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.

 

A LOOK AT NEOLITHIC BELIEFS

 

A LOOK AT NEOLITHIC BELIEFS

Across all the Late Neolithic tribes and clans in "The Eye of Time", there is a very similar set of religious beliefs. Their universe is populated - and influenced, if not controlled, by spirits who inhabit both animate and inanimate objects (animism) and with whom humans must deal in order to have a say in the way their world unfolds around them. The way they do this is through part time religious practitioners called "seers" (shamans, witch doctors, 'clever men', & medicine men in various recent tribal societies), and they achieve  this through trance visions and spirit journeys in which they can talk with both natural and ancestral spirits to heal or understand both medical and social illness. Behind all this there would be a cosmic life-force or energy that powers existence (animatism) and which both seers and spirits use to enhance their powers and abilities  (yes, this is exactly 'the Force' in Star Wars).  

Anthropologists have recorded this belief system among hunter-gatherer and agricultural tribal societies across the world from Siberia and the Canadian Arctic to the southern tips of Africa, South America and Australia. The question is, how far back can it be traced? Despite localised practices and the unstructured nature of the religion, the core beliefs and cosmology are remarkably similar across the globe, which might suggest a very ancient origin for the concepts.  But finding clear evidence for particular religious beliefs in prehistory has never been easy.

In the late 1960s, an archaeologist in South Africa, David Lewis-Williams, put forward a theory that the stone age rock art of the region was a representation of shamanic trance experience among the San hunter-gatherers who had painted it. It took him more than a decade to persuade his contemporaries that his was a valid approach, at which point he began to offer a similar interpretation for European Palaeolithic cave art. I'm not sure he ever really won that round, but his theory is at least now considered along with longer established interpretations by many European archaeologists.

According to Lewis-Williams, religion is the way in which we interpret, through our cultural filters, the neurological signals our minds create when we enter altered states of consciousness (asc). Our brains are "hard-wired" to produce these signals that include dots, hatching, zig-zags, and spirals. We all experience these in dream states, daydreams, migraines and sometimes in fevers, but some people are able to bring on an intense asc, including hallucinations, through mind-bending drugs, sensory deprivation, or rhythmic self-mesmerism (i.e. trancing). In small-scale hunting societies these people can become shamans – religious practitioners who journey through the asc into a separate reality (the same one Castaneda was on about, whether or not he actually experienced it) which they interpret as the spirit world.

He suggested that there are several intermediate stages between full consciousness and full trance: The lightest asc brings out the geometrics listed above, with sounds such as buzzing and the swishing of wind or water. As the consciousness slips further towards trance, the mind begins to interpret these designs as more familiar objects: bees, snakes, fishing nets, animals, and ladders. Then comes a significant transition, accompanied often by the sensation of passing through a vortex or tunnel (as in near-death experiences, another form of asc) before emerging on the "other side", where the images have become real. Lewis Williams reckoned that almost all prehistoric art in Europe, America, Australia and Africa could be seen as images representing these transformations. He further cited the illustration  of a limited range of animal species in the art of any region as evidence that these were not simply hunting scenes or pictures of everyday events. He held that the artwork depicted these asc experiences, either to share them with other shamans, to explain them to other people, and/or to aid the shamans to find their way to the correct mind-set and enter the spirit world on subsequent occasions. In many traditions, the shift into other realities is accompanied by physical changes, in which the shaman 'becomes' a spirit animal for the journey (Figs 1 & 2). The shift is also sometimes likened to 'dying' or 'drowning' and Lewis Williams has frequently drawn attention to examples of  these scenarios in prehistoric art.

Fig 1: Therianthrope (half animal/ half human) in Game Pass, Natal Drakensberg. The figure is seen as a shaman transforming to an antelope - the head & hooves are already gone. His hair stands on end as an indicator of trance.

Fig 2: European cave painting generally accepted as a shaman: is he wearing a 

skin or is he a therianthrope too? Note he is also "bleeding from the nose" (DLW) 

a common side effect of trance.

Unlike Castaneda, he never says (or denies) that these other 'realities' exist, but simply posits that they were very real to the people of the time. These beliefs would have formed an integral part of their cosmos, the parts and totality of which were often reflected in art, architecture (the symbolic organisation of space) and ritual activity (such as burials).

Finally, Lewis-Williams turned his attention to more complex societies. In 2005 he published “Inside the Neolithic Mind” with David Pearce. In this work the authors took as examples sites in the Near East (Nevali Cori, Jericho, Catal Hoyuk, and Gobekli Tepe) and in the British Isles (Bru na Boinne, including Newgrange,  and Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales) to show how the art and architecture reflected a continuation of similar beliefs beyond hunting societies.

The idea was that, as with the earlier cave art, the entoptic (mind-created) images at tombs like Newgrange and Bryn Celli Ddu were used by shamans to focus their minds on achieving trance states to commune with the ancestors in the tomb. Not all tombs had this artistic element, but the dark interior, like the darkness of a cave, would add to the sensory deprivation used to boost asc transformations and communication with the spirit world. Lewis-Williams and Pearce's work is a pretty academic thesis, well supported by ethnographic observations throughout, and too long to deal with in detail here, but I would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject as essential reading, whether you end up believing it or not.

 In Neolithic Britain there was a widespread tradition of communal burial for a selected elite of the population. These people were buried in Long Barrows, Portal Dolmens, or Passage Graves (in different parts of the country) that were regularly revisited and where the ancestral bones were handled or moved around during rituals at key times of the year (summer & winter solstice etc). There were no grave goods to indicate status or power, and the bones were often mixed up, or stored by bone type rather than together as skeletons. It seems that what was important was not the individuals, but the group they belonged to.

Around some of these tombs – the Passage Graves in Scotland and Eire especially – is some wonderful abstract art (Figs 3 & 4). This shows zigzag lines, diamonds, chequer patterns, concentric rings and spirals. The long barrows of Western England tend to be art free zones, but one, Stoney Littleton, has a large spiral ammonite set into the wall next to the entrance to the burial chamber. All these images may be interpreted in terms of the neurological effects of asc: they are the geometric shapes that people see in migraines, the early stages of trances, near-death experiences and drug-induced trips. Spirals may often also metamorphose into the tunnels and vortices seen in these states (with the light at the end), the transitional phase into a full hallucinatory state, death, or, in the minds of our Neolithic ancestors, the spirit world. So entering a passage grave or barrow may have been seen as entering the vortex or tunnel that leads through into the spirit worlds - where the dead ancestors reside (as they do indeed in tombs).

 

Fig 3: The kerbstone opposite the entrance at Newgrange Passage Grave.

 We simply don’t know what became of the rest of the population on death. Some were evidently cremated, but there simply are not enough bodies in the communal graves to be the surviving sample of the whole Neolithic population. Estimates vary as to the proportion of the population treated in this way, but centre round 5%; a significantly small number. These chosen few continued to interact with the living through the use of their bones in religious ceremonies, and the probable reburial of some of those ancestral bones in special places such as deep pits or the ends of ditches; places where the boundary with the underworld has been physically thinned.

It is thought by an increasing number of archaeologists that the bones and burial sites were being revisited as representatives of the ancestral spirit community, who could be approached to mediate with the rest of the spirit world on behalf of their living descendants. If this were the case, it would make sense to pick for this task people who in life had had experience of these same negotiations: the shamans or "seers".

Lewis Williams deliberately avoided using Stonehenge as an example because of the controversy he thought it would arouse, so that we may never know how he saw it fitting into his overall pattern. I think it fits very well (see other articles on this blog), both with the cosmology as a whole, and as a place for (and physical aid to) shamanic trancing. I have dealt with the cosmology/ heart of the world aspect elsewhere; here consider for a moment the idea that Stonehenge worked as a physical aid to asc.

 The ditch provides a symbolic separation and distancing from the outside world, a sensation further enhanced by the ring of close set stones in the circle, which experiments have shown to block and alter sound travelling in and out of the monument whilst at the same time creating an effective visual barrier. Drumming or chanting in the circle would be amplified by the stones, enhancing both rhythmic and sensory routes into trance. The sheltered inner area, with the impassable "gates" of the trilithons and the focus created by the tallest  trilithon and the Altar Stone provides a doubly segregated zone where direct contact with the spirit world is possible, either to the underworld through the stones themselves or to the heavens through the open air above them. Added to this, let's not forget that Stonehenge also functioned as a burial ground: the ancestors were on hand within the bounds of the monument to come when needed.

  

Fig 4: Newgrange front entrance: with "courtyard" where we believe rituals involving the ancestors inside were performed. Is the decorated kerbstone here original, or put there to close the tomb off?

This interpretation is without any direct archaeological support at this stage, but it shows that such a functionality would work. And there is some evidence of art on the stones. Apart from the famous axe-heads and daggers, there are several other 'faces' - mostly natural, and two or three low-relief  shapes that could be pecked. One of these, on Stone 16, is a crude spiral. So perhaps., after all, there is something in the stones and the structure that gives an indication of the way the building may have functioned. It makes you think, doesn't it?

 

THE TEMPLE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD

 

THE TEMPLE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD

 

Over the years I've worked at Stonehenge, there is a question which is repeatedly asked and to which the expected answer is "It's a mystery, we don't know." It is: "Why was Stonehenge built HERE?" I believe there is a  plausible and fascinating answer to this question which fits all the evidence, but for which there is and probably never will be any absolute proof.

The environmental evidence, from snail shells, pollen (rare here), and other sources seems to show that the landscape around Stonehenge was relatively open grassland as far back as the Mesolithic. Near the river and perhaps up some of the side valleys there was woodland, but away from these there were only a few small copses scattered amid the rolling grassland of the plain. This in itself must have been rare in southern Britain, and may in part account for the special status of the area in Mesolithic and early Neolithic times.

During the Stonehenge Riverside Project's excavations (2004 - 2009), archaeologists found that the ditches of the Avenue enclose a set of roughly parallel periglacial gullies running down the slope, apparently formed by melt-waters from the permafrost at the end of the last glaciation. At some point, then, someone utilising this unusual landscape must have noticed the stripes of greener grass over the gullies running exactly along the alignment of the Summer Solstice sunrise - Winter Solstice sunset. To minds ready to read symbolic meaning into every part of the landscape this must have seemed more than coincidence and rendered it a place of special supernatural interest (an SSI of its day?). But that would have been nothing to their reaction when they climbed the slope to the top of the stripes and looked around.

Six years ago one of my colleagues, Simon Banton, pointed out to me the level horizon visible from the monument at Stonehenge. His interest was in the opportunity for astronomical observations this would have presented to Neolithic star-gazers: not only is the horizon from this point horizontal within a degree or so, but it would have been mostly clear of trees, and ideal for accurately locating the positions of solar and lunar standstills, not to mention all the stellar peregrinations they might have felt were significant.

Whilst I agree with this idea, and would be surprised if such an ideal site was NOT used as an observatory at some point, I think there is something else that the Neolithic stripe walkers would have seen when they reached more level ground at the top of the slope. Laid out around them and above them was a fine model of the cosmos, and there they were, standing at its very centre, on a site indicated by the solstice-aligned striations.

Before I expand on the 'model of the cosmos' idea, let me just reiterate what I have said before: that although the evidence for it is lacking across what is now England, I consider it likely that the religion of these islands, and indeed that of most of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Europe north of the Mediterranean, was a form of shamanism. In this view, the world - indeed all levels of the cosmos - are populated and run by spirit beings, some of which in some places were elevated at this time to the status of gods. The shamans were part-time priests, in that they were also farmers and warriors like other men and women, and were probably a small portion of the population (although in some hunter-gatherer societies many more people may have been shamans). They were of high status, and as hierarchies developed in societies across the continent, they may well have been among the elite from whom leaders were chosen (however that was done - by vote, by heredity, or by strength).

 Above: South-eastern Native American Cosmos. Below: Old Testament Israelite Cosmos.
(both artist's impressions)

Recent societies still operating within shamanic systems of belief (ie those whose beliefs have been recorded by anthropologists or other writers), whilst they show great variety in their practices, share a remarkably constant view of their world and the cosmos around it. Peoples as far apart as Siberia and Africa, the Amazon and Australia, share a broad set of beliefs in which the world we live in is a thin surface populated by both living animals and a wide variety of spirit beings. There are also one or more levels above the surface in which the sky spirits and/or gods dwell, and a matching number of underworld levels with their own sets of spirit inhabitants. In some of these, at least, the various levels are seen as disc shaped, just like the view visible from Stonehenge. This combination of a naturally open landscape and a circular, level horizon would have been almost unique in Britain at the time and would surely have been seen as highly significant in religious terms. The astronomical implications would have been an added bonus, and would have added to the overall impression that they were standing at the heart of a symbolic cosmos, which with just a modicum of reality adjustment could become real.

It is almost impossible at this time to be sure of any of the beliefs or perspectives of the Stonehenge people, but if they were anything like those I have suggested here, Stonehenge would have been a very special place indeed. This great stone temple was built on a site marked by the spirits as the centre, or at least on the axis, of the universe and of the shamanic reality. It was, quite literally, located at the Heart of the World.

Above: The Mayan Cosmos