Spirituality of Stone: Palestinian, Celtic, and Lenape Voices

It is obvious as we face climate-chaos, empire-collapse, techno-conundrums of all kinds (drones as the new soldiers, pagers as bombs, “should we geo-engineer the sky, the ocean . . . ?”) that we need ancestral wisdom.  So yes, we turn to “elders”—especially among our humankind kin, and even our plant-sisters and animal-brothers. But what if the demand of the hour goes beyond what seems to breathe and grow like us?  Our oldest progenitors are water and rock.

Jacob anointed a rock.  Pre-Celtic Indo-European ancestors built cairns. Bedouin in the Hejaz enshrined a meteor fragment.  So what’s up with this spirituality of stone?  Were our ancestors just backward?  Or did they know something we need—now more than ever—to recover?  But the counsel here is tricky.  In each case, the hard ones may be said to have initiated. The ore granted Abram’s son a dream. The sky sent a blaze of planetary fragment to the desert-wanderers predating Muhammad. And the upwelling rock at the world’s edge “embraced” Amergin and crew when first they fled towards the sun-decline and faced wave-terror seeming to prevent the access to safety they sought.  Stone as starter, granite as agent!  We face collapse today—virtually on every front to which we turn.  From the sky, storm; from the ocean, flood; from below our feet, quake and drought and fire.  And we want the usual quick fix, a techno-plan we can land in a moment and keep to our consuming, accumulating, destroying ways.  But what if the only real way forward is both slow and back?

Rock is our original rhizome, hosting the waters of our birthing, itself rebirthed by water, to cycle down low, on high, and in-between, regulating temperature and Time writ large.  And now as a species we face upheaval on a scale we have never before faced on this rock-throne that is our home, and it may well be if we turn to the elders to learn what to do, they will say listen to the stones.