Carningli and Mother Earth

 Look at the profile of the mountain summit:  from the left, we see head, breast, rib cage, and finally raised knees.  Is this why we have a tradition that this summit is a reclining female, Mother Earth, or the Earth Goddess?  Or is all of that just a modern fantasy?  who knows?

I wonder how old the tradition might be that Carningli is a sacred female mountain?  The name -- Carningli or Angel Mountain -- of course suggests a tradition of sanctity maybe going back to Early Christian times; and indeed the tradition is still alive today that St Brynach used to climb up to the summit for periods of contemplation and prayer, during which he was deemed to commune with the angels.  But the FEMALE tradition?  Laurence Main thinks it is very old indeed -- going back well before Christian times.  So that takes us into the Iron Age, during which time the mountain was inhabited by a small village community.  The traces of the hill fort are still evident today.  to my mind, if the mountain was VERY sacred during the Iron Age people would not have lived on it -- but all is conjecture......

The "sacred female" tradition must have something to do with the profile of the mountain, which will not have changed very much over many thousands of years.  The skyline profile certainly does look like a woman lying on her back, as we can see above.  So might we have a tradition here that goes back as far as the Neolithic?

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certainly rather strange that when the story of Mistress Martha Morgan came to me, her intense spiritual / emotional relationship with the mountain was a key part of the story and of her psyche.  As she says over and again, she is a part of the mountain, and the mountain is a part of her.  It is her cathedral, and the cave in the mountain is her special place -- and place of very powerful symbolism.  What does that say about Carningli?  What does that say about Martha, and about me?  Answers on a postcard, please.......