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Ritual Landscapes
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BuckyE
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Re: Ritual Landscapes
Oct 14, 2005, 08:51
There may very well be a bit of Yank bias in my theorizing, sure. That's an insightful point. And if so, would it be so VERY different from that of folks who had spent who knows how many generations trying to make farmland out of climax forest using stone and bone tools? Wasn't their background very much like mine? Hmmm... :^)

"Subjugating" is my modernist term, and yes indeed, it's a loaded one. I use it exactly in its etymological sense: from Latin subjugatus, past participle of subjugare, from sub- + jugum yoke; 1 : to bring under control and governance as a subject. They were creating the belief that the land is a posession, a thing to be used, like all their other tools and animals.

I don't doubt many of the stones, especially celestially oriented structures (as opposed to, say, little statue menhirs) had much to do with propitiating, cajoling and coercing dieties and ancestors. Neolithic farming was backbreaking, grinding work compared to the foraging it superseded. They knew they needed all the help they could get. (And they certainly wouldn't have needed "calendars" to tell them when to do farm chores.) There may well still, even by the time of Stonehenge, have been animistic die hards grumbling about how the priests and priestesses had forgotten the land behind the cliff faces, cave walls and stone surfaces where the spirit animal power helpers dwelt. People in almost modern times still believed fairies lived under the hills, and isn't this a dim echo of the same idea, mixed up with the barrow builders?

But putting up a stone ring, building a cairn or digging a henge are all human chores making human spaces. The centers of ritual were no longer caves or cliff faces, no longer naturally occuring features. Of course I have no way to PROVE it, and as Nigel told us in person right to our faces, "You can't demonstrate the continuity," but all I see and feel at the sites is modernity, a complete disconnect from the land AS IT IS in its own right. The huge Avebury henge blocks out all but the sky and the humanly moved and placed stones. Imagine Stonehenge restored, with three concentric rings of stone. A prison of stone, open only to a circle of blank sky. Barrows and passage "graves," placed, pointed and built ON the earth, not tunneled INTO it. Nope, sorry, to me, all of this has nothing to do with anything natural, anything that lives outside human control.

I'm still working on the long version of this. Anyone be interested in reading a multipage essay if I post it to our Lovebunnies web site?
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Re: Ritual Landscapes (Rhiannon)		 Replies:
Re: Ritual Landscapes (Rune)
Re: Ritual Landscapes (Moth)
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