Landscape organizes everything within sight.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Folk v. Housing

Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000. His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn.
-- Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

Other links:

  • the rest of Scotland has its share of sacred stones, sometimes standing monuments, but sometimes, similarly, merely sacred rocks in the middle of fields, over which one must not plow.
  • there exists, as I learned from my Scandinavian folklore teacher Timothy Tangherlini, a prototype in Scandinavian folklore wherein a rock in the middle of the field must not be plowed because fairies (trolls, fians) live below
  • more broadly, the sacred geography of most cultures associates different types of beings with different types of places, giving us hints as to what psychologists and anthropologists have deemed the "psychogeography" of ancient peoples, and what obsesses new age fanatics about the supposed spiritual nature of rocks. From Central American folklore, the wamani, apu, and tirakami are supernatural beings that live on mountain peaks and in mountain lakes. Minnesota and California have their share of sacred rocks. Some kami of Japan occupy similar positions. Kevin Nute, a Japanese architecture theorist, has written perceptively about the concept of "ma" and how it relates folklore to contemporary building, planning, and architecture

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