Book Review: Spirit Stones by Dianne Ebertt Beeaff

Submitted by Runemage on Friday, 06 January 2012 Page Views: 4443

This is a good-sized paperback with the shiny cover showing the unmistakable stones of Callanish against a peaty landscape with low cloud under a blue sky. One particularly anthropomorphic stone has a sunburst above it and this is a graphic illustration of the book’s ethos, Spirit Stones.

The typeface at the beginning of each chapter is not one whose name I know, but it does give a very pleasant “Celtic” appearance to the opening text. It’s not the usual Garamond - I've added what I think it is at the bottom of this page for anyone else who's interested in unusual fonts.

Spirit Stones is illustrated with the author’s own good quality colour photographs. Of course there are a few of the more well-known megalithic monuments, who among us doesn’t have those in their own collection, but I was very heartened to see quite a few of the less well-known sites given an airing.

The text is divided into two main sections, Fact and Fancy, although for audiences outside the US, having sections on Spiritual Fitness in the Facts section as well as Sacred Space is something we don’t usually see. Apart from that, the Facts section mostly deals with what it says and it also includes Culture, Architectural Design, Medium and Motif and the aforementioned Sacred Space.

It’s written in a very easy and general style so that anyone who is not familiar with timelines and construction details will be able to have a decent grasp of the basics. However, anyone who wants a reference section or bibliography to check any of the stated facts will be disappointed. Facts like the Neolithic folk built stone walls around their fields, farmed deer, or that their houses were square and built in the style of Maeshowe and Cuween, complete with side-chambers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denying that these statements don’t apply to a very small section of the Neolithic inhabitants in certain areas, it’s just that Dianne makes it sound as though all Neolithic settlements throughout Europe were like this and there’s no archaeological evidence to back that up. Even in Orkney itself, the square stone houses we see today wouldn’t have housed many of the population.

There are a few mistakes, like “Hinduism’s Tibetan Book of the Dead” and “Durrington Wells” being used several times to describe Durrington Walls. Or saying Alfred Watkins called energy lines ley lines. Some I couldn’t make head nor tail of, for example “In Britain, the ceremonial flames that now mark Guy Fawkes Day on the sixth of November were no doubt first lit for Samhain.” Or the reason for putting the term Pagan in inverted commas throughout.

One photograph I didn’t recognise was plate 23, “The spiralled corbel roofing in the Tomb of the Eagles, Orkneys. The spiral represents eternity, evolution and growth”

Having been there myself twice I wondered how I could have missed it. It doesn't look right. Here’s Wideford’s image showing the concrete roof inside the main chamber of Tomb of the Eagles

However, Cuween Hill Cairn has several corbelled roofs and this image, again by Wideford, looks very similar to plate 23 to me.

I have taken an inordinately long time to review this book as I’ve read and re-read it, trying really hard not to dismiss it on many levels but to look for its good points too, and there are many outside the usual megalithic factual presentations.

The book is called Spirit Stones and the main message throughout is that visiting megalithic sites can bring you spiritually closer to the Ancestors. Whilst this is considered very much a New Age opinion, it does have quite a following among some of our members. Dianne has excelled in this part of the book by using her own ideas for exercises and meditations which follow each chapter.

I read a lot of things like this and it’s refreshing to come across original ideas like hers, presented in an easily understandable way with no hint of her way being the only way to access the Divine. On the contrary, it’s written with a gentle hand and gives many tasters for subjects a reader may like to pursue in-depth on their own. The four main areas of the Fancy section are Life and Death, Heaven and Earth, Secular and Sacred and Body and Soul, so much thought and original ideas are expressed.

As Diane says in the introduction, “We are each the product of a boundless past. Stone monuments, as part of that past, can renew our sense of the mystery and wonder of life, of the great gift of being and the continuity of the human spirit. There’s no shortage of books on either megalithic prehistory or spiritual growth. What we celebrate in this book is their connection”

Review by Runemage

Spirit Stones, written by Dianne Ebertt Beeaff

ISBN 978-1-58985-198-6

Available from Five Star Publications, price $19.99 and also discounted at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

309 pages plus glossary and index.