F Rosa Rubicondior: More Powerful Old Dead Gods of Wiltshire

Monday 22 June 2020

More Powerful Old Dead Gods of Wiltshire

Distribution of features over a composite Lidar and OS profile data derived digital surface model (shaded) with OS 10k overlay © Environment Agency copyright and database right 2019. All rights reserved. Lidar Composite DTM 2m resolution, Scale 1:8000 and 1m resolution, Scale 1:4000; © Crown copyright and database rights 2013 OS 1:10000 Scale and Profile DTM Raster, Scale 1:10K; EDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service (100025252)
A Massive, Late Neolithic Pit Structure associated with Durrington Walls Henge. Internet Archaeology 55.

A major new discovery in the landscape of Wiltshire, England, associated with Durrington Walls, shows the immense power that must have been wielded in the name of some long-forgotten god or gods some 4,500 years ago. The labour-force needed to construct structures like Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and and Durrington Walls indicates an economy and political organization able to provide and command this labour-force as well as to supply it with food - which would need some form of tax on those who were producing it.

This in turn suggests a ruling class that would have needed more than simple force of arms. It suggests an elite ruling with divine sanction, probably in the form of priest-kings and a fearful population who believed the priests and gods were necessary to ensure continuity of the seasons and the success of the crops. It's likely that these structures played an important part in the religious rituals, so there was a strong motive for constructing them.

A paper published in Nature recently provided evidence of the rule of powerful god-kings in Ireland who were probably part of an elite clan of such powerful families across Britain and Europe so we could have had a similarly powerful ruling elite in Britain. The evidence of incest or close-kin marriages in that clan suggests a power and divine status on a par with those of an Egyptian Pharaoh. But whatever the relationship between the religion and the political power, there can be little doubt that religion was behind the construction of these massive structures.

The recent discovery is of a series of massive shafts forming a circle some 1.2 miles in diameter and centred on Durrington Walls. It is assumed these shafts formed some sort of boundary. The rough circle nature of the alignment of these shafts reflect the approximate method used to mark them out by pacing from the centre. This would entail some form of counting. It incorporates one of the earliest known monuments - the Larkhill causewayed enclosure - which predates Durrington Walls by some 1,500 years but which probably still held some religious significance to the builders.

It's not clear whether the purpose of these boundary markers was to act as a distant guide to the sacred site within or to warn against entering it. Durrington Walls and Stonehenge are evidently two major and connected religious structures although opinions differ on how they fitted into whatever religion was practiced at that time. According to this Guardian article, some archaeologists including Michael Parker Pearson at University College London, have suggested that, while Stonehenge, with its standing stones, was an area for the dead, Durrington, with its wooden structures, was for the living.

The problem we have in determining exactly what these religious sites and structures were used for is that we know absolutely nothing about the religion or the gods that were essential to life in those far-off days, because, unlike the Hebrews and a few other religions, nothing was recorded and, being created from nothing by the imagination of humans, there is nothing now from which to reconstruct them.

Like the old long-dead gods of Ireland, Crete and Easter Island, nothing of them now remains. Unlike the stuff of the real material world, gods are created from nothing and disappear without trace, yet the seasons still follow one another, Earth continues to rotate to make the sun appear to rise in the morning and the days still lengthen and shorten in sequence and on time. The crops still grow and continuity is maintained. Just as we have seen during the lockdown, the prayers, magic hand-movements and incantations of the faithful made not one iota of difference, because the natural world never did require the intervention of imaginary gods, ancient or modern, to continue to work.

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