Feraferia

Faerie Mysteries of the Holly Tree Month July 8 - August 4…Out in the drying pastures of the sturdy Oaks, away from the now swarming insects of the stream-beds, grows a bushy evergreen of great nobility. He listens to the merry, dry-twig crackle of cicadas by day, and crickets by night. Similarly, the lissome Rowan had listened to the crack of ice sheets through Luis and Nion Months on the opposite arc of the Mandala of Seasonal Nature Mysteries. The Rowan had held her many ears open for sounds that might announce the end of Frost Rule. Now Toyon strains for the heralds that will draw the scorching reign of Sun to a close. Then he may trade his flowers, which in some places he wears even through July, for those reddening berries he shares with his sister, the Rowan, within the charmed circle of Rose and Apple ribes. The Toyon Holly Berries, green for Tinne Month, will turn crimson to celebrate the evening of the year, when the white crescent moon dances, dainty-toed, over the red and golden stairway of the setting sun.
As the heat of the sun increases, the Fays, men and women together now, climb the mountains to catch fantastic glimpses of the meandering Goddess and God. Their course composes incandescent paths of pilgrimage through the sybilline landforms. To follow them is to see this Elm move to the left across the hill; and this great rock move to the right across that stand of Cottonwoods. The messages so versified are glossed at night by communal inlays of dream. They record the Code of the Land from stars dancing across domes of sleep.
During their Holly wanderings, the Fays clear tinder from under trees which are threatened by wildfire. Other areas they close off, and there burn the dead brush, a little at a time, under tight controls. Thus they commune beneficially with the spirits of fire, and encourage the development of adventitious buds and seeds in Chaparral biomes. Dry grasses are hoed up with stangs and pressed into fuel bricks for the following Winter. But for the time being, these are stored under the sacred Toyon Hollies.
The Fays clear and repair the curving, nature-blended sluices that lead from rain-water sumps and from springs, high in the mountains, down into the sacred groves. As always, while they serve, they also sing, mime and dance, celebrating the current processes of season, region, and urge. Holly boys of hot fields lead shady ivy girls in meandering dances about Toyon Hollies and Laurel Sumacs. Kokopelli and Kokopillimana, the divine flutists, reveal the magic quail paths.
In spacious apartments formed by the growth guidance of Holly and Sumac bushes, the Fays rest from the work of preparing Winter faggots of Summer grass. In these aromatic caves of chlorophyll, they while away the mid-noon hours, enjoying the splendid dalliance. It is here that most of the young teach each other the first precious thrills and endearments of love. Whole days may pass in rapture of touching. The Fays caress, rub and pummel each other, and every nature being in their vicinity. Everyone comes to know each biome thoroughly by braille, bringing, in turn, every part of his anatomy into contact with every part of the biome’s anatomy. These virtuosi of touch learn to trace out the voluptuous contours of the greater landforms deified by distance, over each other’s moving bodies. Simultaneously, with deep, inner concentration, they may inhale the fragrance of a particular flora growing on the landform which they exchange with each other through the magic of cultivated caress. This art of Artemis and Aphrodite combined ultimately makes one’s faerie flesh of auto-cthonic touch fill out the whole Land-Sky-Love-Body.
The bush worlds ring with laughter. Bush answers trilling bush across the baking fields, while trees shed leaves to conserve their water supply.
Many devise cunning landmark communion charms, and establish them in poetically strategic places here and there throughout the landscape. The Pictographic Land—Love Language of these charms indicates how to view and feel the thrusts and postures of the region; at what hours and seasons these stress patterns are most prominent due to angles and directions of light and shadow blending; in what kind of weather they are best empathized; and where to go to find the next strophe in the Land Dance Rhapsody. These lines and tracks of love lyric between earth and sky are the Honeymoon Meanderings of the Goddess and the God. The nature signs of region and season show the initiatory sequences of the ‘scape in terms of human erotic urge.
Through the long Summer nights, the Fays somnambulistically travel great distances. They compose new tracks of land-sky revelation. The twists and turns of Gaia’s contours incise themselves deeply in nerve, muscle and viscera, through primeval stick and stone magic, against the aeonic measure of the North Star.
In the moonlight, the Faeries silently water thirsty saplings, and play the hushed game of rock and tree spinning. The Daemons of Tinne, the Holly Month, gambol through the groves carrying bundles of tall stangs. They click them together as they whirl to invisible flutes, making cicada and cricket noises. Nymphs, flitting in the shadowy draws, croak throbbingly in chorus, like frogs. The stangs are placed under boughs bending with the increasing freight of fruit. Or they are used to hoe spiral garden alleys, and to clear irrigation basins about trees, all agleam in the voluptuous moonlight.

The infinite diversity of identities IS the nature of the supreme identity , the divine unity. - Fred Adams, October 31, 1963, handwritten note I found in one of the many boxes of his writings as I try to organize this mountain of material. He did this drawing just a little later; her jewel symbolically tells the same story.…Jo Carson

We celebrated summer Solstice with the OTA at their 50th annual Adonia festival in honor of Ba’al and Astarte. Lead magus Carroll “Poke” Runyon received a gorgeous handmade robe for his accomplishments over these many years. Kudos to all!

The full Moon graces this evening of the longest day of the Year - Happy Solstice to you! Here are the Faerie Mysteries of Duir, the Oak Tree Month June 10 – July 7
A great Live Oak, king of Califia’s trees, spreads his jagged lightning shocks of evergreen, like a Summer storm, over dry expanses of yellow grass. The increasing heat makes oaken shade a God in very truth, for those who undertake high Summer’s Initiations of Blazing Savannas. In Autumn, acorn meal will typify the Summer wealth of myriad seeds riding equinoctial winds. These winds will carry life far and wide through Sun realms, and back to Earth.
On the eve of the longest day of the sacred year, the now fully bloomed Goddess and God, Titania and Oberon, are led by Nymphs and Panisci, Nature hushed and desire-primed, to the White Wedding Stone before the gigantic Live Oak. The Oak and Altar of the Four Rivers stand within a Henge setting of Twelve Great Menhirs, or Monoliths. Their field of gold is edged with the twenty-two vowel and consonant Trees of the Sacred Nature Charm Calendar. The trees and stones are subtly shaped, angled and aligned to every climactic wilderness community and annual celestial event of the surrounding region. They are carved with hieroglyphs of magically corresponding plants, stars and land-form postures. On their edges, the seasonal-arboreal Ogham rock writing is incised. When the Fays whirl through the Henge, the holy pictures and tree strokes speak sparkling colors of wilderness moods and hieratic horizons. Now, to begin the grand defloration and love climax of the year, the stones and trees are now extravagantly decorated.
 
In free, mazy spirals, the thickets of Faerie thorn lead up from two converging stream beds, that together form a Y of Aphrodite. From this rounded combe, the sacred Oak Woodland, in which humane natural beings perennially remarry Califia Land, spreads out to the distant Sierra threshold of the North Star. On the Venus Mound of Midsummer Marriage, is the kindling quick of Faerieland, the acme of exchange for the entire surrounding Land-Sky-Love Lock. In the boughs of the trees that dot off into the distance, the Fays have arranged charms of various Oghams, or Regional Nature Codes, which fuse Archetypes and Eco-Systems. The woodland fringes become intricate dancing semaphors of bird, tree, river, weather and flower Oghams. Each year the codes are altered and augmented, for surprise is the very fountainhead of wildness, as continuation is the river-bed of love life.
The far prominences about Hod Hill, where unite Aphrodite of Deciduous Forests and Ares of Open Grasslands, are all aligned, through the White Wedding Stone, with sacred land and star tracks branching out into the whole world. Many of the prominences are crested with high holy groves. On the edges of these, as far as the eye can see from the Marriage Meadow, twin bon-fires light up. One after another the fires leap over a succession of hills and headlands leading closer to the wedding place.
All are assembled now. As the closest fires flare to ring in the meadow with light, the Great Lady emerges from the Old Oak. Her black hair flies on the still air: Its constellated coils spread the edgeless curtains of Her dark swimming Flesh in all directions. The changing volumes of this stupifying figure, all at once skin, veils, tresses and ageless song, glimmer with stars and fireflies. All stand back from HER!!! Toward Holy Maid and Man, to Kore and Kouros, slowly weaving Her steps in the Topocosmic Dance, and issuing strange clicks from the abysms of her throat, she advances with a tall Stang-Phytala, and places it between the trembling Goddess and God. She raises her arms in blessing. A black candle of Sumac wax burns between the Phytala’s Horns of Ash. Its’ wreath of Solstitial wild flowers spells out, in flower Ogham, the cosmic elan of her holy vowel name, which animates the flesh of the holy consonants. A white quartz crescent Moon glows beneath the wreath.
 
Through the channels at the four corners of the Wedding Stone, ministrant Fays pour out the juices of the Four Rivers of Paradise. After the litanies of the Season are intoned, the Charms of completed pollination and green leaves are gratefully revealed. The new Queen and King of the Wilds exchange Rings and join their right hands - those mighty Servants of Nature - through the floral wreath. With their left hands, they grasp the two Horns of the foundational Moon-Ark beneath.
As the Black Goddess of Holy Spirit expands with her blessings into the surrounding night, petals of Mexican Elderberry, Laurel Sumac, Jacaranda and Privit rain down from the Shadowy boughs of Oak, over the wedded Pair. The miracle infant of the green fruit is suddenly uncovered from a heap of petals on the White Alter in a blaze of torchlight.

Then the startling shrill cry of mating challenge breaks from the quaking bosom of the new Queen. Her splendid robes fall away, and she darts off into the Southern fringes of a dense Oak thicket. After a choked moment, the King dashes after her. His flight gives the signal for many bonfires to be dumped down cliff-sides that have been especially fire-proofed for the occasion.
From ribald ranks of celebrants a tremendous shout goes up. Big rings and columns of straw appear above their heads at opposite ends of the field. The women gather about the rings, which are tissued over: the men rally about the long straw columns. Through the smokey, Oaken firelight, the men push the columns into swelling waves of women, who, squealing with delight, try to remove the rings from the on-plunging ph**li of grass. When the last Ithyphallos of plaited Califia-Grass is pushed through a Hymeneal Ring, huge gongs and hollow tree-trunk drums resound throughout the hills. The Goddess and the God reveal themselves on a distant ridge in the South. Nakedly they hold aloft Kteis and Phallos of grass fitted together. Then, midst tumult of fire falls, exploding fire works, enormous bombs of flower petals and small green fruits shot from great stang catapults, the two depart on their Summer honeymoon. Evoe!!!
The Midsummer Marriage perennially re-unites the God of human community to the Goddess of all-containing wilderness, the only true commonwealth.
The May Pole and Ring of the preceding Season are removed from their separate mounds in the Black and White Thorn enclosure, and fitted together in the Oak parkland. The Fays dance about it, interweaving ribbons and kisses.
Many marriages are completed this night. And each wedded couple is wedded to other couples according to the mystic bonding of the Paradisal Quaternio. Then again, each Mandalic Family of Syzigies is linked to several other, and a sacred eco-totemic name is assumed by the Clan, whose coherence is visionary. The ramifications of magical and ceremonial crossings of animae and animi finally includes the whole regional human population, which is wed, in turn, to the Land-Sky-Love-Body. Each wedding is also wed to a natural feature of the land. Thus humanity is joined in the family of Nature.
On Midsummer night many Fays assume new magical names in dedication, under the Muse, to new tasks of wilderness care, or, very sparingly, to the paradisal maturation of a few amenable eco-systems. “The principles of evolution must also evolve.”
A happy lunacy of Puck-led wildermaze play proceeds through the last pale-starred watches of the night. At dawning of the longest day, all view the Sun rise behind the North Solstitial Peak. Silently, they meditate on his spiritual eminence. Then they thank the Moon, his Mother, Bride and Daughter, for bringing him in through the ages, and for lensing and regulating his energies with exquisite, painstaking gentleness, in care of all Earth’s children.
Through smoked glass, the adoring Fays watch the Sun break clear of his alpine cone, and put on his Summer sovereign robes of sapphire, fruit-censed skies, all brightly brocaded with bees.
The Sun lights up his great Oak behind the White Wedding Stone of the Moon. His rays stampede down wrinkled arroyos to the Ocean……..
Copyright © 2024 feraferia.org.

I was sad to just learn that the wonderful geomancer and labyrinth-maker Alex Champion died in November, 2021. Although we knew folks in common, I hadn't heard - he was in my film Dancing With Gaia, talking about how "When you honor the world around you, the energy comes in." So true! Here is a link to him being interviewed about this "On Labyrinths and Leys with Alex Champion"

AiD054: On Labyrinths and Leys with Alex Champion Legendary labyrinth maker Alex Champion chats about labyrinths, leys and life in general at the 2018 ASD West Coast Conference in Santa Cruz.(49 mins, 45MB) Sadly, Alex passed away on 14 November 2…

This is precisely why we need Kore Soteira, the maiden savioress, who embodies caring as a core value.

"The modern world is painfully off balance, opulently rich in arms, poor in providing for the needs of human lives. It is this social deficit that represents the most urgent threat to world security. Spending for arms not only fails to meet these needs; it intensifies them. This is the ultimate irony of the search for security through invincible military power. It threatens the society it is intended to protect. . . . In short, what the arms race means in human terms is that more people are condemned to die of hunger and of foul water; children to grow up malnourished in body and mind; the special needs of the elderly to be neglected; people to live out their lives in fear and with hate. It is not only the deprived who suffer as a consequence. All of society is affected by the waste of human resources.

But these are reasonable, mortal words from a reasonable, mortal woman. Looming over her, high as the sky, is a God. The War God. All the present-day world is in the grip of psychic and material servitude to him, and if we review the past four thousand years of human history, this makes perfect sense. Just as the underlying motivation of Bronze Age patriarchy was profit through war—war on the female, war on nature, war on human labor—so the ultimate goal of patriarchy must be the same: the profits of war. For four millennia, war has been the factual source of patriarchal power. Through the mass terror, mass r**e, and mass exploitation of war, through the wartime generation of mass hysterical energy, through the war-oriented manipulation of female reproduction, through the mass conversion of human and natural resources via war into profits (for the few) and “social order” (i.e., hierarchic role-playing, organized repression, and death) for the many—the war machine has virtually created the world as we know it; i.e., as the creator of our psychic and structural world, war is God. And Gods generate not only worlds and social orders, but also belief in those worlds and social orders: a belief that overwhelms human reason.

~ Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth"

Art by Sliman Mansour

On Thursday June 6th,2024 the Hermetic Hour with host Poke Runyon will review and discuss the new expanded Second Edition of "Celebrate Wilderness, Magic, Myth and Love on the Feraferian Path" with author Jo Carson, president of Feraferia, Inc. America's first and still foremost nature and goddess venerating Neo-Pagan tradition. Lady Jo will be our call-in guest. The beautifully illustrated book is now on sale at < pokerunyon.com > for $45.00 free-shipping in U.S. Lady Jo is an award-winning film maker and creator of the Feraferian documentary video: "Dancing with Gaia" which is also carried in our bookstore. The book and the video can be bought together for $55.00. The late Frederick Adams has been called the American William Blake. He was a wonderful artist and magician. Join us and celebrate the goddess. Evoe Kore!

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/the-hermetic-hour 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time

The Ogham Tree Alphabet Calendar calls this Moon Month "Huath," which has become known as Thorn Tree Month - a time of sometimes frustrating limits as we wait breathlessly for the coming Solstice climax of the Year during the "Duir" month. For now, enjoy the Faerie Mysteries of the Hawthorn Tree Month May 13 - June 9;
The Faerie Thorns stretching up the hillsides from the River of Love display masses of white flowers vying with emergent leaves to fill out the tangled arteries of thorny wood. The early, frost-daunting petals of Black Thorn loosen now. Within the Ring-Pass-Not of the knobby tangle of sharp-needled twigs, a miniature Faerieland for song Birds and small mammals is secure against restless predators.
In separate bands, adolescent girls and boys, with Dione and Dion, roam the warming foothills and canyons. They make certain all the Wildlings are pollinating. Some rare and lovely Plant Tribes, restricted to a single location, require special attention, but this attention must never exceed the guidelines of the Biomic Eco-organism, and the guidelines can only inform Faerie Intelligence from its natural center, the Muse Goddess.
While ensuring pollination, the young Fays learn the vast Lore of Wildness and Forestry, the whole Mystique of how Soul and Soil may mix. Their bodies grow strong and trim. They feed exclusively on wild plant foods that they themselves must recognize.
The longing of the Grand Microcosmic Polar Opposites for each other creates the gorgeous surrealistic interiors of dream. At night, on distant ridges, the boys and girls spy each others‘ ripening bodies in the flickering campfires. Older celebrants who wish to undergo further, subtler renewal, join the youngsters for the vigils of Huath. Hu is the Mighty God of panting exhalations and exertions.
The burgeoning Fays call to each other across the great divides, like wild birds or coyotes. If they approach each other in the dark, they display themselves with taunting enticements. Then the girls bound off screaming. The supreme mystery of sexual polarization deepens in isolation. Thus the bolt that will jump the gap at Midsummer gathers a tremendous charge. During this phase of the Sacred Year, the pan-erotic power of human nature-being is expanded into passionate compassion for All Wilderness.
When late at night, the campfires no longer glimmer in the waters, the old romances of the stars are recounted by elder Seers. Young Spirits are dextrously drawn from the flesh to fly, like eager fledglings, through glowing astral wonderlands. The mutant powers inherent in the mounting tides of pubescence are sublimed to exfoliate the Hidden Magics of the Soul.
During their adventures in pollination and nature Lore, the unfolding adolescents occasionally meet on either side of those Hawthorn hedges that stretch into Mayland from the Willow-domed Riversides. The Thorns lead out around ponds towards the Oak and Holly dotted fields and High Holy Maze-groves of Summer. When from East and West they meet across the Thorns, they sometimes don the big wings of metamorphic plant servitors: Butterflies and Moths. They perform mimes of pollination emphasizing local topography in their gestures as expressions of human erotic embrace. The lads come a-whirling bull-roarers. Total synesthetic Land-Sky Language emerges from the Whitethorn Mimes. An atmospheric body develops from the thickening desire these performances engender. And in that atmospheric body of the Polar Mysteries, the many sacred Land-Sky profiles of the region take on sacramental relief.
The hedges themselves seem to sigh out a deep lovely mauve of melancholy longing. Pledged lovers may touch each other dreamily through the hedges, or from either side of a great Oak trunk, until discovered. Others prick each other with the Hawthorns, place their wounds together for a furtive moment and then run off. Some of the initiates gaze at each others’ reflections in pools, or in special Anima-Animus mirrors cunningly blended in sylvan screens of stock and stone. But they never look at each other directly, unless from a considerable distance. Sometimes they approach each other with masks or veils over their heads, so naked torsos and limbs may learn fully to express the developing uniqueness.
The Flowering Ones undergo Soul-revealing nocturnal vigils. They purge themselves in various ways: steam baths, mud immersions, internal cleansing, and hot springs, until their taut bodies are perfectly relaxed.
Towards Midsummer Day, all those who are engaged give themselves over utterly to lonely wanderings in the wilds, and complete fasting. Their Star Bodies learn to zoom together over the billowing hills and down the shadowy canyons of night. They are becoming Faerie Spirits; their communal marriage to each other will also marry them to the Elements and to All Nature.
Copyright © 2024 feraferia.org.

Max Dashu is such an important scholar! Thank you! I especially love the part about the Wild Girl Goddess Krumai, who lived on the highest summit; and the ‘altars in the shape of mountains’. This is good stuff!

The Murkum, Godddess of Mount Haramosh in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan. "All the women of [the Haramosh] valley worshipped a female deity, the Murkum. She helped and delivery and protected mother and child; she was also the chief owner all ibexes and wild goats denoted by the collective term of ‘mayaro’. Therefore she was venerated by hunters, too, who brought her horns.

"The great thrill of the investigations I made in the Haramosh Valley was finding a sanctuary of the Murkum in good order and even in use, in spite of 200 years of Islamic past. It lies almost 3000 m. above sea level near the summer village of Guré, just in front of the tremendous flag of the Haramosh, and this is no accident, as the mountain what is considered the proper home of the Murkum.

"On the steep slope there is an altar built of boulders dominated by a cliff as big as a house with the juniper tree growing beside it. Next to it is a spring. Below the altar, crude benches of stones were directed for the annual meeting of the women. Nut trees grow between them. Even they are considered holy and no branches were ever broken off."

[Shown, a recent photo shows that altars of the same kind still exist, just over the border in Tibetan-speaking Ladakh.]

"I was told that, when the village was founded, the goddess appeared in the shape of a she-ibex on that cliff promising happiness and fertility. Every year the women were together here. Then she herself would send the sacrifice—a she-ibex...
"... women anxious about the welfare of their families still come to the altar table and put leaves of juniper between the boulders. When I visited the place, I found fresh, green branches there. In Haramosh, I saw another sanctuary of the Murkum, stone benches on both sides of the path between the winter and summer villages. When people shift over in spring time, no woman who has born a child since the previous autumn will pass here without distributing bread in honor of the Murkum and putting some Juniper branches between the rough stones of the benches.

"Today in this northern area they do not remember a male god of any importance comparable to that of the Murkum. …

"We have heard that tales of fairies exist almost everywhere, but in some remote valleys the fairies are considered as smaller images of the Murkum, perhaps ask her younger relatives. They have preserved their aboriginal name of ‘darniji’ instead of the Persian ‘peri.’

"In a village on the borders of Punyal I was told of the sanctuary of Murkum and her suite [following]. It was described as a big menhir surrounded by many similar but smaller stones. The locals explained that Murkum and her maidens could rest only on hilltops. The highest mountain is the residence of the great goddess herself, on the others there sit the darnijis. If you want to receive them you must build hilltops in miniature models.

"One group of the darnijis wear the white caps of the unmarried girls. It is their duty to help the hunters and the shamans. As everywhere in the Gilgit Agency they are called ‘racchi,’ i.e. ‘helpers,’ ‘guards.’ [This is probably derived from Indic rākṣī: “protector, guardian.”] When they appear to the hunter in a dream in order to grant him an Ibex they do not bring him flowers or fruit as is otherwise related, nor do they simply betray the whereabouts of the deer tongue, but they present him with a human head. Apparently that means the soul of the mayaro which is to be the victim.

[Mayaro refers to wild horned animals, especially the ibex or mountain goat, the markhor (the largest kind of mountain goats, with long twisted horns), or wild sheep. Their relation to the darnijis or fairies is explained in an earlier section:]

"Ibex and markhor, collectively called ‘mayaro,’ pass for the domestic animals of the fairies, their sheep and goats. Therefore, no animal of this kind can be killed by man which has not been slaughtered before by those ladies.

[This compares very closely to Scottish traditions of the glaisteagan, deer fairies; as well as the Cailleach, who also selects deer to be taken by hunters—or protects them from the men, and punishes men who over-hunt or disrespect her "herd."]

"After the meal [the darniji / fairies] reanimate it by putting the bones together and covering the skeleton with the skin. Then they leave the resurrected animal to one of their chosen man who is just performing the dream ceremony."

"The belief in the great owner-goddess of the animals exists in Caucasia in many variants. The idea is quite common there that the hunter can capture his prey only by her consent. Sometimes her favor even goes so far as to accept him as her lover. But the lucky hunter has to observe certain taboos; otherwise he must die. Sometimes the goddess appears in the shape of a 'pure' animal. The recise idea that a slaughtered animal may be revived from his bones occurs in both areas. Even the detail that a missing bone can be replaced by a rod is identical. Here as there, the belief is connected with wild goats, and this must be a very old affinity, because Thor, the Germanic god, plays the same trick on his bucks. [Meaning, he revives them from their bones after a feast.]

[This Dardic myth is paralleled by a very widespread European tradition known as “the miracle of the bones,” in which ancestral spirits or witches hold a feast after slaughtering animals, usually cattle. They then gather up the bones into the skins and resurrect the animal by pronouncing a simple spell or rite. In one witch trial of the Italian Alps, the formula was Sorge, Ronzola: “Get up, Bossie.” Or the witches’ goddess (in Ferrara she was called Sibillia) would revive the animals by touching the bundle with a wand. A similar story was told as far away as Estonia. In Switzerland and central Europe, it is ancestral spirits who do this, visiting a household and making a feast with the best cow, while the terrified householder looks on; and then bringing her back to life.]

"That goat worship existed among the mountain tribes of Iran can hardly be doubted in view of the Luristan bronzes. Many seals of western Asia depict goats beside a tree. [Not to mention the ibex being a primary theme in neolithic ceramic painting.]…

It is quite evident that there are similarities with institutions of the Kafirs [meaning the pagans in Afghanistan]… we know that they had ‘feasts of merit’ and went head-hunting. They were acquainted with altars in the shape of mountains and fumigated with burning juniper. Moreover, the Kafirs of the Hindukush [i.e. the Kalasha of Chitral] venerated a goddess who appeared as a wild girl and her residence on the highest summit—the Tirikh Mir. I am in no linguist, but I think that even her name, Krumai, indicates a connection with the Murkum of the Gilgit Agency. [i.e., in the Haramosh Valley]

The iconography in my next webcast on Ancient Iran shows a very ancient and widespread veneration of ibexes, in common with their modern Dardic cousins in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan. See comments for examples.

“Ethnological research in Dardistan 1958,” Karl Jettmar. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105/1, 1961, pp. 79-97 (quotes from pp 88-91)