Rock and Stone: The Presence of the Divine in Nepal and India

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Rock and stone, like water, plants, and trees, are part of what surrounds us in nature. All elements possess the potential to embody the divine. As such, they are what turns nature into a sacred landscape: rocks and mountain ranges are perceived as religious symbols that grace and protect the habitat. Rock and stone seem to contain 'the call of a cosmic force struggling to break free.' The cult of stone can be traced back to the megalithic structures of the Neolithic Age and the worship of meteorites in the Ancient Orient as 'ensouled' stones. These are presented in the book's introduction. The main chapter documents stone worship practised in the context of the urban culture of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley. There, thousands of unworked stones without any distinctive iconographic features represent the Supernaturals - whether deities named at some point in the past in accordance with the Hindu tradition or spirits or unnamed ancestor deities. These stones absorb impurities, act as guardians, and often demand blood sacrifices. Placed in open shrines, they represent the idea or essence of place, the genius loci, and the limen between the netherworld and the world of human beings. Individuals, families, and lineages maintain a predefined, stable relationship with these landmarks in rites of passage or during annual urban rituals. In addition, the book documents the Lords of Place of Tibetan and Chetri villages in northern and western Nepal, including the Earth Goddess among the Kond in Odisha and the manifestation of Śiva in the form of a linga or in the aniconic form of an unworked pebble.

The final chapter is dedicated to stone in modern art. The Surrealists of the 1920s were 'stricken with sculptural fever' when confronted with 'living stones'. André Breton explained his fascination in an essay titled "The Language of Stone'.

Born the son of an architect in Hamburg in 1941, Niels Gutschow studied architecture in Darmstadt, completing his PhD dissertation on early-17th-century cities in Japan in 1973. He first set foot in India and Nepal in 1962 and returned in 1970. Ever since, he has gone back almost annually. He kept a residence in Bhaktapur, Nepal, from 1989 to 2021. His major works include The Nepalese Caitya. 1500 Years of Buddhist Votive Architecture in the Kathmandu Valley (1997), Architecture of the Newars. A History of Building Typologies and Details in Nepal (2011), The Sky Face. Kirtimukha and Related Hybrid Creatures in the Architecture of South- and Southeast Asia (2019), Chörten in Nepal. Architecture and Buddhist Votive Practice in the Himalaya (2021), and Nepalese Wood Carving (2023). His work has had continuous support from the German Research Foundation, including for projects in Orissa (1999-2002) and Erdene Zuu, Mongolia (2002). Since 2004 he has been an honorary professor at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. In 2011 he received the Asian Arts and Culture Prize in Fukuoka, Japan. Since 1970 he has worked on a number of architectural conservation projects in Nepal. Following the 2015 earthquake, he was the senior advisor to the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust in rebuilding and restoring collapsed and damaged architectural heritage on Patan Darbar Square in Lalitpur.

Niels Gutschow lives in Abtsteinach, Germany.

The Background

How did stones become a part of my life? Growing up as the son of an architect in Hamburg, I was immersed in a Protestant-dominated society. However, for those who were not baptized, there was no concept of God or gods in the world during the 1950s. As a result, I never accompanied my parents to church. God was simply absent from my life. In 1950, when I visited the Ulm Cathedral, it was not the magnificent interior that stuck in my memory, but rather the experience of climbing the tower (161 m high, completed in 1890). In the summer of 1956, I traveled around the upper end of Lake Garda, with the goal of visiting all of the village churches there. For me, these churches were solely places of architectural and historical interest, and I was not searching for any kind of spiritual contemplation.

The Architecture of the World, 1962

In April 1962, I visited some of the mosques in Istanbul designed by Sinan between 1541 and 1580; on May 6, 1962, the Ka'be-ye Zartosht ("Fire Temple") near Persepolis; on June 15, the Harmandir Sahib (temple) in Amritsar; on July 7, the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya; five days later, the Svayambhūcaitya near Kathmandu; on October 24, the ruins of the great Stupa in Mingun near Mandalay; on Decem- ber 10, the garden of Ryōanji in Kyōtō, and on April 15, 1963, the Ise-Jingu, where the supreme female deity and central figure of Shinto, Amaterasu Õmikami, is represented in an aniconic manner by a mirror. This journey out into the world introduced me to very different manifestations of the divine.

Stone and Obelisk - A Search for Traces with Alfred Renger-Patzsch and Ernst Junger, 1928, 1962 In the 1920s, a series of photographers established a new way of seeing that emphasized patterns and textures in nature: wind ripples in the sand, dune formations, mudflat vegetation shells, rocks, and stones. Among these was Alfred Renger- Patzsch (1897-1966), who, according to his own statement, was interested in "the exact reproduction of form, the taking of inventory, and the creation of documents." Forty years after his death, landscape ecologist Wolfgang Haber recalled that the Greek term ousia was of central importance to Renger- Patzsch: "nature as the inner essence," literally beingness or substance. Renger-Patzsch avoided effects and staging, depicting landscapes, as well as industrial products, architecture, and people in a form of realism previously unknown. A selection of one hundred photographs was published in 1928 under the title The World is Beautiful (Die Welt ist schon).

Much later, Renger-Patzsch was tracking down stones in particular, in the Eifel, in Norway, in Brittany, and in Ireland. A cycle of 62 photographs taken between 1962 and 1965, with an essay by Ernst Junger (1895-1996), was first published in 1966 by the pharmaceutical company Boehringer (based in Ingelheim since 1885). Described as a "late work" the photographer died shortly after publication these photographs were also exhibited in the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 1996, as well as in the Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen in 2010.