The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Six - THE MUSIC OF THE DANCE OF THE GIANTS
A piece of advice from Merlin the Enchanter. -- Samuel Pepys finds that Stonehenge was worth the trip. - Antiquarians and archaeologists. -One astronomer on the Salisbury Plateau. - The Astonishing Discovery of Hawkins. - An observatory and a calendar. - Large nails Very disturbing stones. - Where did the architects come from? - Philologists among the "primitives." - Is there a boatswain without notebook? - On knowledge and invisible writing. - Hypothesis about missing writing. Tradition vs. writing. - The enigma of an initial language.
In the fifth century A.D., Aurelius, heir to the Breton throne, He wanted to erect a monument to the memory of his men who had been killed by the Saxons. He called Merlin the Enchanter, astrologer and magician.
In the fifth century A.D., Aurelius, heir to the Breton throne, He wanted to erect a monument to the memory of his men who had been killed by the Saxons. He called Merlin the Enchanter, astrologer and magician.
Merlin He said to her:
"If you really want to honor the burial of those men with a work that defies the centuries, he sends for the Dance of the Giants, to Killaraus, a mountain in Ireland. There rises a monument of stones such as no one could build in our day, unless it was infinitely powerful. For those stones are enormous, though no others had ever been seen that had so many virtues and virtues. to conceal so many mysteries..."
Aurelius sent an army. The soldiers were unable to move the blocks and steal the Giants' Ball. Then Merlin uttered magic formulas, and the stones became light and easily transported to the coast, embarked and taken to Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plateau, "where they will remain throughout the world." eternity."
This is first mentioned, in the fantastic and wonderful History of the Kings of Brittany, by Geoffroi of Monmouth, which dates back to the From 1140, this set of sandstone and limestone stones that It is, between Wales and Cornwall, the most astonishing of all megalithic monuments. For five centuries, the legend was accepted by Geoffroi of Monmouth. In 1620, King James sent the architect Inigo Jones to study Stonehenge, and he came to the conclusion that it was a Roman temple. Samuel Pepys he declares, in his Diary, that such stones were "worth the journey." "You know God what good could they be!"
The first researcher of Stonehenge was John Aubrey, an antiquator and renowned thief of prehistoric remains, to whom we owe many gossip about Shakespeare's life. He was the one who made the first topological discoveries and observed the alignments of holes and the concentric circles of raised stones. According to Aubrey, Stonehenge has a druidic origin. The same conclusion was reached, a A century later, another antiquian, Dr. Stukeley, a friend of Isaac Newton's youth.
Systematic excavations began in 1801. Cunnington excavated at the foot of the Stone of Sacrifice; He didn't find anything, and left it there A bottle of port, dedicated to future archaeologists. Exactly one hundred years later, Professor Gowland discovered, under the Roman cloak, eighty stone axes and hammers, which attested of the origin, several thousand years old, of the Dance of the Giants. In In 1950, carbon-14 made it possible to establish the date of the Aubrey: 1848 B.C.
What was this complex construction of the neolithic? What could it be used for, Samuel Pepys wondered.
The complete plan, reconstructed by the archaeologists, reveals, through the through the ruins and disorder produced by the centuries, a Rigorous Structure:
A circumference of 115 meters in diameter, delimited by a moat flanked by two slopes, one inner and one outer, and without further ado. than a hallway for the entrance. Almost immediately, and concentric to This was a circle of 56 holes, called "Aubrey's holes." Embedded in this circle, and perpendicular to the entrance, a rectangle bounded at the four corners by stones from which only two remain. A circle 31 meters in diameter, composed of of thirty stones of 25 tons each, joined to the others by lintels and forming, consequently, a continuous series of dolmens. A circle of 59 stones. A horseshoe facing The entrance and composed of ten blocks, each of which weighs about fifty tons, and which are joined two by two by horizontal lintels, thus forming five dolmens. A horseshoe of nineteen stones. Three monoliths or menhirs, one in the center, another at the entrance and the third on the outside of the pit and placed in the middle of the access corridor.
Finally, they are virtually invisible on the ground and partly invisible in the field. between Aubrey's holes and the thirty stones of 25 tons, two composite circles, one, 30 holes, and the another, 29.
Gerald S. Hawkins, Professor of Astronomy, University of Boston, is of English origin. He returned to the country a few years ago. stationed at an experimental missile base in south-west England, in Larkill. This is located very close to Stonehenge. He visited him, as three hundred thousand tourists do every year. They explained to him that, if one stands in the center of the monument, on the morning of the Summer solstice, watch the sun rise on one of the stones placed in a separate place, the Heel Stone. He checked it out with his own eyes.
Then he began to ask himself questions. And the astronomer He became an archaeologist. Later, Fred Hoyle would verify the calculations by Hawkins, who, in a work published in New York in 1965, confirmed his first intuition: those rows of stones They constituted a complex astronomical observatory.
A first examination convinced him that there were at least a hundred possible lineups. How do you distinguish the ones that meant something?
It would have taken many months to figure it out. Hawkins sought help of a computer, affectionately christened with the name "Oscar", to which he provided, on the one hand, the possible alignments of Stonnehenge, and, on the other hand, the key positions (orthos, sunsets, culminations, etc.) of the principal celestial bodies: Sun, Moon, planets, stars.
So Oscar began to point out what he saw in the sky in such a month. On such a day, at such an hour, between such and such megaliths. The result was surprising.
While the planets and stars appeared in their entirety, Stonehhenge, on the other hand, allowed all the significant positions of the Moon and the Sun, and follow their seasonal variations. The graphs and charts established by Hawkins left no room for doubt. "Oscar" had just explained to What were megaliths for? But there's more to Stonehenge than just Megaliths: The Builders Who Raised Stones, Excavated Also the soil. 56 Aubrey holes. 30 holes. 29 holes, 56, 30, 29... What could these numbers correspond to?
Once When the problem was raised, the data was quite simple: Apparently, the men of Stonehenge had only devoted their attention to the Sun and the Moon. The starts, the set-ups, and the culminations of Each of these stars is certainly worthy of interest. But even more so are the spectacular phenomena in which the Sun and the Moon Eclipses. Modern astronomy is less devoted to the observation of rhythms rather than the physiology of mechanisms. But Hawkins remembered the "methodical year."
The Greek astronomer Meton observed that, every nineteen years, the full Moon fell into the same dates of the solar calendar, and that eclipses obeyed it cycle. Actually, it's not exactly nineteen years, but 18.61 years, so you have to make up for this difference by establishing a regular calendar (as we do with the complementary day) leap years). By rounding the figure to 18 or 19, the error is quickly reveals. But, forming a larger cycle, On the basis of this little rectified methodical cycle, now to 18, now to 19, an accuracy that has been valid for centuries is achieved.
The more satisfactory approach, as the calculus, it's a big cycle of 19 + 19 -1-18. Join in. You'll get 56. The same number of Aubrey's holes. (Note, in passing, that Issue 56, which we see appearing on this occasion for the first time in The history of mankind is the number of alchemy, the mass of the stable isotope of iron.) Hawkins, not content with having Having discovered this fact, he imagined that Aubrey's circle, associated with megaliths, would allow, perhaps, the prediction of eclipses.
Herself They calculated the dates of the eclipses that took place at the time of the construction of Stonehenge. "Oscar" was put back to contribution. And, once again, the conclusion was positive: a system of stones displaced along Aubrey's circle would allow Predict eclipse years. And the days? The lunar month is 29.53 days. Two lunar months thus form a round figure of 59 days. which coincides with the sum of the 30 and 29 holes.
Also It coincides with another circle, which we haven't mentioned so far for it is almost entirely conjectural, and that it would consist of 59 blue stones... Hawkins, speculating on Aubrey's 56 holes, the 30 and 29 holes, and the Heel Stone (all observations must be made on the basis of this menhir), he achieved, not only Find the exact dates of eclipses that occurred at the time of the construction, but also calculate, for example, the date of our movable feast of Easter, Christian survival, according to We know, from an ancient pagan tradition. Stonehenge is, therefore, a observatory and a calendar.
So far, as far as we know, no one has refuted the thesis of Hawkins. On the other hand, the calculation of probabilities indicates that There is only a one in ten million chance that those significant alignments are purely coincidental. In spite of everything, the riddle of Stonehenge is unsolved; but the problems the construction of this monument, on the one hand, and the heterodox characteristics of the megalithic phenomenon of which Stonehenge is a part, on the other, They are extremely embarrassing to prehistorians.
So far, as far as we know, no one has refuted the thesis of Hawkins. On the other hand, the calculation of probabilities indicates that There is only a one in ten million chance that those significant alignments are purely coincidental. In spite of everything, the riddle of Stonehenge is unsolved; but the problems the construction of this monument, on the one hand, and the heterodox characteristics of the megalithic phenomenon of which Stonehenge is a part, on the other, They are extremely embarrassing to prehistorians.
By Consequently, Stonehenge is ignored.
Let's open, for example, one of the most recent manuals on Prehistory published in France under the direction of one of our specialists, who They are justly renowned. The book consists of 350 pages of dense typography. In the index of prehistoric sites mentioned in the work, there are dozens and dozens of names. Stonehenge is conspicuous by its absence.
Las rocas que componen el monumento no fueron extraídas del subsuelo inmediato. Las piedras azules, que pesan, por término medio, cinco toneladas cada una, provienen de una mina situada a unos cuatrocientos kilómetros. El transporte debió hacerse por mar y por tierra, y cruzando algunos ríos. Pero, ¿por qué medios? Otros bloques pesan de 25 a 50 toneladas. Las canteras de las que fueron extraídos están más próximas a Stonehenge.
Pero hubo que arrancarlas del subsuelo, transportarlas, tallarlas. Todas las piedras aparecen trabajadas por la mano del hombre, sobre todo las que muestran cierta curvatura para corregir la ilusión óptica (si fueren completamente rectilíneas, se verían cóncavas). Después, hubo que levantarlas, y, por último, colocar las piedras transversales de los dólmenes. Todo ello con precisión centimétrica, si admitimos la finalidad astronómica demostrada por Hawkins. Una operación que ni siquiera hoy sería fácil. Y esto sin contar los cálculos teóricos fundados en leyes matemáticas, físicas y mecánicas.
Hoy se da por cierto que Stonehenge fue construido en varias veces, durante un período comprendido entre los años 2000 y 1700 antes de J. C., aunque la primera implantación pudo ser aún más remota. Ahora bien, la Prehistoria pretende conocer perfectamente a los hombres que poblaban en aquellos tiempos las islas anglosajonas. Son los de la Edad de Piedra, que pronto conocerán el cobre y el bronce, y que empiezan a practicar la ganadería y la agricultura.
Culturalmente, aparecen claramente subdesarrollados en relación con las grandes civilizaciones mediterráneas de la misma época. Se intentó rehacer la construcción de Stonehenge con los únicos métodos primitivos que admite la ortodoxia, y se llegó a conclusiones difíciles de aceptar: se habrían necesitado millones de jornadas de trabajo, es decir, generaciones enteras dedicadas a la edificación del monumento. Ahora bien, Stonehenge no es único, sino que forma parte de un vasto conjunto.
En un radio de una veintena de kilómetros, encontramos otros crómlechs, algunos de ellos gigantescos, como el de Avebury (el crómlech más grande conocido: 365 metros de diámetro); círculos de agujeros en los que se han encontrado vestigios de madera; un monumento concéntrico, llamado «Santuario»; túmulos funerarios enormes; un rectángulo delimitado por un foso de 2.800 metros de longitud por 90 de anchura; un promontorio artificial de 500.000 metros cúbicos; un círculo gigantesco de 450 metros de diámetro; una excavación en forma de embudo, con una profundidad de 100 metros: avenidas anchas como autopistas...
Megaliths exist all over the world. None of the five continents it lacks them. We wanted to see in all of them an intention to funeral parlor. And, certainly, there are numerous graves. TRUE also, that, even at Stonehenge, ashes and ashes have been found. bones between the cromlechs or the other alignments. But the Just because there are cemeteries next to churches doesn't mean Let the churches be, therefore, sepulchres.
The megaliths appear strangely distributed: in separate groups, detached from each other, never far from the coasts, endowed with similar characteristics. The phenomenon seems to have occurred only during the first half of the second millennium before our Age, and to have ceased abruptly, leaving no traces but legends that still endure today.
Hawkins made another Note: Stonehenge is located in the narrow portion of the the Northern Hemisphere where the azimuths of the Sun and the Moon, in their maximum declination, form a 90-degree angle. The Venue symmetrical, in the Southern Hemisphere, would be the Falkland Islands and the Strait of Magellan. Did the builders know about Stonehenge? Calculate longitude and latitude?
It seems as if they were "missionaries," bearers of an idea and a from an unknown cross, would have gone through the world. The sea would have been his main route. These "propagandists" would have established contact with certain populations, and not with other. This would explain the "gaps" or areas of lower density in the distribution, as well as the isolation of certain megalithic foci. This It would also explain how and why the monuments overlap megalithic to the Neolithic civilization. And it would also give, explanation of all the legends that attribute the construction to supernatural beings.
We'd know, at last, why some men capable of vertically placing blocks of 300 tons, and to lift flat stones of 100 tons, they left us no other samples of his prodigious skill. The Irish sagas speak of giants of the sea, farmers and builders. Greek Literature alludes to the "Hyperboreans" and their circular temples, where Apollo, god of the Sun, he appears every nineteen years...
Actually, everything What we know about the megaliths and, above all, the of Stonehenge, which is the most complete and most studied, gives a glimpse the passage of a civilization alien to the normal course of prehistory. A world of higher knowledge marks its passage, for some time centuries, and then it disappears.
The problem of Stonehenge, like that of all monuments megalithic, it doesn't end here. No one doubts, at present, that These monuments are complex structures, bases and instruments of knowledge. As no one doubts that parietal art (we will see it in The course of this work) expresses a metaphysics.
In short, all we know about language among primitive peoples invites us to consider this as a function to which the mind human, even the "uncivilized" one, attributes a privileged value. Geneviève Calame Griauie, in her study of the Dogon (Ethnologie et Langage: La Parole chez les Dogons, 1965), a town in the south-west of the Niger, observes that, for this people, the word 'so', with which Language is designated, it also means,
"The Faculty That Distinguishes to man from the animal, language in the exclusivist sense of the term, the language of one human group distinct from that of another, the plain words, reasoning and its modalities."
In short, the Word is, in all "primitives," synonymous with action undertaken and classification of creation. It is the doing and the knowing, the action about the world and the worldview. "Because the world is Imbued with the word, and the word is the world, the Dogon elaborate their theory of language as an immense architecture of language. correspondences between variations in individual reasoning and the events of social life." There are 48 types of words." broken down into twice 24, the key number in the world.
Thus, at every A word corresponds to an act, a technique, an institution or a element of creation. Thus, in the man of remote ages, the The word is a vast combinatorial whole, a universal calculus loaded with values, possibilities for action and counts, a repository of revealed knowledge and complex material for act on reality.
The Sudanese Bambara distinguish a The first word not yet uttered, the "ko", which is part of the It is the primordial word of God, and a human word, endowed with a material substrate which is the body, the set of organs of the body. body, and by which man has "dominion" over language.
The linguistic element is as material as the body that makes it produces, and the primordial sounds, in relation to the four cosmic elements – water, earth, fire and air – re-engendered in the They produce the verb that will be "born" between the teeth.
In her work on Language, That Unknown, Julia Joyaux refers to A Melanesian legend about the origin of language and its relationship with The Visceral Body: The God Gomawe was strolling when he stumbled with two characters who didn't know how to answer his questions, or not even express themselves. Thinking this was because they had the Empty, he went to hunt two rats, whose entrails he ripped out. He went back to the two men, opened the door for them, and put it in the intestines, heart, and liver of rats. Immediately The two men began to talk. "What's your belly?" means "What's your language?"
Two ideas should be retained. The first is that language is conceived. in its expression through man, as a material reality, and that throwing out a word is as transformative an act as throwing a word arrow or a stone. The second is that the Word-Idea pre-exists the visceral language; that there is a primordial word of God. In luck that, for example, for the Bambaras, the aphone man goes back to the golden age of humanity. Which, in this conception, does not It means the absence of language, but knowledge and communication without sensitive substrate.
In addition, we find in numerous "primitive" theories extraordinarily refined and detailed on correlations Word graphics. We discovered, in civilizations graphic systems that bear witness to a reflection of a distance between the sign and the thing which presupposes a highly developed symbolism.
The Mayan writing, not yet deciphered, seems to have been typical of the Priests; to have been connected with the cults and with a whole science founded on a cyclical concept of time, and forming, in its set (hieroglyphic or alphabetic?), according to J. E. Tompson, a "Symphony of Time". In the enigmatic writing of the island of Easter, Alfred Métraux wants to see a series of reminders for the singers.
Barthel observes that the 120 signs of this system of 1,500 or 2,000 combinations. And, among these signs (characters, heads, arms, animals, objects, plants, geometric drawings), some of which are true images; the A woman is represented by a flower; A person who eats expresses the Recitation of a Poem: The Height of Reflection on Functions aesthetic, magical, religious and language-makers.
The Process of the elaboration and classification of the four stages of the The writing of the Dogon also offers us a disturbing example of subtle awareness of differentiated language.
"This participation of the language in the world, in Nature, in the body, in society from which it is, however, practically differentiated- and in complex systematization, perhaps constitutes, writes Julia Joyaux The fundamental feature of the conception of language in societies so-called "primitives"..."
Which is to say that the linguistics of the pre-civilized It is a linguistics of high civilization.
And now a question arises. Stonehenge, like other monuments It was a complex construction, expression and instrument of mathematical and cosmogonic knowledge, testimony of a culture. That being the case, what was the language of this culture? ¿Beside presume that it lacked writing, no graphic correlative, if we were to Did he leave such an obvious vestige of architectural correlative?
Without The need to put the question on a general level, the simple consideration of technical needs obliges us to accept the idea that there was a writing. After all, how do you They could have made such important calculations, and directed transport operations of a huge and innumerable brigades of workers across several hundred kilometers, and to organize others as important, if it had been not writing?
But how is there not some vestige of it? Maybe the footprints are erased in the course of the centuries, in the face of the utter indifference of the inhabitants of those regions. Atkinson presumes that instructor-builders came from Crete. Did they use, perhaps, to fix the signs, perishable materials?
But the writing on clay tablets was at that time unknown, and the Master builders had plenty of stones and wood. Perhaps it is better to imagine that, as the Bambara tradition says, "the aphonic man goes back to the golden age of mankind," and that the builders, belonging to some priestly caste, Initiates and technicians at the same time, carried out mute operations which were transmitted by some telepathic means.
Or what they proceeded to subtle registers of thinking about materials organic or specially prepared crystals. Or, in short—and in correspondence with what we know about the taboos of language in the ancient world, that the masters kept secret the words and invisible signs necessary for building and building. the functioning of those colossal machine-temples.
But even though the words and writings of the masters remained hidden, the execution of the work must have been signs, a secondary script, a visible writing that it has vanished. If it existed, it may have been used by the architects as a simple need for quartermaster, as a inferior product of secret knowledge, which lacked Visible vehicle of communication.
Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, stages Caesar. The Library of Alexandria is burning. A character says that the Humanity's memory is going to disappear. "Let it burn," he replies Caesar-. It is a memory full of infamy." The master of the world does not expresses, with these words, contempt for knowledge, but rather more or an idea, of the Ancients, according to which the written language It was nothing more than a substitute for the true knowledge recorded in the higher regions of the mind, deposited in silent memory of the initiates.
Plato, in Timaeus, states:
"It is an arduous task to discover the author and father of this universe, and, once discovered, it is impossible to make it known to all men."
In, Phaedrus, relates an Egyptian fable against writing, the use of which It makes men unaccustomed to exercising their memory, and compels them to depend on signs. The books, he says,
"They resemble the portraits, which perish alive but are unable to answer a question. to the questions put to them."
Clement of Alexandria He says: "To write a whole book is to put a sword in the hands of a child."
This fundamental idea of remote antiquity we return to find it, as Jorge Luis Borges observes, in the Gospel text:
"Do not give holy things to dogs, nor throw your pearls into the flesh. swine, lest they trample them under foot and stir you to pieces."
This This is the maxim of Jesus, the greatest teacher of oral teaching, who Only once did he write words on the floor that no one read.
Is Stonehenge the monument of a superior, primordial and, therefore, independent of any visible vehicle, devoid of signs communication graphics? Writing Could Represent a Downfall in exotericism, a by-product of the language of the knowledge, an accessory teaching vehicle for the use of the common of mortals. However, visible writing was necessary for those great works.
Professor Glyn Daniel, in an article published in the September 1964 Observer, noted that the transfer of the huge stones from the Pembrokshire region to the Salisbury Plain must have posed delicate problems of and that the entire operation should have been carried out in accordance with the blueprints, written instructions, orders, and projects. -Formulated the Hypotheses of maps and plans drawn on skins or tablets of wood. It is astonishing that, with the exception of Glyn Daniel, no prehistorian This question seems to have been raised.
We could base another hypothesis on the "quipus," or knotted ropes which were discovered in Peru and which, it is now believed, They were used for the transmission of numerical indications. A few knots They can be used to represent numbers and ideas. Know very little about these knotted ropes, as well as the "sorcerers' scales" of southern Italy or their counterparts in the The Netherlands, which, according to magical tradition, were used to "knot or to unbind the wind." If the practical writing of Stonehenge was of Like this guy, the damp earth of Salisbury must have destroyed his traces for thousands of years.
Finally, we can imagine a writing that was too much small or too large to be perceived: something like the micro-dot that we use for secret messages, or to signs immense traces in the landscape.
A way of knowing how to do without knowing how to say? Will we find one day some vestige of lost writing and we will go back, thanks to To the great language of origins? Herodotus refers to a experiment of Psammetichus, king of Egypt, who had two children brought up, from birth, without the slightest contact with any language.
The The first word these children uttered was "bread" in Phrygian. The king drew the conclusion that Phrygian was older than Phrygian. Egyptian language and had been the already formed language that had received the man. We see, then, that the enigma of language has haunted us from the very beginning. from the king of Egypt to Lévi-Strauss, who What
"Language could only appear suddenly..., and a abrupt passage from one phase in which nothing made sense, to another, in which I had it all."
Was there for all men, then, a great original language, whose initial verb revealed the nature of the things, their true name, and their function in universal harmony? ¿And the Dance of the Giants was written on the music of this great language?