Myth and Magic
In 5800 years time what will our ancestors say about us?
Will they be able to understand the way we live at present, or will they call us savages for plundering the riches of the earth to the detriment of their generation?
Will they be able to decipher any of our writings?
Will the letters of the alphabet still be in use? I think not. Look at our present ‘texting’ language. Imagine getting an article written in that form. I have, for our magazine, and am still waiting for it to be rewritten.
What legacy will we leave to the future, or what will survive to the future of our disposal throwaway society?
When we look at the myth of Newgrange we do not understand fully why our ancestors built this structure, or for that matter what the inscriptions mean. We say the edifice is a ‘passage tomb’ and the inscriptions just, decoration.
If I challenged any of you to make the line of alignment along the ground, along which Newgrange is orientated, I would guarantee very few would even know where to start. We think we are the most intelligent people ever: we invented the GPS (global positioning systems), computers, ephemeris tables, compasses - the list is endless. Yet, even when just moving one of the ancient buildings we got it all wrong. Our modern engineers moved Abu Simbel, during the 1960’s, when the Aswan High dam was being built, but now the sun shines into the building a day later than it should. And they used computers and models to ensure that everything was going to be, perfect!
The recent Time Team investigation of the Stonehenge site has shattered the modern idea that it was constructed with slave labour. As the programme unfolded, it was fascinating listening to the conclusions that they came to based on their scientific findings. The most startling revelation to me was the Time Team concluded that the stones were erected in less than eighteen months. Time Team concluded that the project was achieved with ‘cooperation’ and ‘agreement’. They said, ‘There is no other way this project could have been built in such a short time.’
They can now prove that a vast meeting of tribes was organised for this purpose. Even using today’s machinery and lifting gear I would say that any construction crew would be put to the pin of their collar to construct this site within that time frame, let alone move the huge stones.
When we look almost anywhere else in the world there seems to have been, for want of a better explanation, ‘a technology’ that was able to cut, shape and move massive weights of monoliths, and place them at will, in any position, wherever these individuals wanted. If Time Team is correct, (and I have no reason to say otherwise) then it shows conclusively that our present civilisation has lost something very valuable: how to cooperate for the common good. The commonly held idea that the civilisations which predate our own were made up of savages and only survived on slave labour, is looking very shaky. Cooperation would seem to be the key to the construction, shaping and moving of these giant monoliths. These astounding discoveries turn upside down every conventional theory about early societies.
Here in Ireland we have a great example at Newgrange (see Oscailt December 2007).
Most archaeologists have a problem with Newgrange in that there is no evidence of the habitation of the site at Newgrange or its surrounding area.
It’s almost illogical.
To build such an edifice would have required cooperation and planning, over a considerable time, on a large scale. That is unless they had constructed it earlier; but where? Could these prehistoric people have moved it to its present location from somewhere else? Were these people forced to move it? And what could possibly have motivated them to do it?
Take, for example, the pyramids in Egypt. Archaeologists can now pinpoint where the stone was quarried; where the people involved in the building of the Great Pyramid lived; where the vast kitchens to feed the workers were located; where the master craftsmen were buried. All this is evidence of the physical existence of the people who worked on the job, along with their families. The same is true at Stonehenge, as Time Team have explained.
Because none of this evidence of building, clearing, cutting and scarring of the landscape around Newgrange is in evidence today, then the builders don’t exist, that is the logic that is used! The unfortunate thing is that the edifice/solar indicator, that we refer to as Newgrange, is there in the field for all to see. Someone built it! Was it magic! Perhaps, as Eric Von Daniken proposed in the sixties, it was the gods! Is that the great secret? Whoever it was, it wasn’t ordinary people – according to many books and articles.
“No problem can be solved by the same thinking that created it” Albert Einstein.
Unfortunately, we listen to what we are told: ‘Newgrange is a passage tomb’. Most books and academic works don’t seem to be able to think or visualise anything outside their narrow field of view. I think it needs a different line of thought and reasoning.
When we look at the inside of Newgrange, we can see that some of the roof carvings and support stones are overlapped, indicating that this work was done at an earlier time, before being put into place. Could the whole edifice have been moved and the stones with the overlapped carvings have been misplaced? What a feat of engineering that was if Newgrange was moved.
What modern building or any of our modern day implements that we use, will survive for 5800 years and still be useable and accurate, after that time? Fronts fall off some buildings after twenty years. How many roofs do you know that leak? Newgrange doesn’t leak after 5800 years! I can think of no implement or building which will stand that test of time, and yet we think we are superior to the people who built Newgrange.
Could it have been global warming, spurred on by the final melting of the great glaciers that stretched from Iceland across the North Atlantic, covering parts of Ireland, Scotland and the North Sea 10,000 years ago that made these people move Newgrange?
During 2001 –2003, 2D and 3D ultra scans of the sea floor off the Irish South coast, showed that not only was there the possibility of other gas fields similar to Kinsale but also on the sea bed there were traces of what appeared to be rectangle and square bordered shadows and shapes. This was not what the prospecting companies were expecting. After the 2004 prospecting season one of the companies in an interview said that ‘… operating in 60 -100 meters of water there appeared to be a system of tributaries traced out on the sea floor, for want of a simple description, somewhat like a grey aerial photograph over land.’
In 2006, using a more refined scanning system, along with seismic scans from oil-prospecting vessels, archaeologists were able to piece together a landscape covering 23,000 sq km, stretching from the coast of East Anglia to the edge of Northern Europe. They were able to identify the scars left by ancient riverbeds and lakes, some as large as 25km (15mls) across, salt marshes, valleys, rivers, streams, trees, forest and cultivation of most of what is now the sea floor of the North Sea.
This suggests a phase of global warming on a scale greater than we are experiencing at present. Some scientists have made calculations which show that the vast ice mountains melted over a period of about one hundred years; some say in a shorter time span. Some of the models used show that water could have been seen to rise on a daily basis by about one/two centimetres. This sounds small, but over the period of a year, 365 days, just one centimetre equates to 3.65 meters, and that’s close to 12 feet in old money. If this happened, as is now being put forward, then the people who were living on what is now seabed area would have had little or no time to move to higher ground. Maybe this is the reason we see no sign of habitation or human existence around Newgrange.
This sudden change meant the people would have to move or they would be submerged, together with their possessions.
Regardless of how old it is, or who built Newgrange, the man in the street would agree that the purpose of Newgrange is as a solar indicator, to show the exact moment of the winter solstice. We have seen it on the front page of our newspapers and on television. The sun shines into the inner chamber for about eleven minutes on three days in December. But to make that initial line of the alignment and be confident that it is correct, even using modern equipment, we still get it all wrong. Just how did they do it with such confidence, and precision, not only at Newgrange and numerous other sites in Ireland over 5800 years ago, but also at Stonehenge, the Pyramids, in Peru, Brazil, and Greece – worldwide, in fact?
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones.
But a collection of facts is no more a science than
a heap of stones is a house."
— Henri Poincaré (1854–1912)
So now that we have a ‘heap of stones’ which make a tenuous connection to other sites throughout the world, are we brave enough to make an unbiased assessment of the ‘stones’?
Did they use sophisticated technology, or was it that everyone had the knowledge because they lived under unpolluted skies? As Rev. Bill Darlison has said so many times ‘they understood the motion of the heavens then.’ Could it have been a ‘world-wide’ belief system, religion or faith? It would seem from their stone buildings throughout the world that these ancient people communicated with each other, somehow.
There is only one inescapable conclusion one can come to: these sites were certainly not built as ‘tombs’ or ‘passage graves’. They were for indicating or measuring exactly the motion of the sun and the moon, possibly the planets and even the stars. Based on scientific archaeological findings and historical facts, we can see that these early intelligent civilised people obviously had an extensive technical knowledge of astronomy and sufficient expertise to interpret those observations correctly. Therefore, making a logical deduction, these people’s daily lives would have been similarly civilized, in direct proportion to that accumulated knowledge. The methods our Irish ancestors used show adaptability in the use of available materials, a sophistication and intelligence that is in some ways eons ahead of our own. This solar indicator may be the only surviving building from a society that lived ten thousand years ago, in comfortable homes, cultivated the earth, received treatment in good hospitals, engaged in commercial activity, regarded art and literature, and enjoyed a broad, important cultural heritage. All these are realistic interpretations about the people who built this stone edifice. Yet evolutionists, accustomed to thinking only along materialist lines, prefer to relate stories that are the product of specific dogmas, rather than make rational interpretations compatible with what can be proven scientifically. Their conjecture can never express a definitive, true explanation.
Civilisations appear and disappear
just like specks of dust in sunlight.
Paul Spain
Dublin Unitarian Church October 2009
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