001 C&G Trade Paper - The Hank Harrison Portal Gateway

RITUAL ASTRONOMY
We are stardust we are golden...
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden.
Joni Mitchell
Woodstock Nation
1969
A solitary figure is seated in the center of a stone circle in
West Cork. The circle is situated so that it can be seen
from the Celtic Sea and so that any participants in rituals
held there can observe the sea and the distant horizon.
This human being is an astronomer and a magician. He is
preparing himself to enter the mystery world, a microcosm
locked into the surrounding stones by his ancestors. The
magician’s face and arms are painted with red ochre. The
figures on his body are identical to the figures carved into
the stones. The magic spiral and diamond shapes glow in
the sun and darken in shadow. 21
The magician is an astronomer and a hunter. He senses
the sun is at the center of the moving planets because he
has observed certain vines seeking a fixed point in the
sky as they wind themselves around a tree. He knows the
moon shows the same face to Earth at all times. He knows
the Earth is round because he has seen it measured at
Newgrange, the great temple in the Boyne Valley to the
north. On a clear day he can see the curvature of the
Earth. His grandmothers taught him that the triangular
tension between the Earth, moon and sun causes the
tides to rise and fall. Eventually he will drink an
hallucinatory potion from a small beaker — a drink of
21 Tierney, J.J. “The Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius.” Proceedings of
the Royal Irish Academy, X- C5, #60, Dublin, 1960.