Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

What ideas lay behind the worship in these temples? Renfrew’s researches on the island of Arran, in Scotland, have shown that the tombs there are closely related to the distribution of arable land and it therefore seems that these tomb/temples were somehow linked to the worship of a great fertility goddess, which developed as a cult as a result of the introduction of farming, and the closer inspection of nature that this would have entailed. We can, however, say a little more about this set of beliefs. Although it is very variable, megalithic sites are often sited so that ‘the countryside falls into certain patterns around them. The classic megalithic site is on a platform part-way down a spur which runs from higher ground behind. From the site itself, a bowl or valley in the land will be noticeable below, while the horizon will be surrounded by ridges of hills which wrap around behind the spur.’⁴⁶ These sitings are believed to relate to ancient beliefs about sacred landscape – geomancy. ‘The happy site is almost always sheltered by the hills, slightly elevated within them, and connected to them by land through which the geodic currents flow. In the angle formed by the junction of such hills, the geomancer looked for a “little hollow or little mound”, from which the chain of hills around can be seen to form “a complete horseshoe” with one side open, and streams that run away gently rather than steeply.’⁴⁷ From about 1930 onwards, modern dowsers have explored megalithic sites and picked up very powerful reactions in their vicinity. One dowser, Guy Underwood, published in 1969 a map of primary dowsing lines under Stonehenge which showed that twenty lines converged on the site.⁴⁸ Some, but by no means all megalithic sites are also grouped in straight lines that, when connected on a map, link several places which, in England, have names that end in the syllable ‘ley’. (These are called leylines.) Whether there is anything to this, it does seem to be true that several megalithic circular alignments were prehistoric astronomical observatories. Knowledge of the sun’s cycle was clearly important for an agricultural community, in particular the midwinter solstice when the sun ceases to recede and begins to head north again. From the mound, features on the horizon could be noted where the midwinter solstice occurred (for example), and stones erected so that, on subsequent years, the moment could be anticipated, and celebrated. Sun observatories were initiated round 4000 BC but moon ones not until 2800 BC. Tombs usually faced east. Chris Scarre, of Cambridge, argues that many of these huge stones are taken from sacred parts of the landscape, ‘places of power’ – waterfalls, for example, or cliffs, which have special acoustic or sensory properties, such as unusual colours or texture, and are taken to form shrines in areas that are important for hunting or domestication. This, he says, explains why these stones are transported sometimes over vast distances but are otherwise not modified in any way.⁴⁹

There may however be a further layer of meaning on top of all this. A number of carvings have been found associated with megalithic temples and observatories – in particular, spirals, whorls and what are called cup-and-ring marks, in effect a series of concentric Cs.⁵⁰ Elsewhere in Europe, as we shall see in just a moment, these designs are related to what some prehistorians have referred to as the Great Goddess, the symbol of fertility and regeneration (not everyone accepts this interpretation). In Germany and Denmark, pottery found associated with megaliths is also decorated with double circles and these too are associated with the Great Goddess. Given the fact that, in the very earliest times, the fertility of women must have been the greatest mystery and greatest miracle known to mankind, before the male function was discovered, and given the fact that menhirs almost by definition resemble the male organ, it is certainly possible that the megalithic cromlechs were observatory/temples celebrating man’s new-found understanding. The sexual meaning of menhirs is not simply another case of archaeologists reading too much into the evidence. In the Bible, for example, Jeremiah (2:27) refers to those who say to a stone: ‘You have begotten me.’ Belief in the fertilising virtues of menhirs was still common among European peasants at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘In France, in order to have children, young women performed the glissade (letting themselves slide along a stone) and the friction (sitting on monoliths or rubbing their abdomen along certain rocks)’.⁵¹