On Stonehenge: A Chapel of the Prehistoric World

Ancient uses, the larger ritual landscape and what it tells us about Europe's earliest religions

“Stonehenge presents one of man's first attempts to order his view of the outside world.”

- Stephen Gardiner (1483-1555)

Stonehenge and a Crow, 2014. © Gabriela Gutierrez.

First, we sought our gods in caves. Then, we built our temples above ground. Our new architecture emulated the natural world. It brought with it the darkness of our first temples, with their throbbing stone and their stillness. Be it the pyramids of Giza, Cambodia’s mighty Angkor Wat, or the ancient Neolithic monuments of Malta, our early ancestors forged their places of worship out of the bones of the Earth and aligned them to the sun and the moon and the seasonal shifts of the year.

In their efforts to engage with the silence of the past, numerous theories have wrestled for supremacy.

If we want to gain further insight into our religious inheritance in the western world, it is very useful to cast our arc back over these ancient sites and attempt to bridge the gaps in our historical memory.

Stonehenge is one of the great mysteries of our past. It holds clues to our earlier cosmologies, beliefs, rituals and ways of life. And so in an attempt to further bridge the gaping hole between the modern western world and our spiritual inheritance, today I would like to share some thoughts on Stonehenge. I will present the most favoured current proposition concerning the ancient uses of the site, along with what it may have meant to the prehistoric peoples who went there.

I hope that this will be relevant to anyone of European ancestry interested in uncovering (and perhaps even reclaiming!) the religious traditions and cosmologies of our own heritage.