THE GODS ARE DANCING

 Stonehenge. Circles are ancient. People sitting around a fire, or holding hands in a ring and chanting rhythmic mysteries. Wooden palisades in defense of high ground. The heavens themselves move in great mysterious circles with the passing seasons.  This is the origins of geometry and from there, mathematics: that strange realm of abstract thought and eternal, disembodied truths.  

 

Building a model, whether physical or digital, incites a deeper understanding than looking at pictures can ever do. Sometimes it’s good to work from memory.  To draw a plan of Stonehenge without referring to external sources. What concepts and archetypes have lodged in your subconscious brain.

 

How many bays make up the henge? I’ve known of it for 60 years probably, but never registered the number. Mental Ray has a template called panorama as one possible starting point. You get 12 canvases to draw on, and I found myself placing 3 bays on each.  Turns out that 36 bays is 20% over the top.  Still it was fun to draw and animate.

 

I like the freedom of the lines to represent rough hewn stone. This captures something that native Revit geometry never will. They are only flat stage scenery of course. A nod to the performing arts.

 

No doubt there were performances of a kind at Stonehenge in ancient times.  Were there spirits of the stone?  Did these rough-hewn sarsens represent human ancestors in the minds of those who erected them? Would they have made them smooth and perfectly flat if they had been able?  For me there is something hugely emotive in the irregularity, the “natural stone-ness”

 

I have revived techniques I developed 5 or 6 years ago, using paths and profiles containing splines to break the tyranny of pure, rectilinear geometry.  There are scanned versions of the “ruin” in its present state that have popped up on social media recently.  I have made the quip before about “capturing” v “liberating” reality.  I want to convey the rough & ready feel without becoming too literal.  That’s what models are for.  You have to make choices.  That’s the whole point.  

 

Stonehenge. The name is elusive, enigmatic. Hanging rocks, stone gallows. (Hang, Hinge, Henge) “The giants’ dance” was another ancient label. Religion begins with the ancestors. Dancing on the shoulders of giants. Stone is the material to represent those who came before. From pyramids to cathedrals.  Stone memorialises history.  There were wooden circles and stone circles in the Wiltshire landscape, probably existing side-by-side rather than as an evolutionary sequence as was once suggested.

 

One theory speaks of the realm of the living (wooden structures) and the realm of the dead (cold stone.) There were avenues, routes cut into the landscape, ditches and mounds: stupendous feats of earth-moving.  Was there a ruling class who directed these efforts, wielding the stick and the carrot? That’s how things seem to have worked everywhere else.  Hard for us to imagine a tribal society on the British mainland, in transition from roaming hunter-gatherer bands to settled farming, but highly organised and capable of congregating in their thousands on Salisbury plain.

 

Sarsens are a type of stone, scattered around Salisbury plain by glaciation.  Bluestones were also used, transported from Wales, possibly from a previously erected circle there.  The word Sarsen is an allusion to Saracen, a medieval term for Arabs and North Africans.  Interesting to think of the various interactions between Western Europe and the Middle East over thousands of years of human civilisation.  Sometimes involving power struggles and ideological friction, sometimes free exchange of goods and ideas, often movement of peoples

 

 

Do Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepe share anything in common, beyond a superficial resemblance?  I wish I could shed more light on these fascinating questions.  Meanwhile I have added a basic representation of the inner "horseshoe" : larger stones with more of a taper and somewhat broader & thinner in plan.  Much more could be done, but will I get distracted by some other modeling challenge first?

Tune in next time for another exciting episode.  😂😂😂