The sky is vast and tempestuous. I’m at Stonehenge, standing face to face with huge upright and toppled stones, pondering 5,000 years of touch that wore rock smooth like whale skin. Lichens bristle where hands can’t reach. This is a place of old magic and visions.
Bitter winds slash across the chalk plain, ice-whips sifting out mind clutter, opening up ancient conversations with a long dead Shaman. She is buried in the seated position, in a mound, waiting to be found, her story waiting to be told. She sits next to a man, lying on his back, who may have been the ‘Year King’. Like Lilith, she wants us to know her head remains higher than his. This energy is still part of the psycho-emotional landscape here. I’m tuning in to see where she takes me.
“When the air is clean and cold it is impossible to be anything other than present,” she whispers.
Her shadow drifts between the stones. Cloak of owl, veil of teeth, necklace of bones rattling a rhythm, deer antler antennae missing nothing. In the season of hibernation and dreaming it is the doe who keeps her horns. Shaman sees the world through an animal eye. Nostrils twitch. Scent of wolf. Mask of soot. Blade of flint. Death is watching, hiding in the night, waiting for stragglers who fall asleep in the snow.
She is the Winter Deer and Alchemist, a gold-worker, creating with light and fire and flaming, liquefied metal to produce beautiful things. Perhaps the long forgotten Goddess, residing here, is an ancestor of light and metal-worker Brigid, in Her Winter Hag aspect. The ancestral flame illuminates stories of other Light Keepers – guardians of the ‘Spark of Creation’. The patriarch seized ownership of the story of fire, banishing the female fire spirit to the fogs of the forgotten. Brigid was canonised. Hestia was domesticated and the Vestal Virgins were whipped if the flame went out. The punishment for being sexually active was to be buried alive.
Shaman chalks my eyes and I see the Neolithic past through a pin-hole in time. A diaspora descends – a festival – a ‘coming together’ of time and place and common purpose. Fire spinners, shamans, priestesses, hog roasters, story tellers, healers and drummers move in the folds of the shadows, back lit by blood-red, bone-fires raging on the horizon. Scents of resin and pheromones mingle in the mist. Life force is celebrated in all it’s beauty and pyrotechnic bloodiness. When pleasure is gone death rushes in. This was never a place of static ceremony.
Slither of dawn. Spark of sun.
“The transcendent mechanism of the awakening.” – Anais Nin.
Laser precise, a sunbeam stirs the megalith from slumber. Circle of trilithon gateways amplifying a spiralling mass of celestial harmonics, these slabs of rock talk of a reciprocity of opposites. This is where the Cretaceous East meets the Jurassic West. Head in the sky, roots piercing the soil, right down there in the guts of it, it’s a chthonic stabbing of Mother Earth, in what is often described as spearing the serpent.
According to tests done at nearby Avebury Henge the electro-magnetic force within the stone circle is strongest in daytime, with energy resting at night. Solstice could be a powerful time for waking or subduing the latent power of the megalith.
Is it all about the head space? Are Stone Circles Neolithic particle colliders for the human soul, drawing down cosmic energy, drawing up Earth energy, altering consciousness, opening the pineal gland, creating order from chaos, or creating chaos from order, merging auric fields with all matter?
“The millions of particles of magnetite floating inside the skull and the pineal gland [are] sensitive to geomagnetic fields [leading] to the creation of the hallucinogen DMT.” – They’re Alive! Megalithic Sites Are More than Just Stone, Ancient Origins.
We focus on the megaliths but not much attention is given to the sacred Earth they stand upon because we have moved away from the Earth Religions. I didn’t think I’d be pondering chalk pits but this is where Shaman guides me. Stonehenge stands upon a chalk plateau. Silbury Hill is built of chalk. Avebury Henge is encircled by a chalk bank and ditch. Before the grass grew over, these sacred earthworks must have dazzled in sun and moon light. Chalk was carved into precious artefacts, including drums and tablets. The ‘disputed’ Chalk Goddess (Grimes Graves, Norfolk) was found on a chalk alter in a flint mine. Her spherical, Full Moon, Earth Mother body swells with the primordial, chalk magic that shaped the landscape.
Why did Neolithic people dig a vast arc of cavernous pits encircling nearby Durrington Walls? Were these chthonic piercings used as fire pits, purifying the boundaries of sacred space with chalk and flame, amplifying the energy of whatever took place here? Did the 56 chalk pits at Stonehenge (Aubrey Holes) also harness Earth Magic?
I may never understand the Neolithic psyche but I can explore other spiritual practices to see what they do. In alternative healing, chalk is considered grounding and purifying, whilst enhancing out-of-body experiences, spirit guide connection and psychic powers. In spell-craft chalk is used for drawing boundaries. In Edo and Igbo communities sacred chalk is used in birth and death rituals.
“Chalk around the eyes signifies an ability to see beyond the visible world and into the world of the spirits.” – Paul Basu, Glory Chika-Kanu, Nzu, orhue, scared chalk, Re-Entanglements.
When nature dies back, the ‘winter wait’ is the time for shamanic journeying into the collective womb consciousness. I wonder if, when they dug right down into the bare, winter-bones of those chalk pits, using deer antlers to carve deep into the folds of Mother Earth, Shaman presided over purifying ritual burials and exhumations. Perhaps the living also experienced what it is like to hibernate below ground, like Persephone did, learning about stillness, listening to Mother Earth.
“Dig up all that you buried,” says Shaman. “Dig up all of it, including your shadow. Birth your own freedom.”
There is a place where I thought only I have been. Shaman is propelling me back to this intense, underground space of fear and healing, an experience who’s meaning confuses, yet continues to reveal itself.
“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.” – Maya Angelou.
Ancient Greek scribes staked their claim on the Underworld by putting a menacing Hades down there and here he is now, half-god, half-beast, dragging me down a gaping hole to the Earth’s abyss. Trouble is brewing. Our eyes and knuckles lock across the centre of the Earth, in what is possibly an ancestral memory. If this symbolic knuckle-locking is about male energy suppressing female spirits, or a patriarchal power-grab over Earth Religion, who will win, woman or cloven-hoofed golem?
A splinter of ice from the purest chalk stream, a gift from the Deer Mother, is the weapon I use to stab Hades, in a chilling battle of wills, so fierce, the Earth spilts in two. A pitiful Hades, still clinging to his half of the planet, drifts off into the stratosphere. I melt the ice shard and drink the evidence of this chthonic stabbing, so brutal it shatters the Terra Mater. I don’t feel guilty. I knew She had to spilt open to reveal all that is buried down there.
“Let go of your subconscious attachment to patriarchal trauma,” whispers Shaman.
I am prism of light, with sparking pineal gland, which may well be my own spark of creation, floating upwards out of that hole, in a state of bliss.
I am Chalk Goddess who’s body is in embedded in the medicine of landscape.
I am memory swelling in aquifers, bubbling to the surface as chalk streams.
I am the unknown Goddess cupping the lantern, moulded from clay, in my own image.
I am roots growing into my own darkness.
There is an illuminated path, winding through memory, leading to our own story, but you can’t turn fear to fire, if you don’t dig in the shadow.
References:
Of Chalk & Flint: A Way of Norfolk Magic – Val Thomas
I was buried alive in a shamanic ritual – Nicholas Taylor, The Guardian
4,000-year-old ‘shaman’ burial near Stonehenge has a golden secret – Tom Metcalfe, Live Science
The Seven Jobs of the Shaman – Paul Lawrence, Journeytreehealing
A Burst of Light: Audre Lorde on Turning Fear Into Fire – The Marginalian
They’re Alive! Megalithic Sites Are More than Just Stone – Freddy Silva, Ancient Origins
Archaeologists Had a Huge Reenactment Party to Verify Ancient Pit Oven – Smithsonian Magazine
Nzu, orhue, sacred chalk – Paul Baus, Glory Chika-Kanu, Re Entaglements .
Stonehenge – New Light on Prehistoric Chalk, Wessex Archaeology
Calcite Crystals in the Pineal Gland – authorkarenfrazier