In Ben Wheatley’s 2013 film A Field in England one of the characters, Whitehead, questioning another, named Friend, on his ignorance concerning ‘the stars and the planets’, asks him ‘Have you ever looked up?’, to which Friend shakes his head and replies ‘Sounds badly paid.’ Friend, it seems, might have been an archaeologist. Archaeology is a discipline that is founded on that adage ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’, and, indeed, it has little profited archaeologists to look upwards when all source of value seems to lie beneath their feet.
However, looking up has its benefits. Personally, looking up saved my neck. And I mean this quite literally. As a field archaeologist I spent my days looking down, but my interest in astronomy meant I did occasionally look upwards, and it was then that I realised a strange sensation along my back which turned out to be caused by a large, if benign, spinal cord tumour. Had I not had the forewarning then its prompt removal last summer may have not occurred, and I might not be here today, or at least not as mobile.
Looking up might also save the neck of the prehistorian. Because us shoe-gazing archaeologists are missing a trick. Perhaps it’s a British thing – perhaps us native archaeologists are less willing to look heavenwards because it quite often makes for grim viewing. Certainly, grimmer than the Californian sky I witnessed in a light-pollution free Yosemite National Park in the late 90s where the stars were burning like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and I felt I might be able to read by the light of the Milky Way. I’ll return to this event anon, as it was a formative experience in which I realised that any take on ancient cultures that does not consider the effect of the sky on their worldview is short-sighted. Our belief that the brass is in the muck has led us to inadvertently lose sight of a vital part of human experience. If I may misuse the symbolism of the myth of the Norse god Odin, just as Odin sacrifices an eye to drink from the well of knowledge, so the archaeologist, similarly thirsty, often pursues detailed information at the loss of a wider viewpoint. But this is not a problem just of archaeology, it is a problem with the modern Western scientific method. And by deciding it is more a science than a humanity, archaeology finds itself restricted by its own choice.
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist in his brilliant book ‘The Master and his Emissary’(Yale, 2009) suggests the scientific viewpoint is, broadly speaking, the product of the left hemisphere of the brain, which, paradoxically, is linked to the right side of the body. We have two hemispheres that afford two differing perspectives: the left affords us a highly focused viewpoint, that allows us to abstract and to plan, while the right hemisphere offers more of a bird’s eye perspective, it sees the bigger picture, provides a sense of meaning, and is alert to newness and to the unexpected.
The two hemispheres are joined by the corpus callosum, which McGilchrist argues is not so much a bridge between the two as a filter, allowing the two to work independently. To define the differing functions of the hemispheres he uses the image of a bird, utilizing its left brain to focus on picking individual seeds from stony ground – and its right, ever alert for danger, to simultaneously scan the wider horizon for the unexpected, for the shadow of the predatory hawk. McGilchrist argues the modern Western scientific left-brained worldview relies on abstraction, on things, it is detail-oriented – but it misses the whole. The bigger picture provided by the right-brain McGilchrist links to a sense of meaning, to quality rather than quantity, to experience and flow rather than rigidly fixed and isolated objects or things – to the subjective rather than the measurable and objective, precisely what science cannot measure. There is no instrument, for example, that can measure the quality of a Van Gogh painting; and if we try to dissect its quality using quantitative science, like a frog in the laboratory, we kill what made it alive. But this is a conference on religion after all, so I feel I can stick my neck out… especially as it is now reinforced with titanium. For here I will make a bold leap in linking this wider bird’s-eye view, this right-brained way of seeing the world, with the sky – not the physical locality of atmosphere and empty space we learn of at school, but with the mythical sky, the experienced sky, as Van Gogh painted it. These heavens are a place of mystery, often the abodes of supra-individual powers, thunder numina such as Zeus or Thunor. The history of religions is very much linked to this sky. This may sound naïve, as in the answer a 4-year old might give when asked where God lives – but it’s not hard to see that this idea is fundamental. McGilchrist links the left-brain to the grasping right hand; we grasp ideas, hold them, manipulate them; the heavens, though, as Browning noted, are beyond our grasp, and what’s more are populated by mysterious beings of light. Forget what science tells us.
When I was in Yosemite sitting under a Giant Redwood and looking at the stars I wasn’t seeing named and catalogued nuclear furnaces in a void. I experienced a sense of the numinous, of awe, of mysterious beings of light, such as painted by Samuel Palmer. Similarly, William Blake, when he looked at the sun, saw not ‘a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea’ but ‘an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ (A vision of the last judgement). In Yosemite I saw something similar, even though I knew what the stars were – or rather, I knew what they were made of, as C S Lewis makes clear in his Narnia books, just because you know what a star is made of doesn’t mean you know what it is. Imagine you don’t have the benefit of scientific instruments. What in heaven would you think a star was? We are blinded by science; our analytical minds leech any subjective sense of meaning out of our experience of the sky, until sitting under a tree in Yosemite we see without our perception being hijacked by concepts.
Whether we’re in Yosemite or not, the sky is hardwired into our brains as a place of mystery and fear, of light, warmth and possibly death. The fear of winged beings swooping from the sky is primeval, from when we were squirrel-like arboreal mammals in the primeval forests. Angels, Valkyries and hungry eagles probably look the same silhouetted against the blue, hence the first thing that angels say to quaking mortals is ‘be not afraid’.
This myopic devaluation of lived experience is so ubiquitous in the sciences it goes unremarked. But an example will highlight its limitations. Imagine what a future archaeologist, ignorant of Christianity, might make of a ruined church. An empty edifice encircled by the bodies of the dead and covered in depictions of an ancient Roman execution instrument - seemingly cannibalistic references to drinking blood and eating flesh - all might easily be interpreted as a somewhat macabre ancestor cult. The bones of the dead, either laid in individual graves or grouped in vaults, facing east, might suggest a solar aspect, as would the eastern orientation of the building itself. But what of the presence of chalices and images of vines? Might these suggest instead the building was a wholly secular meeting places on the wine trade route. It’s a poor image of the lived religion. But the empirical archaeologist isn’t supposed to go beyond such data. His reconstruction based on a mere ruin would therefore neglect anything spiritual or celestial. There would be no angels. No Saints. No spires, or blue-painted ceilings studded with golden stars; no Sistine chapel with a celestial creator aloft a cloud. No star that leads the Magi, no Holy Spirit that descends on Christ in the Jordan, this time as a dove of peace not a hungry raptor; no Father who art in Heaven; no Ascension. You get my point. We need to include the sky in our reconstructions, the spiritual, the other. Or we remain in the gutter.
We mustn’t, however, see this ‘heaven’ literally, as the same thing as the space of modern astrophysics. Joseph Campbell once made the amusing observation that if we take these heavenly metaphors literally we have to imagine that, given no body can travel faster than the speed of light, the ascended Christ is still travelling within the bounds of our galaxy, the Milky Way – with his Mother a few thousand miles behind him, on their way to God knows where. We need to look to the sky without seeking literal truth. It’s not that myth is untrue. It’s just not literally true. It points to something that can’t be measured by any instrument. We baulk at this because it’s not scientific – yet the humanities deal with the immeasurable, the symbolic on a daily basis. Art, and the aesthetic response are wholly immeasurable, irreducible. If a henge and the rites performed within were supposed to work on the human mind like an Anthony Gormley installation, or a Shakespeare sonnet, we are never going to understand it if we try to break it down scientifically ignoring its metaphysical aspects and origins.
So, with this in mind, we can now ask, what is a henge? We know the dictionary definition - it is a circular monument, of which there may have been hundreds, the exact figure is unknown as they continue to be discovered by satellite or drone; in size they ranged from a few metres across, small enough to fit a large picnic, to others large enough to fit a village inside, including a pub. Usually they have a bank outside the ditch, pretty useless in terms of defence. Sometimes they have timber or stone settings within them and usually they have a pair of entrances, on opposite sides, though often they have just one or as many as four. They probably originated in Orkney in the Mid-fourth millennium BC and spread south. They can be alone or in groups of three or four; or part of larger monumental landscapes, such as Stonehenge or Avebury where the different monuments give the impression of the different stages at the Glastonbury Festival, an analogy which I hope will wipe from our minds the idea of them as precincts for scientific observations and hallowed silence, like the former reading room of the British library. When the temple site at the Ness of Brodgar, possibly the cult centre of the henge phenomenon, was abandoned, it was done so following a mass barbeque of some 400 to 600 cattle. These sites were more Burning Man than British Museum.
And I’m going to stick my scarred neck out again and suggest we view the henge as the corpus callosum of the prehistoric world. The interface not between left and right brain, however, but between earth and sky, known and unknown, a bridge, but perhaps more importantly, a filter, as we will see, between the palpable and the ungraspable. Of course, the idea that henges stood at the interface of earth and sky isn’t new. Some of the earliest speculations concerning Stonehenge, for instance, mention the solsticial sunrise alignment. But this was not Van Gogh’s sky being considered in such speculations, but the known sky of the astronomer, seen with the scientific left-brain rather than the qualitative right, Stonehenge viewed as a clock or a calendar, as a measuring device. It arose from a projection of our modern selves back in time, to ancestors similarly fascinated by measurement and dividing the world into smaller units – the so-called ‘astronomer-priests’ beloved by earlier generations of archaeologists, but of whom no ethnographical examples are forthcoming.
They were created out of an attempt to prove that the ancient Britons weren’t blue-painted savages but could stand shoulder to shoulder with the Classical civilizations or the Biblical Magi. Yet, as more and more sites were discovered and catalogued and named ‘henges’ (for want of a better term) the more their entrances seemed to point in any random direction, and so the archaeologists lowered their heads again. Besides, new dating techniques showed the sites predated the Greeks and Romans. We didn’t need our ancestors to compete with the Greeks anymore, it was enough to say the sites had predated the Pyramids.
Yet the henge, though made of earth, is not necessarily of the earth. In masking the view of the terrestrial horizon – save for through the entrances, or high hills or mountains, the high banks naturally drew your attention to the sky. As Fabio Silva makes clear (Silva 2015, p.3)[i] we have to begin to reconsider the space above our heads as important to ancient worldviews, far more so than has been hitherto done. He suggests we use the term skyscape as a celestial equivalent to the terrestrial landscape. We need to see the whole of the sky as a nuanced territory with its own stories, its own Dreamtime; as a place of drama, of unfolding patterns; of myth. We have to look beyond our modern desacralized idea of sky, and cease projecting it into the past upon ancient man expecting to find proto-scientists pinpointing single stars on the horizon for precise calendrical measurement. Neither ancient man nor ancient sites worked that way - their brush was broad, the entrances to the henges were wide and the space within them large, suggesting crowds, rather than a select few were present within them… think more a drive-through movie theatre than Jodrell bank. But what were they looking at?
However, looking up has its benefits. Personally, looking up saved my neck. And I mean this quite literally. As a field archaeologist I spent my days looking down, but my interest in astronomy meant I did occasionally look upwards, and it was then that I realised a strange sensation along my back which turned out to be caused by a large, if benign, spinal cord tumour. Had I not had the forewarning then its prompt removal last summer may have not occurred, and I might not be here today, or at least not as mobile.
Looking up might also save the neck of the prehistorian. Because us shoe-gazing archaeologists are missing a trick. Perhaps it’s a British thing – perhaps us native archaeologists are less willing to look heavenwards because it quite often makes for grim viewing. Certainly, grimmer than the Californian sky I witnessed in a light-pollution free Yosemite National Park in the late 90s where the stars were burning like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and I felt I might be able to read by the light of the Milky Way. I’ll return to this event anon, as it was a formative experience in which I realised that any take on ancient cultures that does not consider the effect of the sky on their worldview is short-sighted. Our belief that the brass is in the muck has led us to inadvertently lose sight of a vital part of human experience. If I may misuse the symbolism of the myth of the Norse god Odin, just as Odin sacrifices an eye to drink from the well of knowledge, so the archaeologist, similarly thirsty, often pursues detailed information at the loss of a wider viewpoint. But this is not a problem just of archaeology, it is a problem with the modern Western scientific method. And by deciding it is more a science than a humanity, archaeology finds itself restricted by its own choice.
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist in his brilliant book ‘The Master and his Emissary’(Yale, 2009) suggests the scientific viewpoint is, broadly speaking, the product of the left hemisphere of the brain, which, paradoxically, is linked to the right side of the body. We have two hemispheres that afford two differing perspectives: the left affords us a highly focused viewpoint, that allows us to abstract and to plan, while the right hemisphere offers more of a bird’s eye perspective, it sees the bigger picture, provides a sense of meaning, and is alert to newness and to the unexpected.
The two hemispheres are joined by the corpus callosum, which McGilchrist argues is not so much a bridge between the two as a filter, allowing the two to work independently. To define the differing functions of the hemispheres he uses the image of a bird, utilizing its left brain to focus on picking individual seeds from stony ground – and its right, ever alert for danger, to simultaneously scan the wider horizon for the unexpected, for the shadow of the predatory hawk. McGilchrist argues the modern Western scientific left-brained worldview relies on abstraction, on things, it is detail-oriented – but it misses the whole. The bigger picture provided by the right-brain McGilchrist links to a sense of meaning, to quality rather than quantity, to experience and flow rather than rigidly fixed and isolated objects or things – to the subjective rather than the measurable and objective, precisely what science cannot measure. There is no instrument, for example, that can measure the quality of a Van Gogh painting; and if we try to dissect its quality using quantitative science, like a frog in the laboratory, we kill what made it alive. But this is a conference on religion after all, so I feel I can stick my neck out… especially as it is now reinforced with titanium. For here I will make a bold leap in linking this wider bird’s-eye view, this right-brained way of seeing the world, with the sky – not the physical locality of atmosphere and empty space we learn of at school, but with the mythical sky, the experienced sky, as Van Gogh painted it. These heavens are a place of mystery, often the abodes of supra-individual powers, thunder numina such as Zeus or Thunor. The history of religions is very much linked to this sky. This may sound naïve, as in the answer a 4-year old might give when asked where God lives – but it’s not hard to see that this idea is fundamental. McGilchrist links the left-brain to the grasping right hand; we grasp ideas, hold them, manipulate them; the heavens, though, as Browning noted, are beyond our grasp, and what’s more are populated by mysterious beings of light. Forget what science tells us.
When I was in Yosemite sitting under a Giant Redwood and looking at the stars I wasn’t seeing named and catalogued nuclear furnaces in a void. I experienced a sense of the numinous, of awe, of mysterious beings of light, such as painted by Samuel Palmer. Similarly, William Blake, when he looked at the sun, saw not ‘a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea’ but ‘an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ (A vision of the last judgement). In Yosemite I saw something similar, even though I knew what the stars were – or rather, I knew what they were made of, as C S Lewis makes clear in his Narnia books, just because you know what a star is made of doesn’t mean you know what it is. Imagine you don’t have the benefit of scientific instruments. What in heaven would you think a star was? We are blinded by science; our analytical minds leech any subjective sense of meaning out of our experience of the sky, until sitting under a tree in Yosemite we see without our perception being hijacked by concepts.
Whether we’re in Yosemite or not, the sky is hardwired into our brains as a place of mystery and fear, of light, warmth and possibly death. The fear of winged beings swooping from the sky is primeval, from when we were squirrel-like arboreal mammals in the primeval forests. Angels, Valkyries and hungry eagles probably look the same silhouetted against the blue, hence the first thing that angels say to quaking mortals is ‘be not afraid’.
This myopic devaluation of lived experience is so ubiquitous in the sciences it goes unremarked. But an example will highlight its limitations. Imagine what a future archaeologist, ignorant of Christianity, might make of a ruined church. An empty edifice encircled by the bodies of the dead and covered in depictions of an ancient Roman execution instrument - seemingly cannibalistic references to drinking blood and eating flesh - all might easily be interpreted as a somewhat macabre ancestor cult. The bones of the dead, either laid in individual graves or grouped in vaults, facing east, might suggest a solar aspect, as would the eastern orientation of the building itself. But what of the presence of chalices and images of vines? Might these suggest instead the building was a wholly secular meeting places on the wine trade route. It’s a poor image of the lived religion. But the empirical archaeologist isn’t supposed to go beyond such data. His reconstruction based on a mere ruin would therefore neglect anything spiritual or celestial. There would be no angels. No Saints. No spires, or blue-painted ceilings studded with golden stars; no Sistine chapel with a celestial creator aloft a cloud. No star that leads the Magi, no Holy Spirit that descends on Christ in the Jordan, this time as a dove of peace not a hungry raptor; no Father who art in Heaven; no Ascension. You get my point. We need to include the sky in our reconstructions, the spiritual, the other. Or we remain in the gutter.
We mustn’t, however, see this ‘heaven’ literally, as the same thing as the space of modern astrophysics. Joseph Campbell once made the amusing observation that if we take these heavenly metaphors literally we have to imagine that, given no body can travel faster than the speed of light, the ascended Christ is still travelling within the bounds of our galaxy, the Milky Way – with his Mother a few thousand miles behind him, on their way to God knows where. We need to look to the sky without seeking literal truth. It’s not that myth is untrue. It’s just not literally true. It points to something that can’t be measured by any instrument. We baulk at this because it’s not scientific – yet the humanities deal with the immeasurable, the symbolic on a daily basis. Art, and the aesthetic response are wholly immeasurable, irreducible. If a henge and the rites performed within were supposed to work on the human mind like an Anthony Gormley installation, or a Shakespeare sonnet, we are never going to understand it if we try to break it down scientifically ignoring its metaphysical aspects and origins.
So, with this in mind, we can now ask, what is a henge? We know the dictionary definition - it is a circular monument, of which there may have been hundreds, the exact figure is unknown as they continue to be discovered by satellite or drone; in size they ranged from a few metres across, small enough to fit a large picnic, to others large enough to fit a village inside, including a pub. Usually they have a bank outside the ditch, pretty useless in terms of defence. Sometimes they have timber or stone settings within them and usually they have a pair of entrances, on opposite sides, though often they have just one or as many as four. They probably originated in Orkney in the Mid-fourth millennium BC and spread south. They can be alone or in groups of three or four; or part of larger monumental landscapes, such as Stonehenge or Avebury where the different monuments give the impression of the different stages at the Glastonbury Festival, an analogy which I hope will wipe from our minds the idea of them as precincts for scientific observations and hallowed silence, like the former reading room of the British library. When the temple site at the Ness of Brodgar, possibly the cult centre of the henge phenomenon, was abandoned, it was done so following a mass barbeque of some 400 to 600 cattle. These sites were more Burning Man than British Museum.
And I’m going to stick my scarred neck out again and suggest we view the henge as the corpus callosum of the prehistoric world. The interface not between left and right brain, however, but between earth and sky, known and unknown, a bridge, but perhaps more importantly, a filter, as we will see, between the palpable and the ungraspable. Of course, the idea that henges stood at the interface of earth and sky isn’t new. Some of the earliest speculations concerning Stonehenge, for instance, mention the solsticial sunrise alignment. But this was not Van Gogh’s sky being considered in such speculations, but the known sky of the astronomer, seen with the scientific left-brain rather than the qualitative right, Stonehenge viewed as a clock or a calendar, as a measuring device. It arose from a projection of our modern selves back in time, to ancestors similarly fascinated by measurement and dividing the world into smaller units – the so-called ‘astronomer-priests’ beloved by earlier generations of archaeologists, but of whom no ethnographical examples are forthcoming.
They were created out of an attempt to prove that the ancient Britons weren’t blue-painted savages but could stand shoulder to shoulder with the Classical civilizations or the Biblical Magi. Yet, as more and more sites were discovered and catalogued and named ‘henges’ (for want of a better term) the more their entrances seemed to point in any random direction, and so the archaeologists lowered their heads again. Besides, new dating techniques showed the sites predated the Greeks and Romans. We didn’t need our ancestors to compete with the Greeks anymore, it was enough to say the sites had predated the Pyramids.
Yet the henge, though made of earth, is not necessarily of the earth. In masking the view of the terrestrial horizon – save for through the entrances, or high hills or mountains, the high banks naturally drew your attention to the sky. As Fabio Silva makes clear (Silva 2015, p.3)[i] we have to begin to reconsider the space above our heads as important to ancient worldviews, far more so than has been hitherto done. He suggests we use the term skyscape as a celestial equivalent to the terrestrial landscape. We need to see the whole of the sky as a nuanced territory with its own stories, its own Dreamtime; as a place of drama, of unfolding patterns; of myth. We have to look beyond our modern desacralized idea of sky, and cease projecting it into the past upon ancient man expecting to find proto-scientists pinpointing single stars on the horizon for precise calendrical measurement. Neither ancient man nor ancient sites worked that way - their brush was broad, the entrances to the henges were wide and the space within them large, suggesting crowds, rather than a select few were present within them… think more a drive-through movie theatre than Jodrell bank. But what were they looking at?
An analysis of orientation of entrances provides surprising results. If the sites were luni-solar, that is, preoccupied with the rising and setting of the sun and moon, as was once popularly maintained, one would expect the orientation of their entrances to be mostly east and/or west, that is within the arcs that delimit the rising and setting points of the sun and moon, outside of which these heavenly bodies never stray; however, far from this being the case, analysis has shown that the majority of orientations lay outside of this arc, to the north and south.
This is not to say that solar and possibly lunar alignments were not present nor important. Indeed, just under a quarter (24%) of the henges in this study showed midwinter sun alignments, that is alignments on either the rising or setting of this heavenly body either seen through the entrances or behind a prominent landscape feature (a hill or mountain) or, if the landscape was flat, an artificial mound built for the purpose. It seems that midwinter was deemed the more important date than midsummer, towards which just 15% of sites showed an alignment; this was less than another orientation to circa 75° that potentially marked the rising of the sun on, or around, May 1st, which was found in 22% of sites. In short, the rising and setting of the sun, especially at midwinter and spring, must have been important to the henge builders. But they were far from being the most commonly featured orientations.
These were the north-south orientations, that were usually recorded in the literature as aligned ‘roughly north-south’ as if the builders somehow lacked the skill or drive to properly align them; but the resolute disinclination of these sites to point exactly north or south suggested method rather than sloppy building. And sometimes there was evidence for moving or adjusting the entrances, suggesting the alignment was on something that had moved. This was obviously unlikely to have been a landscape feature, but a skyscape feature fits the bill. The stars, after all, move – not just the daily circling of the pole star, but more slowly, over time - the 25,920 year cyclical wobble of the earth’s axis known as precession that alters the position of the celestial pole thus moving the rising point of a star on the horizon by one degree every 72 years. In a monument in use for over a thousand years, such as Stonehenge, entrances aligned on certain stars would, if they wished to continue to frame those same stars over time, have to be altered to accommodate their precessional shift.
Such might explain the fate of the south-south-west-oriented entrance at Stonehenge. Built in 3100 BC it was later blocked, at which time an internal timber corridor was built within the monument pointing at an angle out of the southern entrance at a slightly different point on the horizon than the old entrance. Using a reconstructive astronomy program named Stellarium it became clear that, due to the phenomenon of precession, the stars formerly seen setting through the south-south-west entrance c 3100 BC had over time drifted out of alignment, until they were no longer visible, arguably prompting its blocking by 2600 BC. Concurrently the same stars were now visible setting through the timber corridor.
This is not to say that solar and possibly lunar alignments were not present nor important. Indeed, just under a quarter (24%) of the henges in this study showed midwinter sun alignments, that is alignments on either the rising or setting of this heavenly body either seen through the entrances or behind a prominent landscape feature (a hill or mountain) or, if the landscape was flat, an artificial mound built for the purpose. It seems that midwinter was deemed the more important date than midsummer, towards which just 15% of sites showed an alignment; this was less than another orientation to circa 75° that potentially marked the rising of the sun on, or around, May 1st, which was found in 22% of sites. In short, the rising and setting of the sun, especially at midwinter and spring, must have been important to the henge builders. But they were far from being the most commonly featured orientations.
These were the north-south orientations, that were usually recorded in the literature as aligned ‘roughly north-south’ as if the builders somehow lacked the skill or drive to properly align them; but the resolute disinclination of these sites to point exactly north or south suggested method rather than sloppy building. And sometimes there was evidence for moving or adjusting the entrances, suggesting the alignment was on something that had moved. This was obviously unlikely to have been a landscape feature, but a skyscape feature fits the bill. The stars, after all, move – not just the daily circling of the pole star, but more slowly, over time - the 25,920 year cyclical wobble of the earth’s axis known as precession that alters the position of the celestial pole thus moving the rising point of a star on the horizon by one degree every 72 years. In a monument in use for over a thousand years, such as Stonehenge, entrances aligned on certain stars would, if they wished to continue to frame those same stars over time, have to be altered to accommodate their precessional shift.
Such might explain the fate of the south-south-west-oriented entrance at Stonehenge. Built in 3100 BC it was later blocked, at which time an internal timber corridor was built within the monument pointing at an angle out of the southern entrance at a slightly different point on the horizon than the old entrance. Using a reconstructive astronomy program named Stellarium it became clear that, due to the phenomenon of precession, the stars formerly seen setting through the south-south-west entrance c 3100 BC had over time drifted out of alignment, until they were no longer visible, arguably prompting its blocking by 2600 BC. Concurrently the same stars were now visible setting through the timber corridor.
The Southern entrances of 60% of the sites studied could also be explained as aligning on the rising and/or setting of these same stars – the stars of the Southern Cross (or Crux) a constellation no longer visible in our northern climes due to precession, but visible in the southern hemisphere where they are striking enough to be depicted on the modern flags of Australia and New Zealand.
Why these stars? For a start, these seemed the most likely target due to their brightness and regular pattern – no other stars rose or set quite so dramatically in that area of the sky in this period – but there was more. These stars, whose shape can better be described as a kite, diamond or lozenge rather than a cross, were also embedded deep in the Milky Way, the sight of which, as my Yosemite experience had taught me, seen in an unpolluted sky, was awe-inspiring. But what about the northern henge entrances? What were they oriented on? The northern entrances, in 58% of cases, seemed to point at the rising and/or setting points of the stars of the W-shaped constellation we know as Cassiopeia, as we see, for example, at the henges at Thornborough; or to the moment the same constellation seemed to touch the earth, such as at the highest point of the Wiltshire Downs, as seen from Marden. Like Crux, Cassiopeia is a constellation housed within the Milky Way.
Why these stars? For a start, these seemed the most likely target due to their brightness and regular pattern – no other stars rose or set quite so dramatically in that area of the sky in this period – but there was more. These stars, whose shape can better be described as a kite, diamond or lozenge rather than a cross, were also embedded deep in the Milky Way, the sight of which, as my Yosemite experience had taught me, seen in an unpolluted sky, was awe-inspiring. But what about the northern henge entrances? What were they oriented on? The northern entrances, in 58% of cases, seemed to point at the rising and/or setting points of the stars of the W-shaped constellation we know as Cassiopeia, as we see, for example, at the henges at Thornborough; or to the moment the same constellation seemed to touch the earth, such as at the highest point of the Wiltshire Downs, as seen from Marden. Like Crux, Cassiopeia is a constellation housed within the Milky Way.
The idea that both these constellations may have been targeted by the henges is compounded by the fact that not only are both Cassiopeia and Crux embedded in the encircling band of the Milky Way, they are also ‘linked’ in a kind of ‘see-saw’ motion, standing at exact opposite sides of the sky, so that the rising of one corresponds to the setting of the other – often at the same moment or within minutes, depending on the relative heights of the north and south horizons.
72% of sites in the study could be interpreted as referencing one or the other, or both, of these constellations, their entrances marking the rising/setting points of the Milky Way where it seemed to touch the horizon. What’s more, from around 4000 BC – 2000 BC the moment Crux rose and Cassiopeia set, the band of the Milky Way that housed them both would have been seen to ring the entire horizon, as if lying upon the earth. This would have been an impressive sight. Indeed, the circular form of the henge, often with banks made of chalk or artificially whitened with gypsum or quartz, might have been inspired by this celestial phenomenon (image 5, below). Later, as Crux set in the south-west, and Cassiopeia rose, the Milky Way would span the sky over the henge like a rainbow, its rising and setting points marked in many cases by the henge entrances – like doorways to the sky (images 3 and 4, below).
Is this all a coincidence? Possibly.
If so, then maybe also coincidental is the fact that the constellations seemingly targeted by the entrances are shaped like a lozenge and a zig-zag, two of the most common symbols in Neolithic art, and often found in monuments aligned to these stars, such as the Neolithic passage grave at Four Knocks in Ireland, or Barclodiad y Gawres on Anglesey, where a pillar stone placed in the chamber depicted these same symbols, carved in multiples one atop the other, as if to suggest their rising and/or setting over time. The passage of the tomb aligned exactly on the rising of Crux one way, and the setting of Cassiopeia the other. The lozenge and the zig zag.
Is this all a coincidence? Possibly.
If so, then maybe also coincidental is the fact that the constellations seemingly targeted by the entrances are shaped like a lozenge and a zig-zag, two of the most common symbols in Neolithic art, and often found in monuments aligned to these stars, such as the Neolithic passage grave at Four Knocks in Ireland, or Barclodiad y Gawres on Anglesey, where a pillar stone placed in the chamber depicted these same symbols, carved in multiples one atop the other, as if to suggest their rising and/or setting over time. The passage of the tomb aligned exactly on the rising of Crux one way, and the setting of Cassiopeia the other. The lozenge and the zig zag.
This stone seems anthropomorphic; it is similar to others found within the same monument and from nearby Bryn Celli Ddu, as well as more distant examples such as the schist figurines from Neolithic graves in Iberia. If these images were related to the constellations it suggests these stars were similarly regarded in an anthropomorphic guise.
This is where myth can help us. Myth, like language, shows its age, We can reconstruct the origins of mythological symbols in the same way as linguists can reconstruct proto-languages.` When we look at the remnants of our oldest extant European myths, those belonging to the Indo-European family of languages, such as Celtic, we find that these myth betray an older core, a Neolithic core that displays many Near-Eastern parallels, as befits a tradition that originated in the fertile crescent, as farming did.
In a nutshell, there seems to be evidence for a proto-myth of agricultural provenance, antecedent to both Indo-European and Near-Eastern mythologies – one of whose motifs is common to us from such later examples as the Greek Persephone, that of the rescue of the sun-maiden (and her cows), often aided by a hero who leads her across the sky, thus ending the wasteland that is winter; and of the strange erotic dance of a woman who bears her naked body before the sun-maiden is released and fertility restored.
An Irish variant, the Death of Cú Roí, tells of a woman named Blathnat, imprisoned with her cows by a giant named Cú Roí Mac Dári[ii] in a fortress built from standing stones (arguably, then, a henge) that is said to spin like a millwheel, like the sky turning about the pole. She sends a message to her lover, the hero Cúchulainn, saying that when she has incapacitated her abductor, and is able to be rescued, she will pour milk into the river that runs through the fort as a sign. The Blathnat myth suggests the sighting of the flowing of the milky river was a sign for the readiness of the rescue of the sun-maiden. If we look at this astronomically, it starts to make more sense. The astronomical identity of the rescuing male is clear in another Irish tale, the Second Battle of Moytura, that describes the rescuer of, in this case a demon’s daughter, had 3 stones in his belt[iii]. I think we’re looking at a drama, told in the winter sky - of the sighting of the flowing Milky Way, followed by the rebirth of the sun at midwinter, led from out of the depths of the earth by the constellation of Orion, famous for his three belt stars - the original sky-walker, releasing the maiden from imprisonment in the underworld by the dark forces of winter, sometimes her father - the original Darth Vader. Some stories, it seems, never grow old.
In a nutshell, there seems to be evidence for a proto-myth of agricultural provenance, antecedent to both Indo-European and Near-Eastern mythologies – one of whose motifs is common to us from such later examples as the Greek Persephone, that of the rescue of the sun-maiden (and her cows), often aided by a hero who leads her across the sky, thus ending the wasteland that is winter; and of the strange erotic dance of a woman who bears her naked body before the sun-maiden is released and fertility restored.
An Irish variant, the Death of Cú Roí, tells of a woman named Blathnat, imprisoned with her cows by a giant named Cú Roí Mac Dári[ii] in a fortress built from standing stones (arguably, then, a henge) that is said to spin like a millwheel, like the sky turning about the pole. She sends a message to her lover, the hero Cúchulainn, saying that when she has incapacitated her abductor, and is able to be rescued, she will pour milk into the river that runs through the fort as a sign. The Blathnat myth suggests the sighting of the flowing of the milky river was a sign for the readiness of the rescue of the sun-maiden. If we look at this astronomically, it starts to make more sense. The astronomical identity of the rescuing male is clear in another Irish tale, the Second Battle of Moytura, that describes the rescuer of, in this case a demon’s daughter, had 3 stones in his belt[iii]. I think we’re looking at a drama, told in the winter sky - of the sighting of the flowing Milky Way, followed by the rebirth of the sun at midwinter, led from out of the depths of the earth by the constellation of Orion, famous for his three belt stars - the original sky-walker, releasing the maiden from imprisonment in the underworld by the dark forces of winter, sometimes her father - the original Darth Vader. Some stories, it seems, never grow old.
How was this experienced? At Yeavering in Northumbria, the henge was sited to the north of the hill of Yeavering Bell so that from the henge around midwinter, just after sunset, you’d witness the Milky Way link the entrances as Orion’s belt rose over the horizon. Then Orion, like the Grand Old Duke of York, would be seen to walk up to the top of the hill and down again, his dog Sirius at heel: His feet, in ancient time, if not now (and hence the importance of using reconstructive software to identify the position of such constellations) walking upon England’s mountains green.
You would have needed to stay the whole night to watch his rise and fall; this was not split-second precision - it was drama. It might not have had the punch of a 2-hour Star Wars movie for those used to modern entertainment, but in viewing the motions of Orion our ancestors at Yeavering would have been as entranced by the rise of the sky-walker as today’s moviegoers. Arguably, the henge-builders framing such a drama were more George Lucas than Hipparchus; if you’re seeking ‘astronomer-priests’ you’re looking in the wrong place. To misquote Obi Wan Kenobi: ‘These aren’t the druids you’re looking for.’ 38% of henges analysed pointed to Orion.
You would have needed to stay the whole night to watch his rise and fall; this was not split-second precision - it was drama. It might not have had the punch of a 2-hour Star Wars movie for those used to modern entertainment, but in viewing the motions of Orion our ancestors at Yeavering would have been as entranced by the rise of the sky-walker as today’s moviegoers. Arguably, the henge-builders framing such a drama were more George Lucas than Hipparchus; if you’re seeking ‘astronomer-priests’ you’re looking in the wrong place. To misquote Obi Wan Kenobi: ‘These aren’t the druids you’re looking for.’ 38% of henges analysed pointed to Orion.
What I think the henge builders were doing a long time ago, involved a galaxy far, far, away – our galaxy, the Milky Way, and its interactions with Orion and the midwinter sun in what was a night-long drama. In December the galaxy would be seen to rise and set in full, twisting about the sky, seen to do a heavenly dance for the first time that year since that particular sight had disappeared in the early summer, obscured by increased daylight and changing skies; its full return to the night sky, accompanied by Orion, portended the rising of the midwinter sun. The sighting of the milky river, as in the Blathnat myth, was a prelude to the rescue of the maiden. And just as the milky river ran through CuRoi’s fort, so, too, it ran through the henges, from entrance to entrance, only not across the earth, except in rare cases such as Marden, but across the sky.
The dancing Milky Way as a female is found in many disparate myths. The Greek Persephone and the Japanese sun-goddess Amaterasu are both released from imprisonment, the former at the solstice, after the erotic dancing of a female figure who shows her private parts. In Greek myth she is named Baubo – ‘womb, belly’, and she exposes herself on the so-called ‘bridge of jests.’. In Japanese myth the name of the dancing figure, Ama-no-Uzume, means ‘whirling heavenly woman’, and she is associated with the Milky Way, as she dances over it, and is later given it as thanks for helping to release the sun – for her erotic dance causes the gods to laugh, and the self-imprisoned sun-goddess Amaterasu, curious to the meaning of the laughter, peeks her head out of the cave and thus the sunlight returns.[iv] What does this myth mean? It seems likely that the dance of the whirling heavenly woman, on the bridge of heavenly river, is the visible dance of the Milky Way seen again in the night sky, seeming to cause or correlate with the rescue of the enfeebled sun.
If the Milky Way was linked to this mythical female figure, the hitherto inexplicable erotic nature of her dance becomes clear. For around 7500 BC, as seen from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia- when this myth was arguably first formulated by the early farmers - the stars of Crux in the Milky Way rose at the exact point on the horizon where the midwinter sun would later be seen to rise.[v]
Was there, then, a correlation between this constellation and the erotic display of the dancing woman of myth, one linked to the rising of the sun at the same location in the past, as if the stars had somehow birthed the sun? A cursory examination of contemporary Neolithic imagery suggests the diamond or lozenge shape was indeed associated in the Neolithic world with the womb and/or vulva. The lozenge of Crux, then, may have been considered a celestial womb, birthing the sun. Likewise, the ‘W’ or ‘M’ shape seen in Cassiopeia was possibly interpreted as the breasts of the Milky Way goddess.
The dancing Milky Way as a female is found in many disparate myths. The Greek Persephone and the Japanese sun-goddess Amaterasu are both released from imprisonment, the former at the solstice, after the erotic dancing of a female figure who shows her private parts. In Greek myth she is named Baubo – ‘womb, belly’, and she exposes herself on the so-called ‘bridge of jests.’. In Japanese myth the name of the dancing figure, Ama-no-Uzume, means ‘whirling heavenly woman’, and she is associated with the Milky Way, as she dances over it, and is later given it as thanks for helping to release the sun – for her erotic dance causes the gods to laugh, and the self-imprisoned sun-goddess Amaterasu, curious to the meaning of the laughter, peeks her head out of the cave and thus the sunlight returns.[iv] What does this myth mean? It seems likely that the dance of the whirling heavenly woman, on the bridge of heavenly river, is the visible dance of the Milky Way seen again in the night sky, seeming to cause or correlate with the rescue of the enfeebled sun.
If the Milky Way was linked to this mythical female figure, the hitherto inexplicable erotic nature of her dance becomes clear. For around 7500 BC, as seen from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia- when this myth was arguably first formulated by the early farmers - the stars of Crux in the Milky Way rose at the exact point on the horizon where the midwinter sun would later be seen to rise.[v]
Was there, then, a correlation between this constellation and the erotic display of the dancing woman of myth, one linked to the rising of the sun at the same location in the past, as if the stars had somehow birthed the sun? A cursory examination of contemporary Neolithic imagery suggests the diamond or lozenge shape was indeed associated in the Neolithic world with the womb and/or vulva. The lozenge of Crux, then, may have been considered a celestial womb, birthing the sun. Likewise, the ‘W’ or ‘M’ shape seen in Cassiopeia was possibly interpreted as the breasts of the Milky Way goddess.
The myth is clear. It can be read as stating: ‘When Orion walks and the sky woman shows her vulva in the night sky, then look there for the rising of the midwinter sun, and the days will lengthen, and the power of the sun be renewed’.
Such a Milky Way goddess instrumental in the sun’s rebirth is also found in Near-Eastern myth, especially Egyptian. In Egypt, the Milky Way goddess Nut (starry twin sister of the earth god Geb, with whom she once lay conjoined) swallowed the sun each evening whereon it journeyed through her stellar body, which was often depicted as a cow, to be reborn from her womb on the horizon at dawn. In later Egyptian belief the soul of the deceased would likewise enter the body of the celestial Cow Goddess for rebirth, associated with the grave and the Milky Way, her form being painted on the lid of sarcophagi. Might the Milky Way in Britain have been similarly seen as the mother of the midwinter sun and associated with death and rebirth?
Irish myth tells of a goddess named Boann, the goddess of the River Boyne, whose name means White Cow. Within the passage grave of Newgrange she conceives a son by the Dagdae, he of the three stones in his belt, by use of magic that stills the passage of the sun in the sky (if we remember that solstice literally means sun-standing still, and the passage of Newgrange itself aligns on the midwinter sunrise we see that the myth and the site match perfectly). Newgrange in myth is known as Brú na Bóinne, literally ‘Womb of the White Cow’; similarly, the Milky Way is known as Bóthar na Bó Finne, the ‘path of the white cow’ -. ‘the path of Boann’. So, as in Egypt a bovine goddess correlated with the Milky Way is associated with the rebirth of the sun on the horizon, and with the burial places of the dead.
Was the Milky Way, this shining river, rising up from the earth like the beanstalk that lead to the land of the giants or the shaman’s ladder to the sky, thought of in prehistoric Britain as the body of the sky mother through which souls might pass beyond, as it was in Egypt, both traditions having been derived from a shared ancestor myth? If so, it may shed some light on the uses of the henges that were aligned on it.
In Egypt mortuary structures such as pyramids were conceived of as devices whereby the soul of the deceased might enter the heavens. It’s easily done if you can point the soul in the right direction through aligning the mortuary structure with a specific point in the sky, and at the right time – when the stellar uber is parked on the horizon and it’s one small step for a man to hop on. Equally opening such a star-gate might enable someone or something to hop off the other way – hence the need to defend the outside world from the henge, not the other way around; heavenly powers might be able to descend to earth, think of Jacob’s ladder with its two way traffic of angels – this would be possibly useful for necromancy or for healing rites where divine powers were of use; and perhaps for rebirth, if souls were seen to return into new bodies. Were, then, these entrances star-gates that offered transport between the heavens and the earth?
Think of the lunar effect at Callanish that saw the moon roll along the horizon and appearing between the stones once every Metonic cycle, that is nearly every 19 years. It’s not an alignment on a rocky sphere known to be 384,400 km away, it is an experience of a celestial entity walking on earth, like a nursery rhyme visit of the Man in the Moon. It’s a visitation, as Dylan Thomas says in Under Milk Wood, ‘before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.’ There’s an immediacy and intimacy in such a visitation. But also fear, hence the defensive ditch lying on the inside…a bridge and yet a filter; a corpus callosum in stone, earth, chalk or wood – offering passage or denying it; a spirit trap.
Henges, it is argued, were built as meeting places between mortals and spirits, ancestral, starry or otherwise ... gateways between the seen and unseen, involved in alignments with heavenly bodies that showed the ‘right’ ceremonial occasions for interactions to occur between this world and the other, when the heavenly goddess lay on the earth, for instance (conjoined with her twin brother the earth, as Egyptian myth has it), or stretched between horizons, perhaps the season of the rebirth of the sun offering the same to the deceased, and promising the same to the faithful – a hope of rebirth in the heavens To look at such sites without analysing the spiritual beliefs of those who built them is to completely miss their point.
They are about interaction between the earth and sky, the graspable and the unreachable.
Such an evocation of ‘mythical time/space’ within the sacred enclosure is suggested in the later Celtic word for a sacred site, ‘nemeton’, which contains the element nem that is used in later times to translate the word ‘heaven’ into Welsh (nef) and stems from the PIE *nebh – sky (which also yields nimbus, cloud). A nemeton, then, was ‘heaven on earth’ – where the divine, timeless, transcendental realm was accessible to both the living (in dreams/visions/ritual states) and the dead.
In Irish myth the gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann are said to have arrived in Ireland by landing on the mountaintops in a great cloud having come from the sky, like the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These places may have been viewed as the sites of spiritual visitation from starry beings. Might some vision like that at Fatima or Guadeloupe have started the whole enterprise? Religions are started by visionaries, not committees. Tim Darvill has argued that Stonehenge was a healing centre, mirroring later cult centres such as Lourdes; yet we must not forget that Lourdes was established after a vision, and that one of the visions at Fatima, seen by an assembled crowd of thousands in 1917, was of the sun ‘dancing’ in the heavens.
Yet we dismiss the sky because it’s a bit close to woo-woo for us modern archaeologists, who inwardly cringe when we visit the bookshop in Avebury and see academic works sat beside books on crop circles and alien abductions. Yet these latter works are modern folklore in the making, close in spirit to ancient beliefs, though myopic with the same modern mindset of literalism that effects the sciences, so that anything spiritual or metaphysical is literalised, spiritual beings from the heavens in these cases becoming physical entities in a nuts and bolts spacecraft. Even worse, such ideas are projected onto the past and we get the Ancient alien views of Sitchen and Von Daniken, as erroneous a vision as the wished-for astronomer-priests of the scientific mainstream, both a projection of our materialist fixations into the past. The trick is to get into our ancestors’ heads without taking the worst of our modern thinking habits with us. We ought to take them at their word – and accept that when folklore and myth filled these sites with spirits, with the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairy folk, it is because such sites were a doorway to numinous experiences that left no physical remains for an archaeologist to dig up.
Lest all this talk of rituals involving circles, visions and spirits be thought too speculative, we only need go back 130 or so years to witness the birth of a similar movement.
The Ghost Dance was a Native American religious movement, flourishing towards the close of the nineteenth century, that took the form of a circular dance performed to bring about healing on a national scale, to summon back the souls of the dead to a land ravished by war and disease since the arrival of the white man; and so recreate the past and put an end to history. It was the result of a vision of one man, Wovoka, a Paiute shaman, that occurred during the solar eclipse of January 1st, 1889, and was given to him by the Great Spirit, but which also included elements of messianic Christianity; it was a religion which spread like wildfire throughout North America. A vision afforded during a celestial event, the promise of resurrection, the circular dance, might have been exactly what was experienced in Orkney some 5,500 years ago.
The Ghost Dance was a peaceable cult yet was put down bloodily. The Ghost-Dance shirts, decorated with celestial imagery, with birds and stars, that the adherents believed would protect them from the bullets of the white man failed. The henge phenomenon may have been the same type of cult – spreading from Orkney and soon to cover the British Isles. I think we need to view it as a visionary cult not unlike the Ghost Dance, with a single originator. Like the Ghost Dance, it, too, would fail – not perhaps due to persecution, though new cults do seem to have arrived and replaced the old, but because the stars involved in the drama eventually changed beyond recognition, and the stars of Crux slipped below the horizon, never to rise again (though they will return, due to the cycle of precession). Perhaps this was a sign that the gods had abandoned the henges, or that the ladder to the stars had been misaligned and broken; or perhaps, more optimistically the old stories were retold and transformed, re-framed with new stars playing old roles, like a celestial James Bond.
Either way, to see the henge as a just the nodal point on the route of the axe trade, as a feasting spot, or some other secularly inspired and unimaginative purpose – the kind of place a committee would meet and take minutes – is like seeing a church as merely a parish centre for WI meetings and coffee mornings, bereft of its origin as a centre of a transformative mystery religion; we need to be brave as archaeologists and open that right-brain, look to the sky with fear and wonder, and realise when we tread the henge we are walking between earth and sky, at the meeting point of heaven and earth – joining two realms, two hemispheres, an interface.
Carey, J. 1990. Time, Memory, and the Boyne Necropolis Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Vol. 10, pp. 24-36
Cleal, R. M. J., Walker, K. E. and Montague, R., 1995, Stonehenge in its landscape: Twentieth century excavations English Heritage Archaeological Report 10
Darvill, T. 2006. Stonehenge: the biography of a landscape, Stroud: Tempus
Doniger, W. 1980 Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts, University of Chicago Press
Eliade, M. 1971. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. Princeton: Princeton UP
Guilhou, N. 2010. Myth of the Heavenly Cow. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology
Harding, J 2003 Henge Monuments of the British Isles Tempus
Hollis, S T. 1987. Women of Ancient Egypt and the Sky Goddess Nut. Folklore and Feminism - The Journal of American Folklore 100, 398
Kerenyi, K. 1967. Eleusis Princeston
Lincoln, B. 1975. The Indo-European Myth of Creation, History of Religions, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 121-145 The University of Chicago Press
Macalister, R A S. 1938–1956 Lebor Gabála Érenn, The Book of theTaking of Ireland, Irish Texts Society
Maravelia, A.-A. 2003. Cosmic space and archetypal time: Depictions of the sky-goddess nut in three royal tombs of the new kingdom and her relation to the milky way. Göttinger Miszellen (197), 55-72.
Mooney, J. The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee. New York: Dover Publications; 1896
O’Cuive, B. 1945. Cath Muighe Tuireadh: The Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin (1945)
Piankoff, A. 1934. The Sky-Goddess Nut and the Night Journey of the Sun. Journal of Egyptology. Volume: 20 issue: 1, page(s): 57-61
Ruggles, C. 1999. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland. Yale
Scarre, C. 2017. 'Neolithic figurines of Western Europe.', in Insoll, T (ed) The Oxford handbook of prehistoric Figurines. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 877-900
Stokes, W. 1905. "The Eulogy of Cúrói (Amra Chonroí)." Ériu 2: 1-4.
Wainwright, G. 1989. The Henge Monuments. Thames and Hudson.
[i] Silva, F, and Campion, N (eds). 2015 Skyscapes: The role and importance of the sky in archaeology Oxbow
[ii] Tragic Death of Cúrói mac Dári", Ériu 2, 1905, pp. 18–35 A. H. Leahy (trans.), Historic Romances of Ireland Vol. 1, 1905, pp. 51–85
[iii] Whitley Stokes (ed. & trans.), "The Second Battle of Moytura", Revue Celtique 12, 1891, pp. 52–130, 306–308
[iv] Witzel, Michael (2005). Vala and Iwato: The Myth of the Hidden Sun in India, Japan, and beyond in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (EJVS) 12-1, March 2005, 1-69
[v] Grigsby, J (2018) Skyscapes, Landscapes, and the drama of Proto-Indo-European myth. http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/32226/1/GRIGSBY%2C%20John_Ph.D._2018.pdf
Such a Milky Way goddess instrumental in the sun’s rebirth is also found in Near-Eastern myth, especially Egyptian. In Egypt, the Milky Way goddess Nut (starry twin sister of the earth god Geb, with whom she once lay conjoined) swallowed the sun each evening whereon it journeyed through her stellar body, which was often depicted as a cow, to be reborn from her womb on the horizon at dawn. In later Egyptian belief the soul of the deceased would likewise enter the body of the celestial Cow Goddess for rebirth, associated with the grave and the Milky Way, her form being painted on the lid of sarcophagi. Might the Milky Way in Britain have been similarly seen as the mother of the midwinter sun and associated with death and rebirth?
Irish myth tells of a goddess named Boann, the goddess of the River Boyne, whose name means White Cow. Within the passage grave of Newgrange she conceives a son by the Dagdae, he of the three stones in his belt, by use of magic that stills the passage of the sun in the sky (if we remember that solstice literally means sun-standing still, and the passage of Newgrange itself aligns on the midwinter sunrise we see that the myth and the site match perfectly). Newgrange in myth is known as Brú na Bóinne, literally ‘Womb of the White Cow’; similarly, the Milky Way is known as Bóthar na Bó Finne, the ‘path of the white cow’ -. ‘the path of Boann’. So, as in Egypt a bovine goddess correlated with the Milky Way is associated with the rebirth of the sun on the horizon, and with the burial places of the dead.
Was the Milky Way, this shining river, rising up from the earth like the beanstalk that lead to the land of the giants or the shaman’s ladder to the sky, thought of in prehistoric Britain as the body of the sky mother through which souls might pass beyond, as it was in Egypt, both traditions having been derived from a shared ancestor myth? If so, it may shed some light on the uses of the henges that were aligned on it.
In Egypt mortuary structures such as pyramids were conceived of as devices whereby the soul of the deceased might enter the heavens. It’s easily done if you can point the soul in the right direction through aligning the mortuary structure with a specific point in the sky, and at the right time – when the stellar uber is parked on the horizon and it’s one small step for a man to hop on. Equally opening such a star-gate might enable someone or something to hop off the other way – hence the need to defend the outside world from the henge, not the other way around; heavenly powers might be able to descend to earth, think of Jacob’s ladder with its two way traffic of angels – this would be possibly useful for necromancy or for healing rites where divine powers were of use; and perhaps for rebirth, if souls were seen to return into new bodies. Were, then, these entrances star-gates that offered transport between the heavens and the earth?
Think of the lunar effect at Callanish that saw the moon roll along the horizon and appearing between the stones once every Metonic cycle, that is nearly every 19 years. It’s not an alignment on a rocky sphere known to be 384,400 km away, it is an experience of a celestial entity walking on earth, like a nursery rhyme visit of the Man in the Moon. It’s a visitation, as Dylan Thomas says in Under Milk Wood, ‘before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.’ There’s an immediacy and intimacy in such a visitation. But also fear, hence the defensive ditch lying on the inside…a bridge and yet a filter; a corpus callosum in stone, earth, chalk or wood – offering passage or denying it; a spirit trap.
Henges, it is argued, were built as meeting places between mortals and spirits, ancestral, starry or otherwise ... gateways between the seen and unseen, involved in alignments with heavenly bodies that showed the ‘right’ ceremonial occasions for interactions to occur between this world and the other, when the heavenly goddess lay on the earth, for instance (conjoined with her twin brother the earth, as Egyptian myth has it), or stretched between horizons, perhaps the season of the rebirth of the sun offering the same to the deceased, and promising the same to the faithful – a hope of rebirth in the heavens To look at such sites without analysing the spiritual beliefs of those who built them is to completely miss their point.
They are about interaction between the earth and sky, the graspable and the unreachable.
Such an evocation of ‘mythical time/space’ within the sacred enclosure is suggested in the later Celtic word for a sacred site, ‘nemeton’, which contains the element nem that is used in later times to translate the word ‘heaven’ into Welsh (nef) and stems from the PIE *nebh – sky (which also yields nimbus, cloud). A nemeton, then, was ‘heaven on earth’ – where the divine, timeless, transcendental realm was accessible to both the living (in dreams/visions/ritual states) and the dead.
In Irish myth the gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann are said to have arrived in Ireland by landing on the mountaintops in a great cloud having come from the sky, like the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These places may have been viewed as the sites of spiritual visitation from starry beings. Might some vision like that at Fatima or Guadeloupe have started the whole enterprise? Religions are started by visionaries, not committees. Tim Darvill has argued that Stonehenge was a healing centre, mirroring later cult centres such as Lourdes; yet we must not forget that Lourdes was established after a vision, and that one of the visions at Fatima, seen by an assembled crowd of thousands in 1917, was of the sun ‘dancing’ in the heavens.
Yet we dismiss the sky because it’s a bit close to woo-woo for us modern archaeologists, who inwardly cringe when we visit the bookshop in Avebury and see academic works sat beside books on crop circles and alien abductions. Yet these latter works are modern folklore in the making, close in spirit to ancient beliefs, though myopic with the same modern mindset of literalism that effects the sciences, so that anything spiritual or metaphysical is literalised, spiritual beings from the heavens in these cases becoming physical entities in a nuts and bolts spacecraft. Even worse, such ideas are projected onto the past and we get the Ancient alien views of Sitchen and Von Daniken, as erroneous a vision as the wished-for astronomer-priests of the scientific mainstream, both a projection of our materialist fixations into the past. The trick is to get into our ancestors’ heads without taking the worst of our modern thinking habits with us. We ought to take them at their word – and accept that when folklore and myth filled these sites with spirits, with the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairy folk, it is because such sites were a doorway to numinous experiences that left no physical remains for an archaeologist to dig up.
Lest all this talk of rituals involving circles, visions and spirits be thought too speculative, we only need go back 130 or so years to witness the birth of a similar movement.
The Ghost Dance was a Native American religious movement, flourishing towards the close of the nineteenth century, that took the form of a circular dance performed to bring about healing on a national scale, to summon back the souls of the dead to a land ravished by war and disease since the arrival of the white man; and so recreate the past and put an end to history. It was the result of a vision of one man, Wovoka, a Paiute shaman, that occurred during the solar eclipse of January 1st, 1889, and was given to him by the Great Spirit, but which also included elements of messianic Christianity; it was a religion which spread like wildfire throughout North America. A vision afforded during a celestial event, the promise of resurrection, the circular dance, might have been exactly what was experienced in Orkney some 5,500 years ago.
The Ghost Dance was a peaceable cult yet was put down bloodily. The Ghost-Dance shirts, decorated with celestial imagery, with birds and stars, that the adherents believed would protect them from the bullets of the white man failed. The henge phenomenon may have been the same type of cult – spreading from Orkney and soon to cover the British Isles. I think we need to view it as a visionary cult not unlike the Ghost Dance, with a single originator. Like the Ghost Dance, it, too, would fail – not perhaps due to persecution, though new cults do seem to have arrived and replaced the old, but because the stars involved in the drama eventually changed beyond recognition, and the stars of Crux slipped below the horizon, never to rise again (though they will return, due to the cycle of precession). Perhaps this was a sign that the gods had abandoned the henges, or that the ladder to the stars had been misaligned and broken; or perhaps, more optimistically the old stories were retold and transformed, re-framed with new stars playing old roles, like a celestial James Bond.
Either way, to see the henge as a just the nodal point on the route of the axe trade, as a feasting spot, or some other secularly inspired and unimaginative purpose – the kind of place a committee would meet and take minutes – is like seeing a church as merely a parish centre for WI meetings and coffee mornings, bereft of its origin as a centre of a transformative mystery religion; we need to be brave as archaeologists and open that right-brain, look to the sky with fear and wonder, and realise when we tread the henge we are walking between earth and sky, at the meeting point of heaven and earth – joining two realms, two hemispheres, an interface.
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