Meanderings

I love researching Goddesses and the sacred; I love tracing things back and back to their origins (or as close as I can get, anyway; there is always further). And so often the roots of a thing come down to place. I love following the strands, finding that one line about an obscure Goddess, the one town in which She had a concrete presence, then tracking the modern name of that town down if I can, and figuring where it was, where was Her temple, Her spring, Her wood; and then if I'm very lucky, finding a photograph someone has posted somewhere, or even, looking down on it through the medium of that wonderful modern phenomenon, satellite photography.

For example, tonight, in writing about Danu, I came across this picture of the origins of Her river, the Danube. It is a simple thing, a place where two smaller rivers come together to form a third. And though the picture looks perfectly ordinary, as if it is just some nice little picturesque scene in Germany somewhere, still, it gave me a chill:

(Picture by Drombalan, posted on Wikipedia, here.)

There is something quite numinous about it.

Last week, in researching the Magdalene, I found myself looking at this glorious photo:

(Picture by Wolfgang Staudt, posted on Flickr, here.)

It is the church of Notre Dame de la Mer, in the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where Mary Magdalene is said to have come ashore; in the crypt is the famous statue of Ste. Sara.

And then that led to this, the satellite picture of the same church, out there in the ordinary and numinous old world:

(Image from Google Maps, here.)

And then by dragging the map a bit to the east, I find this:

It is hard to be sure, but I think those little white spots are some of the famous wild horses of the Camargue, standing there in shallow waters. You can see some of their tracks in the upper left.

It's a miraculous world.