Jesus Christ, Stonehenge Star?

Last time we reviewed Easter 09's tie-in crop of book and film-TV releases and related press announcements. As we were fully occupied last post with 'cannibal' druids, new Templar secrets to do with the Shroud, and so on, I said I'd devote a separate follow-up over Easter weekend to the most promising-looking of the new books. This was The Missing Years Of Jesus by Dennis Price, for which I put in a pre-publication order so I could review it at Easter. It's been getting positive early reviews - perhaps from those encountering the subject matter for the first time.
For this is the first modern full-length book study of this subject, the old West Country folktale known as the Holy Legend, famously referenced by Blake's poem Prelude To Milton, which became the lyric for England's so-called alternate anthem, "Jerusalem" that we've discussed before (see various earlier blog items, passim). The last study (perhaps the only other modern one), out last spring from Clairview Books, Glyn S Lewis's Did Jesus Come To Britain? : An Investigation Into The Traditions That Christ Visited Cornwall And Somerset, was only 78 pp, focussing on local folklore from those two counties. Despite its broader title, this new 252pp hardback also focuses on England's Holy Legend.
The legend takes the traditional form of snippets of local folklore across the West Country that Jesus himself was brought to England as a boy by his uncle Joseph of Arimatheia on one of his (alleged) trips to acquire Cornish tin. These folklore snippets were collected in several early 20th-C. books by Church of England clerics. In 1989, a 21-page essay by AW Smith in the Journal Of The Folklore Society surveyed the various collected folk sayings, songs etc, arguing none of these were provably pre-1804, i.e. before Blake's famous allusion to it. This the big problem with the legend's cred, the difficulty in finding pre-Blakean references. The Journal's conclusion was the legend was just propaganda from the early-20th-C British-Israelite movement (though typically no evidence was offered to support this convenient it-was-all-just-special-interest-propaganda argument).
But here, the author dismisses [p139] Blake's famous allusion to it as negative evidence calculated to make people disbelieve the idea Jesus came here, so Blake's involvement gets short shrift. And even though he's trying to locate JC in England, he explores only a few items from this local folklore roundup. This is counterproductive as the Folklore Journal volume is not well-known, and has a lot more to it in the way of topical references which could lead to firmer evidence (I have the 21-page original). At the very least, a lot of snippets of folklore can create the idea that where there's smoke, there must've been fire, if you see what I mean. It's certainly a tried and tested approach in the speculative book genre.
He does mention the so-called tunic crosses found around the West Country which show Jesus as a boy, but doesn't pursue the matter as to dating or any associated folklore. Price's real interest is in Stonehenge and nearby monuments like Silbury, in whose archaeology he's been involved for several decades. Thus the main rival theory that JC went east during his missing years to India etc., he dismisses in a few words as merely the result of someone claiming psychic powers c1900. As we saw last time, there's a whole lot more to the “Eastern school” than that, with a trail of scholarly books following up on several old manuscripts, going back centuries. Rather than try to amass a weight of counter-evidence for the West Country thesis, he soon shifts to writing about his own favourite site, Stonehenge, which has no associated legends.

This is where the book begins to undermine its own thesis, for in doing so he slights evidence associated with the many rival local legends, which exist from the New Forest right around the whole southwest coast. Priddy in Somerset, which he visited, is the only other site to get a favourable mention. Even Glastonbury doesn't get much prominence, though the Holy Legend is so associated with it it's often referred to as the Glastonbury Legend. But he says he has ignored all the legends about Joseph of Arimatheia returning to Glastonbury post-Crucifixion as irrelevant.

Nothing is known about Stonehenge in the 1st C. AD . The association of Druids with the site has long been ridiculed by archaeo-historians as it's thought to have been in ruins for over a thousand years by that point. But the book keeps trying to tie the legend in with it, as his own personal-interest area, where he worked on various archaeological digs over a period of years. He was the person who flagged up the idea that the 'city' and nearby sacred 'precinct' in a famous early description of the Hyperboreans (Far-Northerners) could well be Stonehenge and Vespasian's Camp hillfort outside Amesbury (see my earlier post on "The Lost City Of Apollo"). But he doesn't pursue this angle here, though it would help his argument as it implies such sites were not abandoned but still in use in the late Iron Age. Instead we get: Did Jesus visit Stonehenge, perhaps to exorcise a "resident demon"? (He argues Stonehenge was a labyrinth like the Cretan one with the Minotaur at its centre.) And did deeply religious archaeologists guess this connection, and interfere with the site and conceal evidence because they were unnerved and thought the place evil? (We also get local ghost stories.)
Because of this Stonehenge-centred approach, the author can't come up with any real evidence, so the book turns into one of those overly-speculative and under-evidenced books you get in this subject area, where the thread of some sensational argument is built around the phrases "might have", "could have," "no reason why not" and so on. Here the thesis is that Jesus didn't just visit as a boy, but lived here for his whole 'missing years' period, ages 12 to 30. This would imply there should be more evidence than previously published. Originally, I thought as Jesus is not named as such in any known British sources (or we'd have heard about it), we'll get the he-was-living-under-another-name approach that we get with sought-after but still-elusive figures like Arthur. (In fact the other rival recent book mentioned last time, Ralph Ellis's King Jesus, argues Jesus was exiled here and became the original inspiration for Arthur.)
We do get the proposal that JC may be commemorated as the Celtic deity Esus, portrayed as a wood-cutter, as Christ was a carpenter. Esus or AEsus is not British however, being known from inscriptions from Gaul and NW Africa, a pagan 'woodsman' deity thought to be centuries older than JC. He also argues this was also the 'Esiu' whose name is inscribed on British Iron Age coins depicting a horse, together with a reminder that Christ rode a sort of horse (an ass). In fact, British coins from the 1st C. BC often depict stylised horses (thought by some to be the Celtic horse goddess Epona); and there are various others of uncertain antiquity depicted on chalk hillsides. (The root AEs- can also be related back etymologically to a pair of Indo-European horse-brother deities, and is also the likely I-E root of ass, i.e. donkey.) We get the translation of the “Phoenician” Bal-deity Beelzebub as “Lord Of High Places” (it's usually given as lord of flying things, i.e. carrion flies), with the suggestion this inspired Blake to write of “England's mountains green” when England doesn't have any real mountains.
No ancient codex manuscripts are cited in support. (The citations in the Folklore Journal article are of course to undateable oral traditions.) Nor is there is any correlative attempt to claim Jesus's teachings paralleled those of Druidism (as those proposing the “Eastern Thesis” have done with Buddhist influence), only vague insinuations that JC could easily been interested in meeting Druids, and vice versa. Little is known of Druidic belief, as it was maintained through oral tradition rather than holy books, but there is a school of thought the author is evidently unaware of, that there was a continuity between the Roman-persecuted Druids and the first generation British Church.
Reconciling pagan and Christian traditions has a broad appeal these days, and some early reviewers are clearly excited about the idea that you-know-who-was-here. It adds buzz to the mystique of a whole New Age Christianity-rediscovered subculture which dates back to the early 70s era of the influential filmed musical Jesus Christ, Superstar. But this 'Jesus Christ, Stonehenge star' approach will only convince the more critical that the entire legend has no basis beyond wishful thinking.
I had higher hopes of this work, partly as the author runs an iconoclastic blog about Wessex archaeo-history, called Eternal Idol, one of whose posts gave the book its punning subtitle The Greatest Story Never Told. However if there is indeed a factual background story, it remains untold. The book is so padded out it reads like a companion to one of those cable-channel historical documentaries where speculative claims keep getting repeated and questions raised which are never answered.
I think (having scripted a few documentaries myself) if one were making such a TV documentary to which this appears to be an advance companion, exploring other avenues into the legend would be far more productive. As I've made clear in earlier posts, I feel there's an underlying story there worth pursuing even if the legend can't be taken literally, at face value. Various ancient codex accounts support Britain's long-standing claim it had a Christian church before Rome, i.e. at Glastonbury, which is of general interest in itself. As is the way the so-called Holy Legend persisted over the centuries underground, through allusions in texts like Blake's "Jerusalem" - what we would call nowadays a literary "code." Perhaps it would help if we gave it a name .... The 'Jerusalem' Code?

Easter 09: Cannibal Druids, Templar Secrets, And ‘Jesus Was Here’

Easter is upon us once more. As I detailed last year ("Another Busy Post-Modern Easter"), nowadays this means speculative books and/or documentaries offering a revised version of Jesus's life and (this being the timely bit) death. The TV companies inevitably run a documentary in this strand over the Easter holidays, and book publishers' spring lists are now sure to include a controversial title attempting to rewrite the New Testament narrative. And if they're not ready, a pre-Easter press release is issued regardless.
For instance, we have a news story that a new academic text (Prof Rachel Elior's Memory And Oblivion: The Secret Of The Dead Sea Scrolls) shows that the Essenes sect, supposedly the first Christians, and authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, never existed – even though the book isn't even out yet. And there are also news stories, serving whatever end, on some long-running controversy. This year, it’s business as usual.

Thus, we had National Geographic announcing that the Druids practised human sacrifice – and cannibalism. In case you only remember National Geographic for those glossy full-colour travel magazines with the yellow trimming and earnest photo-essays on remote parts of the world, they now have their own TV channel where they run speculative documentaries. Their announcement is PR for a new NG documentary (with re-enactments), Secrets Of The Druids. The idea is that those Druids-burnt-people-in-giant-wicker-men stories were not just the Romans’ self-serving propaganda, there’s now archaeological evidence, in the form of the mummified ‘bog body’ known as Lindow Man, and some skeletons in a cave near Bristol. In fact Lindow Man was dug up out the peat in 1981, and Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross wrote a book about him in 1991 (Life And Death Of A Druid Prince) theorizing (if memory serves) he was a Druid who agreed to be sacrificed to protect the land. (He died a ritual ‘threefold’ death, and mistletoe pollen was found in his stomach).
It turns out there’s a question mark after the ‘cannibalism’ part as there’s no real evidence in the mass-grave cave find at Alveston north of Bristol (again, this is nothing new, the find dating back to 2000). Burning people and animals in a giant wicker man as Caesar described doesn’t really work as a prelude to a cannibal feast, but there’s a break-mark on one of the cave bones indicating it could have been a ‘Druid’ drinking the bone marrow. The archaeologist cited here turns out to be Dr Mark Horton, and even he is reluctant to back the Druids-were-ritual-cannibals theory, saying perhaps someone was starving. (I say even he, as Dr Horton got his fingers burnt last year over claims he made as archeo advisor in the BBC Bonekickers TV-series fiasco which I’ve written of at length elsewhere.
Easter being a moveable feast, it can run close to St George’s Day (23rd April) if late, or April Fool’s Day if early, so in between you get a sort of press ‘silly season’ (i.e. the press print stories they otherwise wouldn’t). Last year Easter was relatively late, and our ‘Another Busy Post-Modern Easter’ item also covered items in the press inspired by St George’s Day. This year Easter is relatively early so it follows soon after April Fool’s Day, inspiring hoax news stories to do with sacred relics, so that genuine stories (which are normally high on the strangeness index anyway) get confused with April Fool’s hoaxes.
The Sun newspaper (if we can call it that) had one on a London digger-bulldozer driver finding the Staff Of Moses. (They didn’t bother trying to come up with how it came to be buried in east London, just invoked a few dodgy names like archaeologist Dr Henry Jones of Indiana.)
The Vatican, always under PR siege since Dan Brown cast them as the great villain of Christian history, is usually good for an Easter tie-in story. (The Vatican are currently mulling over some sanction against The Da Vinci Code followup film out soon, Angels & Demons.) This year they did not disappoint, though their genuine non-hoax story echoed an April Fool’s hoax story run several years ago. The first week of April, the Vatican’s own newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reported on where the Turin Shroud was held during its ‘missing years’: the Knights Templar had it. This was suspected at first being a hoax partly as it is a (sort-of) confirmation of the thesis in several books going back to 1978. (There’s even a book arguing the KTs actually created the Shroud relic, the image being that of their last grand master, Jacques de Molay – the image being a bit of post-modern irony on the part of KTs, as their master was sort-of crucified by the Church who – well, you get the idea.)
The report said one of their researchers had found clues in the Vatican Archive that the Shroud was taken away by the Templars so that the Cathars wouldn’t get it, as they would’ve destroyed it since they didn’t believe in a corporeal Jesus. (The Catholic Church destroyed the Cathars and their fellow Gnostics the Albigensians, a massive purge mentioned in most of the 'Holy Blood Holy Grail' books I’ve seen, as part of a grand papal conspiracy to suppress evidence of a Royal Bloodline etc. I think The Da Vinci Code also works it in somewhere.)
The Shroud in this new regard was also the controversial and mysterious sacred relic the Templars venerated, i.e. the bearded head they called Baphomet that they were accused at their 1307-10 purge of worshipping. (Earlier accounts have suggested the head was a relic of John The Baptist who lost his head to either Herod or Salome; or a way of worshipping Islam, with Baphomet a version of Mohamet.) The Vatican report said there was a reference to the KTs using the cloth image in a 1287 initiation. This has stirred up more controversy as a fragment of the border of the Shroud was carbon-dated only to the 14th C, leading to press reports it was a ‘mediaeval fake.’ Since then, others have said that the DNA test was of a patched section of the fire-damaged Shroud, and not valid at all. (The Daily Grail news-commentary website, which ran the Templars-had-the-Shroud story as an April Fool’s joke several years, now mentions there is other manuscript evidence for a pre-mediaeval Shroud. ‘A tenth century codex found in the Vatican Library, the Codex Vossianus Latinus quotes a man called Smera in Constantinople in the 8th century as saying that "King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body."’
The Vatican's researcher was in fact mediaeval scholar Dr. Barbara Frale, who found the account, published last year, of the Pope’s post-1307 inquiry into the Templar accusations, known as the Chinon Parchment. (It was found in 2003 - again there was a time lag, presumably allowing for 5 years to study the document for its implications.) She said the Chinon Parchment trial-document research led her to the 1287 reference, and that the find vindicated the theory first proposed in 1978 that the KTs had the Shroud for a century or more. This theory was first argued in The Turin Shroud: The Burial Cloth Of Jesus Christ? , by Bristol-based iconoclastic revisionist historian Ian Wilson (not to be confused with AN Wilson, biographer of Jesus, St Paul etc) regarding ‘the mystery of the relic's missing years.’
Speaking of ‘missing years,’ there are a pair of new books just out dealing with the missing (i.e. Biblically undocumented) years of Jesus (ages 12-30). These represent one of the two opposing views – in one, he went East, and the other, he went West (we’ll get to that in a moment).
In terms of book coverage at least, the more established view is that he went East into Asia. The "Eastern thesis" has been the basis of ‘alternative-Christian-history’ books since the 1990s via the work by German religious author Holger Kersten. Kersten claimed Jesus had been schooled by Buddhist monks in non-violence and was influenced to change his teachings from Old Testament blood-n-thunder religion into the relatively more pacific New Testament one. It also claimed Jesus survived or escaped crucifixion, returning to live and die in India - where the book became a bestseller. (See The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity? by Elmar R. Gruber & Holger Kersten,1995, and Kersten's 2001 Jesus Lived In India: His Unknown Life Before And After The Crucifixion? )

Kersten's Jesus Lived In India was based on a manuscript with the same title (Masih Hindustein Mein = Jesus In India) written in 1890 by a leading Urdu cleric who had collected documentation on the Indian sojourn of "Issa." Other, earlier books focus just on Jesus’s 17 ‘gap’ years being spent in the East, i.e. not the post-Crucifixion period which is too upsetting for some to consider (including Dan Brown, according to his testimony in the Holy Blood Holy Grail plagiarism case). One example of these is Elizabeth Clare Prophet's 1988 The Lost Years Of Jesus: Documentary Evidence Of Jesus' 17-Year Journey To The East.)
However it’s only now the Jesus-Went-East is about to go mainstream. As I remarked last time, Hollywood has developed a penchant for "Young [fill in famous name]" prequel-style stories, and about to hit the big screen is a "Young Jesus", or rather a "Young Jesus Heads East" story. The upcoming $20-million "fantasy action adventure" The Aquarian Gospel being shot using CGI (like the recent 300 and Beowulf) has JC heading east to acquire Oriental wisdom etc. (I expect the film PR will refer to JC as a"bodacious dude" on his way to fame and fortune after encounters with some wise heads in the East and perhaps with a few mind-expanding substances as well.) The film is officially based on an ancient Buddhist manuscript found in a Tibetan monastery over a century ago which became the basis for Nicholas Notovich's 1898 The Unknown Life Of Jesus Christ.
The tradition that Jesus came west as a youth was not been a serious rival to the Jesus-went-East theory as so far it has merely claimed Jesus was brought here to England on a one-off visit by his uncle Joseph of Arimatheia during a business trip to the Cornish tin mines. (It is of course inspiration for William Blake’s poem beginning "And did these feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green".) There is a range of West Country folk legends regarding this, but none as far as I know claim more than a boyhood visit.
Now however, two recent books have Jesus coming to SW England as more than a summer tourist. One has him spending his entire 17/18 year missing-years long period (ages 12-30) here, and the other has him escaping crucifixion to preach on here in exile as an inspirational leader, eventually inspiring what would become the core of the Arthurian legends. The latter work, Ralph Ellis’s King Jesus, From Kam (Egypt) To Camelot [pictured] has been out for a while without making much of a splash media-wise. (This is perhaps because the author has previously published a series of books on the X-was-really-Y thesis, e.g. Jesus was the grandson of Cleopatra.) I asked a colleague if he would like to review this one, while I ordered the other one, The Missing Years Of Jesus by Dennis Price. This is just out in time for Easter, already making a splash, and places Jesus in our backyard here in that part of Celtica now England’s West Country.
A key element of this story turns out to be Stonehenge, which often gets Easter news stories linked to it (modern Druids etc), no doubt as Easter itself is a compromise (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox), where an ancient luni-solar ‘pagan’ calendar celebration is glossed over by the later Christian celebrations. This new book initially stirred up a fuss pre-publication, with a Church Of England representative backing out of a BBC interview which was then cancelled. The now-published book however has generally been receiving a favourable reaction. I’ve read it, and have a number of issues with its approach, but to do it justice, will cover this as a separate blog item, which I’ll post over the Easter weekend.

Stonehenge – Temple Of The Sun-God?

A new theory about Stonehenge may throw light on a key episode of early British history.
Earlier, I suggested the identification of Stonehenge as the centre of the “Hyperborean” or farthest-North island domain in early Greek accounts may be of interest here. [For details, see “Pytheas And The Lost City Of Apollo” .] That is, it might throw some light on the great unresolved mystery of early British history. How did Christianity become established here, before it did in Rome?
The first issue here is what religion did the British have, which Christianity overtook? Until recently, Stonehenge has not been considered evidence here as archaeological dating puts its abandonment over a thousand years earlier - no later than 1200 BC. Last year it was argued the early Greek travel account of a massive temple complex dedicated to Hyperborean Apollo and ruled by a priestly caste refers to Stonehenge and Vespasian’s Camp hillfort by Amesbury (the nearest town to Stonehenge). The argument modern antiquarian Dennis Price came up with last year was that these references derive from the lost codex of Pytheas detailing his visit here, c.330BC. Excavation of the Vespasian’s Camp rubbish pits show human occupation till 350 BC, which is at least around the time Pytheas visited Britain – though we don’t know exactly where he went. Now, if local religious practices did not change for 4-5 centuries - from then until Christianity arrived in the early Roman Era - then we have a possible continuity of religious belief. Thus, our second question may be answered: before Christianity, the official religion was worship of Apollo, the sun-god, god of healing and learning (and other things).
The problem is there’s still quite a jump in time here, with Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age evidence being run together to present a continuity that may be an illusion. Most people if asked would say the pre-Roman society of Britain was the Kelts, though the Celtic tribes seem to have been largely refugees from the Roman conquest of Gaul by Caesar around 55 BC. And for a long time there’s been such a gulf in the world-views of the academics and the New Agers over Stonehenge itself there’s been no genuine debate to and fro which might help resolve the mystery. But I’m told this was largely due to the English Heritage site’s now-dead chief archaeologist. He proclaimed Stonehenge was a mystery that would never be solved – so there was no point digging anything up. (There’s a conspiracy theory about this, that he made some sort of discovery early on, which so upset him he closed the site to further exploration.)
Now he’s gone, the next generation, including his own trainees, are developing new theories which are coming closer to the alternative view. The much publicised BBC/Smithsonian Museum-sponsored dig in April, the first inside the ring at Stonehenge for over 40 years (!), by Tim Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright, was only days old when they announced they had found evidence to back up their thesis the site was “a prehistoric Lourdes” or healing spa, to which the unwell (but well-off) travelled from across Europe. This is perhaps not surprising, as the two had already co-authored a book documenting this interpretation.
Their thesis is at variance with the traditional notion it was a monument to the ancestral dead, the centre of a necropolis, with thousands of burials in the surrounding plain. (Perhaps the “cure” there – by one account using water poured over the “healing” stones - was usually a failure.) The “necropolis-monument” theory had already been challenged by the ‘astro-archaeological’ argument, popularised in the 1960s by Gerald S. Hawkins in popular paperbacks like Stonehenge Decoded that it was a prehistoric astronomical observatory and “computer.” He diagrammed how the posts and stones were aligned to the rising and setting of the sun, moon and certain constellations at key times. Critics pointed out the alignments involved stones that had stood, and often been moved, at different times, up to and including the 20th-century.
Now we have yet another computer-based ancient-code theory, which specifically attacks the ‘astronomical-computer’ argument, saying apart from an overall alignment of the central avenue to the solstices, the stones are not aligned to anything - except each other. The new book, Solving Stonehenge: The Key To An Ancient Enigma (Thames & Hudson, $40) by Anthony Johnson, “an archaeologist specializing in geophysics, survey and computer applications in archaeology,” advances the theory instead that Stonehenge is a reflection of ‘Pythagorean’ geometry. This is of interest here as the Pythagoreans were linked with the Hyperboreans (remember them?). Indeed, one of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, a priest called Abaris, is said to have visited the Hyperboreans. And Bladud, the legendary “Druid King” founder of the now-famous hot-spring mud spa farther west, the City of Bath in Somerset, supposedly visited Pythagoras, the 6th-C. BC Greek "father of numbers". This is not so strange as it might first sound, since both the Greeks and the Hyperboreans shared a worship of Apollo. The Hyperboreans used to send maidens to Greece every year bearing gifts for Apollo. And Apollo himself was said to leave Greece every 19th year to spend three months among the Hyperboreans, because his mother Leto came from there. The early Greek description we mentioned at the outset refers to this. (Found in the Diodorus’s 1st C. BC World History, it is usually attributed not to Pytheas but an earlier lost codex, Hecataeus’s 6th-C BC History Of The Hyperboreans). It mentions “a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple …. built after the pattern of the spheres.” This last phrase it what gets Stonehenge researchers excited, taken as support for the astro-archaeology theory.
Anthony Johnson’s new book claims to show how (with mathematical proofs) Stonehenge was purely an exercise in Pythagorean geometry. He says this knowledge was part of “the Neolithic belief system”. This would explain how ‘Pythagorean’ geometry existed over two thousand years before Pythagoras. Johnson disputes in effect that “the pattern of the spheres” should be taken as an astronomical reference. What it could also refer to is the ancient ‘Pythagorean’ model of the cosmos as a set of 7 nested spheres, for Stonehenge is a set of 7 nested rings. And Johnson’s claim 56 was the key number is quite compatible with the reference to the celebration in every 19th year. For this is the way the Great or Metonic cycle of 18.61 years was calculated (as 19+18+19 =56), when the sun and moon returned to the same positions in the sky at the same seasonal point.
As to our original question - how did Christianity become established here so early … there is an obscure codex reference to the arrival in Britain of the first disciples from Palestine at the time the local priests were away attending to the manifestation of their god - which occurred every 19 years. But this will have to wait until next time.

Pytheas And The Lost City Of Apollo

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the circumstantial arguments in favour of Christianity possibly arriving in England as early as the 1st Century is the ‘tin-trade’ route. Without getting into the legend of Joseph of Arimatheia being a tin-trader and the morass that is England’s ‘Holy Legend’ here, we’ll just say the route was a historically attested direct link between the southwest coast of England and Palestine in antiquity. This route is associated with the Bronze Age (British tin was needed to make quality bronze). However the only historical accounts are much later, from the Classical period – Iron Age rather than Bronze, indicating it was still in use when Caesar arrived. These descriptions are attributed to early Greek travellers, in particular Pytheas who - some modern writers speculate - travelled to Britain using the established tin-trade route of the time. His account of his voyage of circa 330 BC up to (and around) Britain is lost, but references to it (sometimes sceptical) survive in the work of over a dozen classical-era Greek and Roman writers. There are other early descriptions of Britain which are not credited by these classical writers overtly to Pytheas, but may still derive from his long-lost codex.
One such reference is the account of a ‘spherical’ or round [sphairoeides] temple and precinct ‘sacred to Apollo’ in the land of the Hyperboreans, which survives in the World History of Diodorus Siculus of circa 50 BC. This is often mentioned in books about Stonehenge (e.g. by Gerald Hawkins), the assumption being this must be our earliest description of the site, and is usually thought to derive from an even older lost codex, the 5th-C BC History Of The Hyperboreans by Hecataeus of Abdera. Now an archaeologist has claimed the famous description of a ‘spherical temple and precinct sacred to Apollo’ derives from Pytheas’s 4th C. BC visit. This is slightly startling as there is no consensus about where Pytheas landed on the south coast, though the Avon Valley leading to Stonehenge and other ancient sites seems to have been a major trade route inland. He also argues that the reference is not to a single site but to two distinct sites, with Stonehenge as the ‘temple’ and the sacred precinct another, heretofore neglected, site a mile east, towards Salisbury. This site has evidently been ignored partly as it was misleadingly named 'Vespasian's Camp' by the 16C antiquarian William Camden, no earlier name being known. Camden simply surmised the site must have been a Roman camp from the time of Vespasian’s invasion up the Avon Valley in AD 70. Since then, traces of much earlier use have been found - from the Neolithic (pits) and the early Bronze Age (barrow-style funeral mounds), the chalk spur whose lower slope the ‘camp’ sits on being named Kings Barrow Ridge.
The name or epithet Chorea Giganticum, given in Latin in a 12th-century prose epic of the founding of Britain, is sometimes invoked as a possible ancient name for Stonehenge (which is of course a Saxon name), the Latin being translated Giants’ Circle or Giants’ Dance. This apparent old name appears in two later manuscripts as “Choir Gaur” which is taken to mean the same, Celtic Gawr meaning giant or mighty. It also refers to music: we still use the words choir, chorus, and choreographer for a group of singers or dancers and the dance director. And those who studied such prehistoric circles were also known in the 18th century as Chorographers. As ancient music and dance were often part of sacred rites, the word chorea as a place has implications of a ritual centre. “Coria” meaning a hosting place survives in Gaelic, the older Q-Celtic branch from Ireland. Its root may be the Q-Celtic counterpart of P-Celtic ‘Bor-’, which survives in the Latin name Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. The terms Boreas, Boreades, and Hyperborea which occur in the ancient account refer to the North Wind, the Northernmost land beyond it, with Boreades the name of the sacred precinct’s supervisors, the priests of Hyperborean Apollo mentioned by Diodorus.
The archaeologist in question, Dennis Price, who also got press coverage last year when he found Stonehenge's lost ‘altar’ stone, has been poring over these ancient accounts with language experts from Exeter University. He argues the reference to a round temple and precinct sacred to Apollo has been misunderstood. He argues it must refer to two different sites, with the former being Stonehenge and the latter being not Stonehenge’s wooden ‘sister’ sites of Woodhenge or Durrington Walls, but the larger yet heretofore neglected site called Vespasian's Camp [OS Map ref SU1441 - click this link and type the OS ‘code’ cited into the search box to see a closeup map section].
The ancient account describes the sacred precinct as a ‘city’ [Greek polis]. Vespasian’s biography tells how he stormed some 30 oppida i.e. hill forts which are tribal centres or capitals, from Wight north, and this may be the type of site meant. The site in question has previously been classed as a large Iron Age hillfort: it was 15 hectares across, sitting inside a 40m wide bank ringed by a 5-10m deep ditch. (Some ‘henge’ i.e. bank-and-ditch sites are regarded by archaeologists today not as military sites in the Roman ‘vallum’ style, but where the ditch is inside the bank – impractical for defence - as sacred enclosures, as at Stonehenge.) A 1995 English Heritage archaeological report mentions a layer of domestic rubbish 1m thick, suggesting a once-substantial population. (The main occupation dates are put at 1100-800 BC and 700–350 BC, which don’t really accord with Stonehenge dates.)
Its entrance is not far from ‘The Avenue’ ancient processional way from Stonehenge to the Avon at Amesbury. (Today, the road leading out of Amesbury to Stonehenge crosses the site, with houses on the south side, by the Avon.) Price surmises the earthworks are on such a scale they may have prompted Pytheas to think of Troy, whose divine protector was the sun-god Apollo. A recent book (I was invited to its local ‘launch’ event just before Xmas), Stonehenge: The Biography Of A Landscape, by archeo-historian Prof. Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University, theorises Stonehenge was a sort of prehistoric Lourdes, with Apollo (that most versatile of ancient deities) in this context a healing presence.
All this has been getting press coverage in print and online, but another possible link not featured so far is the Perpetual Choir. The ancient account says that hymns were sung to Hyperborean Apollo non-stop by a large group of dedicated singers (our ‘chorea’ or ‘choir gawr’ again?), and there are allusions to such choirs in Celtic lore. The Troiedd Ynys Prydein (Triads Of The Island Britain), which exist in a handful of discrepant manuscripts, are thought to have been used by bards or druids as ‘mnemonics’, to memorise key cultural and historical events as refrains about which whole narratives once existed.
One triad concerns The ‘3 Perpetual Choirs of Britain’, and some versions of the TYP manuscript give one of the 3 choir-venues as a nearby one - either Salisbury (as Caer-Salog), or else Amesbury. Amesbury, the town closest to Stonehenge, is where stood a famous Priory and convent (in the English version of the Arthurian Romances, the adulterous Guinevere ends up there). Amesbury Abbey was built just below the site of Vespasian's Camp hillfort, and it became part of the now-vanished Abbey’s grounds. Later, the land became part of the Marquess of Queensberry's estate, and in the 18th century the hillfort area was landscaped in the fashion of the day with planted shrubbery, ‘ornamental’ walks, and a grotto including a "Merlin's Cave." Antiquarians have tried to link the place-name Amesbury with the late Romano-British general Ambrosius Aurelianus who helped keep the invading Saxons at bay, as well as with the word ‘Ambrosian’ as it is used to mean heavenly music – as in the Ambrosian Singers, the famous London choral group formed in 1951.
There are obviously more developments to come on this, hopefully touching on the route early travellers like Pytheas took to Britain. Look out for an upcoming BBC-TV episode of Timewatch on new theories about the Stonehenge area.