Introduction to the Megalithic Civilisation

Introduction to the megalithic civilisation

It dates back to a long period from around 10 000 B-C to 2 000 B-C.

A megalith is a giant stone. The megalithic age: a society with religious practices connected to stones, sky…

Also, megalithic cult is linked with the cult of the dead, connected with a specific relation with death.

Two ways to understand “civilisation”: spiritual or material. In the truest sense “civilisation” is spiritual or religious (in the meaning of older time)

Death is taboo in our society, it is kept outside reality.

(Celts are quite similar to ancient Buddhists, Egyptians…)

An Irish Druid, still alive (Lost signs of the Stone Age)

These gigantic blocks of stones were the centre of rituals and New Grange was a kind of cathedral. There were the centres of sacrifices, worship, (adoration), and initiation. (Opening your perceptions of other realities you don’t know, a wakening of your consciousness)

That fashion spread all around the world: Western Europe between 5 000 and 4 000 B-C, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia, N.W Spain.

Megalithic age also implies art, in architecture point of view and pictographic point of view. Some researchers have written that art objects are a collection…?

Some stones were houses of the dead, or givings to get favours from the gods. Architecture went frame simple erected stones to the tumulus forming, a chamber and a corridor.

It’s known that these places were astronomically oriented.

Gavrinis: around 700 B-C (In Brittany, on an island)

New Grange: around 200 B-C

Also two other sites called Dawth and Knowth, where observations aren’t done yet, situated around New Grange. These are smaller structures.

Cults linked to natural phenomenon, natural phenomenon related to the sun, astronomy, nature…

High ranked people like princes, officers and druids were burned in chambers.

1996: a site was discovered where a Celtic prince was burned.

Megalithic age reaches a pic: sedentary people govern by and with religious culture. Faith in and after life.

There is a set of pictographs or ideographs where a whole language is carved on the stones for the following generations to read, decode.

These signs were inscribed in the stones like a conscious act of transmission. They formed something between a sort of language and geometric figures. With these symbols, we deal with something that obey an implicit ideology or system.

Ideology: a body of values, criteria on which a life of community and individuals are based.

Relation of man with the living of this planet was with the three levels: celeste, terrestrial and underground.

Leonard Apple “Quand j’ouvre les yeux, je vois que je ne suis rien dans le vaste univers. Quand je ferme les yeux, je vois que tout l’univers est en moi”

French poet.