Archive for December, 2009
I had many reasons in 2009 for feeling very happy and very proud. I had thought of listing them, but it seemed wrong, somehow, while most of them are documented on this site in any event. While not everything went to plan, I can’t complain, so I hope that you all had an equally satisfying year as well.
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Celebratory Mass at Stonehenge?
1:20 am
Eternal Idol was set up originally as a site for providing original information on Stonehenge. From the very start, I intended to make public information, events and theories that weren’t necessarily to be found on other more mainstream sites, but I also wanted to try to chronicle everyday events there.
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Silent Night, Holy Light?
4:15 pm
The photograph above was taken in the early hours of Christmas morning, 2001. I’ve visited Stonehenge on literally hundreds of occasions and I’ve seen thousands of images of the ruins over the years, but this is without doubt the single most tantalising and evocative picture of the monument that I’ve ever gazed upon.
I first became aware of this picture’s existence a few years ago, so I’m extremely grateful to Jasmine Bonning, Director of Archaeosophia, for succeeding where everyone else had failed, in managing to track down the original and its owner.
Jasmine has long been aware of my interest in Stonehenge, and I’d also told her about the curious phenomenon whereby the stones sometimes seem to ‘draw down starlight’. I had been told about this years ago by English Heritage custodians at Stonehenge, when I used to live on Salisbury Plain and I visited the ruins on a regular basis over the course of a decade.
I witnessed the subtle effect of the stones somehow seeming to ‘draw down starlight’ in 2007, when English Heritage kindly allowed me private access to the monument after dark as part of an official group studying astronomical alignments there, and I also examined the phenomenon at some length in my book “The Missing Years of Jesus“, on pages 127 & 128.
In brief, Jasmine discovered that this haunting photograph had been taken at Stonehenge in the early hours of Christmas Day, 2001, by a Mr Onizuka, who lives in Kumamoto city, Japan. This gentleman had then transferred the rights to Professor Nobuhiro Yoshida, President of the Japan Petrograph Society, International University of Hiroshima, and National Representative for the International Federation of Rock Art Organisations, or IFRAO, & the International Council of Monuments and Sites, or ICOMOS.
Professor Yoshida believes that this photo shows ‘geoluminescence’ or another property he calls ‘hormesis‘, while ‘Earth lights’ and related phenomena have been studied in great depth over the years by Paul Devereux and the various members of the Dragon Project.
Harsh necessity forces me to keep this post much briefer than I would have ideally liked, sadly, but I’m sure I’ll return to it another time. I’m not an expert on photography, so I cannot decide precisely what the picture shows, but of all the images I’ve ever seen of this iconic British monument, it is by far and away the most striking one and it made an instant impression on me. This alone makes it worth presenting to the world, to my mind.
This is a time of year when many of us are drawn to thinking of the Magi, ‘Guiding Stars‘ and other celestial apparitions that have long possessed the power to evoke wonderment. Stonehenge itself is surely the epitome of an ancient structure with the ability to call forth feelings of fascination and awe, so I’m very grateful to Professor Yoshida for allowing me to reproduce this curious photograph that combines ‘fires in the sky’ with the most mysterious prehistoric ruins known to man.
Mirabile visu.
On that hopefully uplifting and entrancing note, my warm and sincere thanks to everyone who has visited Eternal Idol in 2009, and I wish you all a very merry and enjoyable Christmas.
Invictus
6:14 pmSol Invictus
8:53 pm
I would like to echo a sentiment expressed by my friend Talla earlier this evening; we all choose to ignore or celebrate the Winter Solstice in our own way and I can’t think of a better way of expressing what I think of this day:
“Sol Invictus! Happy birthday to the Unconquered Sun! Everything good to my friends and despair to my enemies!”
The wonderful “Sol Invictus” picture is due to the kindness of Marie-Lan Nguyen, Wikimedia Commons.
Earlier this morning, a Winter Solstice ceremony was conducted at Stonehenge by Frank Somers, the leading Stonehenge Druid. There’s some confusion over the timing of the Winter Solstice, so Frank turned up on a freezing Salisbury Plain so that those who had travelled to Stonehenge on this day could witness and take part in a ceremony among the ruins, if they wished.
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Dawn of the Magicians
9:33 pm
It has long struck me that, when pondering the various alignments and arrangements that are discovered in the landscape, there are three immediate, simultaneous and clear-cut reactions to such ‘revelations’, assuming of course that a wide enough cross-section of readers become aware these things.
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One of Eternal Idol’s primary functions has always been to allow a platform or a voice to those many groups or individuals who are otherwise ‘disenfranchised’ or excluded by what can often be the rarefied and exclusive world of professional archaeology, especially in Britain. The kind of people I have in mind are Druids, those with an interest in astronomy, those with an interest in dowsing, amateurs, metal-detectorists – almost anyone who’s not a professional archaeologist, I suppose.
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This post may well be a curiosity and nothing more, but as it is something that’s intrigued me for a long time, I felt it was well worth sharing with others. At the same time, someone ‘out there’ might be able to assist me with the facts, because I’m not entirely sure of the proper title of the painting above.
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