The second Splendid day on the Orkneys takes us to the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, two large and majestic stone circles, with a third, unexcavated circle nearby. Together they form one whole. Some say their layout mirrors the position of the constellation Orion around 6,000 years ago — “the heavens with their feet in the earth.” Who knows.
What we do know for certain is that these places were not built at random. They hold deep knowledge about the movements of celestial bodies and the journey of the Earth within the greater whole. But it goes much further. At some point, we separated religion and science, and for good reasons. Religious rules and absolute truths no longer had a place in the search for factual understanding.
Yet in doing so, we also lost a great deal of spiritual knowledge, about the how and why of life, about how ‘energy’ works, about interconnections and wholeness, and about what we are doing here as a soul in a body. Something about throwing out the baby with the bathwater… By banishing spirit from science, we cut ourselves off from fundamental ways of gathering insight. A real pity.
Our distant ancestors did not struggle with this divide, they viewed everything as interconnected. They didn’t compartmentalize knowledge. They wove together thinking, knowing, and feeling. By resonating with these stone circles in our own time, you can catch a glimpse of that ancient way of seeing and being, and allow it to ripple into daily life. And that is a deeply nourishing experience. The stone circles feel like shamanic healing devices, fully in service of life. Completely supportive.
