A QUEST FOR THE SYMBOLIC MEANING OF THE VOID, DARKNESS AND SILENCE

The archaeological investigations at Dobrzeszowska Mountain. (Holy Cross Mountains area) have revealed some mysterious stone rings, being most probably the remnants of an ancient ritual site. It seems to be very characteristic that no traces of human visitors were found either inside the stone walls or outside them in their vicinity, besides but a few potsherds in the layer of cinders, covering the entrance to this enclosure, which may be dated for the 8th century AD (this chronology has been confirmed by radiocarbon analysis of the ashes). So this place appears to be almost ideally empty! Similar emptiness in the sacred place may be observed at other hill-top stone rings, built in last centuries of the 1st millenium in Poland, in particular at the nearby Lysa Gora (Bald Mountain), but also at others such as Sleza, Wiezyca, or Radunia. Rudolf Otto suggested that such an emptiness used to be frequently associated symbolically with silence and darkness. Therefore the author collects here some information, dispersed among different ethnohistorical and ethnographical sources, which could enhance the possible applicability of this symbolic pattern to at least some of the Slavonic sacred mountains. To this purpose the range of his studies has to cover not only the early medieval history of Slavian religion as well as ethnography of its later surviving remnants, but to include also the numerous analogies from other Indo-European cultures, especially the Germans and Celts, whose influence in Central and Eastern Europe proved to be really long lasting. Some important hints and analogies came also from the best documented areas of Graeco-Roman culture as well.