MEGALITHOMANIA 2019
Stoners’ Glastonbury gathering
What have megaliths to do with a Journal of Strange Phenomena? The rationalist might say ‘not much’. A more insightful truth lies in myth and contemporary legend. Prehistory, by definition, as far as human culture goes, is a blank slate – an invitation to imagine through the divination of remains what on Earth the ancients were up to. But the question goes further. One of the great myths says that our ancient ancestors were key-holders to a ‘lost’ wisdom, pockets of knowledge lost in the folds in the rush to Enlightenment. Hence the relationship of ancient and ‘New Age’ – lost wisdom translates to new science. This is thought to manifest – as phenomena – mostly around special or ‘sacred’ places, places of power, so many of which are marked by stone circles and other megalithic monuments.
A way of drawing out these insights, if that’s what they are, is through phenomenology, sensations gained from our own bodily experience of place. One end of this spectrum is to treat place as a perceptual space performed with the eyes and feet, what archaeologist Miles Russell described as a nice long walk with your eyes open. In the last two decades this has become an accepted approach within academic archaeology. The spirit of place is always fluid and susceptible to lived experience, at which point place and space become fused. At the other end is speculative fiction, or, let’s say, radical future imaginaries, which the rationalist might call ‘bollocks’. Here there be giants, long-skulled princesses, aliens, leys…
Megalithomania, held lately at Glastonbury Town Hall, successfully captures all the colours and subtle overlapping nuances of this spectrum.
Until now I’d managed to avoid this event; I’d heard enough New Age counterfactuals at crop circle gatherings to last a lifetime, and with the same faces involved I didn’t think it would be any different. As croppie Michael Glickman stated at the first Megalithomania conference in May 2006, if not a love story there is at least a flirtation between stone circles and crop circles. Thankfully, my anxieties were relieved by the opening speaker, Anthony Murphy, who delivered an educated and engaging account of his travels around the Boyne Valley, home to the grand Newgrange passage tomb, part of an emerging complex of Neolithic sites in the Brú na Bóinne landscape. It was Murphy who recorded, last summer, crop marks of what has become known as ‘dronehenge’, which in turn led to the discovery of other latent marvels nearby.
Outside at the break, a man stopped me to talk about the Great Pyramid. He told me his name but that he prefers to go by Crazy Rainbow. He had found new info about how the monument was built and wanted to tell others from the podium, but the organiser refused to see him to talk about this. So he’d give an impromptu lecture on the steps at lunchtime, he said; it would be Megalithomania’s first fringe event. I liked that. Later, as I left for lunch I heard him berating people for not listening, for our blindness to his discoveries.
A pyramidiot, our rationalist might have called him. But not me, for I too have grown out of that indoctrinated rage for explanation. Explanationism, John Michell called it. Perhaps it was crop circles that taught us, in their roundabout way, that confronted by the mystery of creation a productive route to learning is to view material in terms of art criticism, which may be understood as the imaginative re-experiencing of creation or perception on the part of the creators. This avoids the problems created by determinate evaluation, not least within archaeology, which, after all, is the sister of anthropology.
A good example of this was Andy Burnham’s reading of a passage from The Old Stones, which he edited, written by archaeologist Vicki Cummings about the mystery of dolmens. Dr Cummings sensibly takes issue with received wisdom that describes dolmens as tombs – or ‘burial chambers’, as the brown signs say. They may well have been used to house the dead at some point but, she argues, it makes more sense that they were conceived to demonstrate tribal prowess at raising and supporting massive stones so that they may be seen, and thus intended to elicit wonder in those gathered (such a feat would have required gatherings). A risk, of course, was collapse, and there is evidence of such failures, left in situ – abandoned; strange for a stone box, if that
was the intention. What we are really considering here is something akin to the original meaning of aesthetics – a more visceral, numinous experience of art than the cerebral 18th century German interpretation.
The first day was rounded off by two key speakers. Paul Devereux gave an overview of his research into archaeoacoustics, including his discovery of the 110 Hz effect in chambered Neolithic monuments. This and his earlier work with entoptic imagery and a ‘prehistory of psychedelia’ (also earthlights and straight-line mysteries) are no longer considered part of a radical fringe. He was followed by archaeologist Julian Richards with an informative talk about ancient DNA and isotopic analysis, and the inherent problems in answering the question: who built Stonehenge?
The second day began with our host, Hugh Newman, talking about the trips he’s made around Central America, Egypt, and Europe, looking at ancient polygonal and cyclopean walls, and their mythical association with giants or gods. These are impressive constructions, and their spread across cultures is surprising – but rather than pointing to a single source, might this not instead suggest the techniques involved were common practice, all within the bounds of human ken? I keep hearing that no mortar was used, but is this necessary with megaliths? It wasn’t used at Stonehenge either. Nor is there much need for exotic technology, which we were assured “has been documented in the Old Testament and elsewhere”.
My old friend Jürgen Krönig followed with a talk on the same subject, but by now I’d realised that there were too many interesting talks to catch them all, and I slipped out to see what Crazy Rainbow was up to.
The John Michell Memorial Lecture, titled Number, Reality and the Prehistoric Origins of Measure, was given by Adam Tetlow. Like John Martineau before him, Adam is a Master’s graduate of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, where he teaches on aspects of geometry, number, and harmonics. Interestingly, he launched into talking about Trickster figures – a warning hidden in plain sight. The first trap I almost stepped in was a reference to the importance of precision in measure. Blondlot’s n-rays came to mind, measurable to the ultimate nth degree of nothing. Mathematics is amazing – not least as an esoteric art form – but to assert that “the Earth was surveyed 8,000 years ago” on the basis of numerical relationships found in the stone rows at Carnac is a bit rich. Suddenly I was transported back to late 1991, to the Assembly Rooms around the corner, listening to the man himself talking at a Cornference about ratios between the Earth’s circumference, and the Moon’s, and the Hermetic Barbary Castle agriglyph. But no one can criticise this angle for its inelegance. With John Michell’s contributions to creative culture, and that of his followers, it is sometimes tricky to determine fact from the counterfactual conditions that act upon people as (and are often indistinguishable from) facts, and are marshalled to give intellectual strength to an alternative position. This level of grass roots legend is admirable stuff, and it works as art on so many levels, not least that of pure reverie. Better that than having to conform to an orthodoxy which would exclude or reject alternative approaches.
My weekend was complete with Steve Marshall talking about his Avebury Soundscapes album, the addendum to his book Exploring Avebury: The Essential Guide. So thorough was his research for the book that it would not all fit in, so he created a website (http://exploringavebury. com), which is an excellent resource. But even this doesn’t touch on an important side to Avebury that is often overlooked by archaeologists: the atmospheric, mystical qualities of ritual landscapes. This isn’t something Marshall finds easy to write about – so while music seems an odd leap, it’s his indigenous terrain and comes more naturally as a way of expressing this sensorial experience. And, entertaining as the music is, what is most interesting about it is how it puts across archaeological ideas in a different way, as if looked at peripherally, capturing the essence of ‘imaginative re-experiencing of creation or perception on the part of the creators’ that I referred to earlier.
Having already reviewed Avebury Soundscapes (FT361:6061), I won’t go into detail about how Marshall’s music opens valuable insights into interpreting Neolithic sites; suffice to say the same applies to much of the leftfield material at Megalithomania. It was yet another welcome reminder to remain sceptical of my own scepticism.