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| Probably a little self indulgent to include myself in 'we' I suppose. I basically meant people who care for and (almost) worship the planet not as a god per se but as an entity to be respected and cared for. If you were to take your trusty yorkshire leg ends around the monastic sites in Ireland you would be forever bombarded with a time that predates these 6th century and onwards buildings. The worship of Brigid the goddess of fertility (later adopted as St. Brigit - Mary's midwife) is abundent especially in the form of bullaun stones by water. Many churches incorporated these as fonts to try to extract some of the power and the existing peasant attraction. I was at a prime example of this on Sunday where a bullaun stone sits next to a holy well with a sign saying - "Font for Holy Water for the cure of headaches". It is obvious from its presence at the well that some form of sacredness was attached to it before St. Kieren arrived upon the scene. You only have to know the roots of the triple goddess Áine (Mother, Daughter & Afterlife Gardian - sound familiar?) to realise how much christianity stole from 'the old ways'. Two things can be taken from the presence of megaliths in churchyards: 1) They were just in good locations and the clergy used them as a landmark attaching no sacred significance to them. This is quite frankly a load of old tat. Here in Ireland a lot of the old fertility rites at harvest time were still in practice in the 1940's and it was only the advent of modern farming methods and tech (and MTV) that has removed them from significance. 2) The people still used these places as a focus and so it was an obvious choice for the church to gravitate towards them. This for the reasons above is quite patently the case. Just this Sunday a farmer told me a few faerie stories connected to some of his local sites. Now this is a man who refered to every time scale as 'since St. Patrick' not AD/BC. He also told me of a very christian experience he had when his aunt died. He told all these stories (old and new alike) in a manner that told me in believed in both as being reality. One little fact I love - Old & middle Irish did not possess a word for superstition. Everything was reality. So there you are. Not only were 'we' there first but 'we' are still there today within the establishment. Old lore and new still exist in harmony side by side. Reply | with quote |  2nd April 2002ce 09:12 In reply to: Re: Rudston (Yorkshirepedestrian) |
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