The Stone Circle. 96 Archetypes for Peace

Not competition, but complementarity.
Not dominance, but cooperation.
Not blind following, but self-recognition:
These are the criteria for a community of peace.

This book is the result of many years of medial research by Sabine Lichtenfels. It began in 1994, when the author accidentally discovered the Almendres stone circle near Évora in Portugal. At that time, it was not yet fenced off and signposted as it is today. Sabine Lichtenfels felt strangely drawn to the stone circle, visited it again and again and was caught up in a network of information from ancient times. She receives messages and images from the tribal culture that created the stone circle. Through a long chain of “coincidences”, of clues, dreams, trances and encounters, an almost complete picture of an archaic high culture emerges, which prevailed in many parts of the world for at least 2000 years, but probably much longer, and only had to give way to a much lower cultural development through the invasion of the so-called Kurgan peoples in the fifth millennium BC.

We may judge this tremendous finding as we wish – as a historical fact, as a projection of an inner landscape of the soul, as a prehistoric memory or even as a vision of a coming universal society – but we cannot escape its inner logic and consistency. This is what a highly developed prehistoric society might actually have looked like.
And even further: if such a model of a non-violent human existence actually existed, if people lived like this for thousands of years, then we know that the vision of a non-violent future society is more than a mere pipe dream. The historical atrocities that humans have committed all over the world in the last five millennia are then no longer an eternal law. War and violence are then merely statistical and no longer universal constants of human existence. The possibility of a non-violent world comes within reach.
When we study the stone circle and its information, we increasingly gain the impression that we are at a real source of our lives, a source that applies at all times because it is part of the universal nature of human beings.

In Almendres, Sabine Lichtenfels also received the commission to rebuild the stone circle in the Tamera peace project, which she co-founded. Together with the geomancer Marko Pogacnik and Peter Frank, the first stones were laid and inaugurated in 2004. Today, the Tamera stone circle is a kind of natural cathedral, a place for contemplation, rituals and prayer.

The 96 stones represent different archetypes that complement each other and together form a unity. They also represent a developmental path – from birth and growing up as a child in contact with plants, through adolescence in contact with animals, to the discovery of sensuality and sexuality, to the awakening of the spirit and commitment to peace, in professions, personal and cultural characteristics and qualities, in contact with the earth and the divine world – until death.

This book is both an aid to personal development and an insight into a powerful vision of peace – the prehistoric utopia.