Medicine Mountain
Credit: By Tommaso Rollo - Imported from 500px (archived version) by the Archive Team. (detail page), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82648886
“Stories are medicine.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés¹
There is a healing mountain called Medicine Mountain on the right bank of the Emerald River. Grandmother lives atop this mountain, greeting pilgrims with a warm welcome and a story or two. The inspiration for Medicine Mountain comes from the real-life Mount Matajur and the nearby peak Zdrava Gora (Healthy Mountain), located on the border between Italy and Slovenia in the Julian Alps.
Matajur was considered a sacred mountain by the Staroverci (Old Believers) who lived in northwestern Slovenia. They called it Velika Baba, which means Great Grandmother or Great Midwife. It was believed to have great healing power. Near the peak of Matajur was a white kača glava (snakehead), a consecrated stone used to create a beneficial bioenergetic field known as a tročan. A tročan was formed by virtually connecting three points in a triangle: three mountain peaks, three trees, or three different things like a mountain, a tree, and a cave. The Staroverci believed that tročans were embedded with great bioenergy, which positively impacted humans, animals, and nature. Matajur was part of two tročans, which made it even more powerful. The white snakehead on Matajur was connected with the black snakehead on Krn and the green snakehead on Kobariški Stol.³ The peaks of Visoka Glava, Glava, and Matajur formed the second tročan.⁴
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New Zork> Ballantine Books, 1992), 15.
The Staroverci (Old Believers) of northwestern Slovenia were a semi-autonomous community that lived by an indigenous pre-Christian faith. Pavel Medvešček, Iz nevidne strain neba (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2016).
Matajur was the meeting place for dehnars (priests) from the staroverci communities. Andrej Pleterski, “Staroverstvo in pričevanja starovercev”, in Iz nevidne strain neba, Pavel Medvešček (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2016), 21.
The white snakehead may have been built into the foundation of the present church on Matajur, although others suggest it was buried to save it from destruction. Pavel Medvešček, Iz nevidne strain neba (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2016), 269.
Visoka Glava, Glava and Lučavčeva Glava formed another tročan. Ibid., 172.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New Zork> Ballantine Books, 1992), 19.
The view from Matajur looking northwards. The famous massif of Krn is just right of centre. Kobariški Stol is just left of centre. Credit: Daniel Goulding
“The nurture for telling stories comes from the might and endowments of my people who have gone before me. In my experience, the telling moment of the story draws its power from a towering column of humanity joined one to the other across time and space, elaborately dressed in the rags and robes or nakedness of their time, and filled to the bursting with life still being lived. If there is a single source of story and the numen of story, this long chain of humans is it.”