Stonehenge

On Salisbury plain in southern England stands an awesome testament of time and mystery—an arrangement of stones that has been the subject of endless poems, studies, legends, and speculations that date as far back as King Arthur and his court. Stonehenge presents a unique cryptic puzzle about the lives of a prehistoric people. Interest in the beauty and mystery of Stonehenge did not surface until the Dark Ages when people began to wonder about the purpose behind the stone structure and about the people that lived in the Stone Age on the Salisbury plains. The decoding of the mystery of Stonehenge unlocks centuries of theories about the somber stones of the Druids. The rugged stones are blank with no words of dedication, no constructional notation, and no readable clues. As the mystery behind the stone structure begins to unfold, a door of history stands ajar. By the 21st century the mystery behind the positioning of the stones (a master plan of architecture) was revealed.

Stonehenge was built between the years 1900 and 1600 B.C.E., a thousand years after the pyramids of Egypt and a few hundred years before the fall of Troy. Its creation corresponded with the flourishing of the Minoan civilization of Crete. In Mesopotamia, Abraham was living at Harran and the Israelites had not yet come into bondage in Egypt.

Within the circular walls of Stonehenge there are pairings of trilithons making a horseshoe shape. These are three stones that are rectangular in shape. Two “heel” stones are anchored into the ground and the third stone rests on top, creating a houselike image. The structure of Stonehenge, seems at first glance nothing more then large stones randomly laid out on Salisbury Plain; however, after much investigation, these stones turn out to provide more information that reveals Stonehenge to be a monumental temple. Stonehenge is decorated with intricate celestial alignments in complete simplicity and symmetry of design so that the rays of the sun shine through specific areas at certain times of the day and year, showing that the engineers who constructed Stonehenge possessed intelligence of a high order.

[Page 439]There have been numerous theories devised by anthropologists and archaeologists about what took place within the stone structures, such as that the Stonehenge sun–moon alignments were created and elaborated to make a calendar to tell time for planting crops and that the structure allowed priests to maintain priestly power, as they were able to call out to the multitude to see the spectacular rising and setting of the moon and sun and their union in an eclipse.

One of the most interesting recordings of the people of Stonehenge comes from the transcripts of the Greek historian Diodorus, who wrote in 1 B.C.E. that Stonehenge was a “Temple in the land of the Celts” and that the God Apollo visited the Celtic island every 19 years and danced the night through the vernal equinox. The writings of Diodorus echo the religion of the Greeks, for the veneration of the sun and moon was also an important element within Greek religion. The writings of Diodorus are richly suggestive and provide clues into the lives of the people of Wessex. They held the sun and moon in highest regard, objects of holiness enough to build an elaborate monument to honor these two celestial bodies.

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