Various linear enigmas exist in ancient sacred landscapes worldwide. These include examples of Native American landscape lines, such as the Chacoan "roads", New Mexico, and the Nazca "lines", Peru; Neolithic linear earthworks, called "cursuses", in Britain; stone rows in Europe, Malaysia and elsewhere; temple alignments in Indonesia. There is also the archaeologically heretical idea of "leys" (alignments of ancient sites), put forward by Englishman Alfred Watkins in 1921. Although the ley theory has long been derided by mainstream scholarship, new German and Dutch findings show that there was a medieval tradition of straight "Doodwegen" (death roads) or "Geisterwege" (ghost paths). It seems Watkins may have unwittingly uncovered vestiges of these features. Certainly Watkins had no concept of current "New Age" notions of "energy leylines", which are modem fantasies. It is argued that such medieval features arise out of a deep-seated, universal conceptual complex associating "spirit ways" with straight lines: straight cords and threads in ancient traditional healing practices as well as straight tracks and other ceremonial landscape markings. It is suggested that these ideas have their roots in archaic shamanism, which, throughout Eurasia, influenced later, ceremonial aspects of monarchy. A proto-Indo-European language vestige is cited. Preliminary evidence is presented indicating that the spirit - line association derived from the ecstatic "journey" experienced during the shamanic trance. This gave rise to images of "flying shamans" in tribal societies throughout the world, and, ultimately, to the "magical flight of the sovereign" in proto-state and state societies. It is this "flight of the soul" that seems to have been translated onto ancient sacred landscapes as straight lines, which later became variously acculturated as sacred ways, spirit and fairy paths, roads of the dead or of ghosts, or Royal Routes. The neurological aspects of the so-called out-of-body state, and its possible association with modem psychological epidemics such as "UFO abductions", is alluded to.