Corsica’s Sacred Geography
Nearly everyone who spends any time on Corsica has had moments of an uncanny feeling that this gorgeous and exotic terrain has been visited before in the dreams of the travelers. Even those who come to Corsica to get away from it all and enjoy a few days lost in recreational bliss get the sense that this has all been explored before. Of course, it’s all true, the place has been inhabited for a very long time. The contemporary Corsican culture is at once hospitable and baffling, with a nearly-impenetrable language, and customs that speak to another world at another time.
But Corsica is not simply an idyllic land that has remain unchanged over time. It has gone through an amazing number of evolutions, and is always on its way to becoming something else. Today, the fine cuisine, derived from local customs and supplemented by fantastic twists from the French, Italian, and Spanish, is some of the richest and most delicious food that a traveler could ask for. And its generous hospitality is certainly on display in the gorgeous local hotels , offering a stay that is somewhere this side of paradise.
The landscape is certainly haunting, there’s no question of that. For such a small island, there are infinite variations in terrain, with beaches that are both accessible and impossible, and mountains that seem so dense that they might serve as the perfect training grounds for the French Foreign Legion. Any notion that there have been multiple civilizations making their lives here is not unmistaken. Ptolemy wrote extensively on Corsica, although the writings still seem to give maddeningly scant information about who actually lived here.
Even more mysterious are traces of what some of the places may have held as a function for these earlier civilizations. The megaliths do speak of a sacred function from another time, and they certainly refer to a religious cosmology that is probably lost forever. Or perhaps it can be found somewhere in the music, the polyphonous choruses that hint at a world view that includes endless plays of mystery between the hidden and the revealed.
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Tags: megaliths
