Death magic
This time, at solstice, when the darkness brings the underworld, where ancestors dwell after death, closest to the living. When it is possible to commune with spirits and to call across the now thin veils between the planes of existence to the venerated ancestors. Shamans, in altered states of consciousness, summon the spirits of the ancestors for guidance.
Death laws
The gods of death enforce the common laws and the orderliness of society. They are gods of trickery, anger, blackness of night. Gods of destruction, evil, villainy, plague, war, thunder and bad fate.
Executions. Sacrifices. Trial by combat. Here, now, be death. A time and place to enter death’s realm, by choice, vote, or judgement.
The actual skeletons
This is not all imagination. In 1978, archaeologists found a young man buried in the ditch: the Stonehenge Archer, a local Beaker-period man of around 4,300 years ago (BC 2,300), killed by a volley of arrows fired at close range — the tips still lodged in his bones. Buried carefully, within the sacred circle, with an archer’s wrist-guard. Executed criminal? Sacrifice? Fallen defender given honour? The stones aren’t saying. His skeleton lies today in Salisbury Museum.
Thousands of years later the monument was still doing death’s business: excavators in 1923 found a man who had been decapitated with a single sword blow — an Anglo-Saxon execution of the 7th century AD, the old temple pressed into service as a gallows-ground at the edge of the civilised world. His bones were thought destroyed in the Blitz, then turned up decades later, mislabelled, in the Natural History Museum. Even Stonehenge’s dead wander.
And beneath it all, the greatest cremation cemetery of its age: the Aubrey Holes and ditch have yielded burnt remains of perhaps 150-240 people, about 60 of them re-excavated from Aubrey Hole 7 in 2008 — the dead of Stonehenge. Men, women and children alike. A 2018 strontium study went further and claimed some of the cremated dead had spent their last years in west Wales — a claim, note, that leans on the contested bluestone-quarry story; the ashes themselves keep their counsel.
Death crossings
The dead require our assistance to cross into the otherworld. Without decent burial, they become ghosts, forever wandering, causing woes to their loved ones.
Stonehenge affords the dead the highest of all levels in death, the burial of cremated remains and associated funerary rituals by the living. Their souls are collected and taken across the boundary of light into darkness by the spirit gatekeepers. Into the forever lands.
Forever or until
Rebirth of the sun, into the light of the new year, a repeating cycle of death and rebirth. The Sun God is immortal, as are we. At this solstice time, in the darkness, one soul enters, another is reborn. This robs death of all terrors, allows courage for all things and is the joy, dancing and merriment of the afterlife while awaiting passage to the next gig.
Winter death & rebirth
Undoubtedly the focus of The Avenue and the monument, the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, the turning point, when one hopes, the light starts to return. The death of the old and the rebirth of the new. Of all festival days, this is the big one. Though the day lasts 7 hours and 50 minutes. The long night: 16 hours and 10 minutes.
Before the famine months, much of the livestock is slaughtered, the mead is ready for drinking, there’s to be feasting and merriment.
The rubbish heaps prove it: at Durrington Walls, the builders’ settlement two miles away, tens of thousands of pig bones show the animals were slaughtered at around nine months old — born in spring, killed in midwinter — with some carcasses so abundant the meat was left half-eaten on the bone. Midwinter feasting on a heroic scale, 4,500 ya (BC 2,500), exactly when the great stones were going up.
The sun’s path ever reduces, until it is ‘stand still.’ Impossible for us mortals to spot the change in azimuth or elevation of 1/60 of the angular diameter of the sun; a two-day period is easier, of 1/16. Best to use an astronomically aligned instrument that allows a ray of light to be cast on a certain point around that time, like, perhaps, maybe, two stones, with a gap
: -)
The oldest cremated remains are from 5,030 to 4,880 ya (BC 3,030-2,880), 300-500 years before the erection of our sarsen trilithons. As Merlin thought, these stones have the ability to do justice to the memory of the dead noblemen of Albion, here, at this time, this ceremony, with the solar god.