NEWGRANGE AND THE SUN-GOD

A bedtime story by Edmund Henry.

 

The BBC Horizon program of last Thursday night discussed a bronze disk found recently in north-east Germany, and dated to about 1600 BC, and identified with local copper-mines as its raw material. The disk has religious symbols of the Sun (life-giver), crescent Moon (indicating time-change) and the Pleiades(“seven sisters”) star-group used as a calendar for spring-to-autumn agricultural work. This disk also has the “Sun’s Boat”, later found in Egyptian religious carvings, which supposedly carries the Sun around and back under the earth to be in place tomorrow morning.

 

Under such stimulation I yesterday revisited our National Museum (Kildare Street) to look again at a roof-stone from the Newgrange sun-temple (built maybe during 3500-2500 BC), which interests me a lot because it has line etchings scored by a chisel. Helped by some Gaelic words explained in Dinneen’s Irish-English Dictionary, I can better explain Newgrange as Dagda the Sun-god dying at the mid-winter solstice, but (if sky is clear) shining at sunrise of some four mid-winter mornings into the centre of the Newgrange “temple”. He thus fertilizes the womb of mother earth, which gives (new) birth to his son Aongus (the ancient Irish god of sexual love). Dagda has another name “Eochaidh Oll-Athair”, the second word meaning “Father of all things” i.e. Creator-God. Aongus is frequently called “Aongus an Bhrogha” meaning Aongus of the fairy mansion i.e. of the Newgrange sun-temple mound.

 

We expect all etchings at Newgrange to be directly connected with the Sun-god. I now can make some sense of some of them, as follows.

 

FIRST: The roof-stone has its etchings filled and blackened by pitch or some such material. I see clearly a horse’s head, ears and shoulders facing right, above/behind which appears the sun-disk giving out rays like curly hair. Then further behind (and to the left) are undulations suggesting sea-waves. So this could represent Dagda on his horse rising out of the sea at morning and/or possibly passing above/through the western sea so as to get back again for tomorrow morning. The horse-head may have a studded cap on top, but with clear bridle strings and rein coming in the right place towards a rider’s hand. There is also a leg with bent knee in the right place for a rider, down the horse’s flank.

SECONDLY: There are several spirals etched on the Newgrange pillar-stones, not yet the “Maze of Crete” design, which I will treat below. Starting at mid-winter sunrise, the Sun does a low loop in the sky and then supposedly returns under the earth to repeat a slightly larger higher loop starting slightly to the left of yesterday’s. And so on to mid-summer, at which it makes the largest highest loop through the sky. Your imagination must guess (for circa 3000 BC) how it loops down below on the way back. Such etched spirals represent this 3-dimensional process, on a flat surface.

THIRDLY: From mid-June to mid-December the Sun apparently repeats the process in the opposite sunrise direction (left to right). But suppose (to avoid confusion) we treated this as a “mirror-image” of the loops of mid-December to mid-June, then we would have a double set of loops (supposedly close together). This could well be the origin of the “Maze of Crete” design, not seen at Newgrange, where five complete spirals (some having connecting ends) appear, as well as several partial ones, on the large stone in front of the actual passage entrance. The mid-winter Sun shines through the “roof-box” and shaft directly above this stone, into the central chamber, if the sky is clear.

 

POSTSCRIPT (4th to 6^th February 2004)

 

As background to all this, we may draw on the “Chronology of World Events” (in particular, page 1688 of Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, 1991 edition). The period 4000-3200 BC mentions “Farming spreads to western and northern Europe…construction of monumental tombs in megalithic technique in .. British Isles…Use of horse …on steppes north of Black Sea… Plough and cart widely adopted in Europe”. The period 2500-2300 BC mentions “Beaker cultures bring innovations (copper-working, horses,…woollen textiles) to Atlantic seaboard”.

 

So we may conclude that by roughly 2400 BC the Boyne valley area around Newgrange had farming (both tillage and livestock, including horses), with ploughs etc. But we should also allow the possibility that etchings on any stones of the Newgrange sun-temple could have been made long after the original structure was built.

 

The Sun-god was (and still is) crucial for crop-growing during the spring and summer. I now consider an etching on the lower left-hand corner of the roof-stone, namely two heavily-etched squares joined at one corner. These could represent two tillage-fields fenced in, to keep grazing animals out. Or, they might represent one tillage-field and one field for grazing animals e.g. cows.

 

Inside the lower square near one edge is a T-shaped small carving (heavily-scored). This could represent the vertical (coulter) and horizontal (ploughshare) blades of a plough. It could also represent some other farming implement such as a pick-axe. Nearby in this square is a heavily-scored dot, which could represent a grain-seed being sowed.

We see many groups of these square or diamond-shaped etchings on the pillar-stones of  the Newgrange passage into the inner chamber, and elsewhere. They might represent tillage-fields and grazing animals being put under the aegis of the Sun-god.

Below to the right of these squares, etchings appear which suggest a pear and apple together, and separately a further pair of cherries or fruits or nuts joined together.

 

But, most interesting, top left on the roof-stone are several circular etchings together forming a (lower) biggish half of a sun-like object, with spiky rays coming out below. This makes sense as the crescent Moon. Below this and facing left, is a quite credible donkey’s head and neck. So we could interpret this as the Moon riding a donkey (hurray!!) across the sky in the opposite direction to that of the Sun - which it surely does as it apparently moves from west (new moon) to east (full moon) over two weeks. And to the farthest left at the top we find wavy lines facing the Moon’s donkey – I need only mention the word “Tides”!!