A West Cork stone circle has provided an 81-year old archaeologist with the answer to the riddle of Stonehenge.
A WEST Cork stone circle has provided an 81-year old archaeologist with the answer to the riddle of Stonehenge. ‘I have solved it completely,’ Prof Terence Meaden, an archaeologist and physicist from Oxford University, told The Southern Star.
He explained that the people who created the Drombeg Stone Circle near Glandore had, in Neolithic times, ‘a fertility religion’ and for them the landscape was the earth mother and the sky was the heavenly father.
The archaeologist said these ‘intelligent people’ used tally sticks in Neolithic times to measure daily the progress of the sun on the landscape before placing some stones to represent the female form and some to represent the male.
He has discovered that at sunrise – not sunset – during the eight ancient agricultural festivals that include the solstices and quasi-equinoxes, the shadows of the male stones fall on the female stone and form ‘a union.’
There are eight couplings contained within Drombeg Stone Circles, some of which are doubles, and the photographic evidence of these couplings is both explicit and stark.
The rising sun, for example, illuminates one of the female stones in such a way that looks like a bright, warm, life-affirming womb, while the adjoining male stone casts a decidedly phallic shadow right in the middle of the womb.
Another female stone – the recumbent stone – has embedded on its surface the unmistakable outline of female genitalia and when the sunrises behind the male stone at the entrance a shadow falls to ‘cover’ the female stone.
Terence said that these parings are ‘a visible consummation,’ a marriage of the earth mother and heavenly father. These meaningful shadows are cast on the recumbent stone during the summer, and shadows cast the other couplings take place during the winter.
Terence’s book – which is entitled “Stonehenge, Avebury and Drombeg Stone Circles Deciphered” – is a dense work, a proper archaeological study, but to the layman the best way to describe it is that the people who created Drombeg put on one of the world’s first slideshows. And to see it changes utterly one’s experience and understanding of Drombeg Stone Circle.
