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Post by Heer E. Tik on May 25, 2009 2:43:28 GMT 2
Tell more about the experience, Kirki. What was it like? What time of day? Is it an overhyped national landmark or does it live up to all the accounts and give off power?
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Post by Sagansara on Mar 9, 2010 13:12:02 GMT 2
Hi people, I have a question for everybody. I'm trying to find some places in which people are living like in ancient times, like some viking villages in Sweden (http://www.foteviken.se/engelsk/e_f10.htm). Actually I'm Turkic and I am more into shamanism or Altai-middle asia beliefs rather than viking culture. And I'd like to live like my elders in the way of shamanism. Is there anybody knows such places? The country doesn't matter. It could be in Finland or in Chile....
By the way, I couldn't find more suitable topic to write this post. If I'm in the wrong topic, sorry.
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Post by Salamandra on Mar 9, 2010 21:47:27 GMT 2
Being Greek, I have visited a variety of archaeological sites with a very stong pagan vibe about them. The Acropolis of Athens is such a place - the moment I'm stepping on the rock, it's as if I'm entering a different cosmos, it's hard to describe. I've heard that there is a legend that no birds fly straight over the Acropolis. Since I used to live far from the place, I can't attest to its truth, but it's interesting anyway. I've also been to Delphi, again, very strong vibe both at the Oracle and at the fountain Castalia. Not as much as the various treasure - keeping buildings . And to Mycenae, but I was too busy being a young school girl at the time!
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Post by rhiannon on Mar 14, 2010 14:42:59 GMT 2
Hey Sagansara, I was in Mongolia last year in the Khentii National Park. As soon as I left Ulaan Bator I was surrounded by shamanism. The way people live, nature, just everything. I could feel the pulse of shamanism every where. People there still live as they did hundreds of years ago as nomads and still have there old believes even though Buddhism and communism raided the country. Maybe you should take a trip there.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2011 14:47:26 GMT 2
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Post by iarnvidia on Apr 19, 2011 13:59:38 GMT 2
So many wonderful places described here!! In the US, all of the historically pagan places are those of the First People since, well, they were here for many, many years before everyone else showed up. One such place is near where I grew up: dnr.wi.gov/wnrmag/2009/10/aztalan.htm Our teachers took us there for a school trip when I was a child, and it was quite neglected--people climbed all over the mounds, dug for “trinkets” in the soil, and were terribly disrespectful. Even then, in made me very sad. It is nice to see since then that they have restricted that disrespectful behavior and done a great deal of work on restoring the site. In nature, however, I believe much of the US has very pagan properties if a person pays attention. The old woods, for example, of the northern Midwest here, never let visitors forget that the forest is ancient and by no means “tame.” They remind us always that something must die so something else can eat, and that both beauty and death exist in the same seasons. The prairies are both pitiless and extraordinary; the old lakes and rivers hide uncountable stories. I believe similar things can be said of the bogs and bayous and mountains. In times of severe stress or sorrow, I often take a blanket outside at night and just lie on the slope of our back hill, looking at the sky. Something about the feel of the enduring earth beneath me and the transitory touch of the night wind reminds me that I exist pretty briefly between the two--and that usually throws things into pretty clear perspective.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2011 17:52:46 GMT 2
In times of severe stress or sorrow, I often take a blanket outside at night and just lie on the slope of our back hill, looking at the sky. Which makes every place of Nature as ''pagan'' as one wishes. It's probably not a matter of a place charged necessarily with history or ruins in the open, etc.. it's those every places that brake the boundaries of history, it's probably the feeling you get when immersed in a moment in time cradled in nature's arms, and in contact with a part of your being that's normally kept sleepy by the enui of civilisation and every day life, a part of being that our ancestors had in them and that was more awake... Or at least it's how I feel at times and something I suppose you were transmitting also with your post here.
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Post by iarnvidia on Apr 20, 2011 19:12:10 GMT 2
Or at least it's how I feel at times and something I suppose you were transmitting also with your post here. Yes! Exactly!
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Post by Heer E. Tik on Oct 23, 2011 10:42:35 GMT 2
« Reply #53 Today at 2:31am » Just a week ago I visited Borg, the town where Egill Skallagrimsson and his family used to live. To this day it is known where in the area certain events described in the saga have happened. Egill's father Skalla-Grimr was a smith and a shapeshifter given to fits of raging violence. One time when Egill was a boy, he was playing a game with his father outside, and winning, but as the sun began to set, Skalla-Grimr started growing stronger, he killed Egill's friend who was also there and seized Egill in order to kill him too, and would have done it if not for the last moment intervention by the old woman from their household, who was Egill's foster mother and who taught him magic. She distracted Skalla-Grimr and started running away. He began chasing her, because he was already in a killing mood and it didn't matter who will be next. She ran along the road that is today the main street of the town, and jumped off the high shore into the fjord. As she was swimming away, Skalla-Grimr hurled a huge boulder after her, it hit her on the back and neither she nor the stone ever washed ashore again. Today there is a cairn standing on the spot where this happened. Certainly qualifies for a pagan place, doesn't it. Don't get carried away by the post-victorian romanticized notions of the epic heroic vikings and sagas... This was dark stuff full of sorcery and otherness, not cuddly and not PC like certain folks today tend to think. An entirely different worldview, a magical reality, a sense of morbid wonder. One can only imagine what it must have been like living among such kinds of people, and what psychological resonance it must have left on them. Walking there where they walked, with 1100 years separating us, makes time shrink and shrivel up and diminish, because the landscapes and the physical environment has not changed at all... And it really transports me there. Skalla-Grimr's burial mound still stands. Many years later, Egill buried his son Bodvarr in the same mound, who died in a tragic accident. And even more years later, I came to the same mound and spent some time sitting on it...
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