While we wait for the “election” to be over with, let’s talk about something that occurred to me while watching a documentary the other day about Stonehenge and all the other megalithic stone circles in Europe.
What everybody goes on about is how the people managed to transport those great big rocks from far away, and no one ever asks why they were there in the first place, because once it was realized that they were astronomical calendars, that told when the solstices were and so forth, that was the end of it. But I’m more interested in the beginning of it.
We know that Stonehenge started out as wooden posts in the ground, and slowly evolved into being the monster that it is today. That’s how it began, with one person, and this is because someone who lived right there and farmed realized that the sun rose and set more toward the south each day as summer waned toward winter and was lower in the sky each day, and set two stakes in the ground, one day, that aligned with the sunrise, and then did this pretty regularly after that until the shortest day had arrived and the sun started back the other way again.
So of course he then wanted to know the longest day, and eventually it rolled around in June. Now he had a stake by itself set off from an line of stakes that aligned with where the sun would be for every day of the year and the two end ones were the most important because they were the solstices.
Then there were the stars, that moved in a circle at night. They needed to be kept track of too, because they changed position in the night sky as the seasons changed, they rose up and moved downward. So the line of stakes became an arc, this way the constellations could be tracked, and the arc became a circle so that not only the repeating six-month cycle could be followed but it could also be coordinated with the motions of the stars.
This was a wonderful tool for this clever farmer, now he knew in advance what to expect from the weather, when planting time was coming, and more exactly when harvest time was near, he no longer had to guess by the clouds in the sky and the increasing coldness in the morning.
It wasn’t long before all his neighbors realized the value of what he had and began visiting him regularly to consult about what the weather might be doing, and they decided to help make his wonderful calendar more permanent than just rotting stakes in the ground. So they brought stones to replace the stakes, and over time the stones were not only replaced with larger and larger ones, but more stakes and more stones were added as both knowledge and the population grew, which in large part was because of the farming success granted by the knowledge that was gained.
Word spread, and other communities began building their own stone circles so they could also have this tool close to home, and these stone circles became gathering places for celebrations, especially at harvest time. They became extremely important to farming communities, they became vital to survival.
It soon became the job of one or a few people to exclusively keep track of each day as compared to the previous years, was it warm on that day last year, and the previous years, did it rain and so on, and by comparing the weather over the years, seasonal trends could be followed. Farmers could be warned that it might snow in a week or there might be a dry spell. These people would have been extremely important, revered, protected and supported by their communities. They were the weathermen.
This is why Europe is covered with about 35,000 stone circles. This is why they evolved from posts in the ground to permanent structures with huge stones often carried long distances. Not because they’re astronomical observatories, which most of them also certainly are, but because of their practical application and their importance to their local communities. The largest stones would have been erected by the largest communities, and that allows us to infer population numbers. Likewise the largest, most elaborate circles.
It would have been an honor to be part of building a new stone circle, the men and women both would have gladly joined in. So that answers the secret of where the workforce came from, it came from everywhere, and willingly and was no doubt done over a period of years. Each year, a goal of so many great stones, even if it was just one a year, to build the new circle that would replace the old small one, that they would be proud of. It was even a status symbol for their community.
This level of knowledge wasn’t passed by word of mouth, there had to be schools where the movements of the sun and stars were taught, along with the lore of past weather events on past days of past years. People wonder what the runes carved into these stones meant. What about runes for Rain, Snow, Hail, Wind? They had to have record keeping because these circles were in use for at least 2000 years. I would guess that the records were marks on flat pieces of wood or parchment, which would explain why none exist now. At one time though, there must have been quite a few places across Europe where these records were stored.
The history of Man is not such a great mystery. Our scientists refuse to accept what they can’t prove and so, keep a dark shroud over our past as if it belonged to them, but what’s obvious is obvious and when you have enough facts, the rest can be assembled from inference simply because we humans aren’t space aliens, we’re us, and we always act in certain ways.
