Some of you may remember my photos in Riot Gibbon’s site of the hilltop altar-temple of Ulaca, in central Iberia. This is a stone-cut stone altar, roughly 8 feet high, with steps that lead to the top, where a sort of rectangular and flat ‘cupmark’ used to receive libations. It is evident that these stone altars -along with the nearby ritual saunas built into huge rocks (also photographed)- are common Iron Age occurrences, or they couldn’t have been cut into the rock were it not for iron tools.
A few years ago, in a dense megalithic area bordering Portugal in granite-paradise Western Iberia, as I was looking for the many dolmens there, I found two huge stone Eggs of incredible proportions opposite a megalithic Phallic Stone (called the Donkey's Penis). This part of the world is particularly wild, and when I walk through it on my own, I get a deep sense of Fear and Awe.
Fear of what may lie there in the wild - wild animals, hostile weather, a stream that is too wide to cross or any strange sounds.
And Awe of the incredible smell of Ancientness that soaks some parts of the landscape, unchanged and uninhabited for millenia.
Now I know that about 140 of these stone altars are scattered throughout Western Iberia, as well as along the Ebro river (which contains the Ibr- prefix that gives name to the land). Although the relatively more famous of these stone altars -like Ulaca- were chiefly Celtic mountain strongholds, there is the possibility that these solar temples in axial/oracle positions, were taken over by proto-Celtic / Indoeuropean tribes (i.e.Keltic) as they arrived in Europe some time in the Bronze Age and that they belonged to an earlier cult. Cupmarks and water channels, like in other European instances, and the survival until recent of ‘superstitions’ (i.e. of pre-christian cults) by the locals (as well as the usual christianization of the stone with crosses on top) are not uncommon (there is ample historical documentation on pre-Roman ‘superstitions’). Now, does anyone have any evidence of these stone altars anywhere else?
The biggest passage grave in Iberia, that lies remote and unvisited, is called Lacara, also in the West, possibly an ancient “L’Kaer”. Has anyone seen the decorated stones of Kermanian / Kervadel in Brittany and is there any relationship here? What is amazing about that place is that it has another undug tumulus nearby that may contain a twin dolmen, as well as a big stone altar in the centre of this sacred landscape (formed by twin temples served by the Lacara river); it's a big natural round Egg-boulder, with rock-cut steps (usually on its north side and cupmarks at the top) which acts as a topo-astronomical omphalos in the area, controlling the view of FOUR mountain tops in the four cardinal points of the horizon.
(Donations for a scanner, please!)
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