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"The gravitational field of the Stone breaks life into its parts, into revelation."
-Peter Makem

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In the year that we would call 2805 BCE, a woman who lived on the land of Britain now called the Yorkshire Wolds, died. Her name was Mera, and her death, like her life, was extraordinary.

Mera was the ancient British equivalent of a shamaness, a powerful mystic who was able to talk to spirits and interact with an unseen world. She could hear the voice of the wind and she could heal the diseases that afflicted people in her community.

Mera's life as a shamaness began when she was 14 years old, and still unmarried because of how sickly she was, and thought unable to bear and feed children. She was bitten by a snake and lay deathly ill for two weeks. Mera came as close to death as a human being can come, and when her recovery came about- itself a miracle- she was able to speak the language of snakes and other animals. A spiritual presence that only she could perceive, and which looked like a snake, accompanied her for the rest of her life, giving her the power to heal and help the dead and the dying to find peace. She was able to go into the bellies of the henges that were constructed in her land, a right reserved for shamans only. She was there at what we now call the Thornborough henges, for fortnights of ritual.

When she died, her following spirit, which always appeared as a snake, carried Mera's spirit into the "Whiteness"- the great Otherworld, and Mera chose to enter a hidden region in that mysterious place, a region that was tied to the inner reality of what appears to us as a small white stone. That stone was buried, along with her body and an earthenware pot full of gifts, in the massive and ancient burial mound that we now call Duggleby Howe. She was not given the "burial of spirit", which was cremation; her body was placed entirely in the ground so that her great power and wisdom would be largely maintained in that place.

Though her body was inhumed, and the essence of her life came to merge and sleep in that mound, becoming a phantom that would inhabit that place for centuries, Mera's "awareness principle", which formed a very living consciousness with the aid of her following spirit, entered that stone and waited for 48 centuries for people to come along and speak with her.

Even in Mera's time, people who could achieve the trance state required to commune with spirits were rare. They became far rarer as time went on. It was only a strange twist of Fate (though not a meaningless one) that brought two people to Mera's white stone who were capable of this communion- and this happened in what we call the year 2004.



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All of the beautiful images in this site are from "The Greenwood Tarot"
And are Copyright © 1996 by Chesca Potter.

All text is copyright © 2006 by Robin Artisson