17 LOCRONAN (5): the Sacred Quadrilateral

During a sacred circuit like the Troménie, the spiritual content of the landscape is temporarily raised to a higher level. Each station serves to heighten the awareness of archetypal spiritual qualities (a difficult explanation for something really simple). The outer landscape becomes interiorized.

At Locronan, the procession mimics the seasonal progression of the year in terms of birth, death, renewal and fertility. It's also a representation of the life cycle. The Celts were thinking in natural cycles. Space and time formed a unity. Christianity and Islam have a linear time concept (from creation to last judgement), and this has destroyed the image of man as a part of nature, by placing him 'outside' nature. And they're both 'paternalistic religions'. Saint Columba, the great Irish missionary monk, once banned all the cows and women from the island of Iona which he justified by the misogynistic saying: “Where there is a cow, there is a woman, and where there is a woman, there is mischief”.

 

This stone was found in 1991 on the Locronan hill during excavations. You can clearly see the engraved quadrilateral on it. It's an evidence that people were aware of the quadrilateral in the landscape.

The landscape around Locronan is very contrasted: a hill in the South, and a deep, marshy valley in the North, with a plateau in between. The town ('Eglise St-Ronan' on the map) is situated between the top of the hill and the lowest part of the valley. The quadrilateral is divided in two by an ancient pre-Roman trackway, a so called corpse road, used to carry corpses to the cemetery. The place where the diagonals cross is called 'Le Menec, the place of the stones'. There must have been megaliths there in the past.

The remaining 'megalith' on the circuit, and the disappeared but testified ones, are an indication that the origin of this 'procession' could date from before the time of the Celts.

The two main stations are 4 (Saint Anne) and 10 (Saint Ronan), the Earth Goddess and the Sun God. Or simply: the earth and the sun, and their interaction, which produces life.

This is evidenced by the fact that seen from station 10, the sun sets above station 4 on May 1 and August 1, while seen from station 4, the sun rises above station 10 on November 1 and February 1, in other words: the main Celtic festivals.