The Abbey

My own personal mental environment for questing this kind of love of place suddenly and unexpectedly appeared through a railway carriage window during my first train journey, made with my family, just after the War. It was nothing as magnificent as Table Mountain, but it loomed large enough in my small mental horizon at that time, and was sufficiently aboriginal, to make me want to know more. It was the massive gatehouse of Thornton Abbey, the only more or less intact part of a former Augustinian medieval religious foundation. It was about twenty miles from home on the railway line to New Holland on the southern bank of the River Humber, where one caught the paddle steamer to Hull. It lured me on my bike to explore it as my quasi-Pentecostal witness; an environment for self-education where I found I could open my mind to thoughts to deep for words. Since then, I have gone back when I can to a place and surroundings that have changed hardly at all since I first went there pedalling a bike in my early teens and began a journey of the mind. Over the years these unchanging ruins have fostered my non-religious life of faith, providing a compass for moving beyond words into a deeper comprehension and more profound understanding of things spiritual.

Today, however, on the shortest day, my particular spiritual focus is on the earthy stone structures of the Neolithic Age that emerged from the dim tribal light around three millennia ago. I remember when I first encountered these brooding machine-like objects as cultural time-markers and notional entrances to a world of the spirit. It was a meeting with a group of young pot-smokers on a hot midsummer’s day. I was filming a megalithic tomb not far from Cardiff to illustrate the anthropological roots of my new subject of cultural ecology, a knowledge system I had invented for voyaging human social progress. As I approached the ancient stones with the camera crew, there was a sweetish odour of cannabis drifting from within the stones. Megaliths are now widely accepted as modern signposts to spirituality, but then they were just beginning to be colonised by a rootless youth culture high on the biochemistry of release and reward. Since that scene was set, the equinoxes have become more significant in my calendar. Today, at the other pole of the year, I have in my mind’s eye another Stone Age building, which is actually on the tourist map to be visited at the winter solstice. It is much further west, in Ireland, where a group of early risers, probably braving the spitting Celtic rain, are gathered from all over the world before the great stone-built tomb of Newgrange. Their hope is to get a glimpse into the hearts of the ancestors who built this astonishing stone receptacle to catch and celebrate the tenuous, yet laser sharp midwinter light of 5,000 years ago. Each time-traveller locked into a personal view of eternity, waits like me at a notional boundary in anticipation of their particular turning of the year before they can move on with their lives. I cannot speak for them, but in my case I am making an intellectual effort to embody my spiritual perception of the cycling world and its material Universe as being one real religious combination. Laurens van der Post’s discovery of being someone other was the outcome of a similar inner search. However, he was constructing a meaning out of himself to replace religion. Like many people of today, he was locked in the scientific cell of his own subjectivity, and left in isolation to find an equivalent for a deity within himself. Within himself he found an other to himself. As an individual he saw himself as both the one who needs, and the other who provides for the need. As an individual he was functioning on two internal planes. Other others, like My Other, are sought out as real people through which another complementary reality is synthesised out of two separate beings.

In contrast to van der Post, I am trying to grasp one reality with two external planes or dimensions. One plane is the objective world of science. The other is the dimension that is not yet, and probably never can be, fully described in the objective language of science. Outside my window, that Yew tree, now turning green with the rising sun, is part of the ‘It’ of an ecosystem taking in the weak energy of the unreliable winter beams to maintain life. For the ecosystem to become a model of religion in relation to me, the ‘It’ has also to be a ‘Thou’ in my relationship concept of nature, which has a subjectivity answering to my own.

Prehistoric structures tuned into the cosmos are evidence that in Bronze Age times, the universe was addressed by its people as ‘Thou’. The uncertain world that faced them was not just a collection of mere objects to their subjectivity. Their adaptive response was to create a culture entrained to an annual cycle of ritual ceremonies in which the community could align itself with the conjunction of numinous power and the family life of neighbours. The turning of the year was always a time to be anxious. It is also a time for rites of passage by which their perceptions of a cosmic ‘Thou’ could be perpetually recreated, and appropriated by the community and the individual. A solstice came to be anticipated as a ritual moment that is particularly likely to create a personal disclosure or symbolic meaning. Even when religion had passed into more and more sophisticated phases of expression, important new personal perceptions of religion experiences by seers and prophets often emerged during a particular ritual enshrined in the devotional calendar.

Many of the symbolic rituals devised by our ancestors arose out of the anxieties that inevitably afflicted human beings living in the environmental circumstances in which our species evolved and lived for most of its existence. Fears that the vegetative forces of regeneration might wear out and the crops fail gave rise to the fertility rituals, sacrifices of animals and the first fruits, etc., practiced by human communities all over the world. Fears that the winter solstice might not mark the end of the sun's withdrawal over the horizon and the beginning of its return explain the ubiquitous existence of solstice rituals, saturnalia, orgies, and so on. Omnipresent fears of predatory animals and hostile tribal neighbours generated the supernatural strength and magical powers of myriad heroes and hero-gods, enabling them to triumph over the monsters, snake-haired medusas, ogres, ghouls, and terrible chimeras which have horrified the imagination since the beginning of anthropological time. Fear of sickness, spells, bad magic, demons, and jealous ancestral spirits generated the need for shamans, wizards, medicine men, white witches, and wise women, with their amulets, masks, drums, ecstatic trances, and magic flights necessary to counter the evils lying in constant wait for us. These have not entirely gone away. Not far from Mexico City, probably getting on to being the largest urban sprawl in the world, good and bad magic is practiced by villagers who guard Motezuma’s gold. For a few pesos for some magic paper and two sacrificial chickens, you can offload all the bad in you and get protection from evil spells that are thrown around left right and centre.

Our capacity to find symbolical means of dealing with the fears of being alive is one of the most striking characteristics of humankind. When in need, we seek symbolical expression as well as practical fulfillment of those needs. One convenient method of classifying symbols, therefore, would be to relate them to the archetypal needs from which they have arisen.

Throughout the millennium between 4,000 BC and 3,000 BC, anxiety about human destiny was expressed in a vogue for constructing passage graves all across northern and Western Europe. During this period, in the lands surrounding the massive tomb of Newgrange, Neolithic tribesmen were building other passage graves and raising mounds over them. Around thirty such tombs lie in the one small area around Newgrange itself. The local prehistoric tribesmen were hardy, determined and well organised. I have only seen Newgrange from the outside, on a wild and very wet summer’s day. It is large. The tomb stands 40ft high and nearly 300ft across; a giant heart-shaped mound dominating its ridge above a river. Something like 200,000 tonnes of stone went into its construction. Great-manhandled slabs of grey-blue sandstone formed the outside kerb, the interior passage and central burial chamber. Millions of fist-sized pebbles were painstakingly gathered to shape the overarching mound. However, as a symbol, which serves to feed the imagination, it is best not experienced through an actual visit on the day when it fulfils its function. Neverthesss, to know such a thing exists and is being used by so-called modern people is sufficient for a meditation such as the kind of thinking I am engaged in today.

The Neolithic or Late Stone Age tribesmen were farmers immersed in nature. They grew corn, raised cattle and sheep, gathered nuts and berries, fished the rivers for salmon and hunted deer with flint, or chert-tipped arrows. So much we know from what they left behind in graves, tombs and pits. They wore clothes of animal skin, or of woven fibres of nettles, flax and grasses. When they broke bones at work or hunting, they mended them with splints. Diseases were common: vitamin deficiencies, osteoarthritis, eroded teeth from stone particles in their flour. Most died either in infancy or in their 20s - young women suffering complications in childbirth, young men meeting accidents while out hunting, fishing and fighting. Anyone who lived to 50 was counted a venerable elder.

Those who hauled the huge sandstone blocks for miles by rope and log rollers, those who trudged up and down with the filler rubble, may well have spent their entire lives at the task. Newgrange was not built in a day: it probably took two or three generations of continual labour to construct. Considering that the builders had only stone, wood and animal bone with which to make tools, the modern mind boggles at the drive and purpose needed to build the likes of Newgrange. The structures originated in a much more local community context than the pyramids of the Egyptian dynastic families who ran a contemporary empire brimming with endless wealth.

These neighbourhood Neolithic tombs had a deeper purpose than to cradle human remains. The great stone slabs, inside and out, were painstakingly incised with elaborate patterns of wave-like curlicues and spirals, tessellated triangles and interlocking panels of diamonds; and with circles surrounded by spidery rays, the emblem of the sun. The entrance of Newgrange is faced with glittering white quartzite — a famous stone in the mythology of healing. Outside the narrow doorway lies the Entrance Stone, a mighty, round-shouldered boulder covered in spirals and triangles, which was probably carved before the mound was raised, or even thought of. In this context it is a symbol of the basic Pentecostal nature of non-representational art. What notions of spirituality, of eternity, life after death and godhead came to illuminate the minds of the carvers and carriers one strives to guess. But the sun was clearly central to their religious beliefs. With astonishing accuracy, the passage they built into the burial chamber inside Newgrange is exactly aligned with the point on the eastern horizon where the sun first shows itself on the morning of the winter solstice.

This morning, the stone-bound slit of a structure known as the roof box will catch the rays of the just-risen sun at around two minutes to nine, and condense them into a single beam. A thin intense finger of light will pierce straight to the back wall of the innermost burial recess at the heart of the mound. For a few minutes the chamber floods with a warm, life- affirming glow. This Stone Age engineered drama of light is acted only for the five or six mornings that span December 2 l, the winter solstice itself. Then the finger slowly withdraws down the passageway and leaves the tomb in darkness for another year.

The modern mind halts at the idea of ''primitive' people, stretched to the utmost simply by the demands of staying alive, being able to combine the intellect, energy, drive and purpose needed to build and decorate a tomb such as Newgrange, and to align its roof box so precisely with the' midwinter sunrise. What did they think it was all for? Was it to give the sun its own royal entrance, a symbolic penetration of the earth's womb by the life-giving sun? Or did they see the souls of their cremated dead riding the departing beam out of the tomb to a conjoining with the sun that would accomplish the lengthening of days and the return of spring for another year?

There is a magic of human destiny and group ambition in these structures, which I suppose I am trying to re-capture at this moment through my suburban window. Magic is expressed in the intuitive inextinguishable hope that inspired them to believe there was a future for family and community. It is through these thoughts that I connect with those infinitely remote men and women and their uncertainties when everything seemed dying around them in the darkest days of the year. What they were about touches me today, albeit in thoughts directed at a cloud-filled sky. I was reassured by the daylight broadening from the east, although the first shafts of sunlight did not hit my personal woodland targets today. It actually burst upon my computer screen as I was writing this story, just after ten-o-clock. The computer is part of my world of objects, one of countless ‘Its’. I am also a spiritual being who must establish personal relationships.

As an heir to the Bronze Age sun worshipers, somehow I have to find the intellectual confidence to say, albeit under my breath, ‘Welcome, thou Sun!’.