Quartz bodies

I spent a relaxing last day of blogjune at the Om Shanti Pamper Day doing pilates and getting massages.

Quartz hand

I mentioned AS Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” story to one of the massage therapists – it is about transformation of the body into stones and joining the ancestors (I said maybe that my body was full of stones). Sheila Variations has written a great review of the story.

She then told me about an Aboriginal story of a medicine man transformed by a spirit, the organs in his body become quartz crystals (magic stones) to help him communicate with the ancestors (Spencer and Gillen in Torrance, The spiritual quest: transcendence in myth, religion and science, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994 p. 142).

There are beautiful descriptions of quartz-like crystals as fallen stars (peoples of Bloomfield River in Queensland) or solidified light (the Arunta peoples) in this article on Meteors in Australian Aboriginal Dreamings.

It is comforting to think of the stories linking up from different parts of the world and how we might talk to others with our shimmering stones on the inside and outside.