Lugh of the Long Arm carries the sun across the sky on the longest days of the year

See also this new video explaining some of the astronomy and mythology behind this event.


The longest days of the year have arrived. The sun's rising and setting positions have reached their most northerly points along the horizon and these rising points are now "standing still" - hence the word solstice, or in Irish grianstad, meaning, literally, "stopped sun".

Orion "carries" the sun across the sky on the three longest days of the year.

The further north you are located from the equator, the longer the days in summer, and the shorter in winter. Here in Ireland, in the Boyne Valley, the sun rises before 5am on Summer Solstice and sets around 10pm. Even in the middle of the night, there is no real darkness as the whole northern horizon remains bathed in light. This is a result of the fact that the sun does not go far enough below the horizon at midsummer for Astronomical Twilight to end.

The sun is crossing over the Milky Way right now.

Something else that's really interesting is happening right now as the sun crosses the sky on these, the longest days. If you could somehow darken the sun, like what happens in a total eclipse, you'd see that the sun is currently positioned directly above Orion. In fact, at Summer Solstice in this modern epoch, the sun appears to be "carried" across the sky by this great anthropomorphic warrior/god/hunter constellation, in his upraised arm. Further to this is the fact that the sun is currently located in one of the two positions where it appears to "cross" over the Milky Way. Astronomers today call the sun's path the ecliptic. This imaginary ring through the sky intersects the Milky Way in two places - one above Orion and the other beneath Ophiuchus, between Sagittarius and Scorpius. It just so happens that in our lifetime, these positions correspond with the location of the Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice sun, respectively.

It is fascinating that the Boyne river, along which the greatest megalithic passage-tombs in Europe were built, has a name that is the same as the old Irish name for the Milky Way - Bealach na Bó Finne, the Way of the White Cow.

In mythology, there are many gods and warriors, but some particularly interesting ones which we examined in Island of the Setting Sun - In Search of Ireland's Ancient Astronomers. One of these is Lugh Lamhfada, Lugh of the Long Arm (or the long throw, perhaps). In the ancient mind, was it perhaps Lugh who was seen to "throw" the sun, moon and planets from his upraised hand?

Amergin's poem, on a photo of the Boyne estuary where he
arrived in Ireland with the Milesians.

There are other characters of mythology that are interesting. Amergin, leader of the Milesians, was known as Amergin of the Bright Knee. The star that we know today as Rigel has an Arabic name which means "bright knee". Amergin asked "who but I knows the place where the sun sets, who but I knows the ages of the moon?" The Annals of the Four Masters says the Milesians arrived in Ireland at Bealtaine in 1694 BC. On that date, the sun was above Orion, being carried across the sky. Because of an effect of the wobble of the earth's axis called Precession of the Equinoxes, the sun's position on the ecliptic on a specific day of the year (eg solstices, equinoxes) is slowly moving westwards through the ecliptic. When the Milesians arrived in 1694BC, their bright-kneed leader set foot on the shore of the Boyne river at the moment the sun was being carried by the constellation Orion - that might have been known then as Amergin. Nowadays, the sun's position at Bealtaine has moved so that it is beneath Aries. It is on Summer Solstice now that Orion/Amergin/Lugh appears to carry the sun across the sky.

And then there's Cúchulainn, the warrior hero of The Táin Bó Cuailnge, who battles in ford water - a ford being the crossing point of a river. Was he guarding the ford of the sky, as hinted in The Táin?

a fair man facing your foes
in the starlit ford of night.

It is no mere coincidence that Cúchulainn is a son of Lugh. The Milky Way was known as Lugh's Chain and Lugh used a weapon called the Tathlum, which is described as a concrete ball - made of his enemies' brains hardened with lime. Could this be the moon?

To the hero Lugh was given
This concrete ball – no soft missile –
In Mag Tuireadh of shrieking wails,
From his hand he threw the tathlum.

Today, as you watch the sun make its way across the sky on the weekend of the Summer Solstice, it would be nice to reflect upon the powerful imagery. The god of light has the sun in his hand.

Knowth kerbstone 83 - natural and man-made holes

This is kerbstone 83 at Knowth – or, if you prefer Martin Brennan's numbering system (which I don't), kerbstone NW9. Professor George Eogan, who excavated Knowth, refers to the style of art on this stone as the "lavish style". He does not offer any further insights into what the carvings might mean. Who can blame him? Brennan suggests the mixture of natural holes and cupmarks "seem to provide a starry background" to lunar imagery. This is indeed a peculiar stone. It's got a series of natural holes and linear markings (maybe a geologist can tell us what they might be called) and engravings that are mostly crescents, with some concentric circles centred around what might be a natural solution hole. There's also a spiral and a wavy line. A very long linear marking across the middle of the stone appears to connect a series of crescents on the far left with a "wavy line" as Brennan calls it, on the right. Curiously, a series of five natural holes (at least they look natural and not man-made) between the spiral and the wavy line appear to be enclosed within a cartouche. One wonders why. The stone is unique in having such a conglomeration of natural features and man-made designs.

Neolithic passage-tomb construction - mutual cooperation or enforced labour?

I'm reading a fantastic book about ancient Ireland right now, written by an archaeologist. It's called 'The Origins of the Irish' by J.P. Mallory of Queens University and it's one of the best books about prehistoric Ireland that I've ever read. Admittedly it's not exclusively about prehistory, and admittedly I'm not finished reading it yet! But on almost every page Mallory is presenting interesting data and posing even more interesting questions. And so we arrive at page 77, and one of the major questions about the passage-tomb builders is given consideration.

The giant passage-tomb of Knowth and one of its satellites. Huge effort was required to build these monuments.

Mallory says that in the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherers considered most material possessions as impediments to mobility. In the Neolithic, however, the emergence of agriculture led to many changes in the way we lived. Interestingly, fish was apparently "off the menu" as there was a major shift from a marine diet to a terrestrial one. We should not be altogether surprised by that, but it seems to have been a fairly dramatic change. The landscape changed too – there was significant cutting down of virgin forests for the purposes of agriculture and monument building. (This, by the way, is mentioned in mythology. But let's not go there right now, lest we scare the archaeologists off . . . and I am well aware that many archaeology students do actually read this blog!)

Most significantly, the Neolithic generally sees the evolution of the concept of:

SURPLUS, WEALTH and SOCIAL RANKING.

"Or," as Mallory puts it, "if you prefer":

WASTE, GREED and DISCONTENT.

And so, as we sowed the seeds of agriculture in the Boyne Valley and other parts of Ireland, introducing a new way of life to the island, we also sowed the seeds of a modern civilisation that, despite all its benefits, has seen us painfully divorced from cosmos and the natural world, such that we're trying to kill our planet – by overpopulating it, by stripping it bare, by choking it and by many other means, insidious and foul. But that's not the main point of this blog post – even if it is a most pressing matter pertaining to our very existence right now.

The point (or rather the question), in terms of the whole idea of social ranking and wealth and "discontent", is this: were the monuments built by a community of people that was unified in its beliefs, and content to contribute to this mammoth effort to enshrine its beliefs, and perhaps immortalise its  "moment in time" monumentally in stone?

Or, as the result of a hierarchy – a system of social ranking – was that community coerced, compelled or otherwise forced into these monumental labours against its wishes?

I'd like to tell you that Mallory gives us a definitive answer to that question. But, despite his obvious brilliance, he does not have enough evidence to place himself on either side of the fence (let's call it a Neolithic palisade) that divides these two options. There might, of course, be a third option – it's possible that some people did it because they wanted to and some were coerced, compelled or otherwise forced.

However, Mallory does lean a little bit towards one side of the Neolithic palisade when he says this, to offer a glimpse at the theory he might prefer:

... while mutual cooperation is always possible, large labour projects have often been seen to indicate the emergence of some form of social elite.

Personally, I've always leaned towards the "we're all in this together" idea – and see in the monuments of the Boyne a collective and cohesive effort representing the endeavours of a community that was largely working as one. What is my evidence for this supposition? I'm not sure that I could give you anything concrete. I see monuments large and small, apparently built to a system based on alignments and on cosmology, representing an effort to record and understand the passing of time, and cycles, but also representing a spirituality, whose complete depth and complexity we might never understand. It doesn't "feel" like a project that was undertaken or completed under duress. But that's just a hunch.

What material evidence would there be, if there had been an elite, and they had compelled the population to haul the giant stones up the banks from the Boyne, and to sail to Cooley and Wicklow and perhaps other areas in search of materials? How would we know one way or the other? I don't have an answer to this question. Perhaps some of the archaeologists do.

Bone fragments in a basin at Knowth (reconstruction).

One thing that's been scarcely discussed, if at all*, is how the bone fragments that were found in Newgrange, and Knowth, and Fourknocks, came to be in the disintegrated state in which they were found. There were burnt remains. These, we are told, were from corpses that were burned on a pyre, and their ashes retrieved after it cooled down, for placement in the passage-tombs. The unburnt bones, however, are small and fragmented. A key question is how did they get to this state? By what process was a person's remains stripped, the carcase defleshed, and the bones then broken, or otherwise made into fragments? And could this be relevant to the question of whether the monuments were built by choice or coercion? (ie, does the disintegrated state of the skeletal fragments indicate or suggest a community where there was violence?)

At Newgrange, there were 750 bone fragments that were "unidentifiable". We don't know whether they were from humans or animals. That's a lot of unaccounted-for bits of bones. In the appendices of Newgrange archaeologist Michael O'Kelly's book about his excavations there, T. P. Fraher of the Department of Anatomy at UCC says:

Apart from some complete hand and foot bones, all human specimens consisted of small fragments.

It's been virtually impossible to tell how many people were interred in the chambers of some of our most famous tombs. At Newgrange, there are fragments from five individuals - but that's all that can be said. Maybe the fragments are from many more individuals? At Knowth's eastern chamber, there were fragments found representing something between 150 and 200 individuals.

Were these all the remains of cherished members of that community of mound builders and astronomers and farmers, lovingly brought to the interiors of the monuments following some ancient ritual of disintegration? Or might some of these bone fragments represent something more sinister – such as ritualistic sacrifice or even cannibalism?

In my own research, I have reached tentative personal conclusions, but it's always healthy to consider other options and possibilities. We are a long way from a full understanding of the people of the Neolithic – such a thing is scarcely possible unless we find a way to travel back in time. All we can do is look at what's there and try to figure it out as much as possible. The truth is that we can scarcely understand ourselves, and our own incongruous and destructive aspects that push us towards the brink of self-annihilation.

I like to think that we can learn something about ourselves by looking into the past. It's possible that Newgrange can teach us enough about ourselves so that we can learn to change for the better . . .

Addendum: I've also been reading Robert Hensey's new book, 'First Light - The Origins of Newgrange' and he adds the following in relation to community effort:

A centralised authority would have been necessary for the gathering of materials and construction work to be accomplished, yet a certain amount of willing cooperation and community 'buy-in' must have been present for the project to be a success. (p.118)

* At least not in the books I've read about the archaeology of the Neolithic/Boyne Valley. But there may well be some solid archaeological research into this area that I'm not aware of. 

Kerbstone 67 at Newgrange

This is kerbstone number 67 at Newgrange. It is one of only three highly-decorated stones - there are 99 kerbs in total. This is in stark contrast to Knowth, where there are many very ornately decorated slabs in a kerb of 127 stones. Most of the kerbs at Newgrange are composed of a stone called greywacke (also called green grit) and were sourced, according to archaeologists and geologists, at Clogherhead on the Co. Louth coast, some 20km journey by river and sea.

PS: The triple spiral partly visible on the very bottom right of the stone is a copyright watermark added to the image by me!

Heaven's mirror - as above, so below at Knowth

The interpretation of megalithic art is a highly subjective area. I have a tendency to go along with some, but not all, of Martin Brennan's interpretations, and am particularly impressed with his interpretation of what he calls the Calendar Stone. This does not mean I am an absolute convert to the notion that all of the Neolithic symbolism carved on stones in the Boyne Valley is cosmic or astronomical in nature. I like to observe and to admire the art, and in some cases to interpret it in the context of astronomy. But what works for the interpretation of one stone does not necessarily transfer to other stones. There's so much art - particularly at Knowth, where one is constantly impressed by the sheer amount of petroglyphs that one wonders how many different people were responsible, and over what span of time. I've been going there for years, and I still stand in awe at this massive megalithic art gallery, grafted carefully and lovingly all those millennia ago.

The above kerbstone is kerb number 86 (according to Professor George Eogan's numbering convention, which we'll use for convenience). It is located on the western side of the kerb, a short distance north of the dramatic and cryptic entrance to the western passage.

So what do I see?

Do I see the C? The opposed Cs, as George called them?

Well, kind of. But I don't think like an archaeologist. So I dislike the simplicity and arbitrary nature of labels like "opposed Cs". I don't think the people who carved them thought of it that way at all.

So what do I see? Do I see what I want to see? Perhaps.

As an astronomer, I might see crescents; crescent moons. And I believe the moon is everywhere in megalithic art. But no, in this stone I see more than that. Here follows my (very subjective) interpretation - and remember that the tour guides at Newgrange tell you that you can all have your own theory, and that everyone's theory is as valid as anyone else's. So here is my just-as-equal-as-yours theory about kerbstone 86 at Knowth:

I might see the arc of heaven. I might see the Milky Way, in all its glory, stretched in a spectacular arch across the ceiling of night, in the beautiful ancient Boyne Valley under the darkest of skies, unpolluted by the choking fumes of modern industry and transport, and unhindered by the artificial light with which we so alienate ourselves from the cosmos today. And I might see this milky road of the stars, this bright way of the heavens, reflected on earth by the Boyne river, which loops magnificently around the great monuments of Brú na Bóinne. Did the ancients think this way? Did they think cosmically? Did the monuments somehow proclaim their tiny place of presence and permanence in a vast cosmos?

In olden times, the Irish for the Milky Way was Bealach/Bóthar na Bó Finne - the Way/Road of the White Cow. The Boyne river is from Bóinn - Bó Finne - the river of the White Cow. The names of the river on earth and the 'river' in the sky had a similar derivation.

Do these carvings on kerbstone 86 at Knowth represent the idea of Heaven's Mirror - As Above, So Below? Is the sky reflected on the ground? Is the line in the middle representative of the demarcation, the liminal boundary between heaven and earth? All of the symbols are enclosed in a sort-of great cartouche, perhaps an indication of the cosmos as an entity with limits - something that ends where the stars are fixed, where the souls go after we gently place their remains in the stone chambers, perhaps?

Or is this stone's symbolism representative of opposed worlds (or even mingling worlds) rather than opposed Cs? The sídhe (mounds) were considered access points through which the Tuatha Dé Danann could pass between worlds - between this world and the otherworld:

And as to Angus Og, son of the Dagda, sometimes he would come from Brugh na Boinn and let himself be seen upon the earth,

Underworld, overworld. This world, the otherworld. Earth, heaven. Ground, sky. Conscious realm, subconscious realm. Reality, fantasy. Fact, theory. Objective, subjective. Tourist, tour guide. Tomb, womb. Decoration, language.

Say what you C. You are unlikely to be proven wrong. But have a go at interpreting it. Because if you don't, someone else will. Someone else will C what you don't C ...

An investigation of the alignment of the passage of Fourknocks passage-tomb

Several years ago I wrote about the Cygnus Enigma and the apparent orientation of Newgrange towards Fourknocks and the orientation of Fourknocks towards a place on the horizon where the brightest star of the swan constellation (Cygnus) would have been rising after its brief glance with the horizon towards the north. Recently I've been looking at this alignment system in more detail, and that study has yielded more interesting results and fascinating possibilities.

SUMMARY

A plan of Fourknocks.

I will summarise what's been written already, before going into new detail. In a nutshell, Newgrange points towards Fourknocks, although neither site is visible from the other. Fourknocks lies about 15km (approx. 9 miles) to the southeast of Newgrange. There are two intervening hills that block the intervisibility of the sites - Red Mountain and Bellewstown. Fourknocks lies at approximately 137.95 degrees of azimuth from Newgrange, according to Google Earth. This would place it on the edge of the range of azimuths covered by the Newgrange solstice alignment, which, according to Patrick (1974) were 133° 42' to 138° 24', while Ray (1989) says the range is 133° 49' to 137° 29'. The best way to try to visualise this is that as the sunlight is retreating from the chamber of Newgrange at solstice, the sun is directly above Fourknocks.

Fourknocks, in turn, has a passage that is aligned to approximately 14° azimuth, in the far northeast. Richard Moore and I had suggested that Fourknocks is aligned in the direction of the Baltray standing stones on the northern side of the Boyne Estuary (Island of the Setting Sun, 2006) and that the two stones lined up to point back towards Fourknocks, even though neither site was visible from the other.

New discoveries

It is this alignment – the axis of the Fourknocks alignment – that has yielded fascinating new information.

Sitting on the sill stone of the rear recess of the Fourknocks chamber, looking out through the passageway to the far horizon, one is looking at a hill towards the north-northeast called Mullaghteelin. Near the summit of Mullaghteelin, directly on the alignment as viewed from Fourknocks, is a barrow (ME027-034----), probably dating to the Bronze Age.

The photograph on right shows the view out through the passage, with Mullaghteelin barrow indicated on the horizon.

Using a map, or better still Google Earth, the alignment can be seen to continue through Donacarney village before crossing the Boyne river and pointing towards the Baltray standing stones. This is where Google Earth has real value in the investigation of long ley lines or straight track alignments. Zooming in on Baltray, we see that both stones are situated on the axis of this alignment from Fourknocks:

The two stones are circled in red - the larger stone has a bigger circle around it. We didn't have this wonderful program when we wrote Island of the Setting Sun in 2006, but it's wonderful to see how accurate the alignment really is. Whether this alignment was created intentionally is an entirely different matter, but one wonders, given the existence of several long-distance alignments of ancient monuments, if indeed the ancients had skills beyond which we give them credit for.

Stones

Here's where it gets really interesting. If you continue the line from Fourknocks beyond Baltray standing stones, you will find that it eventually hits the shoreline on the Irish Sea coast at Clogherhead. It then travels across Dundalk Bay and eventually meets the shoreline of a stony beach on the southern shore of the Cooley peninsula at Rathcor/Templetown. Both of these shores –  Clogherhead and Rathcor/Templetown – were locations where stone for Newgrange was sourced.

Clogherhead (above) was the source of the greywacke slabs that were used as kerbstones, passage orthostats and large structural stones in the chamber of Newgrange. An estimated 200 of these rocks, weighing on average three tonnes apiece, were brought from the shoreline at Clogherhead by boat down along the Irish Sea and up the river Boyne to Brú na Bóinne. For more about the transportation of these greywacke slabs, see Newgrange - Monument to Immortality.

Rathcor and Templetown beaches are littered with rocks of all different types and sizes. Most interesting of these are the granite cobbles which, it is said, were brought from this area to Newgrange to be placed among the white quartz stones that decorate the front of the monument. Again, these would have been transported by sea, across Dundalk Bay, around Clogherhead and then up the Boyne.

So, whether by accident or design, the Fourknocks passage points towards two of the three locations from which it is said that stone was sourced for the construction of Newgrange.

There's more ...

Just for the sake of it, I looked at the alignment in the opposite direction, south-southwest from Fourknocks. Interestingly, it points towards the Blessington Lakes in Co. Wicklow, some 30 miles or 50 kilometres distant approximately. Now this really is a stretch of the imagination, I'll readily admit, but we've all been told that Wicklow is the likely source of the milky quartz at Newgrange, although the exact location or quarry from which it was extracted has never been found. I've heard it suggested that Blessington is a possible source. It could have been transported from that area by barge down the Liffey River into the Irish Sea and from there up to the Boyne.

If the Blessington area turned out to be the source of the Newgrange quartz (and it's by no means anything other than a possibility at this point in time), then the Fourknocks alignment would "point to" all of the major sources of stone for the construction of Newgrange - the greywacke from Clogherhead, the granite cobbles from Cooley and the quartz stones from Wicklow. As it stands, we can say that Fourknocks definitely does point to two areas from which stone was sourced. The third remains an unknown, but Blessington is a possibility.

More recently, Rockabill islands off the coast of Dublin have been suggested as a possible source of the milky quartz at Newgrange. This is equally interesting, because the larger of the two standing stones at Baltray points towards Rockabill for winter solstice sunrise.

Just to finish, the Fourknocks alignment also points to a peak called Eagle Mountain in the Mourne Mountains in the far distance, which are easily visible from Fourknocks on a clear day. I'm not sure if there's any particular significance to this peak to tie in with the alignment. Geologists have told us that the cobble stones from Rathcor/Templetown have their origin in the Mournes. It has recently been revealed that an x-ray study of the granite cobbles of Newgrange is to be undertaken to ascertain their precise original source. Read more here.

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