The markers of forgotten realms and brilliance stand naked beneath the Doric skies of northeastern Scotland. Wedged between yellow seas of rapeseed and barley, stone circles like South Ythsie press from the Dark Ages into the light like the fingers of a drowning man. Guessing how much of Scotland’s ancient culture has been lost to agriculture is a game fit only for fools and liars, but even a fool can see such stone circles aren’t random or pedestrian. Their truth is deeper and hidden in the earth. The wisdom of South Ythsie’s stone circle brightens no minds, graces no tongues today. We are left with flat description, the sterile notation of orientation, distance, and alignment. All the wrong tools for the job in mind.
As above, so below. The hermetic mnemonic arrives unbidden on this solitary walk through pastoral Aberdeenshire. Are we not each of us a living thing home to trillions of other living things, wrapped in meridians of invisible energy, made ill or hale by the will of the biome? Perhaps our predecessors viewed themselves as grove-tenders instead of plunderers, their lives as symbiotic instead of parasitic, where megaliths like South Ythsie’s stone circle, like an acupuncturist’s needle, marked the place of geopathic release.
Hello Aelyth. I love your comment “Perhaps our predecessors viewed themselves as grove-tenders instead of plunderers, their lives as symbiotic instead of parasitic..” We need more of this today! ~Jackie O