STONEHENGE

ENGLAND

The stone circles stood on Salisbury Plain throughout the long evolution of the Celtic culture in Britain. The earth circle was raised in 3000 BC, and the stone circles about 500 years later.

The monument was constantly revisited and reshaped in antiquity, according to shifting beliefs. It was assumed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it had been a focus of worship by the Druids. It looks as if both Stonehenge and the Druids have been somehow amplified, explained, and authenticated by being thrown together by eighteenth and nineteenth-century antiquarians. A wonderful fantasy image was published in 1815, showing The Festival of the Britons at Stonehenge', hundreds of people form orderly and colorful processions round fhe monument, while cattle are assembled within for sacrifice. There is no archeological support for any of this, but it is possible that the real Druids of the first centuries BC and AD claimed that they were the legatees of Stonehenge, that their predecessors had built it; this sort of political lie is how power is acquired. A similar story could be told about many of the other megalithic monuments that were built in the lands of the Atlantic Celts.

At the start of the twentieth century, a reformed Druidical order decided to “take back” Stonehenge. By the 1960s, Professor Stuart Piggott was writing about “elements of increasing fantasy, as the Druids, now standing charismatically within the Stonehenge horseshoe, became a compelling magnet for many a psychological misfit and lonely crank.”