Temporarly drifting north again, I recall that North is not a direction, but a state of mind. "Perhaps new areas of landscape awaken old areas of one's self." If I array myself in a mask carved for an other's primal rites, a wooden-eyed god with a body of stone will petrify me in our coeval dream.

You must call the stone by name
crying loudly: 'Rock Untunjambili
open, that I may enter.'

We no longer enter the Mystery, but shape it to our whims, worshipping ancient deities because our genome wants to be written in stone, clones of "I" in the image of my god.
A few nucleic letters will suffice, a few brittle commandments will do.

Philosopher John Sallis asks: "But what of stone today?—

venturing for a moment to juxtapose (harshly, no doubt) the fleeting now of the human world and the persistent antiquity of stone. What sense does it now display? An impoverished sense, no doubt, now that stone has lost its ancient privilege."

He continues: "stone no longer counts as it once did, as it always did until recently, until the onset of what is called the epoch of technology."

By technology, he is primarily referring to the advance from stone to steel, from natural building materials to man-made fabrications. Perhaps then, the current north pole is a south pole in magnetic parlance, this having historical reasons. This has not always been the case, however, and now and again the two poles change place! During the course of the last 5 million years not only has stone lost its authority, but "Upon this reinforced concrete slab I build my church," collapses the pun and levels the myth.