September 14, 2008

• Even back then The Man was always stickin' it to a brother.
• I imagine the peasants had a pretty good view when they were hauling those stones into place.
• Like the Egyptian great works, Stonehenge appears to have been built largely by an elite class, rather than slaves or the hoi polloi. These weren't savages banging rocks together. Many of the discoveries at the site suggests that this was a very special cult center created by a ruling class and the work that went into it was by highly skilled artisans, possibly drawn from quite far and wide in Europe or beyond. So, even though that's a funny joke, the peasants likely had nowt to do with it. Although we're talking about a site that existed in various forms for a couple of thousand years, so that may or may not be true for the totality. I imagine there was a relatively large lower class community involved with trade, supply of food & other materiel during building and later orbiting the ritual activities, but judging by human nature, they probably were kept out of the very special work being done by the high class druids & architects.
• Stonehenge is not and has never been a Druidic artifact. It's very much pre-Druid. Waving another fact at you too; humanity doesn't change that much. If anyone imagines for one instance that the hard yakka of building ol' Stoney (and after laying down all that "keep off the grass" fencing) would have been done solely by architects and the ruling classes - then you need to crawl out of the cave more often. It's akin to seeing Paris Hilton cleaning up her myriad little doggy's poo or Michael Jackson doing his own laundry. Does not happen, would not happen and is another badly skewed piece of non-history colored by too many steeped herbal infusions and some Archaeological balderdash. Holly (even if cut by a golden sickle) can bend a neuron too well, and never mind the prickles! Maybe, several thousand years hence, some Archaeologist will pick up the remains of coke cans from the mounds of waste we leave all over the place and declare with absolute authority that they represent our mystical and spiritual worship of the multiplicity of gods we created to explain what is either unknown to us, or determinedly denied as having any reality. Such as the existence (or not) of Bigfoot, you might say. :D
• I worship Lord Pepsi, you barbarian!
• 1) I didn't say the Druids built it, I said they were associated with activities there. This is not a radical proposal. 2) Discoveries over recent decades at Stonehenge establish without doubt that the builders had highly advanced astrological knowledge and were *not* the average peon, they were from the highest classes. This current discovery underscores that. You can rule out "Archaeological balderdash" if you like, but then you're just left with crank stuff. The cultural group in ancient Britain with this knowledge were the ones later called the Druids. I'm not talking about the golden-sickle waving post-sixties loonies who call themselves druids but who have about as much connection to the originals as Mills & Boon does to Ovid's Metamorphoses, I'm talking about the ancient culture whose knowledge has been largely lost. They were part of the ruling classes of ancient Britain for a couple of thousand years or more. This is backed up by accounts from classical antiquity. My opinion is that it's nonsense to say "Stonehenge has never been a Druidic artifact" because nobody knows for sure. We know little about Druid teachings or knowledge, because the Romans brutally crushed them and enacted a large scale campaign of negative literature about them. But we know they were central to ancient British culture for a couple of millennia and were deeply a part of society in terms of medicine, law, religion. Druids were drawn from the same classes as were kings and chieftans. It is indisputable that they had astrological knowledge of a high order, which is central to the activities at Stonehenge, so to rule them out there is just bonkers, especially given their connection with the kinds of ruling classes whose remains have been actually found at Salisbury Plain and in the Stonehenge site itself. The link to Egypt is this: discoveries in recent years in Egypt has shown that the workers who built the magnificent artefacts were not low class slaves, but well fed, healthy citizens and likely high status. Here's an analogy: if you want to build a highly technological structure that uses the most advanced techniques of your era, say a launch platform for the Shuttle, you don't hire a bunch of fucking farmers to do it, do you? Relative to the culture of 3000 BC Britain, Stonehenge represents a technological sophistication equivalent to Kennedy Space Center, that's how advanced the alignments are. Like Newgrange. The 'official view' is that the Druids had nothing to do with the construction of Stonehenge. The main objection raised by historians against the Druids using Stonehenge is the idea that they only met in forests. This is not actually borne out by any real evidence, and recent research renders it an archaic idea. It comes from a particular translation of a phrase in Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis, but in actual fact he doesn't say they only met in caves or groves, the Latin phraseology can equally mean an artificially constructed site, particularly, it is inferred, isolated from the masses. I recommend Prof. John North's 'Stonehenge, Neolithic Man and the Cosmos', 1996, a very complex work that goes into great detail about the astronomical properties of long barrows, structures closely linked with religious death ritual. The central principle of the Druids' spiritual belief was the immortality of the soul, we are told, and long barrows thus fit well with Druid ritual practice. About fifteen of these burial mounds are grouped around Stonehenge, not even an hour's walk from the site. These would agree with Mela's wording quite well. This is just one piece of evidence in favor of them at Salisbury. Also, if you're going to cast weird aspersons on drug taking influencing rather conservative and long-held academic theories, try to make your posts read like they were composed by something other than a drunken goat. Just a tip.
• Bow, bow, ye peons and ye masses, Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!
• But if that doesn't work, open yer arms to the hoi polloi yet extant... I'm not one for idealism, nor am I an expert in this field, to me mostly bounded by the stories of Henry Treece. Yet and besides all of that, I WOULD bow down if it did any good whatsoever, so far as going back in a time machine worked out forever...
• I don't know what they mean by "open structure". If they mean that it had large openings, I don't think that discounts the possibility of defensive purposes. It would just seem to discount the possibility of hiding it from view. Or it could be that it was hidden from view during construction (so no one could see the aliens build it). We still do the same thing today on construction projects.
• Peasant: Meh, keep your big rocks. I'd rather have tatties and bacon.
• Discoveries over recent decades at Stonehenge establish without doubt that the builders had highly advanced astrological knowledge and were *not* the average peon, they were from the highest classes. Or at least the project managers were.
• Nothing in archaeology or history is established without doubt. This arguing of the merits of one best guess over another is amusing. "Some scientists believe that one explanation might possibly be..." should never be considered anything close to authoratative. And why would they need a 20-foot high fence? How tall were these peasants?
• To make a wild and baseless guess, perhaps the fence wasn't there so much to keep people out, as to create an artificial horizon on the inside. For astronomical purposes, it'd be very handy, to have a cleaned-up and uniform horizon, to keep the sightlines (and resulting calculations) pure, like those guys in Ohio. And I have serious doubts that the priestly class, whoever they were, were the ones doing the very heavy lifting. Directing construction, maybe even the final shaping, sure, but dragging those things from hither and yon? Why would the elite do the gruntwork?
• Whooaaahhh! You've crushed me with your widely researched kick in the opinion, Hank. You've also given me the best laugh I've had in ages. The "drunken goat" comment is a cracker. I shall use it (but only with your permission of course). I'm of the kind featured in that old tune about ants, a ram and a dam. Aries personalities are supposed to be first in line to get things going. In my case, it's first to fall face down in something or over something, often a pile of scat. As a result i'm expert primarily in the art of shit shoveling. I shall read the literature you recommend and eschew "Asterix" as reference material. Cheers ears! :D
• And why would they need a 20-foot high fence? Obvious isn't it? To stop the dinosaurs from escaping.
• And to keep the drunken goats out.
• And to keep the rams in.
• Stone Henge-Hog
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• Nifty!
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• Bluehenge is a toothless old relic however, with all of its stones having been pulled out. Maybe that's why they put a protective fence around its big counterpart, as noted in Hank's earlier post. Assuming bluehenge came first that is. But as homunculus noted before, in the old days there were many.
• Bluehenge is a toothless old relic... Read that wrong for a minute, Dan.
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• Monkeys, I bring you.... *drumroll* BANANAHENGE!
• *worships*
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