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Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown
Paperback
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: Apr 11 2026
Pages: 50
Weight: 0.18
Height: 0.12 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
We long for our holistic selves to be our legacies. Loralee Clark explores this yearning stitch in the web of us through structures erected 11,000 - 7,000 years ago, infusing myth, fable, and imagination in her research. Psalm-like poems render our connection as people who shaped their bodies as songs to be sung together over millennia. Custom, ceremony, and liturgy are lovingly detailed: You listen to the haw, tip its waxy berries into the pots to grind and cook later; sweet drink during winter. Clark considers how rituals - relationships, transitions, age and season milestones - make meaning, as we hope to understand what lies beyond us, to be spared misfortune, to be remembered. Time, that cyclical ancestor is like a snake's skin, is a slow-motion deep dance affording the stones' wiser agency. Our journey through humanity's history, from Turkey to Orkney, feels as monolithic, yet intimate, as sitting by the fire with our Neolithic ancestors.
-Ann Chinnis, author, Poppet, My Poppet and I Can Catch Anything
Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown excavates our relationships to each other, the earth, and the cosmos. Loralee Clark guides us to ancient sacred sites, where ancestors [mapped] the perpetual cycles of sky and studied the endless above. She connects the loss of communal practices to our current epidemic of loneliness. With hope that we might listen again to the plants, relearn their lessons of trust, diversity, co-existence, Clark charts a more purposeful path for a people lonely and adrift.
-Teresa Burns Murphy, author, The Secret to Flying
Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown guides us through ancient monuments to excavate their buried wisdom. With an archeologist's sensibility, Clark unearths magic, plumbs the starry depths, and scrutinizes the spaces between all things. She entreats us to hear the sky's endless song and the stolid stones' language of permanence. We envision the vast circles that shape all creation, to imagine ourselves in the time when the stars themselves kissed the ground, pushing chaos into becoming. Clark summons the engineers, alchemists, and mystics to the places haunted by ancestral memories - embedded in them, the knowledge that everything is alive. Songs of stones, the voice of a stag's horn, rings of trees, and time itself, all nest in intimate connection.
-Thayer Cory, author, Carried and Cracked Open
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