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Article August 18, 1998
Megalithic myths
Erected c. 4000-c. 1500 by pre-literate cultures who left no explanation of their purposes or other record of their lives, megaliths ('big stones') are found the world over, either singly (menhirs, standing stones), in circles (Stonehenge), rows (Carnac) or as dolmens (two uprights and a lintel). In whatever form, they are often aligned directly with a number of other such sites locally or even internationally distant. Typically they stand over underground water-crossings, near geological faults or tectonic intrusions where the geomagnetic field exhibits measureable anomalies, and consist of stones with high crystal content, capable of generating piezoelectricity.
Megalithic myth comes in two forms: (1) myths about the magical powers of the builders, (2) myths about the magical properties of the stones.
Brittany and Britain are especially rich in these remains, which employ Pythagorean geometry 2,000 years before Pythagoras who, it is said, was taught by Abaros, priest of a winged temple in Hyperborea. Some say this temple was Stonehenge, other that it was Callanish in the Outer Hebrides. Yet, to have known Pythagoras, Abaros must havelived a millenium after the collapse of megalithic culture c. 1500 BC. When the Celts reached Britain, the megalith-builders were already mythic, as in Irish tales of themagic race, the Tuatha de Danaan. Legends of giants and dragons abounded; the stones were said to be alive (Gaelic: fir chreig,'false men'), 'walking' or 'dancing' by night, or (as with Oxfordshire's Rollright Stones going to nearby rivers to 'drink'. Odd lights and will-o'-the-wisps (spirits of the dead?) hovered above them. The early Church found it hard to keep folk away from these 'sacred' sites. Saints trying to found a church elsewhere would find that the 'Devil' nightly removed the stones from the new sites back to the old pagan mound. Many churches, especially in Wales, ended up within stone circles, on old earthworks or on alignments of standing stones.
That megaliths were associated with fertility and healing is clear from folk-myth and made explicit by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain. Of the Giant's Dance (Stonehenge), he has Merlin (who traditionally was said to have 'flown' or 'sung' the stones from Ireland to England) say:'the stones possess mystical power and are useful for many healing purposes. The giants [who] brought them from Africa and palced them on Ireland...designed to take baths among them whenever they were stricken with illness. For they washed the stones and placed their sick in the water, which invariably cured them.' So too cromlechs (stones with hollow centres) were widely said to refertilise barren women.
Puritanically regarded as satanic, many megaliths were broken up. Much of the great circle at Avebury was thus destroyed in the seventeenth century, even as antiquarians like Aubrey and Stukeley declared the stones to be Druidic in origin. Blake refers to'Britain'a ancient rocky Druid shore', and to the 'giant Albion', which saw hidden in the ancient landscape.
Then science stepped in. In the 1890s Lockyer proposed the purpose of the circles like Stonehenge and Cllanish to be calendrical, with individual stones marking the motions of sun and moon. In the 1960s, the Boston astronomer Gerald Hawkins showed Stonehenge to be sophisticated calendar. Professor Alexander Thom's surveys of many British circles and megaliths later proved the precision of the system. Also he deduced the common use of the 'megalithic yard' (2.72 feet), not only in Europe but also in North America.
The scientific evidence encouraged renewed mythologising. Occulists began claiming such sites as central nodes in a system of 'sacred' science devoted to the amplification and distribution of 'earth-energies'. In 1923 Katherine Maltwood claimed o have discerned a giant zodiac carved into the landscape round Galstonbury Tor. In 1936, the occulist Dion Fortune described 'sacred sites' as 'power centres' radiating 'lines of force'. Such claims flouted scientific, archaelogical and historical orthodoxy. 1960s claims linking megalithic sites with UFOs only widened the gap, as did the claim by the dowser Guy Underwood that standing stones marked sites of exceptional magnetic force, anciently associated with healing. Yet research since the 1970s suggests that myths of 'giants dances' and 'walking stones' are not entirely nonsensical. Photographs of the Kingstone at Rollright, taken on three separate dawns in 1979 as part of the Dragon Project (a collaboration between dowser and scientists) showed a hazy glow round the upper part of the monolith, a 'streamer' effect rising at an angle from it. Photographs taken earlier or later (on the same reel of film) showed no such effect. They showed no processing faults, no ordinary explanation was found and attempts to reproduce the effects failed.
The Carnac complex in Brittany is on an intrusion surrounded by fault lines, its rows delineating magnetic field changes. Devereux speculates that UFOs are terrestrial emanations connected with faults and the megalithic system; being electromagnetic, they may influence brain directly. It may be that the megalith-builders knew of such processes and used them to stimulate visionary or altered states of mind.
*My notes: I've recently been informed that viewing from either poles of the world, Giza, Egypt and Easter island is exactly 144 degrees distant and Easter island to a temple in Burma, which has alignment of temple bulidings exacted to a star alignment, has also the same degree distant. Strange coincidents? There's more. All three of these sites are based on ancient astronomy and certain stars alignment which dated more than 10,000 years ago. Could it be that history is much older than we think, and could there be a civilization that perished during the melting of the ice-caps of the polars, on which survivors scattered through out the world and estabished such sites in memory of their doomed homelands? The Incas, which had technology so great whenthe Europeans are still barbaric nomads said that their technology were taught to them by the Viracocha (which we will feature in Inca myths next month), which seems to be a caucasian, bearded humanoid.
updated August 18, 1998
If you wish to read previous article of myth, click below:
Article March 10, 1998-Arthurian myth
Article March 26, 1998-Theosophy
Article April 1, 1998-Hopi Lore
Article May 17, 1998-Khadir
Article June 9, 1998-Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Article July 3, 1998-Cuchulainn
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