Only the guardian of Fourknocks knows its true name

Inside the ancient stone chamber of Fourknocks, a seemingly small yet very impressive monument of the late Neolithic, there are a number of intricately carved stones, some pristinely preserved.

The lintel stone above the western recess at Fourknocks.

The modern visitor is able to see, at close quarters, the careful work of Neolithic artists, people who lived and died in a remote age, when only the most basic technologies were afforded use by human hands. At Fourknocks, the lozenge (diamond) and the zigzag predominate. The angular manifestation of the glyphs is curious. There is one stone, above the passage, bearing concentric circles, and another - the original entrance lintel - bearing a rough spiral, among other curious designs. Most of the other decorated stones are devoid of curvature, containing the distinct angles of diagonal and serrated patterns.

The stones of Fourknocks demand from us an answer, an answer to an unanswerable riddle - why is the spiral, so predominant at Brug na Bóinne, almost absent from this wondrous little passage-tomb, and why do the angles predominate? We can only answer the question with a question:

Who can know?

I have a theory. But that's all it is - a theory. Unfortunately, we cannot travel back in time to speak with the artists of the New Stone Age, whoever they were - farmers, astronomers, poets, priests or magicians. So we have to make do with our own speculations, and our own vivid imaginations. My theory is that the absence of the spiral is directly connected with the absence of the sun. No sun can shine into Fourknocks. Its passageway points to a place in the far north, some 15 degrees (approximately) east of north. No sun can enter into its cold interior. Fourknocks, whatever its other purposes might have been, was definitely not a solar observatory; not in its own right at least. (There are other mounds in the district, and who knows what secretly oriented chambers they might contain?)

The spiral is a convenient and potent symbol representing solar movement. Over the course of the year, the sun appears to wind a series of contracting and expanding spirals in the sky. At Newgrange, the great entrance stone, facing the sunrises on winter solstice, is adorned impressively with huge spirals, one of which appears to end in a line that seems to point in towards the entrance to the cave, perhaps beckoning the sun to "enter in here".

The "guardian" stone of Fourknocks, said to represent a human face.

There is no such theatrical meandering spiral at Fourknocks. Here, we see zigzag lines and diamonds, almost exclusively. Almost. There is one stone that stands out above all others. It is one of the chamber orthostats, positioned just to the right of the passageway as one looks out from the chamber. It is said, by some, to be a crude representation of the human face. Not having access to the artist, or the instruction manual from which he or she was working when they carved it, I can neither agree nor disagree with this contention. There are more angles, and diamonds, and curves. If it's a face, it's a strange one. And yet I find myself drawn to the idea that it is a type of "guardian" stone, if such a concept even existed when these structures were built 5,000 years ago. There is a stone in the western passage of Knowth that has been said, by some, to represent some type of guardian. It has an almost owl-like presence - the owl being the Cailleach of the night, its call often attributed to the Bean Sídhe, the woman who cries out before death. As a place of burial, Fourknocks might have needed just such a presence - a woman of the sídhe to watch over as the souls of the deceased crossed over from this world to the next.

Fourknocks is indeed a sad place. When it was excavated in the 1950s by P.J. Hartnett, the remains of at least 21 children were found, along with burnt and unburnt remains of adults. By the time its period of use was coming to an end, the entrance passage had been filled almost to the top with material, with three separate layers or deposits of human remains. The passage was deliberately blocked up. It was intended that Fourknocks be sealed off. And so it was . . . until the 1950s.

It is a sad fact that all of the burials/deposits were removed during the excavation. There is a sense that the monument has lost an aspect of its sacredness, that the final resting place of so many people would later be stripped out so that nothing of the burials remains.

In being sealed up, Fourknocks shares a history similar to that of Newgrange (which points towards it, incidentally). Archaeologists maintain that Newgrange was sealed for the best part of 4,000 years, until Charles Campbell and his labourers rediscovered the passage entrance in 1699. Fourknocks lay concealed in the landscape for a long time. Because it likely did not have a stone vaulted roof and thus it didn't have a large cairn covering it, it was lost to time. The name Fourknocks is said to be derived from the Irish na fuarchnoic, meaning "the cold hills". But I don't buy it. It doesn't "feel" like an authentic name for a complex of ancient monuments. And this I think its real name has been lost to time. Local historian Brendan Matthews once proposed to me the possibility that Fourknocks was derived from the "four cnocs", meaning the four cnocs or artificial mounds. That seems more plausible to me than the cold hills.

The proximity of Fourknocks to Clonalvy tempts me into looking for a link there. Clonalvy is from Cluain Ailbhe, the meadow of Ailbhe, whoever she might have been. It might also be connected with the Delvin River (Ailbine). I am curious about the mention of a possiblity that Clonalvy was the location of a monument called Lia Ailbhe, a huge standing stone described as the "chief monument of Brega", until it fell in 999 and was broken into four millstones by Máelaschlainn, the high king. That seems like an avenue worthy of research . . . for there is something that has been nagging away at me for years that is telling me to find out the real ancient name of Fourknocks.

Perhaps only the guardian of Fourknocks knows its real name?


(I will deal with some aspects of the angular art and connections to the cosmos in another post).

Science and mysticism - the genius of the Stone Age

The more insignificant modern man becomes - on his shrinking earth, hardly a cosmic speck - the more arrogant he is. He feels far less humility toward the ever-vaster unknown than his forefathers did toward what was thought to be known in a flat, God-ruled, man-centred universe. Science does not seem to touch man's emotions at all: he loses his religious awe and acquires in its place only a boastful complacency about himself. His intelligence grows, but not his genius.
- Philip Freund.

The photo shows a symbol carved into the stone at the very rear of the chamber of Cairn T, Loughcrew, Ireland. It was likely carved there more than 5,000 years ago, by a society of people for whom, I believe, science and spirituality were not considered as separate things. Indeed, I believe our ancient ancestors expressed their genius by grafting huge edifices in stone, lasting memorials to a time in the story of humanity when people had what Fruend refers to as "inventive mind, poetic aspiration, and awe-filled heart" - and yet they watched and measured the movements of the sun, moon and stars. They were, in my opinion, equally adherents to empiricism, metaphysics, philosophy and mysticism. They were farmers, engineers and astronomers, but they were most likely also poets, diviners and shamans, as suggested in mythology. They were both scientists and mystics.

I believe that they saw themselves as one with a cosmos that was vast beyond comprehension. They were neither athiest nor agnostic - but held a deep hope and belief in the existence of an afterlife. The great mounds of the New Stone Age are the best physical exemplifications of this belief. At the end of life, the burnt or unburnt fragments of the individual were lovingly and delicately placed in the chambers of these sacred spaces, from which, it could be implied from the construction and alignment of these monuments towards the rising and setting places of the heavenly bodies, the soul of the deceased was magically transported to the next realm.

The people who built the temples of stone that are Cairn T and its sisters on the ancient hills of Loughcrew, and indeed the vast monuments of the Boyne, which mark a zenith of that society, did so, I believe, in unity and zeal towards a shared belief. Joseph Campbell said that the "awakening of awe, that awakening of zeal" is what pulls people together.

In relation to the great cathedrals of Europe, Campbell said "you mustn't think of slave drivers; that isn't what built the cathedrals. It was a community seizure, a mythic zeal."

The same is probably true for the mound builders.

So what happened to the culture that dedicated itself to fervently building these innumerable mounds and cairns across ancient Ireland?

In the words of Campbell, "the zeal disappeared".

In my opinion - and it is just an opinion - our sense of the cosmic, and the awesome, and the everlasting, and the transcendental, became diminished when we became fascinated with the material, and the corporeal, the earthly, the ephemeral. When bronze arrived, and later iron, we perceived that we need not dream of otherworlds to give us power. We could fashion gleaming possessions - decorative and combative - and this gave us a sense of our own authority over nature. We could transform the murky raw materials of the earth magically into jewellery and weapons. We became alchemists, magicians. We no longer needed to divine our place in the cosmos and in the frantic and at times incongruous schemes of life. We could, we believed, impose our own will upon it. Spirit moved aside a little - or was pushed - and ego took centre stage. This conflict of spirit and ego is perhaps best epitomised in the battle between the Tuatha Dé Danann - the owners of the sídhe/mounds - and the Milesians, who came from Spain to take Ireland from them, driven by mixture of revenge and a jealous longing for a country that they beheld as being so beautiful it looked like the clouds of heaven.

Instead of the Dé Danann Elcmar, who stood on top of Newgrange at Samhain with a fork of white hazel, the archetypal mystic - a diviner, a druidic wise man - we became the Milesian Eremon, who wished to take ancient Tara and impose the domination of a new force upon the land. The symbol of that imposition would become the Lia Fáil - the phallic stone of kingship that would scream when the rightful king placed his foot upon it. And thus at Tara even today it is possible to discern the transformation that occurred after this battle between spirit and ego. The old ways are represented by Duma na nGiall - the Mound of the Hostages that rises out of the earth like a pregnant belly, the mother who is at once part of both world and cosmos. The new ways are represented by the Lia Fáil, the phallic stone placed there in an act of imposition, declaration, and perhaps banishment. We shouldn't be surprised to think that the Neolithic culture was a matriarchal one - its stone chambers are somewhat uterine in design - although we get the distinct sense of a polytheistic society when we take account of mythology which may or may not date to that remote time. But the cultures that followed - in the Bronze Age and Iron Age - created enclosures and ramparts encircling the sacred hill that I believe attempted to make a statement that - instead of considering the monuments to be an extension of the earth, saw the earth as being enclosed within a new system of ownership and dominance. We were no longer an emergence from cosmos. We were an imposition upon it.

The Lia Fáil - the phallus - is another icon of imposition, and the patriarchal nature of that imposition. We planted it there as a symbol of our wish to claim ownership, dominance and control over the land. We did similarly when we planted a flag on the moon. We went there at considerable expense in the greatest single achievement of our era, but we did so as much as as an act of imposition and ownership as we did as an act of scientific exploration or altruistic humanity. We want to own the moon.

To be continued . . .

© Anthony Murphy, 2015

Sunset over a hill called 'Réaltoge', meaning 'star'

This is the sun setting behind a hill called Réaltoge, meaning 'star, as viewed from the top of Dowth in December 2003. In the view also is Newgrange.

My Nikon D7000 is working a treat

I know this is not entirely related to Mythical Ireland, but my Nikon D7000 will, I hope, be used to capture many nice images for the website and other projects. I wanted to share two images that I took with the camera in the past couple of days. It is a nice piece of kit.

The first is a picture of some houses on the outskirts of Drogheda, overlooking the Boyne river. It was taken at ISO100, with an F stop of about F11, and an exposure of 30 seconds.

The second is this picture of Newgrange, again at ISO100, and F11. The exposures on the D7000 seem to show better detail compared to my D200. In some pictures there is both a bright sky and a bright foreground. Impressive.