We also turn to stone. Human life can be characterized as a process of ‘hardening,’ so that death and its associated rituals transform soft, moist flesh into hard, dry bone, and ephemeral wood houses turn into permanent stone tombs for the ancestors. We are infected with what alchemists describe as a ‘hardening spirit.’

Ritual Journeys

Stones become sacred for a variety of reasons. In some cultures, the value of the stone is related as much to the journey that was made to acquire it as to its physical qualities. Long distances and hardships help someone gain esoteric knowledge, and the stone or mineral from that place may be the proof that such a journey had actually taken place.

No stone unturned

Likewise, a stone can act as a mnemonic device for that trip to the beach or mountain. It can be a reminder of the person from whom it was gifted (see the tear-jerking film Departures). Stones, like other seemingly inert material objects, “speak” to us through the memories we attribute to them. They are exograms, or what Michel Serres calls “message-bearing systems” and “angels.” Our skilled use of such crafted stones or message-bearers gave us our ‘extended brain,’ which means we could create and support ideas and memories beyond those of creatures restricted to the brain’s biological memories or ‘engrams’ alone.

Serres: “Because our universe is organized around message-bearing systems, and because, as message-bearers, they are more numerous, complex and sophisticated than Hermes, who was only one person, and a cheat and a thief to boot…Each Angel is a bearer of one or more relationships; today they exist in myriad forms, and every day we invent billions of new ones.”

George Catlin (1796–1872) Sioux Worshiping at the Red Boulders, oil on canvas, 1860.

Keith Basso, in Wisdom Sits in Places, studied Apache sacred boulders and found that, although the stone outcroppings were ‘alive,’ they functioned primarily as ‘mnemonic pegs’ onto which moral stories are hung. Moreover, these sacred places are named in the ancient language, and the names are descriptive pictures, so hearing the name is also seeing the place and connecting with the ancestors. Furthermore, the names of the places are used like mantras or “mind-protectors:” reciting them ensures an ethical life. Basso interviewed Apache convicts who feel that they lost their way because they forgot the names of the large stones in the landscape.

Conclusion

In the science fiction story Three Body Problem, the future humans with unlimited technology decide that writing in stone is actually the best way to communicate a message across time. Go figure. Stones in general act as a stable, material substrate used for the transmission of culture: Plymouth Rock is enshrined like a goddess; Standing Rock is a woman who turned into stone and may one day turn back; Henwas are spirits that have been cursed to be stones but may one day return to their faerie bodies; and the rock ogress in the Tibetan emergence story is angry and ugly because she, too, is living out her negative karma. Thank God Avalokiteshvara told monkey to “marry her already!”

For more on stones, please enjoy Rock Hard Bodies, and Material Minds, Material Angels . Thanks!