Mystery of the Megaliths
Mystery of the Megaliths – An Excerpt from Mystical France
by Nick Inman
All over France there are megaliths, great stones standing in fields and by roadsides, as if defying us to explain their presence. They were placed where they stand deliberately, thousands of years ago, for some reason that we do not know and, say the experts, we can never know.
The trouble for anyone looking into the secrets of the megaliths is that there is so little to go on. What can you say for sure about stones that have few if any distinguishing marks?
It would help if we knew who we were talking about – the creators of the megalithic monuments – but there is no living memory left of them. We have no connection to them. All we know about them is that they were anonymous people living during “the history of humanity before history began”.
Prehistory takes some imagining. It is an absurdly long and vague time comprising 95% of the time that humans have inhabited France. It is much studied but we can only know about it in limited, mundane ways. We can scrape through the remains of latrines but never know what they were thinking. It is as if the people have vanished, but of course they haven’t. Their descendants – us – are still walking the earth and our needs and thoughts may be much the same as thousands of years ago.
But there may be a way we can connect now with then. If we want to know what they were thinking and feeling, we need do no more than look at ourselves and ask how we experience life on the surface of this planet. Our perennial human preoccupations could be the key to understanding the megaliths.
What has changed between those ephemeral millennia and our own over-documented, over-analysed times? Everything and nothing.
We still belong to a universe that, like everything in it, is at once an indivisible whole and its constituent parts. All parts are interrelated and they interact. Sometimes we can see the mechanisms at work; often we can’t. Inevitably, we still us ask what humanity is doing here and how anything came to be. We look around for the answers and at each other but it is not in the faces of our equally mystified fellow beings. So we look up and wonder whether the solution is not in the sky that dominates our earth in its two different guises of day and night. What information could there be up there for us?
The idea that heavenly bodies have something to do with us is not so foolish. Everything is connected so we must be connected in someway to the stars and it is not unreasonable to suppose that they influence life on earth.
Chief of all bodies in the sky is the sun, which provides light and warmth to the Earth. Human life depends on plant growth and that requires just the right amount of sunlight harmonized with a suitable amount of rainfall, at the right times of year. This is true today, when we are obsessed with climate change, as it was 6000 years ago. Life and growth are not to be taken for granted. The climate does vary – perhaps there was an folk memory of the ice age still lingering in people’s minds – and it was natural that prehistoric people should want to mark the winter solstice in the middle of the hungry season when the light began to return to the fields and the shadows lengthen.
It is quite possible they placed their trust in a cosmology represented by great stones planted in the earth directed at the sky.
That is one way to begin to consider the stones. Another is to start with human life. We are concerned as ever with the mysteries of fertility and health. Meanwhile, we try to avoid thinking about the concept of death which we fight against will all the means at our disposal.
It is often supposed that the megaliths are funerary monuments and this may be the case. Prehistoric people had no choice but to come to terms with death – just as we have not – and the stones may have had a purpose of celebrating this rite of passage in the chain of life.
Maybe they knew something about the afterlife that we no longer know. We who have not yet died have no right to disparage any primitive idea of the afterlife as wishful thinking or gullible nonsense. Even if we are convinced that death is a meaningless, random event we cannot avoid the great question it poses. We cannot ask “where do we go?” without simultaneously asking “where do we come from?” and “why?”
We would do well to focus on the nearest megalith from time to time; to reconnect through stone with our roots; and remind ourselves that we are part of a system of forces about which our understanding can only ever be partial.
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About the Author
For the last 25 years, British born Nick Inman has been a travel writer specializing in France, the country he lives in and loves. He has a lifelong interest in, and extensive knowledge of things esoteric and spiritual. He is a photographer, journalist, editor and translator and is married with two children.
Connect with Nick Inman at http://www.nickinman.com
