The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (14 page)

F
ROM
the valleys of the Indus and the Nile to the Orkney Isles, the coasts of Brittany and the jungles of Yucatán, time offers its own verdict on man’s creations. Everywhere men have protested and resisted. Upended fifty-ton stones, alone or in rows or in circles, bear witness to man’s effort to outlive his life and make something that would endure forever. These first grand megalith creations long outlasted their creators. But with their message comes the mystery of their creation, reminding us that men never know the powers of what they have created.

Of the many puzzling megaliths, the enormous works of primeval architecture scattered around northwestern Europe, the most impressive and the most famous is Stonehenge. On an undulating plain near the cathedral city of Salisbury in southern England are the remains of two concentric circles of large stones, enclosing rows of smaller stones. In the early Middle Ages this pile was christened “Stonehenge” from the Old English for “hanging stones.”

Stonehenge “stands as lonely in history,” said Henry James, “as it does on the great plain.” When archaeologists found similar remains elsewhere around the Atlantic fringe of Europe, they tried to give Stonehenge its proper place in history. Most other megaliths were single stones or groups of stones called menhirs (from Breton or Welsh “long stone”) set upright. But Stonehenge was a large open-air structure of stones symmetrically arranged. Some had been shaped to lie on the uprights. The tops of some showed a projecting piece, a tenon, to fit into the mortise hole of the stone that rested on it.

The individual menhirs were single feats of primitive engineering. Stonehenge was something more—a work of primeval architecture. Archaeologists who made timetables from remains in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean, dated Stonehenge near the dawn of European history. They would not believe that Stonehenge could be the work of “barbarians” who had neither metal nor writing. Stonehenge, they said, must have been a distant offshoot from the centers of Western civilization in the Mediterranean. “Megalithic missionaries,” they said, must have brought the advanced Mediterranean technology across Europe. These migrants supposedly were not “fresh contingents of Neolithic farmers” but “a spiritual aristocracy.” The peculiarities of their sepulchral architecture suggested at least three groups of such missionaries in Great Britain. This appealing vision confirmed
the fertility of the revered sources of Western culture in the eastern Mediterranean and at the same time affirmed the incompetence of mere “barbarians.” Without the inspired know-how of Egypt and Mycenae behind them, who could have created such grand structures in those remote centuries?

But this self-serving vision proved an illusion, a parable of the dangers of seeming too wise about man’s powers of creation. An unpredicted new twentieth-century technique for dating man’s past creations dissolved the tempting vision of prehistoric missionaries crossing Europe to instruct Neolithic barbarians in the architecture of megaliths. It was a surprising by-product of World War II research for the atomic bomb. In 1945 an ingenious atomic physicist, Willard Frank Libby (b. 1908), and his students at the University of Chicago suggested that measuring the presence of a rare isotope of carbon (carbon-14) might help date archaeological remains. This form of carbon is always found in the atmosphere in microscopic quantities and it disintegrates at a fixed rate. When organic objects cease to grow, they cannot assimilate carbon. Thus, by comparing the amount of carbon-14 in the object with that in the atmosphere today, it might be possible to fix the approximate date when a fossilized organism died or when a tree was cut. This provided a better method than any before for dating objects up to fifty thousand years in age. When checked by another technique, “dendrochronology” (the use of very old trees to measure antiquity), it appeared that Libby’s assumptions about the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere in the distant past were not quite correct. Tests on the rings of trees several thousand years old revealed that the radiocarbon level before 1000
B.C.
had deviated from the present level and was higher than now. This changed the yardstick for measuring antiquity and meant that specimens were even older than suggested by Libby’s examples based on constant carbon-14 production in the atmosphere.

When applied to Stonehenge and the associated organic remains, these new techniques carried a startling message. They pushed the date for the construction of Stonehenge back to about 2000
B.C.
, long before the Cyclopean stone walls of Mycenae. Stonehenge, one of the most impressive, now became one of the earliest works of European architecture, the work of “mere barbarians,” people who had neither metal nor writing. It meant that other megalithic monuments could have dated from that early age. The enduring monuments of primeval architecture, then, were no longer witnesses to the outreaching power of Mycenae. Instead they revealed man’s irrepressible creative powers everywhere and democratized the history of man the creator. For now it appeared that the great prehistoric works were not dispersed from a single source. From this too we learn not to underestimate man’s powers to create. If we see the
what
we must not always expect
to know the
why
or the
how
. Archaeologists did not see how these prehistoric Britons could have moved fifty-ton megaliths. Still Stonehenge must have been the precocious work of remote antiquity.

The practice of careful burial, to which the primeval megalithic monuments bear witness, also reveals early man trying to create, to outlast the brief span of his life. This sense of time, the awareness that countless others have come before and that others will follow in endless generations, distinguishes man from other animals. With this discovery of the meaning of death—that man’s own life is limited—the life of architecture begins. And so begins man the creator’s effort to conquer time.

Megalithic tombs were built in well-defined styles. There were “passage” graves in which a central stone-built chamber is approached through a long narrow passage, all covered by a circular mound of earth. And there were chamber tombs, or “gallery” graves where the burial chamber is entered directly. Besides, there were long corridors built of megaliths (
allée couverte
), and rows of standing stones, or single standing menhirs. All were symptoms of man’s yearning for immortality, his calculated effort by creating to rescue his person from the ravages of time.

Millennia later, when we study these remains we prove the success of those earliest architects. But their success was ambiguous and megaliths became vehicles of myth. It was said that Saint Patrick, in the fifth century, came upon a passage grave some 120 feet in length. According to a sacred text of the saint’s life, the people said, “We do not believe this affair, that there was a man of this length.” To which Saint Patrick replied, “If you wish you shall see him.” He touched his crozier to a stone near the head of the grave, made the sign of the cross, and said, “Open, O Lord, the grave.” The earth opened, the stones separated, and the buried giant arose. “Blessed be you, O holy man,” said the giant weeping, “for you have raised me even for one hour from many pains. I will walk with you.” “We cannot allow you to walk with us,” the people exclaimed, “for men cannot look upon your face for fear of you. But believe in the God of Heaven and accept the baptism of the Lord, and you shall return to the place in which you were. And tell us of whom you are.” The giant explained that he had been swineherd to the king and was slain by enemy warriors just one hundred years before on that very day. “And he was baptized and confessed God, and he fell silent, and was placed once more in his grave.”

The ancient barrow graves attracted a fantastic variety of inhabitants.
Beowulf
, the Old English epic (c. eighth century), reported a dragon who lived in a chambered barrow guarding a rich treasure. Geoffrey of Monmouth (d.1155), one of the most popular (and most inventive) historians of the
Middle Ages, celebrated Stonehenge. His
Historia regum Britanniae
(1135–1139) told how Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, and his followers had settled Britain and exterminated the native giants. Later, the Jute invaders Hengist and Horsa conquered the land by treacherously cutting the throats of the four hundred and sixty native British princes whom they then buried on the Salisbury plain.

Geoffrey’s story climaxed in the glorious conquests of King Arthur, aided by his resourceful court magician Merlin. One day when Merlin and King Arthur visited the grim Salisbury plain, Merlin proposed a grand memorial like the Dance of the Giants, a structure of enormous stones in Ireland. And why not bring those very same stones across the water to make a monumental circle in this place and “here shall they stand for ever”? When the king laughed, Merlin replied, “Laugh not so lightly … in these stones is a mystery.” Ancient giants, he explained, had brought the great stones “from the furthest ends of Africa” and they had a certain “virtue of witchcraft.” Geoffrey recounted how Merlin used his magic to transport and reerect the Dance of the Giants on Salisbury plain, where they became Stonehenge, which never lost Merlin’s magic.

When King James I visited Stonehenge in 1620 he ordered the famous architect and set designer Inigo Jones (1573–1652) to draw a plan of the monument and explain how it had been built. Jones concluded that “Stonehenge was no work of the Druids, or of the ancient Britons; the learning of the Druids consisting more in contemplation than practice, and the ancient Britons accounting it their chiefest glory to be wholly ignorant in whatever Arts.” Stonehenge then must have been the work of the Romans, for they alone had the required technology.

Forty years later, John Aubrey (1626–1697), who lived near Stonehenge, reviewed the monument for King Charles II (reigned 1660–85). He explored the site and so became known as England’s first archaeologist. The ring of cavities he discovered came to be called Aubrey Holes. In them, supposedly, other stones had once been placed. Dating the structure long before Roman or Saxon times, Aubrey suggested:

Besides the Druids there were plenty of other contenders—including the “Cerngick giants,” who may have built Stonehenge as a “triumphal tropical temple.” John Dryden (1631–1700) himself applauded such speculation:

Druids, imaginary and real, would never cease to haunt Stonehenge. They seem to have won the battle of the legends. Julius Caesar’s vivid description of Druid rituals and human sacrifices in his
Gallic Wars
was embellished by Pliny. But there really were Druids, a priestly class among the ancient Celts. Their name came from their word for tree, probably the oak, in the forests where they performed their rituals. The real Druids were already familiar in Gaul and may have come to Britain with the Celts in about the fifth century
B.C.
Emperor Tiberius suppressed their rituals in Britain in the first century but nostalgia for the Druids survived.

Their most persuasive champion was a friend of Sir Isaac Newton who was a man of science, a Cambridge-trained physician and Fellow of the Royal Society, Dr. William Stukeley (1687–1765). His popular book,
Stonehenge, a temple restored to the British Druids
(1740), sought to “make our moderns ashamed, to wink in the sun-shine of learning and religion,” and sang a paean to the Druids’ wondrous “patriarchal” powers, which he traced back to Abraham. But he did make some useful observations. Measuring the distances between the positions for stones he came up with a “druid cubit” (20.8 inches), their unit of length, and sketched the site in detail so “if it ever happen, that this noble work should be destroyed: the spot of it may be found by these views.”

Stukeley’s awe of the learned Druids led him to the fertile suggestion that the axis of Stonehenge aimed precisely at the point of midsummer sunrise. He found that “the principle line of the whole work” was directed to that point in “the northeast, where abouts the sun rises, when the days are longest.” Later research revealed that the stones were also oriented toward the cycles of the moon. The celestial wanderings of the moon, which shift in periods of 18.6 years, are much more complicated than those of the sun. The four Station Stones appeared to be lined upon the two extremes of the midsummer moonrise. Now archaeologists agree that Stonehenge was indeed some kind of observatory, subtly oriented to the motions of the sun and the moon.

For pious medieval Christians megaliths were a menace. From Nantes (658), in a part of France where many megaliths survived, a Church decree commanded “Bishops and their servants to dig up and remove and hide to places where they cannot be found, those stones which in remote and woody
places are still worshipped and where vows are still made.” Charlemagne, King Alfred, and Canute all issued edicts against the idolatry of megaliths. But gradually it appeared that these monuments of pagan magic could be made to serve Christian piety. Megaliths which could not be moved or hidden or destroyed could readily be Christianized. An incised crucifix or a small stone cross affixed to the top of a menhir did the job. The great stones of the megalithic tombs were incorporated into chapels and churches and Christian tombs seen today in France, Spain, and Portugal.