The End of Week 2: Our Trip to Glastonbury

The week ended interestingly, with a trip to Glastonbury, with a side trip to Stonehenge. At the top is a panorama of the ruined abbey of Glastonbury. Glastonbury itself is an interesting town, in that it has a syncretistic conglomeration of Christian, pagan, and New Age elements. The accretion of legends surrounding the sacred well (probably Druidic, appropriated by Christian pilgrims), the Arthurian legend (pre-Christian, Christianized in the Middle Ages), and the Abbey itself (disbanded with extreme prejudice under Henry VIII) actually validates further something I wrote about in my doctoral dissertation about the accretion of significances to holy sites in pilgrimage narratives.

As a rationalist, I tend to look somewhat disparagingly at uncritical outpourings of mystical feeling, of which there were a lot at Glastonbury. I've got a picture of myself at Arthur's grave, which I didn't mean to be entirely disrespectful to him, but the whole legendary, people-laying-on-Arthur's-grave business got to me a bit.



We climbed a hill above town after seeing the Chalice Well, where the Holy Grail is supposed to be interred (lots of explanation for why the water runs kind of red). The Tor has a tower at the top and supposedly housed a pre-Christian shrine. While we were up there some pretty sickly-looking hippie kid was lying on one of the (possible) sarcophagi up there. Lots of Sedona-like psychic energy vortices, apparently.



Compared to this, Stonehenge was relatively tame, with only one creative anachronism kind of guy keeping vigil. I didn't ask him why, but the National Trust intends to do some significant work at the site, routing the major through road and the access to the site in tunnels, so that the original topography and space can be recreated. I don't know why that was bad, and didn't ask him.

I guess people have gotten out of the idea of Stonehenge being an ancient observatory, as I learned as a kid. Instead it's now thought to be a sacred site of some type, maybe a seasonal temple designed to commemorate the winter and summer solstices and equinoxes. In a book I have about time as a concept (sorry, no title, but it's not here in Britain), the authors talk about the importance to agricultural pre-Christian religion of being in the right place at the right time for celestial happenings. It dovetails very well with the exhibit at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which points out that until the advent of atomic clocks, the concept of time was very much tied to the movement of heavenly bodies and the cycle of the seasons. Something interesting, I think, to be written on the uses of time in human culture.



Also interesting was the carved glyph by the sacred spring at Glastonbury, which looks like some Native American pictographs I've seen.

The speculative explanations of Stonehenge put me in mind of Circlestone, in the Superstition Mountains. Though the scale is nothing like Stonehenge, the same agriculturally-based orientations obtain, and Circlestone probably had the same function.