrote that most sacred sites “result from revelations of the holy at certain locations.”

However, many American Indian traditional narratives more often refer to objects — pipes, drums, arrows or feathers — as sacred rather than they do to geographic features, and when geographic sacred sites are mentioned, they are usually particular features, such as a rock, tree, stream or mountain. As anthropologist Irving Hallowell summarized in reference to Ojibwe belief, there are “potentialities for animation in certain classes of objects under certain circumstances,” but not every object or every patch of land is automatically animate and sacred.

The term “sacred land” was almost unused in the English language prior to 1830, followed by a surge and then decline in its use between 1870 and 1930, during which time it was usually applied to Palestine, but its usage later increased in frequency sevenfold between 1940 and 2000.

Much of its post-1940 use was attributable to increasing employment of the term by American Indian leaders testifying before Congress, where they were more and more often making the argument for the return of their former lands on the First Amendment grounds that all of the land, not just individual locations, was sacred.

“My view of this evidence is that it is the contention of the Indians that the whole territory is a shrine, that whenever you interfere with the land at all, you are interfering with their religion,” Montana U.S. Rep. James F. O’Connor said in 1943, summarizing the testimony of San Ildefonso Pueblo governor Sotero Montaya.

The following year, John Tainewasher of the Yakima said of Indian beliefs regarding the land, “This was created by God for their benefit and the hold is sacred and from the beginning the American Indian believed that it was theirs and did not give it away when the treaty was made.”

“This land is a sacred home of the Hopi people,” an association of Hopi chiefs stated in 1952. “This is our sacred soil.”

Use of the term “sacred land” in reference to American Indian affairs increased beginning in the late 1960s following the attempts of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico to reclaim the Blue Lake area, which the Taos regarded as a sacred site. “They began to plead their cause on the basis of religious rights,” the Native American Rights Fund’s newsletter wrote in 1979. “Congress’ main concern was that granting the Taos claim would establish an undesirable precedent for other Indian land claims calling for return of areas for religious purposes — a situation they thought they had forever precluded with the establishment of the Indian Claims Commission, which was authorized to award only monetary compensation if an Indian land claim was upheld … [Anthropologist John] Bodine emphasized that control of the entire area, not just Blue Lake, was essential to the practice of the Taos religion, for Blue Lake was but one of many ‘shrines’ in the area and all were necessary; that the total ecology must be undisturbed because of the use made of local plants and other natural features; and that the very presence of non-Indians constituted defilement of the ceremonies … This marked the first time in the history of the United States that an Indian claim for land, based on the practice of a Native traditional religion, ended successfully in return of the land to the Indian tribe.”

“Through the 1970s and 1980s, indigenous religiosity was increasingly important in underwriting a transmatinal indigenous identity that could claim rights specifically on behalf of ‘indigenous peoples,’” religious scholar Thomas Karl Alberts wrote. “More recently, as indigenous self-determination transformed into indigenous autonomy within states, the potential of ‘indigenous cosmology’ to deliver self-determination for ‘indigenous people’ became clearer. ‘Indigenous cosmology’ has provided a crucial basis for legal argument to secure indigenous title to ancestral lands, territories and resources. It is as if a key has been found that solves, for indigenists at least, a significant portion of the problem of territorialization.”

This approach was echoed in a 1978 report by United Nations Special Rapporteur Jose R. Martinez Cobo, in which Martinez Cobo recommended that “sacred land or land of historical and spiritual significance for indigenous people must in all cases be excluded from licenses or concessions and protected from intrusions of all kinds … Public land which is sacred or of religious significance to the indigenous populations should be attributed to them in perpetuity.”

With the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, the United States began to develop a formal framework for incorporating Indian claims to sacrality within American law.

By 1979, the Western Shoshone had formed the Western Shoshone Sacred Land Association, which asserted that “the land is most sacred, as is the water flowing upon it; the growing things of the land; the air we breathe; the food that grows for us to eat” in the context of their opposition to the installation of the planned MX missile system on their traditional lands.

Sioux and Cherokee leaders complained that the transformation of Bear Butte in South Dakota into a state park rendered it unsuitable for religious use. Elmer Savilla of the Quechan Tribe in Yuma asserted a claim to the Coso Hot Springs in California, which he described as “a sacred Paiute site.”

“Everyone must realize and respect the fact that the Mother Earth was and still remains sacred to Indian people,” the Native American Heritage Commission proclaimed that same year. In 1984, Robert E. Lewis, former governor of Zuni Pueblo, appeared before Congress to argue for the return of lands considered sacred by the Zuni. Glenn Wasson, chairman of the Winnemucca Indian Community in Nevada, claimed incorrectly in 1986 that “all tribes” had protective laws that “included the protection of our Mother Earth…therefore, the cutting down of a single living tree is sacrilegious–the cutting down of a forest–unthinkable!”

Two years later, the Blackfeet of Montana promulgated Tribal Resolution No. 219-72 to declare the entirety of a disputed strip of land to be “sacred ground.”

Simultaneously, Havasupai Tribal Chairman Delmer Uqualla stated the Havasupai opposition to a proposed uranium mind on their traditional lands near the Grand Canyon.

At the same time, Uqualla clarified, “our beliefs, however, are centered not on vast acreages of land, but on discrete tracts of very limited acreage.” The 1980s also saw continued controversy over ongoing Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho claims to the Black Hills of South Dakota as a sacred site.

Southwestern peoples have been especially active in emphasizing the sacrality of land as central to their quest to regain sovereignty, which is due in part to the extensive body of ritual created by the Puebloans, the special pleading of the cosmology developed by the Hopi in particular, and the sheer abundance of sites considered sacred by these cultures.

In a 1972 statement to Congress, a group of Hopi religious leaders told them that “Hopi land is held in trust in a spiritual way for the Great Spirit … Our sacred ceremonies, during which we pray for such things as rain, good crops, and a long and good life, depend on spiritual contact with these forces left behind on Black Mesa … If these places are disturbed or destroyed, our prayers and ceremonies will lose their force and a great calamity will befall not only the Hopi, but all of mankind … We keep the rest of the world in balance … The life of all people as well as animal and plant life depend on the Hopi spiritual prayers and song. The world will end in doom.”

The Havasupai similarly asserted that “Mat Faar Tiigundra, near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, is the place of Havasupai origin. We have lived at the bottom of the Canyon since time immemorial. We believe that the proposed mine will destroy our world and all of us.”

The intensity and detail of Hopi and Puebloan religious practices tied to sacred spaces, however, was not common to most other North American cultures and resulted from the long-term sedentism of Puebloan groups within an area of scarce resources.

Furthermore, as described by anthropologist Ruth Benedict, Puebloan rites were purely mechanical and involved no question of belief or spirituality. If a priest performed a rain dance, rain was expected to fall. The dance itself, not the intervention of a spirit propitiated by the dance, was the causative action.

Moreover, the Hopi and other activists actually developed a proactive defense against having the mechanistic nature of such ceremonies pointed out by whites by inverting traditional Euro-American condescension toward American Indian religious practices and combining that reversal with a cosmic threat.

“The whole mountain [San Francisco Peaks] tells of many spiritual things that you will not understand even if we told you,” Hopi leader Herbert Talahaftewa informed Congress in 1972. “You query as to the location of these shrines and seeking just how sacred and holy the Mountain is, demanding us to provide the Mountain’s holiness — that, my friend, is the Supreme One’s duty to show you one day and it just may be too late for you to do anything about.”

“Skeptical non-Indians and representatives of other religions seeking to discredit tribal religions have sometimes deliberately violated some of these Holy Places with no ill effects,” Deloria reported. “They have thereupon come to believe that they have demonstrated the false nature of Indian beliefs. These violations reveal a strange non-Indian belief in a form of mechanical magic that is touchingly adolescent, a belief that an impious act would or could trigger an immediate response from the higher spiritual powers. Surely these impious acts suggest the concept of a deity who spends time recording minor transgressions as some Protestant sects have envisioned God … The effect of continuous secularity, however, poses an entirely different kind of danger, and prophecies tell us of the impious people who would come here, defy the Creator, and bring about the massive destruction of the planet. Many traditional people believe that we are now quite near that time.”

By the 1990s and early 2000s, consistent deployment of the term “sacred land” for political purposes by American Indian groups appears to have resulted in popular culture coming to accept a generalized and ahistorical view that all land was always sacred to all American Indians, which was then retroactively applied to Sedona.

While historically and theologically inaccurate, the dominance of this view in the cultural mainstream at the same time that Sedona was rapidly expanding as a metaphysical destination resulted in its widespread acceptance within the Sedona community’s emerging sense of identity.

Its inaccuracy even aided its spread.

“Sedona was considered a sacred site by everyone I spoke to; even people who were not interested in spirituality would mention that it was sacred to Native Americans,” Crockford wrote in “Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona” in 2021. “The physical and sacred space is reinscribed with a new religious history, rewriting and co-opting indigenous history and practice, and claiming what has been stolen and settled as rightful inheritance … When those involved in spirituality talk about ‘the Native Americans,’ they are talking about their own idealized form of the native, who is closer to nature, peaceful, and spiritual, one who is uncorrupted by ‘Western’ civilization.” “The relative lack of an obvious Native connection is important, as it has made it easierfor New Agers to appropriate the landscape into their own narratives,” Ivakhiv agreed.

Increasing American Indian use of the First Amendment to declare lands sacred and thereby reclaim them from United States control was an act of cultural appropriation, and the subsequent adoption of that “sacred land” label by Sedonan spiritual seekers was an act of reverse cultural appropriation. Cultures evolve by borrowing from one another.

The Gaia Hypothesis

The concept of Sedona as a land sacred to its pre-Columbian inhabitants is also intertwined with the presumption that Sedona is a location where an undefined form of “energy” emerges from the earth via “vortexes.”

“Among those who followed a spiritual path, the vortexes were the most frequently cited reason for why they considered Sedona sacred,” Crockford wrote. “In accounts by local authors who are invested in spirituality, the vortexes are credited with a much older heritage. The vortexes were known to Native Americans, who held the whole area sacred … To claim the vortexes as somehow ‘Native American’ can be seen as an attempt at cultural assimilation, taking a space that is sacred to a specific group, the Yavapai, and claiming it for white Americans instead.”

The factual as opposed to the commodified history of Sedona’s vortexes is recent and purely commercial. In its management plan for the Red Rock Scenic Road Corridor, the Arizona Department of Transportation stated, “Sedonans credit Page Bryant as the first to use the word ‘vortex’ with this meaning [a place to tap into the earth’s energy] in 1980.” Ivakhiv cited a reference by a California psychic to Sedona’s “power spots” no earlier than 1976, with vortex tours not taking off until the 1980s.

One of the original vortex sites was considered to be located atop Airport Mesa, which led to disruption of airport operations by tourists wandering across the runway, “so the owners of the airport moved it,” Crockford said. “They got all the local vortex maps changed to say that the vortex is a rock outcrop about halfway up the road that leads to the airport. That is where the vortex is now located, and people go up there and say they feel the special energy. This suggests that only once a site is named as sacred is it then felt as such.”

The purported energy emerging from these votex points, which is often believed to affect human physical and mental health, is purposefully described in ambiguous terms by Sedona’s metaphysical community. Crockford, referencing sociologist Emil Durkheim, compared it to the Hawaiian concept of “mana,” the divine life force that imbued the members of the ruling class and gave them their authority. Ivakhiv made comparisons to the Greek “aether”, the Chinese “qi,” and the Sanskrit “prana”.

Each of these concepts described a fluid medium that either acted as a force on material objects or as a conduit that allowed other forces to act on matter. The Sanskrit variety of the concept further elucidated a system of how this dimensionless force flowed through the body along predetermined lines, concentrating at certain points called chakras — another term frequently heard in Sedona. Mana, aether, prana, and qi were likewise all conceptualized as breath, intangible yet omnipresent. The term “vitalism” is sometimes used by New Age practitioners to describe how this “life force,” rather than biochemistry, is believed to animate all living beings.

The concept of an animating force without density flowing through the body to emerge at certain points provides a parallel to the idea of lines of force flowing through the landscape of Sedona to emerge at vortex points, and the idea of a force or vortex map of Sedona is in fact derived from that analogy. New Age writer and ley line enthusiast Paul Devereux described the lines of force he felt to be underlying the world as “traces … of an effect of the human central nervous system transferred to the land … our minds carry the blueprint of the spiritual earth.”

Ivakhiv commented on the interplay between mental force and physical force as understood by New Age Sedonans: “Most New Age and ecospiritual ceremonial ritual is founded on the supposition that thought forms and images have real effects on the world, and that focused ‘work’ with such images can bring about real results, such as the effective resacralization of a particular place or the reinvigoration of its earth energies … ‘When the ceremonies work, the energy increases; when they don’t, it doesn’t’ … Through the regular use of specific sites for meditation, ceremony, and other practices, then, the red rock landscape is sacralized by Sedona’s New Age and metaphysical community.” In other words, energy lines and vortexes, while preexisting within Sedona’s physical environment, can be enhanced by acts of sympathetic magic.

Where these energies that can be amplified by local magicians come from depends on who you ask. Some psychics classify them into electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic types. Bryant claimed that Oak Creek Canyon was an “electromagnetic grid.” Others attribute Sedona’s “energy” to the intersection of geologic fault lines in the area. Amateur “energy” researcher Dirk van Dijk proposed that Sedona’s numerous underground streams flowing over rocks containing iron oxide would generate and focus the energy of the rocks. Still other theories, Ivakhiv noted, draw comparisons between Sedona’s landscapes and the fundamental shapes of Chinese geomancy, reinforcing the overlay of imported “life force” theories onto the red rock landscape.

Apart from the fact that there are no measurable electrical discharges or magnetic interactions from or between any of Sedona’s vortex points, the underlying principle of an “energy” driving such phenomena has been repeatedly debunked, most notably by Albert Michaelson and Edward Morley in 1887, who demonstrated the nonexistence of a universally-penetrating light-carrying medium.

Particle physicist Victor J. Stenger pointed out the deliberate conflation of a presumed “bioenergetic field” with electromagnetism by New Age practitioners, adding, “No carefully controlled, replicable experiment has ever produced data requiring us to postulate additional components to organic matter, whether material or spiritual, living or non-living. Holistic bioenergetic fields are figments of the imagination.”

Comparably, historians Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy showed that the geographic identifying marks normally presented as proof of the existence of ley lines by advocates of that theory are just as likely to be found by random chance along lines drawn between geographic features not associated with purported energy alignments. The use of geographic features, such as Sedona’s vortex points, to validate its “energies” is comparable to the use of the Forer effect by psychics, in which coincidental correspondence between a generalized prediction and a specific event is selectively used as evidence of the prediction’s truth.