Mountains

And then there is stone. Rocky mantle and lithic crust form the single most taken-for-granted life assumption on which we—literally!—stand. Here as well my Ireland explorations provoke with question and mystery. What became a tour and counsel of cairns and dolmens on a visit in the fall of 2023 will set the tone with a witness to myth and wisdom, 6000 years old (And give rise to the choice of book cover—a dolmen in the megalithic site of Carrowmore in County Sligo, Ireland, foregrounding the 1073-foot high Atlantic coast “mountain” of Knocknerea, topped by a 180-foot in diameter, 33-foot high cairn-tomb known as Maeve’s Heap (Miosgán Meadhbh), a renowned/feared Goddess-Queen of Gaelic myth, that was among the ancestral places I visited with my wife in that fall 2023 pilgrimage.). And then a turn to a biblical tradition that likewise has much to teach—as well as learn—if approached with an indigenously-informed sensibility and concern for “reading.” Indeed, even merely scratching the surface of such a focus demands at least book-length treatment (that the author hopes to tackle soon enough). After all, the very first “christ”—or “anointed one”—in the entire biblical corpus is a stone granting Jacob his first intimations of a Heaven-Earth reciprocation, “spiritized” in his dream-world as “angelic,” and leading him to set the shard upright, pour oil, and announce the “place” Dread-Haunted and the rock a “House of God” betyl (Beth-El). And from there the topic literally ranges seismic and “mountainous.” But in Chap. 7 the exploration can only hint. Centering the inquiry is the writing called Little Saint by American writer Hannah Green, detailing the post-humous career of third century martyr, Saint Foy, whose remains, “spirited” around the mountains of southern France in avoidance of further persecution and later Muslim incursion, end up at a church in the village of Conques, settled over a phonolite rock anchoring the ecclesial practice in much older Celtic inspiration, in terrain populated by menhirs anciently erected to aid in mapping, on earth, the stellar arch of the Milky Way, directing ancestral souls as well as living pilgrims, west towards the ocean and afterlife. Such a layering—Christian on “pagan”—is merely a surface iteration of a geologic depth-phenomenon, in which the history of the planet is etched in an ever-evolving lithospheric palimpsest, for a temporal duration of eons (but not forever). Thus stone—giving testament (to Cailleach) and offering vision (to Jacob). Then granting hearing in a phonolite slab echoing, among other things, Gregorian chant as well as its own resonant vibration determined by its own history of travel, pressure, heat, water, etc. Anciently guiding walking by “earthing” constellations as a kind of map. And finally serving as writing in the longest standing journal the planet ever records. Stone as the first “offspring”—the first “throw off”—of the iron core womb of Earth, but “elder” to all dwellers on soil, in water, cruising air. If we do not understand the spirit—and spirituality—of such, from an ancient Christian point of view we are docetically heretic: our feet do not touch the ground!