this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Paganism
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They're basic shapes painted on rocks, dude. Not sure what you want me to tell you. I didn't write the book, and you didn't read it so idk what either of us are supposed to get from this conversation.
I have a guess about why 🤣
The publisher contacted the author and asked him repeatedly to write a book on the subject. Your armchair assumptions and guesses are worth very little. OP asked for suggestions and I made one. It's called being constructive. 🙄
Name one archæological finding of any runes in any part of Wales.
The writer's website paints him as a New Age yank.
First of all, you're talking about a man who is single handedly (and at a great danger to himself) championing the cause of distributing banned books in a christofascist state. https://foundation451.org/
Second of all, what are you even doing in this community?? If he sounds like a new age yank you sound like a contrarian asshat 🤷🏻
And third, not that you've displayed any sort of openness to information that even remotely contradicts your already very complete worldview, but I've transcribed by hand some excerpts from the book for you:
"Tellstones are used in the Devonshire area of southwest Great Britain. Devonshire (which today is simply called Devon; shire is the old English word for "county") is bordered on the south by the English Channel, on the west by Cornwall, on the north by the Bristol Channel, and on the east by the rest of England. Until the tenth century, maps called this area West Wales, and until the eighth century it was populated entirely by the Welsh. First the Saxons invaded, then the Normans two centuries later. The area is now part of England, but it retains its Welsh culture if not in name, certainly in its traditions and folkways."
"I learned of Tellstones from Rhiannon Ryall's book West Country Wicca: A Journal of the Old Religion. But I only learned the basic form from the book; everything else had to be gathered from people who knew of Tellstones being used or witnessed their use, or from the few I found who actually used them."
"So I did some investigation, and started phoning hotels, restaurants,pubs, and other public places in Wales, asking if anyone had heard of Tellstones. Now mind you, this was pre-Internet. Even though today we can do Google searches (though you'll still find blessed little about Tellstones there), this was before there was a Google, when the 2400-baud modem was the epitome of geek- tech. So I had to do all the leg work Over International Long Distance. Frequently whoever answered the phone would run and grab the oldest person they knew, and sometimes even they would have to refer me to someone else. So even among the elders, the tradition is dying out. This is one reason I felt the need to publish this book and keep Tellstones alive. The meaning of the stones have stayed relatively stable, and the symbols themselves have remained unchanged for as long as anyone could remember the old people recalled their grandparents or great-grandparents using the same stones, the same system."
...
"Every elder, every expert I consulted, listed the same set of symbols and described their appearance the same way. There was never any variant, which speaks to both their widespread use and their antiquity."