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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper explores how a vernacular spiritual healer’s engagement with Scottish megaliths illuminates the Sun–Moon dynamic as a pendulum of enchantment, gender, and wilderness, while offering insights into cosmology, symbolism, and narrative transformation.

Paper long abstract

The paper, based on ethnographic research, explores a local spiritual healer’s engagement with Scottish megaliths, where the Sun and Moon function as symbolic pendulums of enchantment, gendered mysticism, and renewal. Grounded in the healer’s storytelling and ritual practice, stone circles are (re)interpreted as cosmologically attuned architectures, animated by celestial cycles that delineate thresholds of fertility, wilderness, and kinship.

Building on this foundation, the analysis investigates how celestial agents, envisioned in dualistic harmony, shape narratives of gendered balance, cosmic reciprocity, and spiritual reclamation. These perceptions emerge at the intersection of local folklore, archaeoastronomy, and contemporary spiritual practice, and are articulated through ritual engagement, embodied experience, and mythopoetic imagination.

The paper argues that, at the heart of contemporary vernacular spirituality, prehistoric monuments are not framed as static relics but experienced as dynamic presences—sites where cosmic movements inscribe a kinship between land, body, and sky. Within this framework, megalithic landscapes become canvases for personal spirituality and ongoing negotiation between enchantment and disenchantment through celestial symbolism.

Through ethnographic insight into the Sun–Moon dynamic within modern spiritualities, the paper thus contributes to Folklore studies by illuminating broader themes of cosmology, gender, and sacred wilderness.