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Earth Mysteries: Mysterious Sites |
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Without a pleasing scientific explanation, stone circles attract pleasing hokum instead.
Thanks to our built-in tendency to animate the world in our own image, we have beloved, sacred places everywhere on Earth. Europe has thousands of them, as is well documented. Many old European churches are built upon sites that were holy to far earlier societies. And the countryside is dotted with structures built of large stones, many of them arranged in long-distance lines and oriented toward significant astronomical occurrences like the path of the Moon and particular stars.
I focus on Europe here because there's something special about it. As in the rest of the world, the exact reasons for building the structures have been lost. But because a good story is irresistible, in Europe a whole new rootless complex of "Druid" and "new age" mythology has arisen around the monuments.
Stonehenge, for instance, is just too old to be built and used by the Celtic Druids. When Celts first arrived in Britain, Stonehenge was already over a thousand years old. So any records and stories told about it and other stone structures must be suspect. Even the earliest historians of ancient Rome and Greece knew that their sources were not very reliable, but their only choice was to preserve what knowledge they could.
This has not stopped later searchers from accepting whatever evidence they liked from other sources. It's human nature, in the most basic sense, to make connections across gaps in knowledge for the sake of a good story.
The writer John Michell has been working this ground for 30 years. His classic book, The View Over Atlantis, is as hypnotic as a good sermon, beginning with Stonehenge, its kindred sites, and the ley lines that connect them across all of Britain. He mixes these with archaeology and ancient records, spirit communicators, Atlantis tales, and UFO stories, and adds Jungian and Reichian psycho-theory to thicken a bewitching gumbo. Of the old stone structures, Michell concludes that "such places still bear the invisible marks of some feat of natural magic, performed by the adepts of the former world, space and time travellers, masters of revelation, to whom the earth was but another living creature, responding like a man to certain shapes, sounds and poetic correspondences, the keys to universal enlightenment."
That was in 1969, written as the Age of Aquarius dawned. He's a bit more modest in the recent writings you'll find on brittania.com in the informative and entertaining section on the Earth mysteries of the British Isles. But he's still a great prose stylist, and the stones can't contradict him. People I know have gone to centers of Earth energy like Glastonbury and enjoyed visions and vivid dreams. I'd appreciate that myself. Those things are as real as human experience can be, and totally outside Earth science.
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The Stone Circle Webring is a great pilgrimage through this whole topic. If hot springs are more your speed, the Web is crawling with kindred souls. See the U.S. government's list of hot springs for the whole country to get you started. (Mine seems to be listed.)
