Stonehenge?

Question

Best expalin I have heard so far- It was a temple to the sun god build by the celtic tribes in that area- after the last major ice age as europeans began shifting from a nomadic to agrian life style mainly due to environmental reasons less forest more grass land. People realized that shorter winter day was not good for much farming. Except the brief winter solstice that brighten up their lives. The monolith was build to worship the sun during that brief appearance. They knew the effect of the Sun on their way of life, food production, etc - Not the summer solstice that we believe today- in the summer time now people line up on opposite side of the main entrance. If you line up at the entrance in winter you will see the same effect of the risining sun on the monolith. Sun worshipping in Europe was an important event just like the Romans with the festival of bacchus that morphed into Christmas. Even today we get excited by the winter solstice that breaks up the winter dreadiness

Answer 1

Someone of some book has mislead you, Stonehenge pre-dates Celtic settlement in England. Pythagoras mentions it in his writings and this is where the idea that it is connected with sun worship arises. It is undoubtedly a device for predicting astronomical events including eclipses, midsummer, etc. Anyone able to do this in such times would be revered if not feared and so gain power and prestige

Answer 2

Stonehenge was a kind of calendar. Each impetus for the various building stages (Priest: it'll help us worship the sun! Worker: I dunno, I guess. Say, I understand these big rocks, but why do we have to build you a big house nearby?) (Priest a thousand years later: it'll help us worship the moon! Worker: I dunno, I guess. Say, I understand these big rocks, but why do we have to build you a big house nearby?) is just the pack of lies given people working on it inspiration to continue. In fact, the main point is marking starting points in agricultural counts.

Pretend you have no calendar and keep track of time as "x number of days since..." as people there would have had to do. It is easy to lose a day or two, or gain a day or two, or mix and match and really have no idea when you are. That matter because if you plant too early, you have a much greater chance of a killing frost and your family starving... and dying. Because that's what you did if your crop failed. You died. Or might get by by starving the weakest child or two.

Having something that can reset your counting accurately is of obvious use. In many places people set up fairly large beasties similar in function to Stonehenge. Worhipping the sun, you set it up to mark four points of the year. Later realizing worship of the moon causes you to set it up for twelve points of the year. In Stonehenge's case, straight roadways were built out of it that people could look down for miles to monitor when the marker date occurred without having to travel all the way to Stonehenge.

This way, you have a less complicated count of days to let you know if the time of year for, say, planting has come. Instead of "it's been sixteen days since the festival of Cornhoolio which is twenty-two days from the Night of the Scarecrow which is twenty-five days from the winter solstice" you have "it's been eight days since the beacon shone down the road" and you know it's likely the killing frost danger is over and you can plant.

Stonehenge, by the way, wasn't even the largest of these. For instance, there was one nearby, place called Asbury Plain or something like that, that was so big, that entire scene you see on camera for Stonehenge, the pliths and the whole lawn, would fit inside it.

Interesting book on the subject called "The Black Sun" makes the point that a simple multiple stake system marking the rise of the sun in the sky from, say, your doorway, can tell you to within four days when the solstices occurred. Perhaps Stonehenge was more accurate and thereby worth the fantastic effort it looks like having been when you include the roads.

Answer 3

Stonehenge, as someone else said, was built long before the Celtic peoples ever made it to Britain. There is a really good book, its fiction, but uses whats known of actual history, along with an amalgam of researchers speculation, that seemed to me to be closer to the actual truth of Stonehenge than anything I have read, heard, watched or studied.

Its called: Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell

Answer 4

I don't really know that much about Stonehenge only that some of the large boulders used came from Wales, which meant that they were transported via boat and then over land. At that time that must have been a major undertaking.

Answer 5

http://sacredsites.com/europe/england/stonehenge.html

The above website looks at the different interpretations of the site from the 17th century to the present.