Ashanna,
Thank you for the introduction to Romuva.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0pXMOVLC6A
‘We’ have got some stories of the Oak too and had/have our Sacred Groves as well; - which to the utter horror of the people - the missionaries came to cut down:
https://sites.google.com/site/ebaver...maydell600.jpg
So people went silent about those Sacred Trees you would come to sit under - to be healed, to connect to your Ancestors, to pray and to give offerings, to ‘meditate’ (for the lack of a better word) in order to realign yourself with the Life-Universe-and-Everything in a Sacred Manner.
And of course it wasn’t just the Holy Trees, it was the Sacred Springs and Rocks as well - which they came to destroy.
This tradition teaches you to ‘listen’ to the land, feel and listen to the trees, hear the ‘singing’ of the them and the rock formations.
Plus it was not only the horror people felt, but utter bewilderment as well - how could these invaders not sense the Sacredness of those Sites, when they came to them?!!!!
This was utterly incomprehensible!!!
To the invaders - the World was just concepts and beliefs – not direct 'experience',
direct-inner-knowing – how come they did not know
anything!!???
Instead - they called these Sacred Sites "hell" and evil places of the "devil-worship" etc.
Unthinkable!!!!
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Fire as Sacred – yes, 'we' have got that too.
At the end of the video – one can see the effects of agriculture i.e. how it came to Lithuania early.
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Don’t know if you are interested, but here are a lot of archaeological links about Baltic areas:
http://briai.ku.lt/en/publications/a.../volumes/13-2/
I have only glanced through the pictures of the
“Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Stone Age Art in Lithuania, and its Archaeological Cultural Context“; - link, because those are
the same hunter-gatherer artifacts we collectively share.
But of course – as you travel further North East – now the Sacred Rocks
('cognitive map') of 'my people' reflected our Siberian/Euro dual ancestry:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Q9-rStAmYO.../s400/shaa.jpg
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Ashanna, if you have some questions, themes you would like to bring up, I’d be happy to try and explore
our shared Euro–hunter-gatherer heritage with you, though I am not 'knowledgeable'.
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