SKYE stephenson

I plan to share with you – the reader – some of my musings and research about our relations with certain rocks and stones. You may be wondering what I mean when I say relations, since rocks of all types are typically considered inanimate in our language and mainstream culture. But I ask you to consider the possibility that this is incorrect and that such a narrow perspective of livingness diminishes the quality of our lives.

The widely accepted viewpoint that only includes animals (including human-beings) and plant-beings as living beings has only been embraced for less than a millennium or two in the European context, and for much less time in the rest of the world. In fact, many peoples and cultures still today address rocks and stones as “Grandmother” or “Grandfather” to acknowledge their long age and stored memories.  You can be sure that no matter who your ancestors were, they considered rocks and stones (or at least certain empowered ones) to be living beings.

As Linda Hogan, a Native American author, puts it, “When we go back in human history, we find that it is not only the people now recognized as continuing in a tribal tradition who have known the voices of earth…Western traditions of consciousness also derive from this approach to original, or aboriginal, ways of knowing.  Orpheus, for instance, was able to communicate with the worlds of animals, plans, water, and minerals…From nearly all traditions, account after account tells of stones giving guidance.”

Sadly, many of us are not able or do not know how to receive guidance from a stone, and for good reason. A relentless war has long been waged against the honoring of sacred stones (and the sacredness of Mother Earth herself.)  For many centuries now, our religious hierarchies, economic structures, and political institutions have employed a wide variety of overt and covert methods to disempower and discredit sacred ways of living in a planet chock full of many types of sacred living beings, including rocks and stones.

Persecution of those who honored stones began in Europe in the early period of Christian conversion. In 452 CE, the Council of Arles condemned worshippers of rocks; in 538 CE, the Synod of Auxerre stigmatized those who worshiped fountains, forests, and rocks, and in 567 CE, the Council of Tours recommended that all those who, before rocks, do things unrelated to the Church be driven from the Church. During the Inquisition, people could (and did) face severe consequences and even death if caught placing an offering upon a stone or enacting a ceremony with a revered stone. Many believe that those who carry out such acts are witches or sorcerers, and possibly even consorting with the devil.

This forgetting of has also been exacerbated by our schooling. Except for certain types of alternative schooling and some indigenous schools, most of us learned nothing about sacred stones, or the sacred writ large, in our formal education. If anything, efforts were made to disconnect us from direct contact with nature, Spirit, and the sacred, and to focus our developing minds instead upon accumulating rational knowledge so we can become productive workers and complaint adults. What we did learn about stones and rocks in school, for the most part, was through the lens of rational scientific inquiry that studies rocks and stones solely as material objects – not as potentially sacred allies.

Hand-in-glove with this dominantly imposed desacralization has been the insidious allegation that people who say that they have a relationship and communicate with stones or rocks or crystals are crazy. An example of this labelling can be found in the widely used DSM reference manual (version III) that states unequivocally that anyone who believes they have a relationship with a stone is exhibiting signs of distorted thinking and thus is mentally ill.

Due to this generalized disdaining of sacred stones impressed upon us by our cultural milieu, we may harbor (often unconscious) fears and reticence about connecting with a sacred stone as living-being to living-being. Most of us have not been taught that this is a possibility open to us or instructed how to facilitate the process. Neither have we experienced living examples of people doing this, except perhaps in cultures we may consider exotic or more attuned to stones consciousness and shamanism than we believe ourselves capable of.

But the good news is that we all have the capacity to build relations with a stone or rock, for this possibility exists in our ancestral memory bank and in the cosmic consciousness. It cannot be erased, despite the many attempts to do so.  Reconnecting with the livingness of stone-beings can be a potent and powerful healing for yourself, your family, and ancestors, and for the planet.

To give you some inspiration, my monthly columns this year will provide you with some stories and examples of Stone-beings and Stone-consciousness I hope you will find them both enjoyable to read and meaningful in your sacred life journey.

From The Monadnock Shopper News, published February 2-8, 2022.https://shoppernews.com/week0/p11.pdf