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For several years I have photographed large rocks, standing by themselves, which have a presence. In Mongolia, unusual rocks are considered to be ezetei, having powerful shamanic spirits. The chief characteristic in this belief is the concept of the world axis--the world center, where heaven and earth touch, where all times, places, and potentialities converge--and for this reason they are considered to be powerful places of prayer. Taikhar Chuluu is one of the largest and most spectacular of these spiritual rocks, particularly because it sits alone in the midst of a huge, flat plain.
In Japan, too, stones have long been objects of deep devotion. Thousands of years ago, they were seen as symbols of mononoke (supernatural forces which permeate matter and space). Later, an abstract, undifferentiated mononoke was replaced by more definite, animistic deities who resided in the stones, and many of them were given the names of animals or beings that they resembled. Thus, rocks are not inanimate to the Japanese--they are living objects with inner, spiritual beings. To this day, the Japanese visit stones that are sacred to them, where the godspirits are believed to dwell in particular, so that they can pay their respects. Neko-Iwa (Cat Rock), Momo-Iwa (Peach Rock), and Joroko-Iwa are examples from Japan.
These rocks represent the indestructible life force, a quality of strict simplicity, the reduction of a thing or a process to its most essential nature. And there is a timeless quality about stones and rocks that gives them enormous power. As Angus Peter Campbell has written, suddenly you realize that this stone you're gazing upon "...was here before you came, and it will be here after you have gone, receiving the warm west wind, bowing before the terrible winter storms, coping, thrawn, surviving."
A stone is that from which we come, is that to which we go back, it's the earth itself.
Isamu Noguchi
Paul Broadhurst says, "There may be great truth in the idea that the spirit of any native mythology is to be found in the very land itself, somehow fused into the stones and earth once venerated by our ancestors.... If it is possible to reinstate a tradition where these spiritual forces of the earth are again revered and understood, then it may also be possible to eradicate the sickness which has created, in symbolic terms, a wasteland."
The otherness of stones and stars, like that of wild animals, is their deepest mystery, for they are not our products and their purposes are their own. They are the models for thinking our humbleness in the universe, and they are the key to the strangeness of ourselves.
Paul Shepard |
