The megalithic monument is generally supposed to have been a site for religious ceremonies of some kind. Was it still in use when the Romans arrived? The druids (priests of the Celtic religion) are supposed to have used it in some way-is this true?
The monument is ancient-it is certainly older than 3000 BC. Do we know actually what it was used for?
Coincidentally, I just listened to a lecture on the celts, and they were practicing their religion. It would seem that Stonehenge (and the other similar structures that existed and still exist – Stonehenge is just the biggest) was still being used for religious ceremonies of some nature.
We know very little about the celts, and what we do know come from the Romans, who didn’t describe any ceremonies. It seems clear they did practice human sacrifice (severed heads have been found). It’s likely that happened at Stonehenge, but no one is sure.
We know quite a lot about the Celts, who continue to exist in the same way that the Romans continue to exist via their cultural and linguistic descendents.
Celts had nothing to do with the construction of Stonehenge, as it predated them by centuries. They never mentioned it in writing. Any evidence of its use has to be archaeological, which means that it’s going to be difficult to prove that the people using it were Celts, whose definition is linguistic (We don’t know when the last non-Celts disappeared from Britain’s cultural landscape).
The Celts had writing?
Yes but unfortunately most of what we have in it is just personal names on stone monuments.
I don’t believe any significant legends, stories or other records written in Ogham has ever been discovered, has it?
What’s the evidence?
AIUI, “Druids at Stonehenge” is pretty close to pure, evidence-free conjecture. As Dr. Drake notes, the notion that they had anything to do with its construction is certainly false.
Sure they didn’t build it, but if you were the local holy man and there just happened to be this very impressive looking mysterious monument in your vicinity why wouldn’t you incorporate it and perform ceremonies there? What little surviving writings we have about the Druids indicate they studied astronomy, so they would have noticed its alignment with the solstices.
Julius Caesar in the gallic wars claims that Druids studied “the stars and their movements, the size of the cosmos and the earth, the world of nature, and the powers of deities”.
That really depends on what your ceremonies are. There is no positive evidence that the Celts had any use for astronomy with regard to public festivals, though there is evidence that they used astronomy to regulate the calendar.
You are possibly thinking of religious ceremonies on the Christian model, where a priest (or Priest, if you are capitalizing Druid) speaks to the entire assembled population. The purpose of ceremonies was probably quite different, as well. The big festival days were marked by fairs, feasting, and a dread of the supernatural, whose attention you don’t really want to attract. [But of course all that information comes from nominally Christian sources, mostly from Ireland, and it’s hard to control for bias and for change.]
Later folklore ascribes a supernatural creation to megalithic circles. It’s hard to explain without launching into a course on Celtic mythology, but essentially think of Stonehenge as (potentially) the property of the gods. It’s not a good idea, nor a safe one, to just use their property as if it were yours.
TL; DR: our attitudes to both religion and the nature of the landscape are fundamentally different from the Ancient Celts, and there’s plenty of reasons why they might not use Stonehenge.
Also - Stonehenge has been substantially restored - "Present-day Stonehenge consists of the remnants of the last in a sequence of circular monuments built between 3000 and 1600 B.C. But the change to the site over the last century has been dramatic. An 1835 painting by John Constable shows many stone pillars leaning or lying askew in the grass. Photographs taken in 1900 reveal a similarly untidy scene."
[Constable painting [/COLOR]](https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjzi6qd8eLJAhVD8RQKHberCcAQjRwIBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.john-constable.org%2FStonehenge%2C-1835.html&psig=AFQjCNErXC6QcapT3DJyj60DgUwxBySttQ&ust=1450441350607637} [COLOR="Blue)
What the Roman’s would have seen was probably a jumble of fallen stones with little significance.
According to the Romans the Celts practiced human sacrifice by burning people in Wicker man effigies.
Of course, like the cynic narrator Marlow (in Joseph Conrad’s anti-colonialist work ‘Heart of Darkness’) points out while floating down the modern day Thames; Britain back then was the definition of wild and savage to the Roman soldiers who invade only to bring civilization to the ‘barbaric locals.’
Depends on the source you read, according to some it wasn’t human sacrifice but rather the preferred form of capital punishment. You kept your thieves, murderers and other criminals imprisoned until the relevant festival then burnt them all at once which had the double purpose of being a very public display of the penalty for crime and also was supposed to help bring about a good harvest… Two for one bonus.
So these early Stone-Age Britons (the people who inhabited England before the Celts); did they survive at all? Or were they wiped out by the Celts?
That’s a bit much. The Constable painting is not that different from how Stonehenge looks today; it just happens to be painted from the most-damaged quadrant. Even today, post-restoration, less than half of the outer circle is intact and it’s still obviously Something Important. Really, the major part of the restoration was just putting up some of the lintels that had fallen.
They probably became the Celts (or rather, they gradually adopted Celtic languages and customs and became indistinguishable from them).
Not quite sure what you mean here; their festivals (Beltane, Samhain, Imbolc, and Lughnasadh) aren’t centered on the equinoxes or solstices like ours tend to be, but rather halfway between them. But it takes astronomy to determine this kind of thing.
Sorry: you’re right. I was thinking celebration of astronomical events, the way neopagans celebrate the soltices and equinoxes themselves, rather than calendar-based festivals, which of course pretty much everyone has. And Samhain, at least, has decent evidence for being pan-Celtic.
Naah, from what I know, the two (possible Celtic human sacrifice* and Celtic headhunting) aren’t connected in that particular way - the Celts practiced headhunting of the battlefield slain. The heads likely had religious significance, but were also signifiers of a warrior’s might.
- the tide is currently against it, as just a blood libel by the Romans.
OTTOMH Don’t we have ritually sacrificed people left in and preserved by peat bogs in the area? They were royally dressed, had long nails with no dirt under them and other signs they were treated very well before being killed.
This isn’t the body I was thinking of, but a similar case
Re Supernatural Origins Of Stonehenge
In her version of the Welsh Mabinogion Saga, Evangeline Walton says that prior to the coming of Arthurian legends the stones were believed to be the petrified bodies of the first human tribe on the earth.
No. AFAIK, all the well-studied English bog bodies are from Oop North. And only the Lindow men would be of the right time period anyway, and there’s contention as to whether Lindow man was sacrificed (and definitely not royally dressed - he was naked. And his last meal was burned bread, hardly a royal feast.).
Anyway, Stonehenge is on the well-drained chalk downland, not the kind of landscape that makes for peat bogs.
Again, is there any actual evidence for this? It’s fully possible to know about astronomy and to look at Stonehenge without noticing subtleties of its alignment.
Indeed, is there any evidence that Druids took any notice of Stonehenge at all? Suppose I claim they probably knew nothing of it - can this be disproved?
It’s irrelevant to the discussion, but the 1977 paperback cover to Harry Harrison and Leon Stover’s Stonehenge would leave you to believe that it was still in use when the Romans were there:
The 1985 cover, too:
And the 1992:
I personally think the original builders and users were long since gone by then. It’s possible that other folk were using it for completely different ceremonies, or just to admire the Midsummer Sunrise, or something.