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Paul Devereux – Earth Mysteries

The idea that straight ground markings and mystery roads may have represented routes believed to have been taken by entranced shamans in the otherworld – which was always seen as located within the physical fabric of the material environment – is not mere supposition.

In 1990, Alan Ereira filmed the remote Kogi Indians of northern Columbia for the BBC. The Kogi have preserved deep pre-Columbia traits and are ruled by a shamanic elite. These shamans explained to Ereira that their roads held spiritual significance for them, and that the Earth Mother had instructed them that the roads must be constantly walked…

Further they showed him a stone road that was straight and which they said was the trace of a spirit path they took when in the spirit otherworld. They pointed out that spirit routes could be seen by them even when they were not marked by physical roads. The Kogi also have a standing stone criss-crossed with straight lines and this is a map of the spirit paths in the Kogi territory

Alan Ereira

It is a philosophical reserve, home to a society which guards the mental landscape which Europeans reworked over all the rest of America … the Kogi … maintained their world intact with its secrets. 

Paul Devereux – Sacred Sites

The use of a line to express the ‘spirit flight’ sensation is known in rock art, and the ground markings are essentially simpler larger horizontal versions of that kind of iconography. The more engineered and structured features, such as ceremonial causeways were simply the development of these conceptual foundations by more complex state scale societies.

The Kogi of Columbia say they have to walk their paths, some of which are considered to be physical traces of spirit routes taken by their shamans in the otherworld dimension, because of a religious imperative.