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

Ritual Astronomy
Toward the City of God
To the shaman or sibyl of six thousand years ago a void,
knowable only through visions and ritual astronomy,
similar to the that described above, stood beyond material
reality. It was not filled with monsters or with chaos as
puritan antiquarians would have us believe.
As the shaman meditates a beam of light forms
between a cleft in a rock and blinds him momentarily. In
his hand he holds a small cup which he will use to decant
the contents of the larger basin stone. The recumbent
stone has two cup marks ground into it. A polished
quartz crystal is placed in each cup. As the sun appears to
set on the horizon, the beam splits between the crystals,
striking the shaman, transforming him into the lightbeam
itself. He has now seen the vision of his own creation; he
is experiencing infinity. He is, in this state, the spokesman
for his tribe at the court of the Goddess of creation. 23
The ritual astronomy practiced by this skin-clad
hunter was passed to the Bronze Age Bell-Beaker
people, then to the Celts, then to the saints and prophets
of the Middle Ages and finally, through them, to us.
Nothing is lost because the stones are not lost. Through
their carvings and their geometric layouts, the megaliths
tell the story of creation as perceived by hundreds of
generations of Atlantic rim hunter-gatherers. (Plate iii)
23 Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. London:
RKP, 1964. The use of the cauldron or inverted skull as a regenerative
motif survived for thousands of years and became a central image in the pre-
Celtic world. It influenced the Star Temple builders who dedicated rivers and
entire sacred precincts to the Goddess. The Celts inherited this cosmology
and adapted it. That an indole nucleate mushroom was used in ritual at Star
Temples and ring monuments, can be checked quite easily. They grow in
profusion in areas dotted by megaliths. See: Baille, Hugh. “Poisonous
Fungi of South-Western England.” The Illustrated London News, October,
1978; Furst, Peter T. Hallucinogens and Culture. San Francisco: Chandler
& Sharp, 1976.
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