Gabriel Hartley, Wednesday, 6 November 2019
Introduction: Why Kasberget?
My third day of exploring the sacred mounds or cairns around Pohja involved my climb atop the high rocky cliff known as Kasberget. While prior to this past weekend I had been unaware of the two mounds I climbed in the past few days—Skuruberget on Sunday (3 November 2019) and Tomtberget on Monday (4 November)—I had learned about the cairn on Kasberget at least as early as last February of 2019 when my wife Anna and I first started planning our move from Ohio to Raasepori. As this blog demonstrates, exploring ancient sacred sites has been our obsession for most of the past decade and a serious pastime before that. So I was naturally drawn to the Kasberget cairn as soon as I became aware of it on a webpage containing an image of the Pohja rocks above the Bay.
I was immediately intrigued by this sacred site and knew that exploring this charged spot and engaging with its energies would be one of my purposes for being led to relocate in Raasepori. But though I had seen a few different photos of the stone pile on different blogs and websites, none of those websites ever indicated its exact location in Pohja. After some lengthy searching on the web, I finally discovered the location of the cairn. After seeing more photos of the stones on the Google satellite street view of the area, I eventually deduced the actual location on the satellite street map.
There it was—atop the prominent high cliff in the center of the tiny shopping district. After my search of the magnificent online topographical map of the MML or Maanmittauslaitos (National Land Survey of Finland) just this past Saturday, I learned that the hill is named Kasberget, although I could have learned this much earlier from the Google map image descriptions had I been more observant.
The MML map indicates the cairn site in the green text that reads Forngrav / Muinaishauta, the Swedish and Finnish terms respectively that translate as “ancient grave sites.” (Pohja, like much of Raasepori, is predominantly Swedish speaking, although, according to Finnish law, all street signs and maps must display each place name in both of the predominant national languages, Finnish and Swedish—regardless of the dominant linguistic culture of the local inhabitants.) For the moment, at least, I am choosing to refer to these sites as cairns, for reasons I will explain at another time.
Climbing Kasberget for the First Time (in This Lifetime)
As can be seen in the photo above that I took on Wednesday afternoon, the stones are very visible from the streets right in the middle of town. I had, of course, looked up at the stones upon my first arrival in Pohja, which is four kilometers south of our new home in Fiskars. But I deliberately waited before ascending the hill because, after a sudden and unexpected whirlwind move from the United States to Finland—given my equally-unexpected retirement after forty years as a teacher and professor after suffering a stroke in the summer of 2017—I knew I should not rush into any new charged geomantic power configurations. We instead spent the past two months slowly getting to know the terrain and get a dawning feel for the spirit world of this locality. We hiked almost daily through the vast spruce forest right outside our front door, gaining recognition of and by each path and cliff and dark forest spring and moose path. But until this week, I did not yet feel prepared for an encounter with the energies of the Kasberget cairn.
On Saturday morning, however, as I mentioned earlier, I was poring over my newfound favorite website, the MML topographical maps, when I discovered the existence of the Skuruberget cairn. I jumped too soon, however, as I recount in my post on that journey, and entered the central space of this powerful portal without any proper preparation. My entire sense of my place in the multidimensional space-time continuum was scrambled for over a day as I drifted in and out of varying dreamscapes. I approached the Tomtberget mound much more cautiously a day later and then, finally, felt prepared to pay proper respect to the powers of Kasberget.
On Wednesday, then, after successfully negotiating the powers of Tomtberget, I felt called to climb up on Kasberget—finally! I crossed the street from the apoteekki (apothecary or pharmacy) on through the parking lot and grounds of the apartment complex and climbed the western side of Kasberget.
I reached the top and found the cairn framed by windblown pines and grasses among the rocks. The most stunning visual aspect of the Kasberget Cairn for me was the view of Pohja Bay, which opens up beautifully southward, where it flows eventually past Tammisaari down to Hanko and into the Baltic Sea.
My Tuning-In Ceremony
After taking in the views and getting a good sense of the layout of the hill and its relationship to its surroundings, I recognized that this was the proper moment to tune in to the powers of the cairn. I will recount the details of my tuning-in ceremony here not because I think they should necessarily be used as a specific model by others but to give a general sense of the types of engagement that I have learned over the years are necessary. Many of these elements also make up the stages of my daily yogic meditation and chakra-engaging ceremony. They serve me well in my daily encounters with the energies of the world, and they are especially important for communing with the spirits and powers of the planet and beyond.
As in all of my significant endeavors, I opened the ceremony with an invocation of the Golden Light of Grace, my call to the protective karmic powers of the Divine Creator (however one might conceive of such a power or figure). Next, after my opening chant—my literal tuning in—which I learned in my early twenties when I practiced with a group of American Sikh followers of Yogi Bhajan and continue to sing each day all these decades later, I then did my daily pranayama breathing and chakra-clearing, a series of breath localizations that were taught to me in 2012 by the kyy (viper) spirits in Finland. With chakras stimulated and bodily energies attuned to the energies of the place, I then did a ritual medicine wheel ceremony in which I did three rounds of greeting the Seven Directions—the four cardinal directions, downward to the energies of the Earth, upward to the energies of the Heavens, and concluding with grounding myself in and as the center of the Cosmos (which in this moment was embodied by the cairn). After three revolutions around the cairn, greeting the Seven Directions each time, I now felt properly introduced to the spirits of the portal of Kasberget.
These exercises of respect, greeting, and engagement were exactly what I did NOT do on Sunday when I jumped right into the middle of the cairn on Skuruberget. And this lack of grounding and propriety was the source of my multidimensional dreamworld derangement following my eager but stupid encounter. Even so, that destabilizing event smacked me back into proper awareness and led to an enhanced sense of connection and mission, a recognition that my dreams have come true because I am following the cues from higher sources of the Planetary Soul Collective.
Now that I have properly aligned myself with the portal powers of Kasberget, I can go forward in assurance and safety as I climb and connect with the dozens of other cairn portal sites in the greater Raasepori region.
Below are other photos from that climb, as well as other brief comments that I will expand on in future related posts.
Here as elsewhere, it is not accidental that the Pohja church is located in the vicinity of this ancient sacred site. I will cover my lessons regarding these power configurations in another post.
For the moment I am calling this tree in the center of the cairn the Tree of the World. I do not believe that its positioning at the center of the Cosmos is to be taken lightly.
As with the cooptation/cohabitation of ancient sites by modern institutions of power (churches, schools, hospitals, prisons, military bases, etc.), another frequent form of cohabitation is the frequenting of sacred sites by groups of youths and others who use such spots for parties and celebrations. The firepit here is a return to what I believe was one of the key elements of the cairn site in its earlier ceremonial functions, the place of sacred fires. As I learned earlier today, this intuition seems confirmed at least potentially by the fact that the placename “kasberget” is the Swedish translation of the Finnish “roihuvurori,” which in English means “blaze mountain.”
May your own engagements with the cosmic energies of the planet bring you growth, connection, and karmic release.
