Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos

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The MUL.APIN text is famous for its catalogue of stars and planets. Although distant in time and place from the Neolithic monuments of northern Europe, the quoted passage provides written testimony to observations of a sort that could well have been made there at a much earlier date. The shifting of the Sun’s place of rising over the horizon was in Mesopotamia related to the rising of stars, or to constellations, distinguished in turn as staging posts along the monthly path of the Moon round the sky. The people concerned worshipped the Sun in various ways, and took the entrance to the land of the dead to be where the Sun descends over the horizon. Many of the writings from which such beliefs are known, in particular the Gilgamesh epic, are much earlier than MUL.APIN, and even antedate the main structures at Stonehenge.

There appear to be no preferred alignments among the numerous Babylonian and Assyrian tombs excavated. In contrast, the alignments of Egyptian pyramids were settled accurately and deliberately, typically towards the four cardinal points of the compass. The interred ruler faced east, while his dependents faced west to the entrance to the kingdom of the dead. Confronted by such utterly different practices among two peoples who simply happen to have left written testimony of their attitudes to celestial affairs, it is on the whole wise to start with a clean sheet, and to base northern practices on northern archaeological remains. Whether there is an element in common to all of these peoples, in the form of a shared psychology, driving them all to found their religions on their common experience of the heavens, is highly questionable. There are certainly a surprising number of patterns of behaviour that many of them have in common, but they are beyond the scope of this book.

What if it should be possible to produce evidence that many prehistoric monuments were deliberately directed towards the rising and setting of Sun or Moon or star? Why devote so many pages to such a trite conclusion? There are some who will consider that the ways in which this was done were remarkable enough to be put on record, but others will naturally hope to draw conclusions as to motivation, whether religious or of some other kind. Does it not follow that the celestial bodies must have been objects of worship? Historians of religion who have come to this conclusion have rarely used orientations as evidence for it. On the other hand, many of those who have written about the alignment of monuments have taken for granted the idea that the motivation came primarily from the need to provide farmers with a calendar for the seasons. The religionists have interpreted isolated symbols found in the religious contexts of birth and death as self-evidently lunar or solar. They have claimed that worship of the Moon would have long preceded worship of the Sun, on the grounds that the tides and the menstrual cycle in women would have pointed to obvious links between the Moon, the weather, and fertility. The calendarists have argued from a supposed practical need, one that they find in evidence in early Greek texts relating the chief points of the agricultural year to events in the heavens. Both lines of discussion have rested far too heavily on intuition. There are a few tentative pointers to Neolithic and Bronze Age religious beliefs to be found from Stonehenge and its surroundings, but they belong to the end of the book, not the beginning.

FIG. 3(a) Britain and Ireland, showing (as small circles) the main henges as known at present. The rectangle covers the Stonehenge region as drawn in Fig. 3 (#ulink_8c5900a0-719f-5f03-91fd-fe3b2261e4b9)(b) (#ulink_e89eca16-336f-55cb-841c-f9be2c65f432).

FIG. 3(B) Some of the principal prehistoric monuments of southern Britain, discussed in the following chapters. The rectangular grid (at intervals of 100 km) is that of the Ordnance Survey, and will provide a frame for more detailed maps of the Stonehenge and other regions in later chapters. Small squares mark modern towns.

FIG. 4 A star map for the year 3000 BC, here meant only to introduce the names of the brightest stars then visible from Wessex and mentioned in later chapters. The constellation names will be found in a similar figure in Appendix 2. It should be appreciated that star positions change with time, and that no single map can do justice to them over a period of a century, let alone two or three millennia. Other relevant astronomical matters will be introduced as needed, and the following points are added only for those interested in the type of representation adopted in the figure, which might be used to make rough estimates of visibility. It may be thought of as a movable diagram, in which the stars are moving and the shaded area is fixed. The aperture in the latter, bounded by the horizon circle, represents the visible region of the sky. Circles on the star sphere (such as the equator and tropics of Cancer and Capricorn) all appear as circles on this map, since it is in a projection known as stereographic. Stars are shown graded in size according to their brightness (thus Sirius is much the brightest star in the sky). Stars shown covered by the shading may move into view as the heavens rotate clockwise about the central point, representing the north celestial pole. Whether the stars will then actually be visible will depend on whether the Sun is visible or not. Star maps follow various conventions. Stars can be shown as they are seen looking out from the centre of the star sphere or as they would be seen from the outside of the sphere, looking inwards. The second convention, which is that used on a star globe, is the one adopted here. Had the figure been on a larger scale, scales of degrees could have been added, for instance the equator and the horizon (azimuths). The former graduations would have been uniform, but the latter not. (They would have crowded together more in the lower part of the figure.) The two points in which the tropic of Cancer (the smallest of the concentric circles) crosses the horizon represent the most northerly rising and setting points of the Sun. The most southerly points of its rising and setting are where the horizon meets the tropic of Capricorn (also concentric). The tips of the central cross are in the directions of the four points of the compass, north (below), east (left), west (right) and south (above).