The Living Earth: Ancestral memories of a time when the Earth was seen as ‘alive’ are still present in our mythologies. In Greek myth for example; following the great flood Deucalion and his wife are instructed by Zeus to throw stones over their shoulders, each of which transforms into a new man or woman thus repopulating the earth with life. A recent discovery in Turkey confirms the idea that stone was thought capable of possessing a soul. It comes in the shape of a funerary stelae of a high official burial at around 800 AD, and on its face an inscription saying that the entombed man had made an offering which he considered a ‘…ram for my soul that is in this stone…’.
Fragments of the intimate relationship between the living and the dead, animate and inanimate can also be seen in the commonly found Simulacrum at megalithic sites. As well as the numerous examples of anthropomorphic megaliths, many structures are now realised to have been placed in view of ‘sleeping giants’ and other anthropomorphic features in the profiles of the background hills, again reinforcing the sacred quality of the location. The ‘Goats’ cave in Swansea, is a vaguely anthropomorphically shaped mountain which has an entrance at the approximate location of the reproductive organs, giving it female gender. The cave revealed a ritual burial from the Palaeolithic period and was used through the Neolithic and even into Roman times, leaving little question that the ‘human’ shape of the Hill and the location of the cave were influential in this.
The Living Earth: Ancestral memories of a time when the Earth was seen as ‘alive’ are still present in our mythologies. In Greek myth for example; following the great flood Deucalion and his wife are instructed by Zeus to throw stones over their shoulders, each of which transforms into a new man or woman thus repopulating the earth with life. A recent discovery in Turkey confirms the idea that stone was thought capable of possessing a soul. It comes in the shape of a funerary stelae of a high official burial at around 800 AD, and on its face an inscription saying that the entombed man had made an offering which he considered a ‘…ram for my soul that is in this stone…’.
Fragments of the intimate relationship between the living and the dead, animate and inanimate can also be seen in the commonly found Simulacrum at megalithic sites. As well as the numerous examples of anthropomorphic megaliths, many structures are now realised to have been placed in view of ‘sleeping giants’ and other anthropomorphic features in the profiles of the background hills, again reinforcing the sacred quality of the location. The ‘Goats’ cave in Swansea, is a vaguely anthropomorphically shaped mountain which has an entrance at the approximate location of the reproductive organs, giving it female gender. The cave revealed a ritual burial from the Palaeolithic period and was used through the Neolithic and even into Roman times, leaving little question that the ‘human’ shape of the Hill and the location of the cave were influential in this.
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