Stonehenge
Ancient megalithic "monuments" are scattered throughout the landscapes of Ireland and Great Britain: menhirs, dolmens, swinging stones and cromlechs. Yet these gigantic stones were placed and ordered according to precise astronomical calculations by apparently primitive populations. But why did communities with a "subsistence economy" feel the need to determine solstices and lunar movements with mathematical certainty? Can we speak of "scientific research" among the ancient Celts of Great Britain and Ireland?
An old manuscript preserved in the Corpus Christi College Library in Cambridge depicts the stone circle of Stonehenge with this caption underneath:
"Stonehenge, near Amersbury in England. In 483 AD the wizard Merlin transported the dance of the Giants from England to Stonehenge"
Let's focus on the expression "dance of the Giants". Throughout the Middle Ages, standing stones, dolmens, menhirs and cromlechs were known throughout Europe under the various names of "breathing stones, wavering stones, turning stones". The archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden, Olaus Magnus, a great "maker" of books, christened those strange stone circles "dance of the Giants", undoubtedly because he saw in them, like the scribe of the Cambridge manuscript, transformed Giants made of stone by the Wizard Merlin during a mysterious ballet. Saint Gildas saw the devil's work there:
"diabolical wonders that surpassed in size and number anything that Egypt had produced."
Let us leave the mythical eras. Already in 1747 Stukeley proposed a bold hypothesis. Stukeley was a strange character. As doctor, he was more interested in the standing stones that abound in Wiltshire than in medicine. From his earliest childhood, he lived among those magical circles of elevated stones, of geometric alignments, and questioned them. He abandoned them only to think about them better. On his return, attracted by their mystery, he asked them on his knees the secret of their symmetrical arrangement. One day, after years of patience, study and meditation, he thought he had discovered it. Here, according to him, the secret:
On Hakpen Hill there is a small circle that precedes an avenue made up of six or eight stones, oriented from east to west. Between Kennet and Avebury, there is another avenue that leads to the circles, but in a north-south direction. If you join these fragments with a curved line and know how to look, you can perfectly distinguish that Hakpen is the head of a snake, the avenue is its body and Avebury is a sinuous part of the body, the tail of which can be found traced - further away - from the two stones of the dolmen called "Shelter of the Long Stone" and located halfway between Avebury and the end of the animal.
Stonehenge and similar cromlechs are therefore evidence of a serpent cult. This ophiolatry needed to be given a name to describe the open-air temples. Stukeley gave them the name "Dracontia". And so, based on many Latin texts, a new cult was invented from scratch.
However, little by little, some initially fortuitous observations, then controlled and compared, led some scholars to think of a relationship between the shape of Stonehenge, its orientation and the course of the sun. It seems that the first to draw attention to this possibility was a certain John Smith in 1771. But, before exposing modern theories and hypotheses on the origin, date and meaning of Stonehenge, it is worth saying a few words about the monument.
Stonehenge is essentially inserted within a circular ritual area, delimited by a moat and a series of vertically placed stone circles to which a wide avenue leads, oriented from north to east and defined by two excavations. In the center of the area other monoliths rise, one of which is over ten meters high. Some stones support lintels that join them two by two. Four of these monoliths, topped by three architraves, still stand as they did originally, right in front of the avenue that leads to Stonehenge.
The outer stone circle bears the name "Sarsen's Circle", an expression whose meaning has been lost and which strictly speaking applies only to the Wiltshire menhirs. The word sarsen it was then extended to the tubercle sandstone with which all the monoliths were built. The diameter of the circle is approximately thirty meters. Thirty monoliths stood on its circumference, today only sixteen remain, which - almost all - reach four meters in height. The architraves that surmount them bring the overall height to 4.75 metres. These architraves, cut in the shape of an arch, are slightly wider at the top rather than at the base in order to counterbalance the effect of the perspective. They were fixed on the stones by means of a nut cut so as to fit into a cove obtained in the thickness of the architrave itself.
Inside the Sarsen Circle there is a second circle of twenty-three meters in diameter: that of the Bluestones - Bluestone Circle - and about twenty of these stones remain, most of them diametrically opposed. Still towards the interior, there are two other orders of stones placed in the shape of a horseshoe, open towards the north-east.
The first, whose construction recalls that of the Sarsen Circle, was originally made up of five groups of two monoliths, surmounted by an architrave. The tallest group reaches a height of ten meters. The second, made up of smaller structures, has nineteen stones, the tallest of which only reaches a height of 2.40 metres.
At the center of the monument, within the second order of horseshoe stones, there is a flat stone about five meters long, lying on the ground. The shape and position have earned it the name "altar stone", a name that nothing can justify.
This is Stonehenge.
Let's note some other details: outside the Sarsen Circle there are two series of holes "Z" and "Y", the first at a distance from the circle that varies between 1.50 and 5 metres. The others at around 12 metres. Their function remains mysterious. There seems to be no doubt that they were excavated after the erection of the monoliths. Remains of stones and pottery were found in them. Finally, completely outside, adjacent to the circular moat, there is a third series of holes, known as "Aubrey Holes", from the surname of the antiquarian who discovered them in 1666.
The latter were carefully dug along the circumference of a circle of 85 meters in diameter and their center never deviated more than 30 or 35 centimeters from this circle. Like holes "Z" and "Y", these too were found full of various remains: wood ashes, residues of flint from cutting stone tools, traces of cremation, etc.
