PAGAN WHISPERS
Although I do not subscribe to Cosmic Ordering being some sort of mysterious system for invoking things to happen, I do feel that it has some tie-ins with other genres that I have worked with. I recently published a book by the author Carole Carlton called Mrs Darleys Pagan Whispers and I was prompted by Traces email to think of this book and the Pagan rituals and how they tied in with nature, as does Cosmic Ordering to some extent. This brought me on to thinking of some of the important days in the years, one of them relates to when I first released the Cosmic Ordering: Chakra Clearing CD, it was in the spring equinox.
SUMMER SOLSTICE
The longest day of the year is June 21st. It is the day when the sun is at its most northerly point and this is why it is the longest day. On this day you can see a very old custom at Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, England. Every summer solstice hundreds of people go to Stonehenge to watch the sun rise.
The sun shines on one famous stone – the Heel stone. The Heel or Hele stone stands to the northeast of the Stonehenge circles. The name is probably derived from the Greek word for the sun (Helios). The Heel Stone is a stone which is not located in the main circle.
For the Druids this is a very important moment of the year. Druid celebrations also take place on Midsummers Eve, Bonfires are lit to show respect for the Sun God, whose power they say is greatest at the summer solstice. The fires also represent an attempt to ward off the coming winter. Practice of this ancient ritual, which also includes a summer solstice Circle Dance, is now mainly confined to Cornwall, the West Country, and London’s Hampstead Heath.
The Druids were the priests in Britain 2,000 years ago. They used the sun and the stones at Stonehenge to know the start of the months and seasons. There are Druids in Britain today too.
In the first years of the 20th century, this alignment implied a ritualistic connection with sun worship and it was generally concluded that Stonehenge was constructed as a temple to the sun. More recently, though, the astronomer Gerald Hawkins has argued that Stonehenge is not merely aligned with solar and lunar astronomical events, but can be used to predict other events such as eclipses. In other words, Stonehenge was more than a temple, it was an astronomical calculator.
It was argued that the summer solstice alignment cannot be accidental. The sun rises in different directions in different geographical latitudes. For the alignment to be correct, it must have been calculated precisely for Stonehenges latitude of 51° 11′. The alignment, therefore, must have been fundamental to the design and placement of Stonehenge. As if corroborating the claims made by Hawkins for Stonehenge.
A professor of engineering and a mathematician, Alexander Thom, has shown that many other megalithic sites throughout Britain are also oriented towards the sun and the moon.
The alignment also made it clear that whoever built Stonehenge had precise astronomical knowledge of the path of the sun and, moreover, must have known before construction began precisely where the sun rose at dawn on midsummer’s morning while standing on the future site of the monument. This point needs to be made because, as I suspect, with Stonehenge and many other such monuments, it was the site, a particular place within the landscape, that was important; only later were these sites marked in some more permanent manner by the digging of ditches and banks and (or instead) the erection of wood or stone structures.
This particular spot in the landscape was so important that not only were ditches and banks dug and, later, stone circles and horseshoe arrangements constructed to mark it, but that some of the stones were deliberately transported there with considerable effort from a great distance away.
Contrary to expectations, the great stone circles and horseshoe arrangements for which Stonehenge is famous are later additions to the monument (mostly Stonehenge III) and are not essential to the lunar and solar calculations.
The megalithic ruin known as Stonehenge stands on the open downland of Salisbury Plain two miles (three kilometres) west of the town of Amesbury, Wiltshire, in Southern England. It is not a single structure but consists of a series of earth, timber, and stone structures that were revised and re-modelled over a period of more than 1400 years.
Unlike earlier stone circles oriented on natural features like prominent hills, Stonehenge aligns with no natural features all the alignments being man-made. The builders had to provide an outlier to mark the rising of the sun at midsummer as seen from the centre of the circle. This is the Heel Stone, located 60m from the centre of the circle. Note the barbed wire that has now been placed around the monument. It was put there to protect the site from large group that wanted to overrun the site for the summer solstice.
Mystery surrounds this 5,000 year old World Heritage Site. As old as the pyramids in Egypt, was Stonehenge designed as a place of sun worship, or as part of a huge astronomical calendar? Each monument was a circular structure, aligned with the rising sun at the solstice. Erected between 3,000 BC and 1,600 BC, the stones were carried hundreds of miles over land and sea, while antlers and bones were used to dig the pits that hold the stones. An awe-inspiring family visit, Stonehenge is a powerful reminder of the once-great Stone and Bronze Ages.
A 17th-century architect named Inigo Jones thought Stonehenge was a Roman temple. By the time the 18th and 19th centuries rolled along, popular opinion had changed – Stonehenge was thought to be a Druid temple for sun-worship. (The problem with this theory is that Stonehenge was finished 1,000 years before the Druids came to prominence.
British author John Mitchell has suggested that Stonehenge was a cosmic temple dedicated to all twelve gods of the zodiac. It represents the ideal cosmology, the perfect and complete image of the universe.
And that seems as good an explanation as any for this feat of engineering and construction that continues to fascinate us to this day.
Copyright Stephen Richards
Feel lost about being capable of explaining things and matters to other people? Well, read free communication skills.