My thinking about these things [see here] has changed slightly. Most people go along with the narrative that split rocks are doorways to the underworld. So what is that wedge doing in there?
I used to think the wedge was in order to keep the door from slamming shut - leaving a spirit on the outside. Later I thought maybe the wedge was to keep the spirit in there. At some point FFC suggested the wedge was a way for a user to claim ownership of that particular split. But now, these day, my favorite guess is that the wedge is like the stone placed in the middle of a prayer seat after the seat is used - as the proper way to end the ceremony. So for now anyway I think that the wedge was inserted after someone did a ceremony involving speaking down into the crack.
Maybe someday there will be some actual information rather than guesswork on the topic. For example is there any information about ending the vision quest ceremony?
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Was just going to say that in reading about shamanism, I've run across instructions where the practitioner is supposed to visualize a hole or crack in some place where he or she feels safe and familiar to use it in journeying as a path to the spirit world, or to one of the spirit worlds. Of course if the person did vision quest there or near there it becomes a more powerful spot, as often a link is said to have formed between the person and the spirit of that place.
For those who have had a childhood experience of connection or revelation in nature, you may have experienced the way it creates a bond with the place, making it seem almost magical to you in a personal way. That's a similar mechanism or process, a sort of inadvertent vision quest that happens to certain people who spent time outdoors as children, and that same magical sense of bonding to a place occurs.
I have a hunch that it's mostly people who had that experience as children who end up studying rockpiles.
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