Sometimes “rock music” means literal rocks!

I learned this fact from noted rock&roll lesbian Julian Cope (he/him so far as I am aware). His 90s albums included images of stone monuments in the UK & elsewhere, as well as his liner-note musings on the topic;—plus songs written, & sometimes recorded, at actual sacred sites (including a stoner ballad from his amazing 20 Mothers LP [1995] called “Stone Circles N You”).

I was aware of Stonehenge, sure—big rocks in England! Spinal Tap!—but I had NO idea it was less than unique, & as yer basic American kid (lol) weaned on “western” science & materialism. As opposed to that wack-a-doodle christian bullshit we were surrounded by… My parents had at least that much sense, but atheists then & perhaps now tended to dismiss EVERYTHING that wasn’t nailed down, which is nearly as harmful as buying into the god complex in the first place. I digress, I digress.

In my mid-20s I found a book in the Dartmouth College Bookstore in Hanover, NH, by a guy named Chuck Pettis, called Secrets Of Sacred Space [1999]. It had… a vibe. It looked weirdly practical. I justified the purchase to myself & brought it home.

(Mostly lost on me at the time was that Pettis was based near Seattle. As have been a surprising number of the biggest influences on my life: Jimi Hendrix, Tom Robbins, Kurt Cobain. Tho I did notice Pettis’ “Seattle Ley Line Project”—mapping out every “ley line” in the city via dowsing, on an arts grant. Imagine my surprise when I moved there a few years later. Did the ley lines bring me?)

So working out of Pettis’ book I built a stone circle in our backyard. We lived in a village in the Vermont woods so we had about an acre to play with. I found suitable space south of the vegetable garden.

Pettis suggested a few very specific diameters. I chose the largest that was practical—20′ or so?—& built it out of rocks I found in the yard. Most were maybe bread-loaf sized, not large enough to really sit on. A few of the flatter ones were good for that—East in particular. I filled out the rest of the circumference with a ring of smaller fist-sized stones.

The basic formula is quite simple, tho Pettis provides all the heavy math you could want to build your circle with precision. Mine was… less precise. A tall stone to the North, a rounder one to the South, sittable stones to the East & West. Stones at the positions of the sun’s rise & set on the Solstices (a little less than a third of the way from East to North, East to South, etc, iirc). Smaller stones on each side of the Solstice stones to mark the moon’s apogees—which I won’t get into except to say that the moon’s orbit is wild & chaotic & NO WONDER us water-based critters are out of our minds!

I wasn’t sure what, if anything, to expect from the circle I’d built. I was interested in dowsing but as yet unaware of “magic” or “energy work” or “reiki” or the like. I smoked bowls in it at night, meditated & practiced Tai Chi in it during the day, played guitar in it, mowed around it on weekends. When I moved across the country a few years later, my dad apparently continued the habit of smoking there. Tobacco, not weed. But standing around smoking is standing around smoking.

I can’t say anything astonishing happened in that stone circle—which is less true about the labyrinth I shoveled into the snow one winter—but it was the beginning of a learning curve that continues to this day: Magical Stuff is sometimes slow moving and low-key, & this is an important part of its value.

I’m unsure to this day why I wanted to build a circle (let alone the several I’ve built since) or to visit related sites around the United States. My best guess is that it’s ancestral action of some kind. Maybe on my Scottish side, but I honestly don’t know enough German history—could be some vibes there too. Cope’s book The Modern Antiquarian [1998] addresses the UK end of things, but I’ve never got a look at his Megalithic European [2004]. Could be answers there, I don’t know. Or at least better questions!

(Realizing just now that I can of course do some tarot on this… Will be sure to do so in the near future! I did have a deck back then, given to me by family friends who were largely responsible for opening our minds on a number of fronts. Still have it—& a dozen more of course.)

Fast forward to Seattle. I joined a band, like you do. They had a house & we rehearsed there three times a week & put on shows there once every month or two. Like you do.

My bandmates were from a “macrobiotic community” in rural Alaska. They invited everyone they knew to brunch every Sunday, & served dinner to anyone who was around on any given evening. “It’s not a specific diet,” they said; “it’s more like an approach to eating.” Intentional. When I tell you they changed how I think about food forever.

An amazing community built up around the band & the house, & at some point I decided they needed a stone circle in the yard.

We drove out to a riverbed somewhere east of the city. Quite a ways east. We drug the stones up to my little truck—so heavily loaded down the tires got squashy & lost traction—but somehow we made it back. Not my proudest moment. Rocks are heavy!

We put the circle together in a corner of the sizable front yard, underneath a large tree.

We noticed quickly that at brunches, parties, band practices, people tended to congregate in the “henge”. They balanced on the stones, smoked cigarettes & bowls, engaged in conversation. Interacted in ways they might not have otherwise. We theorized that this could be part of its function. A community center. Bringing people together.

The circle became an important part of “band lore” & when inevitably noise complaints drove us out, the stones had to be preserved. I brought them to my then-current place, just a mile away. Our yard there was much smaller, the neighborhood a bit funkier. The new diameter only 9′ iirc, but the stones seemed larger in the small space. They LOOMED. The circle immediately attracted passersby attention & became something of a neighborhood curiosity. In that location they were referred to as “Kaos Henge”.

Kaos Henge continued to be a gathering spot of sorts. One of my housemates used to trim the grass around it with scissors. (She passed recently & this is one of my favorite memories of her. Safe travels D.)

I glanced out the window at the circle one night—tripping? maybe. who knows!—& the circle was GLOWING.

“Glowing.”

There’s a conversation to be had about literal sight—information we take in with our eyes—as opposed to “seeing”. The word “clairvoyance” breaks down into “clear” & “vision” & refers—as opposed to clairaudience, clairtangency, etc—to information received (say) “psychically” that we experience as though it were being perceived with our eyes. We say we “saw” a ghost, but it may be more accurate (since it is distinctly possible that no light bounces off a spirit or other non-corporeal entity) to say that we perceived it, & that our brain translated this perception into something approximating sight—that we might more easily comprehend the information. (Thanks to Mat Auryn’s excellent books for helping me to understand this phenomenon!)

(… I suppose, now I think about it, I should consider in this light the music that is always playing in my head, & how it changes from time to time & place to place! As well as all the thought I used to give to “musical channeling” & to “channeling the energy of a place in the form of music” as improvisation &/or composition. I still do it, I just don’t spend as much time thinking about it!)

So.

Was Kaos Henge literally “glowing”? Probably not—but it was doing SOMETHING.

I’ve seen similar things since in many other places, but rarely with that kind of focused intensity. It does mean SOMETHING is going on. I am not generally prepared to tell you what, as I don’t understand it myself. But it’s really cool.

That house, by the way, was haunted as fuck.

Kaos Henge went on to yet a third yard when we moved out. Under cover of darkness, even, as my relationship with one particular housemate had gone extremely sour. The kaos stones currently reside as part of the walls of an apiary on a farm in southwest Washington, disassembled & permanently dispersed for carrying “ex-boyfriend energy”—a spurious charge I tend to think but it’s well out of my hands by now.

** The bees, I hasten to add, are WELCOME to the stones & I hope they are enjoying the accumulated Kaos energy!

At our little house in Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles—under 500 square feet as I recall—we had an eensie yard with a beautiful tree, set well back from our side street along the steepest hill in the city. The space was secluded, as quiet & calm as you can get in that town (short of a mansion in the hills). I set up a sizable sittable log in the North-facing position, smaller stones in the East, West, South, and Solstice slots, & spent time there playing guitar, smoking weed, & meditating. The usual. Visiting friends spent time in it as well, smoking cigarettes or spacing out. I wrote some songs there.

I don’t recall building another one since, though we have lived in four houses since then—two in Seattle and two more on the Island Of Misfit Toys where we presently reside. (Well, I’ve built some little desktop ones. Not exactly the same thing.) Our current yard has a ring of sittable tree rounds circling the firepit, plus a driftwood bench to the south—but that’s different. Seems to be, anyway.

I’m feeling today like it’s time to do some circling.

After all this time: Why build one? What do they do?

Intentions when building almost certainly have some effect on the outcome—& mine have often been a bit blank—but—

It seems that they function as a gathering space. Something for a group to flock around.

One could also describe them as “casting a circle” in stone: preparing an intentional magickal space that will NOT be dispersed when the ritual ends (unless someone decides it has ex-boyfriend energy).

Note that a stage can be thought of as a similar kind of space, with related functionalities.

I think that a stone circle functions also as a resonator of sorts—an amplifier, maybe. They do seem to glow, visually &/or palpably, at certain times of year. Solstices, Equinoxes, Cross-Quarter Days. Maybe other times as well; though their structure is oriented to particular days, which may be why those particular days tend to resonate more obviously. Or, those are the days which resonate more obviously anyway.

Each circle also builds up energy of its own, which is always present & which is unique to each circle. That’s been my experience, anyway.

Is “Solstice Energy” a real thing?

Sure it is. So is Monday energy. So is February 10th energy. So is 3:17pm energy. (Astrologers & occultists sometimes go very deep with this stuff. I don’t seem to have the right kind of brain to approach it all systematically, though I find it interesting for sure.)

Each of these “energies” (for lack of a better word… vibes?) has its own distinct flavor. Probably particular uses as well. Summer Solstice energy, for me, is (quite naturally) fiery. Lughnasadh energy possible even more so.

My introduction to “solstice energy” came from playing in an improvising rock band in backwoods Vermont in the late 90s which loved to eat acid, smoke hella bowls, & jaaaaam (in our particular bloody-minded dysphorically garage-funky way that was unlike anyone else I’ve heard before or since). We noticed that when we played at Solstice Parties, there was a… well… a “vibe” that we didn’t encounter at other times. A freewheeling chaos. It was especially noticeable, sonically & experientially, in our free-jazz-influenced passages.

I’ve made a point since of playing improvised music & doing energy work of various kinds on solstices & on other days of interest. Winter Solstice, Equinoxes, the often-dismissed “cross-quarter days”. Regardless of how recently they were coined, Lughnasadh, Samhain, Beltane, Imbolc, DO for sure carry a notable energy.

Which, as a musical mad scientist, I would expect from a mathematical subdivision of a physical phenomenon! (Quarters & eighths of the Earth’s journey round the sun, dontcha know.)

Other subdivisions also carry notable energies—every day, every minute, etc. But some will be more obviously perceivable to most of us—or readily usable or accessible—than others.

I’d love to get around to dialing in some cross-THIRD days—divvy the year into six parts rather than four, just for one example, & check out the energies in those moments—but so far I haven’t found myself doing it. (365 not the most readily divisible number so we’re dealing with some margins of error here… but that’s fine. Moon’s full for 3 days after all!)

One of my biggest takeaways from my years foolin around w/ stone circles & etc, is that ALL space is sacred space. And all time is sacred time.

That may be part of why I haven’t felt the need to build one in a while.

But it’s also, I think, good to have a permanent, curated, intentional energetic space nearby.

** book covers throughout are clickable-thru to purchase or peruse, depending on what I could find around the www at the time!