Stonehenge at dawn
Photograph: Chris Gorman/Getty Images
Rosa's Laws of Theodynamics.
The vast complex of Late Bronze/Early Iron Age monuments, burial chambers and earthworks on Salisbury Plain, in central southern England about which I've written before, continue to remind us how, when a religion and its god(s) disappear into the mists of time and no-one remembers them, unlike a science could be, they cannot be reconstructed from real-world sources, because they were never founded on real-world sources in the first place. They arose entirely in the imaginations of people who lacked the scientific method to discover the truth about the world about them.First Law of Theodynamics
Gods can be created out of nothing and will disappear without trace.
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Third Law of Theodynamics
Gods disappear completely when the number of believers in them reaches zero.
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But to their believers, as we can see by the evidence of the resources they devoted to them, they would have been no less important and no less 'proven' than are the modern gods of present days religions. The evidence for them would have been 'all around them'. It would have been in the 'design' of trees, sunsets and flowers and in the way they always answered prayers like ensuring the sun rose in the morning and the crops continued to grow in the fields, and when they failed this was proof of the failure of their followers to pray hard enough or to believe with enough faith or not having performed the required ritual correctly, or because the god(s) said no, for reasons which could only be guessed at.
Stonehenge itself was built and rebuilt over many generations and may be based on stones relocated from an original site in the Preseli Hills of south-west Wales in about 3000 BC, at about the time Egyptians were building pyramids in which to bury their god-kings.
But, whatever their religion was, and whoever the earliest builders were, or even what their original purpose was, there is emerging evidence that it was not something uniquely British, but was part of an evolving pan-European culture brought to the British Isles by successive waves of immigrants (none of whom, incidentally, were the legendary Druidic priests who arrived very much later and to whom the purpose of the stone circles would have been as much a mystery as they are to us today).
A 5000-year-old 'Towie ball'
Photograph: National Museums Scotland
The lesson from these stones, similar ones of which have been found elsewhere in Europe, is that someone thought it was worth spending time firstly developing the considerable skill to make them in the first place, then the many hours it must have taken to produce each one. This strongly suggests a religious motive and so a symbolic religious significance to the form and design of the stones, and an economy advanced enough to provide the surplus needed to supply the needs of craftspeople who spend their time on essentially non-productive activity such as these stones which would not have had any utility value beyond that of similar stones without the elaborate carvings and decoration.
And again, we can only guess what that might have been as we now know nothing of the imagined power or purpose of these gods or even if there was a pantheon of gods. And yet it was important to their believers for them to devote time and energy to making these artifacts as beautiful and precise as any medieval altar piece, religious icon or illuminated manuscript and supporting the craftspeople who made them.
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