THE LONG DARK NIGHT

Neolithic ritual as palimpsest

This is my chapter in a book dedicated to the late Lionel Sims, archaeologist, anthropologist and astronomer.

In order to begin addressing Lionel Sims’ contributions to archaeology I need to start by introducing a concept I am going to call ‘Cheetham’s Law’. Cheetham’s Law is named after Paul Cheetham of Bournemouth University who made this candid observation to me some years ago whilst on a field trip to Avebury. He said that breakthrough ideas in a field tend to come not from those already established in that field (i.e., professors or professionals) but from ‘newcomers’ - either those just starting out or those who have arrived late and come in from another discipline. On asking why this was he answered that the latecomers brought with them ways of thinking from their own discipline that enabled them to see through old entrenched (and wrong) ideas in the new, whereas the young had not yet learned to abide by those same old, entrenched ideas. In short both parties, both types of newcomer, were not yet aware of what they were not supposed to think. Established ideas have a habit of becoming dogma, and remain mostly unchallenged; this is not just a case of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’, where the frailty of an entrenched idea (the nakedness of the emperor) is evident to all, but no one (except a child – Cheetham’s ‘newcomer’) speaks out, for fear of judgement (though this is often the case); it is more often, I would argue, that those lacunas in thought are simply not seen, as it is a basic psychological dictum that ‘a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest’, as Simon and Garfunkel put it – often wholly unconsciously.

A case in point occurred to me recently when investigating an old house for an archaeology report I was writing. I am no expert in medieval architecture, but I was handed this project being told it was an anomaly, the cross-wing of this particular medieval hall was in the wrong place, at the high-end (where there was a nice carved dais-beam preserved); the house included many other odd features, odd because they seemed to be set in the wrong place. I, however, looked at the plan and saw immediately the description in the Heritage Listing was wrong: the dais-beam was in fact the low-end beam. This example had been overlooked and recorded erroneously as a dais-beam at the high-end of the hall, and all subsequent work done in the house had carried on this assumption. I did not, at that point, know that carved low-end beams were a rarity and therefore usually to be discounted… in other words I did not know what not to think, and hence had solved the enigma through my ignorance. Previous surveyors had not been unable to un-see the description of this beam as the dais-beam, and as a result had concocted a whole raft of reasons for the odd design of the house. The truth was they were looking at it back to front. Once this was realised, every previously odd feature of the house was resolved.

Stonehenge is, in terms of design, a timber building made permanent in stone, complete with redundant woodworking joints (Atkinson 1977, 177). And like the medieval hall house above, it is usually, wrongly, viewed back to front (North 1996, 468–70). Generations of scholars, from Stukeley onwards, have argued for the alignment of Stonehenge and other ritual sites of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age on the midsummer sunrise (Atkinson 1979, 93–7). Stukeley noted that Stonehenge aligned on ‘the point where the Sun rises, or nearly, at the summer solstice’ (Burl 1993, 9) and from this time forward such alignments became the focus of many studies. What Lionel has referred to as a ‘Motley crew’ of archaeoastronomers (online talk, 2020) has continued to promulgate a solar theory. And this became the ‘dais-beam’ of prehistoric archaeoastronomy and continues to exist as so in the popular imagination, given the public preoccupation with midsummer. But it is not just the fact that, as John North, one of Lionel Sims’ intellectual heroes, pointed out, the monument was meant to be viewed from the north-east, looking through the monument towards the setting midwinter sun (North 1996, 459) that was so much the issue (more of that anon), it was that a whole precipice of reconstructed prehistoric belief had been built upon this wrong assumption. Like the anomalous hall built strangely around the ‘dais-beam’, so the edifice of ideas concerning the beliefs and rituals of the Stonehenge builders have been built on the shaky foundations of the rising midsummer sun; and John North and Lionel Sims, like the child in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes, saw fit to speak up. Just as North was not an archaeologist but a historian of science (a ‘latecomer’, in ‘Cheetham’s Law’) so too Lionel, who looked at Stonehenge anew, was not as an archaeologist but as an anthropologist, and saw what others had not seen; indeed, saw what could not be seen. Let me explain.

Archaeology is the science of the hidden - an occult science, if you will. It is a study of the past through remains that, for the most part, lie hidden under the dust of centuries, and yet there is an irony here in that the objects of this study, when found, are the material remains of a culture, usually its most permanent and lasting objects; the hard-wearing, most visible; what the archaeologist lacks is the ephemeral, the fleeting, the immaterial and the invisible – the remnants of a culture least suited to remain preserved in sand and earth. It is difficult, then, for an archaeologist to examine the invisible; but Lionel Sims is such a scholar, and his study of this occult science is truly a study of the hidden. His work looks as much at what cannot be seen, and never could remain; the immaterial; the implied rather than the explicit, so where other scholars had looked to the visible orb of the Sun in alignments, Lionel, following North, looked to the dark winter nights, and brought with him thinking from another discipline, that of anthropology, that would allow him to see what had remained invisible… both metaphorically to generations of scholars and literally – the Dark Moon.

So, what lies behind his ability to see in the dark?

Lionel’s interest was sparked by a theory of the origins of culture, a palaeoanthropological model that suggested early hunter-gatherer societies were based on matriarchal system  - a theory championed by anthropologist Chris Knight in his Blood Relations (1991)– the theory suggested a culture ruled by the phases of the Moon, something Marshack had suggested through early archaeological evidence (1972 i and ii); the model suggests a seclusion of the females at Dark Moon, and in this period of dark to full was when the men went hunting. The argument runs that this seclusion was a ruse by the females to garner increased support from males in provisioning their offspring.  By synchronising their ovulatory cycles and concealing ovulation they maximised parental interest and lessened the chances of husbands cheating. Menfolk would hunt under a waxing Moon while the women were secluded. Full Moon saw the surrendering of game, feasting and marriage (with the husband going to his wife’s camp). These periods of aggregation and separation follow a lunar logic. In a way it put men at the mercy of the Moon.

The point here is not to analyse that theory or comment on its veracity, only to note its importance in the development of Lionel’s thinking. The idea of a past/lost matriarchal system is not new nor limited to the palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. Others, such as Marija Gimbutas (1974, 34) have attributed the same matriarchal rule to later cultures, i.e., the Old European culture of the first farmers in the Balkans and Danube valley (c 7000 BC to the start of the second millennium BC). But, contra-Gimbutas, Sims, after Knight, suggested that the advent of farming and cattle-rearing was when the change to patriarchal rule began in earnest. 

‘In particular, the shift from a hunter’s bride-service to a cattle owner’s bride-price led to a reversal in socio-political marital relations, with a significant deterioration in women’s status. Women became the chattels of men’s cattle exchanges.’ (2013, 184)

Anthropological evidence of cattle-rearing tribes in Africa such as the Dinka of Southern Sudan showed a male-dominated society in which woman was seen in terms of exchange and social status counted in heads of cattle. For Lionel farming marked the advent of the male-dominated system. At some point the old system collapsed. So, he decided to look for evidence of it, predicting:

‘that Neolithic and Early Bronze Age beliefs would display a complex logic which simultaneously respects and transcends an ancient cosmology which in its astronomical aspects had focused on the Moon. By extension, this also implies that the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age introduction of solar symbolism was to modify and transcend earlier engagement with the Moon.’ (2006, 3)

Stonehenge seemed to be a good place to start his search. Might traces of the old lunar system be hidden away beneath the farming rites preserved at such a site? For old powers were not just cast away unthinking; the thrall of superstition meant that once powerful (and hence dangerous) ideas were not simply ousted but integrated, controlled, nullified, tamed… exactly what Knight reasoned had happened to flesh and blood women with the demise of hunter-gathering, hence the uncanny power of the Moon. Was there evidence of the sublimation of such rites, or even an attempt to take control them at Stonehenge?

Lionel’s close reading of North’s work revealed lunar imagery present in this supposedly ‘solar’ site, such as its 29.5 stones in the outer trilithon circle, representative, it could be argued, of the synodic month (Sims 2016, 472). There were also hints in its structure that contrary to popular belief it was not meant to be entered to see an external sunrise, but was meant to be viewed from without, from a position revealed by a double arc of trilithons and leaning lintels that seemed to converge on a spot beside the so-called heel stone (North 1996, 447). And it was from this viewpoint that the forest of stones that was Stonehenge morphed into a solid, impenetrable barrier save for two apertures, an upper and lower window, discovered by John North (1996, 474 and Figs. 170­–176). In this wise, a seeming disparate ring of doorways became a solid structure like the passage grave of Newgrange in Ireland, with its lightbox above the blocked doorway that allowed a single beam of light on midwinter morning to penetrate its inner chamber (O’Kelly 1982, 125). As at Newgrange, Stonehenge boasted a narrow entrance revealed by a heavenly body at midwinter.

This appearance makes total sense in relation to surviving myths and folktales; Lionel is a lover of fairy tales (especially the interpretations of Structuralist Vladimir Propp (1928)) and the belief that myth can be decoded, offering clues to a lost past. For me, too, myth is a way pointer to a lost culture. With this in mind, here I will refer to a myth entitled Aided Chon Roi – ‘The Death of Cu Roi’ (Best 1905; Stokes 1905), an Irish myth, to show how clues about ancient sites, and possible astronomical use, might lay within surviving mythical imagery. It recounts how one Cu Roi mac Dairi had aided the men of Ulster in a raid, but because he was not paid for his services, he seized the plunder, namely a woman named Blathnat (‘Flowers’), the three cows of luchna (that could each produce the milk of 30 cows) and a cauldron.

The Ulster hero Cúchulainn, lover of Blathnat, pursues him. He meets with Blathnat and arranges a ruse by which Cu Roi can be killed and Blathnat, her cows and her cauldron rescued. Blathnat advises Cu Roi that he should build an enclosure for his stronghold of standing stones, accordingly he sends his men away to fetch building materials leaving his stronghold undefended. Blathnat has agreed that when Cu Roi is most vulnerable, she will send a signal to Cúchulainn by pouring the milk of her magical cows down the river (henceforward named “Finnglas (White Flecked).”) that runs through the stronghold. Blathnat bathes Cu Roi and binds his hair to his bedpost, then pours the milk and opens the stronghold doors. Cúchulainn, seeing the signal of the milky river, enters the stronghold of pillar stones, cuts off Cu Roi’s head, and so regains the spoils lost to Cu Roi, though in the earliest extant version (Cross and Slover 1936) Blathnat subsequently dies at the hands of her husband’s seneschal.  It is the old tale of journeying to the underworld and winning the bride (for however tragically short a time – other brides, like the Welsh Olwen, have a happier ending, see ‘The tale of Culhwch and Olwen’ in Jones and Jones 1957), the cow, the magical vessel, stealing the treasure from the dragon.

Cu Roi’s stronghold, built with pillar stones, is suggestive of a stone circle: it is described in the tale ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ thus:

‘In what part of the globe whatsoever Cu Roi should happen to be, every night o’er the fort, he chanted a spell, till the fort revolved as swiftly as a mill-stone. The entrance was never to be found after sunset.’ (trans Cross and Slover 1936)

The turning fort moves in a manner suggestive of the sky revolving around the pole. The inability to find its entrance after sunset in the tale is the result of a magical trick to make it impregnable, yet it suggests a more complex origin: does it only revolve at night or is this just when the motion of the stars in the dark sky make it appear so? Is, then, the entrance visible by day as it is marked by the rising or setting point of the Sun (something not visible after nightfall?); if so, the fort might only be ‘entered’ when the Sun had marked the point of entry/exit, i.e. when the right conjunction had taken place between it and the heavens. This reminds us of North’s Stonehenge, set under a turning sky, drum-shaped like a millwheel, and with an entrance not visible after sunset, as the setting sun shows the doorway. It suggests ingress into the sacred enclosure is only permitted at a certain time of year – the winter solstice. And this is the time the drama is set to take place: the rescue of the cows and women, and cauldron of milk (a treasure trove of lunar analogues, one could argue).

To return to Stonehenge, the sun, yearly, at midwinter ‘enters’ the monument – it penetrates the lower ‘window’ (North 1996, 446). It was here visible for the few days either side of the solstice, as if held in position in the sky; but there was more – for Stonehenge was built on a slight rise, and in climbing that rise along the avenue, an observer approaching the stones at sunset could   ascend at a pace that would counterbalance the setting sun (ibid, 451–2; Sims 2006, 194), keeping the solar disk still in the heavens, thus seeming to stop time itself. This fits another Irish myth that recounts the birth of the god Aenghus: Aenghus (‘one-strength’) is the son of a deity named the Dagdae and is conceived during an adulterous liaison with the cow-goddess Bóand (‘White Cow’; see Swift 2003, 56) (also known Eithne) aided by the magic that sees the Sun appears to stand still in the sky. According to the Tochmarc Étaíne:

‘Elcmar of the Brug [Brú na Bóinne, that is, Newgrange] had a wife whose name was Eithne [Bóand], the Dagdae worked great spells upon Elcmar as he set out, that he might not return betimes (that is, early) and he dispelled' the darkness of night for him, and he kept hunger and thirst from him. He sent him on long errands, so that nine months went by as one day, for he had said that he would return home again between day and night. Meanwhile the Dagdae went in unto Elcmar's wife, and she bore him a son, even Aengus, and the woman was whole of her sickness when Elcmar returned, and he perceived not her offence, that is, that she had lain with the Dagdae.’ (trans Bergin and Best 1938, 143)

The spell performed by the Dagdae is astronomical:

He brought her to the birth in a single day.

It was then they made the Sun stand still

to the end of nine months — strange the tale —

warming the noble fine grass

in the roof of the perfect firmament. (poem 3 Bóand II, trans Stokes 1894)

The magical stilling of the Sun which a creative act occurs suggests the solstice, which literally means ‘sun-standing-still’, when the Sun no longer moves along the horizon (that is, it is seen to visibly rise and set at the same location on the horizon for a few days around the solstice). At Stonehenge this magical feat was made visible even more dramatically by the act of walking along the avenue that seemed to stop the sun from setting. Time was stilled by an active ritual act. At Newgrange, a place for the dead, the effect was more passive, requiring no external movement or engagement with the monument; but this latter was a place of sunrise rather than sunset, when the great cycle of nature had started again, arguably at a point further along the ritual process.

This ‘stilling’ phenomenon at Stonehenge, however, was not limited to the sun. There were two trilithon ‘windows’ at Stonehenge, according to North (1996, 446–447), one above the other, and while the Sun was visible through one each year, the Moon became visible through the other once during the 19-year Metonic (lunar) cycle, perhaps echoed in the 19 stones in the inner bluestone circle within the trilithon horseshoe of Stonehenge. Every 19 years the setting full Moon would be viewable as a line, a sliver of silver, through the upper window during what astronomers refer to as the Southern minor standstill, located 30 degrees south of west (ibid, 473).

But what Lionel did was to ask whether there were also occasions when the Dark Moon and the Sun passed through their respective windows at the solstice? One might ask why no one had asked this before, but the answer is probably because in such a scenario the Moon, logically, would be invisible, appearing in the window when obscured by the light of the sun. Anthropologists, however, such as Sims and Knight, are happier contemplating the Dark Moon - it might not be visible, but its symbolism is what was important. The coincidence of Dark Moon and winter solstice had a combined symbolic potency that went beyond its relative invisibility to the naked eye.

If the alignment of Stonehenge marked the longest night of the year, then its pairing with a Dark Moon, Lionel suggested, would be on the longest and darkest night of the whole 19-year Metonic cycle: a night with no Moon.

Was, then, this alignment about darkness rather than light? If so, it suggests a myth recorded in the metrical Dindshenchas concerning the origin of the name of Dowth, the neighbouring passage grave to Newgrange:

‘A king held sway over Erin, Bressal bó-dibad [‘extinction of cows’] by name. In his time a murrain came upon the kine of Erin, until there was left in it but seven cows and a bull. All the men of Erin were gathered from every quarter to Bressal, to build them a tower after the likeness of the Tower of Nimrod, that they might go by it to Heaven.

His sister came to him and told him that she would stay the sun's course in the vault of heaven, so that they might have an endless day to accomplish their task. The maiden went apart to work her magic. Bressal followed her and had union with her: so that place is called Ferta Cuile from the incest that was committed there. Night came upon them then, for the maiden's magic was spoilt.

“Let us go hence,” say the men of Erin, “for we only pledged ourselves to spend one day a-making this hill, and since darkness has fallen upon our work, and night has come on and the day is gone, let each depart to his place.” “Dubad (darkness) shall be the name of this place for ever”, said the maiden. So hence are Dubad [Dowth] and Cnoc Dubada named.’ (The Metrical Dindshenchas, 78; trans Stokes, 1894)

Here the stopping of the Sun (not specifically referred to as the solstice in the text, but this can be inferred) at a ritual monument accompanies an incestuous union, in the manner of Nut and her brother Geb in the Heliopolitan Egyptian tradition, which is the creative act par excellence (Hooke 1991, 72). While the incest motif in the Egyptian tradition is wholly positive, in Irish it is not, causing the end of the magical state; however, this is likely to be a later (Christian) gloss, rather than part of the original myth – for recent DNA analysis of human remains in the Boyne valley necropolis has shown incest was practised amongst the elites, perhaps to keep the bloodline pure as was the case amongst Egyptian royalty. The authors note: ‘Socially sanctioned matings of this nature are very rare, and are documented almost exclusively among politico-religious elites—specifically within polygynous and patrilineal royal families that are headed by god-kings.’ (Cassidy, 2020, 1). This myth, located at a Neolithic ceremonial site, suggests both a ‘time’ for its actions – the solstice – and a preoccupation with darkness that fits the site mentioned, as the chamber of one of the satellite tombs at Dowth (Dowth south) is aligned, like Stonehenge, on the winter solstice sunset (Ruggles 1999, 129).

If Dowth ‘darkness’ was the place of solstitial sunset, Newgrange might correspond to the place where the light was born at sunrise. Newgrange’s Gaelic name Brú na Bóinne can be translated as ‘Womb of Bóand/White Cow’ (EDiL: http://dil.ie/7037) which suggests the passage grave symbolised the belly of the cow-goddess Bóand from whom Aengus is born (expressed in the sun’s rays appearing in the chamber on the morning of the winter solstice?).

The Dark Moon hypothesis of Lionel Sims might elicit some disagreement from those who might ask why a monument might be built to align on something that could not be seen. However, this is to ignore another intriguing aspect of the alignment that occurred before the ‘darkness visible’ of the midwinter Dark Moon: due to the relative rotation of Earth, Sun, and Moon, when the Moon is once more visible in the same part of the sky as a month before, it is not in the same phase, but an earlier one - 2.2 days earlier, to be exact (Sims 2016, 468). This means that if viewed through an aperture, a full Moon, for example, when next seen through the same aperture, will be 2.2 days from full, a waxing gibbous Moon. If one could only see the Moon through such a gap, one would believe the phases of the Moon occurred in reverse order to that which one would observe if watching its daily changes naturally. It is like a strobe effect where the wheels of a speeding car seem to be going slowly backwards despite their forwards motion. The Moon seen moving forward in the heavens when viewed through the ‘magic’ window at Stonehenge, in the months leading up to the minor lunar standstill, can be seen going back in time, slowly. The lintel doorways of Stonehenge act, then, as a time machine, slowing and reversing the phases of the Moon, reversing history.  Mythologist Mircea Eliade would suggest such a ‘time-machine’ was built to take one back to the time of the gods, the time of creation. In his view the myth behind such temples was a cyclical festival/ritual of rebirth, such as the Ancient Near Eastern Heb Sed (jubilee) in Egypt, and the Akitu (‘barley sowing’) in Mesopotamia (Gaster 1950, 34–49; Eliade 1971, 55–58; Frankfort 1948, 313–318) ceremonies of a cosmogonic or seasonal nature, reflecting an ongoing concern with (re-)establishing order and performed within temples that mirrored the wider cosmos. They involved rites of sacrifice and dismemberment symbolising the destruction and re-creation of the cosmos and linked with the death and rebirth of the land. Such ritual sites of the Near East, had a clear astronomical basis - the Ptolemaic texts in the temple of Edfu describes the pharaoh’s actions in the Heb Sed court thus:

‘He runs crossing the ocean

And the four sides of heaven,

Going as far as the rays of the Sun disk,

Passing over the earth,

Giving the field to its mistress.’ (Frankfort 1948, 86)

Eliade argued that all sacred buildings mirrored the cosmos: ‘Every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model’ (1957, 45), and that such sites sought to express the idea of a ‘timeless’, ideal state – built to reflect the conditions of the illo tempore (1971, 4), a kind of Edenic, pre-fall state, literally pre-history. Such a return to a primordial state of union back to a beginning; a time before creation, is perhaps suggested in the long dark night before the creation of Sun and Moon…hence the need to turn back time and return to the longest darkest night when neither Sun nor Moon existed. This is a rewriting of the mythic past, an escape from history back to an idealised beginning. But Lionel has another interpretation. This turning back of the clock was perhaps more subversive. If the Moon was the clock of the heavens and dictated women’s power, then what did it mean if such sites aimed to somehow turn back the clock of the Moon; dismantle its progress; control it? It is, in Lionel’s view, an attempt to stop progress and hem in women. It is an attempt to reverse the progress of the Moon that gave women their power; it enables one to look through the ‘magic’ window and slow, stop and reverse the Moon; the power of the Moon is thus imprisoned, like Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tales (see Chris Knight’s essay in this volume); and it is the cattle barons of Salisbury Plain who take this female cult and turn it on its head with the objective of investing the Sun with the Moon’s former cultic significance.

‘This bracketing of winter solstice sunset with Dark Moon suggests, by extension of the principle of identity, a coding in which winter solstice sunset is invested with the property of Dark Moon…and by abstracting one Dark Moon from the twelve others in any one year, winter solstice provides the annual anchor for estranging ritual from a monthly to an annual cycle.’ (2006, 12)

The window at Stonehenge harnesses the power of the Moon and lends it to the solar year. But one window is not enough to build a theory on, so Lionel continued to look elsewhere for evidence – this time at Avebury.

North had argued (1996, 274) that the nearby site of Avebury, Britain’s largest Stone Circle set in a larger monumental landscape, was aligned on the midwinter Sunset and southern major lunar standstill, the latter event occurring some nine years after the minor standstill at Stonehenge. But, as at Stonehenge, Lionel’s investigations (2009) went one step further; his approach was a literal approach on foot, up the Beckhampton Avenue through the main Avebury circle and along the West Kennet Avenue towards the Sanctuary; after all, an avenue was meant to be walked. Lionel’s approach to landscape as experiential is based on a phenomenological perspective, looking at the experience of being within a landscape, on its effect on the individual – an approach championed by others such as Paul Devereux (2001; 2003).

Silbury Hill, the largest man-made Prehistoric mound in Europe, and built to the south of the great Avebury henge, Lionel noted, was so-placed as to be obscured for the most part, in a landscape of hills, valleys and different vistas (2009, 393–395). However, from certain, limited, viewpoints the terraced flat top of the hill was revealed to be in seemingly deliberate relationships with the hills behind it. Lionel suggests it may have been periodically cleared of grass, perhaps every nine or nineteen years (2020) to reveal the underlying chalk, making a bright, white line on horizon (2009, 400). This, he suggests, is a model of the crescent Moon (ibid, 403), and his argument hinges on the placement of the Moon in this crescent phase as seen from the vistas in the landscape.

When seen to east at Fox Covert at the start of the Beckhampton Avenue, the Silbury Moon is in the place of the rising Moon (waning) as seen just before sunrise. Days later, such a rising crescent is obscured by the Sun, so this chalk-analogue represents a Moon just before Dark Moon. The second viewing position is of the Silbury Moon as from the north after having crossed the winterbourne stream.  From here the Silbury Moon is in line with the horizon, suggesting you are looking at a Moon that has set, yet is still, paradoxically visible…

‘There is only one place from which the Moon under the horizon can still be seen. That place is the underworld. Descending along the two avenues at these places, which includes the requirement to cross a winterbourne river (Lincoln 1991: 62-75), was an embodiment designed by the builders as a metaphor for entering the underworld.’ (2009, 21)

Having entered the underworld by crossing the Winterbourne, like some native river Styx, the next view of the hill is a view 80 degrees west from the southern circle within the main henge, beside the so-called obelisk; this view is also of a Moon in a position where it could never be seen in actuality, only if one were in the underworld (i.e., below the horizon).  The next visible sighting of the hill is as a crescent on western horizon seen from the east of the hill; this would relate to the Moon as a waxing crescent, seen in the west just after the Sun has set, but still in the underworld as the hill-terrace remains in line with horizon. The final view Sims uncovered was from the wooden palisades just east of the hill in the valley floor; the view here is 30 degrees north of west and aligns on the extreme northern minor limit of the Moon.

The Silbury Moon is seen from here peeping over the oak palisade in Ritual enclosure 1 in West Kennet palisades, which has the river Kennet running through it, which makes us think of the river Finnglas running through Cu Roi’s fort in the tale mentioned at the start of this essay. This tale involved the rescue of the woman and the three magical cows from the underworld, is suggestive of a seasonal return of fertility after winter, the rescuing of the Sun (a female entity in Indo-European myth) from the abyss of the underworld and tied to the appearance and position of the Milky Way on this long dark night (Grigsby 2018, 244 and 282). Lionel would argue the taking of the woman is seizing the power from the Moon, and that the very structure of the monument is about such annexation (Sims 2013i, 12 & 180).

The Sun sets on the western horizon and rises in the east, so travels west to east through the underworld, at least as we ‘experience’ it. In Lionel’s model, the Moon-analogue at Avebury, however, is last seen waning on the east, then when next seen ‘rising’ it is on the western horizon, so it journeys backwards through the underworld. This journey through the Avebury underworld accompanied by the heavenly bodies is not unlike the Edfu texts mentioned above that see the Pharaoh in the Heb Sed ritually traversing the sky, specifically the region known as the Duat, equated with the underworld (Naydler 2005, 17). It is a Hero’s journey through an underworld realm, an initiatory journey through a symbolic, cosmic ritual landscape. Is Avebury a vast initiation site? Lionel says yes – one that embodies the defeat of the Moon’s power and its annexation into a solar pattern, one that concurrently disempowers the status of womenkind (ibid, 16). He envisions senior men taking young men round the landscape as an initiation rite, revealing the secret that the Avebury ‘Moon’ is different from that seen from the sky, as when spied through the vitas of the monument, just as through the trilithon window at Stonehenge, it is reversed; here the power of the Dark Moon, once a monthly occurrence has been displaced by a Dark Moon seen once every 19-years.

One could find issues with certain technical aspects of this theory – there is the fact that Silbury wasn’t built as a single structure, but in stages, over time, so it couldn’t have acted, initially, as a horizon marker; also, the line in the sky formed by the platform which Lionel suggests is an analogue of the crescent Moon is flat – though this doesn’t necessarily negate it being lunar – for might it then closer ape the flat line of the Moon as viewed through the narrow trilithon window at Stonehenge? That is a possibility. There is also the question of whether Silbury Hill may have only been flattened in the Medieval (possibly Early Medieval) period (Malone 1989, 102); if so, it might the hill-top originally have been more rounded, perhaps better representing a full or crescent Moon? But if so then it would have always been visible above the horizon, and therefore never in the ‘underworld’ at all. But these issues are mostly ‘possibles’, not solid rebuttals; indeed, Lionel argues that his theory:

‘has explained nearly thirty features of Silbury Hill in its Avebury monument complex with a single model of lunar-solar conflation. Critics will have to come up with either errors in the data or an alternative and more compelling interpretation of so many features.’ (2009, 21)

Lionel sees Silbury Hill as a myth experienced in the landscape, in which the observer has agency and is an active, creative participant. It is like an Anthony Gormley installation, experienced as a felt landscape, that makes the invisible visible, enabling the experiencer to see what can normally not be seen - the Moon in the underworld.

This idea of the defeat of an older (lunar? Female?) power finds support in the fact that many myths can indeed be read as showing such an overthrow of the feminine. Many Indo-European myths (stemming from at least the fourth millennium BC), for example, seem to tell of a creation of the cosmos through the destruction of a male figure named ‘Twin’ by another named ‘Man’ (Lincoln 1975, 139); but as I have argued, this is a relatively late and corrupted version of an originally very different creation myth (Grigsby 2018, 47–75). The ‘newer’ myths attempt to obscure and displace earlier ones that had a much greater female emphasis, as Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty says:

‘In studies of Indian mythology, the Ṛgveda is usually taken as the beginning; but it would be misleading here to begin with the Vedas, for by the time they were being composed (c.1200 BC) a major power shift had already taken place. In the earlier, Indo-European period, there appeared in myth and ritual an important goddess… She survives in the Ṛgveda in the figures of Urvaśi, Saraņyū, and Yamī, each appearing in a single obscure hymn.’ (1980, 79)

Some scholars, such as Puhvel are dismissive of an original female presence in the myths, stating that ‘It seems this…male-female myth is of a trite and transitory anthropogonic kind, with the female a mere folkloristic foil to her brother’ (1987, 64). However, Near Eastern myths display similar male-female pairings without the female element being regarded as a mere foil (Hooke 1991). The extant Indo-European androcentric myths are a later cultural adaption (Grigsby 2018, 63 & 75; Wiseman 1995, 92), bearing little resemblance to the original, oldest strata of these myths, yet remnants remain hinting at more ancient forms; the myths are a palimpsest beneath which the older versions can just be discerned.

Lionel (2006) sees in the very fabric of Stonehenge this same palimpsest, of patrilinear replacing matrilinear cults, writ large in stone and reflecting an ongoing concern that he believes started much earlier than the Bronze Age, with the demise of hunter-gatherer cultures many thousands of years before. That distant victory over the power of the Moon/woman remained in myth and ritual, still undermining the lunar logic of the hunter-gatherers – what he has called a Neolithic counter-revolution against egalitarian hunter cultures (2020). For the Moon could not be got rid of. Man is a superstitious animal; one suspects there was a fear that time itself would somehow stop if the natural lunar pattern were interrupted… and so there had to be sublimation and inclusion rather than elimination, but under solar domination. Accordingly:

‘Neolithic rituals would have been drawn from a time-resistant syntax of sacred power ultimately derived from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer cultures…In embracing and adapting this ancient rule to the logic of northwest European pastoralists… strictly lunar scheduling to ritual could be reduced and estranged into solar cycles at lunar standstills whilst preserving the phase properties associated with the synodic month.’ (2006, 15)

Such a theory makes Sims heir to a long line of free-thinking individuals, often ignored by the academy, who have approached archaeological questions uniquely, via myth and anthropology (examples, then, of ‘Cheetham’s Law’), and who have found evidence, as Doniger and myself have in Indo-European myth, for the removal or demotion of the feminine (Doniger 1980, 79). Robert Graves in his ‘The White Goddess’, suggests such a conflict was preserved in an ancient Welsh poem named the ‘Battle of the trees’, and occurred in Bronze Age Wessex, at the ‘necropolis’ of Stonehenge, and that it was a war of words that saw the change in an alphabet that ousted one set of gods from the national omphalos, effecting the rise of male gods over the Goddess (1948, Chapter 2). In this he echoes Gimbutas, who likewise promulgated the idea of a peace-loving matriarchy in Old Europe ousted by Kurgan warriors from the Black Sea (1989, 318). My own work suggests that Neolithic myth displays less evidence for a ‘matriarchy’ ruled over by a goddess than Gimbutas posits, rather a more equal male and female pairing on a Near Eastern model, but it nevertheless identifies a similar obfuscation of feminine roles by the time of the advent of the Bronze Age (Grigsby 2018, 71–72) - some level of androcentric replacement occurred whether it was at the extreme level Gimbutas paints or not. What is debatable is when.

Interestingly, an earlier, palaeolithic date for this paradigm-shift is suggested by another academic pariah, Stan Gooch. For Gooch, the matriarchy and its lunar wisdom, celebrations based on the number 13 and the linked symbolism of blood, red ochre and Moon, were linked to Neanderthal Man, and the conflict was between them and Homo Sapiens. His ‘Cities of Dreams’ (1989) identifies the same patterns in the myths as Propp, Knight and Sims, but theorises their origins lay earlier in prehistory. Lionel would argue that as hunter-gatherers, early Homo Sapiens lived in a similar lunar culture as Gooch suggests for Neanderthal Man, and that therefore the conflict was not between mankind and Neanderthals but between hunter-gatherers and cattle-herders after the advent of farming, when the psychology of the tribe had changed, indeed, had to change. Farming needed different timescales than hunting; and the solar year was more useful for planting than a solely lunar one; what is more, the males were ever-present, not away hunting for half the month; the dynamic of society would have changed, irrevocably.

Analysis of western myth, then, shows evidence of a growing misogyny in which the female comes to be seen as a commodity; yet they also reveal their roots in older myths that show her as more than a bargaining-piece for cattle, more than a prize. Myth is a palimpsest that records, despite attempts to scratch it from the pages, the original role of woman; it tells us she is there, and that she was obscured. Lionel sees the stone circles of Britain as colossal and lasting attempts in stone to write this new narrative. Whether such sites held the Dark Moon for worship or control is ultimately debateable, but either way it is still darkly present; though it remains in academic circles, as it does in myth - obfuscated, hidden, occult, and ignored. With Gooch and Graves, Sims joins the company of thinkers who stand apart from academia and instead peer into the darkness, into this palimpsest of the past, in search of the traces of an earlier way of being, a clue to a lost cultural ethos that history tried to eradicate.

Lionel Sims’ interpretations peer behind the face of things to focus on what cannot be seen, or barely seen - on the occluded and the obscure. Unlike many others in the field, he revels in what is implied, hidden and dark, and his work acts as a foil to mainstream speculations – a ‘shadow’ in the Jungian sense - a rich and mercurial counterpoise – that opens-up vistas into worlds of ritual and belief - vistas usually left undisturbed. It is a method that leaves some of his contemporaries uncomfortable, for like the dais-beam mentioned at the start, it suggests they have all been looking at things the wrong way around.

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