Eternal Idol

About a year ago, I posted up a series of detailed articles dealing with Pytheas of Massilia and his description of a “notable temple, circular in shape” that he’d seen during a visit to Britain in or around 350 BC. I identified Stonehenge as the temple he referred to, while I went on to identify the nearby Vespasian’s Camp as the City of Apollo he’d described.

This was reported in various newspapers and reproduced all over the internet, but in the ensuing twelve months, I’ve not seen or read anything to make me think that I was mistaken in what I wrote, although I’d be blissfully happy if anyone could point out any single error I made when I put together the evidence. A week or so ago, I wrote to someone who’s a notable scholar in his field, who was kind enough to reply in great detail to my enquiry, which concerned the origin and antiquity of certain words that I thought might possibly have a bearing on Stonehenge’s function in prehistory.

As it turns out, my surmises were completely mistaken, so it was good to be able to rule out what would have been an investigative dead end that would have shed no light at all on Stonehenge. It was satisfying to receive such a detailed response and I immediately wrote back to express my gratitude, but I was taken aback by a line in the original reply that had been added almost as an afterthought, saying, in as many words, “…I’m not at all sure that Pytheas’s account refers to Stonehenge, as opposed to any other possible round building in the whole of the ancient British isles!….)

At times like this, I sometimes wonder I bother acknowledging the existence of an ‘academic elite’, but then I occasionally have a look at the statistics on this site, which show me that thousands of people visit every week and hundreds of people visit each day, many of whom spend a great deal of time studying its content. I don’t mind if this is the only way you make your presence known and I’m very flattered as well, but if someone’s got something to contribute by way of pointing out where I’m mistaken or else by offering a train of thought or information that others can share, then please post up a comment and that way, we’ll all profit.

So, my Pytheas posts of last year identified Stonehenge as a place of kings, while I also pointed out that Vespasian’s Camp possesses Bronze Age and Neolithic features, which led me to think that the connection between Stonehenge and royalty went back far beyond Pytheas’ time. With this in mind, it was very pleasing to read the press releases of a few weeks ago, which dealt with the results of the dating tests on the cremated human remains from the earliest phases of Stonehenge.

You can study the details for yourself on the various links, but when some very clever and perspicacious archaeologists concluded that Stonehenge had been a place connected with royalty in its earliest phases, it’s fair to say that I felt very pleased indeed that I’d published my features on Pytheas over a year before, which came to the same conclusion, but without the benefit of a huge budget, access to Stonehenge-related remains and all the other resources possessed by archaeological institutions and major television channels.

What was my method? Heinrich Schliemann decided to believe that every last word in Homer’s Iliad was true and as a direct result, he discovered what was thought at the time to be the legendary city of Troy. If such a method was good enough for Schliemann, then it’s certainly good enough for me, while it has the added benefit of “doing no harm” inasmuch as a study of myths and stories isn’t going to damage Stonehenge or its environs in any way, unlike some of the archaeological investigations that have been carried out there over the years. Very briefly, I’ve got good reason to believe that looking closely at certain stories and legends will prove to be an exceedingly profitable line of enquiry as far as Stonehenge is concerned and if the posts on this site seem intermittent, it’ll be because I’m working on two major stories, for want of a better way of putting it.

I already have all the material for the first, thanks to the exceedingly generous co-operation of an expert in his field based in America, but the second looks as if it’s going to be like pulling teeth as far as getting assistance from the relevant experts is concerned. I found one possible source that initially looked promising, but on closer inspection, the majority of contributors to the site chose to describe themselves as ‘distinguished scholars’, which made me shudder. Three weeks down the line and I’ve not received a reply, so the second story I’ve referred to might take a while to materialise, but it’ll see the light of day come Hell or High Water. If there’s the remotest chance that these legends, myths and stories can thrown the faintest possible light on Stonehenge, then they’re well worth investigating, but it’s easier said than done.

Is my method unsound? Apparently not, because in the first instance, I came to a firm conclusion about Stonehenge that was later backed up by others far more knowledgeable and experienced than me. Furthermore, this method of paying serious attention to legends and myths about Stonehenge is at the cornerstone of the investigations by Professors Wainwright and Darvill, who, judging by the various reports on the BBC, are very interested indeed by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s descriptions of some of the Stonehenge stones possessing healing properties.

Apart from anything else, however, these gentlemen fail to distinguish between the healing properties the stones are said to have possessed when they were on Mount Killaraus and the well-defined, secondary use to which they were put when Stonehenge was erected on Salisbury Plain as a monument to the 460 dead British nobles. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account contains no less than seven specific references to Stonehenge being a monument to the dead built on the order of kings, Aurelius and Uther, but I’ve already been through this in painful detail on a previous post entitled “Merlin has risen from the grave.”

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account carries faint but unmistakable echoes of what Pytheas had to say about this notable place being intimately connected with royalty, while it’s hard to see how anyone could reasonably dispute that Stonehenge was a also place of dead, bearing in mind the vast barrow cemetery that surrounds it and the huge amount of human remains that have been discovered inside the monument. Be all that as it may, it seems that Professors Wainwright and Darvill remain convinced by the “healing stones” theory and by what Geoffrey of Monmouth had to say about these matters, although his full account specifies that it was a place of the dead that was intimately connected with royalty, an idea echoed in the aforementioned press releases and conclusions. Pytheas of Massilia said something almost identical and if you take into account all the barrows around Stonehenge and the cremated remains inside it, then that’s three separate enquiries all coming to pretty much the same specific conclusion.

I might perhaps add the other article I wrote about the Stonehenge Sentinel, where I speculated about the likelihood of some ritual at Stonehenge in prehistory that closely resembled the murderous ceremony that took place at the Temple of Diana at Nemi in Italy in remote antiquity. The incumbent priest of this temple was known as Rex Nemoriensis, or the King of the Grove, which would once more account for or affirm the aspect of royalty, while the matter of the dead at Stonehenge is self-evident.

Otherwise, on this link, you’ll see a video clip with Professor Wainwright stating his opinion that Stonehenge was the Lourdes of its day, so it’s worth looking into this a bit more deeply. Interestingly enough, it seems that the first occasion when the place came to prominence was when it was besieged by a king, Charlemagne, in the eighth century AD, but it was to be over a thousand years after this before it began to find world fame. And how did it do this? By the appearance of what are officially termed apparitions, in this case of the Virgin Mary, and while it may be a theological point as to whether Mary is actually dead or not, something I’m not prepared to argue, the fact remains that apparitions are almost always connected with the dead.

As to any healing properties that Lourdes may possess, the young girl who saw these apparitions in 1858 never made any claim that the site was to be connected with healing. To be sure, stories of miraculous cures soon began to circulate, but as I write this, there have been an estimated 200,000,000 visits to Lourdes as opposed to 67 officially-attested cures, which doesn’t strike me as a very impressive success rate. I don’t doubt that there have been many visits to the shrine that have resulted in sufferers feeling cured or actually being cured, but Lourdes is primarily a devotional site where any experience of improved health is a welcome by-product of a visit whose primary purpose is one of veneration of an apparition. I’m certainly not knocking Lourdes in any way, not least because an elderly relative of mine once visited the place some years ago; sadly, this visit did not result in a cure, but the man I’m referring to felt uplifted and had the dread of death removed from him, something I don’t doubt that many other people have experienced, so this is all to the good as far as I’m concerned. Nonetheless, if we’re to regard Stonehenge as a healing shrine, then we could do far better than compare it to Lourdes.

I noticed on this same link, which contains another trailer for the forthcoming Timewatch documentary, that my former colleague Dr Jackie McKinley is seen speaking about the Amesbury Archer, who was coincidentally named as the King of Stonehenge when he was discovered in May 2002. You might think that this mention of a king in connection with Stonehenge would go some good way towards affirming the aforementioned notion of the monument being connected with royalty, but from what I can see on the clip, far more emphasis is being placed on his wounded knee than on his status as a king, something that was once the subject of worldwide news.

Now, this is fair enough as far as I can see, because this physiological aspect of the man’s remains was mentioned at length in the BBC’s Meet the Ancestors special that was made shortly after the discovery. It would be wrong to anticipate precisely how Timewatch & Co are going to work this into the theory of healing stones at Stonehenge, but it’s something I’ve not been able to stop brooding over.

There seems to be no question that this man suffered a wound to his left knee, possibly a year or two prior to his death. From what I’ve seen and heard, this wound would have made walking an increasingly agonising process, although we can’t be 100% sure, apparently, whether he actually lost his kneecap or patella when he was injured or whether this bone was somehow overlooked during the course of the meticulous, well thought-out and completely professional excavation that resulted in this man’s remains being brought to light.

Nonetheless, we know that he originated from somewhere in continental Europe and ultimately made his way to the Stonehenge region, while I don’t doubt for a moment that he was intimately familiar with a monument that was apparently under construction when he died nearby in or around 2,300 BC. So, it might be enlightening to ask ourselves a few questions about this or to otherwise think out loud, so if anyone’s got any relevant contributions to make, I’d be fascinated to hear them.

The first scenario is that this man received his injury somewhere in Europe and such was the renown of Stonehenge as a healing shrine at the time that he hobbled all the way here. If this indeed happened, then it clearly failed to cure him.

A second scenario is that Stonehenge had a wide reputation as a healing place, but the man who was to be known in our time as the King of Stonehenge travelled here from continental Europe for some other reason, because he was fit and well and had no need of healing. At some point during his stay in the Stonehenge region, he received this crippling injury and travelled to Stonehenge itself, but again, he failed to be cured.

A third scenario is that Stonehenge had no connection whatsoever with healing, so the man known as the King of Stonehenge either received his injury as a result of some other ceremony connected with the monument, or else it was a complete accident with no connection to the monument.

All of which makes me wonder if the senior Boscombe Bowman, one of the individuals discovered in May 2003, will receive a mention? As you can find out for yourself, an examination of this man’s remains showed us that like the Archer or King of Stonehenge, he too received a crippling injury to his left leg. This wound healed, but resulted in the one leg being notably shorter than the other, meaning that two prominent metalworkers connected with the same monument at the same time were walking around as best they could with pronounced limps in the same leg.

An analysis of the Bowman’s tooth enamel tells us that he most likely originated somewhere in south Wales, but if we go through the list of possible scenarios, a surprising picture emerges.

The first scenario is that this man received his crippling injury elsewhere, but such was the allure of Stonehenge as a healing place that he hobbled for miles to get there. Judging by the nature of his severe injury i.e. a complete fracture of the thigh bone, this would have been well-nigh impossible. So, this suggests that he received this injury somewhere in the Stonehenge region; he went on to recover from it and Stonehenge may possibly have played some part in this, but there’s always the possibility that something at Stonehenge actually caused the break in the first place. It may have been construction work or another form of accident, or as I’ve suggested, it may have been some ceremony at Stonehenge that caused this wound to the man’s upper left leg and this may have also been the case with the Amesbury Archer.

Alternatively, the Bowman may have received his injury in his native Wales, while he may have recovered from it during a stay at the Preseli Hills, which were apparently renowned for their healing springs. In which case, this rules out a pilgrimage to Stonehenge as a healing shrine. All in all, I must admit that the idea of Stonehenge as a healing place seems pretty doubtful to me, while I can’t help but wonder how the Stonehenge Sentinel, the man filled with arrows in 2,300 BC, fits into this picture. A failed experiment in early acupuncture or lancing boils?

It’s hard to make sense of it all, but on balance, I’d go with what the legends have to say and we’ll just have to wait until the Timewatch documentary is broadcast to see how convincing the case is for Stonehenge having been a place of healing. If nothing else, it’ll be worth seeing a theory pursued to its fullest possible extent, with no stone left unturned, so to speak.

As I noted in the post entitled “Temple of Coelus?” it seems that archaeologists are now having to give some serious thought to the idea of Stonehenge being used, altered or somehow rearranged by the Romans. As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m solely interested in the truth about the place and while I’m highly doubtful about the idea of it being a healing shrine, I wouldn’t completely rule it out. It’s an article of faith that there are no Roman references to Stonehenge, but I know of a validated Roman inscription that’s currently on display that pretty much spells out a link between healing and Stonehenge, to my mind, although I’m not on the Timewatch payroll. I might be a million miles wide of the mark, but I’d be amazed if it wasn’t included in the forthcoming Timewatch documentary because it seems to me to be to be far more convincing than any other arguments I’ve heard for the connection between Stonehenge and healing. Still, it would be wrong to spoil any surprise that the makers of this documentary have in store, so we’ll just have to wait and see what appears on the small screen.

Finally for now, the words “Wounded Knee” bring to mind the infamous site in South Dakota, America, where a massacre of Lakotah Sioux Indians took place on December 29th, 1890. It’s not hard to imagine some enterprising archaeologist in the distant future discovering the remains of men, women and children suffering from a variety of injuries, then finding that the place was once known as “Wounded Knee”. If our archaeologist did some delving into the folklore, he’d presumably find mention of Medicine Men at some point, which would lead him to believe that he’d stumbled across some renowned place of healing to which people had travelled in ages past to be cured of their various wounds. It would make sense of a kind, but if he took the trouble to unearth the entire story in all its sorrowful, hideous detail and not merely be satisfied with the healing part, he’d inevitably discover that the “Kings of the Wild Frontier” had been involved and that it had been a place of violent, lingering death. Not healing.

Words by Dennis Price.

Categories: Archaeological discoveries 2008, Bluestone, Lost City of Apollo, Pytheas of Massilia, Stonehenge, Stonehenge Sentinel
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