http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file
   For complete access to all the files of this collection
	see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php 
  ==========================================================
From The Sunday Times
June 8, 2008

Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill

Stonehenge
The Sunday Times review by John Carey

What is it about Stonehenge that makes people take leave of their
senses? Why should a harmless-looking group of megaliths induce
softening of the brain? These are questions that Rosemary Hill's witty,
erudite book persistently prompts. Oddly, she points out, nobody in the
Roman period or the early Middle Ages seems to have noticed that
Stonehenge existed. Or maybe they had other things on their minds than
antiquarian research. At all events, they left no written record. But
from the 12th century on, theories and explanations about the monument
proliferate. It was made by giants in Ireland and transported to
Salisbury Plain by the wizard Merlin. Or it had something to do with
King Arthur. Or with Joseph of Arimathea, in whose tomb Christ was
buried, and who came to Britain after the resurrection with the
disciples. Or it was built by Hebrew-speaking Phoenicians, worshippers
of Hercules, who very probably helped to carry the stones. Or it was a
Roman temple (this was Inigo Jones's idea, who had been to Rome and
ought to have known better). Or it was the tomb of Boadicea. Or a
post-Roman Buddhist temple (this was the historian James Fergusson,
writing in the Quarterly Review in 1860).

Then there were the druids. In reality, there is not a shred of evidence
that a druid ever set foot in Stonehenge. Caesar and Tacitus both
describe druids, but do not site them there. Tacitus connects them with
Anglesey where, he says, a fanatical band of druids, shrieking curses,
waylaid a detachment of legionaries, but was chased off. It was the
magpie-minded antiquary John Aubrey who in the 1660s first connected
Stonehenge with druids, and it soon became an established fact that they
built it as their headquarters. It was there that they did solemn things
with mistletoe, and performed human sacrifice. Caesar had written that
druids built wicker effigies, placed living men inside, and set them on
fire. It is just the kind of atrocity story that conquerors have always
invented about the conquered, but it has been eagerly believed since the
17th century, and inspired Robin Hardy's classic 1973 horror film The
Wicker Man. An alternative version of the druids made them gentle
proto-Christians who had intuitive knowledge of the virgin birth and the
crucifixion centuries before they happened. William Stukeley, the friend
and biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, favoured this view, and provided an
illustration of a druid - an ascetic-looking sage in primitive hiking
gear and sandals.

The Romantics preferred the human-sacrifice version. Wordsworth and
Blake both relished the thought of Stonehenge as a ?cruel druid temple?
full of ?horrid shrieks?. JMW Turner completed the descent into
melodrama with a painting that showed the monument illuminated by a
violent electric storm. In the foreground a shepherd lies dead, struck
by lightning. His dog howls beside him, and there are evidently several
casualties among the sheep. In 1781, the Ancient Order of Druids was
founded in the Kings Arms public house in Poland Street, and 11 years
later Edward Williams, a laudanum addict and forger of ancient Welsh
poetry, who called himself Iolo Morganwg, ?revived? the Gorsedd (or
community) of Bards and celebrated the autumn equinox in an improvised
stone circle on Primrose Hill. After that there was no stopping druids.
They have multiplied and spawned endless splinter groups - half a dozen
new orders a year, Hill reckons, since 1990. Meanwhile, throughout the
1980s, druids were joined for their midsummer ceremonies by
representatives of many other persuasions (countercultural philosophers,
UFO-spotters, ley-line tracers, rock musicians, mystics) all exercising
their immemorial right to watch sunrise over Stonehenge and fight the
police.

A great strength of Hill's method is that she is by no means inclined
just to laugh at what seem ludicrous beliefs. She carefully unpicks
them, showing what made them attractive in their cultures, and how
scholarly their adherents often were, apart from their brief descent
into Stonehenge madness. John Wood, for example, who published a book on
Stonehenge in 1747, believed that it should rightly be called ?Choir
gaur?, a name he derived from Hebrew via Welsh, and that the druid
priesthood had locked up astronomical secrets emblematically in the
design of their temples. Even fellow druid-fanciers mocked these
?whimseys? of a ?crackt imagination?. But astro-archeology has shown
that Stonehenge is, in effect, an observatory, and that the outer ring
of Aubrey holes (called after John Aubrey, who discovered them) were
designed to predict lunar eclipses on a 56-year cycle. Besides, Wood was
also the architect who, with his son, created Georgian Bath, and when he
designed the Circus he based it on Stonehenge. It is 60 Hebrew cubits
wide (the measure Wood believed druids used), its 30 houses equal in
number to the outer row of sarsen stones, and it is crowned with large
acorns, dear to the druids as ?priests of the hollow oak?. Wood also
believed that the stone circle at Stanton Drew, near Bristol, was a
temple to the moon and a druid university, and his son built the Royal
Crescent at Bath as a lunar symbol. Wood's Circus was imitated by other
architects. Without it we should not have Oxford Circus or Piccadilly
Circus, or, Hill argues, the modern traffic island, which is a town
planner's adaptation of Wood's idea.

Archeologists, if not quite the villains of Hill's story, are taken to
task by her for their overweening confidence in scientific method and
their impatience with druids old and new. All the same the
archeologists' discoveries about Stonehenge are the most wonderful
things in her book, and her survey of them is lucid and enthralling.
Near the future site of Stonehenge, wooden posts were raised, perhaps
for a ritual purpose, some time between 8500 and 6700BC. By way of
comparison, the pyramid of Cheops, the oldest of the Giza pyramids,
dates from 2560BC. That is also approximately the date when Stonehenge's
ring of sarsen stones was raised. The lintels on top are held in place
by mortice and tenon joints, and linked by tongue and groove joints.
These are woodworking techniques: Stonehenge is a wooden building
imitated in stone. Nobody knows why. Nor does anyone know who the
builders were, what their purpose was, or why or how they transported
bluestones from the Mynydd Preseli area of south Wales to form a
matching circle inside the locally quarried sarsens.

Long before any stones arrived, a ditch was dug and a bank built,
forming an almost perfect circle round the whole site, and faced with
gleaming chalk. Nearby were 17 long barrows, earth mounds raised above
communal graves, some of which had been there 1,000 years when
Stonehenge was begun. The team currently digging at Stonehenge announced
last month that they think the site was used as a royal cemetery, a
theory already noted in Hill's book. Perhaps the transition from
communal to single graves marked the emergence of a social elite - the
beginning of traditional British class distinction. Like most thinking
about Stonehenge, that is speculation. But it is the kind of idea that
Hill stimulates, because she values imagination as much as scientific
certainty. Her book is a treasure: stylish, thoughtful, miraculously
condensed, and as full of knowledge as a megalith is full of megalith.

k