< I'm sympathetic to that assertion but it begs the question 'says who?' >

It's basic animism - i.e. the so-called 'primitive' thought that all things in Nature are imbued with a sense of 'spirit.' But if we take that as the primer, we'd have a website full of spurious rocks and pebbles. We've gotta see this animistic sense of spirit in the right context - and in this case 'spirit' isn't some ghostly or Doris Stokes-type form waffling from the other side. In tribal groups, such <i>spirit</i> is literally the feel or impression one gets of a place. Most of us here have had it surely? You're wandering along through the hills when, for some weird reason, the place you're at suddenly has a 'feel' to it - something decidely different from the land around it. Such sites usually become defined as sacred after many people have experienced similar things there. There are plenty of books on the subject, most of which can be found in your anthropology and comparative religion sections in the library. Mircea Eliade's not a bad place to start.

These days we know that such experiences are due to geomagnetism and its effect on the central nervous system, eliciting a small altered state, but our ancestors knew nothing of the sort and so related to it directly as a feeling or 'spirit of place'. The old school analysts, trying to escape the natural world in their rationalistic science at the time of Darwin, denigrated such experiences as primitive and thought such notions of a 'living universe' to be backward - so they called it animism and thought that would be the last of it. Thankfully not!

Whilst animism is embedded in everything in Nature, it was only with certain large rock outcrops where great gods or spirits were said to reside. Hence, I assume (not having read Mr Cope's works), that's why TMA likes to have big lumpy outcrops. It's their animistic qualities!

There are a number of great rock sites I've been and had weirdy feelings from, then later taken others (without telling) to see their impressions. It might sound silly, but I <i>know</i> that in times past, legends or tales were said of these places, but when I've looked such info up, have found nothing. And so they remain simply in my experiential domain and I don't include them here (I've actually taken some of them off TMA).