stone circles – Feminism and Religion

What twenty years of pilgrimage taught me about ritual, place and the slow cultivation of perception…

Ever since my first shamanic training in the UK and in Sweden in 2005, I felt called to seek out prehistoric ritual landscapes. Over the past two decades I slept in Neolithic burial chambers, welcomed the dawn from Bronze Age stone circles, wandered among standing stones on remote islands, and returned to certain places often enough that they became companions on my journey.

In this post I share some images and insights from my latest overnight solo adventure at the sacred site of Machrie Moors, on the Isle of Arran, Scotland, and how my practice of spontaneous immersion grew into a deep way of listening.

Going to Machrie Moor

Unlike the better-known circles of Avebury or Callanish, Machrie rarely appears in guidebooks outside Scotland, and perhaps because of that, it retains a remarkable intimacy. Sheep wander freely between the stones, the wind rolls in over the hills, and the landscape seems content in itself.

Set between sea and the dramatic outline of Goat Fell (which in the morning light appeared like a reclining goddess, see image below), the Machrie Moor complex consists of six stone circles in open moorland. There are also several other smaller menhirs that seem strategically placed like signposts leading into the site, which you can’t see from very far because it’s in a valley.

My ancestors built great circles of stones that represented their perception of real time and space, and enabled them to tell time: the stone circles were cosmic calendars. They went to great lengths and detail to get it right. It was obviously very important to them to have the stones of a particular kind, in the right positions according to position of the Sun at different times of the year, and then to celebrate ceremony within it.

I have for decades had a much smaller circle of stones assembled, representing the ‘Wheel of the Year’, as the annual cycle of Earth around Sun is commonly named in Pagan traditions. I have regarded this small circle of stones as a medicine wheel. It is a portable collection, that I can spread out in my living space, or let sit in a small circle on an altar, with a candle/candles in the middle. Each stone (or objects, as some are) represents a particular Seasonal Moment, and is placed in the corresponding direction. I have found this assembled circle to have been an important presence. It makes the year, my everyday sacred journey of Earth around Sun, tangible and visible as a circle, and has been a method of changing my mind, as I am placed in real space and time. My stone wheel has been a method of bringing me home to my indigenous sense of being. Continue reading “Her Magic in the Stone Circle by Glenys Livingstone”