Читать книгу The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills - Страница 20

And that this place may thoroughly be thought True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.

John Donne, Twicknam Garden

Let us be clear: there were no Druids at Avebury until the present day. Druids were a Celtic priesthood (and later a nineteenth-century reinvention) and Avebury fell into disuse long before the Celts arrived in Britain. Indeed, one of its most remarkable aspects is that no Iron Age artefacts at all have been found within the henge. Perhaps people steered clear of the circle at that point in time. So we can safely say that it is highly unlikely that Alban Eiler, the Celtic spring festival, was ever celebrated there during the Druids’ heyday.

Having said that, most cultures celebrate a spring festival at or about the time of the vernal equinox. Certainly some Neolithic monuments–the passages in the tomb at Knowth, in Ireland, for example–seem to be aligned to sunset and sunrise at the equinox (literally, ‘equal night’), on 20/21 March. There doesn’t appear to be any such alignment at Avebury: but that is not to say categorically there was not one. Keiller never finished his reconstruction, and we have an incomplete picture of the other settings–the Cove, the inner circles and the stone row–that lay inside the main circle.

So when today’s Druids meet to observe Alban Eiler, they could indeed be following a tradition observed through the ages at Avebury. The sun god meets the awakening spring goddess, Eostre–from whose name we derive both ‘Easter’ and ‘oestrogen’. Sap rises, green things stir, the life force returns to the earth.

Dr Martin Ekwall,

A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury, Hackpen Press