From the Neolithic, a wide range of peoples expended incredible effort to erect large stones, or megaliths, for communal burial spaces. A boulder built Passage Grave was covered with an earthen mound and characterized by a long passage that led to a subterranean burial chamber. Newgrange in Ireland and Maeshowe in Scotland are the most renowned examples, though there are hundreds of others around the world.
It is well understood that the mounds acted as repositories for mortal remains from the sheer number of human bones — unburnt, charred, or cremated — recovered from hundreds of sites; and that many of these tombs align toward the location of the sun on the horizon, Newgrange to winter solstice sunrise and Maeshowe to winter solstice sunset. But why were the passages constructed with solar alignments? For astronomical and ritual functions, which were optical in nature, and bound tightly together. In prehistoric times; art, science, and religion were once all of one thing.
Solar Images
To control access to the chamber, the entrances of passage graves could be closed or opened. Tombs were sealed by various methods (boulders, slabs, blocks, or wooden elements) that left purposeful apertures for the sunlight to penetrate the chamber. The objective of the ritual was not the light itself, but the image it carried. When properly configured, the image of the sun, the solar disk, was projected into the inner chamber. In the case of the solstice sunrise oriented passage graves, the image of the sun—sol, the soul—appeared on the backstone of the chamber and moved, as the sun rose, its image travelled from the innermost chamber up the passage, through the hole, and out into the world; a powerful symbol of agricultural and personal rebirth, signification of the afterlife, and the carrying away of the souls. These tombs were light receptacles, simple camera obscuras that oriented toward the object or event that the people wanted to project as an image into the inner chamber.
Fig. 1. Newgrange (aerial diagram)
The enormous cairn (75m diameter and 12m tall) has an 18m long passageway that aligns toward the winter solstice sunrise.
Fig. 2. Newgrange (cross-section)
Around the time of the winter solstice sunrise, the sun's light passes through an opening above the doorway and projects down the passageway to the rear of the inner chamber.
Since light is not archeologically durable how can it be determined that there was a projected image rather than a generalized area of light that penetrated the tombs? From the artworks inside the chamber that describe the shape of the light. The modern day visitor to a passage grave may be left with the impression that the sunlight illuminates the artworks engraved on the stones of the passage and chamber, this is however, backwards, for it is the artworks that illustrate the light.
Cairn T at Sliabh na Callaigh at Loughcrew, Ireland orients toward the equinox sunrise. On March 21st sunlight shines through the passage and illuminates the backstone of the rear recess. As the sun rises, angling upward and toward the south, a broad area of light slowly moves over the backstone from upper left to lower right. Circular solar pictographic engravings on the backstone demarcate the diagonal movement of the light across the stone. These circles specifically chart the sun's course and so document the procession of a solar disc, proving that it was an image of the sun, not just generalized light, projected inside. Passage graves were multi-purpose sites with calendric and observatorial functions. The passage was a sort of telescope that a person had to crawl inside to use, not unlike climbing down the tube of a huge modern telescope, except the observer didn’t look outward toward the sky but inward at its image. The ability to make a large optical device out of stones and earth is nothing short of brilliant. |
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Fig. 3. Cairn T, Loughcrew, Equinox alignment | |||
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Monumental Images
The optical aspects of passage graves are not limited to solar movements. Megalithic monuments often come in clusters with sight lines from monument to monument. The small apertures that projected the image of the sun into the chambers during the direct alignment would also project images of distant mounds or standing stones when the sun was in the opposite quadrant, the reverse alignment. For example, the sun shone directly into the Maeshowe chamber during the winter solstice sunset when the sun was at its southwestern extreme, but during the reverse alignment, summer solstice sunrise, when the sun was at its northeastern extreme, the image of the distant Barnhouse Standing Stone would project inside the Maeshowe chamber. How did this work? When the sun was low in the northeastern sky, the light would strike the northeastern side of Barnhouse Stone and reflect. The southwest side of Maeshowe would still be in full shadow, meaning that its entrance, passage, and chamber were still dark, ready to receive the image. When an aperture is in shadow and aligned to a brightly lit object, the image of the object will be cast inward in the most spectacular fashion. There was a seasonal exchange between the mounds and adjacent megaliths.
Fig. 10. Reverse Alignment
'Spirit' Images
Between the direct alignment and the reverse alignment is a window of time when the entrance to the chamber would fall ever so slightly into shadow while the area directly in front of the passage would still be bathed in full sunlight. At this point the mound became a spirit chamber. A shaman ushers a dozen people through the cloaked entrance of the tomb. They crawl down the passage way into its dim womb where they huddle in fear and hope. Candlelight flickers across the faces and stones as the lore is told. The shaman extinguishes the candle. The shaman’s confederates outside uncover a hidden hole in the entrance cover and ‘magically’ the image of gods and elders ‘emerge’ from the backstone (really the projected image of bedecked shamans’ assistants outside). Exultations and lamentations arise in the darkness, tears and song, for here is what it means to die and learn what lays beyond the mortal veil. Attendees lay hands on the spirits on the backstone, connecting to the sky above and to those below, touching the eternal and indomitable. Through the spirits they gain a piece of immortality and a peace for their own mortality. The image brings the promise that they will be reunited with the others that have gone before.
Fig. 11. Spirit Chamber
Throughout this page I have used the traditional terms for Neolithic/Bronze Age boulder-built mounds, ‘passage-graves’ and ‘passage tombs.’ But these terms can be unduly limiting. It may be as unfair to label the mounds as ‘tombs’ solely because of the ashes and bone fragments, though accurate, just as it would be misleading to label them as ‘larders’ because of the pottery shards, or ‘jewelry stores’ because of the beads and personal accouterments, or ‘theatres’ because of the light-borne apparitions, or ‘observatories’ because of the telescopic function. These mounds were multi-faceted facilities. During the course of the era of the passage-mound tradition, society was in an early phase of the division of labor process. Much of life was still intertwined, connected, whole. Today our way of life in the developed world is compartmentalized; the funeral home, church, observatory, grocery store, mall, and cineplex occupy distinctly different places and distinctly different spheres. Back in prehistory there was one place to serve many roles. It might not even do the mounds proper credit to call them ‘ritual centers.’ (We have to guard against the default value in anthropology that any object whose utility is not glaringly obvious gets labeled as ritual in function.) The mounds were peculiar community centers, glue that held the group together, a place that held the important, practical to mythological, that ensured the success of the clan. These sites, from construction to implementation, made a group of families into a unit, a culture. The mounds were loci civitas, the heart of the common wealth, the repository of ‘we.’ Their importance cannot be understated.
Posted March 9, 2010
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