Mythological Question 

Not many legend about these standing white stones were preserve by the local folk and the one that survived the test of time died out with the last keepers of the tradition but we do have some stories and details that are worth researching, those stories will probably  make no sense to our modern eyes and will be overlooked as mare children tales made by a bunch of superstitious people.

It is no coincidence that these tombstones were shaped as houses (as I showed you in the previous post they were also called Kuća or Vijećna kuća that literally means eternal house), since the Neolithic and even earlier Europeans connected the symbol of the house with the underworld, so you will often find funeral urns shaped like houses all over Europe which clearly resemble that symbology. The symbol of the house was also connected to the „cult“of the earth mother, we can see this relation for example in some early Neolithic sculpture where a woman figure  (probably a goddess ) has its lower body shaped like a house. For those that already know the key the ultimate symbology of the house is clear, the house is a metaphor for the womb, so the house shaped tombstones allude to some kind of rebirth.

The origin of these standing white stones was always matters of controversy among the local folk, so the only sources available were legends and myths, one legend tell us that once a race of giants lived in these regions and they were the creators of these stones, it is said that these “giants” could live 900 years. The translation of giant in the local language is Div the word is directly derived from the PIE *dyeu (shine, bright) from which we get the name of the sky-father in the European tradition (Zeus, Dievas,…), during the Christianization process our tales were corrupted and we were no more eable to recognize the mythological symbolism in them, so by looking at the etymology of the word giant in the local language it is clear that those giants in reality represent the gods themselves that are the mythological representation of the collective ancestral energy or the accumulated honor, so those white stones were built by our ancestors…us!

We can now analyze why they lived 900 years, the number 900 can be a symbolical number, so the only number that is really showed is the number 9 which is over present in our European tradition since is connected to the pregnancy period and thus rebirth itself, to reinforce this thesis there is an other legend that talks about a female giants (we already established those are not giants) that carried the tombstones on her head, it was said she could live 900 years: 300 years as virgins, 300 married and 300 as a widow. I want you to think about the practice of carrying a chest on the head in pre-industrial rural Europe, this technic aloud you to carry great weights with little effort and it was almost exclusively practiced by women, in this legend the image of a women carrying a weight on her head was used as a metaphor for the pregnancy. I’ve already shown you the symbolical equivalence of the tombstones as a symbol for the womb, this image can also be connected to the myth of atlas that carries the world, so in conclusion we can say that the female giant was carrying us all.

Throughout history the tombstones were often moved from their original spot and the dirt beneath them has been digged up, this happened because there were rumors about a big treasure that was buried under those white stones, this treasure is both symbolical end physical, indeed under the tombstones that were not robbed often were found  golden and silver objects, we can connect this practice with the common European tradition of burying someone with his objects ( often made of gold since gold can be preserved for a long period of time) that he possessed during his life time, these objects will be later collected by the initiate (the one that want to be reborn ) during the Halloween ritual. The symbology of the treasure can be found in a lot of our tales, where the hero will need to fight and kill the horrendous creature to get the treasure that can also be symbolized by a maiden that need to be saved. These two views symbolical and physical are obviously directly connected with each other.

We too will have to defeat the horrendous creature in the cave and reclaim the treasure and finally regain our lost memory.