Stonehenge

I read an article from National Geographic a few days ago (which I can't seem to find now, so there's no proof it exists) that said they've decided recently that Stonehenge may have been an ancient Lourdes sort of place, with religious significance and the idea of magical healing. The idea is based on the fact that all the bodies they have found were damaged or sick in some way, not all of them with obvious injuries of the sort that could be called 'sacrificial'.

I admit that I've never been there, but based on my obsessive devouring of all the new info and theories, I think this one is the most cohesive and multifaceted. It absorbs the ancient evidence from before the stones were set, the fact that lots of celebration sites have been found without a lot of evidence of long-term living in the immediate area, it explains the abundance of burial mounds in the area, takes into account the previous discoveries at Woodhenge and along the river, and doesn't try to discount the idea that the whole place is specifically aligned with the heavens. And I'm a big fan of cohesive, all-inclusive theories. People are complex, and I think just because we perceive their technology as simpler, it doesn't mean their minds were, or that their cultures were. Everywhere people go, every site that people use, has more than one purpose, even if it was founded for one specific thing, and to try and make it mean less than that is to sell people short.

We know it wasn't built by Druids. We think we know that it was used long afterward but Druids, and I think that's just a natural extension of how it was used before-- even without knowing the purpose or who built it, anyone walking onto that plain can see that it was an important place, that there had to be a reason to move such big stones so far and arrange them in entirely-not-easy-to-accomplish ways, and if you're the sort that's open to energy-patterns, you'd be able to feel all the focus and belief the place was steeped in. I think that's what draws millions of tourists there every year-- not just the idea that it's a great mystery, but the idea that there's all this energy that people don't recognize these days but still has the ability to alter your view of the world, even a little bit. There's a voyeauristic thrill to looking in on places where other people once worshipped, and a connection to a past we no longer have roots to, and whatever drew those people there to begin with is still there, underneath it all, unexplained, still doing whatever cosmic thing it has always done.