Category: Ancient wisdom
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Journeying into the starlit sky and remembering home
The Wayfinding system represents what is also lost in much of European ancient knowledge. We can only guess at the meaning and significance of stone circles, great constructions over time such as Stonehenge and Avebury. That they had great meaning and significance is not in question. What it was is lost– and perhaps deliberately so,…
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Polynesia: The Ancient Knowledge of “Wayfinding”
The ancient methods used by the early Polynesians to travel across the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean are known as “wayfinding.” This is a system that integrated a variety of means to plot and check location, including not only the daytime location of the sun, but night-time stars and ocean swells.
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Celebrating the final harvest: the calendar of the moon
…in this modern era, it is worth considering the relevance of the sun, the moon, and the varied timings of the seasons, as to when harvest is celebrated. This can be taken on a metaphorical as well as literal level.
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Memory, stories and mythmaking: a window into forgotten past
This post explores the connection between myth and memory, building upon the idea that storytelling remains a valid way in which memory (and all of the rich knowledge garnered over deep time) can be accessed and expressed.
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Cultural memory: what we remember and what we forget
Bringing together the wisdom of the Earth found in nature, science, mythology and spirituality The Journey Begins: Remembering and Forgetting A natural corallary to discussing “what is known” is to consider “what is remembered?” and why? We have today shards of ancient knowledge and information, we have re-imagined practices and stories built on interpretations of…
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What is known? Relationship between science and ancient memory
Introduction Science is not an unchanging, infallible truth. It is sometimes treated as that. That once something is said, with a scientific authority, it is a truth never to be disturbed and anything which does not agree with this is a falsehood, or at best perhaps a folkloric anachronism which is viewed as simplistic and…
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Spiralling into Liminality: the Labyrinth, a Practice from Time Immemorial
Bringing together the wisdom of the Earth found in nature, science, mythology and spirituality Introduction The word “spiralling” can have many connotations. One of them is of something spinning badly and negatively out of control. When someone or something is said to be spiralling, it is to describe something going very badly wrong. And yet…
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Discovering whispers of the ancestors: a pilgrimage to the Roman Barrows
Introduction If you pay attention, if you learn how to pay attention, the land and nature are always speaking to you. But sometimes it is not always easy to hear the message. For too much in busy, modern life, it is easy to miss the subtle messages. For it is true that sometimes nature roars.…