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The Megalithic Portal and Megalith Map : Index >>
Stones Forum >> Summer/Winter Solstice Alignments
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Summer/Winter Solstice Alignments |
WinterBloom
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08-01-2007
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from Buckinghamshire
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|  Posted 16-01-2007 at 17:41
How precise are these in general? For example, at Newgrange, I'm led to believe the 'centre' of the structure is lit only on that one morning, for around 15 minutes. Is this correct?
How on earth did they know when the shortest day was?
Winterbloom,
Confusedland.
[ This message was edited by: WinterBloom on 2007-01-16 19:16 ]
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bat400
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from South Central Indiana, US
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| Posted 16-01-2007 at 19:24
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On 2007-01-16 17:41, WinterBloom wrote:
How precise are these in general? For example, at Newgrange, I'm led to believe the 'centre' of the structure is lit only on that one morning, for around 15 minutes. If that is so, how on earth did they know when the shortest day was?
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I seem to recall that the "effect" seen at Newgrange os actually visible for several days around the solstice, but, as you say, for a relativelt short period of time during those days. - So 15 minutes out of the year isn't really right.
It would be difficult to "measure" the time in the shortest day without a "modern" clock. But -- It is not at all difficult to measure the extreme of the movement (i.e. the most northerly or most southernly point) of the sun at sunrise or set. I've done it myself with two sticks.
You just start measuring in early Dec and keep it up until January. The difference between the solstice itself and the few days around the solistice is quiet minor, but you can easily tell which of those days is the extreme. My "2 stick" method was not precise, but it was accurate. (It depends on the width of your sticks, the extact repeatability of where you stand to look over the end of the stick, how straight you plumb the verticle when you plant your stick itself, etc.)
If the alignment is a person sighting over an earth mound to a gap in some hills, you're only talking about a precision of plus or minus a few degrees. Not surprisingly, many of the "earthwork" alignments in the Western hemisphere are this level of accuracy. (Fort Ancient, OH, Old Stone Fort, TN.) They can be seen for several days around the solstice. And since the apparent diameter of both the sun and moon are about half a degree - that is all the accuracy you'll need.
However, where they've have found postholes in alignment grids (indicating the sighting was along multiple posts) the accuracy goes up to a degree or less (some of the alignments at Mound State Park, IN, and various "calendar" sprial petroglyphs in the American SW.)
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KenWilliams
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from Dublin
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| Posted 16-01-2007 at 23:22
It's often said that the chamber in Newgrange is only lit on the morning of the winter solstice but the very meaning of the name being the 'sun standstill' is a clue that over several mornings, the sun appears in pretty much the same place on the horizon and therefore will light the chamber in a very similar way.
You could determine the solstice by measuring how far the sun travels along the horizon over a few years using a gnomon and markers of stone or wood to track the shadow. Determinig the actual date was the easy part, creating a passage and chamber on a slope so that the sun entered the chamber, not through the door, but through the slit above it, and onto the floor of the chamber which, because of the slope, is now at the same height as the slit above the door itself, is a fantastic achievement. The implications are that no matter how many people stood outside to witness the event, the sun entered the chamber unhindered, unlike at Loughcrew where someone standing outside the door will block the light. Wonderful stuff!
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mishkin
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from Chelmsford
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| Posted 17-01-2007 at 07:18
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On 2007-01-16 23:22, KenWilliams wrote:
It's often said that the chamber in Newgrange is only lit on the morning of the winter solstice but the very meaning of the name being the 'sun standstill' is a clue that over several mornings, the sun appears in pretty much the same place on the horizon and therefore will light the chamber in a very similar way.
You could determine the solstice by measuring how far the sun travels along the horizon over a few years using a gnomon and markers of stone or wood to track the shadow. Determinig the actual date was the easy part, creating a passage and chamber on a slope so that the sun entered the chamber, not through the door, but through the slit above it, and onto the floor of the chamber which, because of the slope, is now at the same height as the slit above the door itself, is a fantastic achievement. The implications are that no matter how many people stood outside to witness the event, the sun entered the chamber unhindered, unlike at Loughcrew where someone standing outside the door will block the light. Wonderful stuff!
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I was going to write that it probably came from timber circles but realised there is probably no date overlap with longbarrows. But a wooden post gives both height and width for measurement. Stoney Littleton has the same effect apparently with the shaft of sun going down the passage - winter solstice.
Watching the sunrise, something I do over the weekend, is one of those marvellous events in winter; there is a soft orange/amber colour (good for photos) below the horizon, and then it appears into view fairly quickly (never timed it but about 3 minutes) before it pops free of the earth and floats into space and then you get the harsher yellow light.. you also see the moon as well at this time of year clearly in the morning....
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bat400
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from South Central Indiana, US
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| Posted 17-01-2007 at 15:30
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On 2007-01-16 23:22, KenWilliams wrote:
Determinig the actual date was the easy part, creating a passage and chamber on a slope so that the sun entered the chamber, not through the door, but through the slit above it, and onto the floor of the chamber which, because of the slope, is now at the same height as the slit above the door itself, is a fantastic achievement. The implications are that no matter how many people stood outside to witness the event, the sun entered the chamber unhindered, unlike at Loughcrew where someone standing outside the door will block the light. Wonderful stuff!
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Absolutely. This had to have been "the hard part" and really speaks to the continuity of purpose the people at Newgrange had.
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cropredy
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from Oxon
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| Posted 17-01-2007 at 15:49
Winterbloom,
I can find and plot this and many other alignments in seconds, the one you mention will be the same as the sun shineing into newgrange, but no matter how many standin line with it, they will never block it off.
Because all the celestial alignments min/max positions are fixed to a seies of detectable lines, some can just sense them, others need assistance via antennae extensions that help identify their position.
Many natural materials can be employed, currently simple welding rods are the most effective.
Its so simple and easy to do this, that all around the globe there is evidence of how it has been employed to construct in perfect alignment .
But everybody seems to want to find the difficult method to arrive at that which is simple.
Professor Thom , is the ultimate of this, I wish I had been about when he was, I could have saved him ever so much effort.
These are my alternative opinions, so I must dissappear again down into the sacred parts, bye.
kevin
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KenWilliams
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from Dublin
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| Posted 17-01-2007 at 17:22
We have as much proof that they dowsed as we do that they performed the macarena. My money would be on the sticks in the ground.
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cropredy
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| Posted 17-01-2007 at 17:37
Ken Williams,
I certainly cannot do the macareno.
You prefer the sticks, and you can see them work , and give a result.
I can dowse, and see them produce results.
Doing the macareno, is only for a certain few, most of us can bob about and say we can dance.
Popping up here makes me understand how a worm feels up on the surface.
Kevin,
slithering back down into an alternative reality.
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TheCaptain
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from near Bristol
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| Posted 17-01-2007 at 23:59
Having seen and taken measurements at well over a thousand megalithic monuments over the last few years, I must point out here that it is only one or two, presumably very special, megalithic monuments that actually do align with anything like this. Many generally face somewhere between northeast and south, giving perhaps a false impression to those who do not look in detail. The alignments of places like Stonehenge and Newgrange cannot be disputed, but the effort taken to create these accurately must have been substantial. For the majority, I believe somewhere generally in the right direction probably sufficed, and, in my opinion, they perhaps more often had openings for chambers looking towards some feature in the landscape. And this method of building and architecture continues to this day.
If it was really easy for "the Special One" to line these places up back then, and there was any specific reason for them to have been, then surely they all would have.
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cropredy
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 08:43
The Captain,
Didn,t want to pop back up here, but if I simply state that at all megalithic sites that I have visited, which I haven't counted, I have checked for alignments where suitable.
I have found all are sited to make use of a detectable occurance of spirals.
These spirals are formed by many lines creating a sort of pathway for a force to earth into the end point of the spiral formed, always water is detectable under these points .
The long barrows are in particuler easier to state which central alignment of lines they have been constructed along.
These alignments are not set always in an East/west line, but the specific occurance of geometric patterns of crossing lines is most common upon that alignment.
I had hoped by now to have been able to couple drawings of my findings together with photographs of sites, to try to further illustrate something that is not visable.
I assure you that I am in no way lying or missleading anyone, and only accept the skeptism due to my realisation that i myself only 18 months ago would have thought my findings as laughable.
I am drawn off into other areas at the moment seeking to fully understand and comprehend fully what a dowser is detecting, and am gratefull for the space offered to these alternative theories upon this site.
I will as soon as I possibly can start to further expand and explain, with added drawings and photos of specific sites the correlation between what I detect and the subsequent constructions.
In even close proximity to each other, I can detect the spiral setups along differing alignments, sometimes only a feww degrees apart from each other, and what I detect flowing along these alignments varies according to celestial positions, it isn't a fixed situation, but a constantly altering and fluxing one.
The churchs offer a better understanding as they are more recent and again are always aligned to the spirals, not to a particuler direction, but the most common alignment that the spirals occurs is east/west.
The clearest visable aspect of this , is in several french churchs were the church has been added to by the way of an additional aisle and the spirals occur at slightly differing alignments, therefore the whole construction is angled to suit.
Kevin
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karloff
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 10:36
Hi Chaps
cropredy, there is no need to ascribe extra sensory powers to our prehistoric ancestors Instead why not accept the simplest explanation. It is likely that prehistoric people carried out astronomical observations over a reasonably large amount of time and taught successive generations the results. This enabled people to both predict astronomical events and to build monuments with alignments. Basically early science i.e. learn through observation and test by prediction. Normally (although not exclusively) monuments with these alignments start occurring during more settled phases of cultures (e.g. the Neolithic) when agriculture means that surpluses are produced which means specialised casts of people can be supported by larger farming communities.
[ This message was edited by: karloff on 2007-01-18 10:38 ]
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Chyknel
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 12:27
Alignments are a fuzzy and ill-researched subject IMO. Energy lines apart (please, just this once!) whilst some are more or less "definite" the majority are no more than "maybes" arising from the fact that you can't point anything anywhere without aligning to something, whether terrestrial or celestial. So which are just chance and which are deliberate. In most cases, blowed if I know.
There have been some statistical studies which show a general alignment en masse, but that still doesn't solve the chance/deliberate question in individual cases. Worse still, approximate alignments are no use at all unless the exact intended viewpoint is clear. The telegraph pole in my garden aligns with Orion if I stand on one leg and on a local hill if I stand on the other. Which did BT intend? Should i write to them?
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James
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from High Desert
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 18:00
Greetings!
The "Old Ones" had the Time, and Inclination, to study pretty much everything that went on, in, and around them.
Many Moderns tend to sit back, surf the `net, crack a book or two, and not go outside, or "inside", for Knowledge, Wisdom, or even Fun!
That`s why I like this here Portal-everyone gets to learn-(or be Learned).
The "Sun Dagger", and the Solstice Window at Chaco Canyon were not made for landscape viewing, but for serious Ritual purposes-Agricultural and Religious-and my Opinion is that Science and Spirituality were One Thing with Two Faces, in the Way Back When, and that the separation of the two has only occurred recently ( not that there weren`t plenty of one-sided arguments Way Back When!).
Listen hard to the Inner Voices, and you will find Connection to the World,and the Ancestors-
Plant your Sticks at Solstice and Equinox, and you will find Connection to the World, and the Ancestors-
Our new house is being built by orienting to the Sun and Moon-Solar Power, you know-and the Moon?
Landscape Viewing, of course!
Sticks and Stones make a Fine Home!
Yours in the Light /!\
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sem
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from Bridgend,S.Wales
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 20:21
The accepted theory of Megalithic monument building says that they were built by an already static population in order to impose their authority on an area. If this is the case people would have had plenty of time to study the sky before building the monuments.
However, recently a new theory has sprung up which says people built the monuments on ground that was already sacred. Stonehenge is a good example as there are post-holes there dated to about 8000BC. Now if the people were nomadic when constructing the monuments, how did they align things for the whole year round at one spot?
I often disagree with Cropredy but in this case I think he may be on to something.
Many people ascribe dowsing and the like to something supernatural, but I am sure we posess abilities that have long been lying dormant, drowned out by the complexities of modern living. Animals posess some of these so why not humans?
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cropredy
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 20:29
Sem,
A light in the wilderness.
A ray of sunshine, cheers.
Kevin
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bat400
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from South Central Indiana, US
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 22:32
Point of order, gents. The topic: winter/summer solstice alignments.
You can see these. With your eyes. So long as our ancestors had eyes, memory, could count talley marks, and could make some marks, they would have been able to determine the solstice extremes in a location if they stayed their long enough.
Building something to "mark" the event could have been relatively easy to very difficult (time consuming and/or hard to engineer) depending on what it was they were trying to build to record the event.
But the Captain it right. Of all the prehistoric monuments and artworks only a minority have such a solstice alignment - and of those, most don't need an accuracy better than a few days. (Or, they take advantage of an observed natural event. I've read that the Chaco Canyon "sun dagger" is caused by a shaft of light through natural cracks between rocks. If so, all it took was someone observing this on what they already knew to be an important day - and then creating the pictograph at the observed location.
The decision to mark certain days - based on a philosophy we'd call religion? -Very likely. The determination that observed natural events were "unique" on particular days? No supernatural abilities needed - just observation and experimentation. (Two keystones of science -  )
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cropredy
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| Posted 18-01-2007 at 22:43
Bat 400,
With their EYES, WHY are so many sites not aligned to the sun?
Drunk?
Kevin
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TheCaptain
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from near Bristol
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| Posted 19-01-2007 at 00:19
Most are aligned to absolutely nothing. Same as my house. Same as your house too. But I suspect your garden like mine, is on the south side. Nothing complex or superpowered needed to say why or make it that way.
Why not go and actually check out in reality the hundred or so remaining Cotswold long barrows. They are lined up facing all over the place, from almost due north at Belas Nap to almost due south at Waylands Smithy just to name two. And if you dont want to actually go and look in reality, check them out in your library.
[ This message was edited by: TheCaptain on 2007-01-19 00:32 ]
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Chyknel
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| Posted 19-01-2007 at 08:56
On 2007-01-19 00:19, TheCaptain wrote:
Most are aligned to absolutely nothing.
[/quote]
Or maybe, to be more precise, nothing which is evident to us. But of course, the sky is full of stars and there might have been other long-gone settlements and monuments so we just don't know.
One thing about the energy lines alignment stuff (and only one), if monuments took account of those then all the monuments lying on so-called ley lines ought to be aligned in the same way as each other I suppose. Which they aren't.
[ This message was edited by: Chyknel on 2007-01-19 08:58 ]
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cropredy
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| Posted 19-01-2007 at 09:16
Have I been talking to myself ?
I ask myself.
At all megalithic sites, I detect at least 13 different alignments of lines crossing at one point.
More often 34 lines cross at one point.
In the centre of the tower at the top of Glastonbury tor 55 lines cross.
In the centre area of the rollright stones circle two points of crossing lines occur, 55 at one point 34 at the seond point, these two points are 89 inchs apart.( oh!, fibonacci?)
But only along certain alignments do the spirals occur each side of the lines, in a fleur de lie
fashion .
At all of the long barrows I have been to ( many) The barrow is aligned along the line where the spirals occur.
I consider that any construction built in precise alignment and conforming with these lines , will resist wear and remain, they will be at one with the subtle forces around this planet, whereas most other constructions plonked anywhere will be destroyed and will dissappear, hence there are many megalithic sites, and norman churchs still standing.
Kevin
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