Insights which might, directly or indirectly, help understand Avebury And The Culture That Created It

(Quotations Appear In Random Order)

"As you drive or cycle into Avebury, you cannot fail to be aware of other monuments in the landscape: the huge mound of Silbury Hill beside the A4, the more ancient West Kennet Long Barrow on the brow opposite, or the rows of standing stones of the West Kennet Avenue.   Yet nothing quite connects. There are fragments of lost worlds muddled with the present, all asking the same question: What am I doing here, what do I mean?"   Mike Pitts ~ "Hengeworld", Arrow Books 2001

"In a world rabid with spirits as early prehistoric Britain was, people's world-picture was very different from ours."   "Death and regeneration are the themes of Avebury."   Aubrey Burl ~ "Prehistoric Avebury", 2nd Ed, Yale University Press 

"The question of mortatilty was of profound concern but the deep perception of the periodicity of nature based on the cycles of the moon and the female body led to the creation of a strong belief in the immediate regeneration at the crisis of death.   There was no simple death, only death and regeneration.

This culture took keen delight in the natural wonders of this world.   Its people ... built magnificent tomb-shrines and temples, comfortable houses in moderately sized villages, and created superb pottery and sculptures ... Their culture was a culture of art. "   Marija Gimbutas ~ "The Language Of The Goddess", Thames and Hudson 1989

"Of the undamaged megaliths inside Avebury Henge which bear recognisable heads (which means the majority of them), left-facing heads number fifty against nine right facing ones ... They are likely to be heads which the Neolithic worshippers knew too, and that is the ultimate criterion."

"The concept is unique and awesome.   It is an inconspicuous artform lost thousands of years ago when the race of artists disappeared from the face of the earth, along with the worshippers who understood and adored Avebury and Stonehenge.   Some calamity, we know not what, intervened and the aged, ancestral fertility system collapsed. The megaliths were never used, never understood again."  Terence Meaden ~ "The Secrets Of The Avebury Stones", Souvenir Press 1999

"Silbury was designed to bring elemental forces together within the persona of the Great Goddess, to the benefit of the community.   So rock and earth were joined by wind-rippled water, glazed by the sun's fire and by moon and starlight, all merged within her recumbent body. This union accords with Gimbutas view of the pan-Eurasian Neolithic deity as "the Goddess-Creatrix in her many aspects.""  Michael Dames ~ "Silbury - Resolving The Enigma", The History Press 2010

"The Avebury monumental landscape, in its totality, was a dynamic memory space."  Lynne Kelly ~ "The Memory Code", Atlantic Books 2017

"Figure 48b. Avebury Cosmology 2.  Over the course of a winter night 3300-2500 BCE, the Northern and Southern Cross, the pointers to the Poles, both in the Milky Way, corresponded along the main alignment of the henge.   Alpha and beta Centauri rose with Crux over Waden Hill as Cygnus made its 'Underworld passage' below the northern bank of the henge.   These horizontal movements would have emphasized not only the axial symmetry of the North and South Celestial Poles, the axis mundi, but also the mirroring by the monument of the circle of the Milky Way.   As Cygnus made its deepest descent at midnight, Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approached the top of the North Pole.

Figure 48c. Avebury Cosmology 3.   Each night around 3000 BCE, as Cygnus reappeared in the northeast and Crux began to set toward the south, the Milky Way rose in the east to lie horizontally over the entire bank of the henge .... the symbolism of the monument as centre of earth and the heavens was completed by the horizontal ring of the galaxy"  Nicholas R Mann ~ "Avebury Cosmos", O-Books 2010

According to the Heritage Daily website (16/4/19) recent DNA research shows that immigrant farmers introduced agriculture into Britain and largely replaced the indigenous hunter-gatherers population around 6000 years ago.   The incoming farmers displayed Aegean ancestry, coming to Britain via the Mediterranean corridor.   According to Professor David Reich "By studying ancient DNA, we see that 90% of Britain’s population was replaced about 4,500 years ago by large-scale population movement from the continent, and this new study shows a more dramatic 99% replacement a millennium-and-a-half earlier"

The BBC news website further explains (16/4/19) how researchers compared DNA extracted from Neolithic human remains found across Britain with that of people alive at the same time in Europe. The Neolithic inhabitants were descended from populations originating in Anatolia (modern Turkey) that moved to Iberia before heading north. They reached Britain in about 4,000BC.   The BBC credited this information to research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution - Published 15/4/19.

"It remains a magical place as so many who have been there will agree. A visit to Avebury is a very personal event. It still seems to retain, somehow, the spirits of all those who laboured in its creation or whatever it was that led them to create it. If you have never been there a visit will not be an empty experience. You will come away with a head full of questions and probably a realisation that somewhere over the years modern society has lost something important."   "Avebury - A Present From The Past" ~ Quotation captured from website April 2019

"Prehistoric stone circles and henges are largely a phenomenon of the British Isles"   Marija Gimbutas ~ "The Language Of The Goddess" p313, Thames and Hudson 1989

"The Goddess gradually retreated into the depths of forests or onto mountain tops, where she remains to this day in beliefs and fairy stories.   Human alienation from the vital roots of earthly life ensued, the results of which are clear in our contemporary society.   But the cycles never stop turning, and now we find the Goddess reemerging from the forests and mountains, bringing us hope for the future, returning us to our most ancient human roots."   Marija Gimbutas ~ "The Language Of The Goddess" p321, Thames and Hudson 1989

"Recumbent stone circles are a mainly Scottish tradition in stone circle building. What distinguishes them is that one stone in the circle is lying down - usually the most massive and attractive of all - and if one stands at the centre of some of the circles when the moon is following its most southerly course in the night sky, the moon appears either to rise or set in the direction of the recumbent stone ... The intention may have been to saturate the horizontal megalith with the spiritual light of the full or waxing moon, symbol from earliest times of woman's menstual cycle and pregnancy ... At times of high ceremonial a priestess may have lain on the recumbent stone, her body the new horizon against which the moon would set at many of the recumbent stone circles."  Terence Meaden ~ "The Language Of The Goddess" p184-185, Thames and Hudson 1989

"What, then,  can be the reason for so much of tribal art looking utterly remote?   Once more we should return to ourselves and the experiments we can all perform. Let us take a piece of paper and scrawl on it any doodle of a face. Just a circle for the head, a stroke for the nose, another for the mouth. Then look at the eyeless doodle. Does it look unbearably sad?  The poor creature cannot see.  We feel we must 'give it eyes'- and what a relief it is when we make the two dots and at last it can look at it us!  To us all this is a joke, but to the native it is not.   A wooden pole to which he has given a simple face looks to him totally transformed.  He takes the impression it makes as a token of its magic power. There is no need to make it any more lifelike provided it has eyes to see."   E H Gombrich ~ "The Story Of Art", p46, Phaidon, 16th Edition

"At the same time, modern art and primal art are ideologically opposed.   Primal art is integrated with daily life and modern art is set totally outside daily life ..."  p10

"Ancient art, wiped clean of its ... content by the ages, seems almost natural in its distance - a distance that allows it to become, paradoxically, more intimate than the art of our own times." , Lucy Lippard ~ "Overlay, Contemporary Art And The Art Of Prehistory", p11-12, The New Press, 1983

"Gilgamesh came to the mountain called Mashu,
whose great twin heads look one way and the other:
the one looks toward the setting of the sun;
the other toward the rising of the sun." 

David Ferry ~ "Gilgamesh", Tablet IX, p49, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1993

"So at Avebury we see that the antiquity of the ongoing May festival is traceable to the Megalithic Period 4000 years ago. Even in Christian times may-pole dancing continued at Avebury, as elsewhere in Britain, Germany etc., for these celebrations began as nothing less than a public ceremony of hierogamy in praise of the sexual union of God and Goddess (phallic pole implanted in female Earth), and persisted less recognisably into modern times as a rustic wedding of the May Queen and King....

[And later in the same post]

Could Tara and Taran have been deity names of the hill people at Neolithic Avebury? Tara was a popular, widely-known, Indo-European name for the primal Earth Goddess, and she may have been so called in Proto-Indo-European ages like the British Neolithic. In India Tara was the best-loved of the pre-Vedic goddesses because she was the Earth Mother deity or Terra Mater. She was Tari for the Dravidians of Bengal, Turan in Etrusca, Taranis in Romano-Gaul, Terah for the Hebrews, Terra Mater in Rome, and there was a Tara in Greece and a Green Tara in Tibet.

The male equivalent was Taran, rain fertiliser of Earth and thunder-god. He was Taru for the Hattic people and Tarai in the Andamans. The thunder-god’s name in Scandinavia was pronounced Thor, in Germany Thunar or Donar, and for the Anglo-Saxons Thunaer (hence Thursday from Thor’s Day), perhaps via a link to Near-Eastern storm-gods like Thur the thunder/bull god in Phoenicia. For the Celts he was Taran in Wales and Torann in Ireland. Was he Taran in Britain? Maybe for Celtic Britain at least, because the Romans found that the Britons were Welsh-speakers, and the Norman Domesday Book records that Wiltshire countrymen were still speaking Welsh in 1086 CE. The origin of the word Taran-tara now provides a crucial link with the past. Taran-tara endures in English as a clarion cry or ‘magic bugle call’ used by hunters to invoke -- although they know it not -- the aid of pagan gods (Walker 1983, 976) whose powers were greatest when in congress."

Terence Meaden  ~ From a post on Megalithic.co.uk dated 17 June 2004 available here.

"...known tribal beliefs as recorded by Gordon Frazer (1922: volume 2: 239) and Mircea Eliade (1958: 136) in which souls of people who died during the course of the year were thought to reside in convenient stones or rocky outcrops until some propitious day like the solstices when they depart for paradise where the sun sets (Eliade 1958: 136-138).

If something similar was believed by the people of the lost world of the Avebury Hills, might these modified rocks be evidence of a similar myth, expressed in stones which shelter souls as repositories until the time and day arrives for departure to a sunset paradise? Such beliefs would comfort a nostalgic community dreaming of paradise, which is a desire not so different from expectations held by advocates of today’s world and tribal religions."   

Terence Meaden ~ "Neolithic Art And Animism On The Avebury Hills of Southern England", 2021

"Of course, we can never be certain, but I think it probable that most ordinary people in later prehistoric Britain had never visited Stonehenge or Avebury and if they had, they would have been told to wait behind the bank and ditch that surrounded those great henges; the inner area would have been a very holy place reserved for important individuals on special occasions"   

Francis Pryor ~ "Scenes From Prehistoric Life", Head of Zeus Ltd 2021