THE YIN AND YANG OF AVEBURY

 

THE YIN AND YANG OF AVEBURY

 

 When I talk about Stonehenge as a symbolic centre of the cosmos, an Axis Mundi to beat all Axes Mundi, I am expounding an interpretation I proposed more than a year before I began planning "The Eye of Time". In fact, it was having that vision without enough solid evidence to write an archaeological paper, that led me to publish it in a novel. But the interpretation I put forward in my books and stories of Avebury as 'the Place of Balance' was constructed for the novel alone, to explain its differences to Stonehenge in both location and architecture. And yet, the more I use this imagined interpretation, the more it fits the monument. I wouldn't (outside the novels) go so far as to say that Avebury is all about balance, but it certainly seems to have been a significant factor in the design. First, let me explain what I mean by 'balance' (please excuse me mansplaining if you've got this already).

At the core of most, if not all, shamanic religions is the concept that everything in the cosmos has an opposite. Stability is maintained by the way in which these opposites balance or cancel each other out. If someone or some force messes with anything, they risk creating an imbalance, which can lead to a range of consequences for living creatures (although most importantly for humans, from our perspective). These maladjustments can cause illness, or social malaise, or famine, or some natural disaster. When you put it in those terms, it is not so far from the truth, although science tends to see the cosmos as being in a constant state of flux, shifting balance  all the time and forever on the brink of natural disasters. And we (most of us, anyway) believe that human intervention has led to exaggerated imbalances which may now be causing global warming, unstable climates and a mass extinction of frightening proportions.

Part of the shaman's job is to identify what is out of balance in his or her little world and to propose ways to restore the balance. Since it is often the spirit world that is seen as the origin of these changes, it is natural to commune with them, or other friendly spirits, to find out what is going on. The shaman must therefore be familiar with the oppositions in the cosmos, and at what level their effects may be felt, and what parallel opposites can be employed to help restore the balance.

I have talked about these oppositions before (see "A Look At Neolithic Beliefs" below), including the idea that they can be grouped together so that a single symbol may, at different levels, represent more than one pair of opposites. So a tall monolith associated with a stone circle may represent a male phallus, or the masculine aspect in general, or the exterior world, or a pointer to the stars (or the sun or moon), and by association light, life, growth, and sometimes even goodness. In the same way, the 'cove' represents an interior, a cave, and by extension an entrance to the underworld. It may also represent a womb, and thus femininity, birth and of course death. I'm not talking here about different interpretations in different cultures/societies, although this is bound to happen; I refer to levels of significance of the same symbol in a single society. It always worries me when I read that an arrangement of stones means this or that and authors argue between themselves about whose belief is more likely to be correct. The truth may be that most of them are 'true' (in the sense of being useful for understanding) on different occasions, and that more than one projection of the symbolic meaning may be active at any given time.

                        The Cove at Avebury.
 

So how does Avebury fit with this view of the world? Well, almost everything about the site is paired with an opposite. There were two avenues, one leading towards a burial mound (darkness, the underworld, death), the other to another circular monument on a ridge (light, the heavens, and life, perhaps). The upright stones that lined the avenues are also paired off, broad and slim (suggestions have included male/slim/phallic and female/plump/ fertility, but other  interpretations may be equally valid). There are four entrances to the henge and the outer circle, placed opposite one another as if to create an internal balance rather than to align with some celestial activity like some other monuments, such as Stonehenge.

The circle of the bank and ditch and the outer ring of stones may be seen to symbolise a totality, perhaps even the whole medial level of the cosmos, as well as continuity (the cycle of the seasons) and/or stability (continuity within the totality). At the same time, the barriers of the bank and ditch serve to separate the symbolic totality within from the world outside, a principal opposition between sacred and profane. Like Stonehenge, the boundaries separate the microcosm from the macrocosm, and it is hoped that what happens in the microcosm has a corresponding effect in the greater reality outside.

 

                                                Reconstruction of Avebury from the South

Within the main circle there are two smaller rings of stones. One contains a cove, the other once held an obelisk. The latter, it now appears, was erected on the site of an earlier structure, perhaps a building or house. The significance of this is not known, nor do we know if there is anything older beneath the other, northern circle. Finally, the two inner circles are not placed along a diameter of the outer ring; they are almost entirely contained within the north-eastern half of the monument, which they fill, leaving the other half empty. The entrances are positioned to emphasise this bifurcation of the sacred space within the banks. Again, we may not know quite what this opposition symbolised, but it was clearly of some significance. There are probably others, too, but from these few it seems plain that here is a site at which the nature of opposition is demonstrated visually, and that significant oppositions may be worked on, perhaps to restore the balance between them in any given situation.

The inference in the novels and stories that the inner circles were used for initiation ceremonies is, of course, just part of the narrative, as is the idea Weyllan proposes that whilst Stonehenge sits at the Heart of the World, the symbolic centre of the cosmos, Avebury is the fulcrum, the point of balance of the totality, a position which gives it a power almost as pervasive as that of its rival on the Plain. There is no evidence at Avebury to support either hypothesis, and they are included only as illustrations of the sort of practical applications and meanings that our Neolithic and Bronze Age forebears might have put on them.

As the title suggests, this coming together of the symbolism of natural oppositions to create a harmonic whole is often represented today by the forces of Yin & Yang and the eponymous symbol that represents their interplay. In a way, it's a shame the inner circles aren't along a central alignment, so that the monument as a whole could be seen as an embodiment of yin/yang. But then, we can hardly expect an identical rationalisation of the forces of disharmony and balance from such different places, cultures, and times. It is still possible, however, that the circles within represent light and dark forces in their own way, still placed within dark and light elements of the totality in the same way the inner circles of the Yin/Yang symbol are paired with their opposites: the concepts are (or were) universal, even if the visualisation differs across the globe.

 

Yin-Yang: Yin is dark and negative, Yang is light and positive. Importantly, there is Yin within Yang, and vice versa, to create the balance.

 

STONEHENGE AS A NEOLITHIC CALENDAR

 

STONEHENGE AS A NEOLITHIC CALENDAR

 

The controversy over the real purpose of Stonehenge and why it was built continues. Recently a 'new' theory has been published by Prof. Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University. It is in reality a re-think of an old chestnut, the 'Stonehenge is a Stone Age calendar' hypothesis, and like its predecessors does not stand up well to close scrutiny. Or even quite distant scrutiny, come to that.

 Basically, Darvill suggests that "the site was a calendar based on a tropical solar year of 365.25 days". He refers here to the Sarsen phase monument, constructed around 2500 BC. In this interpretation, each of the 30 upright stones in the circle counts as a day marking off a thirty day month. Twelve of these, like the Egyptian calendar, form a year of 360 days. To correct the calendar each year, there are five additional days at the year's end, represented at Stonehenge by the five trilithons. Leap years would be calculated by counting off the four station stones, to give a pretty accurate calendar.

 It's a neat solution, except…

 The main problem is: where are the stones to count the twelve months? Darvill suggests vaguely that they may have been part of a bluestone arrangement, now vanished. We know the various arrangements of the 'bluestones' and none of them contain just twelve stones. None of them are perfectly contemporary with the sarsen circle, either. So why build a calendar out of twenty-ton stones and not add the months until later, and then remove them while the structure is still in use? And since the bluestones belong to a different phase of the monument and presumably had their own significance and symbolism, why use them and not a dozen more sarsens?

 And why, if we are to count one stone per day in a month, do we suddenly switch to special structures of three even bigger stones to count off the five left-over days? Surely there has to be more to the trilithons than this?

 On the subject of phasing, there is no evidence that the four station stones were positioned at the same time as the main circle: most writers put them later (so that the sight lines pass outside the pre-existing circle), although some have said they might be earlier (so that the circle is constructed so as to not interfere with the sight-lines, or the stones were used to plot the centre point of the new monument); very few have theorised that they were built at the same time. Then there are those sight lines. They are so obviously the best reason for the positioning of the station stones it seems trivial to suggest that they were needed, by the people who planned this clock, to count to four. And why were they not incorporated into the main structure?

 Finally there are several sarsens excluded from the master plan. There is one (or was there two?) Heel Stone at the entrance and one (or was it two - or three?) upright stones just inside the circle. What purpose did they serve? 

  Looking at the monument overall, is there any indication at all of significance in the numbers of stones? Well, there are perhaps a few. There were thirty uprights in the sarsen circle, apparently divided into three sets of ten by the slimline stones 11 and 21. The trilithons are, as the name indicates, comprised of three stones each, and there are five of them. 2x5=10, so there may be a correlation with the ten stone segments, albeit a slightly tenuous (no pun intended) one. One Heel Stone (or two?), one Slaughter Stone (or three?), one Altar Stone and one extra-large Trilithon. The trilithon uprights seem to alternate with pairs of rough + smooth. So, almost certainly three is significant, with one, two, five, ten and thirty all having possible symbolic meaning. The only occurrence of four is in the station stones, which seem to be made from two pairs of stones.

 If we turn instead to the first phase Aubrey Holes, which I believe were originally filled by bluestones, there were fifty-six of them. That number itself is significant as the number of years in a great lunar cycle as outlined elsewhere in this blog. You can subdivide that by 2, 4, 7, 8, 14 and 28, numbers which bring to mind calendrical periods in our own calendar. But since no stones or posts survive in situ, we cannot assume that any of these numbers were important to our Neolithic forebears. Dealing with later settings of the bluestones is tricky. We are not sure how many Q&R holes there were originally, nor how many bluestone were set into the circle inside the sarsen temple. The inner feature was altered at least twice using different numbers of settings. Significantly, none of these comprised just twelve stones, so we are still missing our counter for the twelve months of Darvill's calendar.

One more thing about those months. Why did our farming forebears feel the need to create an artificial month of 30 days with three 10-day 'weeks', when they had a perfectly usable lunar month of 28/29 days already? A natural month that is can easily be divided into two periods of 14 or 15 days (waxing and waning moon) and with little effort, into 'weeks' of 7 or 8 days. These divisions would have been adequate and quite accurate enough for any timekeeping needed for a rural community or tribe. And they would hardly need to rationalise differences between the lunar and solar year: they could just choose which of the solsticial days is the start of the new year and adjust their farming routine by about a week each month. It wouldn't have been beyond our ancestors to do that, and less bother than dealing with months which never seem to self-correct.

 Darvill has looked at the numbers, seen a few passing similarities to the Egyptian calendar, and thrown together a house of cards. Egypt was an urbanised state with a complex professional priesthood and bureaucracy. They needed to tally the passing of each day and to calculate and plan for major events involving co-ordinated effort from various groups that all needed to come together on the same day. What evidence is there for a similar need among the late Neolithic people of southern Britain? The answer is that there isn't any.

 So there was no need to build a calendar from massive stone blocks, and whilst they worked so hard to move and shape the stones, they forgot to include key elements of the calculation. The theory also fails (like the 'health-spa' idea that was Darvill's last theory) to explain a single one of the many other stone circles and henges in the British Isles.