Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
You Mean to Say That Stonehenge Is Actually a...Well, Duh
Take a close look at this reconstructed Iron Age round house from Pimperne, Dorset, England.
Note, in particular, the internal circle of support posts and lintels, marking off the inner living area.
If it doesn't look strikingly familiar to you, you can't possibly be pagan.
Although Stonehenge predates the Iron Age by more than a millennium, it's hard not to suspect that its familiar ring-with-lintels structure may well have been a visual echo of something that its builders knew intimately from their own daily lives.
You've heard of Stonehenge as temple, observatory, cenotaph. Well, it may or may not have been any, or all, of those things.
But it seems to me not to stretch credibility to claim that, first and foremost—whatever else it may also be—Stonehenge is a house.
If—if—this is so, then the next question to ask must surely be: whose house is it?
Comments
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Tuesday, 03 August 2021A few years ago a British architect proposed that Stonehenge was a dwelling, and published a drawing showing how it may have appeared. Stonehenge has an inner circle of tall stones with lintels, and a lower outer circle. It would have been relatively easy to lay logs across from low lintels to high lintels giving the roof a decent slope. Space between outer stone posts could have been filled with wattle and daub appropriate for the time. The outer stone circle finished with wattle and daub would have offered good protection from raiding tribes too, and so did the circular earthwork that once surrounded the whole thing. Live was not all peace and love then any more than now. A structure this big and well constructed would have been a tribal "Great Hall" or Long House, for a whole clan or tribe, not just for one nuclear family.
All the wood disappears in a few hundred years, leaving only the stones. I tend to take a practical approach to viewing ancient architecture. What works? What's for dinner? What keeps the rain off? What protected them from other tribes? My pagan experience usually has ritual and ceremony close to home, part of daily life, and my best guess is that would have been the same thousands of years ago. -
Wednesday, 04 August 2021
Hmm; I'm trying to imagine cooking dinner with a standing circle and "horseshoe" of bluestones in the way. It seems more probable to me that if Stonehenge is a house, it's symbolically, rather than literally, so.
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Thursday, 05 August 2021
As for cooking, we need to remember that fireplaces with chimneys were not invented until fairly recently. Great halls, long houses, and even family dwellings had an open fire in the center. Smoke rose out a hole in the roof. The atmosphere in their houses was always somewhat smoky. Cooking was done at the open fire. During inclement (British rain) weather it was more pleasant to cook inside under a roof than outside in the open.
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Woodhenge as the House of the Deities and Stonehenge as the House of the Ancestors perhaps.